Andy is correct about the racists among the suffrage-mvmt feminists. (Wasn’t all of them, though, but those who didn’t agree weren’t noisy enough. I was taught this in women’s studies, in fact. And racism within the modern movement has been a major internal issue, as has anti-lesbian sentiments from some participants, e.g., read up on the “lavender menace” event at NOW in the 70s)
re: refusing to be a “Man”, etc:
Ever heard: ‘Be a man.’ ‘Act like a man.’ ‘He’s a real man.’ ‘Prove you’re a man.’ etc? The dictionary denotation of “Man” may indeed be “male” but the working definition is pretty tightly tied to those other connotations. It’s not like the feminists could readily use some other word to designate this sense of being a man and expect everyone to recognize it.
But aside from that, let’s go back a few frames. Early radical feminism was an expression of rage, and when people are really mad at someone they are close to, people towards whom they’ve been stifling their rage for a long time because they have to live with them, the first stuff that comes out generally is pretty hateful. But often such conversations clear the air and lead to much better closeness; often the angry person is quite conscious of that being the desired goal and the intent. (If you weren’t going to reconcile, why bother trying so hard to communicate with someone about whom one’s first complaint is the absence of listening?)
Robin Morgan: upper class leftie, seriously into the neoMarxist campus stuff of the time, occupying th elitist magazine office with her ‘brothers’, etc – was part of the earl radical feminism that was sort of “cut and paste” from Marxist theory, take out “the bourgeoisie” and substitute “men”, switch “women” in for the “proletariat”, and discuss “the revolution”, very binary, very good guys (gals in this case) and bad guys (guess who). Well, she, and radical feminism along with her, grew up. Yes, I’ve read more than the Cliff Notes. I haven’t read Monster and her other poetry stuff, in all honesty, but I’ve read and reread all of her nonfiction. Where she ended up, theoretically, is at the perspectives outlined in The Anatomy of Woman. The excerpt I provided earlier in this thread was not surrounded by an ongoing rant against men. By the time she wrote it she very clearly saw men as being just as swept up (involuntarily) in the social system she and her sistren had dubbed “patriarchy” as women were – just less in a position to see the social system from a feminist vantage point as she and colleagues could.
Marilyn French – hey, c’mon, The Women’s Roomis a work of fiction. Certainly she used it to illustrate her point, but she makes her main character quite a bit more bitter and hateful towards men than she herself comes off in her actual theory work. Beyond Power is not a hate book.
If you want to say that there exist central leaders respected within the women’s movement who are openly and insistently anti-male and who hate men, I’d agree with you. Mary Daly qualifies, for example. But it isn’t an accurate characterization of French or Morgan and it isn’t common among the movement’s theorists, nor did I run into it often among students faculty and other everyday participants.