In the 1970s and 1980s, supporters of pacifism, feminism and ecology were mainly on the left of the political spectrum, though that never stopped them from challenging socialist and communist parties over ideology, basic aims, style, image and organisation. They were innovative at a time when established left-wing parties appeared to have run out of ideas. The emergence of these movements coincided with the transformation of the working class sketched above. They appeared to be both bearers and symptoms of the transition to a ‘post-industrial’ society. Consequently, many argued that socialist parties would do well to widen their appeal to the predominantly middle-class supporters of the new social movements, so as to compensate for their increasing difficulty in mobilising a rapidly changing working class.

The gender conflict was part of a relatively peaceful, but nevertheless momentous, social upheaval, a true revolution which forced everyone - not only socialists- to adjust. Conservatives faced a particular predicament: the traditional family they defended was being eroded by the capitalist system they staunchly upheld. The parties of the Left, traditionally committed to the emancipation of women and their integration into the labour market, were faced with a paradox of the different nature. Women were becoming ‘productive’ workers in unprecedented numbers. According to socialist ideology, this would make them more susceptible to left-wing values. However, women were not, on the whole, joining a skilled and highly unionised proletariat, but a deregulated labour market of the kind socialists had fought against for over a hundred years.

The ‘dual militancy’ of socialist feminists heralded a development of great significance: increasingly, the socialist parties would come to be considered as one of the sites where campaigns devised elsewhere would be conducted. The evolution amount to a major ‘reform’ of the socialist parties, a reform largely engineered from the outside. By the end of the 1960s, the wider socialist movement was - unknowingly - poised on the threshold of the most momentous transformation in its history

It had started out as a machine for the self-emancipation of the working class and the generator of endless campaigns. It was now becoming an instrument which could be used by those who had found elsewhere, in the feminist, pacifist or ecological movements, a political home, The instrument which socialists had forged at the turn of the century for the improvement of the conditions of the working class, the capture of state power, and the eventual transformation of capitalism into a classless society - the political party - had become the battleground of various types of progressive causes seeking to use the party for their own ends.

Once the barriers between the private world and the realm of politics had been torn down, everything could be turned into an issue: abortion, pregnancy, the myth of the vaginal orgasm, rape (including material rape) and sexual violence in general, sexual harassment, unequal pay, unequal access to better jobs, hierarchical organisations, war, competitive society, the tyranny of dominant aesthetic norms, being overweight (‘fat is a feminist issue’), natural childbirth, male authorship, pornography, child-care, health, parliamentary representation of women, language, history, and much more. From Norway to Sicily, from Portugal to Greece, these themes were politicised. This was a language socialism had never spoken. A new agenda was being born.

Notwithstanding Greer’s bestseller, it is generally accepted that the initial impetus behind the feminism of the second wave came from the USA. With hindsight an impressive list of causal factors may be assembled. The image of modernity and emancipation of the American woman was part of an American myth which turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. By accelerating the dissolution of traditional values, modernity itself created the conditions for the liberation of women from their conventional roles. The USA, as the pioneer of mass higher education, produced a proportionately higher number of educated women than other countries. The struggle for racial equality, which prefigured the student movement of the late 1960s, had laid some of the foundations for a feminism dominated by the values of equal rights. No strong class-based party existed to monopolise these new struggles and anchor them to socialism. The non-structured, fragmentary and non-party based nature of American politics was better suited to the development of feminism than the system of parties which dominated Europe.

The real challenge feminism presented to the Left was not that it asked the Left to incorporate women’s demands in its general programme; there had never been objections to this, at least in principle. Feminism’s real challenge was that it invited the organised Left fundamentally to recast its own ideological framework, abandoning the unspoken axiom that the socialist movement was a movement of men which women could join on men’s terms and, in exchange, receive men’s support. This new movement of universal emancipation required a de-masculinised politics; a socialism for women and men. To this demand the resistance was, not surprisingly, formidable. A century-old movement of men could not simply shed its skin like a snake during a change of season.

The obstacles confronted by first-wave feminism in its encounter with socialism can be subsumed under a single heading: the theoretical framework of socialism, Marxist and non-Marxist alike, could accommodation only aspects of the relations between the sexes which could be explained in socio-economic terms, and tracked back to an inequality in the relations of production…Even when the first socialists attacked specifically sexual forms of oppression, they never failed to track these back to their socio-economic origins.

That feminism had a preferential relationship with the Left, that Left parties upheld women’s demands for political and social equality more consistently and more vigorously than other parties, is difficult to deny. Nevertheless, the alliance between feminism and socialism was fundamentally unequal. It was accepted by socialists only on their own terms, namely that the social struggle between capital and labour was to be recognised as fundamental; the emancipation of women as women depended on the victory of the working class. Feminists who refused the terms of this alliance had to be content with demanding the extension to women of liberal or ‘bourgeois’ rights, assuming that social and economic emancipation would somehow ensue from political freedom. According to the cannon of the established Left, once true universal suffrage was achieved, liberal feminists would rest on their laurels. Those who still felt dissatisfied could opt to join the socialist movement, whose aims were still far from being achieved. It seemed, in other words, that women had to follow, whether liberals or the socialists, but they had to follow.

Socialists appeared to be more consistent than liberals in their support for the extension of equal rights to women. Socialist parties were seen by many middle-class women activists as the best instrument with which to reach working-class women. Socialism accepted, in principle, even if only for the distant post-capitalist future, the idea of complete female emancipation. There was a further powerful ideological synchrony: both movements were children of the modern world. At the time, feminist women, like socialist men, stood in radical opposition to traditions.

By the turn of the century, socialism and independent feminism had gone their separate ways. The former rose powerful, a men’s movement in a man’s world. Feminism struggled to surface. It was forced to resort to symbolic politics. It was squeezed between the paternalism of its few male sympathisers, the hostility of the majority of men, and the indifference of too many women. The disjuncture between feminism and socialism occurred when the socialist movement became organised as a mass movement, when factory workers became overwhelmingly male, and when the universalist and arguably utopian objective of ‘total’ emancipation gave way to a more concrete and more reformist practice