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.

It may be difficult to demonstrate the beneficial impact of the cultural unrest of the 1960s on the decades that follow. It is difficult to minimise its importance: it contributed, directly and indirectly, to the birth of mass feminism, to the ecological movement, to the growth, expansion and diffusion of the importance of subjectivity and consciousness, to the recognition of the existence of institutionalised and disguised forms of racism and repression. In academia, the movement directly or indirectly led to a revolution in the humanities and social sciences: the development and spread of social history in all its forms, the growth of sociology, the flowering of interdisciplinary approaches, the evolution of increasingly sophisticated theoretical methods.

I think that the nature of the society in which people live has a good deal to do with their quality and the way they behave, and a society in which there is considerable injustice, inequality and oppression … cannot be a society in which the citizens exhibit all the qualities that please democrats and liberals. And if this is so, it is because of these conditions and not because of any moral fault that some may be able to find in these people.