Joan Didion on the Women's Movement

I'll let Didion's The White Album do the talking about the Stalin-Mao configuration of 1970s feminism that emphasized personal transformation and revelation of resentment as the MOST political event:

They [feminists] had invented a class; now they had only to make the class conscious. They seized as a political technique a kind of shared testimony at first called a 'rap session,' then called 'consciousness-raising,' and in any case a therapeutically oriented American reinterpretation, according to the British feminist Juliet Mitchell, of a Chinese revolutionary practice known as 'speaking bitterness.' They purged and regrouped and purged again, worried out one another's errors and deviations, the elitism here, the 'careerism' there. These puritans of the political spirit, they made of social injustice a moral issue -- one that could only be repaired by a thorough and public flogging of the enemy. The laughable practice of "speaking bitterness" that was recast from the practices of revolutionary China as a way of making the peasants understand their victimization at the hands of a class enemy was supposed to give women a new sense of agency - as the politically pure protagonists of a drama of self-discovery as collective redemption.

Didion's aphoristic criticism cuts to the core, but this is not to say that our work is done. The early deformations of the women's movement have to be understood historically and in the context of the successful institutionalization of "new social movements."