Male Chauvinism in the Student Movement

Male chauvinism—perhaps a misleading term since it tends to obscure the fact that women's male chauvinist attitudes can oppress them or other women—has hurt the radical movement Many potentially radical women are unwilling to join an organisation which they believe is indifferent to women's oppression.

The student movement is infected with male chauvinism, a bourgeois ideology, as is the rest of society under capitalism. Long ago most of us faced up to our own deeply embedded racist attitudes and began to conquer them. Now we must root out our male chauvinsim as carefully. Here we are dealing with the social and psychological forms of discrimination rather than the economic aspects of male chauvinism. We must recognise also that no one—including our women members—is automatically exempt from male chauvinist attitudes. We must, by scrupulous attention to the content of a pro-women's liberation position, prevent the subject from becoming a bandwagon which intimidates free political debata in SDS the way that some Black hustlers have sought to racist-bait other radicals into accepting their positions as gospel.