The Personal Is Political: Radical Feminist Critique

The phrase "the personal is political" is most directly traced to an essay of that title written by the American radical feminist Carol Hanisch in 1969 and published the following year in Notes from the Second Year: Women's Liberation, a mimeographed anthology edited by Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt in 1970. Hanisch wrote the piece in defense of the consciousness-raising groups then spreading through New York Radical Women and similar collectives, against critics, including some fellow leftists, who dismissed such groups as "therapy" or self-indulgent navel-gazing rather than serious political organizing; her argument was that women's private, individual complaints about housework, sex, and childcare were in fact symptoms of a shared, structural system of power, so that the very distinction between a merely "personal" problem and a "political" one was itself an ideological device that concealed the systemic character of women's subordination.