The radical feminist manifesto as generic appropriation: Gender, genre, and second wave resistance

Abstract

This study analyzes radical feminist writers’ generic appropriation of the rhetoric of the historically masculine manifesto genre, which was popular among male‐governed organizations of the New Left Movement of the 1960s. I argue that the radical women's appropriation of the manifesto genre allowed them to acquire an authoritative speaking position from which to contest male chauvinism, but, in some ways, constrained their rhetoric to the discursive conventions of the patriarchy.