Opengender

Mitchell (1971) argued that all forms of second-wave feminism can be traced to the same radicalising context:

Although the recent chronological development ran from Blacks, Students and Hippies to women, I think that the common context just described [the US Civil Rights movement] produced them all, enabling one movement to exist in a country in which another does not. This common context has been crucial in the formation of Women's Liberation. It is this context which establishes a break with earlier feminism, and which establishes the struggle against oppression as a revolutionary one ... (Mitchell, 1971: 36)

During the 1960s, many young women became involved in lesbian lifestlyes through the hippy movement (Faderman, 1991: 203) or through European or US New Left movements (Hollibaugh, 1980: 205-208; Marks and de Courtivron, 1981: 30-32; Faderman, 1991: 204). Lesbians quickly became dissatisfied with these environments, however.

Like the hippie movement, the Left was countercultural and radical on the surface, but its attitude toward women was no more liberated than that of the conservatives. The women of the Left who became interested in feminism when the movement was reborn in the mid-1960s had honed their analytical tools through New Left debate and literature . . . When they tried to raise women's issues in leftist groups such as SNCC and the National Conference for New Politics and were unsuccessful, they were convinced that they could no longer work complacently with males of the New Left. They would have to begin meeting separately if they wished to focus on those issues. (Faderman, 1991: 204)

Lesbians within established homophile groups such as DOB were also radicalising in this more militant context. Many had begun comparing themselves with other forms of New Left militancy such as the student and Black Power movements (Faderman, 1991: 193-196).

Articles slowly began to appear in The Ladder comparing lesbians to other oppressed minorities, and the rhetoric escalated as the decade progressed. By 1968, the readership was exhorted, in the language of other militant movements, to do battle against the enemies of women in general and lesbians specifically. (Faderman, 1991: 193)

In the United States, the Stonewall riot coalesced this process of radicalisation into a specifically gay militancy:

A handful of activists, made militant by the general militance of the '60s, had the foresight and imagination immediately to seize upon the riots, which had been started by more flamboyant and working-class homosexuals, and present them as an event that heralded a new gay militant movement of justified fury. (Faderman, 1991: 195)

New publications and organisations proliferated and brought more lesbians from the New Left into gay liberation (Faderman, 1991: 197). Initially, radical lesbians took a collaborative attitude towards militant forms of gay liberation:

It should first be understood that lesbianism, like male homosexuality, is a category of behaviour possible only in a sexist society characterized by rigid sex roles and dominated by male supremacy. Those sex roles dehumanise women by defining us as a supportive/serving caste in relation to the master caste of men, and emotionally cripple men by demanding that they be alienated from their own bodies and emotions in order to perform their economic/political/military functions effectively. (Radicalesbians, 1970: 17)

Collaboration between radical lesbians and Gay Liberation came under stress very quickly, however. In the US, lesbians frequently became frustrated at liberal gay rights agendas which focused on civil inequalities of primary concern to male gays.

They complained that gay reformists pursued solutions that made no basic changes in the system that oppressed lesbians as women and their reforms would keep power in the hands of the oppressors. (Faderman, 1991: 211)

The British GLF articulated a more revolutionary approach (Watney, 1980), but the British New Left saw feminism as 'divisive:'

We have both independently been accused by men on the left of having betrayed our socialism and of living in a lesbian feminist ghetto. We have been urged to set aside such bourgeois individualism and to get back to the 'real thing' which is fighting the class struggle ...

... Even gay men are inscribed within it. Not only are many of them misogynists, but their bonding together as men does little to challenge patriarchal consciousness, and some of them appear to share with all males a resistance to understanding feminist consciousness. (Jackson and Mahony, 1980: 137-138)

Many lesbians moved away from this 'political dead-end in terms of women's liberation' and 'in the direction of revolutionary feminism' (Jackson and Mahony, 1980: 139).

In France, the 'new feminisms' were also "steeped in Marxist culture" (Marks and de Courtivron, 1981: xi). Radical feminists redeployed the tools of their dialectical training in "an attempt to formulate a theory that would combat women's absence from the patriarchal discourses of Marxism and account for women's specificity" (Marks and de Courtivron, 1981: xii). 

Within the American WLM, heterosexual feminists pressured lesbians to remain silent about their sexuality for fear of reinforcing the stigmatisation of feminism as the bitter and twisted ranting of penis-envious lesbians. The advent of gay liberation increased these lesbians' consciousness of their oppression as lesbians. Consciousness-raising groups provided an ongoing forum for militant lesbians in the US to explore the specificities of lesbian women's oppression.

Many 1970s feminists were encouraged in their exploration of lesbianism through consciousness-raising (CR) groups ... women often came to believe that men were kept in power as a group because of women's nurturing, subordinate personal relations with them. It was heterosexuality that supported male supremacy. (Faderman, 1991: 208)

A meeting was called in 1970 between GLF lesbians and lesbians in the feminist movement to discuss the discriminatory narrowness of the liberal agenda of the broader women's movement.

[It was] historic in that it was the first meeting of radical young Lesbians without gay men, the first time Gay Liberation Front women had met with Lesbians from the women's movement, and the first time Lesbians from the women's movement had met each other as Lesbians. (Love and Abbot, 1985: 113)

The first resolution of the Lavender Menace Manifesto (produced by lesbians involved in the 1970 meeting) was:

Be it resolved that Women's Liberation is a Lesbian plot. (Love and Abbot, 1985: 115)

In the context of a militant black separatism, the lesbian separatist movement was formed (Tallen, 1983; Hess et al, 1980):

As for the women's movement, almost from the beginning there was radical and separatist opposition to the reformist and male-female integrationist National Organisation for Women ... Radical feminists learned from the example of racial separatists ... [T]he militant understanding that racism/sexism were supported by the real interests of a certain element of society went hand in hand with the separatist tactic of not working politically with that element. For racial separatists that element was whites. For feminist separatists it was men. (Hess et al, 1980: 126)

Similarly, tensions within the French Women's Liberation Movement (MLF) led to a separatist movement modelled on the US, for which Monique Wittig was temporarily the spokeswoman:

The "Féministes révolutionnaires," was formed in 1970 ... [and] were devoted to the total destruction of the patriarchal order. They adopted the American model of consciousness-raising groups ... to allow each woman to speak, to eliminate the possibility of the most skilled speaker taking over (which was what was happening at the general assemblies of the MLF) ... (Marks and de Courtivron, 1981: 33)

Lesbian feminists now "emphatically rejected the notion that they were part of a homosexual minority" (Faderman, 1991: 207). Rather than advocating assimilation, the radicalised lesbian-feminist movement launched a fundamental critique of the institution of heterosexuality itself.

Their decision to become lesbian-feminists stemmed from their disillusionment with the male-created world and their hope of curing its ills ... (Faderman, 1991: 216)

Rejecting biologistic accounts, separatists began to recast lesbianism as an elective, counter-identificatory, mode of resistance to patriarchy. This expanded the field of lesbianism considerably.

There were probably more lesbians in America during the 1970s than any other time in history, because radical feminism had helped redefine lesbianism to make it almost a categorical imperative for all women truly interested in the welfare and progress of other women. (Faderman, 1991: 207)

A second generation of lesbian feminists came to lesbianism through this radical feminist movement (Faderman, 1991: 216). This expansion engendered a wave of new feminist publications, projects, and activism (Faderman, 1991: 219). But the rejection of previous forms of lesbianism by a second generation of radical lesbian-feminists, together with their radical critique of heterosexuality, generated conflict between generations of lesbians, as well as between lesbians and heterosexual feminisms, and between lesbians and gays (Faderman, 210-214). As the decade progressed, the diversity of lesbian discourses would reassert itself — both from within and without. Lesbians would polarise over issues of race and community, heterosexuality, bi-sexuality, role-playing, and sado-masochism. Until the codification of queer discourse at the very end of the 1980s, however, all of these dissenting fields within lesbianism and feminism would continue to refer their dissent to the discourse of radical feminism.