Feminist Publisher Speaks On Radicalism in the '70s

"There is a part of me that still believes in permanent revolution," Charlotte Bunch, a leading feminist publisher and the author of "Lesbianism and the Women's Movement," told an all-female audience at Agassiz House yesterday.

Bunch said the problem in the women's movement is maintaining a sense of "the struggle for power."

As the commercialization of "women's books" and "women's movies" replaces the radicalism of the sixties, feminists must not sell out to the media establishment, she added.

As a radical feminist in the late sixties. Bunch gained her first experience with the media by mimeographing copies of underground polemics on women's liberation.

In recent years she entered the more established world of publishing and academia and now edits "Quest," a feminist magazine, and teaches courses on feminist theory at the Institute of Policy Studies in Washington.

Bunch said she abandoned the radical world "because what I encountered in the activist movement of the sixties was a lack of any clear strategy for power."

As a result of this confusion within the women's movement about the meaning of feminism, many women dropped out of activism. "1977 was the year when the activists burned out," she said.

Comparing feminist theory to Marxism. Bunch predicted that within several decades feminism will evolve into a coherent theory of revolutionary change, and will-provide the framework for women to gain power in the media and the national economy.