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Fundamental Feminism: Contesting the Core Concepts of Feminist Theory. By Judith Grant. New York: Routledge, 1993. 226p. $52.50 cloth, $16.95 paper.

In Fundamental Feminism, Judith Grant articulates and develops a provocative set of claims regarding AngloAmerican feminism and the contemporary feminist project. Anglo-American feminist theory, she argues, is far more unified than divided. Undue attention to the varieties of hyphenated feminisms (e.g., liberal-feminism, radical-feminism, socialist-feminism) begs the important question, What makes feminist theory specifically feminist? Grant proceeds to answer this question with respect to two distinct versions of feminist theory. The first is a discernible tradition of Anglo-American feminism whose constituent core concepts include Women, experience, and personal politics. The second is a refurbished feminist theory informed by "the idea of an ideological structure of gender from which we seek liberation" (p. 189). Grant's effort on behalf of "a revitalized feminist theory" functions simultaneously as "a theory against feminist theory" (p. 14). The burden of Grant's argument lies in her claim that the second—and preferred—version of feminist theory is analytically distinguishable from its Anglo-American relative because it has dispensed altogether with the first two of the core concepts and treats the third with cautious consideration. In three out of the five substantive chapters, Grant develops her claim that several varieties of Anglo-American feminism (socialist feminism, mothering theory, early and contemporary radical feminism, standpoint theory, et al.) share a conceptual structure anchored in three core concepts that were first introduced by early radical feminists in the late 1960s. As a result of the infamous intransigence of New Left men, the idea of a specific women's oppression theoretically analogous to modes of oppression recognized by the New Left was invented by disaffected women of the New Left. The idea that women are oppressed as women implied the recognition of women as a collectivity. This, in turn, generated a theoretical quest for the basis of connection among women, which landed feminists into the quagmire of essentialism when Woman emerged as the rhetorical figuration of women's shared oppression as women. In order to sustain the claim that all women are similarly oppressed, within a political and intellectual environment that offered no resources for the "objective" (i.e., theoretically rigorous) depiction of this oppression, experience was invoked as that which united women. In a related and now familiar innovation, the purview of the political (notions of institutions, oppression, coercion, and rules) was expanded to include practices and habitats labeled as personal. Among the three core concepts identified by Grant—woman, experience, and personal politics—the first two in particular have generated consequences of disastrous import for feminist theory and politics. Whom does "woman" refer to? What is implied in the term experience? And what is to be included in personal politics? According to Grant, "This triage of questions remains the albatross around the neck of feminist theory. The task of answering these questions has proved endless" (p. 39). The problem with experience as a foundational concept is that women's experiences do not always unite them. The quest for experiential unity has issued, notoriously, in predominantly white and often middle-class versions of "women's experience." In a related vein, the counterquest for "authenticity" issues in the proliferation of nonnegotiable differences among women. "Identity politics" is the inevitable result. And then there are politically conservative antifeminist women whose "experience" must be repudiated. How to account for women whose experiences do not accord with those of others? Which experiences should be prized as central and valid? Which do not qualify as such, and why?