Watson & Crick on Radical Feminism

In the latest Bitch issue, there's a fascinating interview with history-minded feminist Vivian Gornick, who offers this excellent answer to a rather broad and ridiculous question:

Q: In the 1990 New York Times Magazine article I mentioned earlier, you wrote, "Radical feminism is not wanted this year, perhaps not this decade." What do you think a contemporary radical feminism would look like, and how might it be galvanized?

A: The thing is, what radical feminism did in our time was put the terms in place. A good analogy would be when DNA was discovered by Crick and Watson. In the 1980s, I did a book on women and science, and I met many biologists, women and men alike, who all said that DNA was the great, astonishing, explosive discovery. They said, after that, it was all just putting the markers in place - the map was there, all they were doing was filling in the map. For some people, that was a way of explaining that they felt cheated at not being able to have won the Nobel Prize for themselves for this; some people felt demoralized; some people felt that now the drones would take over. And other people understood that if you kept on working hard, without the glamour of knowing you could win a Nobel Prize for figuring out DNA, you would make significant discoveries. And that, of course, is exactly what has happened in the past 25 years: All kinds of things have been [done] in science that they never dreamed of doing when they said, "Oh, it's all been discovered already."

That's the only thing I can offer you [laughs], that analogy. What I really mean is, keep on pressing thought to its deepest conclusion. Whatever insight anybody has into how women's rights somehow exemplify the human condition, existentially and politically and culturally, to that extent you do good work and you live a good life. Who knows what will be the next contribution that opens up another few hundered people to deeper thought about all this? That's my idea of radical feminism: Just think as deeply as you can about the usage that inequality for women has been put to. There are reasons for all the anxiety [about feminsim], and there are interesting questions to ask: Why is there such resistance? Why is it so unwanted by so many, men and women alike? Why is it so feared? What's really behind it?

Those are the things that Stanton turned to toward the end of her life when she got bored with suffrage [laughs], like we get bored with abortion.