Second-wave and radical feminist theorists never treated women’s resistance to our own sex’s collective interests as an inconvenience or mystery to be explained away; instead, they built a body of analysis specifically to account for it, and that analysis remains sharper and more precise than anything the term ‘misogyny’ alone can capture.
Misogyny, properly defined, is contempt for or prejudice against women as a sex, and nothing in that definition restricts it to men. A woman who habitually distrusts other women’s accounts of male violence, or measures women against harsher standards than she applies to men, is expressing misogyny regardless of her own sex. This is sometimes called ‘internalised misogyny’.
However, second‑wave theorists were wary of leaving the analysis at that. Calling a pattern ‘internalised misogyny’ names the contempt, but not the structure that produces it or the survival calculations shaping women’s choices. Rather than treating women’s alignment with male power as a simple failure of understanding, they asked instead what women are responding to, and how our options under patriarchy make certain forms of compliance, identification and sideways hostility more rational than they appear.
Dworkin: Why some women side with male power
Andrea Dworkin’s Right-Wing Women (1983) remains the most sustained feminist treatment of this question. Dworkin argued that conservative women are frequently not confused about how male dominance works; many understand it with model lucidity, and their alignment with powerful men or male‑run institutions reflects a calculated bet about personal safety rather than ignorance of feminist analysis. In other words, these women are fully aware of the reality of male domination and organise politically on that basis, not despite it.
This reframes the question entirely. It is not, ‘Why don’t these women understand feminism,’ but rather, ‘What has this woman worked out, correctly (and often in isolation and based on her own experience and observation) about where safety lies inside a system that punishes resistance and rewards compliance?’ A 2025 essay revisiting the book observes that Dworkin resisted any tidy, timeless account of conservative women, insisting instead that their choices be read as rational responses to real constraints. That is Dworkin’s uncomfortable but consistent materialist point: alignment with patriarchy is frequently strategy, not stupidity.
Male identification: Seeing the world through men’s eyes
A related concept, most associated with Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire (1979), is male identification: the tendency for females to see the world through men’s eyes, to measure our worth by proximity to male approval, and to build our politics and loyalties around male institutions and projects rather than around solidarity with women as a sex class. Raymond wrote the book as a doctoral thesis under the supervision of Mary Daly, situating it firmly within the radical feminist tradition that treats such orientations as structurally produced rather than as individual women’s failings.
Raymond has continued to argue that dominant institutional narratives foreclose alternative feminist readings of these questions, describing this as a kind of “propaganda for a definition of reality within which only certain limited viewpoints are possible”. The point generalises it thus: under a system that rewards closeness to male power and punishes open solidarity with women, women will predictably orient themselves toward men’s institutions and men’s judgment of us.
Daly: Reform, foreground, and complicity
Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology (1978) extended this analysis further, arguing that the ‘equality’ or reform framework distracts women from the more radical task of dismantling patriarchy altogether, and instead channels our energy into securing concessions that leave patriarchal structures fundamentally intact. Daly’s argument was that such reforms are always revocable and therefore leave women perpetually vulnerable, because legal equality on paper does nothing to touch the underlying architecture of male‑dominated institutions and social relations. Her division of social reality into ‘foreground’ (patriarchy’s false, distorting order) and ‘background’ (women’s authentic, connected existence) offered a way of naming how women can become invested in defending the foreground’s terms even when those terms disadvantage us.
Horizontal hostility
But a further, more general concept explains conflict within any oppressed group. Horizontal hostility, or lateral violence, describes intimidating or undermining behaviour directed sideways at members of one’s own group rather than upward at the actual source of oppression. It has been documented across systemically exploited communities as a pattern in which aggression and dissatisfaction are displaced onto peers, driven by powerlessness and fear of confronting those who hold real power.
Second‑wave feminist theory makes sense of this among women as a sex class in terms of ‘survival’. Dee Graham’s Loving to Survive (1994) argues that under male violence, women’s attachment to men and many behaviours labelled ‘femininity’ are best understood as survival strategies: like hostages who bond with captors, women work to placate men because our safety and that of our children depend on male restraint. Sonia Johnson similarly describes how women are ‘seasoned’ to orient every decision around men’s likely reactions, making our internal sense of safety contingent on “behaviour we can neither control nor change.” When survival, resources and basic legitimacy are mediated through men in this way, it is structurally safer for many women to compete with and police other women than to confront male power directly.
The logic is straightforward: in a system where men’s violence and men’s decisions form the background threat, women who maintain men’s approval or limit male displeasure protect ourselves and those we are responsible for. Aggression that might otherwise be directed at the structure, or at men as its agents, is displaced sideways onto women who refuse the expected survival strategies or who challenge male authority. Horizontal hostility is thus the intra‑group expression of a wider survival economy: under male dominance, hostility towards non‑compliant women can feel safer, and may even be rewarded, while hostility towards male power is punished.
| Concept | Originating theorist/text | Core mechanism |
|---|---|---|
| Alignment with male power | Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women (1983) | Calculated safety strategy under unequal power |
| Male identification | Janice Raymond, The Transsexual Empire (1979) | Orienting worth and politics around male approval |
| Reform complicity | Mary Daly, ‘Gyn/Ecology’ (1978) | Equality framework leaves patriarchal structure intact |
| Horizontal hostility | Dee L. Graham, Loving to Survive (1994); Sonia Johnson, ‘Taking Our Eyes Off the Guys’ (1990) | Displaced aggression onto peers as a survival strategy under male power |
Frameworks, structures, mechanisms
Describing these frameworks is not to pathologise or criticise individual women; rather, it’s about naming the structural conditions under which women make political and personal choices. Understanding why a woman defends arrangements that disadvantage women as a class helps clarify the mechanisms at work — but it does not alter the material effects of those arrangements on other women, particularly those most vulnerable. What these concepts offer is exactness: the ability to distinguish between women who simply disagree about strategy and women who actively defend structures that transfer risk away from male power and onto women.
Dworkin, Raymond, Daly and Graham each insisted, in different registers, that women’s political and personal choices be understood within a structure of unequal power. For Dworkin and Raymond, that means recognising calculation and identification; for Daly, the ways women can be drawn into defending the foreground; for Graham, the fact that many of our behaviours and attachments are survival responses under male violence, not freely chosen preferences. These frameworks do not deny the force of survival or the limits on women’s agency; instead, they insist that when we describe alignment with male power we do so in terms that acknowledge both the structure and the costs to other women.
That remains the task: to name the structure honestly, without sentimentality, and without romanticising either resistance or survival. We need to be able to say when a woman’s actions are shaped by fear or coercion, and when they actively reinforce arrangements that transfer risk away from male power and onto women, without letting the fact of survival blur that distinction altogether.
Further reading
- Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women (1978)
- Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology (1978)
- Janice Raymond, The Transsexual Empire (1979)
- Dee Graham, Loving to Survive (1994)
- Sonia Johnson, ‘Taking Our Eyes Off the Guys’ (1990)