In the New Orthodoxy She Had Embraced, a Mythical “Patriarchy” Took Precedence over the Marxist Ruling Class as the Well-Spring of Social Evils

In graduate school, Bettina had begun for the first time in her life to open her mind to the work of leftwing writers who were not on the Party's list of approved authors. At the same time, she was careful to limit the range of her interest to the writings of authors who were politically correct by the standards of her New Left comrades: “radical feminists, authors who applied a Marxist paradigm to gender issues,” and those approved by the Women's Studies movement such as Shulamith Firestone and Juliet Mitchell, authors of The Dialectics of Sex and Women: The Longest Revolution. In the new orthodoxy she had embraced, a mythical “patriarchy” took precedence over the Marxist ruling class as the well-spring of social evils. In the radical vision she now adopted, women took their place beside the proletariat as a fundamental element in the axis of social “oppression” and thus in the revolutionary struggle for “social justice.”

--David Horowitz, Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive Passion (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2012), 86.