The Race to Innocence: Confronting Hierarchical Relations Among Women

This article provides a theoretical framework from which to advocate women's human rights issues. The authors argue that feminist solidarity has failed because of the tendency to focus on ways that one is oppressed without addressing how multiple systems of oppression (such as capitalism, imperialism, and patriarchy) place women in hierarchical relations to one another. As these systems operate simultaneously, the authors present strategies for women's rights advocates to look at their own relative positions of power and how they are complicit in the oppression of other women. It is from the recognition of one's relative position of power, that advocates can then work to disrupt all systems to end the subordination of women.