In my replies to Doug and the Sandwichman, I suggested that the tendency to prioritize women as victims (i.e., not as agents, history-makers) rather than ordinary concerns of ordinary women may be a position that marginalizes both male leftists and US feminists.
That said, it is possible that leftists and feminists still won't get anywhere in the USA even if they ditch that (IMHO counterproductive) tendency. In recent years, notable demonstrations (aside from anti-Iraq War protests) in the USA were held by gay men and lesbians seeking to marry; undocumented workers and their predominantly Latino allies; and deaf students at Gallaudet, apparently the only US campus that saw a huge upheaval (missing from anti-war campus protests) in recent times. Perhaps, in the USA, political energy is left, at least for the time being, only among those, like GLBT individuals, undocumented workers, and the disabled, who do not yet have rights and privileges that the dominant group has. If that's so, a perspective that sees workers as such as the collective agent of social change, the perspective that defines the Left, necessarily becomes marginal. Moreover, political energy of oppressed groups historically dissipated as soon as de jure equal rights got granted, even though substantial equality was far from achieved. Since women already have de jure equality, it is possible that the time for feminism as a social movement is over, though it remains as self-definitions and perspectives of some activists and scholars. It's difficult to figure out where to go from here. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>
