Red scare
It is difficult to convey how many of the arguments within feminism in the 1970s through the early 1990s are seemingly incomprehensible without knowing that these arguments are being made by and among some women who had already rejected anything that smacks of leftist politics because they had invented a feminism in opposition to male supremacists (and jerks) they encountered in the New Left.
Reading "Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory," Angela P. Harris.