So, the standpoint theorists are not arguing that the feminist alternative to established knowledge is already present and fully formed in women's actual life experience.It is, rather, a potential to be realized through practical struggles for new kinds of social relations: new forms of rationality and understanding are seen both as emerging through these struggles and as, in turn, serving as a resource for them. There is, then, an internal relationship between the new forms of knowledge, and the struggle for liberation from oppressive and distorting social relationships. In this respect, the standpoint epistemologies can be seen as an extension and deepening of their predecessors in the Hegelian and Marxian traditions. However, that legacy raises serious questions about the relationship between the feminist theorists who identify and elaborate the liberatory potential in women's ordinary lives and the contradictory and distorted common experience of those women.