Ideologies - Feminism

Origins of feminism?

Origins of feminism?

The two key texts at the heart of the emergence of liberal feminism are Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and Harriet Taylor’s Enfranchisement of Women (1851).

The main thrust of this era was that there were societal customs and legal constraints that stopped women from entering the public sphere or made their success in it impossible.

Women were deemed not to be rational, intellectual or physically capable enough, so were denied a place in politics, the economic marketplace and academic/professional life.

What are the three main waves of feminism?

The first wave is liberal feminism

The second wave is Marxist, radical and socialist feminism.

The third wave is postmodern feminism.

What were the characteristics of (first wave) liberal feminism?

Classical liberalism. Liberal feminism in its earliest form utilises classical liberalism's ideas about human nature, freedom and the individual to create a feminist theory that liberates women.

Rational. Wollstonecraft's argument started with the premise that women are human. All humans have the same capacity for rationality, so women have the same capacity as men.

Education. Wollstonecraft demanded real education for women on the basis of their capacity for reason. This would have two benefits:

• Rational and independent women would bring benefits to wider society.

• It would allow rational and independent women to be autonomous, making their own choices about their life, which for Wollstonecraft was the basis for being fully human.

Gender justice. Discrimination against women could be found in the lack of rights and equal opportunities for women. In line with the liberal idea that all have equal moral worth, there should be equality of treatment in the following areas:

• the intellectual sphere - all have an equal right to education

• civic life - all should have the right to vote, and women should play a role and have a say in the making of the law

• economic life - equal opportunities to access all jobs and equal pay for the same work; the idea of economic independence for women was crucial to Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

Reformism. Crucial to achieving gender justice was winning the right to vote. Once women could influence the making of laws, these could be shaped to tackle discrimination against them and ensure equality of treatment.

What are two examples of positive discrimination in practice?

The use of all-women shortlists by political parties, such as the Labour Party, to tackle the gender imbalance in Parliament. Following the 2019 election, 51% of all Labour MPs were women.

Affirmative action in the USA - when introduced by President Kennedy in 1961, this was based on 'race, creed, colour or national origin, but in 1967 President Johnson added gender to that list.

What was Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s key work?

In her work Women and Economics (1898), Charlotte Perkins Gilman was in tune with liberal feminism as she saw clear economic hurdles blocking women's progress However, her writing did not fit comfortably with any particular strand of feminism and her idea of gender as socially constructed was well ahead of its time.

How did Perkins Gilman view society?

Humanity was the only species where 'the female depends on the male for food" and 'sex-relations is also an economic relation' and this had limited social progress and evolution.

This male domination can also be found in an androcentric culture, with male domination in the arts, humanities, fashion and health reinforcing the domestic role of women as wife, mother and housekeeper.

Women have 'the same human energies and human desires and ambition within', but their culturally defined roles have 'kept them back from their share in progress.

What did Perkins Gilman say about the economic independence of women?

As a woman lacks economic independence, she was assigned a social role that locked her into her home' and this role was culturally created, not based on biological difference.

Her proposed solution was economic independence for women, centralised nurseries and co-operative kitchens to create true freedom for women to think and judge for themselves.

This freedom for women, and equality between men and women, would allow for a more natural growth of the qualities and virtues that would bring true and lasting progress to society.

What is a reform Darwinist?

As a reform Darwinist, Gilman believed that humanity could direct and control evolution through its own actions.

What legislative examples are there to show the effect of the feminism movement?

Civil Rights Act (1964), in the USA, and the Equality Act (2010), in the UK.

The UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals, which include Goal 5; 'Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.

What examples are there of liberal feminism in action?

As examples of liberal feminism in action, you can use the suffragettes and suffragists in the UK and the National American Woman Suffrage Association in the USA, who all campaigned for women's voting rights.

The National Organization for Women (NOW) was founded in 1966 to promote feminist ideals, lead societal change, eliminate discrimination, and achieve and protect the equal rights of all women and girls in all aspects of social, political and economic life. Betty Friedan was one of its original founders.

What do Marxist feminists (second wave) believe?

Although liberals claimed that discrimination was the root cause of the oppression of women, Marxist feminists saw capitalism as the problem.

Friedrich Engels, in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), made the point that class oppression is the most universal form of oppression and the cause of all other forms of oppression.

How do Marxist feminists view marriage?

Marriage was an institution built on exploitation, with the man as the property-owning bourgeois and the woman as the property-less proletarian.

The property-less woman was degraded and reduced to servitude in her own home as a slave to male lust and an instrument to produce children - the working classes of the future.

What is reproductive labour?

Unpaid labour performed by women in the home, such as cooking, washing clothes and bearing/raising children.

This unpaid labour produces the workers of the future and ensures the current workers are fit and able to work.

What do Marxist feminists argue in relation to reproductive labour?

Marxist feminists built on the work of Engels to argue that reproductive labour should either be recognised as productive and fairly paid or be socialised (carried out by wider society) so that women can take their place in the workforce.

What did Marxist feminists propose as the solution?

The solution is the abolition of private property, capitalism and the family as an economic unit. This would mean all adults would work and therefore marriage and the family would no longer be based on economic relations as men and women would be equal.

What do radical feminists is the root cause of oppression?

Although Marxist feminists blame capitalism and private property as the cause of the oppression of women, radical feminists argue that patriarchy is the root cause of oppression.

Who was a key proponent of radical feminism?

Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970) was integral to the radical feminist approach, with its focus on patriarchy and how the family and wider culture are used to support masculine authority in all areas of life and, outside the home, permit women no authority at all.

How do radical feminists view the patriarchy?

Patriarchy is the most universal and the most damaging form of oppression and historically the first form of oppression. This means that tackling discrimination or overthrowing capitalism cannot eradicate the oppression of women.

What do radical feminists believe by ‘the personal is the political?

Radical feminists argue that patriarchy is a pervasive relationship that dominates both the public sphere and the private sphere.

The personal includes the experiences of women related to the female body (e.g. menstruation, child birth and pregnancy) and the experiences of women in the home and in the workplace (e.g. sexual harassment, domestic labour and sexual violence).

By bringing these issues out into the light, the understanding of oppression was greatly deepened. The home and the female body were now added to the political and the social as sites of oppression.

How radical feminists view the issue of sex and gender?

Simone de Beauvoir stated that ‘one is not born but rather becomes, a woman’ (The Second Sex, 1949)

Radical feminists do not deny biological sex differences but they see humans as androgynous.

Gender is a social construct, as femininity has changed over time and varies between different cultures.

The division into 'masculine' and 'feminine genders is not a division into two equal parts.

Masculine traits like competitiveness, assertiveness and courage are seen as superior to feminine traits like passivity, submissiveness and emotion, and these are used to justify the dominance of man over woman.

What is existentialism?

Humans have no nature, or essence, and use their freedom to make themselves through their own actions.

What evidence is there to support the idea that gender is a social construct?

You can illustrate the idea of gender as a social construct using American anthropologist Margaret Mead's Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), which showed clear differences in the social roles and personality traits that were seen as desirable and normal across three different cultures in Papua New Guinea.

What did De Beauvoir suggest are the four strategies for freedom to create a future when men and women are true equals?

• Women must go out to work.

• Women must become intellectuals.

• Women must exercise their sexuality as they see fit.

• Women must seek economic justice and independence by changing society into a socialist society.

What is the patriarchy?

Sylvia Walby in Theorizing Patriarchy (1990) identifies six different structures that form this system of control:

• The state - the legal and political structures that prevent or limit

  representation for women within the state.

• The household - housework is a woman's most fulfilling role; even if a

  married woman works, housework remains her domain.

• Culture - women are expected to want children and to sacrifice their

  careers when they have children in order to bring them up. Perhaps the most pervasive and damaging current myth is the 'beauty myth'.

• Sexuality - women should be virgins until marriage, practise monogamy in marriage and subordinate their sexual needs to those of their husband.

• Work - where women have sought work, this is in the part-time sector or lower-paid roles that are associated with 'feminine' traits, such as teaching, nursing and caring.

• Violence - high levels of domestic abuse have historically been kept off the

  public agenda as the home is seen as 'personal.

What are equality feminists?

What are difference feminists?

Equality feminists. Those who believe that the goal of feminism is to achieve equality between the sexes by freeing women from difference. Liberal, radical, socialist and postmodern feminists all have different visions of how this will be achieved.

Difference feminists. Those who believe that women are essentially different from men biologically and psychologically. These differences matter.

What was Kate Millett’s key work?

Kate Millett was a radical feminist who argued for 'sexual politics', as politics refers to any power-structured relationship like the relationship between men and women.

In 1970, Kate Millett's Sexual Politics was published, highlighting the subjugation of women in great literature and art, and showing the value of a feminist critique in all areas of life.

What did Kate Millett view as the key institution of the patriarchy?

The key institution of patriarchy is the family - it acts as 'a patriarchal unit in a patriarchal whole'. It is within the family that children are socialised into patriarchy-prescribed gender roles. This socialisation is reinforced by peers, education and the wider culture to create a uniformity of attitudes.

What would the sexual revolution involve?

• the end of sexual inhibitions and taboos to create sexual freedom.

• the end of the ideology of patriarchy and its means of socialisation - the family

  unit.

• the undermining of the traditional family unit through the abolition of the sex role for women, full economic independence for women and the socialisation of care of the young.

• a re-examination of the masculine and feminine traits of gender, selecting those traits which are desirable to both sexes.

What is socialist feminism?

Socialist feminism is closely associated with Sheila Rowbotham and emerged in the 1970s, looking to blend the ideas of radical feminism with Marxist feminism.

• Women act as a reserve army of labour, working for low pay when needed, keeping wages low and then returning to their family when there is unemployment. Allows men to 'console themselves for their lack of control at work with the right to be master in their own home'.

• Labour in the home is unrecognised, certainly in terms of pay, and is used to suggest that women are unreliable and often absent from the workplace, so need to be kept out of better jobs.

• Reform will never be enough as it not possible for women to be free within

  patriarchy or capitalism.

• Socialist feminism recognises patriarchy and capitalism as forms of

  oppression that are separate but linked, so both must be tackled separately as well as collaboratively by a revolution if women are to be liberated.

What is postmodern feminism?

Postmodernism, which emerged towards the end of the 20th Century, rejects the idea that there are grand narratives that offer one all-encompassing theory that explains everything. As a result, postmodern feminism is more of a collection of different ideas.

Different women, in different locations and at different times, all experience oppression in different ways.

One key criticism levelled by bell hooks at all the preceding forms of feminism is that they represented the interests of white, middle-class women who sought sisterhood within their experiences. This side-lined the experiences of black women in the USA and meant their voice was not being heard.

What is intersectionality?

Gender should be understood via intersectionality. In 1989, Kimberlé Crenshaw coined this term to detail how systems of oppression overlap and create unique experiences for people based on their multiple identity categories.

She describes this in her famous quote: 'The experience of being a black woman cannot be understood in terms of being black and of being a woman considered independently, but must include interactions, which frequently reinforce each other.'

What was bell hooks’ key work?

bell hooks was a contemporary feminist who dealt with the issues of gender, race, class and sexual oppression in her book, Ain't l a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981).

Why did hooks critique Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique?

hooks wrote a withering critique of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, arguing that 'the problem that has no name' is not the condition of women in society. It is 'the plight of a select group of college-educated, middle- and upper-class, married white women' who wanted more than their husband, children or house - they wanted careers.

hooks argued that the feminist movement gave a voice to this group and drowned out the voices of women without men, without children, without homes, poor white women and all non-white

What are the consequences of the interlocking system of 'imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, which shape the dominator culture in the USA and work to promote injustice, exploitation and oppression?

Of these interlocking systems, patriarchy is the system that exploits the family to teach these dominator values, socialising both men and women to believe men are inherently dominating, superior to the weak, especially women, and have 'the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence'. These systems of oppression have left black women as the most marginalised group in society.

What did bell hooks propose as the answer?

The answer is to acknowledge that patriarchy is the problem and to work together, between genders, classes and races, to end it and all other forms of oppression.

By doing this, the feminist movement can have more impact and can be more diverse and inclusive.

What is post-feminism?

Post-feminism sees many of the objectives of the feminist movement as having been achieved.

As a result, it is time to move on from feminism. Now, women should focus on female accomplishments and female power. Some have gone further, arguing that women should claim the power to dominate and manipulate using their sexualised bodies. Many feminists do not see post-feminism as a form of feminism at all but rather as a form of anti-feminism.

What was the gender pay gap in April 2022?

The Office for National Statistics reported that the UK median hourly pay for full-time employees was 8.3% less for women than for men in April 2022.

What are the key debates within feminism?

• Public vs Private

• Difference vs Equality

• Reform vs Revolution

• Is feminism a single doctrine?