Feminism(s) - Readings

Rosalind Delmar — What is Feminism?

🔑 Key Takeaways

1. The “Obvious” Meaning of Feminism Is Misleading

Delmar opens by challenging the idea that feminism has a self-evident meaning. She writes that this assumption “has become an obstacle to understanding feminism, in its diversity and in its differences” (from the document).
Feminism is not a single, stable ideology.

2. Feminism Is Plural, Not Singular

The women’s movement has always contained multiple feminisms—radical, socialist, Marxist, lesbian separatist, women of colour, etc.
Delmar notes that these groups often harden into separate identities, each claiming to be the “true” feminism.

3. Early Women’s Liberation Assumed a Shared Female Identity

The 1960s–70s movement relied on the idea that women share common experiences and could speak as “we.”
But this unity was based on shared description, not shared analysis, which later proved fragile.
She writes that “unity based on identity has turned out to be a very fragile thing.”

4. Not All Women’s Actions Are Necessarily Feminist

Delmar uses the example of the Greenham Common peace camp.
Although symbolically feminine and woman-led, it is not automatically feminist.
This raises the question: Can an action be feminist if the actors do not identify as feminists?

5. Two Competing Definitions of Feminism

Delmar identifies two major ways people define feminism:

A. Feminism as any activity that benefits women

This makes feminism extremely broad but also vague.

B. Feminism as a specific set of ideas and analyses

This allows feminism to be distinguished from general women’s activism.

She argues that the second definition is necessary if feminism is to have a coherent history.

6. Histories of Feminism Often Oversimplify

Feminist history is frequently written as the history of the women’s movement, but this collapses important distinctions.
For example, Ray Strachey’s The Cause treats feminism as culminating in the suffrage movement, but Delmar shows this ignores intellectual feminisms outside organized activism.

7. Mary Wollstonecraft Is Not the “Beginning” of Feminism

Strachey treats Wollstonecraft as the origin of feminist theory, followed by a “forty-year silence.”
Delmar counters this by citing research showing feminist ideas persisted in Owenite socialism.
Thus, feminism has existed both within and outside women’s movements.

8. Feminists Have Never Shared a Single Concept of “Woman”

This is one of Delmar’s most important points.
The meaning of “woman” has shifted dramatically:

  • natural rights subject (Wollstonecraft)

  • property-owning subject (Victorian suffragists)

  • maternal subject (post-suffrage feminists)

  • sexed subject (psychoanalytic feminism)

She writes that “‘woman’ is too fragile to bear the weight of all the contents and meanings now ascribed to it.”

9. Contemporary Feminism Intensifies Old Tensions

The women’s liberation movement introduced:

  • sexual politics

  • consciousness-raising

  • separatism

  • focus on female sexuality

  • emphasis on women as both subject and object of feminism

But this also produced crises—especially around the assumption that women form a unified political category.

10. Feminism’s Future Is Uncertain

Delmar concludes that feminism is fragmented, historically discontinuous, and shaped by crises of representation.
She argues that we cannot yet know what forms feminism will take.

🧠 Core Insight

Feminism is not a single ideology or movement but a shifting field of ideas, practices, and identities.
Attempts to define it as unified—whether historically or politically—oversimplify its complexity.