Feminism
Feminism as an ideology has always been highly controversial. It asks such questions as: do women have too much or too little power? It is not only controversial as far as traditional defenders of the status quo are concerned. Some women feel that they are in favor of equality with men, but do not like the idea of feminism. It has been said that we live in a post-feminist age and some agree that the main goals of feminism have been fulfilled, so that it is quite unnecessary for feminists to continue their argument against male domination.
Feminism, however, is also controversial in the sense that different feminists mean different things by the term. There are different varieties that seem to have little in common. Today we shall try to explain these different feminisms, and also try to suggest a way of extracting some kind of unity out of this formidable diversity.
Liberal feminism would appear to be the earliest form of feminism. Feminism has a particular relationship to liberalism, and it has been said that all feminism is ‘liberal at root’. However, there were multiple attempts in history to find conceptual basis for the role of women in the society, not all of them were pointless.
Plato argued in The Republic that women can be among the elite who rule philosophically in his ideal state, adopting a gender-free view of political capacities. Aristotle, on the contrary, had contended that ‘the relation of male to female is naturally that of superior to inferior, of the ruling to the ruled. But even Plato was not truly feminist due to his explicit elitism. Only a tiny number of women would have been eligible to become rulers, and those that did, would have to act just like men.
The position of women in medieval theory is depicted in explicitly hierarchical terms with women being seen as more sinful than men, inferior to them and not equipped to take part in political processes. Aquinas follows Aristotle in arguing that a wife ‘is something belonging to her husband’.
Mary Wollstonecraft is rightly regarded as the first major feminist, and in her famous A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), she argues for women’s economic independence and legal equality. At the time she wrote, a married woman could not own property in her own right, enter into any legal contract or have any claim over the rights of her children. History, philosophy and classical languages were considered too rigorous for women to learn; botany and biology were excluded from their educational curriculum, and physical exercise thought unsuitable.
Wollstonecraft directs her argument to middle-class women. The middle-class woman is the woman who is neither dissipated by inherited wealth, nor brutalized by poverty. Wollstonecraft had adopted the assumption that all people are rational. The problem with gender inequality, she said, lay with the environment. Physical frailty derives from a cloistered upbringing, and this was thought to impact negatively upon intellectual ability.
Women, Wollstonecraft argues, are placed on a pedestal but within a prison. Women ought to be represented in government and have a ‘civil existence in the State’. They should not be excluded from civil and political employments. The enlightened woman must be an ‘active citizen’ ‘intent to manage her family, educate her children and assist her neighbors'. The emancipation of women is, in Wollstonecraft’s view, part of the case against autocracy and arbitrariness in general.
Wollstonecraft’s position has a number of shortcomings, but it is generally acknowledged that she tended to compare reason to feeling, identifying feelings with animal appetites that men exploited. Moreover, she saw perfection as a realizable ideal, a position undoubtedly influenced by the intensely religious character of her argument. Wollstonecraft’s position was complex, sometimes even contradictory to itself.
John Stuart Mill (influenced by his partner Harriet Taylor) wrote The Subjection of Women in 1869. He argues that women should enjoy equal rights with men – including the right to vote. Women, he contended, were still slaves in many respects, and to argue that they are inferior by ‘nature’ is to presume knowledge of nature: until equality has been established, how do we know what woman’s nature is? He claimed that It cannot be proven that women are housewives and mothers by nature, but he says that they still are more suited for the role. Mill contributed to liberal feminism by extending his liberal principles to the position of women and, like Wollstonecraft, he argued that the family must become a school for learning the values of freedom and independence, which is impossible without female participation.
As a part of western culture, liberal feminism has resulted in ample suffrage movements and advocacies for more equal societal roles of women and men (mostly in voting, ergo taking part in political life). Eventually women received their voting rights as a part of a general democratization of liberalism; but after centuries of oppression, women in general tended to neglect their new rights, and some societal unwritten limitations remained.
The turn-point in achieving a more descent level of equality was the WWII, when men were in high shortage, and females took on some untraditional roles in factories, mining industries and other jobs which were deemed unsuitable for women by definition.
However, despite having that vivid example of how women can be equal to men in terms of labor, they resumed their housekeeping roles for a brief moment in 1950’s, but the process has already been launched. 1960’s (especially in US) were the time of hippies and the birth of civil rights movement, which was opposing all-controlling state. This went along with the general desire of women to finally become more equal in their rights, access to work and equal pay.
General aspirations of feminist movements: right to vote -> right to work -> right to control own body (for example, abortion or decision upon how many children to have if any) - > right for protection from sexualized violence. Alongside with that feminism strives to achieve equal education and work opportunities, including equal pay. Even in the western consolidated democracies, not all of these are yet achieved, and modern feminism tends to reprioritize fighting for equality and rights in favor for ensuring security and preventing sexualized violence.
Radical feminists protest that liberal feminism is too superficial in its approach. All feminisms agree with the extension of liberal principles to women in terms of the vote and civil liberties, but radicals argue that the notion of equality is too abstract to be serviceable. The point about women is that they are different from men, and to argue for equality implies that they aspire to be like men. But why?
Men not only oppress women but they are responsible for war, violence, hierarchy and the exploitation of nature and their fellows. Radicals argue that it is not equality which women should want, but liberation from male modus operandi. Freedom for women thus means being separate and apart from men. It means celebrating their difference from men and their own distinctive sexuality. Liberal feminists not only regard sexuality as irrational and emotional, but they uncritically accept that feelings should be transcended and they adopt a notion of reason that reflects male experience.
Feminism, as radicals argue, is concerned with the interests of women, and a new set of words needs to be developed to reflect the separateness of women. Some radicals like Mary Daly adopt a different style of writing, so as to make it clear that feminism is distinct from male-constructed society. Politics is not simply about the law and state, as liberals think. It is about human activity in general. Radical feminists argue that interpersonal relations are as political as voting in elections. Radicals encourage women to meet separately – to voice their problems without men – and to take personal experience much more seriously than the liberal tradition allows.
Radicals see themselves as sexual revolutionaries, and thus very different from liberal feminists who work within the system. However, in trying to pursue seemingly a more pro-female position, radicals often act even more exclusive than traditional liberalism would entail, making it a very non-constructive direction of feminism, as it inevitably would push men and women one against another.
The socialist critique of liberal feminism argues that liberal feminists ignore or marginalize the position of working-class women and the problems they have with exploitation and poor conditions in the workplace. The question of gender needs to be linked to the question of class. Legal and political equality, though important, does not address the imbalance in real power that exists in capitalist society.
Marxist feminists in particular want to challenge the view of the state as a benevolent reformer, and to argue that the state is an expression of class domination. The freedom of women has to be linked to the emancipation of the working class in general, with a much greater concentration on the social and economic dimensions of gender discrimination. Why should the right to join the armed forces and the police be a positive development if the police are used to oppress people at home and the army to oppress peoples abroad? Liberal feminism neglects the question of production and reproduction that lies at the heart of human activity.
The black feminist critique particularly takes issue with the tendency of liberal feminists to treat women in an abstract fashion, and to assume that women are not only middle class, but white as well. Many of the objections that liberal feminists raise to the hypocritical politeness of men hardly apply to women who are subject to racist abuse and treated in a derogatory fashion because they are black.
The difference was especially shocking in the United States – while white women have been trying to oppose societal pressure for being a mom and a wife, black women were treated as brutally as black men. Whatever inequality and sexualized violence white females experienced, black and Latino women had it several times worse. It was not until the 1990’s and the O.J. Simpson trial when the rights of Black people were finally becoming a serious matter to be taken into account.
The feminisms looked at so far can be called ‘ideological’ feminisms, and they overlap with what can be labelled ‘philosophical feminisms’: feminist empiricism, standpoint feminism and postmodern feminism.
Feminist empiricists take the view that feminism should be treated as an objective science which concentrates on the facts relating to discrimination. Feminist empiricists feel that it is unnecessary and counterproductive to hitch feminism to an ideological position, and that the norms of liberalism involve a value commitment that narrows the appeal of feminist analysis.
Standpoint feminists take the view that the position of women gives rise to a different outlook, so that liberal feminists are wrong to argue simply for equality with men, and to concern themselves only with legal and political rights.
As for postmodern feminists, they consider the tradition of the Enlightenment and liberalism to be hopelessly abstract, ignoring the obvious importance of difference between and within genders. Postmodernism thus focuses on these differences instead of imposing universal values.
Feminist empiricists take the view that sexist and or male chauvinist biases can be eliminated from scholarship and statements if there is a strict adherence to existing norms of scientific inquiry. If projects are rigorously designed, hypotheses properly tested and data soundly interpreted, then sexist prejudices can be dealt with alongside all other. The more female researchers there are in the profession, the better, since women are likely to be more sensitive to sexist prejudices than men. However, the question is not one of female science, but of sound science. The fact is that women are dramatically under-represented in the decision-making structures of the UN or in legislative bodies or in the world of business. Indeed in the ‘public’ world in general, except perhaps in certain new social movements like the peace movement and in certain professions, women tend to be a de-facto minority. These facts can only be established through sound statistical techniques, and they establish the existence of discrimination in ways that cannot be ignored.
Feminist empiricism ensures that feminism has come of age, entering into mainstream argument and debate.
Standpoint feminism arose initially as a feminist version of the Marxist argument that the proletariat had a superior view of society because it was the victim rather than the beneficiary of the market. Standpoint theorists argue that because women have been excluded from power – whether within societies or in international organizations – they see the world differently from men.
Standpoint theorists differ in explaining why women have an alternative outlook. Do women have a more respectful attitude towards nature than men, because they menstruate and can give birth to children, or is it because they are socialized differently, so that nature seems more precious to them than it does to many men? Peace activists may likewise differ in accounting for the fact that women in general are more likely to oppose war than men. Whatever the emphasis placed upon nature or nurture, standpoint feminists generally believe that women are different to men. One of the reasons why standpoint feminists see women as more practically minded than men is because they often have to undertake activity of a rather menial kind. Bryson refers to Marilyn French’s novel The Women’s Room (1978) in which a woman has the job of washing a toilet and the floor and walls around it: an activity, says French, which brings women ‘in touch with reality’ and this is why they ‘are saner than men’. Indeed, Hartsock seeks to redefine power as a capacity and not as domination, arguing that women’s experience stresses connection and relationship rather than individuality and competition.
Postmodernists seek to overcome the dualistic character of traditional theory. We should refuse to accept that we either want to overturn everything or want to keep things as they are. We need to be both subjective and objective, valuing the individual and society.
In this way we avoid making the kind of choices that postmodernists call ‘binary’ and absolutist. This leads postmodernists to stress the importance of difference and plurality, and this is why postmodern feminists argue that the notion of feminism as the emancipation of women is doubly problematic. First, because emancipation sounds as though at some privileged point in time women will finally be free and autonomous, and second, because the very term ‘woman’ implies that what unites women is more important than what divides them.
This, postmodernists argue, violates the logic of both/and, since it privileges sameness over difference. Indeed, Kate Nash argues that because poststructuralism commits us to arguing that woman ‘is not a fixed category with specific characteristics’, we have to be committed to the concept of woman as a ‘fiction’ in order to be a feminist at all.
It could be argued that the emphasis upon different strands of feminism is itself counterproductive. If feminism is defined broadly as the emancipation of women, then it becomes possible to see each of the different feminisms making a positive overall contribution. Researchers often speak of the need to distinguish ‘feminisms from the intolerance’. It would seem that we do not need to choose between a variety of feminisms. Feminism can only be constructed as a viable and dynamic theory through multiple feminisms.
Thus liberal feminism stresses the importance of people as free and equal individuals, while socialist feminists rightly emphasize the importance of class and capitalism as social institutions that negatively impact upon women. Despite its weaknesses, radical feminism argues for a notion of patriarchy that extends into all areas of life and it invites attention to relationships as the location of conflict.
Black feminists warn us eloquently against the dangers of ethno-centrism. Women can be black as well as white, and their experiences in being women in society can change upon their racial or national identity.
As for the philosophical feminisms, feminist empiricists stress the importance of a sophisticated presentation of the facts, while standpoint feminists are concerned with the way in which women’s experience impacts upon their behavior and outlook. Postmodernist feminism helpfully warns against static and ahistorical views of women that ignore the differences between them.
There is no need to counter-position separate feminisms from the development of a feminism which is sensitive to difference, sees the need for alliances with men, acknowledges the problems from which all women suffer in different ways and seeks to make feminism as convincing and well researched as possible. Arguably, feminism as a movement and as ideology could use a more systematic and inclusive approach.