FEMINIST VALUES CATEGORIZATION Dee L.R. Graham, Ph.D., and Edna I. Rawlings, Ph.D. 1.

PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE A woman should introspect, explore, and trust her own thoughts, emotions, desires, and experiences; recognize realistically her positive and negative characteristics; and set goals and work toward them. She should know about the positive value of assertion, stubbornness and decisiveness. She should know herself. She can come to know herself. She can come to know herself through creative work of her own, but this work must be equal to her actual capabilities and capacities. She should know personal truth and trust her intuition, as science and logic are limited techniques for exploring reality. She should credit herself for her thoughts, feelings, and actions. It is important that she validate rather than exploit herself. That she emphasize self-knowledge over other-knowledge, that she have a global perspective of the role she plays in society, that she discern her real wants and needs from those forced upon her by the dominant group and that she be realistic about her fears, problems, dependencies, and the sources of her oppression. She should know that her relation is to reality and not to sex role prescriptions. 2. SELF-DEFINING A woman is to create her own definition of herself rather than accept societys or the dominant groups definition of het. She is encouraged to define herself by her own personal terms rather than by societal expectations. She views herself as a complete human person. She is not restricted by the categorization of human qualities into sex roles. She rejects the male/female polarity and the symbiotic, complementary male/female sex roles. She struggles to overcome the conventional, stereotypical picture of femininity, e.g., woman as submissive, pliable, quit and unintelligent, and has the courage to try non-traditional behaviors. She develops her own standards and values, determining for herself what are important for her to do. She abandons the feminine mystique and acknowledges her personhood as separate from the family or a man. She defines herself as a complete, whole human person, not a helpmate to man, a mother, a housewife, or server of others needs. She also rejects the myth of superwoman. -------------------------These categories were derived from values expressed in over seventy books by feminist authors.

3. PERSONAL POWER The feminist value of personal power is for women to be personally strong, not from dominating others, but, in part, from their love, trust, and faith in themselves and 1

other women. Personal power involves being active, assertive and skillful ---- not allowing oneself to be a passive victim. Women with personal power do not require support from men to survive. Rather, they take control of and responsibility for their lives. They are self-reliant, independent and autonomous, finding dependence on men unnatural. They have a sense of purpose, achievement, and dignity. They are selfgoverning and seek guidance from themselves. They trust their own experiences and have a sense of self-worth and a positive self-image. Their independence comes from making changes in their lives and the way they see themselves. 4. AUTHENTICITY To be authentic is to act on ones own values, convictions, desires, emotions, needs, capabilities, and opinions; to be honest to oneself and others about ones self; to be emotionally spontaneous, throwing oneself into projects, beliefs, and feelings despite sex role stereotypes and pressures; to ignore criticisms if you are doing something you enjoy; to be hornets about ones sexuality; and to openly talk about ones body without shame. Being authentic will expose existing inequalities, lead to conflict (which is the source of all growth), and lead to the discovery of interesting, new facts. 5. CREATIVITY Creativity means being adaptable to changes and having increased diversity in ones thinking. Women need to face an to learn to use anger, aggression, assertion, the balance of power, conflict, competition, and success in new ways. Especially important is using anger creatively. Making choices and decisions based on knowledge of alternatives leads to concrete, creative action. Creative work involves developing ones life plans by listening to ones inner voice and finding ones own identity in fulfilling ones life plans. As women struggle for identity, creativity emerges. Women struggle for authenticity through their personal freedom and emotional liberation from social patterns that keep women from establishing personal identity leads to creativeness. 6. SYTHESIS Feminists value a dialectic approach whereby there is an integration of opposites, e.g., heart and mind, rational and emotional, weaknesses and strengths, the subjective and objective, the abstract and concrete. That is, integration rather than segmentation of the individual is valued. For this reason, women are encouraged to integrate apparent opposites, e.g. , the personal and the professional and the masculine and the famine, i.e. , to be androgynous. This approach requires communication, acknowledging directly what we think and feel and checking out what the other person thinks and feels, keeping ones mind open, exposing conflict, appreciating differences between us, and the achievement of a dynamic synthesis that enhances growth. 7. PHYSICAL STRENGTH

Strength, vitality, health, stamina, and fearlessness are needed for women to accomplish their goals. Physical power and physical equality with men are also needed. 8. THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL This value constitutes a realization that even womens most personal feelings, thoughts and actions as they relate to any given man are political and oppressive in nature. It is an awareness that, in patriarchal society, intimacy with a man, romantic love for a man, motherhood, sex, and even the sex motive are the battlegrounds on which scenarios of man-woman violence are carried out. 9. EQUALITY Feminists value the right of woman and men to live a fee and equal human beings. Equality should exist in all areas of life: womens constitutional rights as citizens, work, access to wealth, responsibilities within a marriage including childrearing and the financial and physical maintenance of the home, and align treatment of problems. 10. MUTUALITY IN RELATIONSHIPS Feminists value egalitarian, non-hierarchical relationships which are based on mutuality. That is, women are encouraged to choose relationships which based on mutual respect, understanding, admiration, giving and cooperation and therefore foster mutual growth. They are discouraged from choosing relationships based on dependency, role playing, suffocating love, or a double standard. 11. ECONOMIC INDEPENDENCE Because ignorance of money has operated to keep women dependent, women must learn to understand economics and how to make money. This will enable us to be financially self-sufficient and therefore economically independent of men. To accomplish this end, women read to move from non-wage earning home work to gainful occupations, need to eliminate segregated occupational structures, and must be rewarded on the basis of the merit work rather than their sex. 12. SEXUAL FREEDOM Sexual oppression is the basis of all other oppression. For this reason, sexual freedom and freedom for all women are inseparable. A first step in the process of liberation from male oppression is the radical redefining of the relationship between women and their bodies. This redefining means rejecting the male concept of female sexuality as innocent and deprived. It means knowing that womens sexuality is their own, not the gift of men, nor derived from the penis. It means learning about ones body in order to be in touch with it. It means knowing about sexuality; having the freedom to speak of sexuality; being assertive as a sexual partner; controlling our own bodies; and rejecting all forms of outside control of womens bodies. In a nutshell, sexual freedom is exercising womens bodies. In a nutshell, sexual freedom is exercising womens right to instigate sexuality with being a human being. 3

13. REPRODUCTIVE FREEDOM Motherhood should be voluntary for all women. This means that the choices to have a child should be up to women and only the women. The conditions of her production and reproduction should not be distorted of held back because of her sex, race, or class. 14. FREEDOM FROM OPPRESSION Freedom from oppression means being able to grow and achieve without restrictions in society. This includes freedom of movement, freedom of choice, freedom from fear of male violence, and freedom to express ones ideas and opinions without constraint, being brushed aside, or being cut down. 15. WOMEN IDENTIFICATION Women identification means that women value themselves and other women as women. This includes crediting women for what they have been responsible and affirming womens capacity to be capable, intelligent, and ethical. There are three related aspects to women identification: an alternative feminist culture, the sisterhood of all women, and the womens collective action to overthrow patriarchal oppression. A healing aspect of feminism for women is the encouragement of the nurturance of the women-spirit and women identity. This is reflected in the awareness of and the preservation of womens cultural heritage for future generations. In addition, women need to develop a feminist alternative culture with its own language and definition of concepts, history, art, music and psychology so that women can express their unique perspective on life, find new ways of expressing power and develop a framework for a new psychology of women. A radical feminist vision of this alternative culture is one of women living with one another collectively and thinking in terms of community rather than individual gains. Another important aspect of women identification is the concept of sisterhood. In sisterhood, women share personal concerns and a common unity based on their understanding and love for themselves and other women. Sisterhood is implicit in women taking cooperative and collective action based on their strength and intellect to free themselves from patriarchal oppression. To liberate themselves women must stop selling out their identities as women by rejecting restrictive sex role stereotypes and by claiming all territory as womens territory. 16. SOCIAL CHANGE Three stages for bringing about social change are subsumed under this feminist value. The first stage is having visions of a changed society, which includes realizing that masculine and feminine and man and woman are cultural constructs 4

which can be changed and even eliminated, envisioning a society free of the psychology of power in which all humans provide for the care of all people. The second stage is feeling a need for social change and feeling obligated to fight for ones rights. The third stage is social action itself: not accepting second clad citizenship, hierarchies, male values, male definitions of women, objectification, or violence toward women, but rather challenging the system and its values by dealing with barriers as they present themselves and openly stating values that challenge the basic structure of the patriarchy; building ones strength, numbers, and unity, and finally, creating an alternative environment that is non-coercive, and non-sexist, in which people are not defined or categorized by sex. 17. HAVING POLITICAL POWER IN SOCIETY A feminist value is for women to be in making decisions shaping society, to exercise their own voice, and too have power to influence the decisions being in society. ----------------------

(This reading material is from the PWU Womens Studies collection.)