Feminism-Theories

October 6

Feminist Theories
feminists are people who try to acknowledge
social inequality based on gender and stop it
from continuing
Differences within feminisms
Differences within and between states

Differences within feminisms

First Wave feminists concerned with
suffrage
womens legal and civil rights
rights to education
Second Wave feminists concerned with
root cause of womens oppression: sexism
It affected their understanding of any other forms of
difference
No possibility of alliance with (progressive) men

Third Wave feminists:

breaking the boundaries
Deconstructing us-them
Theories of Feminism
Mainly in the 1970s and 80s (starting
from1960s)three broad categorizations:
liberal
radical
Marxist/socialist
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Liberal Feminism
Freedom as personal autonomyliving a life
of ones own choosing
Freedom as political autonomybeing coauthor of the conditions under which one lives
Intertwined condition for life
The exercise of personal autonomy depends on
certain enabling conditions that are
insufficiently present in womens lives
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 Social arrangements often fail to respect womens

personal autonomy and other elements of
womens flourishing
Womens needs and interests are insufficiently
reflected in the basic conditions under which they
live
Autonomy deficits like these are due to the
gender system (Susan Moller Okin), or the
patriarchal nature of inherited traditions and
institutions, and that the womens movement
should work to identify and remedy them:
feminist commitment to justice: gender is the
linchpin of the broader system
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What is the crux of the

argument?
committed to major economic reorganization and considerable
redistribution of wealth, since one of
the modern political goals most
closely associated with liberal
feminism is equality of opportunity,
which would undoubtedly require and
lead to both (radical commitments?
NO)
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Philosophical Understanding: the

concept of Rights
Liberal political thought generally locates our
uniqueness as human persons in our capacity for
rationality (Alison Jagger: Feminist Politics and
Human Nature)
Liberals claim that the right must be given priority
over the good
Our entire system of individual rights is justified
because these rights constitute a framework within
which we can all choose our own separate goods,
provided we do not deprive others of theirs
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Basic Tenets
Classical liberalism and welfare liberalism
Female subordination is rooted in a set of customary
and legal constraints that blocks womens entrance
to and success in the so-called public world
Primary goalgender equality
In the public sphereequal access to education,
equal pay, ending job sex segregation, better
working conditionswon primarily through legal
changes
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 In the private sphereissues that influence or

impede equality in the public sphere
Support marriage as an equal partnership, and
more male involvement in child care. Abortion
and other reproductive rights have to do with
control of ones life choices and autonomy

10

Popular Feminist Writers

Mary Wollstonecraft
John Stuart Mill
Betty Friedan
Gloria Steinem
Alice Walker

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What do women want?

Liberal feminism answers: mostly, what men

want: to get an education, to make a decent
living, to provide for ones family

12

How to Achieve these Goals?

An alliance with the statestate is seen as the
protector of individual rights
The state must effectively protect women from
violence, regardless of where that violence
takes place
Support affirmative action legislation requiring
employers and educational institutions to make
special attempts to include women
13

Critique
Jean Bethke Elshtain, Liberal Feminism: Why
Cant a Woman be more Like a Man?
Liberal feminisms three major flaws:
(1) its claim women can become like men if they
set their minds to it
(2) its claim most women want to become like
men
(3) its claim all women should want to become
like men, to aspire to masculine values
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Marxist/Socialist Feminism

In 1972, the Chicago Womens Liberation

Union published Socialist Feminism: A Strategy for
the Women's Movement, which is believed to be the
first to use the term socialist feminism in
publication

15

Basic Understanding
All human societies are marked by some degree of
inequality between the sexes
The subjugation of women to male authority, both
with the family and in the community in general
The objectification of women as a form of property
A sexual division of labor in which women are
confined to such activities as child raising,
performing personal services for adult males, and
specified (usually low prestige) forms of productive
labor
16

 Biological differences between male and

female is translated into male supremacy over
womena near-universal fact
The possibility of male assault stands as a
constant warning to bad (rebellious,
aggressive) women, and drives good women
into complicity with male supremacy
The reward for being good (pretty,
submissive) is protection from random male
violence and, in some cases, economic security

17

 Capitalism is seen as a political/

economic/cultural totality
Capitalist social structure has institutionalized
this patriarchal structure to the detriment of
womens interests.
It is the capitalist society that thrives on some
to be worker and some to be care-giver or
the reproducer of the workers in the society
Womens subjugation lies central to the
capitalist system
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 womens skills (productive skills, healing,

midwifery, etc.) which have been discredited
or banned to make way for commodities
Women are encouraged to be utterly
passive/uncritical/dependent (i.e. feminine)
in the face of the pervasive capitalist
penetration of private life
Capitalist penetration of working class life has
singled out women as prime targets of
pacification/feminization because women are
the culture-bearers of their class.
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 As Engels argued: As mens work and production

grew in importance, not only did the value of
womens work and production decrease, but the
status of women within society decreased.
Engels presented the overthrow of mothers
right as the world-historic defeat of the female
sex
Having produced and staked a claim to wealth,
men took control of the household, reducing
women to the slaves of mens carnal desire and
mere instrument[s] for the production of [mens]
children.
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 In this new familial order, said Engels, the

husband ruled by virtue of his economic power:
He is the bourgeois and the wife represents the
proletariat
Engels believed mens power over women is
rooted in the fact that men, not women, control
private property. The oppression of women will
cease only with the dissolution of the institution of
private property
Therefore, there is a fundamental interconnection
between womens struggle and what is
traditionally conceived as class struggle
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Classical Marxist Feminism

Marx, Engels and Lenin agreed: turning housework into a
public industry would free women from household bondage
Evelyn Reeds Women: Caste, Class, or Oppressed Sex?:
capitalist economic and social relations that created a chain of
oppression
womens oppression as women is the worst kind of oppression
for all women
Although relative to men, women occupy a subordinate position
in a patriarchal or male-dominated society, bourgeoisie women
were capable of oppressing both proletarian men and women. In
a capitalist system, money is most often power
22

 the primary enemy of at least proletarian women is

not patriarchy, but first and foremost, capitalism
far from being eternal, womans subjection and the
bitter hostility between the sexes are no more than a
few thousand years old. They were produced by the
drastic social changes which brought the family,
private property, and the state into existence
With the end of capitalist male-female relationships,
both sexes will thrive in a communist society that
enables all its members to cooperate with each other
in communities of care

23

Womens Labor After the 1917

Communist Revolution in Russia
The idea was: with economic independence
would come the possibility of womens
developing self-confidence and viewing
themselves as makers of meaningful human
history
Was the reality so rosy???

24

Private Complaints
1. the relegation of most women to low-status womens
work (i.e., secretarial work; rote factory work; and service
work, including jobs related to cooking, cleaning, and caring
for the basic needs of the young, the old, and the infirm)
2. the creation of female professions and male professions
3. the payment of lower wages to women than the wages paid
to men
4. the treatment of women as a colossal reserve of labor
forces to use or not use, depending on the states need for
workers

25

The Wages-for-Housework Campaign

Margaret Benston: socialization of domestic labor:
women as that class of people who are responsible
for the production of simple use-values in those
activities associated with the house and family
Maria Dalla Costa and Selma James claimed that
womens work inside the home generates surplus
value
Therefore, mens employers should pay women wages
for the housework they dolet housewives get the
cash that would otherwise fatten employers wallets
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Feasibility of Wages for Housework

If employers were required to pay housewives
wages for housework, the employers would
probably pay housewives husbands lower
wages
Many married women as well as married men
work outside the home as do many single men
and women. Would employers be required to
pay all their workers wages for their at-home
domestic work?
27

 if small companies as well as major

corporations were required to pay all their
workers for domestic work, most small
companies would probably go out of business.
Example:
An estimation of 1972 revealed: white males
had average incomes of $172 a week; white
females had average incomes of $108 a week:
on top of that if the employer had to provide an
extra for housework, they would go out of
business.
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 Paying women wages for domestic work

would give women little impetus to work
outside the household
It will strengthen the traditional sexual
division of labor
Men would feel no pressure to do womens
work, and women would have no incentive to
do mens work

29

Rise of socialist feminism

Unable to explain in exclusively economic
terms why domestic work is viewed as womens
work in socialist as well as capitalist societies
unable to explain womens root of exploitation
as a sex class and as an economic class
to develop a theory powerful enough to explain
the complex ways in which capitalism and
patriarchy allied to oppress women
30

Contemporary Socialist Feminism

Two-system explanations of womens oppression:
Capitalism and patriarchy: Juliet Mitchell and Alison
Jaggar
combines a Marxist feminist account of
class power with a radical feminist account
of sex power
Capitalism oppresses women as workers, but
patriarchy oppresses women as women, an oppression
that affects womens identity as well as activity
(Jaggar)
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 The patriarchal ideology, which views women

as lovers, wives, and mothers rather than as
workers, is almost as responsible for womens
position in society as capitalist economics is
Even if a Marxist revolution destroyed the
family as an economic unit, it would not
thereby make women mens equals
automatically
All women, no matter their work role, are
alienated in ways that men are not

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 In the same way wageworkers may be alienated from the

product(s) on which they work, women, viewed simply
as women, may be alienated from the product(s) on
which they typically worktheir bodies
Women may insist that they diet, exercise, and dress only
to please themselves, but in reality they most likely shape
and adorn their flesh primarily for the pleasure of men
Women do not have final or total say about when, where,
how, or by whom their bodies will be used, because their
bodies can be suddenly appropriated from them through
acts ranging from the male gaze to sexual harassment
to rape

33

Capitalist Patriarchy or Patriarchal

Capitalism
capitalism and patriarchy as two equal partners
colluding in a variety of ways to oppress women
The interdependency of capitalism and patriarchy
Patriarchy should not be considered a system
separate from capitalism just because it existed first
In fact, class and gender structures are so intertwined
that neither one actually precedes the other

34

Concluding Observations
Mao Zedong admitted that despite
collective work, egalitarian
legislation, social care of children,
etc., it was too soon for the Chinese
really, deeply and irrevocably to have
changed their attitudes towards
women.
patriarchy and capitalism must be
overthrown if society is to be truly
humanized
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Radical Feminism
The feminists who formed groups such as the
Redstockings, the Feminists, and the New York
Radical Feminists perceived themselves as
revolutionaries rather than reformers
The basic claim: womens oppression as women
is more fundamental than other forms of human
oppression
The personal is political and all women are
sisters
37

 Radical feminism is a movement that believes

sexism is so deeply rooted in society that the
only cure is to eliminate the concept of gender
completely
Stratification of men above women leads in
time to stratification of classes: an elite rules
over people perceived as closer to nature,
savage, bestial, animalistic
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Basic Arguments
That women were, historically, the first
oppressed group
That womens oppression is the most
widespread, existing in virtually every known
society
That womens oppression is the hardest form
of oppression to eradicate and cannot be
removed by other social changes such as the
abolition of class society
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 That womens oppression causes the most

suffering to its victims, qualitatively as well
as quantitatively, although the suffering may
often go unrecognized because of the sexist
prejudices of both the oppressors and the
victims
That womens oppression provides a
conceptual model for understanding all other
forms of oppression
40

Two Radical Camps

Radical-libertarian feminists
Radical-cultural feminists

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Radical-libertarian Feminists
Rejected the sex-gender system
Gayle Rubin, the sex/gender system is a set of
arrangements by which a society transforms biological
sexuality into products of human activity
Claimed that an exclusively feminine gender identity is
likely to limit womens development as full human persons
They encouraged women to become androgynous persons,
that is, persons who embody both (good) masculine and
(good) feminine characteristics
First celebrated androgynous women was Jo Freeman
(Joreen)
42

Radical-cultural Feminists
Replaced the goal of androgyny with a summons
to affirm womens essential femaleness
Women should not try to be like men: on the
contrary, they should try to be more like women,
emphasizing the values and virtues culturally
associated with women
interdependence, community, connection, sharing,
emotion, body, trust, absence of hierarchy, nature,
immanence, process, joy, peace and life
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Key Proponents
Kate Millet
Shulamith Firestone
Marilyn French

44

How to Eliminate Sexism?

Natural Reproduction: The Site of Womens
Oppression
Firestone and Marge Piercy
Natural reproduction is neither in womens best
interests nor in those of the children so
reproduced. The joy of giving birthinvoked so
frequently in this societyis a patriarchal myth.
The family would be eliminated as a biological as
well as an economic unit: Mattapoisett
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Natural Reproduction: The Site of

Womens Liberation
Far from liberating women, reproductive
technology further consolidates mens power over
women; it gives them the ability to have children
without womens aid.
Womens oppression was caused not by female
biology in and of itself, but rather by mens
jealousy of womens reproductive abilities and
subsequent desire to seize control of female biology
through scientific and technological means
46

 Men realize patriarchy cannot survive unless

men are able to control womens power to
bring or not bring life into the world.
Adrienne Rich described how men took the
birthing process into their own hands.

47

Multicultural, Global,
and Postcolonial Feminism
Women are different from each othernot all
women think and act alike; nor do all women
value the same things or aim for the same
goals.
Challenging the female essentialism
Disavows female chauvinism

48

Multicultural Feminism: General

Reflections
Gender-focused mainstream feminism was
critiqued
It is not only sexism, but racism,
ethnocentrism, classism, heterosexism,
ableism, or ageism that may be the major
contributor(s) to their low status

49

Birth of Multiculturalism in the US

Israel Zangwill (1908): The Melting Pot
America was seen as a transforming nation, banishing
old loyalties and forging a new national identity based
on common political ideals
By the 1970s new waves of immigrants began to
criticize the Great Alchemists work
Assimilation gave way to a celebration of ethnicity in
the 1970s, as salad bowl, cultural mosaic and
quilt metaphors for the United States increasingly
displaced the melting-pot metaphor
50

 We do not all have to look, act, speak, and

think alike to be American
An all-American kid need not have blue
eyes, blond hair, and white skin
An all-American kid may have yellow skin,
brown eyes, and black hair.
We should learn to think of our society as
consisting not of a majority and minorities but
of a plurality of cultural groups

51

Multicultural Feminism
Elizabeth Spelman: Inessential Woman:
Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought
In their desire to prove that women are mens full
equals, they stressed on womens sameness
Instead: it emphasizes on complex identity of
women: multiple jeopardy: Black lesbian
feminist socialist, mother of two, including one
boy, and a member of an interracial couple:
Audre Lorde
52

Global and Postcolonial Feminism:

General Reflections
The oppression of women in one part of the
world is often affected by what happens in
another, and that no woman is free until the
conditions of oppression of women are
eliminated everywhere
Emphasizes on the political division of nations
into the so-called First World nations to the socalled Third World nations
53

 While the First World women are concerned about

the issues of gender and reproduction, the Third
World women are more concerned about political,
economic and social issues.
Many Third World women, therefore reject the term,
feminist, instead embrace the term womanist
(Alice Walker)
womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender
feminism is a component of a much larger umbrella
of womanism: feminism is stronger in color
Walker defined a womanist as a Black feminist or
woman of color committed to the survival and
wholeness of entire people, male and female.
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Main Issues
Diversity and Commonality
Sexual/Reproductive Issues Versus Economic
Issues

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