Feminism Flashcards
Lib feminists on HN
Belief in individualism
Should have right to choose + given equality in public realm
Foundational equality- women are entitled to the same rights as men
Radical fems on HN
Starts in the family, women are not born passive, mediocre or immanent- she is socialised to believe that proper women must embody those characteristics.
Conditioning due to the patriarchy. Men + women have fundamentally different natures, stemming from biology known as essentialism. Liberation can only be achieved when women are encouraged to allow their diff natures + creative spirit to flourish
Equality feminists believe patriarchy can be overthrown when gender roles and stereotypes are challenged.
De Beauvoir on HN
‘One is not born but rather becomes a woman’
Women are conditioned to accept oppression
Socialist fems on HN
Women are forced into submission by capitalism. They are seen as part of a man’s priv property, and have to take child duties off of a man so they can work.
Domestic work is a 2nd shift, women work harder
Rowbotham on HN
Argued that to achieve women’s liberation required a ‘revolution within a revolution’ maintained that capitalism & sexism are so closely linked that the only way to destroy both was radical change in the cultural conditioning of humanity, regarding child-rearing, homes, laws and the work place
Post-mod on HN
More at play than gender, experiences vary for a range of reasons… not just diff between men & women but women and other women (diff classes, race, cultures, relig etc)
hooks on HN
Best known for bringing cultural concerns of women into the mainstream fem movement. Focuses too much on white, college-educated middle and upper-class women who had no stake in concerns of women of colour
Liberals on patriarchy
Women should not be discriminated against ag due to ‘accidents of birth’
Wollstonecraft - patriarchy in the pub realm could be combatted by education & opening up the public sphere to all women.
Radicals on patriarchy
Gender is the most imp cause of Soc div & have advanced the theory of sexual politics.
Patriarchy draws attention to the systematic, industrialised and pervasive power of men
‘The person is the political’
Politics/ power relationships can be found in all relationships between men and women. Focus on diff aspects of the ‘personal’ to show how they are political and patriarchy pervades every aspect of life.
Socialists on patriarchy
Capitalism creates patriarchy, women should join together with men to fight capitalism and by doing so, removing patriarchy too.
Lenin in the USSR making divorce + abortion legal
Patriarchy is the consequence of capitalism, only a rev based on Soc values will bring about women’s liberation
Perkins Gilman on patriarchy
From childhood girls are forced to conform to a domestic role & motherhood shown by toys advertised for them
Post-mod on patriarchy
Challenged that gender alone was the primary factor affecting women. Putting gender alongside race, religion or class was a more precise way of understanding the challenges facing women.
Intersectionality
Fem oft focuses on white-middle-class women.
Sylvia Walby’s six structures of patriarchy
Culture- women = misrepresented in media & pop culture
Sexuality- women’s sexuality more likely to be treated negatively
Paid work- women are more likely to be paid less
Violence- women are more prone to abuse
Household- women are more likely to do the housework & raise the children
State- women are unlikely to have formal power + rep
Liberals on the state
Can play a role in the promotion of women’s liberation in the public realm, policy should not go beyond the front door.
Women have right to decide what they want to do
Harm principle- will get involved if needs be.
Full legal equality and equality of opportunity
Radicals on state
Prov an equal, legal framework is insufficient to overthrow the patriarchy
State promotes the interest of patriarchy
Will get involved in the priv sector, the patriarchy stems from the bedroom
De Beauvoir on the state
Conditioning of women.
Motherhood is a way of turning women into slaves as they are forced to focus on motherhood and feminists rather than politics, technology or anything outside the family
Should eradicate patriarchal values in the pub and priv sphere by outlawing porn & ensuring harsher punishments for domestic violence, rape and other crimes against women.
Millett on the state
Female oppression was both pol & cultural, sub the undoing of the trad family unit was key to a true sexual revolution.
Family= ‘patriarchy’s key institution’
Socialists and the state
Reject the idea that the state is a neutral body, instead that it works in the interest of capitalism and the patriarchy.
Need a rev.
Cap forces us to continue to uphold the patriarchy
Pub + priv sphere
Rowbotham on the nature oppresion
Women are doubly oppressed as they are forced to sell their labour to survive, also forced to use their labour to support their husbands and children.
Libs on Public/ private divide
Do not seek to change the private, domestic sphere. Society should give women and men an equal opportunity to stay at home, or go out to work or both.
Politics stops at the front door.
Wollstonecraft- key to women making decisions is education. Does not dislike marriage as an institution, women just need choice.
Don’t believe the fundamental reconstructing of Soc is necessary. Rejects that patriarchy as the systematic + pervasive syst of oppression if women, highlights its just discriminatory
Radicals on public/ private divide
Legislation should start in the home. Oppression starts at home and in the family, from the ways in which we are brought up and our attitudes, legislation and education are needed to stop oppression
Millet on the public/ private divide
Millet’s ’sexual politics’ critiques the patriarchy w/ a particular focus on it w/in the family. Women treated as prop of the husband
Socialists on the public/ private divide
Capitalism makes women property, cap was based on the accumulation of priv prop, assuring the paternity of their heirs were vital to men, women required to be virgins and monogamous (in marriage).. soc rev would fix legislation in every aspect.
Rowbotham on public/ private divide
Institute of marriage closely resembles feudalism
Gilman on public/ private divide
Sex and domestic politics went hand in hand; for women to survive they were reliant on their sexual assets to please their husbands so that he could financially support his family
Post-mod on pub/priv divide
Fem everywhere
Focus on minorities speaking up
Susan Brown Miller
Talked ab men creating and benefitting from an ‘ideology of rape’, Men are aggressive, dominating & destructive and women are victims of this.
Men rape bc they have the ‘biological capacity’ to do so (women don’t)
Not all men rape, but they benefit from it bc of fear & anxiety it creates amongst women.
Andrea Dworkin
Pornography is the tool by which men objectify and subjugate women. Pornographers should be sued for supporting violence against women.
Heterosexual sex is almost always subjugation, and so women should not have relations w/ men.
There should be a sep lesbian state set up as option to escape men (paralleled w/ Jewish persecution)
Wittig
Identified herself as a Radical lesbian. In her work the straight mind; she argued that lesbians are not women bc to be a lesbian is to step outside of heterosexual norms of women, as defined by men for men’s ends
Lesbian feminism
Not enough for women to abstain from sex w/ men- to be truly free they must become lesbians. Only this was they can break free from being a woMAN
Instead to be a lesbian is to seize a pos + indep identity
For Wittig and other ‘radicalesbians’ like Charlotte Bunch & Ti Grace Atkinson women were an oppressed class that would become conscious of their oppression and become revolutionary. Therefore mixing Marxist analysis w/ radical feminism.
Ti Grace Atkinson
‘Feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice’
Ecofeminism
Earth was in danger of environmental destruction and women could by united action save the world in a way that men could not.
Women are naturally closer to the environment than men
Vandana Shiva and the Chipko movement in India
It is an extension of patriarchy that men should wish to dominate and exploit the natural world like they do women. Most land is also owned by men and they want to dominate the natural world.
Women could help w/ over-pop if they had greater control over their own fertility.
Men have a tendency to see themselves as superior ro nature and women see themselves as part of it
Vandana Shiva
Says that women have a special connection to the environment & so can combat cap
Friedan on sex and gender
‘Our biology is not our destiny’
De Beauvoir on sex and gender
‘Woman has ovaries, a uterus; these peculiarities imprison her in the subjectivity, circumscribe her within the limits of her own nature’
Described woman as ‘not man’ and the ‘second sex’ now internalised… women perceiving that they have roles bc of biology ‘women are not conscious of their own acceptance of their inferiority’ unconscious being
Otherness
Male sex is considered ‘normal’ women are considered abnormal- diff and therefore ‘other’
Androgyny
Sexless. Fems who agree w/ androgyny hold that women & men have the same basic nature as human beings. Sexual differences are biological facts of life but insists they have no Soc, pol or econ is.
Cold link to lib fem who believes we are all indivs
Rads… Soc can be reconst even dem to achieve ‘personhood’.
Essentialism
Belief that biological factors are crucial in determining psychological and behavioural traits. Unchangeable sexual identities of women & men and this impacts Soc & cult characteristics of gender
Transfeminism
Rise of transgenderism has led to arguments that sex is socially constructed
More fluid understanding of being a woman… no such thing as woman, impossible to generalise and constrain every1 in that bracket
What do all fems agree on?
Women are not treated equally
Libs on society
Women are discriminated against in Soc, focus on ref in the pub sphere
Rads on society
Society is pervaded by patriarchal values, seek to keep men’s dominant pos.
The person is the political. All rel between men and women is based on power and dominance
Equality fems on society
Want a Soc where gender ceases to struc a persons identity
Rad diff fems on Soc
Encourage the recog of women’s superior cultural values such as compassion + pacifism, believing these will overcome masculine qualities of selfishness
Cultural feminism also challenge the domestic cultural arg that women are inferior and subservient to men
Soc fems on society
Women suppressed by capitalism, effectively working 2 shifts. Conditioning the next gen into workers
Post modern on society
Challenge the notion that gender is the sole factor in determining female oppression in society, arguing that black and working class women’s experience of the patriarchy are different from those of white, middle class women- intersectionality
The person is the political
Associated w/ 2nd wave feminism seemed to convey that rel between men and women in public sphere… aspects of life that were considered personal were exactly where pols needed to get involved… causing oppression
Soc fems on the economy
Soc fems believe that the econ is the key determinant of female oppression , cap in the econ sphere (not patriarchy) determines the nature of female oppression in society. Cap needs women to play a subservient role in the econ & Soc as a reserve labour force.
Modern Soc fems= interplay between cap in the econ & patriarchy in the Soc that causes oppression of women
Greenham common peace camp
Set up in the 1980s at the RAFs Greenham common base as a protest against the govs dec to site nuclear missiles there.
All women- women = life givers who had to protect their children + future gens
Mainly non-violent protest took the form of singing songs, linking arms to create a human chain around the base, sit into etc
Women were a perm fixture for 20 years. Police forcibly removed for trespassing (under MT)
Media was hostile towards a largely innocuous protest.
Became a symbol of fem protests against the values of aggression and destruction.
Wealth in partnership with nature rather than exploiting it
