Feminism Flashcards
Social Feminists and what did they believe?
Friedrich Engels: Family is the source of oppression but this is because of the history of property and men
Shiela Rowbotham: women have always been oppressed and a revolution was needed to destroy both capitalism and the patriarchy
Simone De Beauvoir (also a radical feminist and equality one): insisted that women’s position was determined by social and not natural factors, and developed a complex critique of patriarchal culture. Her work highlights the extent to which the masculine is represented as the positive or the norm,** while the feminine is portrayed as ‘other’. Such ‘otherness’** fundamentally limits women’s freedom and prevents them from expressing their full humanity. De Beauvoir placed her faith in rationality and critical analysis as the means of exposing this process and of giving women responsibility for their own lives. ** ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine.’**
Difference Feminist
Charlotte Perkins Gillman
Radical feminist(s)
Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics
Shulamith “Shulie” Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution can see that she was heavily influenced by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (socialists) bc she states ‘Feminists have to question, not just all of Western culture,but the organisation of culture itself, and further, even the organisation of nature.’ showe radicalism
The link between sex and gender
long-story short, there is none (according to feminists),sex is the biological traits that make us male or female (or on rare occasions intersex) whereas gender is just the expression of that sex which are learned from society, gender can also be challenged and has been frequently in the last century. There’s no concrete link between sex and gender, gender is just an assumed expression of sex which leads to the formation of stereotypes of sexes. gender is not caused by sex.
How did movements of feminism initially start?
The National Women’s Suffrage Association, led by Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906), was set up in 1869 and merged with the more conservative American Women’s Suffrage Association in 1890. Similar movements developed in other western countries.
-Women got the right to vote in 1918 in the UK but it was only until 1928 that it was actually equal with men.
* In the US it was 1920
Equality Feminists
Simone de Beauvoir:
equality could only be achieved via an androgynous ideal. In her words; this would occur “when there would no longer be men and women but only workers equal with one another.” Both women and men would benefit from a society built upon the principle of equality.
