Feminist Thinkers

Question 1

Who are the 5 feminist thinkers? (in order)

Answer 1

• Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• Simone De Beauvoir
• Kate Millett
• Shelia Rowbotham
• Bell Hooks

Question 2

What were the key ideas of Perkins-Gilman?

Answer 2

• Socialist feminist
• Sex/domestic economics are hand in hand – for women to survive, they have to depend on their sexuality and body in order to please their husbands.
• Societal pressure – young girls compelled to conform in society and prepare for motherhood by playing with toys and wearing clothes that are specifically designed for and marketed to them.

Question 3

What were the key ideas of Simone De Beauvoir?

Answer 3

• Socialist feminist
• Sex versus gender – ‘one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’.
• ‘Otherness’ – men are perceived as the ‘norm’ and women deviants from this norm.

Question 4

What were the key ideas of Kate Millett?

Answer 4

• Radical Feminist
• Family – undoing the traditional family was the key to true sexual revolution.
• Portrayal of women in art and literature – she showed how patriarchal culture had produced writers and literary works that were degrading to women.

Question 5

What were the Key ideas of Shelia Rowbotham?

Answer 5

• Socialist feminist
• Capitalism – women forced to sell labour to survive and use their labour to support their family under the capitalist system.
• The family – not just an instrument for disciplining and subjecting women to capitalism but a place where men took refuge from alienation under a capitalist economy.

Question 6

What were the key ideas of Bell Hooks?

Answer 6

• Post-modernist feminist
• Women of colour – she brought the cultural concerns of women of colour into mainstream feminism.
• Intersectionality – the mainstream feminist movement had focused mostly on the plight of white, college-educated, middle/upper-class women who had no stake in the concerns of women of colour.