gender/ society Flashcards
Fuller
Women must retire within themselves, and explore the groundwork of being till they find their particular secret. Then … they will know how to turn dross into gold.’
-Only women can define their female essence based on experience
-can recognise unique feminine biology that make us women
-can be found in role of motherthood
-this can be liberating – must look beyond others ideals but what is in oursleves
O brien
Is a naturalistic feminist who argued that motherhood can be a positive thing if women are in control of their choice to become a mother. She thought de Beauvoir devalued motherhood.
The implication of de Beauvoir’s model of human development is not only that parturition [birth] is non-creative labour, but that the product, the human child, has no value, that the value of children must wait to be awarded by the makers of value, men.’
Men are biologically alienated from process of reproduction so aim to establish control in other areas of life
Feminism should look beyond how women are exploited to how they are empowered
Wary of reproductive technology to limit this empowerment
- The problem is not childbirth and motherhood but male control of those things. agree with part of Firestone’s identification of the problem, but thinks that her solution is too drastic and involves sacrificing the good with the bad.
Rich
- Patriarchal thought has limited female biology to its own narrow specifications. The feminist vision has recoiled from female biology for these reasons; it will, I believe, come to view our physicality as a resource, rather than a destiny.’
Often sees biology merely as conditioned to be wombs
Merely sees women as a resource
Need to recognise innate worth and good in the female body.
Is procreative and sacred. Loo to own biology for truth/worth.
Woolf
Suggested that men and women should be educated differently. ‘Ought not education to bring out and fortify the differences [between the sexes] rather than the similarities?’
women have an intuitive approach to moral reasoning which involves considering the way things are and how they could be different.
Naturalism Evalutaion
Innate biological differneces
Studies done at the University of Pennysylvania have indicated that male and female brains are connected up differently (male connections run from front to back, the connections in female brains zigzag.
Another study done at Edinburgh university showed that it took men longer to recognise whether a face is friendly or not.
Studies at Cambridge suggest that testosterone inhibits the ability to read emotions whist oxytocin enhances it.
Weaknesses
an over-simplification and are naturalistic feminists guilty of reductionism and essentialism
naturalistic feminism trap women into the narrow roles that liberal feminism fought to avoid.
fall foul of the naturalistic fallacy by assuming that what is natural is au
Dworkin -
says that such technologies will enable men to ‘farm’ women more effectively. Dworkin uses the brothel model and the farm model to explain how men interact with women.
The ‘farmed’ woman (wife) has more power than the mistress/prostitute because ‘…it is not in a husband’s best interest to use up or waste his wife too quickly.
A wife, it turns out, is not as easily replaceable as a prostitute is. It makes good sense, therefore, for a husband to take relatively good care of their wives. reproductive technologies enable men to get more from their wives for less.
Pinker
Is an atheist and scientist who argues for biological essentialism ( biological influences precede cultural influences). He is in favour of liberal feminism, arguing that there should be political and social equality, freedom of choice for women and that we should eliminate violence and discrimination against women.
Hoever, he is critical of radical feminism which he thinks believes in ‘tabula rasa’ meaning ‘blank slate’ – the view that the mind is blank from birth containing no human nature, so there is no brain sexual dimorphism. The result of that would be zero innate cognitive differences between men and women. He goes on to accuse radical feminism of holding this view for ideological reasons rather than a rational appreciation of the evidence e.g. prenatal testosterone, so he claims it is against science. He therefore expects a society freed from all sexism to still lack a 50-50 split of men and women in all professions and social positions. This is because men and women, on average, have different temperaments, interests and goals.
Critcisim; Culture could explain Pinker’s data rather than biology: Temperament, interests and goals are indeed statistically different for men and women, but that does not prove they are innate. Society might condition men and women differently in those traits
-oppression of women and therefore the social conditioning that follows from oppression could be the cause of the universality of gender roles.
Response “The gender paradox” is the name given to the statistically observed phenomenon that as gender equality increases in a society, the gender split in terms of the different lifestyle and profession choices men and women make also increases. Some argue this is best explained by biological essentialism.
Halkes
Was a Catholic feminist
argued that as Jesus’ teaching on the Kingdom of God required social and spiritual transformation.
women must learn to develop their gift of care into the public sphere.
men must give up their privileged sense of entitlement and learn the virtue of care in the everyday.
Her analysis therefore criticises the ‘headship’ teaching in Mulieris Dignitatem for failing to extend female/male mutuality far enough and for still privileging the male’s role in the public sphere.
De Beauviour
Was a radical feminist who made a Marxist style argument that religion is merely a tool of the male oppressor group which keeps women under control in their oppressed place with false promises that they will go to heaven if they obey and claiming that women are associated with sin and temptation for men due to the story of The Fall.
False consciousness
Basis women suffer from a ‘false consciousness’
This is the support of stereotypical gender roles
Women become the second sex – role of wife, mother, and object
Cannot live fully liberated lives when dictated by the false consciousness
Existentialist basis
She famously claimed that “one is not born, but rather becomes a woman.” This means she thinks that gender roles and differences are the result of socialisation, not biology. The gender divide started for biological reasons but its perpetuation is cultural.
She thinks most mothers are thereby ‘intimidated’ into becoming mothers, so not making a real choice for themselves. She argued that motherhood forces women to sacrifice their own desires and selves for the sake of child-rearing.
She also argued that there is no female biological nature because all women are different and she believed that to truly combat patriarchy requires people to “destroy the concept of motherhood”. There is no maternal instinct; how a mother feels about her child depends on the social context. As evidence for this, she pointed out that many mothers dislike or resent their child in certain contexts. She attributes this to women being socially pressured into motherhood.
Argues that the Christian valuing of Mary shows that it is only through being a man’s “docile servant that she will be also a blessed saint” in Christianity.
-Perpetuates the ‘Myth of the eternal feminine’
-idea of passivity we are conditioned to from a young age
-this is unachiavelby docility and virginity
-leaves feeling women have ‘failed’
Daly
makes a similar point to Beauvoir but drives it further. Daly argues Mary is portrayed as a passive empty ‘void waiting to be made by the male’.
Mary is a ‘rape victim’ because ‘physical rape is not necessary when the mind/will/spirit has already been invaded’. The idea that God raped Mary might seem like a startling claim, however consider that there was no consent asked for, and even if there was consent consider the power difference between God and Mary, which would make God difficult to refuse and devalue any given consent. God is the ultimate Harvey Weinstein.
So, Jesus’ mother Mary is indeed put on a pedestal by Christianity, but only to encourage women to become passive, submissive and obedient so that women would all the better become the sexual property of men.
Illustration of Daly’s point: when the catholic church say they like and respect Mary – that’s just like a slave owner saying they like and respect the subservient obedient slaves.
Firestone
Firestone agreed with Marx and Engels that the history of the world was a history of class struggle. However, she rejected the idea that the class divisions were economic. She argued that the original division was between ‘two distinct biological classes for procreative reproduction’.
Firestone believed that what was natural is not necessarily good.
Thought that women should be liberated from the ‘barbaric’ nature of pregnancy.
Should ‘own the means of production’ and take control of the things used to exploit them. I.e. women must take control of childbirth.
Hypothesised that as technology developed it would become possible for babies to grow in artificial wombs
Thought that it would be better for children to be raised communally by a larger group of adults.
Supports androgony
The abolition of gender norms. Rather than expecting people to identify as either male or female society should remove these expectations. Biological sex then becomes unimportant; people become essentially androgenous. This would permit people to have more genuine free choice when it came to relationships.
The end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself
Critcisms of radical feminism
No defintion of what women really is - Daly does not provide us with a very clear picture of what a natural woman is other than saying that she is not what patriarchy says that she is. Consequently, the idea of celebrating female nature is difficult if we don’t know what that nature entails.
Too radical solutions - radical solutions (such as lesbianism, separatism or androgyny) are unnecessary. Equality can be achieved through more moderate methods such as changes to the law
A related point is that these radical solutions are undesirable. Women do not want to live separately from men. Many might prefer to be in heterosexual relationships, and want to be mothers
Oakley
Sociological work
‘conventional family’ 1980s
-saw the nuclear family, two parents/two children
-expectations on women, to marry/have children present from a young age
-repression of career aspirations
Rights in cohabitation saw greater freedom, living with friends also
-average age of women’s marriage increases
Feminist methodology
-did interview and support to mobilise women to engage – reaction to cynical research methods
-saw movement from traditional roles , challenging assumptions
Cticisims
-methodology subjective
-finding on her interpretations, her personality
Chester – ideas overstated, neo conventional family remain of dual working family
Foucault
Believed that human sexuality cannot be defined in simple binary terms
-Essentialist view –sees innate characteristics of feminine and masculine, not a product of society
Existentialist view – Bioligal sex of little significance, but a product of pariahy and upringing
Sex and Power
Foucault- we should look past and abandon essentialists/existentialist distinction
-look at sex from Marxist perspective – human interactions based on power
-Foucault develops this , cannot define sexuality in binary terms
-The church’s control of sexual practices is a means of maintaining power and the Church does this by normalising men and women’s sexual practises.
-He argued that sex is for pleasure, companionship and education.
Fredian
Wrote ‘the feminine mystique’ and did research that showed that the middle-class women of the late 1950’s who played the role of dutiful wife and homemaker where bored and frustrated, not fulfilled.
Her book transformed lives because once women realised the ideal housewife role they felt obliged to play was disliked by so many other women, they realised they could abandon the traditional expectations and pursue their own careers and live independent lives.
Bernard
In 1972, sociologist Bernard looked at symptoms of anxiety, depression, neurosis and passivity in married and unmarried people. She found that men were better off married than single, and concluded that they got those benefits at the expense of women.
She also argued that when children are loved, feel secure and provided for then family structure
