Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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
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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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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Mary Wollstonecraft
John Stuart Mill
Betty Friedan
Gloria Steinem
Alice Walker
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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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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)
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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
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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
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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
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Main Issues
Diversity and Commonality
Sexual/Reproductive Issues Versus Economic
Issues
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