Feminism
Feminism
Political Theory, Throughout most of Western history, women were confined to
the domestic sphere, while public life was reserved for men. In medieval
Europe, women were denied the proper to have property, to study, or to
participate publicly life. At the top of the 19th century in France, they were
still compelled to hide their heads publicly , and, in parts of Germany, a
husband still had the proper to sell his wife.
whilst late because the early 20th century, women could
neither vote nor hold elective office in Europe and in most of the us (where
several territories and states granted women’s suffrage long before the federal
did so). Feminism Political Theory, Women were prevented from conducting
business without a male representative, be it father, brother, husband, legal
agent, or maybe son. Married women couldn't exercise control over their own
children without the permission of their husbands. Moreover, women had little
or no access to education and were barred from most professions. In some parts
of the planet , such restrictions on women continue today.
The
ancient world
There is
scant evidence of early organized protest against such circumscribed status.
within the 3rd century BCE, Roman women filled the Capitoline Hill and blocked
every entrance to the Forum when consul Marcus Porcius Cato resisted attempts
to repeal laws limiting women’s use of pricy goods. Feminism Political Theory, “If
they're victorious now, what is going to they not attempt?” Cato cried. “As
soon as they start to be your equals, they're going to became your superiors.”
That rebellion proved exceptional, however. for many of
recorded history, only isolated voices spoke out against the inferior status of
girls , presaging the arguments to return . In late 14th- and early
15th-century France, the primary feminist philosopher, Feminism Political
Theory, Christine de Pisan, challenged prevailing attitudes toward women with a
bold involve female education. Her mantle was haunted later within the century
by Laura Cereta, a 15th-century Venetian woman who published Epistolae
familiares (1488; “Personal Letters”; Eng. trans. Collected Letters of a
Renaissance Feminist), a volume of letters handling a panoply of women’s
complaints, from denial of education and marital oppression to the frivolity of
women’s attire.
Feminism Political Theory, The defense of girls had become a
literary subgenre by the top of the 16th century, when Il merito delle donne
(1600; the price of Women), a feminist broadside by another Venetian author,
Moderata Fonte, was published posthumously. Defenders of the established order
painted women as superficial and inherently immoral, while the emerging
feminists produced long lists of girls of courage and accomplishment and
proclaimed that ladies would be the intellectual equals of men if they got
equal access to education.
The so-called “debate about women” didn't reach England until
the late 16th century, when pamphleteers and polemicists joined battle over
truth nature of womanhood. After a series of satiric pieces mocking women was
published, the primary feminist pamphleteer in England, writing as Jane Anger,
responded with Jane Anger, Her Protection for ladies (1589). Feminism Political
Theory, This volley of opinion continued for quite a century, until another
English author, Mary Astell, issued a more reasoned rejoinder during a Serious
Proposal to the women (1694, 1697). The two-volume work suggested that ladies
inclined neither toward marriage nor a spiritual vocation should found out
secular convents where they could live, study, and teach.
Influence
of the Enlightenment
The
feminist voices of the Renaissance never coalesced into a coherent philosophy
or movement. Feminism Political Theory, This happened only with the
Enlightenment, when women began to demand that the new reformist rhetoric about
liberty, equality, and natural rights be applied to both sexes.
Initially, Enlightenment philosophers focused on the
inequities of class and caste to the exclusion of gender. Swiss-born French
philosopher Rousseau , for instance , portrayed women as silly and frivolous
creatures, born to be subordinate to men. additionally , the Declaration of the
Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which defined French citizenship after the
revolution of 1789, pointedly did not address the status of girls .
Female intellectuals of the Enlightenment were quick to means
this lack of inclusivity and therefore the limited scope of reformist rhetoric.
Feminism Political Theory, Olympe de Gouges, a noted playwright, published
Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne (1791; “Declaration of
the Rights of Woman and of the [Female] Citizen”), declaring women to be not
only man’s equal but his partner. the subsequent year Mary Wollstonecraft’s A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the seminal English-language
feminist work, was published in England. Challenging the notion that ladies
exist only to please men, she proposed that ladies and men tend equal
opportunities in education, work, and politics. Women, she wrote, are as
naturally rational as men. If they're silly, it's only because society trains
them to be irrelevant.
The Age of Enlightenment became an era of political ferment
marked by revolutions in France, Germany, and Italy and therefore the rise of
abolitionism. Feminism Political Theory, within the us , feminist activism took
root when female abolitionists sought to use the concepts of freedom and
equality to their own social and political situations. Their work brought them
in touch with female abolitionists in England who were reaching an equivalent
conclusions. By the mid-19th century, issues surrounding feminism had added to
the tumult of social change, with ideas being exchanged across Europe and North
America.
Feminism Political Theory, In the first feminist article she
dared sign together with her own name, Louise Otto, a German, built on the work
of Fourier , a French social theorist, quoting his dictum that “by the position
which women hold during a land, you'll see whether the air of a state is thick
with dirty fog or free and clear.” And after Parisian feminists began
publishing a daily newspaper entitled La Voix des femmes (“The Voice of Women”)
in 1848, Luise Dittmar, a German writer, followed suit one year later together
with her journal, Soziale Reform.
The
suffrage movement
These debates and discussions culminated within the first
women’s rights convention, held in July 1848 within the village of Seneca
Falls, New York. Feminism Political Theory, it had been a spur-of-the-moment
concept sprang up during a social affair of Lucretia Mott, a Quaker preacher
and veteran social activist, Martha Wright (Mott’s sister), Mary Ann
McClintock, Jane Hunt, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the wife of an abolitionist
and therefore the only non-Quaker within the group. The convention was planned
with five days’ notice, publicized only by alittle unsigned advertisement
during a local newspaper.
Stanton drew up the “Declaration of Sentiments” that guided the Seneca
Falls Convention. Using the Declaration of Independence as her guide to
proclaim that “all men and ladies [had been] created equal,” she drafted 11
resolutions, including the foremost radical demand—the right to the vote. Feminism
Political Theory, With Douglass , a
former slave, arguing eloquently on their behalf, all 11 resolutions passed,
and Mott even won approval of a final declaration “for the overthrowing of the
monopoly of the pulpit, and for the securing to woman equal participation with
men within the various trades, professions and commerce.”
Yet by emphasizing education and political rights that were
the privileges of the upper classes, the embryonic feminism had little
reference to ordinary women cleaning houses in Liverpool or picking cotton in
Georgia. the only nonwhite woman’s voice heard at this time—that of Truth , a
former slave—symbolized the space between the standard and therefore the elite.
Feminism Political Theory, Her famous “Ain’t I a Woman” speech was delivered in
1851 before the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, but Truth didn't
dedicate her life to women’s rights. Instead, she promoted abolitionism and a
land-distribution program for other former slaves. within the speech, Truth
remarked, “That man over there says that ladies got to be helped into
carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to possess the simplest place
everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives
me any best place! And ain’t I a woman?”
Although Seneca Falls was followed by women’s rights
conventions in other states, the interest spurred by those first moments of
organizing quickly faded. Concern within the us turned to the pending war ,
while in Europe the reformism of the 1840s gave thanks to the repression of the
late 1850s. Feminism Political Theory, When the feminism rebounded, it became
focused on one issue, women’s suffrage, a goal that might dominate
international feminism for nearly 70 years.
Feminist
Philosophy
This entry provides an summary of all the entries within the
feminist philosophy section of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP). Feminism
Political Theory, After a quick account of the history of feminist philosophy
and various issues regarding defining feminism, the entry discusses the three
main sections on (1) approaches to feminist philosophy, (2) feminist
interventions in philosophy, and (3) feminist philosophical topics.
Feminists working altogether the most Western traditions of
up to date philosophy are using their respective traditions to approach their
work, including the traditions of analytic, Continental, and pragmatist
philosophy, along side other various orientations and intersections. As they
are doing so, they're also intervening in how longstanding basic philosophical
problems are understood. As feminist philosophers perform add traditional
philosophical fields, from ethics to epistemology, they need introduced new
concepts and perspectives that have transformed philosophy itself. Feminism
Political Theory, they're also rendering philosophical previously
un-problematized topics, like the body, class and work, disability, the family,
reproduction, the self, sex work, human trafficking, and sexuality. and that
they are bringing a very feminist lens to problems with science, globalization,
human rights, popular culture, and race and racism.
Contemporary feminist philosophical scholarship emerged
within the 1970s as more women began careers in education , including
philosophy. As they did so, they also began taking over matters from their own
experience for philosophical scrutiny. These scholars were influenced both by
feminist movements in their midst also as by their philosophical training,
which was anything but feminist. Feminism Political Theory, Until recently one
couldn't attend grad school to review “feminist philosophy”. While students and
students could address the writings of Simone de Beauvoir or reminisce
historically to the writings of “first wave” feminists like Wollstonecraft ,
most of the philosophers writing within the first decades of the emergence of
feminist philosophy brought their particular training and expertise in touch on
analyzing issues raised by the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and
1970s, like abortion, social action , civil right , the institutions of
marriage, sexuality, and love. Additionally, feminist philosophical scholarship
increasingly focused on the exact same sorts of issues philosophers had been
and were handling .
Feminist
Beliefs and Feminist Movements
The term “feminism” has many various uses and its meanings
are often contested. for instance , some writers use the term “feminism” to ask
a historically specific movement within the us and Europe; other writers use it
to ask the assumption that there are injustices against women, though there's
no consensus on the precise list of those injustices. Although the term
“feminism” features a history in English linked with women’s activism from the
late nineteenth century to this , Feminism Political Theory, it's useful to differentiate feminist ideas or
beliefs from feminist political movements, for even in periods where there has
been no significant political activism around women’s subordination,
individuals are concerned with and theorized about justice for ladies . So, for
instance , it is sensible to ask whether Plato was a feminist, given his view
that some women should be trained to rule (Republic, Book V), albeit he was an
exception in his historical context (see, e.g., Tuana 1994).
Our goal here isn't to survey the history of feminism—as a group of ideas
or as a series of political movements—but rather to sketch a number of the
central uses of the term that are most relevant to those curious about
contemporary feminist philosophy. Feminism Political Theory, The references we
offer below are only alittle sample of the work available on the topics in
question; more complete bibliographies are available at the precise topical
entries and also at the top of this entry.
In the mid-1800s the term “feminism” was wont to ask “the
qualities of females”, and it had been not until after the primary
International Women’s Conference in Paris in 1892 that the term, following the
French term féministe, was used regularly in English for a belief in and
advocacy of equal rights for ladies supported the thought of the equality of
the sexes. Although the term “feminism” in English is rooted within the
mobilization for woman suffrage in Europe and therefore the us during the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century, in fact efforts to get justice for
ladies didn't begin or end with this era of activism. So some have found it
useful, Feminism Political Theory, if controversial, to consider the women’s
movement within the us as occurring in “waves”. On the wave model, the struggle
to realize basic political rights during the amount from the mid-nineteenth
century until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 counts as “First
Wave” feminism. Feminism waned between the 2 world wars, to be “revived” within
the late 1960s and early 1970s as “Second Wave” feminism. during this second
wave, feminists pushed beyond the first go after political rights to fight for
greater equality across the board, e.g., in education, the workplace, and
reception . Feminism Political Theory, newer transformations of feminism have
resulted during a “Third Wave”. Third Wave feminists often critique Second Wave
feminism for its lack of attention to the differences among women thanks to
race, ethnicity, class, nationality, religion (see Section 2.3 below; also
Breines 2002; Spring 2002), and emphasize “identity” as a site of gender
struggle. (For more information on the “wave” model and every of the “waves”,
see Other Internet Resources.)
However, some feminist scholars object to identifying
feminism with these particular moments of political activism, on the grounds that
doing so eclipses the very fact that there has been resistance to male
domination that ought to be considered “feminist” throughout history and across
cultures: i.e., feminism isn't confined to a couple of (White) women within the
West over the past century approximately . Feminism Political Theory, Moreover,
even considering only relatively recent efforts to resist male domination in
Europe and therefore the us , the stress on “First” and “Second” Wave feminism
ignores the continued resistance to male domination between the 1920s and 1960s
and therefore the resistance outside mainstream politics, particularly by women
of color and dealing class women (Cott 1987).
One
strategy for solving these problems would be to spot feminism in terms of a
group of ideas or beliefs instead of participation in any particular movement .
As we saw above, this also has the advantage of allowing us to locate isolated
feminists whose work wasn't understood or appreciated during their time. But
how should we set about identifying a core set of feminist beliefs?
Some would suggest that we should always specialise in the
political ideas that the term was apparently coined to capture, viz., the
commitment to women’s equal rights. Feminism Political Theory, This
acknowledges that commitment to and advocacy for women’s rights has not been
confined to the Women’s Liberation Movement within the West. But this too
raises controversy, for it frames feminism within a broadly liberal approach to
political and economic life. Although most feminists would probably agree that
there's some sense of rights on which achieving equal rights for ladies may be
a necessary condition for feminism to succeed, most would also argue that this
is able to not be sufficient. Feminism Political Theory, this is often because
women’s oppression under male domination rarely if ever consists solely in
depriving women of political and legal rights, but also extends into the
structure of our society and therefore the content of our culture, the workings
of languages and the way they shape perceptions and permeate our consciousness
(e.g., Bartky 1988, Postl 2017).
Is there any point, then, to asking what feminism is? Given
the controversies over the term and therefore the politics of circumscribing
the boundaries of a movement , it's sometimes tempting to think that the
simplest we will do is to articulate a group of disjuncts that capture a
variety of feminist beliefs. Feminism Political Theory, However, at an
equivalent time it are often both intellectually and politically valuable to
possess a schematic framework that permits us to map a minimum of a number of
our points of agreement and disagreement. We’ll begin here by considering a
number of the essential elements of feminism as a political position or set of
beliefs.
Normative
and Descriptive Components
In many of its forms, feminism seems to involve a minimum of
two groups of claims, one normative and therefore the other descriptive. Feminism
Political Theory, The normative claims concern how women ought (or ought not)
to be viewed and treated and draw on a background conception of justice or
broad moral position; the descriptive claims concern how women are, as a matter
of fact, viewed and treated, alleging that they're not being treated in
accordance with the standards of justice or morality invoked within the
normative claims. Together the normative and descriptive claims provide reasons
for working to vary the way things are; hence, feminism isn't just an
intellectual but also a movement .
On this account, that ladies and men need to have equal
rights and respect is that the normative claim; which women are denied equal
rights and respect functions here because the descriptive claim. Admittedly,
the claim that ladies are disadvantaged with reference to rights and respect
isn't a “purely descriptive” claim since it plausibly involves an evaluative
component. However, our point here is just that claims of this type concern
what's the case not what need to be the case. Feminism Political Theory, Moreover,
as indicated by the ellipsis above, the descriptive component of a substantive
feminist view won't be articulable during a single claim, but will involve an
account of the precise social mechanisms that deprive women of, e.g., rights
and respect. for instance , is that the primary source of women’s subordination
her role within the family? (Engels 1845; Okin 1989). Or is it her role within
the labor market? (Bergmann 2002). is that the problem males’ tendencies to
sexual violence (and what's the source of those tendencies?)? (Brownmiller
1975; MacKinnon 1987). Or is it simply women’s biological role in reproduction?
(Firestone 1970).
Disagreements within feminism can occur with reference to
either the descriptive or normative claims, e.g., feminists differ on what
would count as justice or injustice for ladies (what counts as “equality”,
“oppression”, “disadvantage”, what rights should everyone be accorded?) , and
what kinds of injustice women actually suffer (what aspects of women’s current
situation are harmful or unjust?). Feminism Political Theory, Disagreements can
also dwell the reasons of the injustice: two feminists may agree that ladies
are unjustly being denied proper rights and respect and yet substantively
differ in their accounts of how or why the injustice occurs and what's required
to finish it (Jaggar 1994).
Feminism Political Theory, Disagreements between feminists
and non-feminists can occur with reference to both the normative and
descriptive claims also , e.g., some non-feminists accept as true with
feminists on the ways women need to be viewed and treated, but don’t see any
problem with the way things currently are. Others disagree about the background
moral or politics .
Feminism is grounded on the assumption that ladies are
oppressed or disadvantaged by comparison with men, which their oppression is in
how illegitimate or unjustified. Under the umbrella of this general
characterization there are, however, many interpretations of girls and their
oppression, in order that it's an error to consider feminism as one
philosophical theory , or as implying an agreed platform . (James 1998: 576)
Feminism
Political Theory, James seems here to be using the notions of “oppression” and
“disadvantage” as placeholders for more substantive accounts of injustice (both
normative and descriptive) over which feminists disagree.
Some might like better to define feminism in terms of a
normative claim alone: feminists are those that believe that ladies are
entitled to equal rights, or equal respect, or…(fill within the blank with
one’s preferred account of injustice), and one isn't required to believe that
ladies are currently being treated unjustly. However, if we were to adopt this
terminological convention, it might be harder to spot a number of the interesting
sources of disagreement both with and within feminism, Feminism Political
Theory, and therefore the term “feminism” would lose much of its potential to
unite those whose concerns and commitments extend beyond their moral beliefs to
their social interpretations and political affiliations. Feminists aren't
simply those that are committed in theory to justice for women; feminists take
themselves to possess reasons to cause social change on women’s behalf.
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