Also, as deailted as possible descriptions of the dieas of every wave of Feminism, including Post-feminism, complete with a chronological breakdown and celebrity-worshipping identification of the main people in each group. Please?
Are you taking the biscuit, sunshine? OK, you get ten minutes cut and pasting to warm up my fingers...
All these are subject to the caveat that different people hold opinions from different strains of feminist thought, that lumping everything into little chronological chunks is silly, and that I’m very biased.
Liberal feminism (first wave) - from Wollstonecraft onwards, but really kicking off about 1848 (Seneca Falls convention in US) and reaching nice climax 1905-1914 in UK with suffragettes.
Basic principles: society has false beliefs about women’s capabilities, women have been excluded from academy, forum, marketplace. Need to get educational and the enforcement of civil rights for women, then we can leave them to get on with it in the same way men do now.
Lots of issues about women’s access to the ”public sphere” addressed. Aims to advance women within society.
Icon: Mary Wollstonecraft (big on Reason), Betty Freidan (big on housewives)
Problems: Helps women into competitive liberal society, doesn’t address the injustices of that system. “Gender justice does not require us to give the losers as well as the winners a prize”(Rosemary Tong Feminist Thought: A Comprehensive Introduction) Doesn’t tend to involve a reassessment of the values of society, and the relation of society, the self and the state.
Assumes “neutral” (some would say male-centred) values are good, doesn’t rethink things like individuality v community, competition v altruism, rationality v emotion.
Tends to focus on white middle-class women in industrialised countries.
Key words: Equality, rights, a piece of the pie. Mmm, pie.
Radical feminism (second wave) - Mid 1960s onwards (Feminine Mystique published 1963)
Growing out of left-wing politics, but rejecting the idea that working for gender equality divides the Movement, and that all struggle is class struggle.
Based on idea that sexism is the fundamental oppression. In Lib Fem, there is no direct causal connection between men doing well and women doing badly - it is a flaw in an otherwise good societal model (liberal democracy). In Rad Fem, there is a direct causal connection between the oppression of women and the privilege of men.
This leads to other shifts in perception: e.g. can institutions such as the law, or “science”, or “experts” be used to right gender oppression, or are they inherently misogynistic? Can women be advanced within society or does society need drastically reorganising?
Keeping up the “public sphere” work but also a lot of “private sphere” issues (sex, sexual assault, reproduction) considered: the slogan “The Personal is Political” is very popular.
Key words: Oppression, liberation, patriarchy, consciousness raising.
Icons: Kate Millet, Germaine Greer, Susan Brownmiller
Black feminism - concurrent with second wave
Disagreeing with premise that sexism trumps all other oppressions. Critiquing previous feminist movements for their erasure of black women’s experience by concentrating on white middle class women’s lives as though they represented all women. Trying to expand focus of feminist activism from this focus to issues relevant to black community - for example, not just abortion rights but forced sterilisation abuse.
Demonstrating how race (and often class) intersects with gender to produce effects which can’t be explained by a simplistic understanding of “patriarchy”.
Icons: bell hooks, Sojourner Truth, Angela Davies
Lesbian Feminism - 1970s
Using sex between women as a start-point to critique heterosexuality as a form of enforced control for the majority of women.
Icons: Adrienne Rich, radicalesbians
Key words: lesbian continuum (Rich), woman-identified woman
Post-structuralist feminism - 1990s (Gender Trouble published 1990)
Arguing that gender is not something one is but something one does; a series of performative gestures.
Stating that gender is discursively produced; i.e. created by the very sets of meanings (medical, legal, philosophical, psychoanalytic) which aim to investigate and explain it. It has NO PREDISCURSIVE EXISTENCE. Ohhh, getting excited now.
Showing how gender intersects with race, class, other sets of meanings and has no coherent identity. Looking at local manifestations rather than global metanarratives.
Icons: Judith Butler and cohorts
Post-feminism - when it happens depends on how you define it
Has been variously described as: a third-wave feminism inflected by all the above, people arguing that second-wave feminism was dour, joyless and unsexy (without having been there or read any of it), people who believe that feminism has gone too far.
I didn’t do Marxist Feminism, psychoanalytic feminism, or cultural feminism.
How detailed is “as detailed as possible”, any way? I am suspicious and will only be pacified by cake. Or pie. |
