Feminism (Simple Explanation)

Feminism looks at equality and fairness for all people, based on their gender, how they express their
gender, their gender identity, their sex, and their sexuality. It uses ideas from many subjects (this is
called interdisciplinary) and also uses political activism (working to make change).

In the past, feminism started by looking closely at the unequal treatment of men and women. But over
time, feminism grew to look at gender and sexuality as things that society shapes, not just things we are
born with.

Now, feminist theory tries to study and question the unfairness that happens when ability, class, gender,
race, sex, and sexuality come together (this is called intersectionality). Feminists try to change situations
where these connections cause unfair power differences.

Talking and learning about these unfair situations helps students see the problems in the world and
motivates them to fix harmful patterns wherever they see them.

feminist political activists work on issues like:

 reproductive rights (women’s right to make choices about their bodies),

 domestic violence,
 fairness,
 social justice,
 workplace rights, like medical leave, equal pay, and protection from sexual harassment and
discrimination.

Anytime we see stereotyping, objectification, human rights violations, or oppression that involves these
connections (intersectionality), it becomes a feminist issue.

Feminism is made up of political movements, ideas, and social movements that all want the same thing:
to create and protect equal political, economic, personal, and social rights for women. This includes
making sure women get the same chances in education and jobs as men.

Feminists usually support the rights of women and believe in equality.

Feminist movements have worked, and still work, to win rights for women, like:

 the right to vote,

 the right to hold public office,
 the right to work,
 the right to fair wages or equal pay,
 the right to own property,
 the right to get an education,
 the right to sign contracts,
 the right to be treated equally in marriage,
 and the right to maternity leave.
Feminists also fight for women and girls to have control over their own bodies (bodily autonomy and
integrity) and to protect them from rape, sexual harassment, and domestic violence.

Feminist campaigns have helped bring about big changes in history for women’s rights — especially in
Western countries, where people say feminism helped achieve:

women’s right to vote,

gender-neutral words in English,

women’s reproductive rights (like the right to birth control and abortion),

the right for women to sign contracts and own property.

Although feminism mostly focuses on women’s rights, some feminists (like bell hooks) say that feminism
should also work for men’s freedom, because traditional gender roles hurt men too.

Feminist theory (the ideas that came from feminist movements) tries to understand gender inequality
by looking at women’s roles and life experiences. Feminism has built ideas in many subjects to deal with
issues like how gender is shaped by society.

But some types of feminism have been criticized because they only reflected the views of white, middle-
class, educated women. This is why new types of feminism were created that focus on different groups,
like black feminism or multicultural feminism.

Liberal Feminism (Simple Explanation Keeping All Words)

Liberal feminism is an individualistic form of feminist theory, which focuses on women’s ability to
maintain their equality through their own actions and choices.

Liberal feminists argue that society holds the false belief that women are, by nature, less intellectually
and physically capable than men; because of this, society tends to discriminate against women in the
academy, the forum, and the marketplace.

Liberal feminists believe that "female subordination is rooted in a set of customary and legal constraints
that blocks women’s entrance to and success in the so-called public world".

They strive for sexual equality via down-to-earth political and legal reform.

In the United States, liberal feminism was quiet for four decades after winning the vote in 1920.

In the 1960s, during the civil rights movement, liberal feminists drew parallels between systemic race
discrimination and sex discrimination.

Groups such as:

 the National Organization for Women

 the National Women's Political Caucus
  the Women's Equity Action League

were all created at that time to further women's rights.

In the U.S., these groups have worked for the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment or
"Constitutional Equity Amendment", in the hopes it will ensure that men and women are treated as
equals under the democratic laws that also influence important spheres of women's lives, including:

 reproduction
 work
 equal pay issues
 Other issues important to liberal feminists include but are not limited to:
 reproductive rights and abortion access
 sexual harassment
 voting
 education
 fair compensation for work
 affordable childcare
 affordable health care

bringing to light the frequency of sexual and domestic violence against women

cal feminism is a type of feminism that calls for a radical (complete and deep) change in society, where
male supremacy is removed from all parts of life, both social and economic.

Radical feminists want to end patriarchy (male-dominated systems) by questioning and changing social
rules and institutions, not just by changing laws through politics.

This means they:

👉 Challenge traditional gender roles (the old ideas of what men and women should do).

👉 Oppose the sexual objectification of women (when women are treated like objects for others’
pleasure).

👉 Try to make people more aware of problems like rape and violence against women.

🌸 History and Ideas

Early radical feminism started during the second wave of feminism in the 1960s.

👉 At that time, radical feminists saw patriarchy as something that existed throughout all of history
("transhistorical phenomenon").

👉 They believed patriarchy is not only the oldest and most common form of control, but also the main
form — and that it shaped other forms of oppression.

Later, radical feminism influenced other types of feminist politics, like:

👉 Cultural feminism,

👉 Or ideas that mixed issues of class, money, and patriarchy together as causes of oppression.

Radical feminists believe that the real cause of women’s oppression comes from patriarchal gender
relations (how men and women are treated differently by society),

👉 not mainly from laws (like liberal feminism says),

👉 or class conflict (like anarchist, socialist, or Marxist feminism says).

Radical Feminism: Theory and Ideology

Radical feminists assert that society is a patriarchy in which the class of men are the oppressors of the
class of women.

They posit that because of patriarchy, women have come to be viewed as the "other" to the male norm
and as such have been systematically oppressed and marginalized.

They furthermore assert that men as a class benefit from the oppression of women.

Radical feminists seek to abolish patriarchy, and believe that the way to do this and to deal with
oppression of any kind is to address the underlying causes of it through revolution.

While some radical feminists propose that the oppression of women is the most fundamental form of
oppression, one that cuts across boundaries of all other forms of oppression, others acknowledge the
simultaneous and intersecting effect of other independent categories of oppression.

These other categories of oppression may include, but are not limited to:

oppression based on race

social class

perceived attractiveness

sexual orientation

ability

Patriarchal theory is not generally defined as a belief that all men always benefit from the oppression of
all women.

Rather, patriarchal theory maintains that the primary element of patriarchy is a relationship of
dominance, where one party is dominant and exploits the other party for the benefit of the former.

Radical feminists believe that men (as a class) use social systems and other methods of control to keep
women (and non-dominant men) suppressed [citation needed].

Radical feminists also believe that eliminating patriarchy, and other systems which perpetuate the
domination of one group over another, will liberate everyone from an unjust society.
Some radical feminists called for women to govern women and men, among them Phyllis Chesler,
Monique Wittig (in fiction), Mary Daly, Jill Johnston, and Robin Morgan.

Redstockings co-founder Ellen Willis wrote in 1984 that radical feminists:

"got sexual politics recognized as a public issue,"

"created the vocabulary... with which the second wave of feminism entered popular culture,"

"sparked the drive to legalize abortion,"

"were the first to demand total equality in the so-called private sphere" ("housework and child care ...
emotional and sexual needs"),

and "created the atmosphere of urgency" that almost led to the passage of the Equal Rights
Amendment.

The influence of radical feminism can be seen in the adoption of these issues by the National
Organization for Women (NOW) [citation needed], a feminist group that had previously been focused
almost entirely on economic issues.

Marxist Feminism

Marxist feminism is a branch of feminism focused on investigating and explaining the ways in which
women are oppressed through systems of capitalism and private property.

According to Marxist feminists, women's liberation can only be achieved through a radical restructuring
of the current capitalist economy, in which much of women's labor is uncompensated.

🌸 Theoretical Background in Marxism

Influential work by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (1848) in The Communist Manifesto and Marx (1859)
in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy laid the foundation for some of the early discourse
about the relationship between capitalism and oppression.

👉 The theory and method of study developed by Marx (1859), termed historical materialism, recognizes
the ways in which economic systems structure society as a whole and influence everyday life and
experience.

👉 Historical materialism places a heavy emphasis on the role of economic and technological factors in
determining the base structure of society.

👉 The base structure prescribes a range of systems and institutions aimed to advance the interests of
those in power, often at the cost of exploiting the working class.

👉 Marx (1859) argues that these systems are set by the ruling class in accordance with their need to
maintain or increase class conflict in order to remain in power.

👉 However, Marx (1859) also acknowledges the potential for organization and collective action by the
lower classes with the goal of empowering a new ruling class.
👉 As Vladimir Lenin (1917) argues in support of this possibility, the organization of socialist
consciousness by a vanguard party is vital to the working class revolutionary process.

In 1884, Engels published The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State.

👉 According to Engels (1884), the shift from feudalism to private ownership of land has had a huge effect
on the status of women.

👉 In a private ownership system, individuals who do not own land or other means of production are in a
situation that Engels (1884) compares to enslavement — they must work for the owners of the land in
order to be able to live within the system of private ownership.

👉 Engels (1884) explains that the transition to this type of system resulted in the creation of separate
public and private spheres and assigned access to waged labor disproportionately to men.

👉 Engels (1884) argues that a woman's subordination is not a result of her biological disposition but of
social relations, and that men's efforts to achieve their demands for control of women's labor and sexual
faculties have gradually become institutionalized in the nuclear family.

Through a Marxist historical perspective, Engels (1884) analyzes the widespread social phenomena
associated with female sexual morality, such as:

fixation on virginity and sexual purity

incrimination and violent punishment of women who commit adultery

demands that women be submissive to their husbands

👉 Ultimately, Engels traces these phenomena to the recent development of exclusive control of private
property by the patriarchs of the rising slave owner class in the ancient mode of production, and the
attendant desire to ensure that their inheritance is passed only to their own offspring.

👉 Chastity and fidelity are rewarded, says Engels (1884), because they guarantee exclusive access to the
sexual and reproductive faculty of women possessed by men from the property-owning class.

As such, gender oppression is closely related to class oppression and the relationship between men and
women in society is similar to the relations between proletariat and bourgeoisie.

👉 On this account, women's subordination is a function of class oppression, maintained (like racism)
because:

it serves the interests of capital and the ruling class

it divides men against women

it privileges working-class men relatively within the capitalist system in order to secure their support

it legitimates the capitalist class's refusal to pay for the domestic labor assigned, unpaid, to women

SOCIALIST FEMINISM
Socialist feminism is a type of feminism that looks at both public life and private life of women. It says
that women can only be free if we end both the economic problems and the cultural reasons behind
women’s oppression.

Socialist feminism mixes two ideas:

It expands on Marxist feminism, which says capitalism causes women’s oppression.

It adds from radical feminism, which focuses on gender and patriarchy.

But, socialist feminists disagree with radical feminism’s idea that patriarchy (male control) is the only
or main cause of women’s oppression. Instead, socialist feminists say women are not free because
they depend on men for money in society. This economic dependence keeps women under men’s
control, especially in capitalism where wealth is not shared fairly.

Socialist feminists believe that freeing women is part of a bigger fight for fairness in society, economy,
and politics.

They use ideas from Marxism, like the idea that people’s lives are shaped by their material needs and
history (called historical materialism). This means they study how sexism and the division of work
between men and women change with the economic system of each time period. Most of these
problems come from capitalist and patriarchal systems.

Socialist feminists don’t fully agree with Marx’s idea that only class struggle shapes history and
economy. Marx said that if we end class oppression, gender oppression will disappear too. But
socialist feminists think that is too simple. They work to show how gender and class work together to
create different kinds of oppression and privilege for men and women of different classes.

👉 Example: A woman’s class is often based on her husband’s job. For instance, if a secretary marries
her boss, she takes on his class status.

In 1972, the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union published “Socialist Feminism: A Strategy for the
Women’s Movement”, which was the first time the term “socialist feminism” was published.

Other socialist feminists, like Radical Women and the Freedom Socialist Party, point to old Marxist
writers like Frederick Engels (The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State) and August
Bebel (Woman and Socialism). These works link gender oppression and class exploitation.

On the other hand, the Socialist Party USA is a socialist feminist party that is not fully Marxist
(although some members are Marxists). Their statement says:

👉 “Socialist feminism confronts the common root of sexism, racism and classism: the determination of
a life of oppression or privilege based on accidents of birth or circumstances. Socialist feminism is an
inclusive way of creating social change. We value synthesis and cooperation rather than conflict and
competition.”

🌸 Psychoanalytical Feminism
Psychoanalytic feminism and Feminist psychoanalysis are based on Freud and his psychoanalytic
theories, but they also supply an important critique of it.

It maintains that gender is not biological but is based on the psycho-sexual development of the
individual, but also that sexual difference and gender are different notions.

Psychoanalytical feminists believe that gender inequality comes from early childhood experiences,
which lead men to believe themselves to be masculine, and women to believe themselves feminine.

It is further maintained that gender leads to a social system that is dominated by males, which in turn
influences the individual psycho-sexual development.

As a solution it was suggested by some to avoid the gender-specific structuring of the society
coeducation.

From the last 30 years of the 20th Century, the contemporary French psychoanalytical theories
concerning the feminine, that refer to sexual difference rather than to gender, with psychoanalysts like
Julia Kristeva, Maud Mannoni, Luce Irigaray, and Bracha Ettinger, have largely influenced:

not only feminist theory

but also the understanding of the subject in philosophy

and the general field of psychoanalysis itself

These French psychoanalysts are mainly post-Lacanian.

Other feminist psychoanalysts and feminist theorists whose contributions have enriched the field
through an engagement with psychoanalysis are:

Jessica Benjamin

Jacqueline Rose

MEN’S FEMINISM

Since the 19th century, men have played an important role in supporting feminism during each wave of
the movement. Many men have worked to help women gain equal rights in different parts of life. They
often did this by using their male privilege to support women’s causes.

Some feminist men, along with scholars like Bell Hooks, have said that freeing men from the limits of
sexism and traditional gender roles is also an important goal of feminism. This means that men, too, are
trapped by gender expectations, and feminism can help free both women and men.

📜 History of Men’s Role in Feminism

👉 Parker Pillsbury and other male abolitionists (people who fought against slavery) were early
supporters of feminism.

Pillsbury helped write the constitution of the American Equal Rights Association in 1865.
He was vice-president of the New Hampshire Woman Suffrage Association.

In 1868–69, he co-edited Revolution with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a key feminist leader.

👉 During the 1600s and 1700s, many French male writers supported women’s rights.

Montesquieu wrote about female characters, like Roxana in Persian Letters, who challenged male-
dominated systems.

Denis Diderot and Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach also wrote in favor of women’s rights.

Marquis de Condorcet supported women’s education.

👉 Jeremy Bentham, a liberal thinker, argued that women should have equal rights in law and society.

👉 In the 1800s, men like Sir Henry Maine criticized patriarchy in his book Ancient Law (1861).

👉 John Stuart Mill, who wrote The Subjection of Women, presented a women’s petition to the British
parliament in 1866 and supported votes for women. He said that marriage at the time took away
women’s freedom, rights, and property. His ideas were shaped by his friendship (and later marriage)
with Harriet Taylor.

👉 In 1840, women were banned from taking part in the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London.

Men like William Lloyd Garrison, Charles Lenox Remond, Nathaniel Peabody Rogers, and Henry Stanton
protested by sitting silently with the women.

Supporters argued that it was wrong to stop women from joining the anti-slavery cause, just as it was
wrong to separate people by race.

👉 Some people at that time argued that women were not suited for male responsibilities. But
abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson disagreed. He said:

“I do not see how any woman can avoid a thrill of indignation when she first opens her eyes to the fact
that it is really contempt, not reverence, that has so long kept her sex from an equal share of legal,
political, and educational rights... [A woman needs equal rights] not because she is man’s better half, but
because she is his other half. She needs them, not as an angel, but as a fraction of humanity.”

📝 Male Responses to Feminism (Michael Kimmel)

Michael Kimmel, an American sociologist, described 3 kinds of male reactions to feminism around the
1900s:

1️⃣ Pro-feminist men

They believed feminism would help men too.

They supported women working, voting, and sharing housework.

2️⃣ Anti-feminist men

They opposed women’s rights and wanted to keep the patriarchal family system (where men are in
charge).

3️⃣ Masculinist groups

These men’s groups formed because they felt that masculinity was being weakened by women’s
growing rights.

Postmodern Feminism: A Discussion

Postmodern feminism mixes feminist ideas with postmodern and post-structuralist theories. It moves
beyond the older arguments of liberal feminism (focused on legal equality) and radical feminism
(focused on patriarchy). Postmodern feminism shares common ideas with postmodern philosophy, like
the interest in how language shapes our world.

📌 Origins and Theory

👉 Judith Butler, in her famous book Gender Trouble (1990), made a big change in feminist thinking. She
argued that not just gender, but even sex itself is shaped by language.

Butler built on and questioned the ideas of Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan.

She agreed with Luce Irigaray that what we call "feminine" is really just a reflection of what is seen as
"masculine."

👉 Butler’s Critique:

Older feminists said sex is biological and gender is social. Butler asked: Why do we think even the body
(sex) is natural and not shaped by society?

She said that assuming gender is always created the same way leads to essentialism (thinking all women
are the same).

She believed women's oppression doesn’t have one cause or one solution, which is why some people
say postmodern feminism doesn’t offer a clear plan for action.

👉 Butler and Postmodernism:

Butler rejected the term "postmodernism" because she thought it was too unclear.

Scholar Moya criticized Butler, saying she misunderstood Cherríe Moraga and wrongly thought we can’t
compare or rank different types of oppression.

Moya argued that Butler’s ideas ended up pushing aside the very voices of women she claimed to
support.

📌 Mary Joe Frug’s View

Frug said postmodern feminism believes that human life is always shaped by language.
Power works not just through force but through the way language limits and shapes what we see as
real.

But because language can be re-interpreted, it can also be a way to fight back and create change.

👉 Frug’s second idea:

Sex is not natural or clear-cut. It’s a meaning system made by language.

Society gives meanings to the female body, then claims these meanings come from nature, but in fact
society created them!

Sexual difference is not fixed — it can be changed through new ideas and interpretations.

📌 French Feminism and Postmodernism

French feminists like Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous helped shape postmodern feminism.

Cixous called for a new way of writing — not tied to biology but changing through language ("writing
with the body").

Irigaray said men look for their own hidden natural side in women, which stops women from truly being
seen as different.

Kristeva said "woman" is not a fixed idea but is always in the process of becoming.

Toril Moi pointed out that these writers focused not just on femininity but also on differences between
people.

📌 Kate Bornstein

Kate Bornstein, a transgender writer and activist, calls herself a postmodern feminist — this is not the
same as being post-feminist (which suggests feminism is no longer needed).

🌈 Feminist Movements and Postmodernism

Postmodern feminism reminds us that gender and sex are not simple or natural truths. They are shaped
by:

Language

Power relations

Social systems

It challenges us to see gender and sex as changing ideas, not fixed realities. However, some critics say
this makes it hard to figure out how to act politically or to fight oppression clearly.