Feminism

Unit 5b: Other ideological traditions
Howard Williams
The Professor in International Politics at the Department of International Politics at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth writes for BBC Parliament

The British suffragettes pioneered women's political organisation

Feminists advocate the equal treatment of women with men against the background of the apparent subordination of one sex to the other.

Feminists regard women as being disadvantaged in relation to men politically, economically, socially and domestically. They want to reverse this position.

Early feminists were generally liberals who wanted to gain the same political and economic rights for women as men.

ALSO IN THIS SECTION: Unit 5B - Other Ideological Traditions Nationalism Anarchism Fascism

In Britain the suffragette movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century reflected this view in campaigning for equal voting rights for women.

Socialist feminists differ from liberals in combining their criticism of the lowly position of women with a demand for a general social transformation that will emancipate working people as a whole.

Socialist feminists tend to regard the disadvantaged position of women as an outcome of the general capitalist exploitation of individuals.

Radical feminists, by contrast, argue that there is a conflict inherent in the relationship between men and women which can only properly be addressed by women pressing their interests at the expense of those of men.

Post-modernist feminists have more recently called into question the possibility of their being any objective understanding of the relationship between the sexes - just as with social relationships in general.

They have argued that we have to accept that only partial standpoints or perspectives are open to us, and within this context post-modernist feminism - stressing its partiality - is more honest and open than mainstream political doctrines.

Personalities behind the movement

One of the most important founding figures of feminism is Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797).

She gave a distinctive feminine voice to the radical ideas of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. The title of her main work: A Vindication of the Rights of Women contrasts with Tom Paine's The Rights of Man which appeared in the same year (1792).

Wollstonecraft moved in the same radical circles as Paine and her book is, like Paine's, directed at Edmund Burke's defence of the ancien regime in Reflections on the French Revolution.

To understand the novelty of her views Wollstonecraft has to be compared with the prevailing view of women presented in literature and philosophy of the day.

Rousseau, for example, regarded women no more than the playthings of men and for Hegel, writing later in the 1820s, the difference, "between man and a woman is the difference between animal and plant".

Emancipation through better education

The general reaction to 'Vindication' among the educated (male) public was one of outrage and disbelief.

A main argument of 'Vindication' was that women should in their social behaviour put duty, not beauty, first.

A woman should be anxious not only to inspire the love of me but also their respect by appealing not to the senses but to the intellect.

She wished: "to show that elegance is inferior to virtue". She argues that women should receive an education equal with that of men.

They should be educated in the sciences, literature and arts and not simply confined to domestic and feminine studies.

She wanted to see the emancipation women not at the expense of men, but as a mutual advance.

For women simply to be treated as the plaything of men is not only bad for women, it is also bad for men: where one half of the human race remains enslaved, the other liberated portion is dragged down with it.

As men throw off the arbitrary rule of kings and emperors so also women should remove themselves from ignorance and dependence.

What both sexes should aim at, for Wollstonecraft, is modesty. With modesty behaviour is guided not by desire but by reason.

A criticism that may be voiced about Wollstonecraft as a liberal feminist is that she focuses too heavily on the emancipation of middle class women.

For her the main means of improvement for women is education. As it is unnatural and unwise to segregate the sexes, a national system of co-educational schools will help put women on a new and better footing in society.

Emancipation as socialist revolution

Socialist or Marxist feminists have taken a more radical approach to the disadvantage of women.

Friedrich Engels linked the condition of women to the condition of the working class in general.

Personal relations and relations within the family can only, in his view and Marx's, mirror relations within society in general.

Thus the emancipation of women must take place in the context of a socialist revolution. From the female perspective the objective of this revolution was to create a community of women.

The Russian socialist Alexandra Kollontai (1873-1952) is a prominent example of this kind of feminist who devoted herself to the organization of women both before and after the Russian Revolution.

In practice the treatment of women in Bolshevik Russia was often a disappointment.

Although constitutionally given the same status as men and encouraged to play a more prominent part in economic, social and political life, the majority remained as underprivileged as ever.

Russian women suffered like their male comrades from the harshest political oppression for the sake of the ill-starred communist cause.

Man as enemy for radical feminists

The growth of radical feminism in the twentieth century was in part an understandable response to the failures of Marxist feminism.

Radical feminists argued that the causes of the oppression of women were more deep-rooted than class relations in an economically unjust society.

Impetus was given to the development of radical feminism by the work of the French intellectual Simone de Beauvoir who inaugurated what has been described as a second wave of feminist writing in the 1960s and 70s.

Prominent writers in this period were Germaine Greer, Kate Millet and Shulamith Firestone.

At the heart of the oppression for radical feminists is man himself. It is the habitual behaviour of men and the willing and unwilling compliance of women that has led to a patriarchal society.

Radical feminists have argued that the dominant positions of males, wherever they occur, should be highlighted and criticized.

They see prostitution and pornography as the products of a male dominated society.

Some radical feminists are prepared to work with men to alter this situation; others see the answer only in the combination of women and treating men as an enemy.

From this latter perspective some radical feminists argue that lesbianism is the answer to the problems caused by men's oppression of women.

In the last decades of the twentieth century feminism has been one of the most vibrant ideologies in the advanced world.

It has done a great deal to transform public attitudes to gender roles by bringing home the unique situation of females as both potential and actual child-bearers.

© Professor Howard Williams 2004
Department of International Politics
University of Wales, Aberystwyth