Feminism
페미니즘
Feminism is the set of political, social and cultural movements and ideas that campaign for women's rights in order to achieve equality between women and men, on the principle that the sexes are equal and must be treated as such. From Olympe de Gouges's Declaration of the Rights of Woman (1791) it ran through a first wave from the mid-nineteenth century that sought legal equality and the vote, a second wave from the late 1960s that put patriarchy, the body and the private sphere at the centre ("the personal is political"), and a third, intersectional wave from the 1990s. Its currents include liberal, radical, socialist, Marxist, materialist and queer feminism. The Marxist women's movement of Clara Zetkin and Alexandra Kollontai fought for women's emancipation but rejected the label "feminist" as individualist and bourgeois and refused alliances with "bourgeois feminism".
In depth
Word and definition
The French encyclopedia defines feminism as the body of movements and ideas that campaign for women's rights on the principle that women and men are equal and must be treated as such. Alexandre Dumas fils used the word "feminism" pejoratively in 1872 to mock men who supported equality of the sexes; from 1882 the suffragist Hubertine Auclert popularised it in its present sense. The ideas of women's liberation and emancipation, however, go back to the Enlightenment. Feminism contains opposed tendencies: difference feminism, which defends a specifically female identity, against universalist or constructivist feminism, and divisions among liberal, radical, socialist, materialist and queer feminism.
The French Revolution and the first wave
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen gave women no particular rights. In 1791 Olympe de Gouges published the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen — "woman has the right to mount the scaffold; she must equally have the right to mount the rostrum" — and was later guillotined. The main aim of the first wave, from the mid-nineteenth century, was equality of men and women before the law. The International Woman Suffrage Alliance was founded in Berlin in 1904; the first national women's suffrage came in 1893 in the self-governing British colony of New Zealand, and the first in Europe in the Grand Duchy of Finland in 1906. In Russia the women's movement won from the Provisional Government in the summer of 1917 suffrage without property qualification for every level of government. French women could not vote until 1944; in Spain, women's suffrage, championed by Clara Campoamor, entered the 1931 constitution. In Germany Helene Stöcker founded the League for the Protection of Mothers in 1905 and advocated a "New Ethics" of sexual self-determination, contraception and the right to abortion; the middle-class Federation of German Women's Associations refused to admit her league.
The socialist women's movement and "bourgeois feminism"
The Marxist tradition drew its theory of the woman question chiefly from Engels's The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) and August Bebel's Woman and Socialism (1879); Engels made the appearance of private property coincide with the end of mother-right and the beginning of women's subordination. Clara Zetkin and Alexandra Kollontai were its most prominent representatives, yet they rejected the label "feminist" as individualist and bourgeois. In Germany working-class and middle-class women lived in different worlds: for propertyless women workers equality in industrial work was central, for middle-class women equality in marriage law and a political voice. The journal Die Gleichheit, edited by Zetkin, coordinated the proletarian women's movement. The first International Conference of Socialist Women at Stuttgart in 1907 created the Socialist Women's International, and Zetkin imposed the principle of refusing any alliance with "bourgeois feminism". In this tradition women's mobilisation was to remain subordinate to the class struggle, since only the overthrow of capitalism could end women's oppression. After the October Revolution the Bolsheviks at first cooperated with the women's movement and enacted reforms feminists had prepared for decades, but they did not accept an independent women's movement, which they considered bourgeois, and pursued their own state-led project of emancipation.
The second wave and its currents
Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) supplied one of feminism's best-known adages: "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." The second wave, beginning in the late 1960s with France's Mouvement de libération des femmes and Women's Lib, reformulated the concept of patriarchy, coined that of sexism and treated the private sphere as the privileged site of male domination — "the personal is political"; women's control over their bodies, abortion and contraception came to the fore. Liberal feminism sought reform through legislation and public opinion. Radical feminism saw men's oppression of women, patriarchy, as the foundation of the system of power. In 1969 New York Radical Women split between "politicos", who saw capitalism as the main source of women's oppression, and "feminists", who located it in male supremacy. In The Dialectic of Sex (1970) Shulamith Firestone wrote that the end goal of feminist revolution must be the elimination not only of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself. French materialist feminism analysed the sexes as antagonistic social classes; Christine Delphy described a domestic mode of production.
Socialist and Marxist feminism
Socialist feminism grew out of the 1960s–1970s New Left with a focus on the interconnection of patriarchy and capitalism; the first publication to use the term is believed to be a 1972 pamphlet of the Chicago Women's Liberation Union. Marxist feminism extended Marxist analysis to unpaid domestic labour and sex relations. In 1972 Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, Silvia Federici and others launched the Wages for Housework campaign in Italy. Juliet Mitchell's "Women: The Longest Revolution" (1966) synthesised Beauvoir, Engels and others; Heidi Hartmann (1981) objected that such work asked about women's relation to the economic system rather than to men. Gayle Rubin's "The Traffic in Women" (1975) coined the "sex/gender system", and Lise Vogel's Marxism and the Oppression of Women (1983) became a founding text of social reproduction theory. The communist Claudia Jones worked from the 1930s to bring Black women workers' needs into the Communist Party and theorised the "triple oppression" of race, class and gender; Angela Davis, in Women, Race and Class, argued for the socialisation of housework.
The third wave and after
From the 1990s a third wave emerged in the United States in the wake of Black feminism, seeking to be more inclusive. Intersectionality, articulated by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, holds that sexism and other discriminations operate together. Judith Butler's Gender Trouble (1990) developed the theory of gender performativity, which strongly influenced queer theory. Traditional Marxist feminists have criticised intersectionality for relying on bourgeois identity politics and narrowing the conception of class.