Together with other controversial aspects in the society, feminism sprang into life in the late during the second half of the twentieth century. It attracted much media attention besides generating a tremendous energy that translated into real change in many women’s lives. According to the Oxford Concise Dictionary of Politics feminism:
A way of looking at the world, which women occupy from the perspective of women. It has its central focus the concept of patriarchy, which can be described as a system of male authority, which oppresses women through its social, political and economic institutions.
Others have defined it as the advocacy of women right’s in a male dominated society (Osborne 9).
The origins of the women’s movement in the Western world can be traced back to the French revolution, which took place in 1789. Women had very little choices on how they lived their lives. For the gentry, marriage, the convent or scratching a living as a governess were just the only options. Very few women were able to rely on this for their living. For the less well off, before industrialization, men and women worked together on the farm or in the workshops. There were great differences between the amount of work the women did and the amount of pay and that of their male counterparts. With the spread of industrialization came a more formalized separation between the ‘men’s work’ and the work that women could do. Whatever their economic and social background, there was no active role for women in the public arena. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, some women were beginning to chafe against such restrictions.
Marx condemned the idea of division of labor as one of the major causes of the oppression of the women in the society. He suggested that the specialization of labor as well as the allocation of certain groups of people to perform certain tasks in the community is fundamentally alienating (Osborne 56). He also condemned communism due to its ‘fixation of social activity’ that allocated some of the demeaning works to women. In the German Ideology and later Capital (1867) Marx roots the division of labor in what he associates with the natural division of the family (Donovan 88). His theory posits that the primary divisions especially in the roles of the two gender in the society occurs in the family setting. Marxists believe that the division of labor within the family is the root of the first form of ownership of one person by another. Marx likened it to the enslavement of the women folk especially the wife and children by the husband as the first form of private property thus bringing in the idea of capitalism. Marxism perceives feminism as a form of capitalism whereby human beings have been overpowered by commodities. Marx envisions an unalienated world, a communistic world where people will experience a more holistic relationship to the products of their labor, and where people will no longer be divided against one another because of their class relationship to the modes of production (Donovan 87).
A group of ex-movement women developed the radical feminist theory during the first two decades of the second half of the twentieth century. The women were primarily from New York and Boston. They comprised of all the women who had participated in the political activities of the civil rights as well as the anti-war campaigns of the 1960s. They were opposing the contemptuous treatment they received from male radicals in the ‘New Left’. Owing to this, much of the radical feminist theory was forged in reaction against theories, organizational structures as well as personal styles of the men in the society. As far as the theory is concerned, the radical feminists were determined to establish that their own personal subjective issues had an importance and legitimacy equal to those of their male counterparts. The theory posits that the issues were interrelated- that male supremacy and the subjugation of women was indeed the root and model oppression in the society and that feminism had to be the basis for nay truly revolutionary change. Additionally, the theory posits that the idea that the personal is political; that male domination or rather patriarchy-not capitalism-is at the root of women’s oppression and that women need to identify themselves as a subjugated class or combat their oppressors i.e. men. Moreover, it postulates that men and women are fundamentally different, in terms of style and cultures, and that the women should form the basis of the future society (Donovan 167).
The theory of liberal feminism brings in the school of political though from which liberal feminism has evolved. Whether liberals define reason largely in moral or prudential terms, they nevertheless concur that a just society allows individuals to exercise their autonomy and to fulfill themselves. Liberals claim that the ‘right’ must be given priority over the ‘good’ (Donovan 121). In other words, our entire system of individual rights is justified because these rights constitute a framework within which we can all choose our own separate goods, provided we do not deprive others of theirs. Such a priority defends religious freedom but simply on the grounds that people have a right to practice their own brand of spirituality. The same holds for all those rights we generally identify as fundamental in any given setting. When it comes to the basic unit of the society i.e. the family, liberals agree that the less we see of masculinity in our everyday life, the better for all the members of the society. However, in the public sphere the liberals are divided into two groups: classical and welfare liberals (Donovan130). Classical liberals think that the state should confine itself to protecting civil liberties. They also think that instead of interfering with the free market, the state should simply provide everyone with an equal opportunity to determine their accumulations in the market. On the other hand, welfare liberals believe that the state should focus on economic disparities as well as civil liberties. Welfare liberals call for government intervention in the economy such as legal services, school loans, low cost housing, social security and aid to families with dependent children so that the market does not perpetuate or otherwise solidify huge inequalities. Although both approaches appear in liberal feminist though, most contemporary liberal feminists seem to favor welfare liberalism.
Feminism is mostly associated with the oppression that women suffer in a male dominated society. Radical feminists defined the problem as one of patriarchy in which their male counterparts dominated in all areas of life. Male domination resulted in “wholesale oppression of women” (Osborne29). This faction mounted women-only campaigns especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, which focused on the effects of male violence, rape, pornography. Marxist feminists linked male domination with class exploitation, arguing that equal rights for men and women would improve the lot of poor women. Liberal feminists placed the emphasis on change from within the society rather than revolutions by putting forward positive role models for girls, establishing equality in their own relationships and lobbying parliament for legislation on equal rights.
Works Cited
Donovan, Josephine. Feminism Theory: The Intellectual Traditions of American Feminism.
London, GBR: Continuum International Publishing, 2000. Print.
Osborne, Susan. Feminism. Harpenden, GBR: Pocket Essentials, 2001. Print.
