Theory, Feminism, and

Feminist Theory

Prof. Reicha Tanwar

Former Director,
Women’s Studies Research Centre,
Kurukshetra University, Kurukshetra
As we begin to consider feminist theory, we
must examine a number of important and
central issues, including:
• What is “theory”? What does it mean to
theorize?
• What is specifically feminist about feminist
theory?
• Are there specific methods for feminist
theorizing?
• What is the relation of theory to everyday
experience and practice?
• What are the implications of the diversity of
feminist theories?
The Editors of Feminist Frameworks
suggest the following regarding theory:

A theory offers a general account of how a range

of phenomena are systematically connected; by
placing individual items in a larger context, it
increases our understanding both of the whole
and of the parts constituting the whole. Theory
is a systematic, analytic approach to everyday
experience.…
Feminist Theory

• Attempts to develop a comprehensive

account of the subordination of women,
including its supposed essence and origin;
• Is a prerequisite for developing effective
strategies to liberate women;
• Identifies the underlying causes of women’s
subordination.
Feminist theory attempts to describe women’s
oppression, to explain its causes and
consequences, and to prescribe strategies for
women’s liberation. In “Women Do Theory,”
Jane Flax suggests that theory is a systematic,
analytic approach to everyday experience. Flax
argues that everybody does this unconsciously
and that to theorize is to bring this unconscious
process to a conscious level so that it can be
developed and refined.
All research operates on theories, though
most of them are implicit. We screen out
certain things; we allow others to affect us;
we make choices and we don’t always
understand why. Implicit theory-making
includes our assumptions about the way the
world works. Theory makes those choices
conscious, and enables us to use them more
efficiently.
Feminism and Feminist
• The term Feminism and Feminist entered the
English language in the 1890s at the time of
women’s emancipation movement
• Feminism is the ideology or theoretical
commitment to the women’s liberation
movements
• Feminist theory and Politics is marked by
intense internal debates and is generally
recognized by now that it would be more
accurate to talk about Feminisms in the plural
rather than one single feminism
• Feminism refers to Political, Cultural and
Economic movements aimed at establishing
greater rights and legal protections for
women
• It is the belief in the importance of gender
equality, invalidating the idea of gender
hierarchy as a socially constructed concept
• Although this hierarchy is justified on grounds
of natural differences between men and
women
• Feminist hold that it is in fact based on
socio cultural and economic power
structures which have little to do with the
biological differences between the sexes

• Feminist is a person whose belief and

behaviour are based on Feminism
Feminist activists have campaigned for
women legal rights such as-
• Rights of contract, property rights and voting
rights
• To protect women and girls from domestic
violence, sexual harassment and rape
• Advocates for workplace rights including
maternity leave and equal pay
• To advocate women’s rights to bodily
autonomy and reproductive rights
• Feminist theory is the extension of feminism
into theoretical or philosophical discourse. It
aims to understand the nature of gender
inequality
According to Flax, Feminist Theory has
several purposes:

1. To understand the power differential

between men and women
2. To understand women’s oppression—how
it evolved, how it changes over time, how it
is related to other forms of oppression
3. How to overcome oppression
Flax suggests that feminist theory is intimately
related to action: “Feminist theory is the
foundation of action and there is no pretense
that theory can be neutral. Within feminist
theory is a commitment to change oppressive
structures and to connect abstract ideas with
concrete problems for political action. There
has to be a commitment to do something about
the situation of women.”
The Diversity of Feminist Thought

It would be a mistake to expect a brief and clear

definition in a sentence or two of feminism or
feminist thought. Feminism, after all, has a long
history, going back at least to the 18th century
and the work of early liberal feminist thinkers
such as Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart
Mill. Feminism is also a response to women’s
lives and experiences and the varieties of
feminisms reflects the changing and varied
nature of women’s experience. Despite these
difficulties, all varieties of feminism agree that
women have been oppressed and unjustly
treated.
Theories of Feminism

There are various theories of Feminism:

Liberal Feminism-
• It can be understood as equal rights feminism
or particularly ‘First Wave’ of women’s
movement
• Throughout the nineteenth century liberal
feminism had developed often as an
extension of other emancipatory movements
• In this approach the explanation for
women’s position in society is seen in terms
of unequal rights or artificial barriers to
women’s participation in the public world,
beyond the family and household
• Belief in ‘Equality first’ which means
freedom from unwarranted restrictions by
others
• Emphasis upon reform than revolutionary
change
• They asserted that women are not
fundamentally different to men and, yet
they are denied opportunities on the basis
of their sex
Liberal Feminist Writers

Mary WollstoneCraft- (1759-1797) Born in

Spitafields, London
Wrote the famous book, ‘Vindication of the
Rights of Women’ published in 1792. She
emphasized

• Repressive hierarchies are not natural?

• Why can women not be equal to men?
• Why should women be excluded from civil and
political employment?
J.S. Mill (1806-73)

• British Philosopher wrote ‘The Subjection of

Women’ in 1869
• Women should enjoy equal right with men
including right to vote

• Women are rational being and not inferior to

men

• Comments on three major facts of women’s

lives that are hindering them: society and
gender constriction, education and marriage
Liberal Feminism

• Lens of gender and gender equality

• Emphasis on traditional understanding of
human nature and personhood: rationality,
individual autonomy, self-fulfillment
(characteristics possessed by all).
• Sex and gender neutral; all human beings
possess a common nature.
• A just society is a society that allows
individuals to exercise their freedom and
fulfill themselves.
• Emphasis on equality of opportunity: all
persons deserve an equal chance to develop
their rational and moral capacities so that they
can achieve personhood.
• Because society has the false belief that
women are by nature less intellectually and
physically capable than men it excludes
women from many opportunities and the true
potential of women goes unfulfilled.
• Liberal feminists argue that women share the
same rational human nature men do and so
should be given the same educational
opportunities and civil rights as men are
given.
• The goal of women’s liberation is freeing
women from oppressive gender roles:
sexual and gender equality.
• Liberal feminism led to advances in the
economic sphere, in equality of opportunity
and in civil rights.
• The main problem of liberal feminism is its
tendency to accept male values as universal
values. All women should want to become
like men, to aspire to masculine values.
Liberal feminism often did not include an
analysis of class or sexuality (the
sex/gender system).
Marxist Feminism

• Central to all Marxist Feminist is the belief that

Women’s subordination is not permanent
and natural but historically specific
product of class society
• Marx claimed to provide a comprehensive
analysis of human history and society

• Family and sexual relationships are other

forms of social organization the product of
particular stage of economic development
• They cannot be altered at will, it can be changed
or ended with socio-economic change
• In Marxist feminism hierarchical class relations
are seen as the source of coercive power and
oppression of all inequalities ultimately, sexual
oppression is seen as a dimension of class
power
• They accept some version of what is called the
base superstructure model of society, that is
social relation including those related to
sexual inequality are conceived as crucially
shaped by the economic base of society
rather than by ideas and attitudes
Marxist Feminist Writers
Frederick Engels

• Engels in his famous work The Origin of Family,

Private Property and the State published in
1894 argued that in early tribal societies
men, women and children lived together as a
part of larger households in which production
was for use rather than exchange
• The subordination of women occurs when man
began to domesticate animals and breed
herds
• Women seek monogamous relation in marriage
and the family is privatized

• Male domination would only disappear with

socialization of production

• In Engels there is an added dimension of

materialist conception of history and the
placing of the human essence into labour

• The central contention was that the oppression

of women was rooted in the impersonal logic of
capitalism and private property
Maria Mies

• A German scholar, feminist and activist

• She is author of numerous ground breaking

works on women and globalization

• Her classic work is Patriarchy and

Accumulation on a World Scale written in
1986

• It was the product of the struggle of women’s

autonomous organizations
• Marxism and a conception of capitalist
exploitation as a subset, a special case, of a
more general kind of exploitation inherently
involved with patriarchal society
• According to Mies Patriarchy is to be found in
the social relations of production
themselves, and is perhaps the single most
important and shaper of these relations
• It is therefore not just a form of oppression,
but in the full sense a form of exploitation of
women’s labour and exploitation of women’s
bodies
• Lens of class.
• Influence: the philosophies of Marx and
Engles
• Key concepts: class, wealth, capitalism
• Explanation: women's oppression originated
in the introduction of private property.
Capitalism is the cause of women's
oppression.
• Prescription: The capitalist system must be
replaced by a socialist system in which the
means of production belong to one and all.
• Rejection of the abstract individualism of
liberal feminism.
• Emphasis on our social nature, as it is our
social existence (class, the kind of work
we do) that determines our consciousness.
• A woman’s conception of herself is a product
of her social existence which is largely
defined by the kind of work she does—
relegated largely to domestic work in the
private sphere and the reproduction of the
species (rather than production).
• With its emphasis on economic factors,
Marxist Feminists see women as a distinct
economic class, rather than as individuals,
analyzing the connections between women’s
work status and their self-image.
• Capitalism perpetuates the subordination of
women by enforcing their economic
dependence on men.
• Impact on comparable worth debate, wages
for housework, women’s double-day.
• The weaknesses of Marxist Feminism
include its obscuring differences between
distinct economic classes of men and
women and its failure to make room for
issues unrelated to the nature and function
of work (the sex-gender system).
Radical Feminism-
• It is essentially a theory of, by and for women

• They protest that liberal feminism is too

artificial in its approach.
• Women are oppressed because of their sex and
sexual oppression is a fundamental form of
oppression, here patriarchy is the key term
• The notion of shared oppression is intimately
connected with a strong emphasis on
sisterhood of women
• Any woman has more in common with any
other woman- regardless of class, race, age,
ethnic group, nationality – than any
woman has with any man.
• Such an agenda encourages some degree of
separatism from men
• Furthermore, this identification with women
and rejection of male dominance involves
both a critique of the existing organization of
heterosexuality as prioritizing men and a
recognition of lesbianism as a challenge to
that priority
• They describe sexual oppression a
fundamental form of oppression and primary
oppression of women

• Men as a group are considered to be the

beneficiaries of this systematic form of power

• It is also called as feminism of difference

• Caral Hanisch coined the slogan ‘The

Personal is Political’

• Advocates revolutionary model of social

change
Radical Feminist Writers
Simone De Beauvoir (1908-86)

French Author and Philosopher

• She occupies a unique place among feminist
theorists
• Her major work The second sex (1949) is
considered a classic study of women’s
condition
• She found that man put himself as subject
and woman as object, as the other
• She linked the history of woman to that of
inheritance, because it seemed to her to be a
byproduct of the economic evaluation of the
masculine world

• Existentialism determines the conceptual

framework of The Second Sex

• She mentions ‘One is not born but rather

becomes a woman
• No biological, psychological’ or economic
fate determines the figure that the human
female presents in society

• It is the civilization as a whole that produces

this creature, intermediate, between male
and eunuch, which is described as feminine
• In her book she assembled philosophical,
psychological, anthropological, historical,
literary and collected evidence to argue that
faminity and domesticity are not natural
attributes of womanhood but artificial creation
which limit freedom of women and deny
them the expression of full humanity
• State as manifestation of men’s political power
reflecting other deeper structures of
oppression – male power cannot be reduced to
economics but it is embedded in family, in
reproduction, in sexuality or the language
we use
Shulasmith Firestone
• Her book The Dialectic of Sex: The Case of
Feminist Revolution was published in 1970 and
acquired the reputation of being the most
articulate expression of the radical feminist
position
• In the book there is a theoretical attempt to
present the basic class division and
oppression of society as a sexual one. Her
book triggered off an important debate on
artificial reproduction both within and outside
the feminist movement
• Radical feminists believe that science and
technology can be used positively to
reorganize and eventually to eliminate natural
reproduction
• She states Radical Feminism is the first
feminine movement which connects
effectively the ‘personal’ with the ‘political’
• Her remedial strategy is revolutionary but
simple. Abolition of the family will end
repressions that mould sexuality into narrow
and rigid formations
• She analyses the powerlessness of woman,
chiefly in psychological terms
• Lens of sex/gender and sexuality.
• Influence: to some extent the black power
movement, other social and progressive
movements of the 1960s.
• Key concepts: biology, sex/gender system,
patriarchy, power, dominance, hierarchy.
• Explanation: women's biology is closely
related to their oppression, as well as all the
manifestations of sexual violence.
• Prescription: generally revolves around their
conception of female biology, perhaps
androgyny (radical-liberation feminists),
separatism (radical-lesbian feminists), recovery
of an authentic female nature (radical-cultural
feminists).
• Main insight: distinctions of gender, based on
sex, structure virtually every aspect of our lives
and are so all-pervasive that ordinarily they go
unrecognized.
• Gender is the unquestioned framework in
terms of which we perceive and interpret the
world. Radical feminists appeal to women
not as an economic class but as a class
defined by the sex/gender system.
• Sexuality is the root cause of oppression—
women are oppressed because they are
women.
• Radical feminists, through their analysis of
the gender system, first disclosed the
elaborate system of male domination known
as patriarchy.
• Radical feminists focus on the subordination
of women as its primary concern—revealing
how male power is exercised and reinforced
through such practices as sexual
harassment, rape, pornography, prostitution,
as well as childbearing, housework, love and
marriage. Radical feminists made stride in the
battle against violence against women.
• In response to the almost total domination of
women by men, radical feminists have tried to
celebrate womanhood in contrast to the
devaluation of women that pervades the
larger society, focusing on the creative power
inherent in women’s biology.
• Biology gives rise to those psychological
characteristics linked with women:
nurturance, warmth, emotional
expressiveness, endurance, practical
common sense.

• A possible problem: in celebrating

womanhood are they celebrating what has
already been defined as feminine by
patriarchy? Some radical feminist theory was
also biological determinist and obscured
differences among women.
Socialist Feminism-
• Socialist feminism arose out of the belief that
feminism is not simply a legal and political
question- though socialists do support the
case for the legal and political
emancipation of women

• Socialists take the view that women’s

emancipation is also and primarily – a
social question so that the movement for
women’s freedom needs to be linked with
the struggle to transform capitalism itself
In brief there are three major socialist feminist
traditions may be described as deriving from
debates between Radical and Marxist feminists –
• The first strand involves a concern with the
social construction of sex (gender) which
was largely seen in terms of Freudian Psycho
analysis. Hence the first strand termed a
dual system model of social analysis that is
patriarchy and capitalism.

• The second strand describes a unifield system

sometimes referred to, as capitalist
patriarchy.
• The third strand is known as ‘Dynamic Duo’
approach of Heidi Hartman in which sexual
and class oppression interact but are not
cast as independent forms
Socialist Feminist Writers
Juliet Mitchell

• Juliet Mitchell a socialist feminist writer born in

New Zealand in 1940

• Her book Women’s Estate was published in

1971. Her other publication Psychoanalysis
and Feminism, published in 1974

• She argues that traditional socialism is in error

is exaggerating, the role of private property in
subjugating women
• To understand the continuous oppression of
women in the past and the present, she treats
women as a feminist problem but seeks Marxist
answers
• She mentioned, women’s life is governed by
women’s conditions. a) Production, b)
reproduction, c) Sexuality, d) the Socialization
of Children
• She asserts not biology but culture is at the
root of women’s degradation
• A cultural revolution is necessary for a specific
struggle against patriarchy
• In such a battle women must maintain their
autonomy
Iris Young
• Her vision of good society is differentiated,
culturally plural network of contemporary
urban life

• Her goal is principle of group representation

in democratic public among with the group
differentiated policies

• She proposes an ideal of urban life, nurturing

diversity and cooperation in providing
services conceived, distributed and
administered justly
• Influence: Marxism, psychoanalysis, radical
feminism
• Key concepts: unity and integration of
capitalist system and patriarchy
• Explanation: women's oppression is
complexly determined by a variety of
forces, including economic, social,
psychological.
• Socialist feminism attempts to synthesize
best insights of Marxist and Radical
feminism. Capitalism, male dominance,
racism, imperialism are intertwined and
inseparable.
• Socialist feminism remains more historical
than biological and more specific than
universal: recognizes all the important
differences among human beings—class,
sex, but also age, race, ethnicity, nationality,
sexual orientation.
• Women, like all human beings, are constituted
essentially by the social relations they
inhabit. A woman’s life experience is shaped
by all these various dimensions.
• Refuses to reduce oppression to one single
type or cause.
Psychoanalytic Feminism

• The lens of psyche

• Influence: Freud, the psychoanalytic
movement, including object relations theory
• Key concepts: sexuality, the Oedipus
complex, id, ego, superego
• Explanation: women's oppression is tied to
the manner in which she resolves the
Oedipus complex
• Prescription: altering parenting habits,
reconceptualizing the Oedipal stage; women
must gain insight into how their psychic
lives–especially their sexual lives—were
structured while they were still infants.

• Weaknesses: is female sexuality parasitic

upon male sexuality? How does
psychoanalysis deal with issues of race and
class?
Existentialist Feminism

• Influence: Existentialism, Sartre, De Beauvoir

• Key concepts: woman as "Other"
• Explanation: women is oppressed by virtue of
"otherness", the object whose meaning is
determined for her.
• Prescription: Woman must become a self, a
subject who transcends definitions, labels,
and essences. She must make herself
whatever she wants to be.
Postmodern Feminism-
• Feminist writings influenced by post modern
thinking stress plurality rather than unity and
in particular reject conceptions of women as a
homogeneous category
• The emphasis is here upon difference both
within and between subjects and the diversity
of forms of power
• They concentrate upon destabilizing the
manifold operations of power, rather than
mobilizing political struggle around identities
like women, gay or black
• It lies precisely in the antagonism to singular
structural explanation and the attraction to
considering multiple determinants to
diversity, plurality and indeterminacy

• They question the idea of a central

explanatory
• Foundation or coherent care to human
sociality, a notion which is perceived to be
critical to the project of modernity and instead
focus on the constructed fragility of
subjectivity that is its internal
fragmentation as well as its diverse forms
• Influences: Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, other
postmodernists
• Key concepts: difference and diversity
(race, culture, class)
• Explanation: woman as difference
• Prescription: by refusing to center, congeal,
and cement their separate thoughts into a
unified truth too inflexible to change,
feminists resist patriarchal dogma.
Ecofeminism
• Influences: radical environmentalism, animal-
rights movement
• Key concepts: the nature/culture divide, the
relationship between human and nonhuman
nature
• Explanation: woman, nonhuman animals, and
the environment have all been identified
together as natural forces to be dominated by
Man
• Prescription: overcoming the rift between
nature and culture, feminism must work to
eliminate all forms of the oppression of
nonhuman nature
• Ecofeminists argue that we will not succeed
in eliminating the hierarchical relations that
plague the human social order unless we
also eradicate those that regulate the
relationships between the human social
order and nonhuman nature. The
denigration of women and men of color, of
working-class women and men, and of
animals has its material origins in the
subjugation of women by men. The male-
female relationship is the paradigm for any
and all hierarchical relationships.