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WHY FEMINISM? A VERY BRIEF HISTORY
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- ROSIE THE RIVETER
- THE SIXTIES
WHY FEMINISM? A VERY BRIEF HISTORYFeminism can roughly be called the sum total of all the attempts to understand and solve the differences that exist between men and women in all spheres of society. Philosophy is no exception, so feminist philosophy must first, before it moves on to social issues such as reproductive rights or domestic abuse, attempt to identify the characteristics of philosophy itself which are susceptible to patriarchal manipulation or contextualization. However, early feminists were not concerned with philosophy at all. Mary Wollstonecraft, who at the end of the Eighteenth Century penned A Vindication of the Rights of Women might have been a brilliant philosopher, but she was more concerned simply with articulating the political principles of her movement. Her daughter, Mary Shelly, who was also a committed feminist, spent her time writing fiction. The rights of women, to them, needed no philosophical justification beyond the simple and well-articulated principles of the movement. But then again, these early feminists were more concerned with uniting women than taking on the institutions of higher learning themselves. But as feminism made its way into Western political consciousness, it became necessary to explicitly outline the relationship between the demands of feminist women and the philosophical foundations of the democratic tradition in the West. On the American continent, this was the job of American suifragists, who were living at a time, the early 19th Century, when America was still optimistic about the foundations of democracy, and who could place defenders of male domination at a serious disadvantage by turning the still-radical but widely accepted classical liberal position against the old fools. No one did this better or longer than Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a contemporary of Susan B. Anthony. Stanton used every principle of liberal democracy to justify the emancipation of women; once women were so obviously exposed as the rational creatures they had always known they were, it became easy to extend the arguments of liberalism across the “flow pads” of democracy. Women should have the right to vote, as they are affected and as they affect their society as much as men do. Women should have the right to the same educational opportunities; education was not only a way for women to survive economically without being either a burden or a slave to men, but it was also seen as a good in itself, the icon of liberal rationalism and an informed democracy, ideals which the founders, however blind they were to women, praised and encouraged. In 1919 and 1920, in what would be the largest step thus far taken in accommodation to feminism, women were granted the right to vote, that precious gem of democracy proudly held up to the undemocratic world. Now, women could share in this uniquely liberal method of governance. The abstract political fight had yielded a concrete, if somewhat concretely abstract, gain. That abstraction would be the tension between political power on paper and political power in practice. And political power in practice would require another step: economic power. ROSIE THE RIVETERDainty but muscular, adorned with protective gear and a look of grim, almost handsome determination, Rosie was a character in posters the War Department of the United States government produced during the Second World War. The men were gone to fight and die, and so the women had to go to work. This was an excellent example of how there are times when an oppressive system shoots itself in the foot when attempting to fulfill its aims. Clearly, women had to work in order to sustain both the war effort and the side profits. But in so encouraging this work, the United States effort also proved, or helped women prove, their effectiveness, their competence, and by extension their right to full and categorical equality. The “Patriarchs” tried, after the war, when all those young men came back needing jobs, to put women back in the home. They invented “family values’ and kept women’s wages low (actually, as we shall see below, there are no “Patriarchs” per say, but the fact that you were compelled by the metaphor itself demonstrates a strength of feminism you should keep in mmd). But women kept working and fought for higher wages. Differences still exist, but Ward and June Cleaver no longer define the American family. Rosie, by the way, today appears on feminist t-shirts. She has become a symbol of what women can do, an inversion of her intended purpose, a deconsiructed and reconstructed text. Her motto, as it appeared on the old posters, is “We can do it!” THE SIXTIESFeminist politics became feminist theory in the 1960’s. Along with having worked alongside men for twenty years, women had also begun attending colleges and universities in mass numbers. Suddenly, in the midst of that anomolous combination of historical forces which combined to make the 1960’s what they were, women were involving themselves in every university subject, and many were conscious of the differences they perceived. Ten years earlier, Betty Friedan had published The Feminine Mystique the first popular post-war feminist work, a book which probably changed the perspectives of millions of American women. Like everything else during the “Love Decade,” feminist theory exploded, went on a trip, tamed upside down and inside out. The availability of birth control, the acceptability of casual sex, and the subsequent realization by conscious women that sex was not enough, would permanently alter relations between women and men. At the same time, feminists for virtually the first time began discovering, and acting upon, differences among themselves. Women who wanted equality with men found themselves in disagreement with women who for whatever philosophical or personal reasons simply didn’t like men. In many cases, the women who favored equality dropped out of the theoretical endeavor and kept working alongside men (however warily) for equality. This meant that by the 1970’s, the most popular theoretical feminists were somewhat divorced from the sentiments of the majority of American women, who had always generally wanted equality with men rather than a philosophical advantage against them. Today, as we shall see, there are so many brands of feminism that it is more than valid for Women’s Studies to be a legitimate department in any major university. The unity of awareness of patriarchy has remained. The differences in approach have gotten larger and more numerous, to the point where a significant chunk of all feminist theoretical writing is devoted to criticizing other feminist theoretical writing. This is not a bad thing for feminism, since turning upon itself is what a progressive theory is supposed to do. But it isn’t bad news for those debating against feminism either, since these divisions. make the weaknesses of many particular feminist variations painfully clear, and since taken together, those flaws can inspire patterns which expose the potential flaws of contemporary feminism in general. 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