Introducing Feminism: A Graphic Guide (Graphic Guides)

by Cathia Jenainati

Although Woolf is often regarded as a feminist literary critic rather than a social activist, her writing often displays acute awareness of discrimination and social marginalization. A Room of One’s Own is littered with examples of situations where women are actively barred from social and cultural media such as libraries, universities and exclusively male eating places. In many ways, her writing becomes more relevant to later feminists who pursued consciousness-raising during the second wave of feminist activity.

Her ideas on the need for establishing a female literary tradition were later taken up by the gynocritics (see here).

Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) ushered in a new era of thinking about woman’s position in society, and it has become a classic of feminist philosophy. De Beauvoir (1908–86) offered a new understanding of social relations between men and women. Her interpretation of the social construction of femininity as Other paved the way for the theoretical discussions of the second wave.

De Beauvoir explained subjectivity (our sense of Self) through exis philosophy. Existentialism proposes that one exists first, and through one’s acts, one becomes something. She reasoned that an individual has absolute control over their fate, and neither society nor organized religion should limit our freedom to live authentically. But since men have claimed the category of Self, of Subject, for themselves, woman is relegated to the status of Other. Consequently, the category of woman has no substance except as an extension of male fantasy and fears. Since all cultural representations of the world around us have been produced by men, women read themselves in terms of masculine definitions and “dream through the dreams of men”. Thus woman is required to accept her status of Other, “make herself object” and “renounce her autonomy”.

Second wave feminists adopted and adapted De Beauvoir’s reasoning that women’s oppression lay in their socially constructed status of Other to men. The term “second wave” was coined by Marsha Lear to describe the increase in feminist activity in America, Britain and Europe from the late 1960s onwards.

The WLM emerged out of the New Left of the WRM in the late 1960s. In the US, it came as a result of civil rights activism and anti-Vietnam campaigning. The WLM provided theoretical solutions to women’s oppression, whereas the WRM was the more practical and socially driven movement.

In 1963, Betty Friedan (1921–2006) published the best-selling The Feminine Mystique, which heralded feminism’s second wave. The title refers to the idealization of traditional roles ascribed to women (as wives and mothers) which is interpreted as a means of keeping women subordinate to men.

“The feminine mystique says that the highest value and the only commitment for women is the fulfilment of their own femininity … “… it says that this femininity is so mysterious and intuitive and close to the creation and origin of life that man-made science may never be able to understand it. “The mistake, says the mystique, the root of women’s troubles in the past is that women envied men, instead of accepting their own nature, which can find fulfilment only in sexual passivity, male domination, and nurturing maternal love.”

There are many problematic issues about Friedan’s argument: She did not identify the source of women’s oppression, nor did she take into consideration women’s varied access to education. Friedan, like de Beauvoir, focused solely on the experience of middle-class, heterosexual, white women. Both critics tended to blame women themselves for their subordinate position and failed to acknowledge the need for society to change in order to accommodate women’s changing lives.

These Superwomen of the 1980s attempted to achieve the impossible task of being both “woman” at home and “man” at work. Friedan claimed that in order to resolve their dilemma, the women’s movement should be restarted, , and this time men should be involved in order to change public values, leadership styles, and institutional structures.

In 1968 in France, the Women’s Liberation Movement (known as MLF) split into two factions. One group of feminists maintained that achieving equality with men should remain the aim of the movement, while another argued for the importance of maintaining difference between men and women. This second branch of the MLF, the postfeminist faction, encompasses psychoanalytic critics such as Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous.

The Dialectic of Sex was published in 1970. Shulamith Firestone (b. 1945) believed that women’s capacity for reproduction was the source of their oppression. Therefore in order to eradicate social inequality, a biological revolution is needed.

Firestone revised Marx and Engels’ theories of history, which overlooked women’s exclusion from society. This distinction allowed her to examine reproduction rather than production as the driving force in history. Women should seize control over the means of reproduction in order to eliminate sex class discrimination. This can be achieved through wider access to contraception, sterilization and abortion.

Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics (1970) was another radical feminist text which explained the roots of women’s oppression in terms of patriarchy’s sex/gender system. Millet (b. 1934) insisted that sex is political because the relationship between males and females underlies all power relations.

Similarly to Firestone, Ann Oakley (b. 1944) made the case against biological motherhood. In Women’s Work (1974) she challenged the “myth of biological motherhood” which is based on three assumptions:

She systematically countered these assumptions by arguing that: 1. Women’s need to be mothers is artificially instilled in them during socialization – when the mother teaches the daughter society’s expectations of her – and is not an essential or natural part of their existence. 2. The belief that mothers need their children is based on the fallacy of a maternal instinct which must be satisfied or else the woman will become frustrated. Oakley refutes the idea that women are instinctively drawn to their children and asserts that mothers are not born, they are made. 3. The myth of biological motherhood is manifested most prominently in the assumption that all children need their mothers, which is itself based on erroneous reasoning.

Oakley reasoned that because “men are individualized” and capitalism is abstract, men have been more immediately blameable. Yet she also concluded that it was impossible to generate a patriarchal model of society which would correspond to a universal experience of women’s oppression. Oakley provocatively suggested that although some social groups might have conspired against women, yet women have also conspired among themselves and discriminated against their own kind. She advocated a more active engagement of feminists in the sociological aspects of women’s lives rather than confining their efforts to the elite domains of research and academia.

In the 1970s, a decade which witnessed intense feminist activity on the political and sociological levels, feminist academics became actively engaged in challenging the Western literary canon.

Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of their Own (1977) attempted to establish a literary tradition which reflected the variety of women’s experience of the world. It also claimed women writers as significant contributors to the corpus of Western literary writing. Showalter divided female literary history into three phases.

Gynocriticism became associated with AngloAmerican feminist literary criticism, and Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) is one of its most influential works. It attempted to establish an Anglo-American literary tradition of women without referring to or incorporating male authors.

In the 1970s, many feminists such as Firestone, Friedan and Millet castigated Freud for his theory of penis envy, which claimed that a girl’s perception of herself and all those like her is that of “inferior castrates”. They argued that women’s social status of powerless Other had little to do with biology (gender) and much to do with social constructs of femininity.

Friedan rejected Freud’s over-emphasis on sexuality and argued that it was society’s obsessive concern with the female body that discriminated against women. She promoted a focus on the socio-economic and cultural situations which determine women’s fate, rather than their lack of a body part. Yet feminist critics have never had a unified voice. Their strengths lie in the diversity of their perspectives. Yet a number of feminist critics found in Freudian psychoanalysis useful concepts which they adapted to their understanding of female sexuality and women’s relationship to motherhood, as we’ll see.

Dorothy Dinnerstein and Nancy Chodorow are two feminist critics who used a psychoanalytic framework for analysing the complicated role that women as mothers play in society. They focused on the Freudian concept of the pre-Oedipal stage of psychosexual development – during which the infant is still attached to its mother – to show how sexuality and gender are constructed to give primacy to men over women. Mermaids and Minotaurs Dinnerstein re-interpreted the significance of the pre-Oedipal stage in her analysis of how culture’s gender arrangements have influenced women and men’s perception of themselves as mermaids and minotaurs.

The boy’s separation from his mother engenders emotional deficiencies and the sense of a struggle for survival which prepares him for his public role as a competing male. In contrast, the girl who remains attached to her mother is able to empathize with others, forming warm and intimate relationships which hold the private domestic world together.

As a feminist who identifies as a lesbian, Rich coined the term “compulsory heterosexuality” in 1980. She maintained that patriarchal society dictates that women must choose men as their sexual partners and perpetuates the ideology of the heterosexual romance. Consequently, lesbian sexuality is seen as deviant and transgressive.

Mary Daly (b. 1928) is a radical feminist philosopher and theologian. In 1973 she published God the Father, in which she maintained that the function of God in all religions is to “act as a legitimating paradigm for the institution of patriarchy”.

In her most famous book, Gyn/Ecology (1978), she rejected the term “God” altogether. She urged women to access the “wild woman” within them who will liberate them from social restrictions of feminine behaviour. Daly advocated revising language, which mainly represents men’s experience of the world.

During the 1980s, feminist activity became the target of numerous attacks by academics, journalists and public speakers who told women that their struggle for equal rights had been won and was over. Women were invited to return to their homes and perform their roles of mothers and wives while benefiting from the limited political and social rights they had earned.

The central concern of black feminist thought is the inseparability of race and gender. Most black feminists refuse to see themselves as women first and foremost.

Truth’s most famous speech, “A’n’t I a Woman?”, was delivered at a convention on women’s rights in 1851. In it, she is reported to have challenged a Protestant minister’s claims that men deserve more privileges than women because they are intellectually superior and because God created Jesus as a man. Her speech is often cited as an example of early black feminist political activism, although in many ways it is more about the status of the racialized and feminized body.

As an advocate of black women’s rights, Tubman participated in the 1895 National Conference of Colored Women in America (NCCWA). She later became a strong supporter of women’s suffrage. Tubman’s life was rife with stories of disobedience and rebellion.

However, her relationship with white women activists was tested with the passing of the 15th Amendment of the US Constitution, which granted black men the vote. Stanton and Anthony were highly critical of this Amendment, and felt that white women were entitled to suffrage before black men. In this instance Harper’s loyalty was to her race over her gender, and she broke the relationship with the white activists.

The statement underscored the participation of women of colour in second wave politics, and declared that only black women can identify their needs and write about their identities. It also declared that a collective and non-hierarchical distribution of power could pave the way for a revolutionary society in which oppression based on gender and sexual discrimination could be challenged and eradicated.

In her essays and speeches, hooks highlights the need to recognize and celebrate women’s diversity and to fight against the “exclusionary use of the term feminism” by white middle-class women. She has famously urged women to stop declaring themselves to be feminists and to announce instead that they advocate feminism.

Walker published several works of fiction which caused controversy among black critics for their depiction of black men as sexist, violent husbands. She has often been accused of complicity with white stereotypes of black men, but has defended herself by claiming that her fiction attempts to highlight problems which have been long considered taboo. Walker’s publication of a collection of essays, In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983), ushered in an era of black gynocriticism, and she has influenced many feminist thinkers across the world.