what is the feminist theory essay

Feminist Theory in Sociology

An Overview of Key Ideas and Issues

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Feminist theory is a major branch within sociology that shifts its assumptions, analytic lens, and topical focus away from the male viewpoint and experience toward that of women.

In doing so, feminist theory shines a light on social problems, trends, and issues that are otherwise overlooked or misidentified by the historically dominant male perspective within social theory .

Key Takeaways

Key areas of focus within feminist theory include:

• discrimination and exclusion on the basis of sex and gender
• objectification
• structural and economic inequality
• power and oppression
• gender roles and stereotypes

Many people incorrectly believe that feminist theory focuses exclusively on girls and women and that it has an inherent goal of promoting the superiority of women over men.

In reality, feminist theory has always been about viewing the social world in a way that illuminates the forces that create and support inequality, oppression, and injustice, and in doing so, promotes the pursuit of equality and justice.

That said, since the experiences and perspectives of women and girls were historically excluded for years from social theory and social science, much feminist theory has focused on their interactions and experiences within society to ensure that half the world's population is not left out of how we see and understand social forces, relations, and problems.

While most feminist theorists throughout history have been women, people of all genders can be found working in the discipline today. By shifting the focus of social theory away from the perspectives and experiences of men, feminist theorists have created social theories that are more inclusive and creative than those that assume the social actor to always be a man.

Part of what makes feminist theory creative and inclusive is that it often considers how systems of power and oppression interact , which is to say it does not just focus on gendered power and oppression, but on how this might intersect with systemic racism, a hierarchical class system, sexuality, nationality, and (dis)ability, among other things.

Gender Differences

Some feminist theory provides an analytic framework for understanding how women's location in and experience of social situations differ from men's.

For example, cultural feminists look at the different values associated with womanhood and femininity as a reason for why men and women experience the social world differently.   Other feminist theorists believe that the different roles assigned to women and men within institutions better explain gender differences, including the sexual division of labor in the household .  

Existential and phenomenological feminists focus on how women have been marginalized and defined as  “other”  in patriarchal societies . Some feminist theorists focus specifically on how masculinity is developed through socialization, and how its development interacts with the process of developing femininity in girls.

Gender Inequality

Feminist theories that focus on gender inequality recognize that women's location in and experience of social situations are not only different but also unequal to men's.

Liberal feminists argue that women have the same capacity as men for moral reasoning and agency, but that patriarchy , particularly the sexist division of labor, has historically denied women the opportunity to express and practice this reasoning.  

These dynamics serve to shove women into the  private sphere  of the household and to exclude them from full participation in public life. Liberal feminists point out that gender inequality exists for women in a heterosexual marriage and that women do not benefit from being married.  

Indeed, these feminist theorists claim, married women have higher levels of stress than unmarried women and married men.   Therefore, the sexual division of labor in both the public and private spheres needs to be altered for women to achieve equality in marriage.

Gender Oppression

Theories of gender oppression go further than theories of gender difference and gender inequality by arguing that not only are women different from or unequal to men, but that they are actively oppressed, subordinated, and even abused by men .  

Power is the key variable in the two main theories of gender oppression: psychoanalytic feminism and  radical feminism .

Psychoanalytic feminists attempt to explain power relations between men and women by reformulating Sigmund Freud's theories of human emotions, childhood development, and the workings of the subconscious and unconscious. They believe that conscious calculation cannot fully explain the production and reproduction of patriarchy.  

Radical feminists argue that being a woman is a positive thing in and of itself, but that this is not acknowledged in  patriarchal societies  where women are oppressed. They identify physical violence as being at the base of patriarchy, but they think that patriarchy can be defeated if women recognize their own value and strength, establish a sisterhood of trust with other women, confront oppression critically, and form female-based separatist networks in the private and public spheres.  

Structural Oppression

Structural oppression theories posit that women's oppression and inequality are a result of capitalism , patriarchy, and racism .

Socialist feminists agree with  Karl Marx  and Freidrich Engels that the working class is exploited as a consequence of capitalism, but they seek to extend this exploitation not just to class but also to gender.  

Intersectionality theorists seek to explain oppression and inequality across a variety of variables, including class, gender, race, ethnicity, and age. They offer the important insight that not all women experience oppression in the same way, and that the same forces that work to oppress women and girls also oppress people of color and other marginalized groups.  

One way structural oppression of women, specifically the economic kind, manifests in society is in the gender wage gap , which shows that men routinely earn more for the same work than women.

An intersectional view of this situation shows that women of color, and men of color, too, are even further penalized relative to the earnings of white men.  

In the late 20th century, this strain of feminist theory was extended to account for the globalization of capitalism and how its methods of production and of accumulating wealth center on the exploitation of women workers around the world.

Kachel, Sven, et al. "Traditional Masculinity and Femininity: Validation of a New Scale Assessing Gender Roles." Frontiers in Psychology , vol. 7, 5 July 2016, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00956

Zosuls, Kristina M., et al. "Gender Development Research in  Sex Roles : Historical Trends and Future Directions." Sex Roles , vol. 64, no. 11-12, June 2011, pp. 826-842., doi:10.1007/s11199-010-9902-3

Norlock, Kathryn. "Feminist Ethics." Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy . 27 May 2019.

Liu, Huijun, et al. "Gender in Marriage and Life Satisfaction Under Gender Imbalance in China: The Role of Intergenerational Support and SES." Social Indicators Research , vol. 114, no. 3, Dec. 2013, pp. 915-933., doi:10.1007/s11205-012-0180-z

"Gender and Stress." American Psychological Association .

Stamarski, Cailin S., and Leanne S. Son Hing. "Gender Inequalities in the Workplace: The Effects of Organizational Structures, Processes, Practices, and Decision Makers’ Sexism." Frontiers in Psychology , 16 Sep. 2015, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01400

Barone-Chapman, Maryann . " Gender Legacies of Jung and Freud as Epistemology in Emergent Feminist Research on Late Motherhood." Behavioral Sciences , vol. 4, no. 1, 8 Jan. 2014, pp. 14-30., doi:10.3390/bs4010014

Srivastava, Kalpana, et al. "Misogyny, Feminism, and Sexual Harassment." Industrial Psychiatry Journal , vol. 26, no. 2, July-Dec. 2017, pp. 111-113., doi:10.4103/ipj.ipj_32_18

Armstrong, Elisabeth. "Marxist and Socialist Feminism." Study of Women and Gender: Faculty Publications . Smith College, 2020.

Pittman, Chavella T. "Race and Gender Oppression in the Classroom: The Experiences of Women Faculty of Color with White Male Students." Teaching Sociology , vol. 38, no. 3, 20 July 2010, pp. 183-196., doi:10.1177/0092055X10370120

Blau, Francine D., and Lawrence M. Kahn. "The Gender Wage Gap: Extent, Trends, and Explanations." Journal of Economic Literature , vol. 55, no. 3, 2017, pp. 789-865., doi:10.1257/jel.20160995

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Feminist Theory in Sociology: Deinition, Types & Principles

Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

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BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

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On This Page:

Feminist theory is a major branch of sociology. It is a set of structural conflict approaches which views society as a conflict between men and women. There is the belief that women are oppressed and/or disadvantaged by various social institutions.

Feminist theory aims to highlight the social problems and issues that are experienced by women. Some of the key areas of focus include discrimination on the basis of sex and gender, objectification, economic inequality, power, gender role, and stereotypes.

Feminists share a common goal in support of equality for men and women. Although all feminists strive for gender equality, there are various ways to approach this theory.

Some of the general features of feminism include:

An awareness that there are inequalities between men and women based on power and status.

These inequalities can create conflict between men and women.

Gender roles and inequalities are usually socially constructed.

An awareness of the importance of patriarchy: a system of social structures and practices in which men dominate, oppress, and exploit women.

Goals of Feminism

The perspectives and experiences of women and girls have historically been excluded from social theory and social science.

Thus, feminist theory aims to focus on the interactions and issues women face in society and culture, so half the population is not left out.

Feminism in general means the belief in the social, economic, and political equality of the sexes.

The different branches of feminism may disagree on several things and have varying values. Despite this, there are usually basic principles that all feminists support:

1. Increasing gender equality

Feminist theories recognize that women’s experiences are not only different from men’s but are unequal.

Feminists will oppose laws and cultural norms that mean women earn a lower income and have less educational and career opportunities than men.

2. Ending gender oppression

Gender oppression goes further than gender inequality. Oppression means that not only are women different from or unequal to men, but they are actively subordinated, exploited, and even abused by men.

2. Ending structural oppression

Feminist theories posit that gender inequality and oppression are the result of capitalism and patriarchy in which men dominate.

4. Expanding human choice

Feminists believe that both men and women should have the freedom to express themselves and develop their interests, even if this goes against cultural norms.

5. Ending sexual violence

Feminists recognize that many women suffer sexual violence and that actions should be taken to address this.

6. Promoting sexual freedom

Having sexual freedom means that women have control over their own sexuality and reproduction.

This can include ending the stigma of being promiscuous and ensuring that everyone has access to safe abortions.

The Waves of Feminism

The history of modern feminism can be divided into four parts which are termed ‘ waves .’ Each wave marks a specific cultural period in which specific feminist issues are brought to light.

First wave feminism

The first wave of feminism is believed to have started with the ‘Women’s Suffrage Movement’ in New York in 1848 under the leadership of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Those involved in this feminist movement were known as suffragettes. The main aim of this movement was to allow women to vote. During this time, members of the suffrage movement engaged in social campaigns that expressed dissatisfaction with women’s limited rights to work, education, property, and social agency, among others.

Emmeline Pankhurst was considered the leader of the suffragettes in Britain and was regarded as one of the most important figures in the movement. She founded the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), a group known for employing militant tactics in their struggle for equality.

Despite the first wave of feminism being mostly active in the United States and Western Europe, it led to international law changes regarding the right for women to vote.

It is worth noting that even after this first wave, in some countries, mostly white women from privileged backgrounds were permitted to vote, with black and minority ethnic individuals being granted this right later on.

Second wave feminism

Second-wave feminism started somewhere in the 1960s after the chaos of the Second World War.

French feminist author Simone de Beauvoir published a book in 1949 entitled ‘The Second Sex’ which outlined the definitions of womanhood and how women have historically been treated as second to men.

She determined that ‘one is not born but becomes a woman’. This book is thought to have been foundational for setting the tone for the next wave of women’s rights activism.

Feminism during this period was focused on the social roles in women’s work and family environment. It broadened the debate to include a wider range of issues such as sexuality, family, reproductive rights, legal inequalities, and divorce law.

From this wave, the movement toward women’s rights included the signing of the Equal Pay Act of 1963, which stipulated that women could no longer be paid less than men for comparable work.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 included a section which prevents employers from discriminating against employees on the basis of sex, race, religion, or national origin. Likewise, the famous Roe v. Wade decision protected a woman’s right to have an abortion from 1973.

Third wave feminism

The third wave of feminism is harder to pinpoint but it was thought to have taken off in the 1990s. Early activism in this wave involved fighting against workplace sexual harassment and working to increase the number of women in positions of power.

The work of Kimberlé Crenshaw in the 1980s is thought to have been the root. She coined the term ‘intersectionality’ to describe the ways in which different forms of oppression intersect, such as how a black woman is oppressed in two ways: for being a woman and for being black.

Since there was not a clear goal with third-wave feminism as there was with previous waves, there is no single piece of legislation or major social change that belongs to the wave.

Fourth wave feminism

Many believe that there is now a fourth wave of feminism, which began around 2012.

It is likely that the wave sparked after allegations of sexual abuse and harassment, specifically of celebrities, which gave birth to campaigns such as Everyday Sexism Project by Laura Bates and the #MeToo movement.

With the rise of the internet and social platforms, feminist issues such as discrimination, harassment, body shaming, and misogyny can be widely discussed with the emergence of new feminists.

Fourth-wave feminism is digitally driven and has become more inclusive to include those of any sexual orientation, ethnicity, and trans individuals.

Types of Feminism

Liberal feminism.

Liberal feminism is rooted in classic liberal thought and these feminists believe that equality should be brought about through education and policy changes. They see gender inequalities as rooted in the attitudes of social and cultural institutions, so they aim to change the system from within.

Liberal feminists argue that women have the same capacity for moral reasoning and agency as men, but that the patriarchy has denied them the opportunity to practice this. Due to the patriarchy, these feminists believe that women have been pushed to remain in the privacy of their household and thus have been excluded from participating in public life.

Liberal feminists focus mainly on protecting equal opportunities for women through legislation. The Equal Rights Amendment

in 1972 was impactful for liberal feminists which enforced equality on account of sex.

Marxist feminism

Marxist feminism evolved from the ideas of Karl Marx, who claimed capitalism was to blame for promoting patriarchy, meaning that power is held in the hands of a small number of men.

Marxist feminists believe that capitalism is the cause of women’s oppression and that this oppression in turn, helps to reinforce capitalism. These feminists believe that women are exploited for their unpaid labor (maintaining the household and childcare) and that capitalism reinforces that women are a reserve for the work force and they must create the next generation of workers.

According to Marxist feminists, the system and traditional family can only be replaced by a socialist revolution that creates a government to meet the needs of the family.

Radical feminism

Radical feminists posit that power is key to gender oppression. They argue that being a woman is a positive thing but that this is not acknowledged in patriarchal societies.

The main belief of radical feminists is that equality can only be achieved through gender separation and political lesbianism. They think the patriarchy can be defeated if women recognize their own value and strength, establish trust with other women, and form female-based separatist networks in the private and public spheres.

Intersectional feminism

Intersectional feminism believes that other feminist theories create an incorrect acceptance of women’s oppression based on the experiences of mostly Western, middle-class, white women.

For instance, while they may acknowledge that the work of the suffragette movement was influential, the voting rights of the working-class or minority ethnic groups were forgotten at this time.

Intersectionality considers that gender, race, sexual orientation, gender identity, and others, are not separate, but are interwoven and can bring about different levels of oppression.

This type of feminism offers insight that not all women experience oppression in the same way. For instance, the wage gap shows that women of color and men of color are penalized relative to the earnings of white men.

Feminist theory is important since it helps to address and better understand unequal and oppressive gender relations. It promotes the goal of equality and justice while providing more opportunities for women.

True feminism benefits men too and is not only applicable to women. It allows men to be who they want to be, without being tied down to their own gender roles and stereotypes.

Through feminism, men are encouraged to be free to express themselves in a way which may be considered ‘typically feminine’ such as crying when they are upset.

In this way, men’s mental health can benefit from feminism since the shame associated with talking about their emotions can be lifted without feeling the expectation to ‘man up’ and keep their feeling buried.

With the development of intersectionality, feminism does not just focus on gendered power and oppression, but on how this might intersect with race, sexuality, social class, disability, religion, and others.

Without feminism, women would have significantly less rights. More women have the right to vote, work, have equal pay, access to health care, reproductive rights, and protection from violence. While every country has its own laws and legislature, there would have been less progress in changing these without the feminist movement.

Feminist theory is also self-critical in that it recognizes that it may not have been applicable to everyone in the past. It is understood that it was not inclusive and so evolved and may still go on to evolve over time. Feminism is not a static movement, but fluid in the way it can change and adjust to suit modern times.

Some critics suggest that a main weakness of feminist theory is that it is from a woman-centered viewpoint. While the theories also mention issues which are not strictly related to women, it is argued that men and women view the world differently.

Some may call feminist theory redundant in modern day since women have the opportunity to work now, so the nature of family life has inevitably changed in response.

However, a counterpoint to this is that many women in certain cultures are still not given the right to work. Likewise, having access to work does not eradicate the other feminist issues that are still prevalent.

Some feminists may go too far into a stage where they are man-hating which causes more harm than good. It can make men feel unwelcome to feminism if they are being blamed for patriarchal oppression and inequalities that they are not directly responsible for.

Other women may not want to identify as a feminist either if they have the impression that feminists are man-haters but they themselves like men.

There are criticisms even between feminists, with some having values that can lead to others having a negative view of feminists as a whole.

For instance, radical feminists often receive criticism for ignoring race, social class, sexual orientation, and the presence of more than two genders. Thus, there are aspects of feminism which are not inclusive.

What is the main goal of feminism?

The goal of feminism is to reach social, political, and economic equality of the sexes. Feminists aim to challenge the systemic inequalities women face on a daily basis, change laws and legislature which oppress women, put an end to sexism and exploitation of women, and raise awareness of women’s issues.

However, the different types of feminists may have distinct goals within their movement and between each other.

How was feminist theory founded?

Although many early writings could be characterized as feminism or embodying the experiences of women, the history of Western feminist theory usually begins with the works of Mary Wollstonecraft.

Wollstonecraft was one of the first feminist writers, responsible for her publications such as ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’, published in 1792.

How does feminist theory relate to education?

Feminist theory helps us understand gender differences in education, gender socialization, and how the education system may be easier for boys to navigate than girls.

Many feminists believe education is an agent of secondary socialization that helps enforce patriarchy.

Feminist theory aims to promote educational opportunities for girls. It assures that they should not limit their educational aspirations because they may go against what is traditionally expected of them.

What are feminist sociologists view on family roles and relationships?

Some feminists view the function of the  nuclear family  as a place where patriarchal values are learned by individuals, which in turn add to the patriarchal society.

Young girls may be socialized to believe that inequality and oppression are a normal part of being a woman. Boys are socialized to believe they are superior and have authority over women.

Feminists often believe that the nuclear family teaches children gender roles which translates to gender roles in wider society.

For instance, girls may learn to accept that being a housewife is the only possible or acceptable role for women. Some feminists also believe that the  division of labor  is unequal in nuclear families, with women and girls accepting subservient roles in the household.

How does feminist theory relate to crime?

Feminists recognize that there is a disproportionate amount of violence and crime against women and that the reason may be due to the inequalities and oppression that women face.

Suppose the patriarchy posits that men are more powerful. In that case, this can lead them to abuse this power over women, resulting in harassment, physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, and even murder of women.

Feminists point out that there is a lot of systemic sexism in the justice system which needs to be tackled. Female victims of sexual abuse from men may often feel as if they are the ones put on trial and even experience blame for what happened to them.

Thus, many women do not report their sexual abuse for fear of not being believed or taken seriously in a system that favors men.

Therefore, many feminists would aim to fix the system so that fewer men commit these crimes and that there is proper justice for women who experience violence from men.

How far would sociologists agree that feminism has changed marriage?

Feminists often believe that the meaning of marriage is deeply rooted in  patriarchy  and gender inequality. In modern times, it would, therefore, not make sense for a woman to get married unless she has a partner willing to overturn a lot of the traditional and sexist values of marriage.

Most feminists believe that women should have the choice over whether they want to get married or even be in a relationship. Marriage for feminists can be; however, they want it to be, including their vows and values that make them and their partners equal.

A study found that having a feminist partner was linked to healthier heterosexual relationships for women (Rudman & Phelan, 2007).

They also found that men with feminist partners reported more stable relationships and greater sexual satisfaction, suggesting that feminism may predict happier relationships.

There are  differences between radical and liberal feminism  regarding ideas about the private sphere. Liberal feminists are generally not against heterosexual marriage and having children, as long as this is what the woman wants.

If the woman is treated as an equal by their partner and chooses how to raise their family, this is a feminist choice.

Even in modern marriage, radical feminists argue that women married to men are under patriarchal rule and are still made to complete much of the unpaid labor in the household compared to their husbands.

What is meant by the term malestream?

Feminists use the term malestream to highlight the need for more inclusive research methodologies and theoretical perspectives that better represent and address the experiences and issues of women and other marginalized groups.

It’s a call to move beyond the male-centric biases in various academic disciplines, including sociology.

Armstrong, E. (2020). Marxist and Socialist Feminisms.  Companion to Feminist Studies , 35-52.

Bates, L. (2016).  Everyday sexism: The project that inspired a worldwide movement . Macmillan.

Crenshaw, K. W. (2006). Intersectionality, identity politics and violence against women of color.  Kvinder, kön & forskning , (2-3).

Malinowska, A. (2020). Waves of Feminism.  The International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication,  1, 1-7.

Oxley, J. C. (2011). Liberal feminism.  Just the Arguments,  100, 258262.

Rudman, L. A., & Phelan, J. E. (2007). The interpersonal power of feminism: Is feminism good for romantic relationships?.  Sex Roles, 57 (11), 787-799.

Srivastava, K., Chaudhury, S., Bhat, P. S., & Sahu, S. (2017). Misogyny, feminism, and sexual harassment.  Industrial psychiatry journal, 26( 2), 111.

Thompson, D. (2001).  Radical feminism today . Sage.

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Home › Feminism: An Essay

Feminism: An Essay

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on April 27, 2016 • ( 6 )

Feminism as a movement gained potential in the twentieth century, marking the culmination of two centuries’ struggle for cultural roles and socio-political rights — a struggle which first found its expression in Mary Wollstonecraft ‘s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). The movement gained increasing prominence across three phases/waves — the first wave (political), the second wave (cultural) and the third wave (academic). Incidentally Toril Moi also classifies the feminist movement into three phases — the female (biological), the feminist (political) and the feminine (cultural).

The first wave of feminism, in the 19th and 20th centuries, began in the US and the UK as a struggle for equality and property rights for women, by suffrage groups and activist organisations. These feminists fought against chattel marriages and for polit ical and economic equality. An important text of the first wave is Virginia Woolf ‘s A Room of One’s Own (1929), which asserted the importance of woman’s independence, and through the character Judith (Shakespeare’s fictional sister), explicated how the patriarchal society prevented women from realising their creative potential. Woolf also inaugurated the debate of language being gendered — an issue which was later dealt by Dale Spender who wrote Man Made Language (1981), Helene Cixous , who introduced ecriture feminine (in The Laugh of the Medusa ) and Julia Kristeva , who distinguished between the symbolic and the semiotic language.

The second wave of feminism in the 1960s and ’70s, was characterized by a critique of patriarchy in constructing the cultural identity of woman. Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949) famously stated, “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman” – a statement that highlights the fact that women have always been defined as the “Other”, the lacking, the negative, on whom Freud attributed “ penis-envy .” A prominent motto of this phase, “The Personal is the political” was the result of the awareness .of the false distinction between women’s domestic and men’s public spheres. Transcending their domestic and personal spaces, women began to venture into the hitherto male dominated terrains of career and public life. Marking its entry into the academic realm, the presence of feminism was reflected in journals, publishing houses and academic disciplines.

Mary Ellmann ‘s Thinking about Women (1968), Kate Millett ‘s Sexual Politics (1969), Betty Friedan ‘s The Feminine Mystique (1963) and so on mark the major works of the phase. Millett’s work specifically depicts how western social institutions work as covert ways of manipulating power, and how this permeates into literature, philosophy etc. She undertakes a thorough critical understanding of the portrayal of women in the works of male authors like DH Lawrence, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller and Jean Genet.

In the third wave (post 1980), Feminism has been actively involved in academics with its interdisciplinary associations with Marxism , Psychoanalysis and Poststructuralism , dealing with issues such as language, writing, sexuality, representation etc. It also has associations with alternate sexualities, postcolonialism ( Linda Hutcheon and Spivak ) and Ecological Studies ( Vandana Shiva )

Elaine Showalter , in her “ Towards a Feminist Poetics ” introduces the concept of gynocriticism , a criticism of gynotexts, by women who are not passive consumers but active producers of meaning. The gynocritics construct a female framework for the analysis of women’s literature, and focus on female subjectivity, language and literary career. Patricia Spacks ‘ The Female Imagination , Showalter’s A Literature of their Own , Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar ‘s The Mad Woman in the Attic are major gynocritical texts.

The present day feminism in its diverse and various forms, such as liberal feminism, cultural/ radical feminism, black feminism/womanism, materialist/neo-marxist feminism, continues its struggle for a better world for women. Beyond literature and literary theory, Feminism also found radical expression in arts, painting ( Kiki Smith , Barbara Kruger ), architecture( Sophia Hayden the architect of Woman’s Building ) and sculpture (Kate Mllett’s Naked Lady).

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Feminist Theory

Jo Ann Arinder

Feminist theory falls under the umbrella of critical theory, which in general have the purpose of destabilizing systems of power and oppression. Feminist theory will be discussed here as a theory with a lower case ‘t’, however this is not meant to imply that it is not a Theory or cannot be used as one, only to acknowledge that for some it may be a sub-genre of Critical Theory, while for others it stands alone. According to Egbert and Sanden (2020), some scholars see critical paradigms as extensions of the interpretivist, but there is also an emphasis on oppression and lived experience grounded in subjectivist epistemology.

The purpose of using a feminist lens is to enable the discovery of how people interact within systems and possibly offer solutions to confront and eradicate oppressive systems and structures. Feminist theory considers the lived experience of any person/people, not just women, with an emphasis on oppression.  While there may not be a consensus on where feminist theory fits as a theory or paradigm, disruption of oppression is a core tenant of feminist work. As hooks (2000) states, “Simply put, feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation and oppression. I liked this definition because it does not imply that men were the enemy” (p. viii).

Previous Studies

Marxism and socialism are key components in the heritage.of feminist theory. The origins of feminist theory can be found in the 18th century with growth in the 1970s’ and 1980s’ equality movements. According to Burton (2014), feminist theory has its roots in Marxism but specifically looks to Engles’ (1884) work as one possible starting point. Burton (2014) notes that, “Origin of the Family and commentaries on it were central texts to the feminist movement in its early years because of the felt need to understand the origins and subsequent development of the subordination of the female sex” (p. 2). Work in feminist theory, including research regarding gender equality, is ongoing.

Gender equality continues to be an issue today, and research into gender equality in education is still moving feminist theory forward. For example, Pincock’s (2017) study discusses the impact of repressive norms on the education of girls in Tanzania. The author states that, “…considerations of what empowerment looks like in relation to one’s sexuality are particularly important in relation to schooling for teenage girls as a route to expanding their agency” (p. 909). This consideration can be extended to any oppressed group within an educational setting and is not an area of inquiry relegated to the oppression of only female students. For example, non-binary students face oppression within educational systems and even male students can face barriers, and students are often still led towards what are considered “gender appropriate” studies. This creates a system of oppression that requires active work to disrupt.

Looking at representation in the literature used in education is another area of inquiry in feminist research. For example, Earles (2017) focused on physical educational settings to explore relationships “between gendered literary characters and stories and the normative and marginal responses produced by children” (p. 369). In this research, Earles found evidence to support that a contradiction between the literature and children’s lived experiences exists. The author suggests that educators can help to continue the reduction of oppressive gender norms through careful selection of literature and spaces to allow learners opportunities for appropriate discussions about these inconsistencies.

In another study, Mackie (1999) explored incorporating feminist theory into evaluation research. Mackie was evaluating curriculum created for English language learners that recognized the dual realities of some students, also known as the intersectionality of identity, and concluded that this recognition empowered students. Mackie noted that valuing experience and identity created a potential for change on an individual and community level and “Feminist and other types of critical teaching and research provide needed balance to TESL and applied linguistics” (p. 571).Further, Bierema and Cseh (2003) used a feminist research framework to examine previously ignored structural inequalities that affect the lives of women working in the field of human resources.

Model of Feminist Theory

Figure 1 presents a model of feminist theory that begins with the belief that systems exist that oppress and work against individuals. The model then shows that oppression is based on intersecting identities that can create discrimination and exclusion. The model indicates the idea that, through knowledge and action, oppressive systems can be disrupted to support change and understanding.

The core concepts in feminist theory are sex, gender, race, discrimination, equality, difference, and choice. There are systems and structures in place that work against individuals based on these qualities and against equality and equity. Research in critical paradigms requires the belief that, through the exploration of these existing conditions in the current social order, truths can be revealed. More important, however, this exploration can simultaneously build awareness of oppressive systems and create spaces for diverse voices to speak for themselves (Egbert & Sanden, 2019).

Constructs 

Feminism is concerned with the constructs of intersectionality, dimensions of social life, social inequality, and social transformation. Through feminist research, lasting contributions have been made to understanding the complexities and changes in the gendered division of labor. Men and women should be politically, economically, and socially equal and this theory does not subscribe to differences or similarities between men, nor does it refer to excluding men or only furthering women’s causes. Feminist theory works to support change and understanding through acknowledging and disrupting power and oppression.

Proposition 

Feminist theory proposes that when power and oppression are acknowledged and disrupted, understanding, advocacy, and change can occur.

Using the Model

There are many potential ways to utilize this model in research and practice. First, teachers and students can consider what systems of power exist in their classroom, school, or district. They can question how these systems are working to create discrimination and exclusion. By considering existing social structures, they can acknowledge barriers and issues inherit to the system. Once these issues are acknowledged, they can be disrupted so that change and understanding can begin. This may manifest, for example, as considering how past colonialism has oppressed learners of English as a second or foreign language.

The use of feminist theory in the classroom can ensure that the classroom is created, in advance, to consider barriers to learning faced by learners due to sex, gender, difference, race, or ability. This can help to reduce oppression created by systemic issues. In the case of the English language classroom, learners may be facing oppression based on their native language or country of origin. Facing these barriers in and out of the classroom can affect learners’ access to education. Considering these barriers in planning and including efforts to mitigate the issues and barriers faced by learners is a use of feminist theory.

Feminist research is interested in disrupting systems of oppression or barriers created from these systems with a goal of creating change. All research can include feminist theory when the research adds to efforts to work against and advocate to eliminate the power and oppression that exists within systems or structures that, in particular, oppress women. An examination of education in general could be useful since education is a field typically dominated by women; however, women are not often in leadership roles in the field. In the same way, using feminist theory for an examination into the lack of people of color and male teachers represented in education might also be useful. Action research is another area that can use feminist theory. Action research is often conducted in the pursuit of establishing changes that are discovered during a project. Feminism and action research are both concerned with creating change, which makes them a natural pairing.

Pre-existing beliefs about what feminism means can make including it in classroom practice or research challenging. Understanding that feminism is about reducing oppression for everyone and sharing that definition can reduce this challenge. hooks (2000) said that, “A male who has divested of male privilege, who has embraced feminist politics, is a worthy comrade in struggle, in no way a threat to feminism, whereas a female who remains wedded to sexist thinking and behavior infiltrating feminist movement is a dangerous threat”(p. 12). As Angela Davis noted during a speech at Western Washington University in 2017, “Everything is a feminist issue.” Feminist theory is about questioning existing structures and whether they are creating barriers for anyone. An interest in the reduction of barriers is feminist. Anyone can believe in the need to eliminate oppression and work as teachers or researchers to actively to disrupt systems of oppression.

Bierema, L. L., & Cseh, M. (2003). Evaluating AHRD research using a feminist research framework.  Human Resource Development Quarterly ,  14 (1), 5–26.

Burton, C. (2014).   Subordination: Feminism and social theory . Routledge.

Earles, J. (2017). Reading gender: A feminist, queer approach to children’s literature and children’s discursive agency.  Gender and Education, 29 (3), 369–388.

Egbert, J., & Sanden, S. (2019).  Foundations of education research: Understanding theoretical components . Taylor & Francis.

Hooks, B. (2000). Feminism is for everybody: Passionate politics . South End Press.

Mackie, A. (1999). Possibilities for feminism in ESL education and research.  TESOL  Quarterly, 33 (3), 566-573.

Pincock, K. (2018). School, sexuality and problematic girlhoods: Reframing ‘empowerment’ discourse.  Third World Quarterly, 39 (5), 906-919.

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Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Introduction to feminism, topics: what is feminism.

• Introduction
• What is Feminism?  
• Historical Context
• Normative and Descriptive Components
• Feminism and the Diversity of Women
• Feminism as Anti-Sexism
• Topics in Feminism: Overview of the Sub-Entries

Bibliography

Works cited.

• General Bibliography [under construction]
• Topical Bibliographies [under construction]

Other Internet Resources

Related entries, i.  introduction, ii.  what is feminism, a.  historical context, b.  normative and descriptive components.

i) (Normative) Men and women are entitled to equal rights and respect. ii) (Descriptive) Women are currently disadvantaged with respect to rights and respect, compared with men.

Feminism is grounded on the belief that women are oppressed or disadvantaged by comparison with men, and that their oppression is in some way illegitimate or unjustified. Under the umbrella of this general characterization there are, however, many interpretations of women and their oppression, so that it is a mistake to think of feminism as a single philosophical doctrine, or as implying an agreed political program. (James 2000, 576)

C.  Feminism and the Diversity of Women

Feminism, as liberation struggle, must exist apart from and as a part of the larger struggle to eradicate domination in all its forms. We must understand that patriarchal domination shares an ideological foundation with racism and other forms of group oppression, and that there is no hope that it can be eradicated while these systems remain intact. This knowledge should consistently inform the direction of feminist theory and practice. (hooks 1989, 22)

Unlike many feminist comrades, I believe women and men must share a common understanding--a basic knowledge of what feminism is--if it is ever to be a powerful mass-based political movement. In Feminist Theory: from margin to center, I suggest that defining feminism broadly as "a movement to end sexism and sexist oppression" would enable us to have a common political goal…Sharing a common goal does not imply that women and men will not have radically divergent perspectives on how that goal might be reached. (hooks 1989, 23)

…no woman is subject to any form of oppression simply because she is a woman; which forms of oppression she is subject to depend on what "kind" of woman she is. In a world in which a woman might be subject to racism, classism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, if she is not so subject it is because of her race, class, religion, sexual orientation. So it can never be the case that the treatment of a woman has only to do with her gender and nothing to do with her class or race. (Spelman 1988, 52-3)

D.  Feminism as Anti-Sexism

 i) (Descriptive claim) Women, and those who appear to be women, are subjected to wrongs and/or injustice at least in part because they are or appear to be women. ii) (Normative claim) The wrongs/injustices in question in (i) ought not to occur and should be stopped when and where they do.

III.  Topics in Feminism: Overview of the Sub-Entries

• Alexander, M. Jacqui and Lisa Albrecht, eds.  1998. The Third Wave: Feminist Perspectives on Racism.  New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press.
• Anderson, Elizabeth.  1999a.  “What is the Point of Equality?”  Ethics 109(2): 287-337.
• ______.  1999b.  "Reply” Brown Electronic Article Review Service, Jamie Dreier and David Estlund, editors, World Wide Web, (http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/bears/homepage.html), Posted 12/22/99.
• Anzaldúa, Gloria, ed. 1990. Making Face, Making Soul: Haciendo Caras.  San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.
• Baier, Annette C.  1994.  Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Barrett, Michèle.  1991. The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
• Bartky, Sandra. 1990.  “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power.” In her Femininity and Domination. New York: Routledge, 63-82.
• Basu, Amrita. 1995. The Challenge of Local Feminisms: Women's Movements in Global Perspective.  Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
• Baumgardner, Jennifer and Amy Richards. 2000.  Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
• Beauvoir, Simone de. 1974 (1952).  The Second Sex. Trans. and Ed. H. M. Parshley.  New York: Vintage Books.
• Benhabib, Seyla.  1992.  Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics.   New York: Routledge.
• Calhoun, Cheshire. 2000.  Feminism, the Family, and the Politics of the Closet: Lesbian and Gay Displacement.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• ______.  1989.  “Responsibility and Reproach.”  Ethics 99(2): 389-406.
• Collins, Patricia Hill.  1990.  Black Feminist Thought. Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman.
• Cott, Nancy.  1987.  The Grounding of Modern Feminism.  New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.“ Stanford Law Review , 43(6): 1241-1299.
• Crenshaw, Kimberlé, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller and Kendall Thomas. 1995.  “Introduction.” In Critical Race Theory, ed., Kimberle Crenshaw, et al. New York: The New Press, xiii-xxxii.Davis, Angela. 1983. Women, Race and Class.  New York: Random House.
• Crow, Barbara.  2000.  Radical Feminism: A Documentary Reader.  New York: New York University Press.
• Delmar, Rosalind.  2001. "What is Feminism?” In Theorizing Feminism, ed., Anne C. Hermann and Abigail J. Stewart.  Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 5-28.
• Duplessis, Rachel Blau, and Ann Snitow, eds. 1998. The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women's Liberation.  New York: Random House (Crown Publishing).
• Dutt, M.  1998.  "Reclaiming a Human Rights Culture: Feminism of Difference and Alliance." In Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age , ed., Ella Shohat. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 225-246.
• Echols, Alice. 1990.  Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-75.   Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Engels, Friedrich.  1972 (1845).  The Origin of The Family, Private Property, and the State.   New York: International Publishers.
• Findlen, Barbara. 2001. Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation, 2nd edition.  Seattle, WA: Seal Press.
• Fine, Michelle and Adrienne Asch, eds. 1988. Women with Disabilities: Essays in Psychology, Culture, and Politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
• Fraser, Nancy and Linda Nicholson.  1990.  "Social Criticism Without Philosophy: An Encounter Between Feminism and Postmodernism." In Feminism/Postmodernism, ed., Linda Nicholson. New York: Routledge.
• Friedan, Betty.  1963. The Feminine Mystique.   New York: Norton.
• Frye, Marilyn.  1983. The Politics of Reality.  Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press.
• Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. 1997.  Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press.
• Grewal, I. 1998.  "On the New Global Feminism and the Family of Nations: Dilemmas of Transnational Feminist Practice."  In Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age, ed., Ella Shohat.  Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 501-530.
• Hampton, Jean.  1993. “Feminist Contractarianism,” in Louise M. Antony and Charlotte Witt, eds. A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity,  Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
• Haslanger, Sally. Forthcoming. “Oppressions: Racial and Other.”  In Racism, Philosophy and Mind: Philosophical Explanations of Racism and Its Implications, ed., Michael Levine and Tamas Pataki.  Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
• Held, Virginia. 1993. Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Herrman, Anne C. and Abigail J. Stewart, eds. 1994.  Theorizing Feminism: Parallel Trends in the Humanities and Social Sciences.  Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
• Heywood, Leslie and Jennifer Drake, eds. 1997.  Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism. 
• Hillyer, Barbara. 1993.  Feminism and Disability. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.
• Hoagland, Sarah L.  1989. Lesbian Ethics: Toward New Values.   Palo Alto, CA: Institute for Lesbian Studies.
• Hooks, bell. 1989. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black.  Boston: South End Press.
• ______.  1984. Feminist Theory from Margin to Center.  Boston: South End Press.
• ______. 1981.  Ain't I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism.   Boston: South End Press.
• Hurtado, Aída.  1996.  The Color of Privilege: Three Blasphemies on Race and Feminism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
• Jagger, Alison M.  1983.  Feminist Politics and Human Nature.  Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
• James, Susan. 2000.  “Feminism in Philosophy of Mind: The Question of Personal Identity.” In The Cambridge Companion to Feminism in Philosophy, ed., Miranda Fricker and Jennifer Hornsby.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Kiss, Elizabeth. 1995.  "Feminism and Rights." Dissent 42(3): 342-347
• Kittay, Eva Feder.  1999.  Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency. New York: Routledge.
• Kymlicka, Will.  1989. Liberalism, Community and Culture. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Mackenzie, Catriona and Natalie Stoljar, eds.  2000.  Relational Autonomy: Feminist perspectives on Autonomy, Agency and the Social Self.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• MacKinnon, Catharine.  1989.  Towards a Feminist Theory of the State.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• ______.  1987. Feminism Unmodified.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Mohanty, Chandra, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, eds.  1991.  Third  World Women and the Politics of Feminism.    Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• Molyneux, Maxine and Nikki Craske, eds. 2001. Gender and the Politics of Rights and Democracy in Latin America. Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillan.
• Moody-Adams, Michele. 1997.  Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture and Philosophy.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Moraga, Cherrie.  2000. "From a Long Line of Vendidas: Chicanas and Feminism." In her Loving in the War Years, 2nd edition.  Boston: South End Press.
• Moraga, Cherrie and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds. 1981.  This Bridge Called My Back: Writings of Radical Women of Color. Watertown, MA: Persephone Press.
• Narayan, Uma.  1997.  Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third World Feminism.   New York: Routledge.
• Nussbaum, Martha. 1995.  "Human Capabilities, Female Human Beings." In Women, Culture and Development : A Study of Human Capabilities, ed., Martha Nussbaum and Jonathan Glover.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 61-104.
• _______.  1999.  Sex and Social Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• O’Brien, Mary.  1979.  “Reproducing Marxist Man.”  In The Sexism of Social and Political Theory: Women and Reproduction from Plato to Nietzsche, ed., Lorenne M. G. Clark and Lynda Lange.  Toronto: Toronto University Press, 99-116.  Reprinted in (Tuana and Tong 1995: 91-103).
• Ong, Aihwa.  1988. "Colonialism and Modernity: Feminist Re-presentation of Women in Non-Western Societies.” Inscriptions 3(4): 90. Also in (Herrman and Stewart 1994).
• Okin, Susan Moller. 1989.  Justice, Gender, and the Family.  New York: Basic Books.
• ______.  1979.  Women in Western Political Thought.   Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Pateman, Carole.  1988.  The Sexual Contract.    Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
• Reagon, Bernice Johnson. 1983. "Coalition Politics: Turning the Century." In: Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith. New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 356-368.
• Robinson, Fiona.  1999.  Globalizing Care: Ethics, Feminist Theory, and International Affairs. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
• Rubin, Gayle.  1975.  “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex.”  In Towards an Anthropology of Women , ed., Rayna Rapp Reiter.  New York: Monthly Review Press, 157-210.
• Ruddick, Sara. 1989.  Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace.  Boston: Beacon Press.
• Schneir, Miriam, ed. 1994. Feminism in Our Time: The Essential Writings, World War II to the Present.  New York: Vintage Books.
• ______.  1972.  Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings. New York: Vintage Books.
• Scott, Joan W. 1988.  “Deconstructing Equality-Versus-Difference: or The Uses of Poststructuralist Theory for Feminism.” Feminist Studies 14 (1):  33-50.
• Silvers, Anita, David Wasserman, Mary Mahowald. 1999.   Disability, Difference, Discrimination: Perspectives on Justice in Bioethics and Public Policy . Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield.
• Simpson, J. A. and E. S. C. Weiner, ed., 1989. Oxford English Dictionary.   2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press. OED Online. Oxford University Press.  “feminism, n1” (1851).
• Snitow, Ann.  1990.  “A Gender Diary.”  In Conflicts in Feminism, ed. M. Hirsch and E. Fox Keller.  New York: Routledge, 9-43.
• Spelman, Elizabeth.  1988. The Inessential Woman.   Boston: Beacon Press.
• Tanner, Leslie B.  1970  Voices From Women's Liberation.   New York:  New American Library (A Mentor Book).
• Taylor, Vesta and Leila J. Rupp.  1996. "Lesbian Existence and the Women's Movement: Researching the 'Lavender Herring'."  In Feminism and Social Change , ed. Heidi Gottfried.  Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.
• Tong, Rosemarie.  1993.  Feminine and Feminist Ethics.   Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
• Tuana, Nancy and Rosemarie Tong, eds. 1995.  Feminism and Philosophy. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
• Walker, Alice. 1990. “Definition of Womanist,” In Making Face, Making Soul: Haciendo Caras , ed., Gloria Anzaldúa.  San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 370.
• Walker, Margaret Urban.  1998. Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics. New York: Routledge.
• ______, ed. 1999.  Mother Time: Women, Aging, and Ethics. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
• Walker, Rebecca, ed. 1995. To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism.   New York: Random House (Anchor Books).
• Ware, Cellestine.  1970.  Woman Power: The Movement for Women’s Liberation .  New York: Tower Publications.
• Weisberg, D. Kelly, ed.  1993.  Feminist Legal Theory: Foundations.  Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
• Wendell, Susan. 1996. The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability. New York and London: Routledge.
• Young, Iris. 1990a. "Humanism, Gynocentrism and Feminist Politics."  In Throwing Like A Girl. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 73-91.
• Young, Iris. 1990b.  “Socialist Feminism and the Limits of Dual Systems Theory.”  In her Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory . Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
• ______.  1990c.  Justice and the Politics of Difference.   Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Zophy, Angela Howard. 1990.  "Feminism."  In The Handbook of American Women's History , ed., Angela Howard Zophy and Frances M. Kavenik.  New York: Routledge (Garland Reference Library of the Humanities).

General Bibliography

Topical bibliographies.

• Feminist Theory Website
• Race, Gender, and Affirmative Action Resource Page
• Documents from the Women's Liberation Movement (Duke Univ. Archives)
• Core Reading Lists in Women's Studies (Assn of College and Research Libraries, WS Section)
• Feminist and Women's Journals
• Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy
• Feminist Internet Search Utilities
• National Council for Research on Women (including links to centers for research on women and affiliate organizations, organized by research specialties)
• Feminism and Class
• Marxist, Socialist, and Materialist Feminisms
• M-Fem (information page, discussion group, links, etc.)
• WMST-L discussion of how to define “marxist feminism” Aug 1994)
• Marxist/Materialist Feminism (Feminist Theory Website)
• MatFem   (Information page, discussion group)
• Feminist Economics
• Feminist Economics (Feminist Theory Website)
• International Association for Feminist Economics
• Feminist Political Economy and the Law (2001 Conference Proceedings, York Univ.)
• Journal for the International Association for Feminist Economics
• Feminism and Disability
• World Wide Web Review: Women and Disabilities Websites
• Disability and Feminism Resource Page
• Center for Research on Women with Disabilities (CROWD)
• Interdisciplinary Bibliography on Disability in the Humanities (Part of the American Studies Crossroads Project)
• Feminism and Human Rights, Global Feminism
• World Wide Web Review: Websites on Women and Human Rights
• International Gender Studies Resources (U.C. Berkeley)
• Global Feminisms Research Resources (Vassar Library)
• Global Feminism (Feminist Majority Foundation)
• NOW and Global Feminism
• United Nations Development Fund for Women
• Global Issues Resources
• Sisterhood is Global Institute (SIGI)
• Feminism and Race/Ethnicity
• General Resources
• WMST-L discussion on “Women of Color and the Women’s Movement” (5 Parts) Sept/Oct 2000)
• Women of Color Resources (Princeton U. Library)
• Core Readings in Women's Studies: Women of Color (Assn. of College and Research Libraries, WS Section)
• Women of Color Resource Sites
• African-American/Black Feminisms and Womanism
• African-American/Black/Womanist Feminism on the Web
• Black Feminist and Womanist Identity Bibliography (Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library)
• The Womanist Studies Consortium (Univ. of Georgia)
• Black Feminist/Womanist Works: A Beginning List (WMST-L)
• African-American Women Online Archival Collection (Duke U.)
• Asian-American and Asian Feminisms
• Asian American Feminism (Feminist Theory Website)
• Asian-American Women Bibliography (Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe)
• American Women's History: A Research Guide (Asian-American Women)
• South Asian Women's Studies Bibliography (U.C. Berkeley)
• Journal of South Asia Women's Studies
• Chicana/Latina Feminisms
• Bibliography on Chicana Feminism (Cal State, Long Beach Library)
• Making Face, Making Soul: A Chicana Feminist Website
• Defining Chicana Feminisms, In Their Own Words
• CLNet's Chicana Studies Homepage (UCLA)
• Chicana Related Bibliographies (CLNet)
• American Indian, Native, Indigenous Feminisms
• Native American Feminism (Feminist Theory Website)
• Bibliography on American Indian Gender Roles and Relations
• Bibliography on American Indian Feminism
• Bibliography on American Indian Gay/Lesbian Topics
• Links on Aboriginal Women and Feminism
• Feminism, Sex, and Sexuality
• 1970's Lesbian Feminism (Ohio State Univ., Women's Studies)
• The Lesbian History Project
• History of Sexuality Resources (Duke Special Collections)
• Lesbian Studies Bibliography (Assn. of College and Research Libraries)
• Lesbian Feminism/Lesbian Philosophy
• Society for Lesbian and Gay Philosophy Internet Resources
• QueerTheory.com
• World Wide Web Review: Webs of Transgender

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ReviseSociology

A level sociology revision – education, families, research methods, crime and deviance and more!

Feminist Theory: A Summary for A-Level Sociology

This post summarises the differences between Liberal, Marxist, Radical and Difference (Postmodern) Feminists. It covers what they believe the causes of gender inequalities to be and what should be done to tackle these inequalities and male power in society.

Table of Contents

Last Updated on March 9, 2023 by Karl Thompson

This post summarises the key ideas of Radical, Liberal, Marxist and Difference Feminisms and includes criticisms of each perspective.

Introduction – Feminism: The Basics

• Inequality between men and women is universal and the most significant form of inequality.
• Gender norms are socially constructed not determined by biology and can thus be changed.
• Patriarchy is the main cause of gender inequality: women are subordinate because men have more power.
• Feminism is a political movement; it exists to rectify sexual inequalities, although strategies for social change vary enormously.
• There are four types of Feminism – Radical, Marxist, Liberal, and Difference.

Radical Feminism

• Society is patriarchal – it is dominated and ruled by men – men are the ruling class, and women the subject class.
• Blames the exploitation of women on men. It is primarily men who have benefitted from the subordination of women. Women are ‘an oppressed group.
• Rape, violence and pornography are methods through which men have secured and maintained their power over women. Andrea Dworkin (1981)
• Radical feminists have often been actively involved in setting up and running refuges for women who are the victims of male violence.
• Rosemarie Tong (1998) distinguishes between two groups of radical feminist:
• Radical-libertarian feminists believe that it is both possible and desirable for gender differences to be eradicated, or at least greatly reduced, and aim for a state of androgyny in which men and women are not significantly different.
• Radical-cultural feminists believe in the superiority of the feminine. According to Tong radical cultural feminists celebrate characteristics associated with femininity such as emotion, and are hostile to those characteristics associated with masculinity such as hierarchy.
• Some alternatives suggested by Radical Feminists include separatism – women only communes, and Matrifocal households . Some also practise political Lesbianism and political celibacy as they view heterosexual relationships as “sleeping with the enemy.”

Criticisms of Radical Feminism

• The concept of patriarchy has been criticised for ignoring variations in the experience of oppression.
• It focuses too much on the negative experiences of women, failing to recognise that some women can have happy marriages for example.
• It tends to portray women as universally good and men as universally bad, It has been accused of man hating, not trusting all men.

Marxist Feminism

• Capitalism rather than patriarchy is the principal source of women’s oppression , and capitalists are the main beneficiaries.
• The disadvantaged position of women is because of the emergence of private property and the fact that women do not own the means of production.
• Under Capitalism the nuclear family becomes even more oppressive to women and women’s subordination plays a number of important functions for capitalism:
• (1) Women reproduce the labour force for free (socialisation is done for free)
• (2) Women absorb anger – women keep the husbands going.
• (3) Because the husband has to support his wife and children, he is more dependent on his job and less likely to demand wage increases.
• The traditional nuclear family also performs the function of ‘ideological conditioning’ – it teaches the ideas that the Capitalist class require for their future workers to be passive.
• Marxist Feminists are more sensitive to differences between women who belong to the ruling class and proletarian families. They believe there is considerable scope for co-operation between working class women and men to work together for social change.
• The primary goal is the eradication of capitalism. In a communist society gender inequalities should disappear.

Criticisms of Marxist Feminism

• Radical Feminists – ignores other sources of inequality such as sexual violence.
• Patriarchal systems existed before capitalism, in tribal societies for example.
• The experience of women has not been particularly happy under communism.

Liberal Feminism

• Nobody benefits from existing inequalities: both men and women are harmed
• The explanation for gender inequality lies not so much in structures and institutions of society but in its culture and values.
• Socialisation into gender roles has the consequence of producing rigid, inflexible expectations of men and women.
• Discrimination prevents women from having equal opportunities.
• Liberal Feminists do not seek revolutionary changes: they want changes to take place within the existing structure.
• The creation of equal opportunities through policy is the main aim of liberal feminists – e.g. the Sex Discrimination Act and the Equal Pay Act.
• Liberal feminists try to eradicate sexism from the children’s books and the media.
• Liberal Feminist ideas have probably had the most impact on women’s lives – e.g. mainstreaming has taken place.

Criticisms of Liberal Feminism

• Based upon male assumptions and norms such as individualism and competition, and encourages women to be more like men and therefor denies the value of qualities traditionally associated with women such as empathy.
• Liberalism is accused of emphasising public life at the expense of private life.
• Radical and Marxist Feminists – it fails to take account of deeper structural inequalities.
• Difference Feminists argue it is an ethnocentric perspective – based mostly on the experiences of middle class, educated women.

Difference Feminism/ Postmodern Feminism

• Do not see women as a single homogenous group.
• There are differences in the experiences of working class and middle class women, women from different backgrounds and women of different sexualities.
• Criticise preceding feminist theory for claiming a ‘false universality’ (white, western heterosexual, middle class)
• Criticise preceding Feminists theory of being essentialist.
• Critique preceding Feminist theory as being part of the masculinist Enlightenment Project .
• Postmodern Feminism is concerned with language (discourses) and the relationship between power and knowledge rather than ‘politics and opportunities’.
• Helene Cixoux is an example of a postmodern/ destabilising theorist.

Criticisms of Difference Feminism

• Walby argues that women are still oppressed by objective social structures, namely Patriarchy.
• Dividing women into sub-groups weakens the movement for change.

Frequently Asked Questions about Feminism

Feminism is a diverse body of social theory which seeks to better understand the nature, extent and causes of gender inequalities. Some Feminists are also political activists who actively campaign for greater gender equality.

The main types of Feminism are Liberal, Marxist, Radical and Difference or Postmodern Feminisms. (Although many Feminists themselves may not recognise these ‘types’ because they oversimplify Feminist theory.

The goals of Feminists vary from person to person but a general shared aim is to reduce the amount of sexism and gender oppression in societies.

Yes. The majority of countries on earth still have fewer women in politics, women are still paid less than men on average, and are more likely to be subject to domestic abuse than men. And if we look at sexuality inequalities there is still overt oppression of gay and trans people in many countries.

Related Posts/ Find out More…

Feminism runs across the whole A-level Sociology course, and is especially relevant to the sociology of the family .

Other related posts include…

• An Introduction to Sex, Gender and Gender Identity (from my ‘introblock’).
• Feminist Perspectives on the Family – includes links to more in-depth posts.
• Radical Feminist Perspectives on Religion – includes links to more in-depth posts.
• Global Gender Inequalities – an overview of statistics
• How Equal are Men and Women in the UK …?

Sources Used to Write this Post 

• Haralambos and Holborn (2013) – Sociology Themes and Perspectives, Eighth Edition, Collins. ISBN-10: 0007597479
• Chapman et al (2016) – A Level Sociology Student Book Two [Fourth Edition] Collins. ISBN-10: 0007597495
• Robb Webb et al (2016) AQA A Level Sociology Book 2, Napier Press. ISBN-10: 0954007921

A-Level Sociology Knowledge Disclaimer : This post has been written specifically for students revising for their A-level Sociology exams. The knowledge has been adapted from various A-level Sociology text books. These text books may mis-label or misunderstand aspects of Feminist theory and probably oversimplify them.

The knowledge above (labels used/ interpretations) is what students are assessed on in A-level Sociology, I make no claim that these representations are the same as the interpretations the theorists represented in said text books (and thus above) may make of their own theories. It may well be the case that for degree level students and beyond the theorists and theories above may be ‘correctly’ represented differently in those ”higher levels’ of academic realities”.

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3 thoughts on “Feminist Theory: A Summary for A-Level Sociology”

Explained in a lucid way😍😍

Great post. Simplifies the whole issue a lot. Thanks.

very educative

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What is feminism?: An introduction to feminist theory

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, eds., What is Feminism? (New York 1986). THIS WORK CONSISTS OF A SERIES of essays, mostly retrospective, by intellectuals and academics, all veterans of the British, American, and Canadian women's movements. The overall idea is to take stock of the prospects and problems raised by the women's movement during the past two decades. It should be stated at the outset that even to raise the question "what is feminism?" is important. "Second wave feminism," like the New Left, Black Power, and Socialist movements to which—at least in the United States — it largely succeeded has developed its own shibboleths and unquestioned assumptions that make criticism from within difficult. The editors' introduction to this volume alludes without being wholly explicit to what appear to have been special problems in its compilation. They speak, for example, of the "enormous difficulty" involved in such questions as defining feminism, of the "many ... people from a wide range of social and ethnic backgrounds [who] were invited to participate and accepted but got into difficulties," at the fact that "the book developed] into something other than what we first intended" and of their determination not to "lose sight of the celebration behind the worries" but instead to make "creative use of anxiety." As in most collections, it is hard to find a unifying theme in the essays. Only a few directly address the question that gives the anthology its title — and it is mostly these that I will discuss. Before beginning, however, I wish to note that most of the essays frequently touch upon two related, but distinguishable, themes concerning feminism. The first is the fact of enormous diversity among women which raises the question of what kind of feminist perspective and practice can unify them. The second relates to the reality of internal divisions and contradictions among feminists. The most frequently cited of these divisions is between a point of view that stresses the similarities between men and women, and one that stresses the differences between the sexes. Furthermore, in several of the essays the fact of diversity and or conflicts among women is related — though rarely clearly and directly — to another question: the relationship of the women's movement to its Eli Zaretsky, "What is Feminism?," Labourite Travail, 22 (Fall 1988), 259-266.

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Feminist Film Theory: An Introductory Reading List

Evolving from the analysis of representations of women in film, feminist film theory asks questions about identity, sexuality, and the politics of spectatorship.

Not unlike the emergence of feminist theory and criticism in the domains of art and literature, the women’s movement of the late 1960s and 1970s sparked a focused interrogation of images of women in film and of women’s participation in film production.  The 1970s witnessed the authorship of massively influential texts by writers such as Claire Johnston, Molly Haskell, and Laura Mulvey in the United Kingdom and the United States, and psychoanalysis was a reigning method of inquiry, though Marxism and semiotics also informed the field.

Feminist film theory has provoked debates about the representations of female bodies, sexuality, and femininity on screen while posing questions concerning identity, desire, and the politics of spectatorship, among other topics. Crucially, an increasing amount of attention has been paid by theorists to intersectionality, as scholars investigate the presence and absence of marginalized and oppressed film subjects and producers. This reading list surveys a dozen articles, presented chronologically, as a starting point for readers interested in the lines of inquiry that have fueled the field over the last fifty years.

Laura Mulvey, “ Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema ,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18.

To put it most simply, Mulvey’s 1975 essay is nothing short of iconic. A cornerstone of psychoanalytic feminist film theory, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” describes the ways in which women are displayed on screen for the pleasure of the male spectator. Many of the essays listed below engage explicitly with Mulvey’s essay and the notion of the male gaze, illustrating what Corrin Columpar (2002, see below) describes as a “near compulsive return” to this pioneering work. But even Mulvey herself would later push back on some of her most provocative claims , including her positioning of the spectator as male, as well as her omission of female protagonists.

“ Feminism and Film: Critical Approaches ,” Camera Obscura 1, no. 1 (1976): 3–10.

Established in 1976, Camera Obscura was (and remains) a groundbreaking venue for feminist film studies. This introductory essay to the first issue contextualizes the necessity of such a journal in a scholarly and cultural environment in which there is a true “need” for the feminist study of film. Camera Obscura was, in part, an American response to the wave of British contributions to the field, often published in the journal Screen (the home of Mulvey’s essay). The editors spend much of this essay unpacking the camera obscura, an image projection device, as a metaphor for feminist film theory, as it functions as a symbol of contradiction that “emphasizes the points of convergence of ideology and representation, of ideology as representation.”

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Michelle Criton, Julia Lesage, Judith Mayne, B. Ruby Rich, and Anna Marie Taylor, “ Women and Film: A Discussion of Feminist Aesthetics ,” New German Critique no. 13 (1978): 83–107.

What makes film an enticing object of study for feminists in the first place? As Criton et al. attest, the answers lie in the social rather than individual or private dimensions of film as well as in its accessibility and synthesis of “art, life, politics, sex, etc.” The conversation featured here provides a glimpse into contemporary conversations about the work of Claire Johnston and Laura Mulvey and psychoanalysis as a shaping force of early feminist film theory. Additionally, they consider how a feminist filmmaking aesthetic can reveal and critique the ideologies that underpin the oppression of women.

Judith Mayne, “ Feminist Film Theory and Criticism ,” Signs 11, no. 1 (1985): 81–100.

Acknowledging the profound impact of “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Mayne surveys the development of feminist film theory, including both its historical contexts and its fixations upon psychoanalysis and the notions of spectacle and the gaze. Mayne outlines how contradiction—variously construed—is “ the central issue in feminist film theory and criticism” (emphasis added). Additionally, the author calls into question the historiography of women’s cinema, noting the “risk of romanticizing women’s exclusion from the actual production of films.” She urges scholars to, certainly, continue the necessary exploration of forgotten and understudied female filmmakers but to also open up the conception of women’s cinema to include not just the work of female directors but also their peripheral roles as critics and audience members.

Jane Gaines, “ White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory ,” Cultural Critique , no. 4 (1986): 59–79.

What, Gaines asks, are the limitations of feminist theory’s early fixation on gender at the expense of nuanced understandings of race, class, and sexuality? While feminist theory may, in its earliest years, have opened up possibilities for interrogating the gendered politics of spectatorship, it was largely exclusionary of diverse perspectives, including, as Gaines notes, lesbians and women of color. In doing so, “feminist theory has helped to reinforce white middle-class [normative] values, and to the extent that it works to keep women from seeing other structures of oppression, it functions ideologically.” Through an analysis of the 1975 film Mahogany and informed by black feminist theorists and writers such as bell hooks, Mayne argues that psychoanalysis ultimately results in erroneous readings of films about race.

Noël Carroll, “ The Image of Women in Film: A Defense of a Paradigm ,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48, no. 4 (1990): 349–60.

Carroll theorizes why psychoanalysis was so attractive to feminists in the 1970s and 1980s: by providing a theoretical framework, he argues, psychoanalysis was a means to “incorporate” and “organize” the “scattered insights of the image of women in film approach.” Taking issue with Mulvey’s perspective on voyeurism, Carroll positions the image approach, or the study of the image of women in film—in this case with an emphasis on theories of emotion— as a “rival research program” to psychoanalysis. He argues that paradigm scenarios, or cases in which emotions are learned behavioral responses, influence spectatorship and how audiences respond emotionally to women on screen.

Karen Hollinger, “ Theorizing Mainstream Female Spectatorship: The Case of the Popular Lesbian Film ,” Cinema Journal 37, no. 2 (1998): 3–17.

Hollinger surveys theoretical responses to lesbian subjectivity and the female spectatorship of popular lesbian film narratives. She articulates the subversive power of the lesbian look as a challenge to Mulvey’s notion of the male gaze, asserting its potential to empower female spectators as agents of desire.

Corinn Columpar, “ The Gaze As Theoretical Touchstone: The Intersection of Film Studies, Feminist Theory, and Postcolonial Theory ,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 30, no. 1/2 (2002): 25–44.

The male gaze is not, as Columpar articulates, the sole tool “in the contemporary feminist film critic’s box”: so are the ethnographic and colonial gazes, brought to film theory from postcolonial studies. Columpar reiterates that the early fixation upon gender and the male gaze “failed to account for other key determinants of social power and position.” Interdisciplinary perspectives, such as those informed by postcolonial theory, are better equipped to unpack “issues of racial and national difference and acknowledge the role that race and ethnicity play in looking relations.”

Janell Hobson, “ Viewing in the Dark: Toward a Black Feminist Approach to Film ,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 30, no. 1/2 (2002): 45–59.

Hobson illuminates the absence and/or disembodied presence of Black female bodies in Hollywood cinema. She argues that the invisibility of Black women’s bodies on screen was a defense mechanism against the disruption of “whites as beautiful, as the norm.” By turning away from the gaze and toward the sound of Black women’s disembodied voices in speech and song, viewers are better equipped to recognize how their voices are “used in mainstream cinema by way of supporting and defining the normalized (white) male body,” therefore “ensur[ing] the identity of white masculinity.”

E. Ann Kaplan, “ Global Feminisms and the State of Feminist Film Theory ,” Signs 30, no. 1 (2004): 1236–48.

Kaplan reflects on her trajectory as a pioneering feminist film theorist, illuminating her shift from cinema’s depictions of the “oppressions of white Western women” to the study of trauma in global and indigenous cinema. Importantly, she notes that in her earlier research, she failed to “confront the really tough questions of my own positionality.” In doing so, she invites readers to consider the ethics of witnessing and white, Western feminist participation in the development of multicultural approaches.

Jane M. Gaines, “ Film History and the Two Presents of Feminist Film Theory ,” Cinema Journal 44, no. 1 (2004): 113–19.

It may come as a surprise to many that, internationally speaking, women were indeed undertaking various forms of creative labor in the world of film production during the silent era, including screenwriting, producing, directing, etc. The question, then, is not just “why these women were forgotten” but also “why we forgot them.” Gaines considers the “historical turn” in feminist film studies, arguing that scholars must be mindful of how they narrativize and rewrite the rediscovered facts of women’s work in cinema.

Sangita Gopal, “ Feminism and the Big Picture: Conversations ,” Cinema Journal 57, no. 2 (2018): 131–36.

In this fascinating article, Gopal synthesizes responses to a series of questions posed to film scholars regarding feminist theory, praxis, and pedagogy, as well as feminism as “an unfinished project” and feminist media studies as a “boundless” field. Where theory is concerned, Gopal usefully highlights Lingzhen Wang’s and Priya Jaikumar’s suggestions for more explicitly linking and situating feminist media studies within “the big picture.” Notably, Jaikumar ponders the possibilities of feminism creating a framework such that “it is not possible to ask a question if it is absent of a politics.”

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Essay on Feminism

500 words essay on feminism.

Feminism is a social and political movement that advocates for the rights of women on the grounds of equality of sexes. It does not deny the biological differences between the sexes but demands equality in opportunities. It covers everything from social and political to economic arenas. In fact, feminist campaigns have been a crucial part of history in women empowerment. The feminist campaigns of the twentieth century made the right to vote, public property, work and education possible. Thus, an essay on feminism will discuss its importance and impact.

Importance of Feminism

Feminism is not just important for women but for every sex, gender, caste, creed and more. It empowers the people and society as a whole. A very common misconception is that only women can be feminists.

It is absolutely wrong but feminism does not just benefit women. It strives for equality of the sexes, not the superiority of women. Feminism takes the gender roles which have been around for many years and tries to deconstruct them.

This allows people to live freely and empower lives without getting tied down by traditional restrictions. In other words, it benefits women as well as men. For instance, while it advocates that women must be free to earn it also advocates that why should men be the sole breadwinner of the family? It tries to give freedom to all.

Most importantly, it is essential for young people to get involved in the feminist movement. This way, we can achieve faster results. It is no less than a dream to live in a world full of equality.

Thus, we must all look at our own cultures and communities for making this dream a reality. We have not yet reached the result but we are on the journey, so we must continue on this mission to achieve successful results.

Impact of Feminism

Feminism has had a life-changing impact on everyone, especially women. If we look at history, we see that it is what gave women the right to vote. It was no small feat but was achieved successfully by women.

Further, if we look at modern feminism, we see how feminism involves in life-altering campaigns. For instance, campaigns that support the abortion of unwanted pregnancy and reproductive rights allow women to have freedom of choice.

Moreover, feminism constantly questions patriarchy and strives to renounce gender roles. It allows men to be whoever they wish to be without getting judged. It is not taboo for men to cry anymore because they must be allowed to express themselves freely.

Similarly, it also helps the LGBTQ community greatly as it advocates for their right too. Feminism gives a place for everyone and it is best to practice intersectional feminism to understand everyone’s struggle.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Conclusion of the Essay on Feminism

The key message of feminism must be to highlight the choice in bringing personal meaning to feminism. It is to recognize other’s right for doing the same thing. The sad part is that despite feminism being a strong movement, there are still parts of the world where inequality and exploitation of women take places. Thus, we must all try to practice intersectional feminism.

FAQ of Essay on Feminism

Question 1: What are feminist beliefs?

Answer 1: Feminist beliefs are the desire for equality between the sexes. It is the belief that men and women must have equal rights and opportunities. Thus, it covers everything from social and political to economic equality.

Question 2: What started feminism?

Answer 2: The first wave of feminism occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It emerged out of an environment of urban industrialism and liberal, socialist politics. This wave aimed to open up new doors for women with a focus on suffrage.

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Feminist Ethics

Feminist Ethics aims “to understand, criticize, and correct” how gender operates within our moral beliefs and practices (Lindemann 2005, 11) and our methodological approaches to ethical theory. More specifically, feminist ethicists aim to understand, criticize, and correct: (1) the binary view of gender, (2) the privilege historically available to men, and/or (3) the ways that views about gender maintain oppressive social orders or practices that harm others, especially girls and women who historically have been subordinated, along gendered dimensions including sexuality and gender-identity. Since oppression often involves ignoring the perspectives of the marginalized, different approaches to feminist ethics have in common a commitment to better understand the experiences of persons oppressed in gendered ways. That commitment results in a tendency, in feminist ethics, to take into account empirical information and material actualities.

Not all feminist ethicists correct all of (1) through (3). Some have assumed or upheld the gender binary (Wollstonecraft 1792; Firestone 1970). They criticize and aim to correct the privileging of men as the more morally worthy half of the binary, or argue against the maintenance of a social order that oppresses others in gendered ways. More recently, feminist ethicists have commonly criticized the gender binary itself, arguing that upholding a fixed conception of the world as constituted only by “biological” men and women contributes to the maintenance of oppressive and gendered social orders, especially when doing so marginalizes those who do not conform to gender binaries (Butler 1990; Bettcher 2014; Dea 2016a). Feminist ethicists who are attentive to the intersections of multiple aspects of identity including race, class, and disability, in addition to gender, criticize and correct assumptions that men simpliciter are historically privileged, as if privilege distributes equally among all men regardless of how they are socially situated. They instead focus more on criticizing and correcting oppressive practices that harm and marginalize others who live at these intersections in order to account for the distinctive experiences of women whose experiences are not those of members of culturally dominant groups (Crenshaw 1991; Khader 2013). Whatever the focus of feminist ethicists, a widely shared characteristic of their works is at least some overt attention to power, privilege, or limited access to social goods. In a broad sense, then, feminist ethics is fundamentally political (Tong 1993, 160). This is not necessarily a feature of feminist ethics that distinguishes it from “mainstream” ethics, however, since feminist analyses of ethical theory as arising from material and nonideal contexts suggest that all ethics is political whether its being so is recognized by the theorist or not.

Since feminist ethics is not merely a branch of ethics, but is instead “a way of doing ethics” (Lindemann 2005, 4), philosophers engaged in the above tasks can be concerned with any branch of ethics, including meta-ethics, normative theory, and practical or applied ethics. The point of feminist ethics is, ideally, to change ethics for the better by improving ethical theorizing and offering better approaches to issues including those involving gender. Feminist ethics is not limited to gendered issues because the insights of feminist ethics are often applicable to analyses of moral experiences that share features with gendered issues or that reflect the intersection of gender with other bases of oppression. Feminist philosophical endeavors include bringing investigations motivated by feminist ethics to bear on ethical issues, broadly conceived.

1.1 Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Forerunners of Feminist Ethics

1.2 nineteenth-century influences and issues, 1.3 twentieth-century influences and issues, 2.1 gender binarism, essentialism, and separatism, 2.2 ethic of care as a feminine or gendered approach to morality, 2.3 intersectionality, 2.4 feminist criticisms and expansions of traditional moral theories, 2.5 rejections of absolutism: pragmatism, transnational feminism, and nonideal theory, other internet resources, related entries, 1. feminist ethics: historical background.

Feminist ethics as an academic area of study in the field of philosophy dates to the 1970s, when philosophical journals started more frequently publishing articles specifically concerned with feminism and sexism (Korsmeyer 1973; Rosenthal 1973; Jaggar 1974), and after curricular programs of Women’s Studies began to be established in some universities (Young 1977; Tuana 2011). Readers interested in themes evident in the fifty years of feminist ethics in philosophy will find this discussion in section (2) below, “Themes in Feminist Ethics.”

Prior to 1970, “there was no recognized body of feminist philosophy” (Card 2008, 90). Of course, throughout history, philosophers have attempted to understand the roles that gender may play in moral life. Yet such philosophers presumably were addressing male readers, and their accounts of women’s moral capacities did not usually aim to disrupt the subordination of women. Rarely in the history of philosophy will one find philosophical works that notice gender in order to criticize and correct men’s historical privileges or to disrupt the social orders and practices that subordinate groups on gendered dimensions. An understanding that sex matters to one’s ethical theorizing in some way is necessary to, but not sufficient for, feminist ethics.

Some philosophers and writers in almost every century, however, constitute forerunners to feminist ethics. Representative authors writing in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries discussed below explicitly address what they perceive to be moral wrongs resulting from either oppression on the basis of sex, or metaethical errors on the part of public intellectuals in believing ideal forms of moral reasoning to be within the capacities of men and not women. In the early-to-mid-twentieth century, at the same time that feminism became a more popularly used term in Europe and the Americas, more theorists argued influentially for ending unjust discrimination on the basis of sex. Some authors concertedly argued that philosophers and theorists erred in their understanding of what seemed to be gendered differences in ethical and moral reasoning.

In the seventeenth century, some public intellectuals published treatises arguing that women were as rational as men and should be afforded the education that would allow them to develop their moral character. They argued that since females are rational, their unequal access to learning was immoral and unjustifiable. They explored meta-ethical questions about the preconditions for morality, including what sorts of agents can be moral and whether morality is equally possible for different sexes. For example, in 1694, Mary Astell’s first edition of A Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest was published, advocating for access to education. It was controversial enough that Astell issued a sequel three years later, A Serious Proposal, Part II , that challenged “those deep background philosophical and theological assumptions which deny women the capacity for improvement of the mind” (Springborg, “Introduction,” in Astell 2002, 21). At the time, some apparently attributed the first Serious Proposal not to Astell, but to Damaris Cudworth Masham, a one-time companion of John Locke, since such criticisms of the injustice of women’s lot and the background assumptions maintaining their subordinate situation were familiar to Masham (Springborg, “Introduction,” in Astell 2002, 17). Although Masham sharply disagreed with aspects of Astell’s work, she too would later come to be credited with “explicitly feminist claims,” including objections to “the inferior education accorded women” (Frankel 1989, 84), especially when such obstacles were due to “the ignorance of men” (Masham 1705, 169, quoted in Frankel 1989, 85). Masham also deplored “the double standard of morality imposed on women and men, especially … the claim that women's ‘virtue’ consists primarily in chastity” (Frankel 1989, 85).

A century later, Mary Wollstonecraft, in her Vindication of the Rights of Women ([1792] 1988), renewed attention to girls’ lack of access to education. Criticizing the philosophical assumptions underpinning practices that denied girls adequate education, Wollstonecraft articulated an Enlightenment ideal of the social and moral rights of women as the equal of men. Wollstonecraft also broadened her critique of social structures to encompass ethical theory, especially in resistance to the arguments of influential men that women’s virtues are different from men’s and appropriate to perceived feminine duties. Wollstonecraft asserted: “I here throw down my gauntlet, and deny the existence of sexual virtues,” adding that “women, I allow, may have different duties to fulfil; but they are human duties, and the principles that should regulate the discharge of them … must be the same” (51). The revolutions of the Enlightenment age motivated some men as well as women to reconsider inequities in education at a time when notions of universal human rights were gaining prominence. As Joan Landes observes, Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet was an extraordinary advocate for the rights of women in France during the same period who argued in 1790 for “the admission of women to the rights of citizenship” and “woman's equal humanity on the grounds of reason and justice” (Landes 2016). Like many theorists of their time and places, including Catherine Macaulay (Tomaselli 2016), Olympe de Gouges, and Madame de Staël (Landes 2016), Wollstonecraft and Condorcet granted that there were material differences between the sexes, but advanced moral arguments against ethical double-standards on the basis of universal humanism. Yet the notion of universal humanism tended to prioritize virtues traditionally seen as masculine. Wollstonecraft, for example, argued against perceptions that women lacked men’s capacities for morality, but praised rationality and “masculinity” as preconditions for morality (Tong 1993, 44).

In Europe and North America, nineteenth-century moral arguments coalesced around material issues that would later be appreciated by feminist ethicists as importantly intersecting. A remarkably diverse array of activist women and public intellectuals advanced recognizably feminist arguments for women’s moral leadership and greater freedoms as moral imperatives. The resistance of enslaved women and the political activism of their descendants, the anti-slavery organizations of women in Europe and North America, the attention to inequity in women’s access to income, property, sexual freedom, full citizenship, and enfranchisement, and the rise of Marxist and Socialist theories contributed to women’s participation in arguments for the reductions of militarism, unfettered capitalism, domestic violence and the related abuse of drugs and alcohol, among other concerns.

Offering the first occurrence of the term feminisme (Offen 1988), the nineteenth century is characterized by a plurality of approaches to protofeminist ethics, that is, ethical theorizing that anticipated and created the groundwork for modern feminist concepts. These include some theories consistent with the universal humanism of Wollstonecraft and Condorcet and others emphasizing the differences between the sexes in order to argue for the superiority of feminine morality. The most well-known of the former in philosophy are John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women ([1869] 1987), which he credits Harriet Taylor Mill with co-authoring, and Harriet Taylor Mill’s essay, “The Enfranchisement of Women” (H. T. Mill [1851] 1998). Like their Enlightenment forerunners, Mill and Taylor argue that women ought to have equal rights and equal access to political and social opportunities. As a utilitarian philosopher, Mill further emphasizes the benefits to society and to the human species of improving women’s lives and social situations. Mill expresses skepticism about claims that women are morally superior to men, as well as claims that women have “greater liability to moral bias,” emotionality, and poor judgment in ethical decision-making ([1869] 1987, 518 and 519). Mill and Taylor tend to overemphasize the roles of women who are wives. They grant some differences between men and women that are controversial today; Mill’s works especially emphasize the benefits to family and domestic life as reasons to support the liberation of women from subjugation. Despite these views, both argue for the benefits of women’s liberation to scholarly and political spheres. For example, they describe differences in achievement and behavior to be the result mainly of women’s social situations and education, making their view consistent with the arguments of both the Enlightenment scholars noted above, and some, but not all, of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors discussed below.

Attitudes about the reasons for the moral goodness of such achievements differed. Some early utopian and Socialist movements in Europe that influenced women’s rights activists in America and would later influence British thinkers, including John Stuart Mill, lauded feminine virtues and women’s importance, but did so in ways that would reinforce views of women as “superior” because of innate qualities of gentleness, love, spirituality, and sentimentality (Moses 1982). In contrast, other Socialist movements expressed radical views of the equality of men and women not by attributing distinctive or greater moral virtues to women, but by challenging systems of privilege due to sex, race, and class (Taylor 1993). Although Mill and Taylor would later argue that “sexual inequality is an impediment to the cultivation of moral virtue,” some American activists such as Catherine Beecher forwarded a “separate-but-equal” vision of men and women as psychologically and essentially different, a view “according to which female virtue is ultimately better than male virtue” (Tong 1993, 36 and 37). In the pivotal year of 1848, Frederick Douglass insisted that “all that distinguishes man as an intelligent and accountable being, is equally true of woman” (quoted in Davis 2011, 51). In the same year, the Declaration of Sentiments was signed at a women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, and socialist and anarchist revolutions took place in Europe. The revolutionaries included public thinkers who advocated communal property and sexual equality, and who criticized the involvement of state and church in marriage. Their arguments about practical and feminist ethics influenced Emma Goldman and other turn-of-the-century thinkers.

Philosophical thinkers of different backgrounds gained greater access to education and printing presses in the nineteenth century, resulting in a plurality of approaches to the project of understanding, criticizing, and correcting how gender operates within our moral beliefs and practices. For example, the attachment of some protofeminist thinkers to the domestic virtues shaped their ethical recommendations. Some white and middle-class activists argued for the end of slavery and, later, against the subordination of emancipated women of color precisely on the grounds that they wished to extend the privileges that white and middle-class women enjoyed in the domestic and private sphere, maintaining the social order while valorizing domestic feminine goodness. As Clare Midgley says, “Women’s role was discussed in terms of family life. Emancipation would mark the end of the sexual exploitation of women and of the disruption of family life, and the creation of a society in which the black woman was able to occupy her proper station as a Daughter, a Wife, and a Mother” (Midgley 1993, 351).

In contrast, some former slaves including Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and descendants of slaves including Mary Church Terrell, grounded their work for women’s rights and arguments for women’s moral and sociopolitical equality in rather different priorities, asserting more interest in equal protection of the laws, economic liberation, political representation, and in Wells-Barnett’s case, self-defense and the exertion of the right to bear arms, as necessary to the very survival and liberation of Black Americans (Giddings 2007). Cooper, who rightly criticized white feminists for racist (and female-supremacist) statements when they were offered as reasons to work for white women’s voting rights rather than Black men’s, advanced a view of virtues and truth as having masculine and feminine sides. A century before care ethics would become a strain of academic feminist ethics, Cooper urged that both masculine reason and feminine sympathy “are needed to be worked into the training of children, in order that our boys may supplement their virility by tenderness and sensibility, and our girls may round out their gentleness by strength and self-reliance” (Cooper [1892] 2000, 60). Her timeless concern for the U.S. was that a nation or a people “will degenerate into mere emotionalism on the one hand, or bullyism on the other, if dominated by either exclusively” (61). Hers is a normative argument for appreciating the contributions that both traditionally feminine and masculine values could offer to a well-balanced ethics.

Explicitly arguing that standpoints matter to knowledge claims and moral theorizing, Cooper insisted that historical knowledge necessary to a nation’s self-understanding depends on the representation of Black Americans’ voices, and especially the “open-eyed but hitherto voiceless Black Woman of America” (Cooper [1892] 2000, 2; Gines 2015). Manifesting Cooper’s call for representations, Wells-Barnett determinedly included accounts of girls and women killed by lynching along with the narratives of murdered men and boys, and challenged the “racial-sexual apologies for lynching to trample the twin myths of white (female) sexual purity and black (male) sexual savagery” (James 1997, 80). Wells-Barnett’s investigative journalism led her to the blunt suggestion that some of the sexual relationships giving rise to cover stories of rape as justifications for lynching were consensual relationships between white women and Black men, while rapes of Black women and girls, “which began in slavery days, still continues without reproof from church, state or press” (quoted in Sterling 1979, 81).

Like Wells-Barnett, anarchist and socialist writers, some from working-class backgrounds, advanced frank arguments for differently understanding women’s capacities and desires as sexual beings with their own moral agency. Leaders included Emma Goldman, whose anarchism was developed as a response to Marx and Marxism (Fiala 2018). Goldman argued for broader understandings of love, sexuality, and family, because she believed that traditional social codes of morality resulted in the corruption of women’s sexual self-understanding (112). Like Wells-Barnett, Goldman coupled arguments against feminine sexual purity with attention to the sexual exploitation of, and trafficking in, women who did not enjoy the state’s protection (Goldman 2012). Some suffragists’ “emphasis on female morality repulsed Goldman. Yet, while she ridiculed the claim that women were morally superior to men … she also emphasized that women should be allowed and encouraged to express freely their ‘true’ femininity” (Marso 2010, 76).

Although early twentieth-century protofeminists differed in their beliefs as to whether men and women were morally different in character, they generally shared a belief in Progressive ideals of moral and social improvement if only humankind brought fair and rational thinking to bear on ethical issues. Progressive-era pragmatists, including Wells-Barnett, Charlotte Perkins-Gilman, Jane Addams, and Alice Paul, “saw the social environment as malleable, capable of improvement through human action and philosophic thought” (Whipps and Lake 2016). The beginning of the century was characterized by remarkably optimistic thinking even on the part of more radical theorists who appreciated the deep harms of oppressive social organizations. Most of the Progressive activists and suffragists of this era never described themselves with the new term, “feminist,” but as the immediate forerunners of feminism, they are described as feminists today.

Although belief in the possibilities for change seems widely shared, Progressive-era feminists did not always share common ground regarding women’s moral natures or how to achieve moral progress as a nation. For example, both Goldman and pro-suffrage Charlotte Perkins-Gilman argued for individual self-transformation and self-understanding as keys to women’s better moral characters (Goldman 2012), while maintaining that a person’s efforts were best supported by a less individualistic and more communitarian social and political framework (Gilman 1966). While Goldman included greater access to birth control and reproductive choice among the morally urgent routes to women’s individual self-discovery, Gilman and many feminists argued for women’s access to contraception in ways that reflected increasingly popular policies of eugenics in North and South America and Europe (Gilman 1932). Eugenics-friendly white women’s contributions of feminist ethical arguments to disrupt oppressive pronatalism or to avert the measurable costs of parenthood in sexist societies often took the form of deepening other forms of marginalization, including those based on race, disability, and class (Lamp and Cleigh 2011).

In the U.S., the centrality of sex and gender issues in public ethics reached a high-water mark during the Progressive Era, moving one magazine to write in 1914 that “The time has come to define feminism; it is no longer possible to ignore it” (Cott 1987, 13). Unfortunately, this sentiment would decline with the start of World War I and the consequent demise of optimistic beliefs in the powers of human rationality to bring about moral progress. Yet throughout the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, as economic difficulties, military conflicts, and wealth disparity fluctuated internationally, women’s groups and feminist activists in many countries would advance, with some success, feminist and moral arguments for workplace, professional, electoral, and educational access, for the liberalization of contraception, marriage, and divorce laws, and against militarism. Some of their gains in greater access to voting, education, and prosperity may have contributed to the wide audience that was receptive to Simone de Beauvoir’s publications in Europe and, after translations were available, in North America.

Beauvoir first self-identified as a feminist in 1972 (Schwarzer 1984, 32), and consistently refused the label of a philosopher despite having taught courses in philosophy (Card 2003, 9). Yet beginning in the 1950s, both her Ethics of Ambiguity ([1947] 1976) and The Second Sex ([1949] 2010) were widely read and quickly appreciated as important to feminist ethics (Card 2003, 1). As works of existentialist morality, they emphasized that we are not all simply subjects and individual choosers but also objects shaped by the forces of oppression (Andrew 2003, 37). Like the protofeminists described above, Beauvoir focused on the embodied experiences and social situations of women. In these pivotal works, she advanced the case that embodiment and social situatedness are not only relevant to human existence, but are the stuff of human existence, so crucial that philosophy ought not ignore them (Andrew 2003, 34). In The Second Sex , she argued that some men in philosophy managed the bad-faith project of both ignoring their own sex-situatedness and yet describing women as the Other and men as the Self. Because men in philosophy take themselves to be paradigmatically human and take it upon themselves to characterize the nature of womankind as different from men, Beauvoir said that men socially construct woman as the Other. Famously, Beauvoir said, “one is not born, but rather becomes, woman,” that is, one may be born a human female, but “the figure that the human female takes on in society,” that of a “woman,” results from “the mediation of another [that] can constitute an individual as an Other” (Beauvoir [1949] 2010, 329). The embodied human female may be a subject of her own experiences and perceptions, but “being a woman would mean being an object, the Other” (83), that is, the objectified recipient of the speculations and perceptions of men. Beauvoir described a woman who would transcend this situation “as hesitating between the role of object, of Other that is proposed to her, and her claim for freedom” (84), that is, her freedom to assert her own subjectivity, to make her own choices as to who she is, especially when she is not defined in relation to men. A woman’s position is therefore so deeply ambiguous—one of navigating “a human condition as defined in its relation with the Other” (196)—that if one is to philosophize about women, “it is indispensable to understand the economic and social structure” in which women aim to be authentic or ethical, necessitating “an existential point of view, taking into account her total situation” (84). In other words, philosophers speculating about women ought to take into account the obstacles to women’s opportunities for subjecthood and choice that are created by those who constructed an oppressive situation for women to navigate.

Beauvoir’s positions—that woman has been defined by men and in men’s terms, that ethical theory must attend to women’s social situation and their capacity to be moral decision-makers, and that women’s oppression impedes their knowing themselves and changing their situation—reflect the concerns of many forerunners of feminist ethics. Beauvoir’s work profoundly shaped the emergence of feminist ethics as a subfield of philosophy at a time when philosophers more generally had moved away from the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tendencies to describe women as lacking morally worthy rational capacities. Instead, by the middle of the twentieth century, some influential philosophers in Europe and the Americas had moved toward approaches that often led to describing both gender and ethics as irrelevant to philosophical discourse (Garry 2017).

2. Themes in feminist ethics

In the fifty years that feminist ethics has been a subject of philosophical scholarship in (initially) Western and (increasingly) international discourse, theorists have considered metaethical, theoretical, and practical questions. Questions that occupied scholars in preceding centuries, especially those regarding moral agents’ natural (and gendered) capacities for moral deliberation, are critically reconsidered in debates that arose in the 1970s and 1980s. One main area of inquiry addresses whether and why there may be meaningful differences in feminine and masculine priorities of care and justice in normative theory. Concern about feminist methods of articulating ethical theories arise during this time and continue. These debates can be found in the scholarship of intersectionality, Black feminist thought and women of color feminism, transnational feminism, queer theory, disability studies, and twenty-first century criticisms of feminist ethics. They are of special concern whenever feminist ethicists seem to uphold a gender binary and simplistic conceptualizations of woman as a category. Questions about the shortcomings of traditional ethical theories, about which virtues constitute morally good character in contexts of oppression, and about which kinds of ethical theories will ameliorate gendered oppressions and evils generate critical scholarship in every decade.

Gender binarism, which is the view that there are only two genders—male and female—and that everyone is only one of them (Dea 2016a, 108), is assumed by most feminist ethicists in the 1970s and 1980s (Jaggar 1974; Daly 1979). Some of these feminists criticize male supremacy without thereby preferring female supremacy (Frye 1983; Card 1986; Hoagland 1988). They argue that although the categories of “men” and “women” are physiologically distinct, the potential of feminism to liberate both men and women from oppressive gendered social arrangements suggests that men and women do not have different moralities or separate realities, and that we do not need to articulate separate capacities for ethics (Jaggar 1974; Davion 1998).

Other feminist ethicists offer radically different views. Mary Daly, for example, argues in Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism that women were traditionally defined throughout intellectual history as being subversive of rationality, impartiality, and morality as traditionally conceived. Daly argues that women ought to embrace, as essential to women’s natures and good, some of the very qualities that she says men have ascribed to women as essential to women’s natures and bad. Daly suggests valuing both women’s capacities for childbearing and birth (as opposed to capacities to engage in war and killing) and women’s emotionality (versus rationality) (Daly 1979).

Radical feminists and lesbian feminists who disagree with Daly as to whether women’s moral natures are innately better than men’s agree with Daly in arguing either for essentialism (Griffin 1978; cf. Spelman 1988 and Witt 1995) or for women’s separation from men (Card 1988; Hoagland 1988). Some of them argue that separatism allows a setting in which to create alternative ethics, rather than merely responding to the male-dominated ethical theories traditionally discussed in the academy. They also argue that separatism better fosters women’s increased connection to each other and denies men the access to women that men might expect (Daly 1979; Frye 1983; Hoagland 1988).

In deep disagreement, philosophers such as Alison Jaggar argue against separatism as being in any way productive of a different and morally better world. Jaggar maintains that “what we must do instead is to create a new androgynous culture which incorporates the best elements of both …, which values both personal relationships and efficiency, both emotion and rationality. This result cannot be achieved through sexual separation” (Jaggar 1974, 288). Related arguments for androgynous approaches to ethics are influential in arguments supporting androgyny, gender bending, and gender-blending that are prevalent in the 1990s (Butler 1990; Butler 1993), and gender-eliminativist and humanist approaches to feminist ethics and social philosophy that are prevalent in the twenty-first century (LaBrada 2016; Mikkola 2016; Ayala and Vasilyeva 2015; Haslanger 2012).

One criticism of gender binarism is that its assumption marginalizes nonconforming individuals. In efforts described as promoting coalition between trans activists and non-trans feminists, some feminists argue that we ought to examine the gender privilege inherent in presuming a binary that reflects one’s own experience better than the experiences of others (Dea 2016a; Bettcher 2014). Yet such “beyond-the-binary” approaches, in turn, have been cautioned against as well-intentioned but, at times, invalidating trans identities, “by invalidating the self-identities of trans people who do not regard their genitals as wrong” or “by representing all trans people as problematically positioned with regard to the binary” (Bettcher 2013). Recognition of “reality enforcement” and its interconnection with racist and sexist oppression may better defray the harms of normalizing a gender binary (Bettcher 2013).

Jaggar argues against separatism or separate gendered realities, noting that there is no reason “to believe in a sexual polarity which transcends the physiological distinction” (Jaggar 1974, 283). The work of psychologist Carol Gilligan therefore has great influence on philosophers interested in just such evidence for substantial sex differences in moral reasoning, despite the fact that Gilligan herself does not describe these differences as polar. In her landmark work, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (1982), Gilligan disputes accounts of moral development that do not take into account girls’ moral experiences (18–19), or that describe women as stuck at an interpersonal stage short of full moral development as in the theories of Lawrence Kohlberg (30). Gilligan argues that Kohlberg wrongly prioritizes a “morality of rights” and independence from others as better than, rather than merely different from, a “morality of responsibility” and intimate relationships with others (19).

Gilligan’s research follows Nancy Chodorow’s in suggesting that for boys and men, “separation and individuation are critically tied to gender identity” (Gilligan 1982, 8). Further, the development of masculinity typically involves valuing autonomy, rights, disconnection from others, and independence, while seeing other persons and intimate relationships as dangers or obstacles to pursuing those values. This perspective is referred to as the “perspective of justice” (Held 1995; Blum 1988). Women, in Gilligan’s studies, were as likely to express the perspective of justice as they were to express a perspective that valued intimacy, responsibility, relationships, and caring for others, while seeing autonomy as “the illusory and dangerous quest” (Gilligan 1982, 48), in tension with the values of attachment. This perspective is known as the perspective of “care” (Friedman 1991; Driver 2005).

Philosophers who apply Gilligan’s empirical results to ethical theory differ about the role that a care perspective should play in normative recommendations. Nel Noddings’s influential work, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (1984), argues for the moral preferability of a care perspective as both feminine and, as she later says explicitly, feminist (Noddings 2013, xxiv), orienting moral agents to focus on the needs of those one cares for in relational contexts rather than on abstract, universal principles. Like her historical predecessors discussed above, Noddings emphasizes the feminine “to direct attention to centuries of experience more typical of women than men” (xxiv), in part to correct the extent to which “the mother’s voice has been silent” (1). Noddings’s normative theory endorses the moral value of partiality that justifies prioritizing interpersonal relationships over more distant connections. Virginia Held’s (1993; 2006) and Joan Tronto’s (1993) different applications of the perspective of care endorse care as social and political rather than limited to interpersonal relationships, and suggest that an ethic of care provides a route to realizing better societies as well as better treatment of distant others. Both Held and Sara Ruddick (1989) urge societal shifts to prioritize children’s vulnerabilities and the perspectives of mothers as necessary correctives to moral and political neglect of policies that would ensure the well-being of vulnerable people in relationships requiring care. This concern is further elaborated in Eva Feder Kittay’s attention to caregivers as “secondarily” or “derivatively dependent” (1999). In normative theory and applied ethics, care-work and caring in workplace relationships have come to receive more attention in twenty-first century philosophy than previously, as appreciation for the ethical demands of relational support-provision and client-centered or helping professions come to be influenced by variations on the ethic of care (Kittay 1999; Feder and Kittay 2002; Tronto 2005; Lanoix 2010; Reiheld 2015).

Robin Dillon observes that, “Care ethics was for some time the dominant approach in feminist ethics and so feminist discussions of virtue” (2017b, 574). Although the ethic of care continues to be strongly associated with feminist ethics, Gilligan’s work in psychology and Noddings’s work in philosophy were immediately contested (Superson 2012). Some feminist ethicists have argued that the ethic of care valorizes the burdened history of femininity associated with caring (Card 1996). The complex history of femininity and caregiving practices were shaped in contexts of oppression that may permit “moral damage” to women’s agency (Tessman 2005). If that burdened feminine history includes attention to particular relationships at the expense of attention to wider social institutions and systematic political injustice, then the ethic of care runs the risk of lacking a feminist vision for changing systematic and institutional forms of oppression (Hoagland 1990; Bell 1993). Further worries about the ethic of care include whether unidirectional caring enables the exploitation of caregivers (Houston 1990; Card 1990; Davion 1993), and whether such caring excludes moral responsibilities to strangers and individuals we may affect without meeting interpersonally (Card 1990), thereby risking an insular ethic that ignores political and material realities (Hoagland 1990). Another concern is whether we risk generalizing some women’s prioritizing caring to all women, which disregards the complex pluralism of many women’s voices (Moody-Adams 1991). Finally, preoccupation with women’s kinder and gentler feelings may prevent or distract from attention to women’s capacities for harm and injustice, especially the injustices borne of racial and class privilege (Spelman 1991).

The above criticisms tend to proceed from a view that it is problematic that an ethic of care is predicated on seeing femininity as valuable. They suggest that critical feminist perspectives require us to doubt the value of femininity. However, it remains controversial whether femininity is necessarily defined in relationship to masculinity and is thereby an inauthentic or insufficiently critical perspective for feminist ethics, or whether femininity is a distinctive contribution of moral and valuing agents to a feminist project that rejects or corrects some of the errors and excesses of legacies of masculinity (Irigaray 1985; Harding 1987; Tong 1993; Bartky 1990).

One way that some philosophers offer to resolve the possible tension between conceptions of femininity and feminism is to bring intersectional approaches to the question as to whose femininity is being discussed. Concerns that femininity is antithetical to a critical feminist perspective seem to presuppose a conception of femininity as passive, gentle, obedient, emotional, and dependent, in contrast with a conception of masculinity as its opposite. In a philosophical tradition dominated by white and masculine philosophers, describing femininity as necessarily the opposite of one’s conception of masculinity in a gender binary makes limited sense. Scholars of intersectionality point out, however, that identities are not binary: “the masculinity and femininity in play here are not racially unmarked (if only for the reason that gender is never racially unmarked)” (James 2013, 752). The insights of philosophers of Black Feminism, intersectionality, queer theory, critical race theory, disability studies, and transfeminism, among others, contribute to a view that there is no universal definition of femininity or of the category of woman that neatly applies to all women. Some of these philosophers suggest that the distinctive moral and valuing experiences of women and individuals of all genders may be unjustly ignored or denied by a conception of women or femininity that turns out to be white, ableist, and cisgender (Crenshaw 1991; Collins 1990; Wendell 1996; hooks 1992; Tremain 2000; Serano 2007; McKinnon 2014). Intersectional approaches reject binaries such as “masculinity/femininity” that tend to take the social positions of privileged people as generic. Minimally, intersectionality is “the predominant way of conceptualizing the relation between systems of oppression which construct our multiple identities and our social locations in hierarchies of power and privilege,” offering a remedy to histories of exclusions in feminist theory (Carastathis 2014, 304).

Although intersectional insights can be found in the works of writers even from the distant past, the predominance of intersectionality in feminist ethics today is largely owed to Black feminists and critical race theorists, who were the first to argue for the significance of intersectionality (Crenshaw 1989; Collins 1990; Gines 2014; Bailey 2009). Kimberlé Crenshaw describes intersectionality in different senses: as an experience, an approach, and a problem (Crenshaw 1989; Crenshaw 1991). Crenshaw’s description of intersectionality as an experience includes the phenomena of oppressive practices and harms that occur at, and because of, intersections of aspects of identity. For example, when Black men, but not any women, were permitted to work on a General Motors factory floor, and white women, but not any Black persons, were permitted to work in the General Motors secretarial pool, then Black women were discriminated against as Black women. That is, they were not permitted to have any job at General Motors due to living at an intersection of categories of identity that are treated separately in the law (Crenshaw 1989). Crenshaw’s description of intersectionality as an approach includes centering the lives and testimony of those whose experiences with living at intersections of oppressions have been ignored or denied in traditional philosophical and political theories (Crenshaw 1989; Crenshaw 1991; hooks 1984; Dotson 2014; Lorde 1990; Lugones 1987; Lugones 2014). Crenshaw’s description of intersectionality as a problem includes disrupting the traditional overlooking of Black women’s experiences, and offering the experiences and the approaches described above as challenges to the doctrine that discrimination occurs only along one axis of identity (Crenshaw 1989, 141). Intersectionality is pursued in the interests of expanding understandings of differences and accounting for the experiences of people previously spoken for, if addressed at all, rather than consulted.

Not all philosophers who embrace appreciation of the insights of intersectionality agree on whether it yields a distinct methodology, or a starting point for better inquiry, or a better conception of experiences of oppression (Khader 2013; Garry 2011). Serene Khader suggests that intersectional theories “are united by a critique of what Crenshaw (1991) calls ‘additive’ models of identity” that assume that individuals at intersections of traditionally oppressed identity categories are “necessarily worse off than the individual facing a single oppression,” as if each dimension on which one can be oppressed is easily separable in categories traditionally conceived in isolation (Khader 2013, 75). Instead, “intersectional theorists argue that the oppressions facing multiply oppressed women co-constitute one another and situate those women such that attempts to advance the interests of ‘all women’ may fail to advance theirs” (Khader 2013, 75).

Intersectionality is not without its critics in feminist ethics. For example, Naomi Zack (2005) argues that an intersectional approach to concepts such as that of woman successfully demonstrates problems with essentialism with respect to women’s natures, but degrades the category of woman, “multiplying axes of analysis and thus gender categories beyond necessity” (Bailey 2009, 21) to an extent that may thereby fragment attempts to advocate for women (Zack 2005; Ludvig 2006; Sengupta 2006). Some feminists who support intersectionality have responded to Zack’s concerns by arguing that everyday concepts such as woman include an array of identities, including distinct gender identities that bear a family resemblance and include a range of manifestations (Garry 2011). Other feminists have responded to Zack’s concerns for feminist movement or solidarity by arguing for the possibilities of working in coalitions that do not require widely shared commonality, working to learn from and about positions of difference, and cultivating more humility and less arrogance in theorizing (Lorde 1984; Lugones 1987; Reagon 2000; Bailey 2009; Carastathis 2014; Sheth 2014; Ruíz and Dotson 2017). Other feminist ethicists raise tensions in intersectional theory that are not intended to undermine the approach but to ask for elaboration of its details, including its very definition (Nash 2008). The appeal for these clarifications, however, may reflect traditions that intersectionality is dedicated to disrupting, since it is made in the context of the pursuit of justification, habits of opposition, and a narrow sense of definitional work that is typical in philosophy, a field that has a reputation for lacking appreciation for diverse practitioners (Dotson 2013).

If there is a commonality between all of the above feminist ethicists, it is their interest in provoking reconsideration of ethical theories that failed either to notice or to care when the perspective of the philosopher so criticized was taken for either a generic truth about moral theory or a gender-specific and false description of human nature. Elena Flores Ruíz observes that “professional philosophy sleepwalks ; its somnambulatory practices stroll silently, policing checkpoints without the burden of consciousness of its actions and practices” (2014, 199). In other words, philosophers have at times presumed that they speak for many without sufficient attention to their own presumptions. Ruíz’s claim is akin to Rosemarie Tong’s observation made decades earlier, that traditional ethical theory demonstrates “a sleepy inattentiveness to women’s concerns” (1993, 160). The provocation to alertness is evident in feminist critiques of traditional ethical theories such as deontology, consequentialism, social contract theory, and virtue ethics. Some feminist ethicists sympathetically extend canonical work to concerns that male theorists did not address, while other feminist ethicists resoundingly reject traditional ethical theories because the theories rely on a conception of moral agency or moral value with which they disagree.

2.4.1 Deontology, rights, and duties

Some feminist ethicists endorse deontological moral theories on the grounds that granting women—who have been subordinated in private and public spheres—the same rights routinely granted to men in positions of power would enable women’s freedom and flourishing, especially in contexts of political liberalism. Feminist ethicists have long argued that we should acknowledge women’s equal capacities for moral agency and extend human rights to them (Astell 1694; Wollstonecraft 1792; Stanton [1848] 1997; Mill [1869] 1987; Nussbaum 1999; Baehr 2004; Stone-Mediatore 2004; Hay 2013). While building on existing frameworks of liberalism, rights theory, and deontology, feminist ethicists have argued for granting rights where they have been previously neglected (Brennan 2010). They have argued for rights in the issues of enfranchisement (Truth [1867] 1995), reproduction (Steinbock 1994), abortion (Thomson 1971), bodily integrity (Varden 2012), women’s and non-heterosexual people’s sexuality (Goldman 2012; Cuomo 2007), sexual harassment (Superson 1993), pornography (Easton 1995), violence against women (Dauer and Gomez 2006), rape (MacKinnon 2006), and more. While recognizing limits to the universality of women’s experiences, feminist philosophers have argued for global human rights as a remedy for gendered oppression and dehumanization (Cudd 2005; Meyers 2016).

Feminist criticism of duty-centered frameworks, or, deontology, include those articulated by authors of the ethic of care, who argue against an ethic of duty, especially Kantian ethics, on several grounds. First, they claim that it proceeds from absolutist and universal principles which are unduly prioritized over consideration of the material contexts informing embodied experiences, particularities, and relationships. Second, they claim that it inaccurately separates capacities for rationality from capacities for emotion, and that it wrongly describes the latter as morally uninformative or worthless most likely because of their traditional association with women or femininity (Noddings 1984; Held 1993; Slote 2007). Moreover, an ethic of duty is likely to overly idealize moral agents’ capacities for rationality and choice (Tronto 1995; Tessman 2015). Some feminist ethicists embrace forms of obligation yet reject Kantian deontology when it denies the possibility of moral dilemmas (Tessman 2015). Feminists who argue that duties are socially constructed, rather than a priori, ground the nature of obligations in the normative practices of the nonideal world (Walker 1998; Walker 2003).

Transnational feminists, scholars of intersectionality, and postcolonial feminists argue that feminist advocates of global human rights routinely impose their own cultural expectations and regional practices upon the women who are purportedly the objects of their concern (Mohanty 1997; Narayan 1997; Narayan 2002; Silvey 2009; Narayan 2013; Khader 2018a; Khader 2018b). Critical analyses of some feminist deontologists’ concerns include arguments that universal morals, rights, and duties are not the best bulwark against relativist condonation of any and all possible treatments of women and subordinated people (Khader 2018b) and suggest that advocacy of human rights is perhaps well-intentioned but “entangled with imperialist precommitments in the contemporary West” (Khader 2018a, 19).

2.4.2 Consequentialism and utilitarianism

Since John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill argued both for utilitarianism and against the subjection of women, one could say that there have been feminists as long as there have been utilitarians. In The Subjection of Women ([1869] 1987), Mill argues that the desirable outcome of human moral progress generally is hindered by women’s legal and social subordination. He adds that not only each woman’s, but each man’s personal moral character is directly harmed by the injustice of unequal social arrangements (Okin 2005). Mill expresses special concern that “the object of being attractive to men had … become the polar star of feminine education and formation of character,” an immoral “influence over the minds of women” (Mill [1869] 1987, 28–29), as well as an immoral influence on the understandings of the boys and girls that such women raise. Consistent with the utilitarian principle that everyone counts equally and no single person’s preferences count more than another’s, Mill argues that men and women are fundamentally equal in their capacities for higher and lower pleasures and, arguably, in their responsibilities and interests (Mendus 1994). Harriet Taylor likewise argues in The Enfranchisement of Women for the moral improvement of humankind generally and “the elevation of character [and] intellect” that would permit each woman and man to be both morally better and happier, which are overlapping and important considerations to Taylor (1998, 65).

Contemporary feminist ethicists who address utilitarianism either critique Mill’s work in particular (Annas 1977; Mendus 1994; Morales 2005), or defend a feminist version of consequentialism (Driver 2005; Gardner 2012), or apply consequentialist aims to feminist issues (Tulloch 2005; Dea 2016b). Some consequentialist feminists provide reasons for thinking that utilitarianism can accommodate feminist aims because it is responsive to empirical information, can accommodate the value of relationships in good lives, and is appreciative of distinctive vulnerabilities (Driver 2005).

Critics of utilitarianism include those who specifically resist the expectation of utilitarian impartiality, insofar as impartiality in decision-making ignores emotional connections or personal relationships with particular beings. Feminists have advanced criticisms of impartiality from the points of view of care ethics (Noddings 1984; Held 2006; Ruddick 1989), ecofeminist or environmental ethics (Adams 1990; Donovan 1990; George 1994; Warren 2000), and analytical social ethics (Baier 1994; Friedman 1994). Impartiality may yield implausible requirements to value the well-being of all equally regardless of one’s commitments, material circumstances in a nonideal world, or obligations of caring (Walker 1998; Walker 2003). Impartiality as a desirable quality of moral agents may overly idealize moral agency (Tessman 2015) or tacitly presume a biased perspective in favor of adult, racially privileged, masculine agents in a formal or public sphere whose decisions are unencumbered by relationships of unequal power (Kittay 1999).

Some feminists criticize consequentialism for failing to capture the qualitatively problematic nature of oppressions that are not reducible to harms (Frye 1983; Card 1996; Young 2009). For example, Card argues that even if certain behavior does not produce more harm than good, its symbolism could violate one’s dignity. Her example is the case of women being barred from Harvard’s Lamont Law library even when helpful male classmates provided them photocopies of course readings (2002, 104–105). Card also objects on Rawlsian grounds that the wrongness of slavery was not the balance of benefits and harms, contra consequentialism, but the fact that trade-offs could never justify slavery (2002, 57).

Anti-imperialist and non-Western feminists argue that Mill’s views in particular purport to be universal but include “Western European biases and instrumental reasoning” that establish “problematic rhetorical models for women’s rights arguments” (Botting and Kronewitter 2012). For example, Eileen Botting and Sean Kronewitter argue that The Subjection of Women contains several examples of primitivist and Orientalist rhetorical moves, such as associating “the barbarism of patriarchal marriage with Eastern cultures and religions” (2012, 471). They also object that Mill offers instrumental arguments for women’s rights, such as favoring the reduction of men’s selfishness and the increase in men’s intellectual stimulation in marriage, as well as doubling mental resources for the higher service of humanity (2012, 470), suggesting that women’s liberation is secondary to greater purposes.

2.4.3 Moral contractarianism

Some feminist ethicists argue for forms of contractarian ethics, that is, the view “that moral norms derive their normative force from the idea of contract or mutual agreement” (Cudd and Eftekhari 2018). Contractarian ethics permit moral agents to critically assess the value of any relationship, especially family relationships that may be oppressive on gendered dimensions (Okin 1989; Hampton 1993; Sample 2002; Radzik 2005). Other feminist contractarians appreciate Hobbes’s social contract theory for its applicability to women in positions of vulnerability. For example, Jean Hampton endorses Hobbes’s view that “you are under no obligation to make yourself prey to others” (Hampton 1998, 236). Hampton combines insights of both Kant and Hobbes in her version of feminist contractarianism, “building in the Kantian assumption that all persons have intrinsic value and thus must have their interests respected” (Superson 2012; see also Richardson 2007). Contractarianism arguably corrects gross injustices and inequities traceable to gendered oppressions and the most serious evils that are socially constructed (Anderson 1999; Hartley and Watson 2010).

Some feminists argue for the usefulness of contractarian ethics to evaluate one’s adaptive preferences, that is, “preferences formed in unconscious response to oppression” (Walsh 2015, 829). For example, Mary Barbara Walsh argues that social contract theory models “the conditions of autonomous choice, independence and dialogical reflection,” and therefore “exposes preferences that fail to meet” the conditions of autonomy. Feminist contractarianism may thereby generate new understandings of social contracts grounded in appreciation of material conditions, commitments, and consent (Stark 2007; Welch 2012). Feminist contractarians whose moral theories are influenced by John Rawls’s political philosophy suggest that his methodology, which involves reasoning from behind a veil of ignorance to decide which rules persons are rational to agree to, promotes critical appraisal of preferences that one would not hold in a better world (Richardson 2007, 414).

Feminist critics of contractarianism also raise concerns about adaptive preferences. In the actual, nonideal conditions in which individuals and groups develop, dominant perspectives and oppressive social arrangements can make persons come to prefer things that they would not otherwise prefer, such that the resultant preferences, when satisfied, are not for the agent’s own good, and may even contribute to her group’s oppression (Superson 2012). Feminists who are concerned that not all moral agents can meaningfully consent to contracts point to examples of women who are denied access to the public sphere, the market, education, and information (Held 1987; Pateman 1988). Others point out that traditionally, social contract theory has not attended to the inclusion of the needs of children, disabled community members, or their caregivers (Held 1987; Kittay 1999; Edenberg and Friedman 2013). Feminist critics of contractarianism tend to argue both for full consideration of needs born of differences between bodies and social locations, and against describing gender, embodiment, or dependency as a mere secondary characteristic irrelevant to what a body in need of care requires to flourish and thus what a “reasonable man” would choose behind a veil of ignorance (Nussbaum 2006; Pateman and Mills 2007).

2.4.4 Virtue ethics

Some feminist ethicists contend that virtue ethics, which focuses on living a good life or flourishing, offers the best approach to ensuring that ethical theory correctly represents the conditions permitting vulnerable bodies to flourish in oppressive contexts. Although virtue ethics is most notably associated with Aristotle, whose idealized and masculine agent is not generally considered paradigmatically feminist (Berges 2015, 3–4), feminists and their forerunners have engaged critically for several centuries with questions about which virtues and qualities of character would promote a good life in the context of what we now describe as women’s subordination. Philosophers who argue for feminist ethical virtues raise concerns that sexist oppression presents challenges to the exercise of virtues on the part of women and gender non-conforming people. Robin Dillon observes that feminist virtue ethics “identifies problems for character in contexts of domination and subordination and proposes ways of addressing those problems, and it identifies problems of unreflective theory and proposes power-conscious alternatives” (2017a, 381). Because the history of traditional virtue ethics is freighted with past characterizations of virtues as either gendered or as universal but less accessible to women, Dillon proposes what she calls “feminist critical character ethics” as an alternative to feminist virtue ethics (2017a, 380). Advocates of feminist virtue ethics and critical character ethics consider the relationships of gender to accounts of character, virtues, vices, and good lives (Baier 1994; Card 1996; Cuomo 1998; Calhoun 1999; Dillon 2017a; Snow 2002; Tessman 2005; Green and Mews 2011; Berges 2015; Broad 2015; Harvey 2018).

Like the ethic of care, virtue ethics is often described as offering a theory that is not beholden to abstract and universal principles (Groenhout 2014), but instead acknowledges “that moral reasoning might be an extraordinarily complex phenomenon …, a view on which what the ethical life requires of us cannot be codified or reduced to a single principle or set of principles” (Moody-Adams 1991, 209–210). A further commonality between care and virtue that is of interest to feminists is that “virtue theory, like care ethics, rejects a simplistic dichotomy between reason and emotion, and does not begin from the assumption that all human beings are essentially equal” (Groenhout 2014, 487). Ethical theories of virtue or character tend to appreciate the importance of emotions and interpersonal relationships to a person’s moral development. Some virtue ethics also focus on what opportunities for virtue are available to agents in particular social contexts, which is useful in feminist ethics when it comes to delineating our responsibilities as relational beings and as characters who may exhibit vices resulting from oppression (Bartky 1990; Potter 2001; Bell 2009; Tessman 2009a; Slote 2011; Boryczka 2012).

Indeed, the ethic of care bears so many important similarities to virtue ethics that some authors have argued that a feminist ethic of care just is a form or a subset of virtue ethics (Groenhout 1998; Slote 1998; McLaren 2001; Halwani 2003). Others believe that at a minimum, care and virtue ethics should inform each other and are compatible with each other (Benner 1997; Sander-Staudt 2006). Here, too, however, feminist ethicists disagree. Some contend that lumping together care and virtue might render the complexity of moral experiences and available moral responses less understandable rather than more articulate (Groenhout 2014). Others suggest that this consolidation might overlook important theoretical distinctions, including the capacity for virtue ethics to be gender-neutral while the ethic of care maintains a commitment to embodied, particular, and gendered experiences (Sander-Staudt 2006).

Virtue ethics provides wider opportunities for feminist ethics to attend to virtues such as integrity and courage in oppressive contexts that the ethic of care tends not to prioritize (Davion 1993; Sander-Staudt 2006). Resistance itself may be a “burdened virtue,” which is Lisa Tessman’s term for virtues that allow moral agents, even ones damaged by oppression, to endure and resist oppression, permitting a form of nobility that falls short of eudaimonia (Tessman 2005). Tessman argues that when agents live under conditions of systemic injustice, their opportunities to flourish are blocked and their pursuits may even be hopeless. She suggests that “the burdened virtues include all those traits that make a contribution to human flourishing—if they succeed in doing so at all—only because they enable survival of or resistance to oppression …, while in other ways they detract from their bearer's well-being, in some cases so deeply that their bearer may be said to lead a wretched life” (Tessman 2005, 95). Feminist ethicists have explored virtues that permit the sort of “conditioned flourishing” that Tessman describes (2009, 14), extending discussion of the virtues to specific applications in nonideal circumstances in which vulnerability is fundamental to the nature of a moral agent (Nussbaum 1986; Card 1996; Walker 2003). For example, feminists have argued for distinctive virtues in contexts such as whistleblowing and organizational resistance (DesAutels 2009), healthcare (Tong 1998), and ecological activism (Cuomo 1998).

Feminist criticisms of the limits of virtue ethics point to its emphasis on the personal as potentially problematic when it comes to “accounting for the possibility of social criticism and resistance on the part of the self who is constituted by the very social relationships and cultural traditions that would be the target of her resistance” (Friedman 1993). Virtue ethics may also include intrusive requirements to self-evaluate one’s every feeling or practice to an extent that an ethic of duty, for example, would not require (Conly 2001). Some care ethicists, most notably Nel Noddings (1984), argue that virtue ethics can be overly self-regarding rather than attentive to the point of view of another, and that it locates moral motivation in rational, abstract, and idealized conceptions of the good life rather than in the natural well-spring of moral motivation that is generated by encounters with particular persons.

As is evident from the foregoing, feminist ethics is not monolithic. Feminists have sometimes clashed over being essentialist or anti-essentialist. Some feminist work is authored by members of privileged groups, while other feminist work is written by and attends to concerns of those in marginalized groups. Some feminists have located solidarity in commonality, while others advocate coalition in the presence of intersectionality. The different approaches of feminists to ethics raise questions as to whether feminist ethics can be either universalist or absolutist. Feminists have observed that just as some men in the history of philosophy have falsely universalized from their own experience to describe the experiences of all humans, some feminists have presumed false universal categories of women or feminists that elide differences between women or presume to speak for all women (Grimshaw 1996; Herr 2014; Tremain 2015). Relatedly, some feminist philosophers have criticized absolutism in ethical theory, that is, the prioritization of rigorous applications of principles to ethical situations regardless of the particularities of context or the motivations of the individuals affected, in part because absolutism, like universalism, takes the absolutists’ priorities to be rational for all (Noddings 1984; Baier 1994). Feminist ethicists who have endorsed visions of universal human rights as liberating for all women have been criticized by other feminists as engaging in absolutism in ways that may prescribe solutions for women in different locations and social situations rather than attending to the perspectives of the women described as needing such rights (Khader 2018b; Herr 2014).

The predominant association of feminist ethics with an ethic of care, which is dichotomous with traditional ethical theories on many levels, together with decades of feminist critiques of the work of canonical absolutist theorists, might lead to a perception that feminist ethics is fundamentally opposed to universalism and absolutism in ethics. This perception, however, is not built into the nature of feminist ethics, which has been employed to understand, criticize, and correct the role of gender in our moral beliefs and practices by deontologists, utilitarians, contractarians, and virtue ethicists, who hold some universal principles or absolute requirements to be basic to their views. However, it is evident that the preponderance of scholarship in feminist ethics tends to prioritize all of the following: the moral contexts in which differently situated and differently gendered agents operate, the testimony and perspectives of the situated agent, the power relationships and political relationships manifest in moral encounters, the vulnerabilities of embodied actors that yield a plurality of approaches to ethical situations, and the degrees of agency or capacity that are shaped by experiences with oppression and misogyny. Such priorities tend not to result in relativism, though they certainly depart from rigid forms of absolutism. Feminist ethics is often expressed in morally plural ways, including pragmatism (Hamington and Bardwell-Jones 2012), transnationalism (Jaggar 2013; Herr 2014; McLaren 2017; Khader 2018b), nonideal theory (Mills 2005; Schwartzman 2006; Tessman 2009b; Norlock 2016), and disability theory (Wendell 1996; Garland-Thomson 2011; Tremain 2015).

The following sub-entries included under “feminism (topics)” in the Table of Contents to this Encyclopedia are relevant to the multiplicity of applications of feminist ethics:

• feminist perspectives on autonomy
• feminist perspectives on class and work
• feminist perspectives on disability
• feminist perspectives on globalization
• feminist perspectives on objectification
• feminist perspectives on power
• feminist perspectives on rape
• feminist perspectives on reproduction and the family
• feminist perspectives on science
• feminist perspectives on sex and gender
• feminist perspectives on sex markets
• feminist perspectives on the body
• feminist perspectives on the self
• feminist perspectives on trans issues

See also the entries in the Related Entries section below.

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• Tong, Rosemarie and Williams, Nancy, “Feminist Ethics”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2019/entries/feminism-ethics/ >. [This was the previous entry on Feminist Ethics in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — see the version history .]
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feminist philosophy | feminist philosophy, interventions: history of philosophy | feminist philosophy, interventions: moral psychology | feminist philosophy, interventions: political philosophy | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on autonomy | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on class and work | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on disability | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on globalization | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on objectification | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on power | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on rape | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on reproduction and the family | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on science | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on sex and gender

Acknowledgments

This entry exists thanks to the steady work of Research Assistant Collin Chepeka and the funds of the Kenneth Mark Drain Chair in Ethics at Trent University. Thanks to Noëlle McAfee for helpful comments on a first draft, and thanks to Anita Superson for extensive comments on every section of this entry.

Copyright © 2019 by Kathryn Norlock < kathrynnorlock @ trentu . ca >

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Feminist Theology

Other essays.

Feminist theology claims to seek the equality, justice, and liberation of women from what it perceives to be oppressive male systems of power and domination in religion.

Feminist theology is theology and biblical studies done using feminist methodologies and theories of interpretation. Feminist theology seeks the equality, justice, and liberation of women from what are perceived to be patriarchal or androcentric systems of power and domination that have shaped the church, the history of the translation and interpretation of the Bible, and the Bible. It does not typically regard the Bible as the authoritative Spirit-inspired Word of God. There is not one “feminist theology” but many, each reflecting different historical, cultural, and global settings, particularly using intersectional analysis. Feminist theology, like feminism more broadly, seeks revolutionary change and its effects have been far-reaching, and provide the context for contemporary evangelical ministry.

Overview of Feminist Theology

Feminist theology has developed both alongside and in dialogue with secular feminism. While the word “feminism” might suggest a comprehensive monolithic ideology or movement, it is more an umbrella term for many different feminism(s) that use differing methodologies, address different concerns, and advocate different views, some of which are mutually exclusive. The same is true of “feminist theology.” There is not one “feminist theology” but many, each arising from different historical, cultural, and global settings. This state of flux and diversity is a defining feature of current feminism and feminist theology and is regarded positively as reflecting feminism’s ideological commitments. 1 Feminist theology is not so much theology and biblical studies done by women, but theology and biblical studies done using various feminist methodologies and theories of interpretation. Generally speaking, feminist theology seeks the equality and welfare of women by opposing and dismantling what are seen as patriarchal or androcentric (male-centered) systems of power, domination and exclusion.

Feminist theologians believe these systems of male power and privilege have shaped the history of the church, the history of traditional biblical interpretation—and sometimes even the content of the Bible (written by men for men)—and have justified and resulted in the oppression, silencing, and exclusion of women in all areas of life, including the church. In its search for liberation of women from these structures, feminist theology is informed by and usually considered a form of Liberation Theology.

Intersectionality

In recent years, the concerns and methodologies of feminist theologians have broadened from a focus on women and gender relations to include the compounding effects of race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, (dis)ability, post-colonialism, and what are perceived to be other dynamics of power and privilege. The interconnected, overlapping nature of these social categories is known as “intersectionality.” Intersectional analysis seeks to identify and deconstruct the way that different experiences and dynamics of marginalization intertwine and multiply the harmful effects of each other. It is a feature of third and fourth wave feminism.

On this analysis, the perspective and needs of the marginalized take priority over those of the privileged—among whom are white, well-educated, middle-class, Western, female feminists—and the gender essentialism that characterized much (Western) second-wave feminism, which assumed the experience of all woman was the same (e.g., poor and rich; Western and non-Western), is also deemed problematic. Accordingly, gender essentialism, and sometimes (counter-intuitively) even a binary view of gender, have been replaced by post-modern subjectivism and diversity .

Feminist theology now employs a wide range of methods and perspectives reflecting the varied experiences of women around the globe; including African-American women (womanist theology); Hispanic-American women ( mujerista theology); Korean women ( minjung feminist theology); low-caste Indian women ( dalit feminist theology); African and Asian women; women in post-colonial cultures; differently-abled women; and those from the LGBTIQ+ community—including trans-women (biological males).

Despite this diversity, most approaches are interested in the nature and implications of women’s embodiment, and suspicious of body-soul dualism as well as theories that associate women with bodily existence and the natural world, and men with the “higher” world of rationality. The complementarity of men and women portrayed in the Bible and until recently widely accepted in historic, orthodox Christianity is typically rejected. Instead, feminist theology stresses the value and experiences of women’s embodiment as both the source and goal of theological reflection, and the corresponding need for women’s bodies and the experience of female suffering to be acknowledged and present in sacramental ritual and liturgy.

Ecofeminist Theology

Feminist theology often also embraces ecological or environmental concerns , which take various forms that reflect different underlying theologies. For example, one form arises from intersectional concerns for justice and poverty relief, and a commitment to local and global economies, and the environmental conditions necessary to sustain production. Another arises from the belief that male notions of hierarchy, domination and exploitation are responsible for degrading the created world and must be replaced by a feminist approach which upholds the mutuality of humanity and the creation, seeking to achieve their mutual flourishing. Another arises from the rejection of what is regarded as the patriarchal God of the Bible (i.e., God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit of the Father and the Son) and of all hierarchical and/or dualistic distinctions between the divine and the created world, and instead embraces either panentheism or a feminine deity or Creator Spirit.

Evangelical or Biblical Feminism (Egalitarianism)

Since the early 1970’s, some evangelicals have sought to bring feminist thought to bear on the study of the Scriptures and church practice. Initially, they formed the Evangelical Women’s Caucus (EWC), eventually splitting over the issue of homosexuality in 1986, and forming the EWC and Christians for Biblical Equality (CBE)—with the former affirming homosexuality, and the latter rejecting it. The EWC is now aligned with liberal feminist theology.

Evangelical feminists recognize the authority of the Bible as divinely inspired. However, for a variety of reasons, they do not accept that Scripture teaches there are different roles and responsibilities for men and women in the family or the church or alternatively argue that these differences do not apply today. They seek identical roles for women and men in ministry and also within marriage.

Feminist Hermeneutics

For all their differences, feminist theologians usually approach the text of Scripture with similar convictions about its interpretation that determine their understanding and application of the text. The articulation of this hermeneutic varies but usually includes: a hermeneutic of suspicion, a hermeneutic of retrieval, and a hermeneutic of reconstruction. 2

A hermeneutic of suspicion involves reading against the text rather than with it. Instead of uncritically accepting the inspiration, authority, inerrancy, and wisdom of the entire text of Scripture, a hermeneutic of suspicion assumes the male patriarchal/anti-women bias of Scripture (written by men for men), and critiques and deconstructs the text and/or the tradition of translation or interpretation associated with it. Not all Scripture is regarded as “the word of God,” and so there is a canon within the canon. Only that which conforms to feminist beliefs should be proclaimed in the church (cf. “hermeneutic of proclamation”).

A hermeneutic of retrieval seeks to recover and venerate the lost history of women in the Bible and the history of the church. It also involves remembering the suffering of women in Scripture, especially victims of violence and injustice (e.g., Hagar , Tamar , the unnamed concubine , and the daughter of Jephthah ), 3 and questioning the place of these accounts in Scripture and their continued use in the church (cf. ‘hermeneutic of remembrance’).

A hermeneutic of reconstruction seeks to revise traditional (male-dominated) approaches to the Bible and historic Christianity and replace them with women-centered approaches. In so doing, the Bible becomes a resource for the liberation of women, and feminist theory leads to changed praxis (cf. “hermeneutics of creative ritualization” or “actualization”).

These hermeneutical principles are reflected in a statement produced by feminist authors meeting at the 2010 conference of the Society of Biblical Literature. They determined that “feminist” work—

• must challenge/destabilize/subvert the subordination of wo/men, rather than strengthen or reinforce it;
• must reflect appreciation of and respect for wo/men’s experience by acknowledging wo/men’s capacities and agency; […]
• must have as its consequence far-reaching changes in religion and society, as well as political and revolutionary significance. Hence, it must be practical, this-worldly, transformative, renewing, and transitional. 4

In short, feminist theology is not a theoretical academic pursuit, but is a means to an end: namely, to bring far-reaching revolutionary changes to the lives of women, the church, and wider society.

Theological Language

The critique of language is an important part of this revolutionary change. Most feminist theologians regard the masculine theological language of the Bible and the perceived masculine bias of traditional theological language as problematic, believing that “if God is male, then the male is God.” 5

At the more radical end, some feminist theologians use “G*d” or “God/dess” or Sophia rather than “God,” which is thought to be irretrievably linked to male patriarchal images of God; and “the*logy” or “thealogy” rather than “theology” (cf. Greek word theos is a masculine noun; thea is the feminine form). Other feminists use both male and female names, pronouns and images for God or gender-neutral names like Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer. Re-naming and re-imaging God is a key project for feminist theology, and these linguistic moves reflect significant departures from historic Christian doctrine.

Less radically, some major English Bible translations have adopted a gender-inclusive or gender-neutral approach, both in order to render the original languages more accurately in modern English, and to respond to changes in language that are the result of feminism. The principles of sound translation, and Bible translation in particular, are complex, and some of these translations have been less reliable than others—sacrificing accuracy for the sake of intelligibility or the avoidance of offence. 6

Irrespective of whether feminist convictions are accepted, the changes that feminism has brought to everyday language are a consideration for contemporary Bible translations, and the preaching and theological reflection that make use of them. For example, while the English Standard Version ( ESV ) retains the use of the generic “he,” it also points out in footnotes that the Greek word adelphoi (translated “brothers” in the main text) may in the New Testament “refer either to men or to both men and women who are siblings (brothers and sisters) in God’s family, the church” depending on the context. 7 Thus, while the ESV has not replaced “brothers” with “brothers and sisters” in the main text (cf. NIV 2011), the addition of these footnotes recognizes both the effect of feminism on language meaning and on readers of the ESV .

Engaging with Feminist Theology

These changes in everyday language are evidence of the far-reaching effects of feminism. The central premise of feminist theology—that the church, the Bible, and even the God of the Bible, are misogynistic and bad for women—has been accepted by many if not most people in the secular West. Hence, a resistance or hostility to the biblical gospel and historic Christianity provides the backdrop to most efforts at evangelism and outreach and impacts regular Christians in their daily lives.

Most denominations have faced debates about women’s ordination and the ministry of women, and many have conceded ground to feminist principles and exegesis. Even within denominations that have not changed their polity, individual churches and households can be divided on the role of women in the home and the church. An understanding of feminist theology and its effects are therefore necessary for effective ministry in most cultural settings.

However, there is some common ground between Bible-believing Christians and feminist theologians. For example, beliefs or practices that undermine the dignity and equality of women (e.g., unequal pay, pornography, domestic abuse, and sexual harassment) should be as abhorrent to Bible-believing Christians as they are to feminist theologians—even if we do not agree on the root cause of, or solution to, these problems.

At the heart of both feminist theology and evangelical theology is a question: What is the Bible? The feminist answer is that the Bible is a collection of fallible or at best unreliable human words that must be sifted and read with a hermeneutic of suspicion if they are to be good for women. The answer of the Bible itself is that the Scriptures are the Spirit-breathed authoritative life-giving true word of the living and true God (2Tim. 3:16), and that while the church may err, Scripture does not. 8

Further Reading

Evangelical non-feminist/complementarian resources

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Classic feminist theology texts

Classic evangelical feminist (egalitarian) texts

Overview of feminist theology from a feminist perspective

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