an essay on feminism

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.

Customize your course in 30 seconds

Which class are you in.

• Travelling Essay
• Picnic Essay
• Our Country Essay
• My Parents Essay
• Essay on Favourite Personality
• Essay on Memorable Day of My Life
• Essay on Knowledge is Power
• Essay on Gurpurab
• Essay on My Favourite Season
• Essay on Types of Sports

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Download the App

Essays About Feminism: Top 5 Examples Plus Prompts

When writing essays about feminism, there are a lot of aspects you can focus on. We have collected some of the best essay examples with prompts. 

Feminism is a socio-political movement that is about fighting for equal rights and opportunities for all genders. While many point its beginnings to the women’s rights movements in the 19th century, when women were liberated and finally allowed to vote, feminist thinking can actually be traced back to as early as the late 14th century with the works of French writer Christine De Pizan , touted the first feminist philosopher. 

Today, the definition of feminism has expanded to end discrimination, oppression and stereotyping of all genders from all walks of life. It aims to make radical reforms to eliminate cultural norms and push the legislation of equality-supporting laws. 

Because feminism is a widely relevant topic, you may be asked to write an essay about feminism either as a student or a professional. However, it may be difficult to find a starting point given the broad spectrum of areas in which feminism is found relevant. 

For help with your essays, check out our round-up of the best essays on feminism to provide inspiration:

1. Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit

2. bad feminist by roxane gay, 3. civic memory, feminist future by lidia yuknavitch, 4. trickle-down feminism by sarah jaffe, 5. emily ratajkowski explores what it means to be hyper feminine by  emily ratajkowski , 1. definition of feminism, 2. does feminism still matter in the workplace, 3. would you consider yourself a feminist, 4. historical evolution of feminism, 5. criticisms against feminism, 6. how can we achieve gender equality , 7. who are the feminists in your community and what are they fighting for.

“The battle with Men Who Explain Things has trampled down many women — of my generation, of the up-and-coming generation we need so badly, here and in Pakistan and Bolivia and Java, not to speak of the countless women who came before me and were not allowed into the laboratory, or the library, or the conversation, or the revolution, or even the category called human. 

Solnit starts with amusing narratives of real-life experiences with men who have critiqued her books wrongly. Solnit points out that men’s arrogance and tendency to explain things to women, thinking they know better, have forced women into silence and weakened their credibility even in places where their voices are crucial – such as in the court stand when women testify to being raped. Solnit, thus, emphasizes that the fight against mansplainers is important to the feminist movement. For more, check out these articles about feminism .

“I want to be independent, but I want to be taken care of and have someone to come home to. I have a job I’m pretty good at. I am in charge of things. I am on committees. People respect me and take my counsel. I want to be strong and professional, but I resent how hard I have to work to be taken seriously, to receive a fraction of the consideration I might otherwise receive. Sometimes I feel an overwhelming need to cry at work, so I close my office door and lose it.”

Gay reveals a series of secrets that make her believe she is a “bad feminst.” At first, she had tried to hide her fondness for men, fashion and thuggish rap, among many other things that gave her joy but went against the ideal feminist image etched in the mind of many. Eventually, Gay embraces the “mess of contradictions” that she is, proudly owning the label of a “bad feminist” while she speaks up on issues critical to the feminist movement and debunks myths on the unrealistic standards surrounding the sisterhood.

“​​There is no photo for what my father did to his daughters. It came into our bodies as a habit of being, a structure of consciousness, a way of life. Maybe it is akin to feeling discovered and conquered and colonized. Maybe the first colonizations are of the bodies of women and children, and from there they extend like the outstretched hand of a man grabbing land. Cultures.”

Yuknavitch highlights her rage against “fathers” both in her personal life and in each political administration that she survived. Yuknavitch described how these fathers and father images try to take control of others’ bodies and lives and crush others’ spirits. In her confrontation and memory of such men, however, Yuknavitch also learned to create art and find her feminist purpose.

“Women may be overrepresented in the growing sectors of the economy, but those sectors pay poverty wages. The public sector job cuts that have been largely responsible for unemployment remaining at or near 8 percent have fallen disproportionately on women (and women of color are hit the hardest). Those good union jobs disappear, and are replaced with a minimum-wage gig at Walmart—and even in retail, women make only 90 percent of what men make.”

Jaffe gives an in-depth view of the gains and impasse in the fight to improve women’s working opportunities. She stresses that women’s breakthroughs in the workplace may not always be a cause for celebration if these do not translate to long-term and more concrete changes for women to be treated better in the workplace. Jaffe encouraged feminists to continue organizing themselves to focus on solutions that can address the continued low wages of women, gender pay gaps and the minimal choice of professions offered to women.

“I often think about this. Why, as a culture, do we insist on separating smart and serious from sexy? Give women the opportunity to be whatever they want and as multifaceted as they can be.”

American model Ratajkowski writes a candid memoir on what it means to be hyper feminine in a society that represses and shames sexuality. She recounts how a misogynistic culture heavily influenced her early adventures on exploring her feminine side, how she took it to her advantage and turned being “sexy” into her strength. Ratajkowski also reveals how she feels about feminism today and women, in general, having their own decision and choices.

Writing Prompts on Essays about Feminism 

For more help in picking your next essay topic, check out these seven essay prompts that can get you started:

Feminism is largely believed to be women’s fight against the patriarchy. Could it be a fight against all forms of oppression, discrimination, objectification and stereotyping? Could it be something more? You may even investigate some common myths about feminism. You might be interested in our list of adjectives for strong women .

Now that several women are climbing to the top of corporate ladders, have the right to vote and could get a doctorate, does feminism remain relevant? 

Your article can explore the continued challenges of women in the workplace. You may also interview some working women who have faced obstacles toward certain goals due to discrimination and how they overcame the situation.

This would tie in closely to the topic on the definition of feminism. But this topic adds value and a personal touch as you share the reasons and narratives that made you realize you are or are not a feminist. 

A common misconception is that only women can be feminists. 

The First Wave of feminism started in the 19th century as protests on the streets and evolved into today’s Fourth Wave where technologial tools are leveraged to promote feminist advocacies. Look at each period of feminism and compare their objectives and challenges.

While feminism aims to benefit everybody, the movement has also earned the ire of many. Some people blame feminism for enabling hostility towards men, promiscuity and pornography, among others. You can also touch on the more controversial issue on abortion which feminists fight for with the popularizd slogan “My body, my choice.” You can discuss the law of abortion in your state or your country and what feminist groups have to say about these existing regulations.

Gender equality is pursued in various fields, especially where women have had little representation in the past. One example is the tech industry. Choose one sector you relate closely with and research on how gender equality has advanced in this area. It may be fun to also interview some industry leaders to know what policy frameworks they are implementing, and what will be their strategic direction moving forward. 

Everyone surely knows a handful of feminists in their social media networks. Interview some friends and ask about feminist projects they have worked on or are working on. Of course, do not forget to ask about the outcomes or targets of the project and find out who has benefitted from the cause. Are these mothers or young women? 

WRITING TIPS: Before you head on to write about feminism, check out our essay writing tips so you can have a struggle-free writing process. 

If writing an essay still feels like a lot of work, simplify it. Write a simple 5 paragraph essay instead

Yna Lim is a communications specialist currently focused on policy advocacy. In her eight years of writing, she has been exposed to a variety of topics, including cryptocurrency, web hosting, agriculture, marketing, intellectual property, data privacy and international trade. A former journalist in one of the top business papers in the Philippines, Yna is currently pursuing her master's degree in economics and business.

View all posts

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

First published: Content last modified:

• Tools and Resources
• Customer Services
• African Literatures
• Asian Literatures

• Table of Contents
• Random Entry
• Chronological
• Editorial Information
• About the SEP
• Editorial Board
• How to Cite the SEP
• Special Characters
• Advanced Tools
• Support the SEP
• PDFs for SEP Friends
• Make a Donation
• SEPIA for Libraries
• Entry Contents

Bibliography

Academic tools.

• Friends PDF Preview
• Author and Citation Info
• Back to Top

Feminist Perspectives on Power

Although any general definition of feminism would no doubt be controversial, it seems undeniable that much work in feminist theory is devoted to the tasks of critiquing gender subordination, analyzing its intersections with other forms of subordination such as racism, heterosexism, and class oppression, and envisioning prospects for individual and collective resistance and emancipation. Insofar as the concept of power is central to each of these theoretical tasks, power is clearly a central concept for feminist theory as well. And yet, curiously, it is one that is not often explicitly thematized in feminist work (exceptions include Allen 1998, 1999, Caputi 2013, Hartsock 1983 and 1996, Yeatmann 1997, and Young 1992). Indeed, Wendy Brown contends that “Power is one of those things we cannot approach head-on or in isolation from other subjects if we are to speak about it intelligently” (Brown 1988, 207). This poses a unique challenge for assessing feminist perspectives on power, as those perspectives must first be reconstructed from discussions of other topics. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify three main ways in which feminists have conceptualized power: as a resource to be (re)distributed, as domination, and as empowerment. After a brief discussion of the power debates in social and political theory, this entry will survey each of these feminist conceptions.

1. Defining power

2. power as resource: liberal feminist approaches, 3.1 phenomenological feminist approaches, 3.2 radical feminist approaches, 3.3 socialist feminist approaches, 3.4 intersectional approaches, 3.5 poststructuralist feminist approaches, 3.6 postcolonial and decolonial feminist approaches, 3.7 analytic feminist approaches, 4. power as empowerment, 5. concluding thoughts, other internet resources, related entries.

In social and political theory, power is often regarded as an essentially contested concept (see Lukes 1974 and 2005, and Connolly 1983). Although this claim is itself contested (see Haugaard 2010 and 2020, 4–10; Morriss 2002, 199–206 and Wartenberg 1990, 12–17), there is no doubt that the literature on power is marked by deep, widespread, and seemingly intractable disagreements over how the term should be understood.

One such disagreement pits those who define power as getting someone else to do what you want them to do, that is, as an exercise of power-over others, against those who define it as an ability or a capacity to act, that is, as a power-to do something. The classic formulation of the former definition is offered by Max Weber, who defines power as “the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance…” (1978, 53). Similarly, Robert Dahl offers what he calls an “intuitive idea of power” according to which “A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do” (1957, 202–03). Dahl’s discussion of power sparked a vigorous debate that continued until the mid-1970s, but even his sharpest critics seemed to concede his definition of power as an exercise of power-over others (see Bachrach and Baratz 1962 and Lukes 1974). As Steven Lukes notes, Dahl’s one-dimensional view of power, Bachrach and Baratz’s two-dimensional view, and his own three-dimensional view are all variations of “the same underlying conception of power, according to which A exercises power over B when A affects B in a manner contrary to B’s interests” (1974, 30). Similarly, but from a very different theoretical background, Michel Foucault’s highly influential analysis implicitly presupposes that power is a kind of power-over; and he puts it, “if we speak of the structures or the mechanisms of power, it is only insofar as we suppose that certain persons exercise power over others” (1983, 217). Notice that there are two salient features of this definition of power: power is understood in terms of power-over relations, and it is defined in terms of its actual exercise.

Classic articulations of power understood as power-to have been offered by Thomas Hobbes – power is a person’s “present means…to obtain some future apparent Good” (Hobbes 1985 (1641), 150) – and Hannah Arendt – power is “the human ability not just to act but to act in concert” (1970, 44). Arguing in favor of this way of conceptualizing power, Hanna Pitkin notes that the word “power” is related etymologically to the French pouvoir and the Latin potere , both of which mean to be able. “That suggests,” she writes, “that power is a something – anything – which makes or renders somebody able to do, capable of doing something. Power is capacity, potential, ability, or wherewithal” (1972, 276). Similarly, Peter Morriss (2002) and Lukes (2005) define power as a dispositional concept, meaning, as Lukes puts it, that power “is a potentiality, not an actuality – indeed a potentiality that may never be actualized” (2005, 69). (Note that this statement amounts to a significant revision of Lukes’s earlier analysis of power, in which he argued against defining power as power-to on the grounds that such a definition obscures “the conflictual aspect of power – the fact that it is exercised over people” and thus fails to address what we care about most when we decide to study power (1974, 31). For helpful discussion of whether Lukes’s embrace of the dispositional conception of power is compatible with his other theoretical commitments, see Haugaard (2010)). Some of the theorists who analyze power as power-to leave power-over entirely out of their analysis. For example, Arendt distinguishes power sharply from authority, strength, force, and violence, and offers a normative account in which power is understood as an end in itself (1970). As Jürgen Habermas has argued, this has the effect of screening any and all strategic understandings of power (where power is understood in the Weberian sense as imposing one’s will on another) out of her analysis (Habermas 1994). (Although Arendt defines power as a capacity, she also maintains that “power springs up between men when they act together and vanishes the moment they disperse” (1958, 200); hence, it is not clear whether she fully accepts a dispositional view of power). Others suggest that both aspects of power are important, but then focus their attention on either power-over (e.g., Connolly 1993) or power-to (e.g., Morriss 2002). Still others define power-over as a particular type of capacity, namely, the capacity to impose one’s will on others; on this view, power-over is a derivative form of power-to (Allen 1999, Lukes 2005). However, others have argued power-over and power-to refer to fundamentally different concepts and that it is a mistake to try to develop an account of power that integrates them (Pitkin 1972, Wartenberg 1990).

Another way of carving up the power literature is to distinguish between action-theoretical conceptions – that is, those that define power in terms of either the actions or the dispositional abilities of individual actors – and broader systemic or constitutive conceptions – that is, those that view power as systematically structuring possibilities for action, or, more strongly, as constitutive of social actors and the social world in which they act. On this way of distinguishing various conceptions of power, Hobbes and Weber are on the same side, since both of them understand power in primarily instrumentalist, individualist, and action-theoretical terms (Saar 2010, 10). The systemic conception, by contrast, views power as “the ways in which given social systems confer differentials of dispositional power on agents, thus structuring their possibilities for action” (Haugaard 2010, 425; see Clegg 1989). The systemic conception thus highlights the ways in which broad historical, political, economic, cultural, and social forces enable some individuals to exercise power over others, or inculcate certain abilities and dispositions in some actors but not in others. Saar argues, however, that the systemic conception of power should be understood not as an alternative to the action-theoretical conception of power, but rather as a more complex and sophisticated variant of that model. For, as he says, its “basic scenario remains individualistic at the methodological level: power operates on individuals as individuals, in the form of a ‘bringing to action’ or external determination” (Saar 2010, 14).

The constitutive conception of power pushes the insight of the systemic conception further by focusing on the constitutive relationships between power, individuals, and the social worlds they inhabit. The roots of this constitutive conception can be traced back to Spinoza (2002a and 2002b; Saar 2013), but variants of this view are also found in the work of more contemporary theorists such as Arendt and Foucault. Here it is important to note that Foucault’s work on power contains both action-theoretical and constitutive strands. The former strand is evident in his claim, cited above, that “if we speak of the structures or the mechanisms of power, it is only insofar as we suppose that certain persons exercise power over others” (Foucault 1983, 217), whereas the latter strand is evident in his definition of power as “the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization; as the processes which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses them;…thus forming a chain or system” (Foucault 1979, 92).

What accounts for the highly contested nature of the concept of power? One explanation is that how we conceptualize power is shaped by the political and theoretical interests that we bring to our study of it (Lukes 1986, Said 1986). For example, democratic theorists are interested in different things when they study power than are social movement theorists or critical race theorists or postcolonial theorists, and so on. Thus, a specific conceptualization of power could be more or less useful depending on the specific disciplinary or theoretical context in which it is deployed, where usefulness is evaluated in terms of how well it “accomplishes the task the theorists set for themselves” (Haugaard 2010, 426). On this view, if we suppose that feminists who are interested in power are interested in understanding and critiquing gender-based relations of domination and subordination as these intersect with other axes of oppression and thinking about how such relations can be transformed through individual and collective resistance, then we would conclude that specific conceptions of power should be evaluated in terms of how well they enable feminists to fulfill those aims.

Lukes suggests another, more radical, explanation for the essentially contested nature of the concept of power: our conceptions of power are, according to him, themselves shaped by power relations. As he puts it, “how we think about power may serve to reproduce and reinforce power structures and relations, or alternatively it may challenge and subvert them. It may contribute to their continued functioning, or it may unmask their principles of operation, whose effectiveness is increased by their being hidden from view. To the extent that this is so, conceptual and methodological questions are inescapably political and so what ‘power’ means is ‘essentially contested’…” (Lukes 2005, 63). The thought that conceptions of power are themselves shaped by power relations is behind the claim, made by many feminists, that the influential conception of power as power-over is itself a product of patriarchal domination (for further discussion, see section 4 below).

Those who conceptualize power as a resource understand it as a positive social good that is currently unequally distributed. For feminists who understand power in this way, the goal is to redistribute this resource so that women will have power equal to men. Implicit in this view is the assumption that power is, as Iris Marion Young puts it, “a kind of stuff that can be possessed by individuals in greater or lesser amounts” (Young 1990, 31).

The conception of power as a resource is arguably implicit in the work of some liberal feminists (Mill 1970, Okin 1989). For example, in Justice, Gender, and the Family , Susan Moller Okin argues that the modern gender-structured family unjustly distributes the benefits and burdens of familial life amongst husbands and wives. Okin includes power on her list of the benefits, which she calls “critical social goods.” As she puts it, “when we look seriously at the distribution between husbands and wives of such critical social goods as work (paid and unpaid), power, prestige, self-esteem, opportunities for self-development, and both physical and economic security, we find socially constructed inequalities between them, right down the list” (Okin, 1989, 136). Here, Okin seems to presuppose that power is a resource that is unequally and unjustly distributed between men and women; hence, one of the goals of feminism would be to redistribute this resource in more equitable ways.

Although she doesn’t discuss Okin’s work explicitly, Young offers a compelling critique of this view, which she calls the distributive model of power. First, Young maintains that it is wrong to think of power as a kind of stuff that can be possessed; on her view, power is a relation, not a thing that can be distributed or redistributed. Second, she claims that the distributive model tends to presuppose a dyadic, atomistic understanding of power; as a result, it fails to illuminate the broader social, institutional and structural contexts that shape individual relations of power. According to Young, this makes the distributive model unhelpful for understanding the structural features of domination. Third, the distributive model conceives of power statically, as a pattern of distribution, whereas Young, following Foucault (1980), claims that power exists only in action, and thus must be understood dynamically, as existing in ongoing processes or interactions. Finally, Young argues that the distributive model of power tends to view domination as the concentration of power in the hands of a few. According to Young, although this model might be appropriate for some forms of domination, it is not appropriate for the forms that domination takes in contemporary industrial societies such as the United States (Young 1990a, 31–33). On her view, in contemporary industrial societies, power is “widely dispersed and diffused” and yet it is nonetheless true that “social relations are tightly defined by domination and oppression” (Young 1990a, 32–33).

3. Power as Domination

Young’s critique of the distributive model points toward an alternative way of conceptualizing power, one that understands power not as a resource or critical social good, but instead views it as a relation of domination. Although feminists have often used a variety of terms to refer to this kind of relation – including “oppression,” “patriarchy,” “subjection,” and so forth –the common thread in these analyses is an understanding of power as an unjust or illegitimate power-over relation. In the remainder of this entry, I use the term “domination” simply to refer to unjust or oppressive power-over relations. In this section, I discuss the specific ways in which feminists with different political and philosophical commitments – influenced by phenomenology, radical feminism, Marxist socialism, intersectionality theory, post-structuralism, postcolonial and decolonial theory, and analytic philosophy – have conceptualized domination.

The locus classicus of feminist phenomenological approaches to theorizing male domination is Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex . Beauvoir’s text provides a brilliant analysis of the situation of women: the social, cultural, historical, and economic conditions that define their existence. Her diagnosis of women’s situation relies on the distinction between being for-itself – self-conscious subjectivity that is capable of freedom and transcendence – and being in-itself – the un-self-conscious things that are incapable of freedom and mired in immanence. Beauvoir argues that whereas men have assumed the status of the transcendent subject, women have been relegated to the status of the immanent Other. As she puts it in a famous passage from the Introduction to The Second Sex : “She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other” (Beauvoir, xxii). This distinction – between man as Subject and woman as Other – is the key to Beauvoir’s understanding of domination or oppression. She writes, “every time transcendence falls back into immanence, stagnation, there is a degradation of existence into the ‘en-soi’ – the brutish life of subjection to given conditions – and liberty into constraint and contingence. This downfall represents a moral fault if the subject consents to it; if it is inflicted upon him, it spells frustration and oppression. In both cases it is an absolute evil” (Beauvoir, xxxv). Although Beauvoir suggests that women are partly responsible for submitting to the status of the Other in order to avoid the anguish of authentic existence (hence, they are in bad faith) (see Beauvoir xxvii), she maintains that women are oppressed because they are compelled to assume the status of the Other, doomed to immanence (xxxv). Women’s situation is thus marked by a basic tension between transcendence and immanence; as self-conscious human beings, they are capable of transcendence, but they are compelled into immanence by cultural and social conditions that deny them that transcendence (see Beauvoir, chapter 21).

Some feminists have criticized Beauvoir's conception of oppression for its reliance on a problematic analogy between race and gender (see, for example, her claim that “there are deep similarities between the situation of woman and that of the Negro,” (Beauvoir, xxix)). Beauvoir's frequent use of such analogies, critics contend, erases the experience of Black women by implicitly coding all women as white and all Blacks as male (Gines (Belle) 2010 and 2017, Collins 2019, 194–198, and Simons 2002). As Kathryn T. Gines (now Kathryn Sophia Belle) argues further, Beauvoir's analysis deploys “comparative and competing frameworks of oppression” (Gines (Belle) 2014a). At times, Beauvoir treats not just sexism and racism but also antisemitism, colonialism, and class oppression comparatively, arguing that they rest of similar dynamics of Othering. Her comparative analysis of race and gender is most problematic in her frequent analogy between the situation of women and that of the slave. As Belle argues, this analogy not only obscures the experiences of Black female slaves, it also leads Beauvior to “engage in an appropriation of Black suffering in the form of slavery to advance her philosophical discussion of woman's situation” (265). At other times, Beauvoir treats racism, sexism, antisemitism, colonialism, and class oppression as competing frameworks and argues that gender subordination is the most significant and constitutive form of oppression. Both moves are problematic, according to Belle, the former for its erasure of the oppression of Black women and the latter for its privileging of gender oppression over other forms of oppression.

Feminist phenomenologists have engaged critically with Beauvoir's work while extending her insights into power. For example, Young argues that Beauvoir pays relatively little attention to the role that female embodiment plays in women’s oppression (Young 1990b, 142–3). Although Beauvoir does discuss women’s bodies in relation to their status as immanent Other, she tends to focus on women’s physiology and how physiological features such as menstruation and pregnancy tie women more closely to nature, thus, to immanence. In her essay, “Throwing Like a Girl,” Young draws on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological analysis of the lived body to analyze “the situatedness of the woman’s actual bodily movement and orientation to its surroundings and its world” (Young 1990b, 143). She notes that girls and women often fail to use fully the spatial potential of their bodies (for example, they throw “like girls”), they try not to take up too much space, and they tend to approach physical activity tentatively and uncertainly (Young 1990b, 145–147). Young argues that feminine bodily comportment, movement, and spatial orientation exhibit the same tension between transcendence and immanence that Beauvoir diagnoses in The Second Sex . “At the root of those modalities,” Young writes, “is the fact that the woman lives her body as object as well as subject. The source of this is that patriarchal society defines woman as object, as a mere body, and that in sexist society women are in fact frequently regarded by others as objects and mere bodies” (Young 1990b, 155). And yet women are also subjects, and, thus, cannot think of themselves as mere bodily objects. As a result, woman “cannot be in unity with herself” (Young 1990b, 155). Young explores the tension between transcendence and immanence and the lack of unity characteristic of feminine subjectivity in more detail in several other essays that explore pregnant embodiment, women’s experience with their clothes, and breasted experience (See Young 1990b, chapters 9–11).

Much important work in feminist phenomenology follows Young in drawing inspiration from Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of embodiment and intercorporeality (see Heinamaa 2003, Weiss 1999); like Young, these authors use a Merleau-Pontyian approach to phenomenology to explore the fundamental modalities of female embodiment or feminine bodily comportment. Feminists have also mined the work of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, for useful resources for feminist phenomenology (Al-Saji 2010 and Oksala 2016).

More generally, Oksala defends the importance of feminist phenomenology as an exploration of gendered experience against poststructuralist critics who find such a project hopelessly essentialist. While Oksala acknowledges that essentialism is a danger found in some work in feminist phenomenology – for example, she is critical of Sonia Kruks (2001) for “considering ‘female experience’ as an irreducible given grounded in a female body” (Oksala 2016, 72) – she also insists that a phenomenological analysis of experience is crucial for feminism. As she puts it, “it is my contention that feminist theory must ‘retrieve experience’, but this cannot mean returning to a pre discursive female experience grounded in the commonalities of women’s embodiment” (40). On her view, experience is always constructed in such a way that it “reflects oppressive discourses and power relations” (43); and yet, experience and thought or discourse are not co-extensive. This means that there is always a gap between our personal experience and the linguistic representations that we employ to make sense of that experience, and it is this gap that provides the space for contestation and critique. Thus, Oksala concludes, “experiences can contest discourses even if, or precisely because, they are conceptual through and through” (50). For Oksala, experience plays a crucial role in reinforcing and reproducing oppressive power relations, but radical reflection on our experience opens up a space for individual and collective resistance to and transformation of those power relations.

The concept of experience is also central to Mariana Ortega's analysis of Latina feminist phenomenology (Ortega 2016). Ortega reads the prominent Latina feminists Gloria Anzaldúa and María Lugones as phenomenologists “whose writings are deeply informed by their lived experience, specifically by their experience of marginalization and oppression as well as their experience of resistance” (7). By highlighting the experience of marginalized and oppressed selves who live their lives at the borderlands or in a state of in-betweenness, Latina feminist phenomenology, as Ortega reads it, offers an important corrective to and expansion of the critique of modern subjectivity in the European phenomenological tradition.

For other influential feminist-phenomenological analyses of domination see Bartky 1990, 2002, Bordo 1993, and Kruks 2001. For helpful overviews of feminist phenomenology, see Fisher and Embree 2000, and Heinamaa and Rodemeyer 2010. For a highly influential articulation of queer phenomenology, drawing on the work of Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Fanon, see Ahmed (2006). For a compelling phenomenological analysis of transgender experience, see Salamon (2010).

Unlike liberal feminists, who view power as a positive social resource that ought to be fairly distributed, and feminist phenomenologists, who understand domination in terms of a tension between transcendence and immanence, radical feminists tend to understand power in terms of dyadic relations of dominance/subordination, often understood on analogy with the relationship between master and slave.

For example, in the work of legal theorist Catharine MacKinnon, domination is closely bound up with her understanding of gender difference. According to MacKinnon, gender difference is simply the reified effect of domination. As she puts it, “difference is the velvet glove on the iron fist of domination. The problem is not that differences are not valued; the problem is that they are defined by power” (MacKinnon 1989, 219). If gender difference is itself a function of domination, then the implication is that men are powerful and women are powerless by definition. As MacKinnon puts it, “women/men is a distinction not just of difference, but of power and powerlessness….Power/powerlessness is the sex difference” (MacKinnon 1987, 123). (In this passage, MacKinnon glosses over the distinction, articulated by many second-wave feminists, between sex – the biologically rooted traits that make one male or female, traits that are often presumed to be natural and immutable – and gender – the socially and culturally rooted, hence contingent and mutable, traits, characteristics, dispositions, and practices that make one a woman or a man. This passage suggests that MacKinnon, like Judith Butler (1990) and other critics of the sex/gender distinction, thinks that sex difference, no less than gender difference, is socially constructed and shaped by relations of power.) If men are powerful and women powerless as such, then male domination is, on this view, pervasive. Indeed, MacKinnon claims that it is a basic “fact of male supremacy” that “no woman escapes the meaning of being a woman within a gendered social system, and sex inequality is not only pervasive but may be universal (in the sense of never having not been in some form” (MacKinnon 1989, 104–05). For MacKinnon, heterosexual intercourse is the paradigm of male domination; as she puts it, “the social relation between the sexes is organized so that men may dominate and women must submit and this relation is sexual – in fact, is sex” (MacKinnon 1987, 3). As a result, she tends to presuppose a dyadic conception of domination, according to which individual women are subject to the will of individual men. If male domination is pervasive and women are powerless by definition, then it follows that female power is “a contradiction in terms, socially speaking” (MacKinnon 1987, 53). The claim that female power is a contradiction in terms has led many feminists to criticize MacKinnon on the grounds that she denies women’s political agency and presents them as helpless victims (for exemplary versions of this criticism, see Brown 1995 and Butler 1997a).

Marilyn Frye likewise offers a radical feminist analysis of power that seems to presuppose a dyadic model of domination. Frye identifies several faces of power, one of the most important of which is access. As Frye puts it, “total power is unconditional access; total powerlessness is being unconditionally accessible. The creation and manipulation of power is constituted of the manipulation and control of access” (Frye 1983, 103). If access is one of the most important faces of power, then feminist separatism, insofar as it is a way of denying access to women’s bodies, emotional support, domestic labor, and so forth, represents a profound challenge to male power. For this reason, Frye maintains that all feminism that is worth the name entails some form of separatism. She also suggests that this is the real reason that men get so upset by acts of separatism: “if you are doing something that is so strictly forbidden by the patriarchs, you must be doing something right” (Frye 1983, 98). Frye frequently compares male domination to a master/slave relationship (see, for example, 1983, 103–105), and she defines oppression as “a system of interrelated barriers and forces which reduce, immobilize, and mold people who belong to a certain group, and effect their subordination to another group (individually to individuals of the other group, and as a group, to that group)” (Frye 1983, 33). In addition to access, Frye discusses definition as another, related, face of power. Frye claims that “the powerful normally determine what is said and sayable” (105). For example, “when the Secretary of Defense calls something a peace negotiation…then whatever it is that he called a peace negotiation is an instance of negotiating peace” (105). Under conditions of subordination, women typically do not have the power to define the terms of their situation, but by controlling access, Frye argues, they can begin to assert control over their own self-definition. Both of these – controlling access and definition – are ways of taking power. Although she does not go so far as MacKinnon does in claiming that female power is a contradiction in terms, Frye does claim that “if there is one thing women are queasy about it is actually taking power” (Frye 1983, 107).

A similar dyadic conception of male domination can arguably be found in Carole Pateman’s The Sexual Contract (1988) (although Pateman's work is heavily influenced by socialist feminism, her account of power is closer to radical feminism). Like MacKinnon, Pateman claims that gender difference is constituted by domination; as she puts it, “the patriarchal construction of the difference between masculinity and femininity is the political difference between freedom and subjection” (Pateman 1988, 207). She also claims that male domination is pervasive, and she explicitly appeals to a master/subject model to understand it; as she puts it, “in modern civil society all men are deemed good enough to be women’s masters” (Pateman 1988, 219). In Pateman’s view, the social contract that initiates civil society and provides for the legitimate exercise of political rights is also a sexual contract that establishes what she calls “the law of male sex-right,” securing male sexual access to and dominance over women (1988, 182). As Nancy Fraser has argued, on Pateman’s view, the sexual contract “institutes a series of male/female master/subject dyads” (Fraser 1993, 173). Fraser is highly critical of Pateman’s analysis, which she terms the “master/subject model,” a model that presents women’s subordination “first and foremost as the condition of being subject to the direct command of an individual man” (1993, 173). The problem with this dyadic account of women’s subordination, according to Fraser, is that “gender inequality is today being transformed by a shift from dyadic relations of mastery and subjection to more impersonal structural mechanisms that are lived through more fluid cultural forms” (1993, 180). Fraser suggests that, in order to understand women’s subordination in contemporary Western societies, feminists will have to move beyond the master/subject model to analyze how women’s subordination is secured through cultural norms, social practices, and other impersonal structural mechanisms. (For Pateman’s response to Fraser’s criticism, see Pateman and Mills (2007, 205–06)).

Although feminists such as Fraser, Judith Butler, and Wendy Brown have been highly critical of the radical feminist account of domination, analytic feminists have found this account more productive. For example, Rae Langton (2009) has used speech act theory to defend MacKinnon's claims that pornography both causes and constitutes women's subordination. More generally, Langton (2009) and Sally Haslanger (2012) have drawn on MacKinnon's work to develop an account of sexual objectification and to explore the ways that objectification is often obscured by claims to objectivity (for further discussion of Haslanger's work, see section 3.7 below).

According to the traditional Marxist account of power, domination is understood on the model of class exploitation; domination results from the capitalist appropriation of the surplus value that is produced by the workers. As many second wave feminist critics of Marx have pointed out, however, Marx’s categories are gender-blind (see, for example, Firestone 1970, Hartmann 1980, Hartsock 1983, Rubin 1976). Marx ignores the ways in which class exploitation and gender subordination are intertwined; because he focuses solely on economic production, Marx overlooks women’s reproductive labor in the home and the exploitation of this labor in capitalist modes of production. As a result of this gender-blindness, second wave Marxist or socialist feminists argued that Marx’s analysis of class domination must be supplemented with a radical feminist critique of patriarchy in order to yield a satisfactory account of women’s oppression; the resulting theory is referred to as dual systems theory (see, for example, Eisenstein 1979, Hartmann 1980). As Young describes it, “dual systems theory says that women’s oppression arises from two distinct and relatively autonomous systems. The system of male domination, most often called ‘patriarchy’, produces the specific gender oppression of women; the system of the mode of production and class relations produces the class oppression and work alienation of most women” (Young 1990b, 21). Although Young agrees with the aim of theorizing class and gender domination in a single theory, she is critical of dual systems theory on the grounds that “it allows Marxism to retain in basically unchanged form its theory of economic and social relations, on to which it merely grafts a theory of gender relations” (Young 1990b, 24). Young calls instead for a more unified theory, a truly feminist historical materialism that would offer a critique of the social totality.

In a later essay, Young offers a more systematic analysis of oppression, an analysis that is grounded in her earlier call for a comprehensive socialist feminism. Young identifies five faces of oppression: economic exploitation, socio-economic marginalization, lack of power or autonomy over one’s work, cultural imperialism, and systematic violence (Young 1992, 183–193). The first three faces of oppression in this list expand on the Marxist account of economic exploitation, and the last two go beyond that account, bringing out other aspects of oppression that are not well explained in economic terms. According to Young, being subject to any one of these forms of power is sufficient to call a group oppressed, but most oppressed groups in the United States experience more than one of these forms of power, and some experience all five (Young 1992, 194). She also claims that this list is comprehensive, both in the sense that “covers all the groups said by new left social movements to be oppressed” and that it “covers all the ways they are oppressed” (Young 1992, 181; for critical discussion, see Allen 2008b).

Nancy Hartsock offers a different vision of feminist historical materialism in her book Money, Sex, and Power : Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism (1983). In this book, Hartsock is concerned with “(1) how relations of domination along lines of gender are constructed and maintained and (2) whether social understandings of domination itself have been distorted by men’s domination of women” (Hartsock 1983, 1). Following Marx’s conception of ideology, Hartsock maintains that the prevailing ideas and theories of a time period are rooted in the material, economic relations of that society. This applies, in her view, to theories of power as well. Thus, she criticizes theories of power in mainstream political science for presupposing a market model of economic relations – a model that understands the economy primarily in terms of exchange, which is how it appears from the perspective of the ruling class rather than in terms of production, which is how it appears from the perspective of the worker. She also argues that power and domination have consistently been associated with masculinity. Because power has been understood from the position of the socially dominant – the ruling class and men – the feminist task, according to Hartsock, is to reconceptualize power from a specifically feminist standpoint, one that is rooted in women’s life experience, specifically, their role in reproduction. Conceptualizing power from this standpoint can, according to Hartsock, “point beyond understandings of power as power over others” (Hartsock 1983, 12). (We’ll come back to this point in section 4).

Socialist feminism fell largely out of fashion during the latter part of the 20th century, fueled in part by the rise of poststructuralism, the prominence of identity and recognition based politics, and the emergence of a neoliberal consensus (for a trenchant critique of these developments, see Fraser 1996 and 2013). However, in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008, socialist feminism, now often referred to as Social Reproduction Theory (SRT), has made a comeback. SRT has a long history, with important early contributions by Silvia Federici (1975) and Maria Mies (1986) and connections to the Italian wages for housework campaign that began in the 1970s; for more recent discussions, see Tithi Bhattacharya (2017), Federici (2014 and 2019), and Alessandra Mezzadri (2019). SRT is a Marxist feminist project that orients itself to a question that remains implicit in Marx's theory of value: how is labor power, which is the source of value and thus of exploitation in Marx's account, itself produced, reproduced, and maintained? SRT maintains that labor power is produced and reproduced outside of the official economy, largely through women's unpaid labor within the family or domestic sphere. For social reproduction theorists, the production of goods and services is thus possible only on the basis of (largely) unpaid social reproduction, which includes childbirth, domestic work, caring for children, the elderly and others who cannot work for wages, and so on. For Federici, this represents an ongoing process of expropriation akin to Marx's notion of primitive accumulation (Federici 2014). Social reproduction theorists understand production and reproduction as parts of an integrated system; indeed, they view the distinction between the two as ultimately misleading inasmuch as it obscures the ways in which social reproduction is itself productive of value (Mezzadri 2019). For a related attempt to understand capitalism as a social totality whose relations of production are made possible by the expropriation of socially reproductive labor, environmental resources, and the labor of dispossessed and colonized peoples, see Fraser in Fraser and Jaeggi (2018).

Theories of intersectionality highlight the complex, interconnected, and cross-cutting relationships between diverse modes of domination, including (but not limited to) sexism, racism, class oppression, and heterosexism. The project of intersectional feminism grew out of Black feminism, which, as scholars have recently noted, has a long tradition of examining the interconnections between racism and sexism, stretching back to the writing and activism of late 19th and early 20th century black feminists such as Maria W. Stewart, Ida. B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper, and Sojourner Truth (see Gines 2014b and Cooper 2016). Because these thinkers and activists did not use the term intersectionality, Gines (now Belle) characterizes their work as proto-intersectional, which she defines as follows: “identifying and combating racism and sexism – through activist organizing and campaigning – not only as separate categories impacting identity and oppression, but also as systems of oppression that work together and mutually reinforce one another, presenting unique problems for black women who experience both, simultaneously and differently than white women and/or black men” (Gines 2014b, 14). Other important antecedents to contemporary intersectionality theory include the Combahee River Collective’s notion of “interlocking systems of oppression” (CRC 1977), Deborah King’s analysis of multiple jeopardy and multiple consciousness (King 1988), and the work from the 1980s of Black feminists such as Audre Lorde (1984), Angela Davis (1984), and bell hooks (1981). As Mariana Ortega has argued (2016), there are also important conceptions of intersectionality developed in Latina feminism, particularly in Anzaldúa's account of the borderlands and mestiza consciusness (Anzaldúa 1987) and Lugones's account of the intermeshedness of race, sex, gender, sexual orientation, and class (Lugones 2003).

In other words, the concept of intersectionality has a long history and a complex genealogy (for discussions, see Cooper 2016, Collins 2011 and 2019, 123–126, and Nash 2019). Still, it is widely acknowledged that the contemporary discussion and use of the term intersectionality was sparked by the work of legal theorist Kimberle Crenshaw (Crenshaw 1991a and 1991b), specifically, by her critique of single-axis frameworks for understanding domination in the context of legal discrimination. A single-axis framework treats race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience. In so doing, such a framework implicitly privileges the perspective of the most privileged members of oppressed groups – sex or class-privileged Blacks in race discrimination cases; race or class-privileged women in sex discrimination cases. Thus, a single-axis framework distorts the experiences of Black women, who are simultaneously subject to multiple and intersecting forms of subordination. As Crenshaw explains, “the intersection of racism and sexism factors into Black women’s lives in ways that cannot be captured wholly by looking at the race or gender dimensions of those experiences separately” (Crenshaw 1991b, 1244).

In the thirty years since the publication of Crenshaw’s essays on intersectionality, this framework has become extraordinarily influential in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. Indeed, it has been called “the most important contribution that women’s studies, in conjunction with other fields, has made so far” (McCall 2005, 1771). However, feminist philosophers have noted that this influence has yet to be felt within the mainstream of the discipline of philosophy, where “intersectionality is largely ignored as a philosophical theme or framework” (Goswami, O’Donovan and Yount 2014, 6). Moreover, intersectionality is not without its feminist critics.

Some sympathetic critics of intersectionality have suggested that the concept is limited in that it focuses primarily on the action-theoretical level. A full analysis of the intertwining of racial, gender, and class-based subordination also requires, on this view, a systemic or macro-level concept that corresponds to the concept of intersectionality. Echoing the Combahee River Collective (CRC 1977), Patricia Hill Collins proposes the term “interlocking systems of oppression” to fulfill this role. As she explains, “the notion of interlocking oppressions refers to the macro-level connections linking systems of oppression such as race, class, and gender. This is the model describing the social structures that create social positions. Second, the notion of intersectionality describes micro-level processes – namely, how each individual and group occupies a social position within interlocking structures of oppression described by the metaphor of intersectionality. Together they shape oppression” (Collins et al . 2002, 82).

Others have worried that discussions of intersectionality tend to focus too much on relations and sites of oppression and subordination, without also taking into account relations of privilege and dominance. As Jennifer Nash has argued, this has led to “the question of whether all identities are intersectional or whether only multiply marginalized subjects have an intersectional identity” (Nash 2008, 9). Although some feminist scholars claim that intersectionality encompasses all subject positions, not just those that are marginalized or oppressed, Nash notes that “the overwhelming majority of intersectional scholarship has centred on the particular positions of multiply marginalized subjects” (Nash 2008, 9–10). The over-emphasis on oppression in theories of intersectionality leads theorists “to ignore the intimate connections between privilege and oppression,” for example, by “ignor[ing] the ways in which subjects might be both victimized by patriarchy and privileged by race” (Nash 2008, 12). In response to this concern, philosophers such as Ann Garry have offered a broader, more inclusive conception of intersectionality that emphasizes both oppression and privilege (see Garry 2011).

Rather than supplementing the notion of intersectionality with a macro-level concept of interlocking systems of oppression or broadening it to include relations of oppression and privilege, Naomi Zack argues that feminists should move beyond it. Zack maintains that intersectionality undermines its own goal of making feminism more inclusive. It does this, on Zack’s view, by dividing women into smaller and smaller groups, formed by specific intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and so forth. As Zack puts it, “as a theory of women’s identity, intersectionality is not inclusive insofar as members of specific intersections of race and class create only their own feminisms” (Zack 2005, 2). Because it tends toward “the reification of intersections as incommensurable identities,” Zack maintains that “intersectionality has not borne impressive political fruit” (Zack 2005, 18).

From a very different perspective, queer theorists such as Lynne Huffer and Jasbir Puar have also criticized intersectionality as a theory of identity. Unlike Zack, however, their concern is not with the proliferation of incommensurable identities but rather with the ways in which the notion of intersectionality remains, as Puar says, “primarily trapped within the logic of identity” (Puar 2012, 60). As Huffer puts the point: “the institutionalization of intersectionality as the only approach to gender and sexuality that takes difference seriously masks intersectionality’s investment in a subject-making form of power-knowledge that runs the risk of perpetuating precisely the problems intersectionality had hoped to alleviate” (Huffer 2013, 18). Puar argues further that the primary concepts of intersectionality, including gender, race, class, and sexuality, are themselves the product of Eurocentric, modernist, and colonial discourses and practices and, as such, are problematic from the point of view of postcolonial and transnational feminism (Puar 2012).

Finally, Anna Carastathis has argued that the problem with intersectionality theory lies in its very success (Carastathis 2013 and 2014). Intersectionality has been, on her view, too easily appropriated by white-dominated feminist theory, cut off from its roots in Black and women of color feminism, and incorporated into a self-congratulatory progressivist narrative according to which “intersectionality is celebrated as a methodological triumph over ‘previous’ essentialist and exclusionary approaches to theorizing identity and power relations” (Carastathis 2014, 59; for related critiques, see Nash 2008 and 2019 and Puar 2012). Carastathis cites Kimberle Crenshaw’s lament that intersectionality’s reach is wide but not very deep, and suggests that this may be the result of aversive racism – that is, a desire to assert or establish racial innocence, but without really coming to terms with their own internalized racism – on the part of white feminists (Carastathis, 2014, 68–69).

In response to these sorts of criticisms of intersectionality, some scholars have attempted to reformulate the concept by understanding it as a family resemblance concept (Garry 2011) or by highlighting its provisionality (Carastathis, 2014). Others have argued for an expansion of the intersectional framework to better account for the experiences of diasporic subjects (Sheth 2014) or for a rethinking of this framework in relation to a Deleuzian notion of assemblage (Puar 2007 and 2012). Collins (2019) has proposed the development of intersectionality as a critical social theory through a reflection on its genealogy, epistemology, and methodology.

Most of the work on power done by post-structuralist feminists has been inspired by Foucault. In his middle period works (Foucault 1977, 1978, and 1980), Foucault analyzes modern power as a mobile and constantly shifting set of force relations that emerge from every social interaction and thus pervade the social body. As he puts it, “power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere” (1978, 93). Foucault endeavors to offer a “micro-physics” of modern power (1977, 26), an analysis that focuses not on the concentration of power in the hands of the sovereign or the state, but instead on how power flows through the capillaries of the social body. Foucault criticizes previous analyses of power (primarily Marxist and Freudian) for assuming that power is fundamentally repressive, a belief that he terms the “repressive hypothesis” (1978, 17–49). Although Foucault does not deny that power sometimes functions repressively (see 1978, 12), he maintains that it is primarily productive; as he puts it, “power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth” (1977, 194). It also, according to Foucault, produces subjects. As he puts it, “the individual is not the vis-à-vis of power; it is, I believe, one of its prime effects” (1980, 98). According to Foucault, modern power subjects individuals, in both senses of the term; it simultaneously creates them as subjects by subjecting them to power. As we will see in a moment, Foucault’s account of subjection and his account of power more generally have been extremely fruitful, but also quite controversial, for feminists interested in analyzing domination.

It should come as no surprise that so many feminists have drawn on Foucault’s analysis of power. Foucault’s analysis of power has arguably been the most influential discussion of the topic over the last forty years; even those theorists of power who are highly critical of Foucault’s work acknowledge this influence (Lukes 2005 and, in a somewhat backhanded way, Morriss 2002). Moreover, Foucault’s focus on the local and capillary nature of modern power clearly resonates with feminist efforts to redefine the scope and bounds of the political, efforts that are summed up by the slogan “the personal is political.” At this point, the feminist work that has been inspired by Foucault’s analysis of power is so extensive and varied that it defies summarization (see, for example, Allen 1999 and 2008a, Bartky 1990, Bordo 2003, Butler 1990, 1993, 1997, Diamond and Quinby (eds) 1988, Fraser 1989, Hekman (ed) 1996, Heyes 2007, McLaren 2002, McNay 1992, McWhorter 1999, Sawicki 1990, and Young 1990). I will concentrate on highlighting a few central issues from this rich and diverse body of scholarship.

Several of the most prominent Foucaultian-feminist analyses of power draw on his account of disciplinary power in order to critically analyze normative femininity. In Discipline and Punish , Foucault analyzes the disciplinary practices that were developed in prisons, schools, and factories in the 18th century – including minute regulations of bodily movements, obsessively detailed time schedules, and surveillance techniques – and how these practices shape the bodies of prisoners, students and workers into docile bodies (1977, 135–169). In a highly influential essay, Sandra Bartky criticizes Foucault for failing to notice that disciplinary practices are gendered and that, through such gendered discipline, women’s bodies are rendered more docile than the bodies of men (1990, 65). Drawing on and extending Foucault’s account of disciplinary power, Bartky analyzes the disciplinary practices that engender specifically feminine docile bodies – including dieting practices, limitations on gestures and mobility, and bodily ornamentation. She also expands Foucault’s analysis of the Panopticon, Jeremy Bentham’s design for the ideal prison, a building whose spatial arrangement was designed to compel the inmate to surveil himself, thus becoming, as Foucault famously put it, “the principle of his own subjection” (1977, 203). With respect to gendered disciplinary practices such as dieting, restricting one’s movement so as to avoid taking up too much space, and keeping one’s body properly hairless, attired, ornamented and made up, Bartky observes “it is women themselves who practice this discipline on and against their own bodies….The woman who checks her make-up half a dozen times a day to see if her foundation has caked or her mascara run, who worries that the wind or rain may spoil her hairdo, who looks frequently to see if her stocking have bagged at the ankle, or who, feeling fat, monitors everything she eats, has become, just as surely as the inmate in the Panopticon, a self-policing subject, a self committed to relentless self-surveillance. This self-surveillance is a form of obedience to patriarchy” (1990, 80).

As Susan Bordo points out, this model of self-surveillance does not adequately illuminate all forms of female subordination – all too often women are actually compelled into submission by means of physical force, economic coercion, or emotional manipulation. Nevertheless, Bordo agrees with Bartky that “when it comes to the politics of appearance, such ideas are apt and illuminating” (1993, 27). Bordo explains that, in her own work, Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary power has been “extremely helpful both to my analysis of the contemporary disciplines of diet and exercise and to my understanding of eating disorders as arising out of and reproducing normative feminine practices of our culture, practices which train the female body in docility and obedience to cultural demands while at the same time being experienced in terms of power and control” (ibid). Bordo also highlights and makes use of Foucault’s understanding of power relations as inherently unstable, as always accompanied by, even generating, resistance (see Foucault 1983). “So, for example, the woman who goes into a rigorous weight-training program in order to achieve the currently stylish look may discover that her new muscles give her the self-confidence that enables her to assert herself more forcefully at work” (1993, 28).

Whereas Bartky and Bordo focus on Foucault’s account of disciplinary power, Judith Butler draws primarily on his analysis of subjection. For example, in her early and massively influential book, Gender Trouble (1990), Butler notes that “Foucault points out that juridical systems of power produce the subjects they subsequently come to represent. Juridical notions of power appear to regulate political life in purely negative terms…..But the subjects regulated by such structures are, by virtue of being subjected to them, formed, defined, and reproduced in accordance with the requirements of those structures” (1990, 2). The implication of this for feminists is, according to Butler, that “feminist critique ought also to understand how the category of ‘women’, the subject of feminism, is produced and restrained by the very structures of power through which emancipation is sought” (1990, 2). This Foucaultian insight into the nature of subjection – into the ways in which becoming a subject means at the same time being subjected to power relations – thus forms the basis for Butler’s trenchant critique of the category of women, and for her call for a subversive performance of the gender norms that govern the production of gender identity. In Bodies that Matter (1993), Butler extends this analysis to consider the impact of subjection on the bodily materiality of the subject. As she puts is, “power operates for Foucault in the constitution of the very materiality of the subject, in the principle which simultaneously forms and regulates the ‘subject’ of subjectivation” (1993, 34). Thus, for Butler, power understood as subjection is implicated in the process of determining which bodies come to matter, whose lives are livable and whose deaths grievable. In The Psychic Life of Power (1997b), Butler expands further on the Foucaultian notion of subjection, bringing it into dialogue with a Freudian account of the psyche. In the introduction to that text, Butler notes that subjection is a paradoxical form of power. It has an element of domination and subordination, to be sure, but, she writes, “if, following Foucault, we understand power as forming the subject as well, as providing the very condition of its existence and the trajectory of its desire, then power is not simply what we oppose but also, in a strong sense, what we depend on for our existence and what we harbor and preserve in the beings that we are” (1997b, 2). Although Butler credits Foucault with recognizing the fundamentally ambivalent character of subjection, she also argues that he does not offer an account of the specific mechanisms by which the subjected subject is formed. For this, Butler maintains, we need an analysis of the psychic form that power takes, for only such an analysis can illuminate the passionate attachment to power that is characteristic of subjection.

Although many feminists have found Foucault’s analysis of power extremely fruitful and productive, Foucault has also had his share of feminist critics. In a very influential early assessment, Nancy Fraser argues that, although Foucault’s work offers some interesting empirical insights into the functioning of modern power, it is “normatively confused” (Fraser 1989, 31). In his writings on power, Foucault seems to eschew normative categories, preferring instead to describe the way that power functions in local practices and to argue for the appropriate methodology for studying power. He even seems to suggest that such normative notions as autonomy, legitimacy, sovereignty, and so forth, are themselves effects of modern power (this point has been contested recently in the literature on Foucault; see Allen 2008a and Oksala 2005). Fraser claims that this attempt to remain normatively neutral or even critical of normativity is incompatible with the politically engaged character of Foucault’s writings. Thus, for example, although Foucault claims that power is always accompanied by resistance, Fraser argues that he cannot explain why domination ought to be resisted. As she puts it, “only with the introduction of normative notions of some kind could Foucault begin to answer such questions. Only with the introduction of normative notions could he begin to tell us what is wrong with the modern power/knowledge regime and why we ought to oppose it” (1989, 29). Other feminists have criticized the Foucaultian claim that the subject is an effect of power. According to feminists such as Linda Martín Alcoff and Seyla Benhabib, such a claim implies a denial of agency that is incompatible with the demands of feminism as an emancipatory social movement (Alcoff 1990, Benhabib 1992, and Benhabib et al. 1995; for a reply to this line of criticism, see Allen 2008a chs. 2 and 3). Finally, Nancy Hartsock (1990 and 1996) calls into question the usefulness of Foucault’s work as an analytical tool. Hartsock makes two related arguments against Foucault. First, she argues that his analysis of power is not a theory for women because it does not examine power from the epistemological point of view of the subordinated; in her view, Foucault analyzes power from the perspective of the colonizer, rather than the colonized (1990). Second, Foucault’s analysis of power fails to adequately theorize structural relations of inequality and domination that undergird women’s subordination; this is related to the first argument because “domination, viewed from above, is more likely to look like equality”(1996, 39; for a response to this critique, see Allen 1996 and 1999).

Despite these and other trenchant feminist critiques of Foucault (see, for example, Hekman, ed. 1996 and Ramazanoglu, ed. 1993), his analysis of power continues to be an extremely useful resource for feminist conceptions of domination. For recent important feminist work that draws on Foucault’s genealogical method to offer an intersectional analysis of racism and gender or sexual oppression see Feder (2007) and McWhorter (2009).

Postcolonial and decolonial theory offer overlapping critiques of historical and contemporary practices and discourses of imperial and colonial domination. Yet they also have distinct lineages, theoretical commitments, and implications (for helpful discussion, see Bhambra 2014 and Ramamurthy and Tambe 2017). Postcolonial theory rose to prominence in the late 20th century, in association with the groundbreaking work of Edward Said (1979) and the Subaltern Studies Collective, and has been most influential in literary and cultural studies. Taking as its primary point of reference the northern European colonization of Southeast Asia and focusing primarily on the discursive and cultural effects of colonialism, postcolonial theory is deeply (though not uncritically) influenced by poststruturalism, particularly the work of Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Decolonial theory emerged somewhat later, in the early 2000s, in association with the Latin American and Carribean scholars in the Modernity/Coloniality group. Its primary point of reference is the colonization of the Americas that began in 1492. Heavily influenced by Latin American Marxism, world systems theory, and indigenous political struggles, decolonial theory focuses on the connections between capitalism, colonialism, and racial hierarchies. Although these two approaches are not mutually exclusive, decolonial theory is often viewed as the more radical of the two, due to its broader historical range and its calls for epistemic decolonization and delinking from capitalist modernity/coloniality (Ruíz 2021).

Gayatri Spivak's “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988) is widely viewed as the watershed text in postcolonial feminism. Spivak's essay opens with a critical discussion of an exchange betweeen Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, in which they reject the idea of speaking for the oppressed, insisting instead that the oppressed should speak for themselves. The first part of her essay is devoted to a critique of this claim and of the myriad ways in which Foucault and Deleuze ignore the epistemic violence of imperialism. It is Foucault and Deleuze’s insistence that the oppressed “can speak and know their conditions” that leads Spivak to formulate her famous question, “can the subaltern speak?” (78). If, as Spivak goes on to suggest, the subaltern can not speak, then the “subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow” (83). Drawing on the example of the British banning the practice of sati in colonial India, Spivak suggests that the subaltern cannot speak because she is caught between imperialist discourse and patriarchal traditionalism, neither of which enables her to voice her experience: “Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the ‘third world woman’ caught between tradition and modernization” (102). In other words, there is no space from which the subaltern as female can speak and no way she can be heard or read.

Another emblematic text in postcolonial feminism is Chandra Talpade Mohanty's “Under Western Eyes” (1988). Mohanty's essay is framed as a critique of Western feminist analyses of “Third World Women” for their reductive and overly simplistic understandings of power and oppression. In such discourses, as Mohanty explains, “power is automatically defined in binary terms: people who have it (read: men) and people who do not (read: women). Men exploit, women are exploited. Such simplistic formulations are historically reductive; they are also ineffectual in designing strategies to combat oppressions” (73). By contrast, Mohanty calls for an intersectional understanding of power that refuses to homogenize or falsely universalize women's experience: “the…homogenization of class, race, religion, and daily material practices of women in the Third World can create a false sense of the commonality of oppressions, interests, and struggles between and among women globally. Beyond sisterhood there are still racism, colonialism, and imperialism” (77). Furthermore, by representing “Third World Women” as mere passive objects or victims of oppression, Western feminists implicitly position themselves as active subjects of resistance and revolutionary agents – which Mohanty calls “the colonialist move” (79).

Much of the agenda for decolonial feminism was set by Lugones in a pair of essays published in Hypatia (2007 and 2010). Building on the work of Anibal Quijano (2000), who argued that racialization is rooted in the structure of colonial capitalism, Lugones contends that gender itself is “a colonial concept and mode of organization of relations of production, property relations, of cosmologies and ways of knowing” (2007, 186). Seeing gender as a colonial concept enables feminists to break out of the ahistorical framework of patriarchy. As she explains: “To understand the relation of the birth of the colonial/modern gender system to the birth of global colonial capitalism–with the centrality of the coloniality of power to that system of global power–is to understand our present organization of life anew” (2007, 187). Lugones's decolonial feminist framework combines the insights of intersectionality theory with Quijano’s understanding of the coloniality of power (2007, 187–88). This brings into focus what Lugones calls the “modern/colonial gender system” (2007, 189), a system that is characterized by strict sexual dimorphism and presumed correspondence between biological sex and gender. In the later essay, Lugones simplifies her formulation somewhat: “I call the analysis of racialized, capitalist, gender oppression ”the coloniality of gender.“ I call the possibility of overcoming the coloniality of gender ”decolonial feminism“” (2010, 747).

Although most of the approaches to dominaiton discussed above have been informed by the Continental philosophical tradition, analytic feminists have made important contributions to the feminist literature on domination as well. For example, Ann Cudd (2006) draws on the framework of rational choice theory to analyze oppression (for related work on rational choice theory and power, see Dowding 2001 and 2009; for critical discussion, see Allen 2008c).

Cudd defines oppression in terms of four conditions: 1) the group condition, which states that individuals are subjected to unjust treatment because of their membership (or ascribed membership) in certain social groups (Cudd 2006, 21); 2) the harm condition, which stipulates that individuals are systematically and unfairly harmed as a result of such membership (Cudd 2006, 21); 3) the coercion condition, which specifies that the harms that those individuals suffer are brought about through unjustified coercion (Cudd 2006, 22); and 4) the privilege condition, which states that such coercive, group-based harms count as oppression only when there exist other social groups who derive a reciprocal privilege or benefit from that unjust harm (Cudd 2006, 22–23). Cudd then defines oppression as “an objective social phenomenon” characterized by these four conditions (Cudd 2006, 23).

As Cudd sees it, the most difficult and interesting question that an analysis of oppression must confront is the “endurance question: how does oppression endure over time in spite of humans’ rough natural equality?” (Cudd 2006, 25). Any satisfactory answer to this question must draw on a combination of empirical, social-scientific research and normative philosophical theorizing, inasmuch as a theory of oppression is an explanatory theory of a normative concept (Cudd 2006, 26). (That oppression is a normative – rather than a purely descriptive – concept is evident from the fact that it is defined as an unjust or unfair set of power relations). Cudd argues that social-theoretical frameworks such as functionalism, psychoanalysis, and evolutionary psychology are inadequate for theorizing oppression (Cudd 2006, 39–45). Structural rational choice theory, in her view, best meets reasonable criteria of explanatory adequacy and therefore provides the best social-theoretical framework for analyzing oppression. By appealing to a structural theory of rational choice, Cudd’s analysis of oppression avoids relying on assumptions about the psychology of individual agents. Rather, as Cudd puts it, “the structural theory of rational choice assesses the objective social rewards and penalties that are consequent on” the interactions and social status of specific group members and “uses these assessments to impute preferences and beliefs to individuals based purely on their social group memberships” (Cudd 2006, 45). But, as a structural theory of rational choice , the framework assumes “that agents behave rationally in the sense that they choose actions that maximize their (induced) expected utilities” (Cudd 2006, 46). In other words, structural rational choice theory models human actions as “(basically instrumentally rational) individual choice constrained within socially structured payoffs” (Cudd 2006, 37). When utilized to analyze oppression, structural rational choice theory suggests that the key to answering the endurance question lies in the fact that “the oppressed are co-opted through their own short-run rational choices to reinforce the long-run oppression of their social group” (Cudd 2006, 21–22).

Sally Haslanger’s work on gender and racial oppression, like Cudd’s, is heavily informed by the tools of analytic philosophy, though Haslanger also situates her work within the tradition of Critical Theory (see Haslanger 2012, 22–30). Haslanger distinguishes between two kinds of cases of oppression: agent oppression, in which “a person or persons (the oppressor(s)) inflicts harm upon another (the oppressed) wrongfully or unjustly” (314) and structural oppression, in which “the oppression is not an individual wrong but a social/political wrong; that is, it is a problem lying in our collective arrangements, an injustice in our practices or institutions” (314). Having made this distinction, Haslanger then argues for a mixed analysis of oppression that does not attempt to reduce agent oppression to structural oppression or vice versa. The danger of reducing structural oppression to agent oppression – what Haslanger calls the individualistic approach to oppression – is that doing so fails to acknowledge that “sometimes structures themselves, not individuals are the problem” (320). The danger of reducing agent oppression to structural oppression – what Haslanger calls the institutionalist approach – is that such an approach “fails to distinguish those who abuse their power to do wrong and those who are privileged but do not exploit their power” (320). Haslanger’s mixed approach, by contrast, is “attentive simultaneously [and, we might add, non-reductively] to both agents and structures” (11).

Haslanger also connects her account of structural domination and oppression to her analysis of gender. Haslanger offers what she calls a “focal analysis” of gender, according to which the core of gender is “the pattern of social relations that constitute the social classes of men as dominant and women as subordinate” (228). Other things – such as norms, identities, symbols, etc – are then gendered in relation to those social relations. On her analysis, gender categories are defined in terms of how one is socially positioned with respect to a broad complex of oppressive relations between groups that are distinguished from one another by means of sexual difference (see 229–230). As Haslanger explains, the “background idea” informing this account of gender is “that women are oppressed , and that they are oppressed as women ” (231).

By claiming that women are oppressed as women, Haslanger reiterates an earlier claim made by radical feminists such as Catharine MacKinnon (see, for example, MacKinnon 1987, 56–57). Indeed, Haslanger’s analysis is heavily indebted to MacKinnon’s work (see Haslanger 2012, 35–82), though she does not endorse MacKinnon’s strong claims about the link between objectivity and masculinity, nor does she adopt a dyadic (or, to use Haslanger’s terminology, reductively agent focused) understanding of oppression. But, like MacKinnon, Haslanger believes that “gender categories are defined relationally – one is a woman (or a man) by virtue of one’s position in a system of social relations” (58). This means that “one’s gender is an extrinsic property, and…it is not necessary that we each have the gender we now have, or that we have any gender at all” (58). Since the social relations in terms of which gender categories are defined are relations of hierarchical domination and structural oppression, “gender is, by definition, hierarchical: Those who function socially as men have power over those who function socially as women” (61). As Haslanger admits, referencing the sex/gender distinction, this does not mean that all males have power over all females – but it does mean that females who are not subordinated by males are not, strictly speaking, women, and vice versa. Moreover, as Haslanger notes, “MacKinnon’s account of gender, like others that define gender hierarchically, has the consequence that feminism aims to undermine the very distinction it depends upon. If feminism is successful, there will no longer be a gender distinction as such” because the complex of social relations of domination and structural oppression that give gender its meaning will no longer exist (62). While endorsing MacKinnon’s radical conclusion with respect to the currently existing gender categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman’, Haslanger’s own account offers a somewhat more nuanced view that allows for the future possibility of a kind of gender difference that would not be predicted on gender dominance: “gender can be fruitfully understood as a higher order genus that includes not only the hierarchical social positions of man and woman, but potentially other non-hierarchical social positions defined in part by reference to reproductive function. I believe gender as we know it takes hierarchical forms as men and women; but the theoretical move of treating men and women as only two kinds of gender provides resources for thinking about other (actual) genders, and the political possibility of constructing non-hierarchical genders” (235)

Up to this point, this entry has focused on power understood in terms of an oppressive or unjust power-over relationship. I have used the term “domination” to refer to such relationships, though some of the theorists discussed above prefer the terms “oppression” or “subjection,” and others refer to this phenomenon simply as “power.” However, a significant strand of feminist theorizing of power starts with the contention that the conception of power as power-over, domination, or control is implicitly masculinist. In order to avoid such masculinist connotations, many feminists from a variety of theoretical backgrounds have argued for a reconceptualization of power as a capacity or ability, specifically, the capacity to empower or transform oneself and others. Thus, these feminists have tended to understood power not as power-over but as power-to. Wartenberg (1990) argues that this feminist understanding of power, which he calls transformative power, is actually a type of power-over, albeit one that is distinct from domination because it aims at empowering those over whom it is exercised. However, most of the feminists who embrace this transformative or empowerment-based conception of power explicitly define it as an ability or capacity and present it as an alternative to putatively masculine notions of power-over. Thus, in what follows, I will follow their usage rather than Wartenberg’s.

For example, Jean Baker Miller claims that “women’s examination of power…can bring new understanding to the whole concept of power” (Miller 1992, 241). Miller rejects the definition of power as domination; instead, she defines it as “the capacity to produce a change – that is, to move anything from point A or state A to point B or state B” (Miller 1992, 241). Miller suggests that power understood as domination is particularly masculine; from women’s perspective, power is understood differently: “there is enormous validity in women’s not wanting to use power as it is presently conceived and used. Rather, women may want to be powerful in ways that simultaneously enhance, rather than diminish, the power of others” (Miller 1992, 247–248).

Similarly, Virginia Held argues against the masculinist conception of power as “the power to cause others to submit to one’s will, the power that led men to seek hierarchical control and…contractual constraints” (Held 1993, 136). Held views women’s unique experiences as mothers and caregivers as the basis for new insights into power; as she puts it, “the capacity to give birth and to nurture and empower could be the basis for new and more humanly promising conceptions than the ones that now prevail of power, empowerment, and growth” (Held 1993, 137). According to Held, “the power of a mothering person to empower others, to foster transformative growth, is a different sort of power from that of a stronger sword or a dominant will” (Held 1993, 209). On Held’s view, a feminist analysis of society and politics leads to an understanding of power as the capacity to transform and empower oneself and others.

This conception of power as transformative and empowering is also a prominent theme in lesbian feminism and ecofeminism. For example, Sarah Lucia Hoagland is critical of the masculine conception of power with its focus on “state authority, police and armed forces, control of economic resources, control of technology, and hierarchy and chain of command” (Hoagland 1988, 114). Instead, Hoagland defines power as “power-from-within” which she understands as “the power of ability, of choice and engagement. It is creative; and hence it is an affecting and transforming power but not a controlling power” (Hoagland 1988, 118). Similarly, Starhawk claims that she is “on the side of the power that emerges from within, that is inherent in us as the power to grow is inherent in the seed” (Starhawk 1987, 8). For both Hoagland and Starhawk, power-from-within is a positive, life-affirming, and empowering force that stands in stark contrast to power understood as domination, control or imposing one’s will on another.

A similar understanding of power can also be found in the work of the prominent French feminists Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous. Irigaray, for example, urges feminists to question the definition of power in phallocratic cultures, for if feminists “aim simply for a change in the distribution of power, leaving intact the power structure itself, then they are resubjecting themselves, deliberately or not, to a phallocratic order” (Irigaray 1985, 81), that is, to a discursive and cultural order that privileges the masculine, represented by the phallus. If we wish to subvert the phallocratic order, according to Irigaray, we will have to reject “a definition of power of the masculine type” (Irigaray 1985, 81). Some feminists interpret Irigaray’s work on sexual difference as suggesting an alternative conception of power as transformative, a conception that is grounded in a specifically feminine economy (see Irigaray 1981 and Kuykendall 1983). Similarly, Cixous claims that “les pouvoirs de la femme” do not consist in mastering or exercising power over others, but instead are a form of “power over oneself” (Cixous 1977, 483–84).

Along similar lines, Nancy Hartsock refers to the understanding of power “as energy and competence rather than dominance” as “the feminist theory of power” (Hartsock 1983, 224). Hartsock argues that precursors of this theory can be found in the work of some women who did not consider themselves to be feminists – most notably, Hannah Arendt, whose rejection of the command-obedience model of power and definition of ‘power’ as “the human ability not just to act but to act in concert” overlaps significantly with the feminist conception of power as empowerment (1970, 44). Arendt’s definition of ‘power’ brings out another aspect of the definition of ‘power’ as empowerment because of her focus on community or collective empowerment (on the relationship between power and community, see Hartsock 1983, 1996). This aspect of empowerment is evident in Mary Parker Follett’s distinction between power-over and power-with; for Follett, power-with is a collective ability that is a function of relationships of reciprocity between members of a group (Follett 1942). Hartsock finds it significant that the theme of power as capacity or empowerment has been so prominent in the work of women who have written about power. In her view, this points in the direction of a feminist standpoint that “should allow us to understand why the masculine community constructed…power, as domination, repression, and death, and why women’s accounts of power differ in specific and systematic ways from those put forward by men….such a standpoint might allow us to put forward an understanding of power that points in more liberatory directions” (Hartsock 1983, 226).

The notion of empowerment has also been taken up widely by advocates of so-called “power feminism.” A reaction against a perceived over-emphasis on women’s victimization and oppression in feminism of the 1980s, power feminism emerged in the 1990s in the writings of feminists such as Camille Paglia, Katie Roiphe, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Naomi Wolf. Although this movement has had more influence in mainstream media and culture than in academia – indeed, in many ways it can be read as a critique of academic feminism – it has also sparked scholarly debate. As Mary Caputi argues in her book Feminism and Power: The Need for Critical Theory (2013), power feminists reject not only the excessive focus on women’s victimization but also the claim, made by earlier empowerment theorists, that women are “sensitive creatures given more to a caring, interconnected web of human relationships than to the rugged individualism espoused by men” (Caputi 2013, 4). In contrast, power feminists endorse a more individualistic, self-assertive, even aggressive conception of empowerment, one that tends to define empowerment in terms of individual choice with little concern for the contexts within which choices are made or the options from which women are able to choose. Caputi argues that power feminism relies on and mimetically reproduces a problematically masculinist conception of power, one “enthralled by the display of ‘power over’ rather than ‘power with’…” (Caputi 2013, xv). As she puts it: “feminism must query the uncritical endorsement of an empowerment aligned with a masculinist will to power, and disown the tough, sassy, self-assured but unthinking ‘feminist’” (Caputi 2013, 17). Because of its tendency to mimic an individualistic, sovereign, and masculinist conception of power over, power feminism, according to Caputi, “does little, if anything, to rethink our conception of power” (Caputi 2013, 89). In order to prompt such a rethinking, Caputi turns to the resources of the early Frankfurt School of critical theory and to the work of Jacques Derrida.

Serene Khader’s Adaptive Preferences and Women’s Empowerment offers another rethinking of empowerment in feminist theory. Focusing on empowerment in the context of international development practice, Khader develops a deliberative perfectionist account of adaptive preferences. Rather than defining adaptive preferences in terms of autonomy deficits, Khader defines them as preferences “inconsistent with basic flourishing…that are formed under conditions nonconductive to basic flourishing and…that we believe people might be persuaded to transform upon normative scrutiny of their preferences and exposure to conditions more conducive to flourishing” (Khader 2011, 42). The perfectionism in her account leads her to emphasize the distinction between merely adaptive preferences – those formed through adaptation to existing social conditions – and what she calls “inappropriately adaptive preferences” (IAPs) – preferences that are adaptive to bad or oppressive social conditions and that are harmful to those who adopt them (52–53). She also insists that IAPs are most often selective rather than global self-entitlement deficits (109), which means that they impact individuals’ sense of their own worth or entitlement to certain goods not globally but rather in particular domains and contexts and in relation to certain specific individuals or groups. This allows her to acknowledge the psychological effects of oppression working through the mechanism of IAPs without denying the possibility of agency on the part of the oppressed.

Khader draws on her deliberative perfectionist account of IAPs to diagnose and move beyond certain controversies over the notion of empowerment that have emerged in feminist development practice and theorizing. As the concept of women’s empowerment has become central to international development practice, feminists have raised concerns about the ideological effects of this shift. While acknowledging that the language of empowerment in development practice can have ideological effects, Khader addresses these concerns by providing a clearer conception of empowerment than the one implicit in the development literature and emphasizing what she understands as the normative core of this concept, its relation to human flourishing. She defines empowerment as the “ process of overcoming one or many IAPs through processes that enhance some element of a person’s concept of self-entitlement and increase her capacity to pursue her own flourishing ” (Khader 2011, 176). This definition of empowerment enables her to rethink certain dilemmas of empowerment that have emerged in development theory and practices. For example, many development practitioners define empowerment in terms of choice, and then struggle to make sense of apparently self-subordinating choices. If choice equals empowerment, then does this mean that the choice to subordinate or disempower oneself is an instance of empowerment? Khader’s finely grained analysis provides an elegant way out of this dilemma by emphasizing the conditions under which choices are made and the tradeoffs among different domains or aspects of flourishing that these conditions may necessitate. Discussing a case of young women in Tanzania who chose to undergo clitoridectomy after receiving education about the practice aimed at empowering them, Khader writes: “Are the young women who choose clitoridectomy disempowered because they have few options for unambiguously pursuing their flourishing or are they empowered because they have exercised agential capacities by making a choice? My analysis of IAP allows us to say both” (187). For Khader, empowerment is a messy, complex, and incremental concept. Her analysis of empowerment enables us to see that “self-subordinating choices can have selective empowering effects under disempowering conditions” (189). But the normative core of her account, its deliberative perfectionism, insists that “a situation where one cannot seek one’s basic flourishing across multiple domains is a tragic one” (189).

The concept of power is central to a wide variety of debates in feminist philosophy. Indeed, the very centrality of this concept to feminist theorizing creates difficulties in writing an entry such as this one: since the concept of power is operative on one way or another in almost all work in feminist theory, it is extremely difficult to place limits on the relevant sources. Throughout, I have emphasized those texts and debates in which the concept of power is a central theme, even if sometimes an implicit one. I have also prioritized those authors and texts that have been most influential within feminist philosophy, as opposed to the wider terrain of feminist theory or gender studies, though I acknowledge that this distinction is difficult to maintain and perhaps not always terribly useful. Debatable as such framing choices may be, they do offer some much needed help in delimiting the range of relevant sources and providing focus and structure to the discussion.

• Ahmed, Sara, 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others , Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
• Alcoff, Linda, 1990. “Feminist Politics and Foucault: The Limits to a Collaboration,” in Arlene Dallery and Charles Scott (eds.), Crises in Continental Philosophy , Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
• Allen, Amy, 1996. “Foucault on Power: A Theory for Feminists,” in Susan Hekman (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Michel Foucault , University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press.
• –––, 1998. “Rethinking Power,” Hypatia , 13: 21–40.
• –––, 1999. The Power of Feminist Theory: Domination, Resistance, Solidarity , Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
• –––, 2008a. The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory , New York: Columbia University Press.
• –––, 2008b. “Power and the Politics of Difference: Oppression, Empowerment, and Transnational Justice,” Hypatia , 23(3): 156–172.
• –––, 2008c. “Rationalizing Oppression,” Journal of Power , 1(1): 51–65.
• Al-Saji, Alia, 2010. “Bodies and Sensings: On the Uses of Husserlian Phenomenology for Feminist Theory,” Continental Philosophy Review , 43(1): 13–37.
• Anzaldúa, Gloria, 1987, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza , San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books.
• Arendt, Hannah, 1958. The Human Condition , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• –––, 1970. On Violence , New York: Harcourt Brace & Co..
• Bachrach, P. and Baratz, M.S., 1962. “The Two Faces of Power,” American Political Science Review , 56: 941–52.
• Bartky, Sandra, 1990. Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression , New York: Routledge.
• –––, 2002. “Sympathy and Solidarity” and Other Essays , Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
• Beauvoir, Simone de, 1974. The Second Sex , New York: Vintage Books.
• Benhabib, Seyla, 1992. Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics , New York: Routledge.
• Benhabib, Seyla, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser, 1995. Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange , Linda Nicholson (ed.). New York: Routledge.
• Bhambra, Gurminder, 2014. “Postcolonial and decolonial dialogues,” Postcolonial Studies , 17(2): 115–121.
• Bhattacharya, Tithi (ed.), 2017. “Introduction: Mapping Social Reproduction Theory,” in Bhattacharya (ed.), Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression , London: Pluto Press.
• Bordo, Susan, 1993. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body , Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
• Brown, Wendy, 1988. Manhood and Politics: A Feminist Reading in Political Theory , Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield.
• –––, 1995. “The Mirror of Pornography,” in States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Butler, Judith, 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity , New York: Routledge.
• –––, 1993. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ , New York: Routledge.
• –––, 1997a. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative , New York: Routledge.
• –––, 1997b. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection , Stanford: Stanford University Press.
• Caputi, Mary, 2013. Feminism and Power: The Need for Critical Theory , Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
• Carastathis, Anna, 2013. “Basements and Intersections” Hypatia , 28(4): 698–715.
• –––, 2014. “Reinvigorating Intersectionality as a Provisional Concept,” in Goswami, O’Donovan and Yount (eds.), Why Race and Gender Still Matter: An Intersectional Approach , New York: Routledge.
• Cixous, Hélène, 1977. “Entrieten avec Françoise van Rossum-Guyon,” Revue des sciences humaines , 168: 479–493.
• Clegg, Stewart, 1989. Frameworks of Power , London: Sage.
• Collins, Patricia Hill, 2011. “Piecing Together a Genealogical Puzzle: Intersectionality and American Pragmatism,” European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy , 3(2): 88–112.
• –––, 2019. Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory , Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
• Collins, Patricia Hill, et al ., 2002. “Symposium on West and Fenstermaker’s ‘Doing Difference’,” in Sarah Fenstermaker and Candace West (eds.), Doing Gender, Doing Difference , New York: Routledge.
• Combahee River Collective, 1981. “A Black Feminist Statement (1977),” in Cherrie Moraga and Glora Anzaldua (eds.), This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color , New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press.
• Connolly, William, 1993. The Terms of Political Discourse (third edition), Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Cooper, Brittney, 2016. “Intersectionality,” in Lisa Disch and Mary Hawkesworth (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Crenshaw, Kimberle, 1991a. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,” in Katharine T. Barlett and Rosanne Kennedy (eds.), Feminist Legal Theory: Readings in Law and Gender , Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
• –––, 1991b. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review , 43(6): 1241–1299.
• Cudd, Ann, 2006. Analyzing Oppression , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Dahl, Robert, 1957. “The Concept of Power,” Behavioral Science , 2: 201–15.
• Davis, Angela, 1983. Women, Race and Class , New York: Vintage.
• Diamond, Irene and Lee Quinby (eds.), 1988. Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance , Boston: Northeastern University Press.
• Dowding, Keith, 2001. “Rational Choice Approaches to Analyzing Power,” in Nash and Scott (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Political Sociology , Oxford: Blackwell.
• –––, 2009. “Rational Choice Approaches,” in Clegg and Haugaard (eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Power , London: Sage.
• Eisenstein, Zillah, 1979. “Developing a Theory of Capitalist Patriarchy,” in Eisenstein (ed.), Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism , New York: Monthly Review Press.
• Feder, Ellen, 2007. Family Bonds: Genealogies of Race and Gender , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Federici, Silvia, 1975. Wages Against Housework , Bristol: Falling Wall Press.
• –––, 2014. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation , Brooklyn: Autonomedia.
• –––, 2019. “Social Reproduction Theory: History, Issues and Present Challenges,” Radical Philosophy , 2(4): 55–57.
• Fisher, Linda, and Lester Embree (eds.), 2000. Feminist Phenomenology , Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Press.
• Firestone, Shulamith, 1970. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution , New York: William Morrow and Company.
• Follett, Mary Parker, 1942. “Power,” in Dynamic Administration: The Collected Papers of Mary Parker Follett , Henry C. Metcalf and L. Urwick (eds.). New York: Harper.
• Foucault, Michel, 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison , trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: Vintage.
• –––, 1979. The History of Sexuality , Volume 1: An Introduction , trans. Robert Hurley, New York: Vintage.
• –––, 1980. “Two Lectures”in Colin Gordon (ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 , New York: Pantheon.
• –––, 1983. “Afterword: The Subject and Power” in Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics , 2nd edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Fraser, Nancy, 1989. Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory , Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
• –––, 1993. “Beyond the Master/Subject Model: Reflections on Carole Pateman’s Sexual Contract,” Social Text , 37: 173–181.
• –––, 1996. Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the ‘Postsocialist’ Condition , New York: Routledge.
• –––, 2013. Fortunes of Feminism: From State Managed Capitailsm to Neoliberal Crisis , London: Verso.
• Fraser, Nancy and Rahel Jaeggi, 2018. Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory , Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Frye, Marilyn, 1983. The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory , Freedom, California; The Crossing Press.
• Garry, Ann, 2011. “Intersectionality, Metaphors, and the Multiplicity of Gender,” Hypatia , 26(4): 826–850.
• Gines, Kathryn T. (now Kathryn Sophia Belle), 2010. “Sartre, Beauvoir, and the Race/Gender Analogy: A Case for Black Feminist Philosophy,” in Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, Kathryn T. Gines, and Donna-Dale Marcano (eds.), Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy , Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
• –––, 2014a. “Comparative and Competing Frameworks of Oppression in Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex ,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal , 35 (1–2): 251–273.
• –––, 2014b. “Race Women, Race Men and Early Expressions of Proto-Intersectionality, 1930s-1930s,” in Goswami, O’Donovan, and Yount (eds.), Why Race and Gender Still Matter: An Intersectional Approach , New York: Routledge.
• –––, 2017. “Simone de Beauvoir and the Race/Gender Analogy in The Second Sex Revisited,” in Nancy Bauer and Laura Hengehold (eds.), A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir , Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell.
• Goswami, Namita, Maeve M. O’Donovan and Lisa Yount (eds.), 2014. Why Race and Gender Still Matter: An Intersectional Approach , New York: Routledge.
• Habermas, Jürgen, 1994. “Hannah Arendt’s Communications Concept of Power,” in Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman (eds.), Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays , Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
• Hartmann, Heidi, 1980. “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Toward a More Progressive Union,” in Lydia Sargent (ed.), Women and Revolution , Boston: South End Press.
• Hartsock, Nancy, 1983. Money, Sex, and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism , Boston: Northeastern University Press.
• –––, 1990. “Foucault on Power: A Theory for Women?” in Linda Nicholson (ed.), Feminism/Postmodernism , New York: Routledge.
• –––, 1996. “Community/Sexuality/Gender: Rethinking Power,” in Nancy J. Hirschmann and Christine Di Stefano (eds.), Revisioning the Political: Feminist Reconstructions of Traditional Concepts in Western Political Theory , Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
• Haslanger, Sally, 2012. Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Haugaard, Mark, 2010. “Power: A ‘Family Resemblance’ Concept,” European Journal of Cultural Studies , 13(4): 419–438.
• –––, 2020. The Four Dimensions of Power: Understanding Domination, Empowerment and Democracy , Manchester: Manchester University Press.
• Heinamaa, Sara, 2003. Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir , Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
• Heinamaa, Sara and Lanei Rodemeyer (eds.), 2010. Feminist Phenomenologies : Special Issue of Continental Philosophy Review , 43(1): 1–140.
• Hekman, Susan (ed.), 1996. Feminist Interpretations of Michel Foucault , University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press.
• Held, Virginia, 1993. Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Heyes, Cressida, 2007. Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Hoagland, Sarah Lucia, 1988. Lesbian Ethics: Toward a New Value , Palo Alto: Institute of Lesbian Studies.
• Hobbes, Thomas, 1985 (1641). Leviathan , New York: Penguin Books.
• hooks, bell, 1981. Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism , Boston: South End Press.
• Huffer, Lynne, 2013. Are the Lips a Grave? A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Irigaray, Luce, 1981. “And the One Doesn’t Stir Without the Other,” trans. Hélène Vivienne Wenzel. Signs , 7(1): 60–67.
• –––, 1985. This Sex Which Is Not One , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
• Khader, Serene, 2011. Adaptive Preferences and Women’s Empowerment , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Kruks, Sonia, 2001. Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
• Kuykendall, Eléanor H., 1983. “Toward an Ethic of Nurturance: Lluce Irigaray on Mothering and Power,” in Joyce Trebillcot (ed.), Mothering: Essays in Feminist Theory , Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
• Langton, Rae, 2009. Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectification , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Lorde, Audre, 1984. Sister/Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde , Freedom, CA: Crossing Press.
• Lugones, María, 2003. Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions , Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
• –––, 2007. “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System,” Hypatia , 22 (1): 186–209.
• –––, 2010. “Toward a Decolonial Feminism,” Hypatia , 25: (4): 742–759
• Lukes, Steven, 1974. Power: A Radical View , London: Macmillan.
• –––, 1986. “Introduction” in Steven Lukes (ed.), Power , Oxford: Blackwell.
• –––, 2005. Power: A Radical View , 2nd expanded edition. London: Macmillan.
• MacKinnon, Catharine, 1987. Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 1989. Toward a Feminist Theory of the State , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• McCall, Leslie, 2005. “The Complexity of Intersectionality,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society , 30(3): 1771–1800.
• McLaren, Margaret, 2002. Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity , Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
• McNay, Lois, 1992. Foucault and Feminism: Power, Gender, and the Self , Boston: Northeastern University Press.
• McWhorter, Ladelle, 1999. Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization , Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
• –––. 2009. Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A Genealogy , Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press.
• Mezzadri, Alessandra, 2019. “On the Value of Social Reproduction,” Radical Philosophy , 2(4): 33–41.
• Mies, Maria, 1986. Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labor , London: Zed Books.
• Mill, John Stuart, 1970. “The Subjection of Women” in Alice Rossi (ed.), Essays on Sex Equality , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Miller, Jean Baker, 1992. “Women and Power” in Thomas Wartenberg (ed.), Rethinking Power , Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
• Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 1988. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Feminist Review , 30: 61–88.
• Morriss, Peter, 2002. Power: A Philosophical Analysis , 2nd edition. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
• Nash, Jennifer, 2008. “Re-thinking Intersectionality.” Feminist Review , 89: 1–15.
• –––, 2019. Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality , Durham, NC: Duke University Presss.
• Okin, Susan Moller, 1989. Justice, Gender and the Family , New York: Basic Books.
• Oksala, Johanna, 2005. Foucault on Freedom , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 2016. Feminist Experiences: Foucauldian and Phenomenological Investigations , Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
• Ortega, Mariana, 2016. In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self , Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
• Pateman, Carole, 1988. The Sexual Contract , Stanford: Stanford University Press.
• Pateman, Carole, and Charles Mills, 2007. Contract and Domination , Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel, 1972. Wittgenstein and Justice: On the Significance of Ludwig Wittgenstein for Social and Political Thought , Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
• Puar, Jasbir, 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times , Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
• –––, 2012. “‘I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess’: Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory,” PhiloSOPHIA , 2(1): 49–66.
• Quijano, Anibal, 2000. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantla: Views from South , 1(3): 533–580.
• Ramamurthy, Priti and Ashwini Tambe, 2017. “Preface,” in Decolonial and Postcolonial Approaches: A Dialogue , Special Issue of Feminist Studies , 43(3): 503–511.
• Ramazanoglu, Caroline (ed.), 1993. Up Against Foucault: Explorations of some tensions between Foucault and feminism , New York: Routledge.
• Rubin, Gayle, 1976. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex,” in Rayna Reiter (ed.), Toward an Anthropology of Women , New York: Monthly Review Press.
• Ruíz, Elena, 2021. “Postcolonial and Decolonial Theories,” in Kim Q. Hall and Ásta (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Philosophy , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Saar, Martin, 2010. “Power and Critique,” Journal of Power , 3(1): 7–20.
• –––, 2013. Die Immanenz der Macht: Politische Theorie nach Spinoza , Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag.
• Said, Edward, 1979. Orientalism , New York: Vintage Books.
• –––, 1986. “Foucault and the Imagination of Power,” in David Couzens Hoy (ed.), Foucault: A Critical Reader , Oxford: Blackwell.
• Salamon, Gayle, 2010. Assuming a Body: Transgender and the Rhetorics of Materiality , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Sawicki, Jana, 1991. Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power, and the Body , New York: Routledge.
• Sheth, Falguni, 2014. “Interstitiality: Making Space for Migration, Diaspora, and Racial Complexity,” Hypatia , 29(1): 75–93.
• Simons, Margaret, 2002. “Beauvoir and the Problem of Racism,” in Julie K. Ward and Tommy L. Lott (eds.), Philosophers on Race: Critical Essays , Oxford: Blackwell.
• Spinoza, Benedict de, 2002a. “Theological-political Treatise,” in M. L. Morgan (ed.), Complete Works , Indianapolis: Hackett, pp. 383–583.
• –––, 2002b. “Political Treatise,” in M. L. Morgan (ed), Complete Works , Indianapolis: Hackett, pp. 676–754.
• Spivak, Gayatri, 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?”in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture , Basingstoke: Macmillan.
• Starhawk, 1987. Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Authority, and Mystery , San Francisco: Harper.
• Wartenberg, Thomas, 1990. The Forms of Power: From Domination to Transformation , Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
• Weber, Max, 1978. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology , trans. Ephraim Fischoff et al., Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
• Weiss, Gail, 1999. Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality , New York: Routledge.
• Yeatmann, Anna, 1997. “Feminism and Power,” in Mary Lyndon Shanley and Uma Narayan (eds.), Reconstructing Political Theory: Feminist Perspectives , University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press.
• Young, Iris Marion, 1990a. Justice and the Politics of Difference , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• –––, 1990b. Throwing Like a Girl And Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory , Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• –––, 1992. “Five Faces of Oppression” in Thomas Wartenberg (ed.), Rethinking Power , Albany: State University of New York Press.
• Zack, Naomi, 2005. Inclusive Feminism: A Third Wave Theory of Women’s Commonality , Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

[Please contact the author with suggestions.]

Arendt, Hannah | Beauvoir, Simone de | -->critical theory --> | existentialism | feminist philosophy, approaches: analytic philosophy | feminist philosophy, approaches: continental philosophy | feminist philosophy, approaches: intersections between analytic and continental philosophy | feminist philosophy, interventions: liberal feminism | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on class and work | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on sex and gender | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on the body | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on the self | Foucault, Michel | identity politics | Marx, Karl | phenomenology | race

Copyright © 2021 by Amy Allen < ara17 @ psu . edu >

• Accessibility

Support SEP

Mirror sites.

View this site from another server:

• Info about mirror sites

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright © 2023 by The Metaphysics Research Lab , Department of Philosophy, Stanford University

Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

25,000+ students realised their study abroad dream with us. Take the first step today

Meet top uk universities from the comfort of your home, here’s your new year gift, one app for all your, study abroad needs, start your journey, track your progress, grow with the community and so much more.

Verification Code

An OTP has been sent to your registered mobile no. Please verify

Thanks for your comment !

Our team will review it before it's shown to our readers.

• School Education /

✍️Essay on Feminism for Students: Samples 150, 250 Words

• Updated on  
• Nov 2, 2023

In a society, men and women should be considered equal in every aspect. This thought is advocated by a social and political movement i.e. feminism . The word feminism was coined by the French Philosopher Charles Fourier in 1837. He was known for his strong belief in equal rights for women as men in every sector, be it the right to vote, right to work, right to decide, right to participate in public life, right to own property, etc. Feminism advocates the rights of women with respect to the equality of gender . There are different types of feminism i.e. liberal, radical, Marxist, cultural, and eco-feminism. Stay tuned and have a look at the following sample essay on feminism!

Also Read: Popular Struggles and Movements

Essay on Feminism 150 Words

India is a land of diversity of which 52.2% are women as per an estimate for the year 2023. This doesn’t mean that every woman is getting basic fundamental rights in society. We should not neglect the rights of women and treat them as a weaker sex. Women are equally strong and capable as men. To advocate this thought a movement called Feminism came into existence in 1837. Feminism is a movement that advocates the equality of women in social, political, and economic areas. 

India is up eight notches in #WorldEconomicForum ’s annual gender ranking. And Iceland is #1 for women, again, for the 14th year in a row. @namitabhandare ’s newsletter, #HTMindtheGap looks at why. Plus the week’s other gender stories https://t.co/9Fen6TaEnb Subscribe here… pic.twitter.com/r6XfFMINO0 — Hindustan Times (@htTweets) June 25, 2023

Traditionally, women were believed to stay at home and there were severe restrictions imposed on them. They were not allowed to go out, study, work, vote, own property, etc. However, with the passage of time, people are becoming aware of the objective of feminism. Any person who supports feminism and is a proponent of equal human rights for women is considered a feminist. 

Feminism is a challenge to the patriarchal systems existing in society. Despite this strong movement burning in high flames to burn the orthodox and dominant culture, there are still some parts of the world that are facing gender inequality. So, it is our duty to make a world free of any discrimination. 

Essay on Feminism 250 Words

Talking about feminism in a broader sense, then, it is not restricted only to women. It refers to the equality of every sex or gender. Some people feel offended by the concept of feminism as they take it in the wrong way. There is a misconception that only women are feminists. But this is not the case. Feminists can be anyone who supports the noble cause of supporting the concept of providing equal rights to women.

Feminism is not restricted to single-sex i.e. women, but it advocates for every person irrespective of caste, creed, colour, sex, or gender. As an individual, it is our duty to help every person achieve equal status in society and eradicate any kind of gender discrimination . 

Equality helps people to live freely without any traditional restrictions. At present, the Government of India is also contributing to providing equal rights to the female sector through various Government schemes like Beti Bachao Beti Padhao, Pradhan Mantri Mahila Shakti Kendra, One Stop Center, and many more. 

Apart from these Government policies, campaigns like reproductive rights or abortion of unwanted pregnancy also give women the right to choose and lead their life without any external authority of a male. 

Feminism has also supported the LGBTIQA+ community so that people belonging to this community could come out and reveal their identity without any shame. The concept of feminism also helped them to ask for equal rights as men and women. Thus, it could be concluded that feminism is for all genders and a true feminist will support every person to achieve equal rights and hold a respectable position in society.

Check Out: Women Equality Day

Also Read: National Safe Motherhood Day

Relevant Blogs

Feminism is a movement which has gained momentum to advocate against gender discrimination. It supports the thought that women should get equal rights as men in society.

The five main principles of feminism are gender equality, elimination of sex discrimination, speaking against sexual violence against women, increasing human choice and promoting sexual freedom.

The main point of feminism is that there should be collective efforts to end sexism and raise our voices against female sex exploitation. It is crucial to attain complete gender equality and remove any restrictions on the female sex.

For more information on such interesting topics, visit our essay writing page and follow Leverage Edu .

Kajal Thareja

Hi, I am Kajal, a pharmacy graduate, currently pursuing management and is an experienced content writer. I have 2-years of writing experience in Ed-tech (digital marketing) company. I am passionate towards writing blogs and am on the path of discovering true potential professionally in the field of content marketing. I am engaged in writing creative content for students which is simple yet creative and engaging and leaves an impact on the reader's mind.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Contact no. *

Connect With Us

25,000+ students realised their study abroad dream with us. Take the first step today.

Resend OTP in

Need help with?

Study abroad.

UK, Canada, US & More

IELTS, GRE, GMAT & More

Scholarship, Loans & Forex

Country Preference

New Zealand

Which English test are you planning to take?

Which academic test are you planning to take.

Not Sure yet

When are you planning to take the exam?

Already booked my exam slot

Within 2 Months

Want to learn about the test

Which Degree do you wish to pursue?

When do you want to start studying abroad.

January 2024

September 2024

What is your budget to study abroad?

How would you describe this article ?

Please rate this article

We would like to hear more.

Have something on your mind?

Make your study abroad dream a reality in January 2022 with

India's Biggest Virtual University Fair

Essex Direct Admission Day

Why attend .

Don't Miss Out

What is Feminism?

Feminism has many definitions depending on who you ask, but Britannica provides a simple framework: it’s the belief in the social, economic, and political equality of the sexes. No one should be refused certain rights – such as the right to vote, to hold political office, and to work outside the home – because of their sex or gender. Feminism goes beyond basic rights, however, and seeks deeper cultural shifts like an end to sexism and intersectional oppression based on gender, race, sexuality, and class. In this article, we’ll cover a brief history of feminism, different types of feminism, and whether we still need feminism today.

At its core, feminism is the belief that women deserve equal social, economic, and political rights and freedoms. Over the years, feminism has focused on issues like the right to vote, reproductive and sexual freedom, and equal pay. Feminism has also explored racism, gender norms, self-expression, and much more.

A history of feminist movements

There have always been cultures where women held power, like ancient Sparta where women could own and inherit property, make business transactions, and receive a good education. There have also always been women who fought back against patriarchal cultures. However, “feminism” as we know it is a fairly new concept. Mary Wollstonecraft published “A Vindication of the Rights of Women” in 1792, and while she’s considered a feminist icon today, that term wasn’t applied in her time. The term became more well-known in the 1890s in Great Britain and America.

This is when “ the first wave ” of feminism began to surge. The movement was closely tied with abolitionist movements and focused on suffrage. In 1848, at the Seneca Falls Convention , three hundred attendants agreed on the movement’s goals and strategies. Around the world, women’s rights slowly began to improve. In 1893, New Zealand allowed women to vote in the national elections. The US gave women the right to vote in 1920 while Great Britain followed in 1928.

The second wave began in the 1960s. It was aligned with the anti-war and Civil Rights movements. Reproductive rights and issues related to sexuality also became more prominent. Feminism became more intellectually diverse and complex during these years, as well. Capitalism, the role of women, sexuality, and gender were all discussed as feminist movements around the world became less elitist and more inclusive than during the first wave.

Third-wave feminism is trickier to define, but it both built on and challenged what second-wave feminism started. Third-wave feminism embraced individuality, irony, and the right to self-expression, which included attire and cosmetics their second-wave mothers might have considered oppressive and sexist. The internet played a big role during this era, as well, as it helped spread creative, multicultural feminist content. With its diversity of ideas, third-wave feminism represents a less cohesive movement than the first and second waves.

Are we in the fourth wave of feminism? The wave metaphors are not perfect, but given massive shifts in societies around the world, it’s safe to say that feminism is in a different era compared to the 1990s-2010s. There have been renewed attacks against women’s rights , especially reproductive rights, while the rise of social media gave feminist activists more tools. The fourth wave also represents the most diverse and inclusive version of feminism so far.

Consider taking an online course on  Feminism and Social Justice  to learn more.

Feminism: three main types

Feminism may seem simple at its core, but there are many different types . Here are three of the main ones to know:

Liberal feminism

Liberal feminism is what most people think of when they hear the word “feminist.” It can also be described as “mainstream feminism.” As defined by philosopher Alison Jagger, liberal feminism focuses on political rights and equality in education and the workplace. That includes issues like equal access to education, equal pay, safer working conditions, and an end to job segregation based on sex. Liberal feminism is also concerned with private life as the distribution of unpaid work at home impacts a woman’s ability to participate in public life. In the United States, liberal feminists focused on the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have amended the constitution to ensure legal gender equality . Feminists worked on the ERA in the 1960s and 1970s, but it was never ratified by enough states.

Over the years, liberal feminism has faced criticism on how it measures success and equality by patriarchal standards and fails to analyze gender, race, and class. Liberal feminism can also fail to challenge institutional power and end up reinforcing destructive capitalist cycles. With its focus on what individual women can do to “get ahead,” liberal feminism often fails some of society’s most vulnerable.

Radical feminism

As the name suggests, radical feminism is more aggressive. It focuses on dismantling the patriarchy and traditional gender roles by ensuring reproductive rights, critiquing the nuclear family and motherhood, and challenging institutional power. Rather than trying to change things through established systems, radical feminists are more inclined to change the systems themselves. The movement rose during the 1960s when women in the anti-war and Civil Rights movements found themselves sidelined. Many activists founded feminist groups and embraced more radical ideas.

Today, radical feminism is often linked to trans-exclusionary radical feminism, which denies that trans women are real women. The term “TERF” originated in the 1970s when radical feminists began to split over support of trans women. Trans-exclusionary radical feminists also call themselves “gender critical.” Because of the negative connotations, feminists who support trans women tend to not identify as radical feminists.

Intersectional feminism

Intersectional feminism examines how sexism, racism, classism, and xenophobia intersect and form systems of oppression. It counters “white feminism,” which by ignoring racial oppression, can support white supremacy. White feminism was born during feminism’s earliest days as the most famous figureheads – like Elizabeth Cady Stanton- only cared about suffrage for white women . The suffragettes also excluded poor, working women and dismissed issues involving wages, working hours, and unions.

There have always been feminists embracing and advocating for intersectional thinking, but the term “intersectionality” was coined in a 1989 paper. In the paper, critical legal and race scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw showed how the intersection of race and gender impacted the experiences of Black men and women in the legal system. Sociologist Patricia Hill Collins’ 1990 book Black Feminist Thought is another essential text on intersectionality and how oppression based on race, gender, class, sexuality, and nation forms what Collins calls “a matrix of domination.” Today, intersectional feminism continues to broaden society’s ideas about feminism, power, and oppression.

Does the world still need feminism?

Is feminism still necessary in today’s world? When we look at women’s rights globally, it’s obvious we do. According to the World Economic Forum’s 2022 Global Gender Gap Report , it will take 132 years to reach full gender parity. The COVID-19 pandemic did not help improve women’s rights as women and girls felt the economic impacts harder, had their unpaid work increase, endured more gender-based violence , and experienced more stress. Women are also more affected by climate change , especially in rural areas. In certain places – like some African countries – men have to travel further to find work while women stay behind to run the household, take care of kids, and protect their land. However, their authority may not be protected by law. When women are given more power, however, they make more sustainable decisions, improve food security, and reduce energy demands.

In some areas, feminist movements are met with brutal violence. On September 16, 2022, 22-year-old Mahsa Amini was detained by Iran’s morality police. She died in custody. Her death sparked one of the largest protest movements since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Led primarily by women, the protests demanded equality and an end to Iran’s oppressive government. Protestors in the Kurdish provinces (Mash Amini was Kurdish) have been especially brave as women remove their hijabs in the streets and cut off their hair. The government response has been violent. According to Human Rights Activists , at least 328 people have been killed – including children – while almost 15,000 have been arrested. The protests in Iran are just one example of a feminist movement facing significant backlash.

Has feminism “won” anywhere?

In certain places, the need for feminism and support for feminist movements is clear. However, what about countries where feminists have supposedly “won,” like the United States? The reality is not as victorious as some might hope. In 2017, writer and editor Amy Alexander wrote a piece for NPR critiquing feminism’s enduring focus on white women and marketing over substance. Alexander writes that feminism seems “more concerned with promoting superficial trappings of genuine equality than with doing the tough work required to address the hard, cold facts of gender and racial inequality.”

Writer Moira Donegan also delves into this shallow, shiny feminism in her newsletter “Not the Fun Kind” and piece “Potemkin Feminism,” which argues that feminism’s trendiness hides the fact it doesn’t have real institutional power. Long-fought-for issues, like the gender pay gap, persist. According to Payscale’s 2022 gender pay gap report , American women earn about 82 cents for every dollar a man earns. When the report controls for job title, education, experience, hours worked, and so on, women earn 99 cents for every dollar a man earns. Race impacts the pay gap, as well; Black women are most likely to be paid less even when they have the same level of experience and the same job as a white man. In 2022, feminism’s lack of real power was perhaps made most clear when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. No society has truly reached equality. Even in places where significant gains have been made, feminism is far from irrelevant.

You may also like

16 Inspiring Civil Rights Leaders You Should Know

15 Trusted Charities Fighting for Housing Rights

15 Examples of Gender Inequality in Everyday Life

11 Approaches to Alleviate World Hunger 

15 Facts About Malala Yousafzai

12 Ways Poverty Affects Society

15 Great Charities to Donate to in 2024

15 Quotes Exposing Injustice in Society

14 Trusted Charities Helping Civilians in Palestine

The Great Migration: History, Causes and Facts

Social Change 101: Meaning, Examples, Learning Opportunities

Rosa Parks: Biography, Quotes, Impact

About the author, emmaline soken-huberty.

Emmaline Soken-Huberty is a freelance writer based in Portland, Oregon. She started to become interested in human rights while attending college, eventually getting a concentration in human rights and humanitarianism. LGBTQ+ rights, women’s rights, and climate change are of special concern to her. In her spare time, she can be found reading or enjoying Oregon’s natural beauty with her husband and dog.

Essay on Feminism | 500+ Words Long

Feminism is a powerful movement that has played a significant role in shaping our world. It is a belief in the equal rights, opportunities, and treatment of all genders. In this essay, I will argue for the importance of feminism, a movement that has made significant strides towards gender equality. By exploring its history, examining its goals, and highlighting its impact on society, I aim to convey why feminism is vital for a fair and just world.

The History of Feminism

Feminism has a long and diverse history that dates back to the 19th century. It emerged as a response to the widespread inequality and discrimination faced by women. Early feminists, such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, fought for women’s suffrage, paving the way for women to have the right to vote. The history of feminism is marked by countless individuals and movements that have pushed for gender equality and challenged societal norms.

Equality for All Genders

One of the core principles of feminism is the belief in equality for all genders. It acknowledges that discrimination and inequality affect not only women but also people of all gender identities. Feminism seeks to break down traditional gender roles and stereotypes, allowing everyone to pursue their interests and dreams without limitations. It advocates for a society where every person’s worth and potential are recognized, regardless of their gender.

Empowerment and Choice

Feminism empowers individuals to make choices about their lives, bodies, and careers based on their own desires and goals. Moreover, it emphasizes that women and all individuals should have control over their bodies, including decisions about reproductive health. Consequently, by advocating for choice, feminism ensures that people can lead fulfilling lives that align with their values and aspirations

Challenging Gender Stereotypes

Feminism challenges harmful gender stereotypes that limit the potential of individuals. Stereotypes, such as the idea that women are less capable in STEM fields or that men should not express vulnerability, have long hindered progress. Feminism encourages society to break free from these stereotypes, allowing people to pursue their interests and talents regardless of societal expectations.

Addressing Gender-Based Violence

Gender-based violence, including domestic violence and sexual harassment, is a pressing issue that feminism addresses. It advocates for the safety and well-being of all individuals, working to create a world where no one has to live in fear of violence due to their gender. Feminism has been instrumental in raising awareness about these issues and pushing for legal and social changes to protect survivors.

Intersectionality

Intersectionality is a crucial concept within feminism, recognizing that individuals face overlapping forms of discrimination and privilege based on factors such as race, class, sexuality, and more. Feminism strives to be inclusive and intersectional, acknowledging that the fight for gender equality is interconnected with broader struggles for social justice. This approach ensures that feminism is accessible and relevant to people from diverse backgrounds.

Progress and Achievements

Over the years, feminism has achieved significant progress. Women’s suffrage, reproductive rights, and anti-discrimination laws are just a few examples of the victories won through feminist activism. Women have broken barriers in various fields, from science to politics to sports, showcasing the immense potential that can be unlocked when gender equality is pursued.

Ongoing Challenges

While feminism has made remarkable progress, challenges still exist. Gender pay gaps, underrepresentation of women in leadership roles, and violence against women continue to be issues that require attention and action. Feminism remains a driving force in addressing these challenges and pushing for a more equitable society.

Conclusion of Essay on Feminism

In conclusion, feminism is a powerful movement that promotes equality, empowerment, and justice for all genders. It has a rich history of challenging discrimination, advocating for equal rights, and empowering individuals to make choices about their lives. Feminism’s impact on society is undeniable, as it has brought about significant progress while continuing to address ongoing challenges. By acknowledging and supporting feminism, we contribute to a world where every person can live free from discrimination and fully realize their potential. Feminism is not just a movement; it is a vision for a more equitable and inclusive future that benefits us all.

Also Check: List of 500+ Topics for Writing Essay

334 Feminism Essay Topics & Examples

If you’re looking for original feminist topics to write about, you’re in luck! Our experts have collected this list of ideas for you to explore.

📝 Key Points to Use to Write an Outstanding Feminism Essay

🌟 top feminism title ideas, 🏆 best feminism essay topics & examples, 🥇 most interesting feminist topics to write about, 📌 creative feminist essay titles, ✅ simple & easy feminism essay titles, 🔍 interesting topics to write about feminism, 📑 good research topics about feminism, ❓ feminism questions for essay.

You may find yourself confused by various theories, movements, and even opinions when writing a feminism essay, regardless of your topic. Thus, producing an excellent paper becomes a matter of more than merely knowing your facts.

You should be able to explain difficult concepts while coincidentally touching upon fundamental points of feminist theory. Here are some starter examples of crucial essay-writing points, which can make your work better:

• Research and create a bibliography before beginning to write. There are various book and journal titles available both online and in libraries, and using them defines your essay’s credibility. You may use both books published long ago, such as “The Second Sex” by Simone de Beauvoir, and modern-day publications. Referencing reliable sources throughout your work will help you convince your readers that your approach is factual and in line with the main trends of the academic community.
• Writing a feminism essay outline beforehand will save you precious time. Not only because it is a tool to get your thoughts in order before beginning to write but also because it allows you to judge whether you have covered the subject thoroughly. Furthermore, structuring beforehand enables you to understand possible drawbacks of your previous research, which you can promptly correct.
• Explain the history behind your problem. Doing so allows you to set the scene for your essay and quickly introduce it to an audience, who may not be as well versed in feminism essay topics as you. Furthermore, you can use your historical introduction later as a prerequisite to explaining its possible future effects.
• Be aware of the correct terminology and use it appropriately. This action demonstrates a profound knowledge of your assigned issue to your readers. From women’s empowerment and discrimination to androcentrism and gynocriticism, track the terms you may need to implement throughout your work.
• Do not overlook your title as a tool to gain your readers’ attention. Your papers should interest people from the beginning and making them want to read more of your work. Writing good feminism essay titles is a great start to both catching their attention and explaining what your central theme is.
• Read available feminism essay examples to understand the dos and don’ts that will help you write your own paper. Plagiarism and inspiration are different concepts, and you can get great ideas from others’ work, so long as you do not copy them!

After you have done your research, drafted an outline, and read some sample works, you are ready to begin writing. When doing so, you should not avoid opposing opinions on topics regarding feminism, and use them to your advantage by refuting them.

Utilizing feminist criticism will allow you to sway even those with different perspectives to see some aspects worthy of contemplation within your essay. Furthermore, it is a mark of good academism, to be able to defend your points with well-rounded counterarguments!

Remember to remain respectful throughout your essay and only include trusted, credible information in your work. This action ensures that your work is purely academic, rather than dabbling in a tabloid-like approach.

While doing the latter may entertain your readers for longer, the former will help you build a better demonstration of your subject, furthering good academic practices and contributing to the existing body of literature.

Find more points and essays at IvyPanda!

• 21st Century Patriarchy.
• Third Wave Feminism.
• Men in the Movement.
• Gender Roles in Sports.
• Femininity in Media.
• The History of Feminist Slogans.
• Must-Read Feminist Books.
• Feminist Perspective in Politics.
• Gender Equality in Patriarchal Society.
• Feminism & Contemporary Art.
• Feminism in “A Doll’s House” by Henrik Ibsen Nora is referred by her husband as a songbird, a lark, a squirrel, names that suggest how insignificant she is to her.
• Feminism: Benefits over Disadvantages They believe that feminists make the importance of family less critical than it used to be, which affects children’s lives and their psychological state.
• Feminist Approach to Health In general feminist recognize gender as an important aspect and believe that gender inequality essentially exist.
• The Great Gatsby: Analysis and Feminist Critique The feminist critique is an aspect that seeks to explore the topic of men domination in the social, economic, and political sectors.
• Feminist Perspective: “My Last Duchess”, “To His Coy Mistress”, and “The Secretary Chant” He thinks such behavior is offensive to his position and his power, this is why this woman is in the past, and the other one is waiting for him downstairs to enlarge Duke’s collection of […]
• Hedda Gabler: Feminist Ideas and Themes Central to the female world was the woman with knowledge.”Think of the sort of life she was accustomed to in her father’s time.
• Female Characters in Shakespeare’s “Othello”: A Feminist Critique This shows that Desdemona has completely accepted and respected her role as a woman in the society; she is an obedient wife to Othello.
• Feminism in “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood Religion in Gilead is the similar to that of the current American society especially, the aspect of ambiguity which has been predominant with regard to the rightful application of religious beliefs and principles.
• Feminist Criticism in Literature: Character of Women in Books Wright The unimportance of women in the play is a critical factor for the women should follow all the things that their men counterparts impose on them.
• Top Themes About Feminism It’s a movement that is mainly concerned with fighting for women’s rights in terms of gender equality and equity in the distribution of resources and opportunities in society.
• Third-World Feminism Analysis Although the primary aim of western feminists is centered on the issues women face, the beliefs of the third world consist of various tenets compared to western feminist interpretations.
• Feminism in “The Introduction” and “A Nocturnal Reverie” by Finch One of Anne Finch’s poems, “The Introduction,” talks about female writers of her time in the first twenty lines of her text.
• Feminism in Frankenstein by Mary Shelley Mary Wollstonecraft expressly makes her stand known in advocating for the rights of the women in her novel, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, but her daughter is a bit reluctant to curve a […]
• “We Should All Be Feminists” Adichie’s TED Talk For Adichie, the only thing necessary to qualify as a feminist is recognizing the problem with gender and aspiring to fix it, regardless of whether a person in question is a man or woman. This […]
• Feminist Theory of Delinquency by Chesney-Lind One of the core ideas expressed by Chesney-Lind is that girls are highly susceptible to abuse and violent treatment. At the same time, scholars note that girls do not view delinquency as the “rejection of […]
• Feminist Connotations in Susan Glaspell’s “Trifles” It is a call to reexamine the value of women in a patriarchal society; through their central role in the drama, the female characters challenge traditional notions about women’s perspective and value.
• Metropolis’ Women: Analysis of the Movie’s Feminism & Examples This film is an endeavor to examine the image of the female depicted, the oppression that they have to endure before they are liberated, as well as the expectations of men with regard to the […]
• Feminism in The Yellow Wallpaper In an attempt to free her, she rips apart the wallpaper and locks herself in the bedroom. The husband locks her wife in a room because of his beliefs that she needed a rest break.
• Feminism in Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler Hedda Gabler, upon the discovery that her imaginary world of free-living and noble dying lies in shivers about her, no longer has the vitality to continue existence in the real world and chooses self-annihilation. At […]
• Feminist Therapy: Gwen’s Case Study The application of a feminist perspective in Gwen’s case is different from other theoretical frameworks as the approach highlights the impact of gender and associated stressors on the client’s life.
• Feminism in Advertisements of the 1950s and Today In the paper, the author discussed how the whole process of advertising and feminism is depicted in print advertisements. The common characteristic is the advertisements’ illustration of feminism in the media.
• Race, Class and Gender: Feminism – A Transformational Politic The social construction of difference in America has its historical roots in the days of slavery, the civil war, the civil rights movement, and the various shades of affirmative action that have still not managed […]
• Character Analysis in Pride and Prejudice From the Feminist Perspective Darcy is a character who is able to evolve over the span of the story, and eventually, he recognizes his mistakes.Mr.
• Gender Issues: Education and Feminism These experiences in many times strongly affects the individual’s understanding, reasoning, action about the particular issue in contention In this work two issues of great influence and relevance to our societies are discussed.
• Yves Klein’s Works From a Feminist Perspective The images were painted in the 20th century in the backdrop of the rising pressure in many parts of the globe for the government to embrace gender equality.
• Feminist View of Red Riding Hood Adaptations The Brothers Grimm modified the ending of the story, in their version the girl and her grandmother were saved by a hunter who came to the house when he heard the wolf snoring.
• Feminism in the “The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath This piece of writing reveals the concept of gender in general and “the role of female protagonists in a largely patriarchal world” in particular. In Plath’s novel, the bell jar is a metaphor used to […]
• The Fraternal Social Contract on Feminism and Community Formation The contract was signed by men to bring to an end the conditions of the state of nature. Life was anarchic and short lived which forced men to sign a social contract that could bring […]
• A Feminist Life Lesson in “Sula” by Toni Morrison This essay is going to review gender and love and sexuality as the key themes that intertwined with Nel and Sula’s friendship, while also explaining how these influenced each of the two main characters. On […]
• The Picture of Arabic Feminist Najir’s father’s taking of her sexually excludes her from chances at a marriage of her own, because she is deprived of her virginity, and exposes the young woman to the risk of a pregnancy which […]
• Feminism in “Heart of Darkness” and “Apocalypse Now” However, one realizes that she is voiceless in the novel, which highlights the insignificance of role of women in Heart of Darkness.
• Shifting the Centre: Race, Class, and Feminist Theorizing About Motherhood The author is very categorical in that it is necessary to put the role of the woman of color in the same position as that of the white one since this ensures that cultural identity […]
• Feminist Critique of Jean Racine’s “Phedre” Racine view Phedre as in a trap by the anger of gods and her destiny due to the unlawful and jealous passion that resulted into the deaths of Hippolytus and Oenone.
• Feminist Theory and Postmodern Approaches It seems to me that such technique can be quite helpful because it helps to get to the root of the problem.
• Mary Rowlandson’s Feminism and View on Women’s Role The sort of power developed by Rowlandson was such that it set her apart from the traditional roles of the Puritan women in her time and within her culture.
• Feminist Theory of Family Therapy The purpose of this paper is to review and evaluate the feminist theory based on its model, views on mental health, goals, and the role of the counselor in the process.
• Feminism in ‘Trifles’ by Susan Glaspell The Feminist Movement, also called the Women’s Movement and the Women’s Liberation Movement, includes a series of efforts by women in the world to fight for the restoration of gender equality.
• Willa Cather and Feminism Ability to work and/or supervise oneself as a woman is also quietly depicted through the girl who is able to work in the absence of her father. Cather depicts most of the women in her […]
• Female Chauvinist Pigs: Raunch Culture and Feminism The biological make-up of women and the cultural perception by the society has contributed to this position of women in the society.
• Feminist Analysis of Gender in American Television The analysis is guided by the hypothesis that the media plays a role in the propagation of antagonistic sexual and gender-based stereotypes.
• Hello Kitty as a Kitsch and Anti-Feminist Phenomenon In this scenario, Hello Kitty is linked to the notion of kitsch because it connects adult men and women that are attached to the cute image to constant consumerism.
• Feminism and Respect for Culture A crucial gender aspect that continues to trouble the unity of the people across the world is gender bias, which seems to encourage the formation of the feminist campaigns.
• Feminism in the 20th Century: a Literature Perspective. Research Summaries For years, the sphere of political, social and economical life of people all over the world was dominated by men, while women’ were restricted to the household domain; more to the point, women were not […]
• Feminist Research Methods The study of methods and methodology shows that the unique differences are found in the motives of the research, the knowledge that the research seeks to expound, and the concerns of the researchers and the […]
• Importance of Feminism in Interpersonal Communication in “Erin Brockovich” In this presentation, the theme of feminism in interpersonal communication will be discussed to prove that it is a good example of how a woman can fight for her rights.
• Kate Chopin’s Feminist Short Stories and Novels Two short stories were written by Chopin, A Story of One Hour and The Storm well as her brilliant novel Awakening should be regarded as one of the best examples of the feminist literature of […]
• Women’s Health and Feminism Theory For a woman to be in charge of her reproductive health, she has to know some of the stages and conditions in her life.
• “Othello” Through the Lens of Feminist Theory It depicts female characters in a state of submission and obedience and shows the disbalance in the distribution of power between men and women.
• Historical Development of Feminism and Patriarchy Women in the United States have always encountered challenges that interfere with their individual fulfillment in society.
• Maya Angelou and Audre Lorde: The Black Feminist Poets The themes of double discrimination are developed in the poems “Woman Work” and “Still I Rise” by Maya Angelou and poems “A Meeting of Minds” and “To the Poet Who Happens to Be Black and […]
• Ecological Feminism and Environmental Ethics Because of the effects that the process of globalization has had on the environment, including the increase in the speed of global warming and the scope of its outcomes, environmental ethics has gained significance.
• Feminism: “The Second Sex” by Simone de Beauvoir According to post-structural feminism structures in society still hold the woman back.de Beauvoir states that this is because structures still exist in the minds of people as to the place of women in society.
• “Feminism and Modern Friendship” by Marilyn Friedman Individualism denies that the identity and nature of human beings as individuals is a product of the roles of communities as well as social relationships.
• Feminism Builds up in Romanticism, Realism, Modernism Exploring the significance of the theme as well as the motifs of this piece, it becomes essential to understand that the era of modernism injected individualism in the literary works.
• The Adoption of Structuralism and Post-Structuralism Basics in Feminist Cultural Theory On the contrary, post structuralism is opposite to such an assumption and uses the concept of deconstruction in order to explain the relations and the position of women in the society.
• Charlotte Gilman’s feminism theory Because of the many issues that women face, feminism movements’ seeks equality between men and women in the society. Throughout, the paper will discuss Gilman’s feminism theory and relate it to the issues of women […]
• Comparing Views on the Feminism of Wollstonecraft and Martin Luther King This means that if women are given and encouraged to have the same level of education as the men than the society would be a much better place as both the female and male genders […]
• Feminist Approach: Virginia Woolf In “A room of ones own” Virginia Woolf speaks about the problems of women, gender roles, and the low social position of women writers in society.
• The Feminist Theory in Nursing Since nursing has traditionally been a women’s profession, it is important to understand the oppression of women to gain insight into some of the most pressing issues in nursing.
• Feminist Theory in Psychotherapy This theory puts women at the first place, and this place is reflected in three aspects: the first is its main object of study – the situation and difficulties faced by women in society, and […]
• The Concept of Feminist Epistemology The analysis starts with an overview of the evolutions process of standpoint epistemology; then, the philosophical movement is defined and the major ideas and arguments embedded into the theory are discussed.
• A Feminist Analysis on Abu Ghraib Moreover, these tortures were intended to become public with the help of demonstrations at Abu Ghraib and taking photographs that accentuated the loss of prisoners’ masculine power.[4] According to Foucault’s views, public torture is an […]
• Feminist Perspective in “Ruined” Play by Nottage This is a story about the issues of women in the Democratic Republic of Congo during the civil war. The comments of ‘Anonymous’ published as a response to the review of Jill Dolan, demonstrate the […]
• Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics It seems that this approach to this problem is important for discussing the origins of social inequalities existing in the community. This is one of the main points that can be made.
• Feminist Pro-Porn During Sex Wars In particular, this group was determined to fight for the rights of the lesbians as they realised that the arguments of the anti-porn feminists were against their freedom.
• “Feminism and Religion: The Introduction” by R. Gross Gross critically in order to see the essence of the book and the competence of the author in the current issue.
• Judith Butler’s Feminist Theory From a phenomenological point of view, gender is a stable identity that is realized through the repetition of certain acts. Butler’s article is dedicated to the role of gender, its relation to a body and […]
• Feminist Accountability Approach Therefore, the feminist accountability approach involves the collective responsibility to fight social injustices regardless of gender and race. Therefore, integrating the global approach to social injustice promotes the aspect of universality and unity in promoting […]
• The Feminist and Gender Theory Influence on Nursing That is, gender and feminist theories are still relevant in the modern world. This is explained by the fact that women are struggling to demonstrate their professionalism in order to receive the same recognition and […]
• The Incorporation of Feminism in Literature By focusing on the character, the book portrays the demand for feminism in society to allow females to have the ability and potential to undertake some responsibilities persevered by their male counterparts. The belief in […]
• The Feminist Theory, Prostitution, and Universal Access to Justice In the essay, it is concluded that the theory is a key component of the reforms needed in the criminal justice system with respect to prostitution. In this essay, the subject of prostitution is discussed […]
• Feminism in ‘Telephone Video’ To demonstrate how feminist theory in communication is relevant to music, the paper will analyze the depiction of females, the vocal arrangements, representation of female roles and their visual appearance in Lady Gaga’s “Telephone” music […]
• Feminist Political Theory, Approaches and Challenge However, regardless of studying the perception of women and their role in society, there is no unified approach in feminist political theory that leads to the existence of the so-called feminist challenge.
• Feminism in the Story “Lord of the Rings” The movie, in its turn, instead of focusing on the evolution of the female leads, seemed to be concerned with the relationships between the male characters as well as the growth of the latter.
• Seven Variations of Cinderella as the Portrayal of an Anti-Feminist Character: a Counterargument Against the Statement of Cinderella’s Passiveness It is rather peculiar that, instead of simply providing Cinderella with the dress, the crystal slippers and the carriage to get to the palace in, the fairy godmother turns the process of helping Cinderella into […]
• Feminist Literature: “The Revolt of Mother” by Mary E. Wilkins The woman in her story goes against the tradition of the time and triumphs by challenging it and gaining a new self-identity. The author uses this story to address the issue of women oppression that […]
• Feminist Challenge to Mainstream International Relations Theory Feminist international relations approaches in the past used to be part of the major debate that ensued between the post-positivists and their counterparts, the positivists.
• Feminist Approach in Literary Criticism The reason for this is simple this particular plot’s development suggests that, just as it happened to be the case with the functioning of a male psyche, the working of a female psyche implies that […]
• Comparing Mainardi and Kollantai on Housework and Women’s Oppression Mainardi and Kollantai argue that women should be liberated from chores for the sake of the future. Nonetheless, the two feminists have different views on the way liberation can be achieved.
• Bell Hooks’ Article Analysis With Regard to Women and Minorities Feminism is meant to stop sexist oppression. The major aim of these movements has not yet been achieved. Bell Hooks promotes the knowledge of feminist theory as essential portion of the development of self-actualization.
• Equal Society: Antebellum Feminism, Temperance, and Abolition It is characterized by the emergence of a women’s rights movement that was spearheaded by activists who sought to secure the rights of women to vote, own property, and participate in education and the public […]
• Feminism in the “Lorraine Hansberry” Film Her activism aligns with the fundamental tenets of women of color feminism, which emphasizes the intersecting nature of oppression and the importance of centering the experiences of marginalized groups in social justice movements.
• Gloria Steinem: Political Activist and Feminist Leader Thesis: Gloria Steinem’s direct, bold, argumentative, and explicit style of conveying her ideas and values is the result of her political activism, feminist leadership, and her grandmother, Pauline Perlmutter Steinem.
• The Myntra Logo from a Feminist Perspective The first feature of the Myntra logo that comes under the scrutiny of transnational feminism is the commercialization of female sexuality.
• Feminist Geography and Women Suppression Tim Cresswell’s feminist geography explores how the patriarchal structures of our society have silenced women’s voices and experiences in the field of geography for centuries and how recent changes in the field have allowed for […]
• Feminism from a Historical Perspective Accordingly, the discontent facilitated the development of reform-minded activist organizations across Europe and the United States and the subsequent rise of the Modern or New Women’s Movement.
• The Feminist Theory in Modern Realities The theory and culture of feminism in modern philosophy and the development of society play a significant role in cultural and social development.
• Alice Walker’s Statement “Womanist Is to Feminist…” In her short tale “Perspectives Past and Present,” author and poet Alice Walker famously uses the statement “Womanist Is to Feminist as Purple Is to Lavender,” meaning that womanist is a larger ideological framework within […]
• Feminist Perspective on Family Counselling The author of the article considers the study and the data obtained as a result of it as information reporting not only about the specifics of homosexual relationships but also about their perception in American […]
• Modern Feminism and Its Major Directions Radical feminism views patriarchy as the reason men have more rights than women and attempts to fight against it. Liberal, intersectional, and radical feminism differ in many ways as they have various perspectives on women’s […]
• Feminist Theory and Its Application Alice Walker advocated for the rights of women of color at the end of the 20th century, creating a feminist branch named womanism. The feminist theory is one of the most known and popular theories […]
• Discussion of Feminist Movements The feminist movements have been behind a sequence of political and social movements that champion the equal rights of women in all aspects of life.
• Feminists on the Women’s Role in the Bible The author of the article uses the term intertextuality, which plays a significant role in the text analysis, including from the feminist aspect.
• Feminist Contribution to International Relations Moreover, it will be shown that the concept of gender is important as it helps to shed light on the power dynamics in the sphere of international relations and explain female exclusion from politics.
• Emotional Revival in Feminist Writers’ Short Stories This paper aims to discuss the emotional revival of heroines in the short stories of Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.”The Story of an Hour” is a very short story that describes a woman’s experience […]
• Emotion and Freedom in 20th-Century Feminist Literature The author notes that the second layer of the story can be found in the antagonism between the “narrator, author, and the unreliable protagonist”.
• The Cyborg Term in the Context of Feminist Studies In other words, during the transition of identity from the individual to the collective level, people, especially women, may encounter inequalities manifested in the collective space.
• Feminist and Traditional Ethics The feminist ethics also criticize the gender binary of distinct biological formation between men and women. Consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics are the three theories of conventional ethics.
• Feminism: A Road Map to Overcoming COVID-19 and Climate Change By exposing how individuals relate to one another as humans, institutions, and organizations, feminism aids in the identification of these frequent dimensions of suffering.
• White Privilege in Conflict and Feminist Theories They see how the privilege of whiteness and denial of non-whiteness are connected to the social and political meaning of race and ethnicity.
• Women’s Role in Society From Feminist Perspective Also, in Hartsock’s opinion, that the whole society would benefit if women were allowed to have a role equal with men in a community.
• The Feminist Theory and IR Practice Focusing on how international relations theorists explained some concepts, such as security, state, and superiority that led to gender bias, feminists felt the need to develop and transform the international relations practice and theory.
• Intersectionality and Feminist Activism Therefore, I hope to study the academic literature to discuss the existing tendencies and difficulties to contribute to the understanding of the identified topic in terms of gender and female studies.
• Feminism: Reflection of Cultural Feminism If they found that the gases were harmful and may lead to complications in their body, they would approve the employer’s right to prohibit women from working in the company.
• Feminist Theoretical Perspectives on Rape There is a number of theoretical perspectives aimed at explaining what stands behind rape, that is, how rape is reinforced by, why it is more widespread in specific concepts, and what a rapist’s motivations for […]
• A Feminist Reading of “Wild Nights” and “Death Be Not Proud” From the feminist perspective, the key feature of the speaker’s stance in “Death Be Not Proud” that sets it apart from “Wild Nights” is the speaker’s persona, which is openly and unequivocally male.
• Body: Social Constructionist & Feminist Approaches The idea of the gendered body was based on the focus on the concept of gender, which sees masculinity and femininity as social roles and the need for the representatives of genders to maintain within […]
• Feminist Film Theory Overview The presence of women on the screen is commonly accomplished by the sexualization and objectivization of female characters. Along with that, sadism and fetishism toward the physical beauty of the object and the representation of […]
• “Daddy-long-Legs”: Why Jerusha Is a Feminist Heroine Jerusha is a feminist because she uses the letters to communicate the inequalities she feels in her relationship with Daddy-long-legs and her limits.
• Homosexuality and Feminism in the TV Series The depiction of these complex topics in the TV series of the humoristic genre implies both regressive and progressive impulses for the audience.
• Popular Feminism in Video Post of Emma Watson According to Emma Watson, now feminism is increasingly associated with hatred of men, although in reality it only implies the belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities.
• Contingent Foundations: Feminism and Postmodernism Feminism offers women theoretical bases on which to interrogate the issues of womanhood while Postmodernism takes this away by arguing for the “death of subjects”.abolition of the foundations of the ideals of reality.
• Art, Pornography and Feminism and Internet Influence The purpose of pornography is not the desire to admire the human body and respect physical intimacy. Indeed, society can say that women themselves agree to such rules, but the choice of a minority forms […]
• The Contemporary Image of Feminism Following the initial surge of the movement, governments finally came to acknowledge the magnitude of the situation and satisfied the demands of the female population.
• Feminism and Nationalism: The Western World In this case, we find that feminism has been a different that all the time and therefore, it is impossible to predict the trend of feminism in future.
• Gould’s and Sterling’s Feminist Articles Critique The focal point of this paper is to prepare a critical reflection on the articles by Stephen Jay Gould named “Women’s Brains” in The Panda’s Thumb and by Anne Fausto-Sterling named “The biological Connections,” from […]
• Core Aspects of Black Feminist and Womanist Thoughts Compared to Jones, who believes in “unparalleled advocates of universal suffrage in its true sense,” Lindsey does not support the relegation of the “voices and experiences of women of color to the background”.
• Barbara and Beverly Smith: Black Feminist Statement Sexism was an explicit element of the African American Civil Rights Movement. Fight against segregation was rather single-sided.
• Feminism: Fundamentals of Case Management Practice The feminist therapy’s main emphasis is put on the notion of invoking social changes and transforming the lives of people in favor of feminist resistance in order to promote equality and justice for all.
• Feminist Contributions to Understanding Women’s Lives This gave women a clear picture of the daily realities in their lives. The success of feminism is evident at all levels of human interaction since there is a better understanding of women and their […]
• As We Are Feminist Campaign’s Strategic Goals The present paper is devoted to the analysis of the goals of a feminist campaign As We Are that is aimed at challenging gender stereotypes that are being promoted by the media and society in […]
• Feminist Ethics in Nursing: Personal Thoughts The concept of feminist ethics emphasizes the belief that ethical theorizing at the present is done from a distinctly male point of view and, as such, lacks the moral experience of women.
• Feminism: Kneel to the Rest of Life, or Fight for the Fairness It seems that the law is not perfect, and the public opinion of sexual harassment might influence a woman’s life negatively.
• Feminist Perspective Influence on Canadian Laws and Lawmakers The change in the statistics is attributed to social changes, which include increase of women in the labor force, conflict in female-male relations, increase in alcohol consumption and increase in the rate of divorce. Feminists […]
• Blog Post: Arab Feminism in Contemporary World Women of the Arab world have struggled to overcome inequality, oppression, and rights deprivation by state authorities, which takes the discussion of the Islamic feminist movement to the political domain. According to Sharia, the unity […]
• Feminist Movement and Recommendations on Women’s Liberation According to Nawal El-Saadawi In Egypt, the feminist movement was started by Nawal El-Saadawi, and her article “The Arab Women’s Solidarity Association: The Coming Challenge” has historical importance as it addresses the plight of women in the community.
• Technological Progress, Globalization, Feminism Roots However, the work becomes more complicated when the time distance of the events and processes is shorter, and the stories are unfinished.
• Race at the Intersections: Sociology, 3rd Wave Feminism, and Critical Race Theory In this reading, the author examines the phenomenon of racism not merely as an issue but a systematic, institutionalized, and cultural phenomenon that is hard to eliminate.
• The Feminist Performers: Yoko Ono, Marina Abramovic, Gina Pane The feminist artists ccontributed to the women’s image, its role in society, and exposed the passiveness and submissiveness the women are obliged to endure.
• Feminism and Multiculturalism for Women The foundation of liberalism is having an interest in all the minority cultures that are put together to form the larger special group.
• “The Great Gatsby” by Fitzgerald: Betrayal, Romance, Social Politics and Feminism This work seeks to outline the role of women in the development of the plot of the book and in relation to the social issues affecting women in contemporary society.
• Pornography’s Harm as a Feminist Fallacy In this scenario, scientific research has proven the argument not to be true. It is weakened by the fact that people are not forced to watch the video.
• Feminism in Mourning Dove’s “Cogewea, the Half-Blood” The patriarchal practices embraced by the Indian community and the subsequent system of governance humiliated the writer; hence, the use of Cogewea in the passage was aimed to imply the abilities that were bestowed upon […]
• Feminist Film Strategy: The Watermelon Women These techniques have the capabilities of shifting meaning away from the narrative as the source of meaning to the audience’s background knowledge in making meaning.
• The Emerging Feminism in India and Their Views on God as a Feminist However, among the explanation of the cause of the phenomenon for this lack of agreement is the tendency for people to define religion too narrowly, and in most cases from the perspective of their own […]
• Feminist Psychology in Canada The introduction of the article gives the purposes of the research that include the historical and present condition of the psychology of women field of interest.
• American Art Since 1945 Till Feminism The entire movement represented the combination of emotional strength and the self-expression of the European abstract schools: Futurism, the Bauhaus and Synthetic Cubism.
• Modernist Art: A Feminist Perspective Clarke limited the definition of modernism even further by his restriction of it to the facets of the Paris of Manet and the Impressionists, a place of leisure, pleasure, and excesses, and it seems that […]
• Enlightenment, Feminism and Social Movements As a result of Enlightenment, the creative entrepreneurs as well as thinkers enjoyed the high freedom benefits that were brought in by the Enlightenment thinkers, enabling them to apply the newly acquired liberty to invent […]
• “Our Journey to Repowered Feminism” by Sonja K. Foss Foss tried to work out a new conception of repowered feminism in the article “Our Journey to Repowered Feminism: Expanding the Feminist Toolbox”.
• Feminist Position on Prostitution and Pornography The only requirement is that it should not violate the norms of the law. On the other hand, one of the suggestions for feminists is to envisage individual cases of enslaving women as prostitutes.
• The Politics of Feminism in Islam by Anouar Majid Considering the work The Politics of Feminism in Islam by Anouar Majid written in 1998, it should be noticed that the main point of this article is the Muslim feminism and the relation of West […]
• The Feminist Art Movement in the 1970s and Today The feminist art movement emerged in the 1960s and from that time the women had taken much interest in what causes them to be different from the male gender and particularly, what causes the art […]
• Feminist Theory. Modes of Feminist Theorizing The second point of conflict is the acknowledgment that most of the feminist ideas are part and parcel of our culture yet these ideas might be presented in a way that is hard for us […]
• Australian Feminism Movements The fact that feminism movements do not have a great following in Australia is because they are not generally seen to address issues that women and the society are facing.
• Feminism in Canadian Literature First of all, the female author of the article considered by Cosh is evidently a supporter of the equality of rights for men and women, and her account on the women liberation movement in the […]
• Understanding of Feminism: Philosophical and Social Concepts The vision that emerges, in the narrative as in the world it represents, is of a whole composed of separate, yet interdependent and interrelating, parts.
• Geoffrey Chaucer: A Founder of English Literature as a Feminist Despite the distorted interpretation of gender in the patriarchal society, Chaucer’s vision of women contradicts the orthodox view of the biological distinction of males and females as the justification for gender inequality.
• Feminist Activism for Safer Social Space by Whitzman The scientist pays special attention to the municipal parks, mainly High Park in Toronto, from the point of view of feminists trying to make women involved into the discourse concerning different aspects of the park.
• Western Feminism as Fighters Against Oppression For postmodern feminists and post-colonial feminists, the second component of the new women’s ideology is the idea of the responsibility of the state to rule and administer both genders on the basis of their interpretation […]
• Perils and Possibilities of Doing Transnational Feminist Activism These have promoted awareness of human rights among women and other masses, ensured and led to the adoption of the rules and regulations recognizing women rights and that supports ending of women violations and participated […]
• The Feminist Gendering Into International Relations These are early female contributions to IR academic and the In terms of conferences, the theme of gender and politics was being explored in conferences.
• Western Feminists and Their Impact on the Consciousness and Self-Identity of Muslim Women One of the main objectives of the Western feminism is to give to the citizen of the new nation a feeling of dignity and importance resulting from that citizenship and from his ethnic origin, and […]
• Feminism – Women and Work in the Middle East The history of feminism consists of different movements and theories for the rights of women. The first wave of this phenomenon began in the 19th century and saw the end only in the early 20th […]
• Harriet Martineau, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Marianne Weber: Feminist Sociologists Through her writings she always advocated for the equal rights of women with men and remarked the importance of financial self-sufficiency among women in the society. She observed the role of women in society and […]
• English Language in the Feminist Movement In addition to that, it is of the crucial importance to explore the underlying causes of this phenomenon. Now that we have enumerated the research methods, that can be employed, it is of the utmost […]
• Feminist Ideas in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” One of these issues and the subject of this paper is the theme of feminism in Shelley’s novel. It is time to separate unchangeable morals from local manners”.- Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the […]
• Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Works and Feminism The woman’s role is depicted ever so poignantly in the works of Divakaruni and this also reflects the importance of reclaiming the understanding of the role of women in society.
• Black Feminism: A Revolutionary Practice The Black Feminist Movement was organized in an endeavor to meet the requirements of black women who were racially browbeaten in the Women’s Movement and sexually exploited during the Black Liberation Movement.
• Popular Culture From the Fifties to Heroin Chic: Feminism The women have become aware of their legal rights and disabilities as a consequence of the inclusion of educated women in movements to repair the legal disabilities.
• Positive Changes That Feminism Brought to America
• Are Feminist Criticisms of Militarism Essentialist?
• Western Feminist Critics and Cultural Imperialism
• Social Justice and Feminism in America
• American Women in History: Feminism and Suffrage
• Wendy McElroy: A Feminist Defense of Men’s Rights
• Modern Feminism as the Part of Intellectual Life
• Feminist Movements in Contemporary Times
• Feminist Critiques of Medicine
• Shakespeare: A Feminist Writer
• Liberal Feminism Movement Analysis
• Feminism and Support of Gender Equality
• Feminism: Liberal, Black, Radical, and Lesbian
• Women and Law. Feminist Majority Foundation
• Empowerment and Feminist Theory
• “The Historical Evolution of Black Feminist Theory and Praxis” by Taylor
• Is Power Feminism a Feminist Movement?
• Postcolonial Feminism Among Epistemological Views
• Feminist Theory: Performing and Altering Bodies
• Feminist Theories by Bordo, Shaw & Lee, Shildrick & Price
• Feminist Examination of Science
• Race, Sex and Knowledge From Feminist Perspective
• Colonialism and Knowledge in Feminist Discourse
• Feminism and the Relational Approach to Autonomy
• Feminism and Sexuality in the “Lila Says” Film
• Feminist Perspective: “The Gender Pay Gap Explained”
• Second Wave of Feminist Movement
• Education and Feminism in the Arabian Peninsula
• Black Women in Feminism and the Media
• Spiritual and Educational Feminist Comparison
• Feminist Theoretical Schools in Various Cultures
• The Application of Psychoanalysis in Feminist Theories
• Feminism: Exposing Women to the Public Sphere
• Feminist Psychoanalysis From McRobbie’s Perspective
• Feminist Films: “Stella Dallas” and “Dance Girl, Dance”
• Ageism and Feminism in Career and Family Expectations
• “Feminist Geopolitics and September 11” by Jenifer Hyndman
• The History of Feminism in the 1960
• Feminist Theory in “A Family Thing” Movie
• Feminism in Tunisia and Jordan in Comparison
• Feminism and Gender Studies in Science
• Feminism in the United Arab Emirates
• Conceptualization of Difference in Feminism
• Feminism in the Past and Nowadays
• Feminism in Latin America
• Planet B-Girl: Community Building and Feminism in Hip-Hop
• Methods of Feminism Education and Its Modern Theories
• Feminism in Lorrie Moore’s “You’re Ugly, Too”
• Anti-Feminism and Heteropatriarchal Normativity
• Feminist Archaeologists’ Interpretations of the Past
• The Theory of Feminism Through the Prism of Time
• Development of Feminism in Chile
• Elena Poniatowska and Her Feminism
• Feminism in Laura Esquivel’s “Like Water for Chocolate”
• Concept of “Western Feminism”
• Marxism vs. Feminism: Human Nature, Power, Conflict
• Feminism in Lorber’s, Thompson’s, Hooks’s Views
• Prison and Social Movement in Black Feminist View
• Great Awakening, American Civil War, and Feminism
• Feminism and Roles in “A Raisin in the Sun” Play
• Feminist Miss America Pageant Protest of 1968
• Black Feminist Perspectives in Toni Morrison’s Works
• Feminist Movement as an Attempt to Obtain Equal Rights
• Axel Honneth Views on Feminism
• Activist and Feminist Rose Schneiderman
• Feminist Deceit in Short Stories
• Post-Feminism in the Wonder Bra Commercial
• Feminist Movement Influence on the Arab Film Industry
• Third World Feminism and Its Challenges
• “First Wave” Feminist Movement
• Feminism: the Contraception Movement in Canada
• Beyonce and Assata Shakur Feminism Ideas Comparison
• Feminism in “‘Now We Can Begin” by Crystal Eastman
• Gender Studies of Feminism: Radical and Liberal Branches
• Feminism and Film Theory
• The Realization of Third-wave Feminism Ideals
• Sexuality as a Social and Historical Construct
• Modern Feminist Movements
• Feminist Theories in Relation to Family Functions
• Rebecca Solnit’s Views on Feminism
• “Old and New Feminists in Latin America: The Case of Peru and Chile” by Chaney E.M.
• “Frida Kahlo: A Contemporary Feminist Reading” by Liza Bakewell
• Chinese Feminism in the Early 20th Century
• Feminism and Modern Friendship
• Historical Development of Feminism and Patriarchy
• Women and Their Acceptance of Feminism
• Women, Religion, and Feminism
• The History of the Pill and Feminism
• Challenges to Build Feminist Movement Against Problems of Globalization and Neoliberalism
• Feministic Movement in Iron Jawed Angels
• Hillary Clinton: Furthering Political Agenda Through Feminism
• Feministic View of McCullers’ “The Member of the Wedding”
• “Feminism, Peace, Human Rights and Human Security” by Charlotte Bunch
• Feminism in China During the Late Twentieth Century
• Feminist Political Change
• Antonio Gramsci and Feminism: The Elusive Nature of Power
• Changes That Feminism and Gender Lenses Can Bring To Global Politics
• Feminism Has Nothing to Tell Us About the Reality of War, Conflict and Hard, Cold Facts
• Feminism in the works of Susan Glaspell and Sophocles
• Cross Cultural Analysis of Feminism in the Muslim Community
• The Adoption of Feminist Doctrine in Canada
• Feminist Movement in Canada
• The Feminist Power and Structure in Canada
• Feminism and Gender Mainstreaming
• Feminist Movement: The National Organization for Women
• Feminist Analysis of the Popular Media: The Sexualization Process Takes Its Toll on the Younger Female Audience
• Women in the Field of Art
• The Reflection of the Second-Wave Feminism in Scandinavia: “Show Me Love” and “Together”
• Liberal and Socialist Feminist Theories
• What Does Feminism Stand For? Who are These Creatures who call themselves Feminists?
• Full Frontal Feminism – What is Still Preventing Women from Achieving Equality?
• The Ordeal of Being a Woman: When Feminist Ideas Dissipate
• Comparison and Contrast of Spiritual and Educational Feminists
• Gender Issue and the Feminist Movement
• Dorothy E. Smith and Feminist Theory Development
• Feminist Movement Tendencies
• Scholars Comment on Gender Equality
• The Smurfette Principle in the Modern Media: Feminism Is over?
• The Feminist Movement
• Feminism and Evolution or Emergence of Psychology
• Reasons Why the Black Women Population Did Not Consider Themselves a Part of the Ongoing Feminist Movements
• Black Women and the Feminist Movement
• Feminism and Patriarchy
• Feminism Interview and the Major Aim of Feminism
• Gender and Religion: Women and Islam
• World Politics: Realist, Liberals, and Feminists Theories
• Concept and History of the Liberal Feminism
• Feminism and Women’s History
• Feminist Criticism in “The Story of an Hour” and “The Yellow Wallpaper”
• Obesity: Health or Feminist Issue?
• Feminism in Roger and Dodger Film
• Anarchy, Black Nationalism and Feminism
• Concepts of Feminism in the Present Societies
• Gender Issues and Feminist Movement
• How Did African Feminism Change the World?
• Why Might Feminism and Poststructuralism Be Described as an Uneasy Alliance?
• Does Feminism and Masculinity Define Who People Are Today?
• How Did Feminism Change New Zealand?
• Can Feminism and Marxism Come Together?
• How Did Second Wave Feminism Affect the Lives of Women?
• Does Arab Feminism Exist?
• How Does Chivalry Affect Feminism?
• Has Feminism Achieved Its Goals?
• How Does the French Feminism Theory Manifest Itself?
• Does Feminism Create Equality?
• How Has Feminism Changed the Lives of Women, Men, and Families?
• Has Feminism Benefited the American Society?
• How Does Feminism Explain Gender Differences in Comparison to the Mainstream Psychology?
• Does Feminism Discriminate Against Men?
• How Does Feminism Harm Women’s Health Care?
• Does Feminism Really Work?
• How Does Feminism Threaten Male Control and Alters Their Dominance in Society?
• What Are the Basic Traits of Liberal Feminism?
• How Has Economic Development and Globalization of South Korea Influenced the Role of Feminism?
• What Are the Concepts of Marxism and Feminism?
• How Has Feminism Developed?
• What Are the Main Theoretical and Political Differences Between First and Second Waves of Feminism?
• Why Should Men Teach Feminism?
• How Does Popular Fiction Reflect Debates About Gender and Sexuality?
• When Does Feminism Go Wrong?
• How Do Teenage Magazines Express the Post-feminism Culture?
• Why Has Patriarchy Proved Such a Contentious Issue for Feminism?
• What Are the Main Contributions of Feminism to the Contemporary Lifestyle?
• Can Modern Feminism Start the Discrimination of Men?
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2024, February 24). 334 Feminism Essay Topics & Examples. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/feminism-essay-examples/

"334 Feminism Essay Topics & Examples." IvyPanda , 24 Feb. 2024, ivypanda.com/essays/topic/feminism-essay-examples/.

IvyPanda . (2024) '334 Feminism Essay Topics & Examples'. 24 February.

IvyPanda . 2024. "334 Feminism Essay Topics & Examples." February 24, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/feminism-essay-examples/.

1. IvyPanda . "334 Feminism Essay Topics & Examples." February 24, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/feminism-essay-examples/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "334 Feminism Essay Topics & Examples." February 24, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/feminism-essay-examples/.

• Motherhood Ideas
• Gender Stereotypes Essay Titles
• Women’s Role Essay Topics
• Sociological Perspectives Titles
• Gender Discrimination Research Topics
• Masculinity Topics
• Activist Essay Titles
• Gender Issues Questions

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

44 Student Essay Example: Feminist Criticism

The following student essay example of femnist criticism is taken from Beginnings and Endings: A Critical Edition . This is the publication created by students in English 211. This essay discusses Ray Bradbury’s short story ”There Will Come Soft Rains.”

Burning Stereotypes in Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains”

By Karley McCarthy

Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” takes place in the fallout of a nuclear war. The author chooses to tell the story though a technologically advanced house and its animatronic inhabitants instead of a traditional protagonist. The house goes about its day-to-day as if no war had struck. It functions as though its deceased family is still residing in its walls, taking care of the maintenance, happiness, and safety of itself and the long dead family. On the surface, Bradbury’s story seems like a clear-cut warning about technology and humanity’s permissiveness. Given that the short story was written in the 1940s, it’s easy to analyze the themes present and how they related to women of the time. Bradbury’s apt precautionary tale can be used as a metaphor for women’s expectations and role in society after World War II and how some women may have dealt with the fallout of their husbands coming back home with psychological trauma.

To experience “There Will Come Soft Rains” from a feminist perspective, readers must be aware of the societal norms that would have shaped Bradbury’s writing. “Soft Rains” takes place in the year 2026. Yet the house and norms found throughout were, “modeled after concept homes that showed society’s expectations of technological advancement” (Mambrol). This can be seen in the stereotypical nuclear family that once inhabited the house as well as their cliché white home and the hobbies present. According to writer Elaine Tyler May’s book Homeward Bound, America’s view of women’s role in society undertook a massive pendulum swing during the World War II era as the country transitioned through pre-war to post-war life. For example, in a matter of decades support for women joining the workforce shifted from 80% in opposition to only 13% (May 59). Despite this shift, the men coming back from the war still expected women to position themselves as the happy housewife they had left behind, not the newfound career woman architype. Prominent figures of the 40s, such as actress Joan Crawford, portrayed a caricature of womanhood that is subservient to patriarchal gender roles, attempting to abandon the modern idea of a self-sufficient working-class woman (May 62-63). Keeping this in mind, how can this image of the 1940s woman be seen in Bradbury’s work?

Throughout Bradbury’s life he worked towards dismantling clichés in his own writing. A biography titled simply “Ray Bradbury” mentions that even in his earlier work, he was always attempting to “escape the constrictions of stereotypes” found in early science fiction (Seed 13). An example of him breaking constrictions could be his use of a nonhuman protagonist. Instead, Bradbury relies on the personification of the house and its robotic counterparts. Bradbury describes the house as having “electric eyes” and emotions such as a, “preoccupation with self-protection which bordered on a mechanical paranoia,” something that would make the house quiver at the sounds of the outside world (2-3). While these descriptions are interesting, Bradbury’s use of personification here is a thought-provoking choice when one breaks down what exactly the house is meant to personify.

One analysis of this story notes that the house’s personification, “replaces the most human aspects of life,” for its inhabitants (Mambrol). Throughout the story, the house acts as a caretaker, records a schedule, cooks, cleans, and even attempts to extinguish an all-consuming fire. While firefighting is not a traditionally feminine career or expectation from the 1940s (more on that later), most of the house’s daily tasks are replacing jobs that were traditionally held by a household’s matriarch. Expanding further on this dichotomy of male/woman tasks, a chore mentioned in the story that is ‘traditionally’ accepted as a masculine household duty—mowing the law—is still assigned as a male task. This is feels intentional to the house’s design as Bradbury is, “a social critic, and his work is pertinent to real problems on earth” (Dominianni 49). Bradbury’s story is not meant to commentate on just an apocalypse, but society at large.  Bradbury describes the west face of the house as, “black, save for five places” (Bradbury 1-2). These “five places” are the silhouettes of the family who had been incinerated by a nuclear bomb. The family’s two children are included playing with a ball, but the mother and father’s descriptions are most important. The mother is seen in a passive role, picking flowers, while the father mows the lawn. The subtext here is that the man is not replaceable in his mundane and tedious task. Only the woman is replaced. While this is a small flash into the owners’ lives, what “human aspect” or autonomy of the father’s life has been replaced by the house’s actions if the house is mainly personifying only the traditional 1940s female-held positions? The message here is that a man’s position in society is irreplaceable while a woman’s is one of mere support.

While this dynamic of husband vs subordinate is harmful, wives supporting their partners is nothing new. Homeward Bound explains that life after World War II for many women meant a return to their previous position as a housewife while many men came home irreparably damaged by years of warfare. PTSD, known then as shellshock, affected countless men returning from the war. Women were often expected to mend the psychological damage as part of their domestic responsibilities, even if they were unprepared for the realities of the severe trauma their husbands had faced (May 64-65). The psychological effects of the war came crashing into women’s lives the same way that the tree fell into the autonomous house in “Soft Rains”. As mentioned earlier, firefighting is not a task someone from the 40s would expect of women, but the house’s combustion and its scramble to save itself can be seen as a metaphor for women attempting to reverse the cold reality that the war had left them with. The picturesque family they had dreamed of would forever be scarred by the casualties that took place overseas. While Bradbury may not have meant for women to be invoked specifically from this precautionary tale, it’s obvious that him wanting his science fiction to act as, “a cumulative early warning system against unforeseen consequences,” would have impacted women of the time as much as men (Seed 22). The unforeseen consequences here is the trauma the war inflicted on families.

While men were fighting on the front lines, women back home and in noncombat positions would still feel the war’s ripples. In “Soft Rains” the nuclear tragedy had left, “a radioactive glow which could be seen for miles” (Bradbury 1). Despite the destruction, the house continues its routine as though nothing had happened. This can be seen as a metaphor for how women responded to the trauma their husbands brought back from the war. Women were urged to, “preserve for him the essence of the girl he fell in love with, the girl he longs to come back to. . .The least we can do as women is to try to live up to some of those expectations” (May 64). Following this, many could have put their desires and personal growth to the side to act as a secondary character in their husband’s lives.

The final line can be read as the culmination of similarities between post-war women and Bradbury’s house. The violence and destruction that fell upon the house in its final moments leaves little standing. What’s remarkable is how the house still attempts to continue despite its destruction. The final lines of the short story exemplify this: “Within the wall, a last voice said, over and over again and again, even as the sun rose to shine upon the heaped rubble and steam: ‘Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is…’” (Bradbury 5). The house is acting just like the women from the 40s, clinging to their past in an attempt to preserve something that had already been lost, society’s innocence. One analysis points out that, “The house is depicted in this way because it represents both humanity and humanity’s failure to save itself” (Mambrol). While it might be wrong to say that women were unable to save themselves in this situation, this quote does touch on an idea present in the feminist metaphor for “Soft Rains”. The preservation of “the essence of the girl he fell in love with, the girl he longs to come back to” was a failure (May 64). The same way that the house cannot preserve itself from destruction, women cannot preserve an image of themselves that had already dissolved. As mentioned earlier, women had already entered the workforce, a huge step towards removing sexist stereotypes around women’s worth. After garnering work-based independence, it seems impossible that the idea of women solely as men’s support would not immolate.

While Bradbury’s “Soft Rains” can be viewed as an apt precautionary tale with real modern world issues at hand, in many ways it is a period piece. As a writer in the 1940s, it’s hard to imagine that Bradbury’s story would not have been influenced by the framework of a nuclear family and the stereotypical expectations of this time. Bradbury’s use of personification opens dialogue about gender roles in the 1940s and how war had complicated patriarchal expectations. Despite his attempt to bypass science fiction stereotypes, his story is full of metaphor for gender stereotypes. Using a feminist lens to analyze the story allows it to be read as a metaphor for war and its effects on married women. The standard analysis appears to say that, “machine no longer served humanity in “There Will Come Soft Rains”; there humanity is subservient to machinery” (Dominianni 49). From a feminist perspective, instead of machine, the house represents patriarchy and gender norms. While men suffered greatly during World War II, women often put their wants and futures on hold to support their husbands. This is a selfless act that shows the resilience of women despite their society’s wish to downplay their potential and turn them into mere support.

Works Cited

Bradbury, Ray. “August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains.” Broome-Tioga BOCES, 1950, pp. 1-5. btboces.org/Downloads/7_There%20Will%20Come%20Soft%20Rains%20by%20Ray%20Bradbury.pdf.

Dominianni, Robert. “Ray Bradbury’s 2026: A Year with Current Value.” The English Journal , vol. 73, no. 7, 1984, pp. 49–51. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/817806

Mambrol, Nasrullah. “Analysis of Ray Bradbury’s There Will Come Soft Rains.” Literary Theory and Criticism , 17 Jan. 2022.

May, Elaine Tyler. “War and Peace: Fanning the Home Fires.”  Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era.  20th ed., Basic Books, 2008, pp. 58-88.

Seed, David. “Out of the Science Fiction Ghetto.”  Ray Bradbury (Modern Masters of Science Fiction).  University of Illinois, 2015, pp. 1-45.

Critical Worlds Copyright © 2024 by Liza Long is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Share This Book

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Post-Feminism: An Essay

Post-Feminism: An Essay

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on October 25, 2017 • ( 2 )

It must first be stated that there is no agreement about how postfeminism can be defined and consequently definitions essentially contradict each other in what they say about the term. At its most straightforward, the prefix ‘post’ in this context appears to mean ‘going beyond’ or ‘superseding’: it could therefore be seen as a confident announcement that feminism has achieved its key aims and that there is full equality for all women and a blurring of the boundaries between traditional ascriptions of gender. Given that a brief scrutiny of our current social formation does not support this view, we might, however, imagine that a post-feminist position is one formulated due to dissatisfaction with existing feminist politics and is to be located in an entirely new area or set of propositions altogether. Part of this dissatisfaction might be an awareness that even in its heyday, second wave feminism did not achieve its aim of speaking to the majority of women.

Either of these definitions seems possible and the notion of superseding or going beyond has been widely utilised in popular culture, and to some extent in academic discourse. Given that ‘feminism’ remains within the term post-feminism, albeit problematised by the prefix of ‘post’, this illustrates that ‘feminism is portrayed as a territory over which various women have to fight to gain their ground; it has become so unwieldy as a term that it threatens to implode under the weight of its own contradictions’ ( Whelehan 2000 : 78). The ‘post’ is not the end of feminism : actually feminism is constantly to be picked over only to be rapidly set aside again or dismissed as old hat. For Myra Macdonald , ‘post-feminism takes the sting out of feminism’ ( 1995 : 100); it removes the politics and claims the territory of self-empowerment.

There are some more complex and challenging definitions of the term and according to writers such as Sopia Phoca who co-produced an introductory guide to it, ‘post-feminism is considered as a different manifestation of feminism – not as being anti-feminist’ (quoted in Ashby 1999: 34) and as being associated with the development of post-Lacanian psychoanalysis , French feminism and post-structuralist theory , suggesting perhaps a permanent fracturation between second wave-style personal politics and ‘high’ theory. Ann Brooks (1997), however, would argue that it is not a question of depoliticising feminism, but of marking a conceptual shift between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ – from a model based on equality, to debates around the revivified and theorised concept of difference. For Brooks the term ‘post-feminism’ ‘is now understood as a useful conceptual frame of reference encompassing the intersection of feminism with a number of other anti-foundational movements including postmodernism, post-structuralism and post-colonialism’ ( Brooks 1997 : 1).

Other critics would argue that the ‘post’ prefix added to modernism , structuralism or colonialism seems to unproblematically connote the ‘going beyond’ both spatially and chronologically that has occurred in modern theory; yet Brooks asserts that post-feminism used in this theoretical context signifies feminism ’s maturity. She reflects that rather than ‘post’ meaning going beyond or breaking with, in these contexts it means ‘a process of ongoing transformation and change’ (Brooks 1997: 1). Other kinds of ‘rebranding’ for feminism of course include the use of ‘third wave’ feminism where again the prefix is used to imply key shifts in the meaning of ‘feminism’ itself and in this theoretically-informed definition of post-feminism there might be seen to be common ground between third wave and post-feminism, although third wavers would certainly reject any suggestion that feminism is over. Brooks herself acknowledges the way post-feminism is associated with a negative portrayal of feminism in the mass media – particularly in the way the rhetoric of post-feminism is summoned in the backlash against feminism (see also Faludi 1992 ).

One of the reasons it is argued that the move to post-feminism is essential is because of the influence of postmodern thinking which refuses the ‘grand narrative’ of gender difference, so that it becomes increasingly impossible to lay claim to the identity ‘woman’, because of the impact of ‘difference’ theories and the contestation of knowledges about how ‘woman’ is constructed. Ann Brooks ’s version of post-feminism puts ‘woman’ under erasure; of course one could argue that this denies any political agency to a feminist who cannot lay claim to that identity, ‘modernist’ as it is, suggesting as it does a retreat to the self and ultimately the individualist framing of identity so favoured by enlightenment liberalism. The category ‘woman’, no matter how unsatisfactory as a means to summon up the wealth and diversity of women’s experiences and identities, allows at least a space to lay claim to a wealth of shared experiences (gendered pay differentials, the impact of sexual violence, the relationship of nation to gender for instance) which permits a collective oppositional response to injustices against women.

For critics who are still happy to call themselves ‘feminist’ without any prefixes, such a model of feminism does not readily allow for an acknowledgement of some highly productive shifts in feminism since the 1970s. Feminist politics has not remained static, and many of the central issues, so radical in the 1970s, are now accepted as part of mainstream politics. As Sylvia Walby notes, ‘Who would now call someone who believes in equal pay feminist? Yet before 1975 this was not law and was controversial’ ( 1997 : 163). Rene Denfeld , in her critique of second wave feminism, The New Victorians , bears this out when she points out that while the next generation has problems with the epithet ‘feminist’, they have no problem supporting the principles of equal pay and educational opportunities (Denfeld 1995: 4). For Denfeld this change from broad support of feminism to scepticism and alienation is a response to a change in the terms of second wave feminism itself: ‘It has become bogged down in an extremist moral and spiritual crusade that has little to do with women’s lives. It has climbed out on a limb of academic theory that is all but inaccessible to the uninitiated . . . feminism has become as confining as what it pretends to combat’ (Denfeld 1995: 5). Denfeld is pointing to widely aired anxieties that feminism has become just one more arcane theory – stemming from what she perceives to be a majority of cultural feminist writers creating and delivering women’s studies curricula in American universities, containing an alleged anti-male agenda. It is as if she actually doesn’t want to dismiss feminism but rather to take it ‘back’ from whoever she feels has stolen it. The irony is that ‘post-feminism’ from both Phoca and Wright’s and Brooks’s perspective is in many ways just such another ‘inaccessible’ theory for the uninitiated.

Tania Modleski is more concerned that while ‘woman’ is being put under erasure in the debates about difference, conceptual shifts such as the ‘men in feminism’ debate (a debate about whether men should call themselves feminists or be feminist critics independently of women) might make women disappear from feminism altogether. Talking about one particular anthology of ‘male feminist’ criticism she observes that ‘[i]n an unusually strong post-feminist irony, the final essay of this volume which banishes women from its list of contributors is a complaint about the way heterosexual men have become invisible within feminism!’ ( Modleski, 1991: 12). Modleski’s dissection of post-feminism in the critical sphere in many ways anticipates Susan Faludi ’s arguments in Backlash where it is the appropriation of the language of feminism which is seen to be used against itself in popular culture. Modleski’s combination of questioning theory and using examples of popular film, television and news, suggests that this appropriation goes much deeper and, she would argue, drives us straight back to male-centred discourse and critical authority.

There is still the accusation that second wave feminism failed to cede the hegemony of white middle-class heterosexual women to other groups of women, and there is clearly some truth in this claim. But nonetheless it is clear that many feminists (particularly at the level of grassroots politics) did acknowledge the common links between different sites of oppression; and the growth in political and critical perspectives by women of colour, working-class women and lesbians suggests that for them the struggle is not over. One can think of key voices in black American feminism, such as bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins who emphatically lay claim to ‘feminism’ as a term which still has political resonance, and this suggests that not all proponents of feminist discourse are ready yet to cede the ground to post-feminism, but would rather address the gaps, in the belief that there might be some consensus about what feminism can do.

Source: Fifty Key Concepts in Gender Studies Jane Pilcher and Imelda Whelehan Sage Publications, 2004.

FURTHER READING Ann Brooks (1997) gives a fairly comprehensive account of what ‘postfeminism’ means in a theoretical context; for those still struggling with French feminism, post-structuralism and Lacan. Phoca and Wright (1999) offer a crisp and concise account, liberally using illustrations and graphic narrative. Modleski (1991) and Faludi (1992) offer challenges which provide illuminating comparison.

Share this:

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Ann Brooks , Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women , Feminism , Feminism without women , Imelda Whelehan , Introducing Postfeminism , Literary Theory , Myra Macdonald , Overloaded: Popular Culture and the Future of Feminism , Patricia Hill Collins , postfeminism , Rene Denfeld , Representing Women: Myths of Femininity in the Popular Media , second wave feminism , Susan Faludi , Sylvia Walby , Tania Modleski , The New Victorians , The New Victorians: A Young Woman's Challenge to the Old Feminist Order

Related Articles

• Third Wave Feminism – Literary Theory and Criticism Notes
• Postfeminism and Its Entanglement with the Fourth Wave – Literary Theory and Criticism

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: From Nun to Feminist & Literary Icon

S or Juana Inés de la Cruz, hailed as Mexico’s Tenth Muse, is among Latin America’s most celebrated nuns and female authors. A self-taught scholar, Sor Juana’s literary contributions are wide-ranging, from eloquent sonnets to popular villancicos , essays, and plays. Her erudition and wit earned her recognition in the elite circles of Mexico’s colonial society but did not ensure a trouble-free life. Sor Juana continuously faced strong opposition from the Catholic Church. Despite this, she left a huge literary legacy and is widely regarded as the first published feminist of the New World.

Childhood & Early Years 

Sor Juana was born in 1948 or 1951 in the viceroyalty of New Spain (present-day Mexico) to Doña Isabel Ramirez de Santillana and Pedro Manuel de Asbaje, a captain from the Basque region of Spain. Sor Juana grew up in a single household and her father never recognized her as his legitimate daughter, a circumstance that presented a detriment in colonial Mexican society . The nun was acutely aware of this and went on to eloquently address it in one of her poems. To Sor Juana’s advantage, her mother held a respected position in society as an independent woman of entrepreneurial character, something that was not common in her time. In a feminist reconstruction of Sor Juana’s biography, Theresa A Yugar notes that her mother ran a hacienda by herself, modeling strength and independence to her daughters.

A child prodigy, Sor Juana demonstrated a thirst for knowledge from an early age and knew how to read by the age of 3. The nun claims to have followed her older sister to a school for young girls called “Amigas.” Since higher education was denied to women in 17th-century Mexico, Sor Juana had limited access to books as a young adult. In one of her essays advocating for women’s right to education, she describes how she would insist on dressing up as a boy to be able to attend a university in Mexico City.

At the age of 13, Sor Juana moved to Mexico City to live with her mother’s sister. This is where she entered higher society and gained admiration in elite circles. Her encounter and later friendship with the viceroy of Puebla and his wife marked the beginning of a new chapter in Sor Juana’s life, as their patronage afforded her the freedom to fully dedicate herself to intellectual pursuits and writing.

Convent Life & Relationship with the Church

At the age of 17, Sor Juana had to make a life choice: to enter the convent or marry. These were the only socially acceptable ways for a woman in 17th-century Mexico to protect her social status, economic security, and respectability. Sor Juana chose the convent and dedicated her life to learning, writing, and charity.

Why would Sor Juana choose convent life instead of securing herself through marriage?

Her decision was influenced by several factors. First, the convent was a place where she could access a library and continue her intellectual pursuits, which were limited for women outside the convent walls, and would not be possible as a married woman. Second, taking religious vows allowed her a degree of independence and self-reliance that was otherwise unavailable to women in her time. The Convent of San Jerónimo in Mexico City became a refuge for her to pursue her intellectual interests and protect her autonomy at the same time.

Life in the convent came with its own challenges. Although Sor Juana served the convent in numerous ways, her intellect was questioned and tested by male authorities throughout her life. This led to her engaging in intellectual debates and examinations with prominent scholars of the time. These exchanges not only showcased her scholarship but also brought her recognition as a respected scholar while precariously positioning her as an advocate for women’s education.

As a writer working across different genres and themes, her secular writings, in particular, garnered the discontent of clerical authorities. Sor Juana lived during an epoch when the Catholic Church held immense power and the Inquisition was active in colonial Mexico. Not surprisingly, the nun’s passionate pursuit of knowledge and expression of her ideas often put her at odds with the Church.

Advocacy for Women’s Education 

Sor Juana’s defense of her right to pursue knowledge and self-expression was a point of conflict with ecclesiastical authorities throughout her life. Controversial writings that challenged established norms, such as women’s education and women’s right to engage in intellectual discourse, garnered scrutiny and criticism. Fortunately, Sor Juana enjoyed friendship and protection from the viceregal authorities, which had equal power in colonial Mexico, and little could be done to stifle her self-expression. Notably, Sor Juana shared a deep friendship with the viceroy and vicereine of Puebla, who helped publish her works in Spain. With their departure from New Spain, Sor Juana’s relationship with the Church became more challenging.

Sor Juana did not delay in responding. In her essay titled Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz (“Response to Sister Filotea of the Cross”), Sor Juana presents a trajectory of her life and the obstacles she needed to overcome in order to receive an education. She peppered her argument with the wisdom of great philosophers and biblical sources, avidly defending women’s right to education. Her essay is not only a testament to her erudition and argumentative abilities but also conveys a unique sense of humor. Noting her love for cooking, Sor Juana defends her natural “inclination to letters” wittily suggesting that “if Aristotle had cooked, he would have written a great deal more.” Amidst the challenges and criticisms she faced, Sor Juana courageously defended her “inclination to knowledge” as a gift from God that she could not resist. Her writings left an indelible mark on colonial literature, challenging the prevailing patriarchal norms of the era.

Secular Works & Feminist Themes

A prolific writer, Sor Juana’s literary repertoire includes plays, essays, and a wide array of secular works. She stands as one of the most prominent figures of the Hispanic Baroque and Spanish Golden Age literature. Sor Juana’s literary legacy speaks of her resilience as a woman writing under the scrutiny of ecclesiastical authorities. Among her notable works is “Primero Sueño,” a 975-line baroque poem translated into English as “First Dream,” an enigmatic and mystical poem, considered by many to be Sor Juana’s masterpiece. The poem, which describes the soul’s quest for knowledge as the body falls asleep, is a testament to Sor Juana’s imaginative prowess, erudition, and ability to navigate philosophical themes.

“El Divino Narciso,” one of her notable plays, reflects her deep engagement with theological and allegorical narratives. The play subtly blends Catholic and Aztec beliefs, a feature prominent in the Spanish-American baroque. In a more popular vein, Sor Juana authored numerous villancicos that she composed specifically to be sung in the cathedral. According to one of Sor Juana’s biographies, these villancicos not only celebrate women but also challenge patriarchal attitudes toward them, for example, this carol dedicated to St. Catherine of Alexandria , with whom she shared similar struggles.

Catherine bears the victory! For with knowledge pure and holy She’s convinced the learned men And has emerged victorious — with her knowledge glorious — from their arrogance profane, which would convince and conquer her. But Catherine is the victor!

Other feminist themes imbue Sor Juana’s poetry. Her poem “You Foolish Men” is one of the most notable examples, largely interpreted as a criticism of the “hypocrisy of the relations between men and women in New Spain.”

You foolish men who lay the guilt on women, not seeing you’re the cause of the very thing you blame; If you invite their disdain with measureless desire why wish they well behave if you incite to ill.

Love Poems & Legacy

Sor Juana authored dozens of love poems, many of which were dedicated to the vicereine of Puebla—María Luisa Manrique de Lara y Gonzaga.

Much has been written about the nun’s friendship with the vicereine, hinting at Sor Juana’s homosexuality and her impossible love for María Luisa, the sole source for this speculation being Sor Juana’s poetry itself. Below is an excerpt from a poem Sor Juana dedicated to María Luisa, or Lysis, as she calls her.

My divine Lysis: do forgive my daring, if so I address you, unworthy though I am to be known as yours. I cannot think it bold to call you so, well knowing you’ve ample thunderbolts to shatter any overweening of mine.

Sor Juana concludes the poem with the following verses:

There are women more deserving, yet in distance from heaven the humblest of valleys seems no farther than the highest peak. In sum, I must admit to the crime of adoring you; should you wish to punish me, the very punishment will be a reward.

Taking into consideration Sor Juana’s religious vows as well as the societal norms of her time, it’s most likely that the relationship between the two women was strictly platonic.

Today, Sor Juana’s legacy lives on, making her one of the most celebrated authors, nuns, and feminist voices in the Latin American literary tradition. Chilean Maria Luisa Bemberg ’s 1990 film, I, the Worst of All, brilliantly captures Sor Juana’s journey within the confining walls of the convent and her complex relationship with the Church. Inspired by Octavio Paz’s biography of Sor Juana, the title of the film alludes to a phrase with which Sor Juana signed documents toward the end of her life. Sor Juana’s last days were filled with the turmoil of having to give up her library containing thousands of books and musical and scientific instruments. Sor Juana died soon thereafter due to an epidemic that swept through the convent in 1695.

At the end of her life, Sor Juana fully dedicated herself to charitable activities within the convent. The San Jerónimo Convent where Sor Juana spent nearly three decades of her life has now been converted into the University of the Cloister of Sor Juana, which houses Sor Juana’s remains. A plaque accompanies the coffin, which roughly translates to “I want to see who kills me triumphant, and kill who wants to see me triumphant.”

References:

De la Cruz, Juana Inés (2014). Selected Works. (E. Grossman, Trans.). W.W. Norton & Company.

De la Cruz, Juana Inés (1988). A Sor Juana Anthology . (A.S. Trueblood, Trans.). Harvard University Press.

Yugar, Theresa A (2014). Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Feminist Reconstruction of Biography and Text. Wipf & Stock Publishers.