conclusion on feminism essay

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.

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Conclusion of the Essay on Feminism

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

FAQ of Essay on Feminism

Question 1: What are feminist beliefs?

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

Question 2: What started feminism?

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

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5 Essays About Feminism

On the surface, the definition of feminism is simple. It’s the belief that women should be politically, socially, and economically equal to men. Over the years, the movement expanded from a focus on voting rights to worker rights, reproductive rights, gender roles, and beyond. Modern feminism is moving to a more inclusive and intersectional place. Here are five essays about feminism that tackle topics like trans activism, progress, and privilege:

“Trickle-Down Feminism” – Sarah Jaffe

Feminists celebrate successful women who have seemingly smashed through the glass ceiling, but the reality is that most women are still under it. Even in fast-growing fields where women dominate (retail sales, food service, etc), women make less money than men. In this essay from Dissent Magazine, author Sarah Jaffe argues that when the fastest-growing fields are low-wage, it isn’t a victory for women. At the same time, it does present an opportunity to change the way we value service work. It isn’t enough to focus only on “equal pay for equal work” as that argument mostly focuses on jobs where someone can negotiate their salary. This essay explores how feminism can’t succeed if only the concerns of the wealthiest, most privileged women are prioritized.

Sarah Jaffe writes about organizing, social movements, and the economy with publications like Dissent, the Nation, Jacobin, and others. She is the former labor editor at Alternet.

“What No One Else Will Tell You About Feminism” – Lindy West

Written in Lindy West’s distinct voice, this essay provides a clear, condensed history of feminism’s different “waves.” The first wave focused on the right to vote, which established women as equal citizens. In the second wave, after WWII, women began taking on issues that couldn’t be legally-challenged, like gender roles. As the third wave began, the scope of feminism began to encompass others besides middle-class white women. Women should be allowed to define their womanhood for themselves. West also points out that “waves” may not even exist since history is a continuum. She concludes the essay by declaring if you believe all people are equal, you are a feminist.

Jezebel reprinted this essay with permission from How To Be A Person, The Stranger’s Guide to College by Lindy West, Dan Savage, Christopher Frizelle, and Bethany Jean Clement. Lindy West is an activist, comedian, and writer who focuses on topics like feminism, pop culture, and fat acceptance.

“Toward a Trans* Feminism” – Jack Halberstam

The history of transactivsm and feminism is messy. This essay begins with the author’s personal experience with gender and terms like trans*, which Halberstam prefers. The asterisk serves to “open the meaning,” allowing people to choose their categorization as they see fit. The main body of the essay focuses on the less-known history of feminists and trans* folks. He references essays from the 1970s and other literature that help paint a more complete picture. In current times, the tension between radical feminism and trans* feminism remains, but changes that are good for trans* women are good for everyone.

This essay was adapted from Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability by Jack Halberstam. Halberstam is the Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Gender Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. He is also the author of several books.

“Rebecca Solnit: How Change Happens” – Rebecca Solnit

The world is changing. Rebecca Solnit describes this transformation as an assembly of ideas, visions, values, essays, books, protests, and more. It has many layers involving race, class, gender, power, climate, justice, etc, as well as many voices. This has led to more clarity about injustice. Solnit describes watching the transformation and how progress and “ wokeness ” are part of a historical process. Progress is hard work. Not exclusively about feminism, this essay takes a more intersectional look at how progress as a whole occurs.

“How Change Happens” was adapted from the introduction to Whose Story Is it? Rebecca Solnit is a writer, activist, and historian. She’s the author of over 20 books on art, politics, feminism, and more.

“Bad Feminist” extract – Roxane Gay

People are complicated and imperfect. In this excerpt from her book Bad Feminist: Essays , Roxane Gay explores her contradictions. The opening sentence is, “I am failing as a woman.” She goes on to describe how she wants to be independent, but also to be taken care of. She wants to be strong and in charge, but she also wants to surrender sometimes. For a long time, she denied that she was human and flawed. However, the work it took to deny her humanness is harder than accepting who she is. While Gay might be a “bad feminist,” she is also deeply committed to issues that are important to feminism. This is a must-read essay for any feminists who worry that they aren’t perfect.

Roxane Gay is a professor, speaker, editor, writer, and social commentator. She is the author of Bad Feminist , a New York Times bestseller, Hunger (a memoir), and works of fiction.

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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

Students are often asked to write an essay on Feminism in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Feminism

Understanding feminism.

Feminism is a social movement and ideology that fights for equal rights for women. It began in the late 19th century when women demanded their right to vote.

The Importance of Feminism

Feminism is important because it seeks to achieve equality between men and women. It fights against gender stereotypes and discrimination.

Feminism Today

Today, feminism continues to fight for equality. It also focuses on issues like sexual harassment, body shaming, and equal pay. Everyone can support feminism by respecting and promoting gender equality.

Also check:

• Paragraph on Feminism
• Speech on Feminism

250 Words Essay on Feminism

Introduction.

Feminism, a socio-political movement, has been essential in shaping modern societies. It advocates for gender equality, challenging patriarchal norms that have been embedded in societies for centuries.

The Evolution of Feminism

Feminism has evolved through different waves, each tackling unique issues. The first wave, in the late 19th and early 20th century, focused on legal rights, particularly suffrage. The second wave, in the 1960s and 1970s, broadened the debate to cultural inequalities and gender norms. The third wave, in the 1990s and 2000s, sought to challenge the definitions of femininity itself.

Intersectionality in Feminism

Third-wave feminism introduced the concept of intersectionality, acknowledging that women’s experiences are not universal but are influenced by factors such as race, class, and sexuality. This perspective broadened the feminist lens, allowing for a more inclusive approach to gender equality.

Today, feminism continues to fight for equality in various spheres, including domestic, professional, and political arenas. It challenges stereotypes, advocates for body autonomy, and pushes for equal representation in leadership roles.

Feminism, in essence, is about dismantling systemic gender biases to create a balanced society. It is not about superiority but equality. As society evolves, so does feminism, adjusting its focus to address emerging issues, making it a dynamic and vital movement in the 21st century.

500 Words Essay on Feminism

Feminism, a term that has sparked debates and movements across the globe, is a multifaceted ideology that seeks to define, establish, and achieve gender equality. It advocates for women’s rights on the grounds of political, social, and economic equality to men.

The Origin and Evolution of Feminism

The roots of feminism can be traced back to the 19th century when women started to challenge their assigned roles in society. The first wave of feminism focused primarily on legal inequalities, primarily addressing issues like women’s suffrage. This wave was successful in securing women’s right to vote in many parts of the world.

The second wave, emerging in the 1960s, broadened the debate to include cultural inequalities and the role of women in society. This wave brought issues like reproductive rights, domestic violence, and marital rape to the forefront.

The third wave of feminism, starting in the mid-1990s, sought to challenge and expand common definitions of gender and sexuality. This wave, still ongoing, embraces diversity and change, focusing on intersectionality – the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender.

Contemporary Feminism

Today, feminism continues to evolve to meet the needs of women globally. It has expanded to include the rights of all women, regardless of race, religion, or sexual orientation. Feminists are working to ensure that women have equal opportunities in the workforce, in education, and in politics. They are also fighting against gender stereotypes and societal norms that limit women’s choices and potential.

Feminism and Intersectionality

Intersectionality, a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, is a critical aspect of modern feminism. It acknowledges that women’s experiences are shaped not only by their gender but also by other factors such as race, socioeconomic status, and disability. Intersectional feminism emphasizes the importance of understanding and addressing these overlapping identities to achieve true equality.

Critiques and Misconceptions about Feminism

Despite its progressive aims, feminism often faces criticism and misunderstanding. Some people argue that feminism promotes hatred against men, while others believe it is no longer necessary in today’s society. However, these misconceptions stem from a misunderstanding of feminism’s true aim: equality. Feminism does not seek to elevate women above men but strives for equality for all, regardless of gender.

Feminism is not about creating a matriarchal society; it is about creating a society where everyone, regardless of gender, has equal opportunities and rights. It is about acknowledging and respecting the diversity of women’s experiences and identities. As we move forward, it is crucial to continue the conversation about feminism, dispel the misconceptions, and work towards a more equal and inclusive society.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

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7 Conclusion: Revisiting the “We” of Feminism

• Published: March 2020
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The conclusion first shows that the dynamics of femonationalism should be explained while taking into account feminists’ political subjectivations, and the link between feminist whiteness and nationalism. It also explores how a feminist ethic of responsibility enables us to go beyond the critical question of the foundation of feminism—that is, who the “we” is in the name of which feminists make their claims. A feminist ethics of responsibility implies redefining the subject of feminism as relations among feminists rather than a “we women,” and defining the feminist project as a project of treating other feminists equally. Finally, the conclusion revisits the question of agency and emancipation. It argues that a feminist ethic of responsibility can help define emancipation outside of the liberal vocabulary of agency.

The “we” of feminism is not its foundation; it is an effect of the impressions made by others who take the risk of inhabiting its name. Of course, this “hopeful” narrative has another edge: the “we” of feminism is shaped by some bodies, more than others. — Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotions , 189

Throughout this book, I have defined feminism as a political and moral project, and I have explored its troubles and its reconfigurations in postsecular times. My aim has not been to settle feminist disputes over values such as gender equality, autonomy, or secularism—now debatably heralded as a feminist value as well. 1 Close Rather, I have sought to understand feminism’s trouble through an exploration of feminists’ variegated attachments to the feminist project, and of how these reproduce hierarchies of race and exclusions as well as provide terms for resistance to these exclusions. Indeed, my argument has been that if we are to understand how the recuperation of feminist values for nationalist and xenophobic agendas was made possible, and understand the intractable disputes over the subjects who may or may not be included, as equals, in the feminist project, we must comprehend how attachments to feminism are shaped by race, whiteness, class, sexuality and history, and we must consider their deeply moral nature.

The debates over Islamic veiling practices that have unfolded in the last two decades in liberal democracies, especially in Europe, have captured the imagination of the public with ready-made oppositions between secularism and religious freedom, national identity and religious faith, gender equality and Islamic practices. Ideas about gender equality and emancipation have figured prominently in these discussions, providing a convenient vehicle for modernity—as is often the case—as well as a convenient veil over postcolonial relations, racism, and Islamophobia. Logically, feminists have figured prominently in these debates, on various sides. Their disputes have reconfigured feminist movements in many contexts, creating new alliances and breaking up old ones.

At the same time, feminist discourses about gender equality have been enrolled in nationalist projects that have gained tremendous support in particular in Europe, in the context of the antimigrant politics that has consolidated since the “refugee crisis.” In that sense, in many national contexts, feminists’ inability to agree upon veiling policies has certainly played an important political role in the current recuperation of feminist discourses for xenophobic purposes. However, the active adhesion of a small or large fraction of feminist activists to secularist discourses and veiling bans—which is not to be understated—does not explain the rise of femonationalism, 2 Close that is, the appropriation of feminist values to pursue a nationalist and populist politics. Indeed, a vast majority of those very same feminists would openly oppose such a politics, and in fact, many feminists have actively resisted femonationalism and anti-immigrant politics. Rather, I argue that it is the inability to resist such a femonationalist discourse, and the ignorance of its roots and connections within the feminist movements themselves, that has paved the way to femonationalism, like the perfect epitome of the return of the repressed . In other words, the rise of femonationalism calls attention to the roads not taken, the alliances not forged in time, the foreclosure of critique, and the ignorance linked to privilege within feminism.

From that perspective, the sexularism debates provide an ideal vantage point from which to analyze the present—and future—of feminism as a political project. What is more, these debates also had profound echoes in feminist theory. Indeed, by placing religious Muslim women at the center of attention and discourses, a subject depicted as not liberal enough, the debates have encountered a stream of critical reflections, analyses, and anxieties about the feminist subject, understood as the subject to be emancipated by feminism. Indeed, multiculturalist feminist theory has grappled with the conundrum of reconciling the liberal premises of gender equality with minority rights, 3 Close while critical feminist theory has chastised the political ambitions of feminism to emancipate subjects whose form of life does not follow the political and moral grammar of liberalism. 4 Close These debates have revolved around the meaning of female agency and its role and centrality for feminist politics. 5 Close They have therefore provided a critical return on feminism’s liberal and modern premises, revealing the extent of the exclusions these perform, but they have also opened up a political and normative abyss—to be explored or to recoil from. It is no surprise, then, that sexularism debates have captured not only the public imagination in many European countries but also feminists’ imagination.

In this book, I have proposed to shift attention from female agency and emancipation—a subject at the heart of both the public debate on Islamic veiling and of numerous feminist theorizations—to feminists and the project they inhabit, to use Sara Ahmed’s metaphor in the epigraph of this concluding chapter. Instead of scrutinizing the ability of pious women to display agency even in religiously orthodox settings or the potential of religiosity as a medium of emancipation—a site of important empirical and theoretical developments 6 Close —I have proposed to explore feminists’ political subjectivations in the contemporary postsecular moment. The concept of political subjectivation I have forged aims at describing the process by which becoming a feminist implies not only adhering to a set of norms and political visions, but also tracing boundaries between “good” and “bad” feminist subjects, and entering into relations with these subjects accordingly. It thus captures the articulation between politics and morals that, I argue, is at the heart of the feminist project. This change in focus, from the subject of feminists’ attention —the nonliberal subject to be recuperated, or not, for the feminist project—to the subjects of feminism , responded first to a desire to understand the tremendous emotional charge that these debates triggered for feminists on different sides and what these emotions revealed about the nature of the feminist project. Indeed, while analyzing feminist discourses in the context of sexularism debates, I have argued relentlessly in this book that we must consider feminism not only as a political project of collective emancipation and subjective transformation, but also as a moral project. By creating and imagining political relationships, feminism also produces moral relations between its participants, envisioned as distant others to be saved or as possibly emancipated equals.

Second, this shift in focus responded to the ambition to explore Islamic veil debates as the return of the repressed in feminism, as the excluded domains coming back to haunt this project in various guises depending on the context. I have documented how whiteness and its privileges remain actively concealed, through universalist discourses in particular, and how whiteness shapes feminist politics vis-à-vis Islamic veil regulations. Finally, the focus on feminists’ political subjectivations aimed not only at operating a critical return on the repressed, but also, by outlining the moral dimension of the feminist project, at reflecting on how the ethical drive within this political project may be put in the service of an anticipatory-utopian moment, 7 Close reclaiming feminism’s imaginative and transformative powers. As I analyzed feminists’ discourses, I traced their moral dispositions—the contours of the ethical drive that characterizes this political project—and I reflected critically on the moral harms that feminists may perpetrate, as well as on the asymmetries of power and privilege that shape their relations and the ways in which subjects may inhabit feminism. I also argued that we may harness the potential of this ethical drive in the service of expanding the moral boundaries of the feminist project, in particular to disestablish feminist whiteness.

Feminist Whiteness and Femonationalism

My approach thus shifts our focus and our understanding of Islamic veil debates and femonationalism. While many artful commentaries and analyses of these debates have stressed how they have reconfigured secularism, gender, and sexual emancipation in racialized terms, 8 Close I have focused on the ways in which they trigger feminists’ moral discourses about “good” and “bad” feminist subjects, and how these discourses are shaped by race and postcolonialism, as well as religion and secularism. Seen in this light, Islamic veil debates display well-known features of “difference” debates within feminism. They reproduce what intersectional analyses of feminist movements have critiqued for decades—that is, the centrality of race and racism as mechanisms of privilege and exclusion within feminist movements, as well as the resulting invisibilization of multiple marginalized subjects and subjectivities from the feminist project. 9 Close

I also argue that these debates reveal new features as well. Indeed, because they revolve around issues such as female autonomy and emancipation, they elicit moral discourses that reveal the moral horizon and boundaries that feminism produces. By defining “good” and “bad” feminist subjects—subjects of equal respect and objects of benevolent care; subjects to be regulated, and abject subjects to be condemned—these discourses delimit who is to be part of the feminist project and benefit from its claims, and who is to be excluded. Doing so, they produce and reproduce power relations, hierarchies, and asymmetries in the very name of feminism, based on race, postcolonial relations, and Islamophobia.

My focus on the moral dimension of feminism, and how it connects with politics, has thus led me to complement intersectional approaches of feminist movements with an attention to whiteness and how it shapes the political subjectivation of white feminists. Indeed, in order to account for white feminists’ emotional reactions and their desire to regulate Muslim women’s subjectivities in the name of feminism, I have relied mainly on the concept of feminist whiteness. This concept designates how feminism is made white through the discourses of white feminists. These discourses vary depending on the context, and they also convey different moral relations. I have in particular distinguished between, on the one hand, feminist whiteness as it is expressed in a benevolent relation of care for racialized women—understood as objects of care, beneficiaries of feminist claims made in their names—and on the other hand, feminist whiteness that enforces the exclusion of those racialized subjects who claim their part as equals in the feminist project. Hence, feminist whiteness is shaped by the social context in which it is performed. It fashions feminism when it is conceived as a social project, one of taking care of vulnerable women and representing their needs, and it also fashions feminism understood as a political project creating political relationships among equals.

I argue that the approach focusing on feminist whiteness I have proposed in this book sheds new light on femonationalism and its political success. Femonationalism can be analyzed as resulting from a convergence of material interests in neoliberal times, 10 Close but it should also be understood as elicited by feminist whiteness; that is, as fueled by the political subjectivation of white feminists as white feminists. White ignorance 11 Close and white innocence 12 Close explain why many white feminists did not consider the implications that their claims in favor of veiling bans would have for Muslim women, and how they could be instrumentalized for right-wing and xenophobic political agendas. Indeed, I have argued that feminist whiteness is often predicated upon a denial of relationality with racialized subjects, a denial that fuels the possibility of moral and political irresponsibility. Hence, the political and moral relations with racialized feminists that have been refused, denied, or marginalized by white feminists have transformed into political claims that consolidate and rigidify the boundaries of the national community on the basis of race, class, migration status, and religion.

However, feminist whiteness may be displaced and debunked, for example through the discourse of intersectionality—when it is indeed adopted as an important principle of feminist intervention, as is the case to some extent in Quebec. Then issues of racism and white privilege become part of a more critical feminist practice. What is more, the feminist ethic of intervention in grassroots organizations, when it is critical of the power relations between the one providing service and counseling and the one receiving them, and considers that women should be listened to on their own terms, also provides a potential lever to critique white privilege by encouraging relationality and decentering feminist whiteness and its supposed epistemological superiority. Finally, the most important site of resistance to feminist whiteness is feminist activism and discourses by racialized feminists. Indeed, racialized feminists provide a trenchant analysis and critique of feminist whiteness within feminist organizations and feminist movements at large. Their discourses also reveal the deeply moral nature of feminism. Racialized feminists’ just resentment claims moral redress from white feminists. It demands that they be considered equal participants in the feminist project, and asks as a prerequisite that power relations and white privilege be acknowledged by white feminists. Racialized feminists’ moral address and their experiences of failed solidarity or of the promise of inclusion direct us to inquire more deeply into the moral bonds that the feminist promise holds. I explored those bonds, and the nature of the feminist project, in chapter 6 , arguing that we must develop and deepen what I called a feminist ethic of responsibility if we want to live up to the promise of caring for other feminist subjects that feminism entails and upon which it is based.

Feminist Trouble / Feminist Futures: Revisiting the “We” of Feminism

The question of foundations—of who is the “we” feminists claim to be, to represent, and to make claims about—has been a central one for feminist theory. 13 Close At the heart of antifoundationalist accounts of feminism is the premise that for feminism to be a transformative project, it cannot rest upon essentialist categorizations, especially when those have historically performed exclusions based on race, sexuality, or coloniality. While this claim has accomplished a critical return on the feminist project, contesting its boundaries and its normative horizon, it has not led to new ways to imagine what is the nature of the community that feminism claims to create. This anti-identitarian account of feminism has thus elicited what Judith Butler presents as a practice of critique, one that establishes a critical relation to norms “in the sense that it will not comply with a given category, but rather constitute an interrogatory relation to the field of categorization itself, referring at least implicitly to the limits of the epistemological horizon within which practices are formed.” 14 Close For antifoundationalist feminists such as Teresa de Lauretis, Judith Butler, and Linda Zerilli, the lack of foundation of the “we” is what constitutes feminism as a critical project, although for different reasons. For de Lauretis, feminist theory and practice is based on a paradox, that of being at once limited by its social circumstances and identities, and “excessive to them.” 15 Close For Butler, what constitutes feminism is precisely its critical relation to norms, a relation that is vital for any critical political project. 16 Close For Zerilli, feminism is a project of freedom, creating free relations, rather than a project based on a shared identity, and the question of the “we” is, in fact, irrelevant for this political project. 17 Close

However, can this critical relation to the normativity embedded in the “we” that feminism pretends to incarnate constitute the basis of an anticipatory-utopian moment for feminism? Or can feminism dispense with its utopian dimension? While I agree with the antifoundationalist perspective on the feminist subject wholeheartedly, I ask: can and should another “we” than “we women” emerge from this operation of critique? For some feminist theorists like Judith Butler, there is no other moment than the moment of critique. There is no outside of norms, and new normative projects must elicit new critical ethics. The “we women” must be understood as undecidable, open to reinterpretations, as “permanent openness and resignifiability.” 18 Close The practice of critique for feminism would then make visible the fact that there can be no anticipatory-utopian moment, only possibilities of mobilization produced by “existing configurations of discourse and power.” 19 Close

What type of political subject can then emerge from this critical practice? Two paths seem to have been opened by the antifoundationalist account of feminism. One is Judith Butler’s reflection on coalition based on vulnerability and on a shared precarious life. Indeed, in her recent work Butler has argued that our vulnerability in the face of death and mourning and our social living condition of precariousness are shared conditions of existence—rather than ontological claims—that may lay the antifoundationalist basis for collective action. The precariousness of life, the fact that living makes us dependent on others, is a shared human condition, but also a condition that is unequally distributed among us, with some of us being more exposed to vulnerability than others—a situation denied by those who are shielded from vulnerability by their privileges. Vulnerability is therefore a political relation and can thus lead to political action, in the form of coalitions, presented by Butler as copresence in the public space in the name of a “we” the people, a “we” that exists as copresence and shared vulnerability rather than as an identity. 20 Close

Can such an account of the “we” delineate the contour of a feminist “we”? I argue that Butler’s proposal remains incomplete, in particular because it does not allow us to distinguish between those who are close and those who are distant from us, and this distinction is central for ethical and political purposes. Although we are differently exposed to vulnerability, Butler does not reflect more precisely on how those differences might forge specific political relations, across and within those differences, and therefore constitute different collective subjects. More importantly, while Butler affirms that there is no normative horizon or foundation beyond critique, except a form of collective copresence in the public space to claim forms of protection from institutionalized vulnerability, the very act of claiming rights presupposes an outside of the “we,” an authority that one seeks to challenge and replace. There is, therefore, underlying critique, a desire—a utopia maybe—that the world could be different, that an authority could be replaced. Hence, some kind of anticipatory-utopian moment, unexamined in Butler’s claim, may be in fact shaping her critique. I agree here with Amy Allen’s important reminder that critical feminist theory needs to be both explanatory and anticipatory to be truly a critical project with political potential. 21 Close This anticipatory moment must be articulated if we want to be able to expose its possible exclusions and limits. What is more, my fieldwork and numerous critical accounts of feminists’ relationship to feminism indicate that commitment to this “we,” even if an undecided “we” that is exposed to resignifications, exceeds a pure moment of critique and negativity. Hence, this path toward a potential antifoundationalist political “we” remains only partially explored.

A second path that follows from antifoundationalist accounts of feminism is evidently queer theory on politics and identity, or rather on disidentification. 22 Close While here I will not do a close reading of the various approaches that queer theory has developed to think through the question of collective action without foundations, I want to underline two related concepts that open up a queer feminist theorization of politics. I purposely combine here the terms “queer” and “feminist” as one because, when it comes to antifoundationalist theorizing about politics, the two approaches have more similarities than differences and share the same genealogy. 23 Close Both José Esteban Muñoz and Bruno Perreau argue in similar ways that a queer conception of a political community implies a retrospective glance, a critical return on a political experience . Muñoz underlines the distinctive quality of queerness as an illumination, an ideality, a capacity for imagination especially, but not only, visible in queer aesthetics. 24 Close Hence, for Muñoz, queer politics cannot be encapsulated in the negativity of critique. We must recapture its ideality as a concrete utopia, one of actualizing potentialities. In particular, Muñoz insists on the desire evidenced in queer aesthetic, a desire for a future and a desire for queer relationality, a sharing of experiences and desires. Analyzing an instance of actualized queer potentiality, in the resistance to antiqueer politics in France, Perreau 25 Close also defines a queer political community beyond negativity, as a critical return on an experienced event. He argues that a queer politics not only challenges the norms established by the majority, the idea that communities need fixed boundaries, but that it also claims one’s belonging to a political community, a return on a shared experience.

I join these queer insights in arguing that we need critical imagination and potentiality—a more adequate reformulation of the anticipatory-utopian moment—for feminism as much as for queer politics, and that indeed, these projects are in many ways one and the same. I have proposed in this book an antifoundationalist account of the “we” of feminism that is not only critical of identities, but also, I argue, full of potentiality. Indeed, I have defined feminism as a political and moral project of caring for feminist subjects, understood as subjects who give an account of themselves as feminists, but also as those subjects who are put in relation with feminism through their claims or the claims made about them. The potentiality of these relations is what brings them into the scope of feminism and into the web of political and moral relations it creates. I contend that such an account of feminism can provide critical imagination, beyond the negativity of critique, because it centers on the ethical drive of feminism, on relationality and its inherent affectivity, dimensions that are crucial for utopianism.

One may then ask: if subjects who do not claim to be feminist but are put in relation with feminism are considered to be part of that political community, is that community indeed defined by feminism as a set of shared values and a transformative commitment? What does this claim imply for the political boundaries of feminism? Indeed, a risk lies precisely at this juncture. The critical imagination I propose for the feminist project implies that we extend our care, our relations, to subjects who lay beyond what have been identified as feminism’s shared values and “good” subjects. To take again the example given by Eirini Avramopoulou of a feminist coalition in Turkey, feminism meant here allying with religious Muslim women who do not define themselves as feminist, and “taking care” of each other. 26 Close However, is this in any way new for feminism? Historically feminism has always enrolled in its project subjects who do not define themselves as feminists—“women”—and has claimed to speak for them and in their names. What is more, there is, in fact, no agreement on shared values among those who identify as feminists: gender equality, autonomy, and emancipation are values feminists are fighting for and fighting over at the same time.

However, the risks of the critical imagination that I propose are, I argue, morally and politically worthier of taking. Indeed, the risks that feminists take when they claim to represent “women” and women’s interests are often no risk at all: speaking for and in place of distant others who cannot speak for themselves because they are not listened to may just be an iteration of privilege. What is more, the deep essentialist narrative that these claims fuel enacts closures all too well known. In its place, the risk I propose is a risk inherent to any moral relation because, as Emilie Hache surmises, to treat the other well is never a given. 27 Close It is a complex moral practice, especially, I would add, when we recognize that it is also a political act. Treating others equally is a deeply political action, as Jacques Rancière has carefully documented, but it is also the sign of a desire to treat them well, to be preoccupied by others and by my relation to them. 28 Close Hence, we may take the risk that what we have come to know and experience as feminism may be transformed, becoming in part unrecognizable to us. However, doing so, we might in fact recognize new subjects as part of this project and recognize them as equals—a risk worth taking.

Emancipation without Agency

I conclude this book with a last venture into one of feminist theory’s preferred and perilous topics, that of agency. In opening this book, I underlined that sexularism debates captured feminists’ political imagination in great part because they centered on the nature of agency and autonomy: could pious Muslim women be redeemed as agentic subjects? How could agency be redefined to account for practices of compliance—with conservative gender norms and what were perceived as patriarchal injunctions—rather than resistance? The debate over agency and how best to conceptualize it has provided us with some of the most insightful, innovative and complex reflections in contemporary feminist theory. This centrality to feminist thought is of course intimately linked with the centrality of emancipation in the feminist utopian project. 29 Close I argue, maybe provocatively, that, for the sake of feminism’s emancipatory promise, we do not have to and should not settle the question of agency. My aim in this book has been to decenter our inquiry from the subjectivities and life forms of “distant” others—not-liberal-enough and pious subjects—and to turn away from questions asking whether these subjects can be recuperated for the feminist project, or whether the project’s limits have been exposed, making it irrelevant for postsecular times. I have argued that we should rather focus our attention on the political subjectivities of feminists and what we can learn about the feminist project as the project of creating political and moral relations. Now, last, I argue that this decentering also opens up new ways of thinking about the connection between agency and emancipation.

Many feminist theorists have argued that only by transforming our conception of autonomy and freedom can we reconcile the feminist project with political subjectivities that fall outside the scope of liberalism. 30 Close I have argued, on the contrary, that we need not enter the debate over the definition of what counts as autonomous behavior, freedom, or emancipation in order to decide how we should address questions such as those about forms of Islamic veiling. Indeed, I have argued that the feminist ethic of responsibility that I propose can provide moral and political clues to help us more appropriately address the issues at stake for feminism in these debates because it can erode, or displace, the conflict over who embodies the “good” feminist subject, by shifting our moral inquiry away from the properties of “bad” or illiberal feminist subjects and toward the nature of our relationship with the “others” who are put in relation with us through feminist claims. Rather than asking, Can pious Muslim women—or any other type of eccentric feminist subject—display autonomous behavior? Can they be recaptured as potential emancipated feminist subjects? I propose to ask, How should my relationship to these eccentric feminist subjects be defined? What is its nature? Is it marked by power asymmetries? Do these asymmetries endow me with heightened moral responsibility to care for them as potential feminist subjects?

Now I return to the agency debate to also argue that, while the approach I propose sidesteps the question of agency, it does not leave us in a political vacuum from which emancipation has disappeared. Rather, I offer that we can productively think of emancipation without agency. Both Saba Mahmood and Amy Allen have argued for the need to suspend normative (liberal) feminist assumptions in the face of the consequences that these assumptions can have, and have had, for the illiberal or not-so-liberal (female) subjects regulated by postcolonial, neoliberal, and secular discourses. 31 Close Saba Mahmood’s critical appraisal of feminism’s normative liberal embrace of freedom leads her to ask the question of feminist responsibility—but not to provide us with a satisfying answer, other than sustaining the critique. She writes: “Do my political visions ever run up against the responsibility that I incur for the destruction of life forms so that ‘unenlightened women may be taught to live more freely?’ ” 32 Close This critique is a challenge to the feminist project as a normative project of emancipation. It is also a challenge to the liberal understanding of autonomy, and an affirmation that there is a paradox of subjectivation, one in which I may desire to inhabit norms that oppress me or constrain me. As Alison Weir notes, this is only a paradox from the point of view of the liberal understanding of autonomy. 33 Close From a more socially and historically astute and conceptually rich understanding of subject formation, such as the one developed by Foucault and which precisely inspires Mahmood’s reflections, it is no paradox at all but the very condition of subjectivation. However, a nonliberal understanding of autonomy, such as the conception offered by Mahmood of subjectivation as the practices of inhabiting social norms, does not provide a sound basis from which to think about the emancipatory potentiality of feminism. Indeed, Mahmood’s response to this critique and this challenge is placed on more personal terrain, that of the ethics of the anthropologist herself. As she attempts to give a more complex and comprehensive account of these forms of life, her proposal is to adhere to “a political imperative, born out of the realization that we can no longer presume that secular reason and morality exhaust the forms of valuable human flourishings. . . . A particular openness to exploring nonliberal traditions is intrinsic to a politically responsible scholarly practice . . . and a willingness to reevaluate one’s own views in light of the Other’s.” 34 Close Interestingly, I find here echoes between what Mahmood describes as the “politically responsible scholarly practice” 35 Close and the feminist ethic of responsibility I have defined, in that both seek to create a space of possibility for the Other. However, Mahmood does not apply her insights to feminism as a political and moral practice, and her profound reflections on the nature and limits of liberal and critical accounts of agency seem to offer no potentiality for feminism as a critical and utopian project, but rather to enjoin us to abandon not only feminism’s liberal premises but also its ambition to emancipate subjects.

Reflecting on Mahmood’s proposal, Amy Allen also endorses an approach that favors a continuing critical engagement with the identity categories that are mobilized by feminism, and a stance of humility toward the liberal norms that animate the feminist project. She remarks: “The endpoint of this line of questioning is the adoption of a stance of humility toward one’s own normative and political commitments, a stance that recognizes its own limits and contingencies and that is willing to have those commitments de-stabilized in the encounter with other forms of life.” 36 Close She therefore proposes to break with the normative certainties inherent to most of modern critical theory about the importance of freedom, autonomy, and reflexive rationality, as well as with the idea of a specific place for the Western Enlightenment within modernity, an idea defended by some prominent critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas. Allen provides a full and complex picture of the challenges that arise for feminist theory if it is to adopt a critical stance toward its normative ideals because it recognizes that they are also the product of relations of power, of a history not only of enlightenment but also of colonization and racism. Her answer to this challenge first suspends the relation of necessity between feminism and any particular understanding of freedom as autonomy, 37 Close and, second, offers a negativistic conception of power, inspired by Foucault, that understands emancipation as “the transformation of a state of domination into a mobile, reversible field of power relations.” 38 Close Indeed, this negativistic conception of emancipation does not need to imagine a “power-free utopia” and therefore is based on a more complex understanding of power and of how it shapes agency in ambivalent ways. This proposal, by loosening the normative requirements that define what is emancipation, should open up feminism to subjectivities that are not regulated by liberal norms. Hence, Allen resolves the conundrum of agency and emancipation by proposing a figure of emancipation—a more versatile field of power relations—that can accommodate “thin” conceptions of agentic behavior. For Allen, this conception preserves the possibility of both moments—critique and anticipatory-utopian—because the conception of emancipation is rooted in a more realistic understanding of power and therefore of agency.

While it is important to base our normative endeavors on more realistic representations of power and agency, Foucault’s negativistic conception may fall short of satisfying a political project such as feminism that has always defined itself as transformative and collective . This negativistic conception gives us more appropriate lenses to make sense of how power shapes agency, and of what may fall under a broader scope of emancipatory practices. It gives us a concept that is more adjusted to identify emancipatory possibilities in the complex interweaving of subjectivation and social forces. While I think we must retain such a negativistic conception of emancipation in a critical feminist approach, I argue that it must also be complemented, because this conception is too focused on the individual as the locus of agency or power (and as the subject of power) to make sense of the role of relations in emancipation, and therefore it is too limited to capture emancipation as a collective project.

Among the reconceptualizations of autonomy outside of the premises of liberalism and individualism, relational accounts of autonomy have opened a theoretical space to think about autonomy as the product of social, emotional, and moral relations, rather than an attribute of the sovereign individual. 39 Close Alison Weir has developed this insight in her reflection on the articulation between identities and freedom, arguing that if we take seriously the idea that we are socially constituted, we cannot provide a definite answer to the question of whether we act as autonomous individuals . 40 Close However, this realization must not lead to feminist despair. Indeed, relationships provide us with a sense of identity, home, connections, freedom, and, importantly, possibilities for change. Some relations will foster my capacity for autonomy, and, reciprocally, freedom is also expressed in my ability to sustain the relations I choose to forge, in my ability to choose whom and what I choose to love. Among those relationships are, following Weir, relationships of solidarity and identification that feminists may choose to develop. While Weir’s vision of solidarity and shared values among feminists is, I believe, too optimistic, she does provide an important insight when she underlines, using María Lugones’s idea of feminist coalitions as a form of “traveling” toward the Other, 41 Close the transformative nature of solidarity relationships forged among feminists.

However, I have argued that such a transformation is not the product of a subjective imaginative capacity, that of “meeting” the “other” or putting myself in her shoes—even if halfway—as suggested, for example, by Iris Young. I also affirm that it cannot emerge from an “impulse” for solidarity between feminists, as suggested by Weir. Indeed, Weir suggests that identification with shared feminist values, and identification as/with women and as/with feminists, can provide a positive basis for feminist solidarity, forged in resistance and dissent. Contrastingly, I have documented in this book that agreements and identifications with feminist values do not lead to solidarity—as debates on Islamic headscarves have largely demonstrated—and I have also showed that identification with/as women or feminists is the result of a complex process of political subjectivation, which more often than not encloses the feminist subject along racial and religious lines. Hence, Weir’s proposal of a transnational feminist subject bonded by solidarity and identification, although both processes are understood as reflective, ethical, and political processes, remains insufficient to bring about the transformations of feminist solidarity she calls for.

The feminist ethic of responsibility I have proposed shares the premise that our freedom as political and ethical subjects is embedded in the relationships we may be able to forge and sustain, the collective feminist subject we may create. Moreover, I argue that this ethic can sustain a transformative collective project because it requires a political recognition of power asymmetries between feminists, and because it involves ethical practices of care that erode boundaries between “good” and “bad” feminist subjects, thereby contributing to disestablishing social hierarchies such as whiteness—but also, importantly, hierarchies based on good and bad sexualities or hierarchies based on ablebodiedness. 42 Close Caring for those subjects deemed improper and bad is not only an ethical practice that opens spaces of possibilities for the other: it is also both a political promise of equality—treating the other equally is one of the ways in which I treat her well—and a transformative practice challenging the very social hierarchies that sustain forms of oppression. It is in this sense that a feminist ethic of responsibility constitutes a project of emancipation, an emancipation without the prerequisite of agency.

A way to disrupt femonationalism, which is proliferating in Europe in particular, is to pay attention to those excluded subjects who are spoken for instead of spoken to, and to the boundaries of the moral world we create by making claims as feminists. National borders, citizenship regulations, religious and racial identities cannot serve as the limits of our communities. Nor can transnational feminist discourses that focus on distant others who are time and again spoken for. What is more, femonationalism, homonationalism, and other attempts to hollow out emancipatory projects to recuperate them in neoliberal agendas (think, for example, of business feminism ) not only pose a threat to these emancipatory projects, as the conflicts and divisions I described clearly show, they pose more broadly threats to democracy, by emptying political projects that help us imagine the world we have in common of their very ethical drive. What femonationalism does to feminism is not only align it with xenophobic and racist political agendas, but also empty feminism of its potential to create a political community of equals, to engender moral relations.

By contrast, by concentrating our attention on the concrete consequences of our actions and discourses, instead of on the values we say we uphold, we may make space for others in our feminist discourses and communities. Holding to feminism as a treasure in peril to be lost triggers defensive reactions, an abstract adhesion to a set of ideas and an imagined community that in fact forecloses the feminist subject. Instead we must conceive feminism, as Linda Zerilli proposed, 43 Close as a world-building activity, a work that creates feminist relations . Acknowledging that I am in relation with other feminist subjects, and subjects who are spoken for by feminism, rather than believing that I represent them or their interests, implies scrutinizing the type of relations that connect us: What are the hierarchies that structure those relations? How can they be undone? This is not an abstract proposal or a naïve project of promoting moral feelings such as love and care among feminists. In fact, promoting love and care as grounds for political relations can be a radical and revolutionary project. 44 Close It is a concrete project that we can apply in our contexts of work and mobilization. Who is concretely part of my project? What power does she have to voice her concern and be listened to? How are whiteness, racism, classism, ableism, and heteronormativity shaping the relations I create through feminism? What are the consequences of our actions on other subjects we enroll in our political project of community? Can we make a promise to treat the other well, and make amends when we did not?

I am indebted to theories of care that have helped me articulate a utopian vision of feminism rooted in the ethical drive of feminism. This drive is not limited to feminism, and the hierarchies that need to be disestablished, within feminism and beyond, are not limited to race and religion. Some of the insights we may gain from this investigation into feminist ethics and politics may be used to understand coalition politics that go beyond feminism. I do think that feminist theories and feminist ethics of care provide a specific normative vision of politics and democracy. This critical and normative potentiality must be harnessed to oppose the recuperation of feminism by nationalist and xenophobic discourses, and, more broadly by neoliberal political agendas. Rethinking the articulation between moral relations and the political community that feminists create is, I hope to have shown, at the heart of this project of femoresistance .

  Scott, Sex and Secularism .

  Farris, In the Name of Women’s Rights .

  Deveaux, Gender and Justice in Multicultural Liberal States ; Phillips, “Feminism and Liberalism Revisited” ; Hirschmann, The Subject of Liberty ; Mackenzie and Stoljar, Relational Autonomy .

Abu-Lughod, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?”; Mahmood, Politics of Piety .

Lépinard, “Autonomy and the Crisis of the Feminist Subject.”

  Rinaldo, “Pious and Critical” ; Bracke, “Conjugating the Modern/Religious” ; Reilly, “Recasting Secular Thinking for Emancipatory Feminist Practice” ; Brandt and Longman, “Working against Many Grains.”

I borrow here Amy Allen’s distinction—which she borrows from Seyla Benhabib—between explanatory-diagnostic and anticipatory-utopian moments in political theorizing. See Allen, The Politics of Our Selves .

  Scott, The Politics of the Veil .

  Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins” ; Crenshaw, “Postscript” ; Townsend-Bell, “What Is Relevance?”; Emejulu and Bassel, “Whose Crisis Counts”; Bacchetta, “Décoloniser le féminisme.”

  Mills, The Racial Contract ; Sullivan and Tuana, Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance .

  Wekker, White Innocence .

The debate started at the end of the 1980s, with interventions such as those of Linda Alcoff, Teresa de Lauretis, and Denise Riley. See Alcoff, “Cultural Feminism vs. Poststructuralism” ; de Lauretis, “Eccentric Subjects” ; Riley, “Am I That Name?” . Since then, this debate has continued to shape feminist theorists’ understanding and reflections; see, for example, recently Weir, Identities and Freedom .

  Butler, “Contingent Foundations,” 1995 ; Butler, “What Is Critique?,” 216.

  de Lauretis, “Eccentric Subjects,” 116.

  Butler, “Contingent Foundations,” 1995 .

Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom .

  Butler, “Contingent Foundations,” 1995 , 50.

  Butler, “Contingent Foundations,” 1995 , 46.

  Butler, “Vulnerability, Precarity, Coalition.”

Allen, “Emancipation without Utopia.”

Muñoz, Disidentification .

See Jagose, “Feminism’s Queer Theory.”

Muñoz, Cruising Utopia .

  Perreau, Queer Theory .

Avramopoulou, “Crossing Distances to Meet Allies.”

Hache, Ce à quoi nous tenons , 31.

Rancière, Disagreement ; Hache, Ce à quoi nous tenons .

Amy Allen captures artfully this connection in “Emancipation without Utopia.”

Reformulations of freedom and autonomy are present in feminist critical theory, multiculturalist feminism, and feminist liberal theory. See Allen, “Feminism, Modernity and Critical Theory” ; Hirschmann, The Subject of Liberty ; Deveaux, Gender and Justice in Multicultural Liberal States ; Mackenzie and Stoljar, Relational Autonomy . For an analysis of the multiculturalist and proceduralist feminist accounts of autonomy and their limits for rethinking the feminist project, see Lépinard, “Autonomy and the Crisis of the Feminist Subject.”

Ratna Kapur provides a similar critique of the liberal assumptions of human rights discourse and its failure to account for subaltern subjectivities. She argues that this failure leads to the demise of that ideal; see Kapur, “In the Aftermath of Critique.”

  Mahmood, Politics of Piety , 197.

  Weir, Identities and Freedom .

  Mahmood, “Feminist Theory Embodiment, and the Docile Agent,” 225.

  Allen, “Feminism, Modernity and Critical Theory,” 278.

  Allen, “Feminism, Modernity and Critical Theory,” 279.

Allen, “Emancipation without Utopia,” 515.

See in particular Nedelsky, Law’s Relations .

Lugones, “Playfulness.”

  Inckle, “Debilitating Times.”

  Nash, “Practicing Love” ; Molinier, Le care monde .

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Feminism: An Essay

Feminism: An Essay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Tags: A Literature of their Own , A Room of One's Own , Barbara Kruger , Betty Friedan , Dale Spender , ecriture feminine , Elaine Showalter , Feminism , Gynocriticism , Helene Cixous , http://bookzz.org/s/?q=Kate+Millett&yearFrom=&yearTo=&language=&extension=&t=0 , Judith Shakespeare , Julia Kristeva , Kate Millett , Kiki Smith , Literary Criticism , Literary Theory , Man Made Language , Mary Ellmann , Mary Wollstonecraft , Patricia Spacks , Sandra Gilbert , Simone de Beauvoir , Sophia Hayden , Susan Gubar , The Female Imagination , The Feminine Mystique , The Laugh of the Medusa , The Mad Woman in the Attic , The Second Sex , Toril Moi , Towards a Feminist Poetics , Vandana Shiva , Vindication of the Rights of Woman

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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.

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Feminism Essay: How to Write a Powerful Paper on Women’s Rights

A feminism essay or paper takes an in-depth look at what the word means, how women have been historically treated and the work still to be done toward equality.

A feminist essay can examine women’s rights from the perspective of several different disciplines, such as gender studies, history and sociology.

Regardless of your topic, writing a feminist essay requires you to be well informed on the topic and knowledgeable about your resources, so you can provide accurate facts and persuasive arguments to support your ideas.

Read on for a step-by-step breakdown of how to write a strong essay about feminism.

Define the topic for your feminism essay

To define your topic, first, start with defining feminism and its many facets.

Feminism is defined as the political, economic and social equality of all genders; however, it has come to mean much more than that.

For instance, there are now intersectional feminists who study issues related to race and sexual orientation alongside those related to gender.

There are also two waves of feminism.

First Wave feminism focused mainly on women’s suffrage, voting rights and reproductive rights while Second Wave feminism encompassed these topics while adding societal changes like workplace discrimination and rape culture.

Feminist movements often focus on specific marginalized groups such as trans people, Black Lives Matter activists and queer folks.

To help you narrow down your definition of feminism and decide which topics will best suit your needs, ask yourself a few questions.

What is my definition of feminism? What issue would I like to explore? Is this issue restricted to gender? What does my definition allow me to explore? What does my definition limit me from exploring?

Once you answer these questions, you’ll know which area best suits your topic and what information should go into each paragraph.

Researching the Topic For your feminism essay

This step is perhaps the most important part of writing a powerful feminist essay.

You need to gather facts and statistics about your topic, but don’t stop there!

Find articles, essays and interviews with experts in the field to get perspectives that are both traditional and outside the box.

Sometimes looking up just one source can change your entire understanding of something; always try to read multiple perspectives before making any conclusions.

Additionally, pay attention to sources because not all are created equal.

Some may be biased, some may contain factual inaccuracies and some may not even use credible sources at all.

The only way to tell if a resource is credible or not is by evaluating the author’s credentials (e.g., their academic background), whether they cite their sources properly and the opinions of other scholars in the field.

If a scholarly article was published in a peer-reviewed journal, chances are good that the writer’s statements are based on sound evidence and expert opinion.

However, if the article was published elsewhere, do your research to make sure the writer is qualified and can back up their claims.

Create an outline for your Feminism paper

An outline for your Feminine paper should have the following parts: introduction, argument, conclusion, and bibliography.

The introduction should be a brief overview of what you are going to be talking about in the essay.

Arguments should consist of your points as they relate to feminism. The conclusion should summarize your points and draw conclusions from them.

The bibliography is where you will list all sources used in the paper.

Remember the outline is not necessarily set in stone – feel free to change it if you want.

For example, if you think that two paragraphs would work better than one paragraph then by all means do so.

A good Feminine essay outline should not be detailed; instead, it is meant to highlight the topics which are going to be covered in the essay.

You can also use subheadings within your body paragraphs to help make things clearer or give more information when necessary.

Remember, there are no right or wrong ways to create an outline, just what works best for you!

Writing Your feminist essay Argument

There are many ways to structure your argument depending on the nature of your topic and style of the essay.

It is important to remember that a solid introduction and conclusion are the foundation of your essay, and without them, you won’t be able to establish your thesis.

In the introduction, you want to give your reader a broad idea of what you’re going to be discussing in the essay and why it matters.

Remember, though, that introductions are short- keep your brief.

An effective feminism essay argues in favour of women’s rights while providing examples of how women are currently disadvantaged.

A simple essay may argue that feminism is necessary to fight against gender inequality, while a more complex essay might argue that feminism is necessary in order to dismantle patriarchy.

Be sure to address your topic, include examples, and provide a thesis statement in your introduction and conclusion.

The body of the essay about feminism will be divided into three paragraphs.

The first should cover the definition of feminism and provide context for the following paragraphs.

The second paragraph should introduce an example of how women are currently being disadvantaged, while the third paragraph will discuss solutions to these problems.

For example, in the first paragraph, you could talk about the definition of feminism and mention that it includes fighting for gender equality.

The second paragraph could mention some issue like male violence against women and child marriage that is happening around the world. The third paragraph could then be dedicated to possible solutions to these problems.

For example, you could talk about campaigns like HeForShe and UN Women’s call to end violence against women and girls.

It is important to know that when you are citing resources, you must also include a bibliography as well as citations within the text of your paper so readers know where they can find more information.

Hitting the Right Tone

Once you’ve written your essay, take a few moments to reflect on your tone.

This is the final check to make sure that your paper is being communicated in the appropriate manner.

One easy way to determine your tone is to ask yourself who you are talking to and what they already know about the subject.

For instance, someone who has never heard of feminism would be reading this article from a very different perspective than someone who has spent years studying feminist theory.

The former may have a lot of questions about the topic and its implications, while the latter is likely to be more familiar and comfortable with the language.

This means that you’ll have to approach your writing in two different ways, tailoring your argument to your audience’s level of knowledge.

Think carefully about whether or not you’re using too much jargon or speaking too broadly, and make adjustments accordingly. You want to strike the right balance between accessible and academic writing. When people start reading your essay, their minds should light up with understanding; if they don’t understand something immediately, you need to find a way to explain it more clearly or change your word choice.

Tips for Writing a College Feminism Essay

Write strong introductions and conclusions

The introduction of the feminist essay should be informative, yet concise.

This is your chance to inform the reader of your thoughts and reasoning.

Do not feel obligated to present every detail, just enough to tell the story you wish to share.

Give an explanation of what you plan to say in the rest of your essay.

Next, conclude by bringing back your point one last time and summarizing the main points of your argument.

This is your opportunity to touch on the importance of feminism and remind the reader of what you’re trying to accomplish.

Consider your tone

It is essential to consider the tone of your essay, which refers to the attitude that a writer takes towards their subject. Tones are usually classified in terms of formal and informal or objective and subjective.

The formal tone is more reserved, with less personal input on the author’s part.

This tone is often seen in research papers and thesis papers.

The informal tone, on the other hand, is more conversational and casual. This tone is found in blogs, news articles, and editorials.

The formal tone is typically preferred in scholarly essays due to the seriousness of the subject matter.

However, both styles can be used effectively depending on your purpose and intended audience.

If you use the wrong tone in your essay it might sound preachy or off-putting to your readers.

Keep sentences simple, clear and concise

One important element of your essay is sentence structure.

Avoid unnecessarily complicated or difficult sentences. Your writing will be much easier to read if you keep things straightforward and concise.

There are times when complex sentences are appropriate, but only when it serves your purpose.

Generally speaking, simpler sentences are better as they help readers connect better with what you’re trying to say.

A feminism essay’s sentences should be as direct and clear as possible. Using short, to-the-point sentences helps the reader better understand your point of view.

This doesn’t mean you should avoid using long sentences occasionally, just be mindful of what you’re saying.

Too many big words or sentences that are too complicated won’t make your essay more credible.

In general, you want to convey your ideas in a clear and engaging manner. Make it easy on your reader!

Use the active voice and descriptive verbs

It’s a good idea to mix the active voice with passive sentences, especially when you’re telling a story or describing events.

Active voice, in essence, is where the subject of the sentence is doing the action that is expressed in the verb.

Passive voice, on the other hand, places more emphasis on what happens to someone or something rather than who does it.

Feminist papers should be written in an active voice because it focuses on what the subject is doing rather than what is happening to them.

This is crucial for avoiding ambiguity and confusing language.

Use concrete language

One way to improve your writing style is by using specific language and examples.

Concrete language relates more closely to objects, actions, and details that people can see or experience.

For example, instead of saying I wanted, try I wanted.

Specifics are always better than vague statements that may cause misunderstanding.

In feminist writing, the focus is on the woman and how she has to break down barriers in order to succeed.

As a result, language should be specific and accurate.

Address counterarguments

One of the goals of a persuasive feminist essay is to convince the reader that your position is correct.

This means you must acknowledge any valid arguments against your viewpoint and provide a response. This response could include evidence, logical explanations, or qualifications.

You also need to show that you’ve considered all aspects of your topic before making any claims about it. This is necessary in order to present a fair and balanced perspective on the subject.

Provide sources

One of the most common mistakes in an essay is not citing your sources.

Citing your sources is one way to back up what you are arguing or stating.

It gives credibility to your argument while demonstrating that you are informed about the topic.

One important way you need to cite your sources is by listing them at the end of your essay.

Doing so also allows readers who are interested in knowing more about your topic easy access to relevant information.

It’s true that some writers prefer to use footnotes, but it is generally accepted that the referencing system used at the end of your paper is the preferred method.

Avoid sexist language

Sexist language refers to words and phrases used primarily to refer to either women or men.

Examples of sexism include referring to a group of men as gentlemen, calling women sweethearts, or asking someone when they’re going to start a family.

Avoid these types of language in your writing because it is offensive and dismissive. Instead, replace gendered language with gender-neutral terms.

This will help to create a less biased and therefore, more effective essay.

A few ideas of gender-neutral terms to use in place of feminine language include driver, employee, human being, and student.

The tone and language you choose should be a reflection of your intended audience. To do this, you have to know what your audience is looking for.

Men are typically more interested in facts, figures, and straight talk whereas women are more receptive to emotional stories that make the point.

This means that if you’re writing a feminist essay on a political issue such as health care, you might want to take the latter approach. This strategy is more likely to lead to a successful essay.

Proofread, proofread, proofread!

Once you’re sure your paper has addressed all of these points and that it is perfect, it’s time to proofread your essay.

This step will help you ensure that there are no typographical or grammatical errors.

Even one typo can take away from what you’re saying and ultimately detract from your argument.

To check for mistakes, print out your essay then read it aloud to yourself, using different voices for different parts of the writing if possible.

This will help you catch any misspellings, misuse of punctuation and other mistakes that can otherwise be difficult to spot.

Next, ask a friend or colleague to proofread your essay for you.

Their opinion is often more objective than yours and this way you can be confident that your essay is the best it can be.

Feminine essay topics Examples

Essay topics for a feminist essay can be based on a wide range of issues.

For example, how feminism is perceived in America, the impact of feminism on male and female relationships, or the role of feminism in politics.

Here is a list of a few essay topics that a writer might consider, in order to write a powerful paper on the rights of women:

• What is your opinion of feminism and its effect on society?
• What does feminism mean to you?
• What is the feminist movement today, and where is it headed?
• Do feminists fight only for the rights of females, or are they working to protect everyone’s rights?
• Why is it important for girls to embrace feminism?
• How has feminism helped you personally?
• Why is it important for boys to become feminists too?
• When did you first become aware of the feminist movement, and why was this moment so significant to you?
• You’ve said that feminism is about fighting for the rights of both males and females. Could you elaborate on what this entails?
• In your own experience, which types of struggles have been the most challenging to overcome, and which ones have been the easiest?
• Explain the importance of feminism to a woman’s daily life.
• Explain the importance of feminism to a man’s daily life.
• Would you like to live in a world without any form of discrimination?
• Which is more important – personal happiness, or fighting for the rights of others?
• In your opinion, is achieving equal rights worth the struggle?
• If someone asked you to define feminism in just one sentence, what would you say?
• What advice do you have for young people who want to know how to get involved with the feminist movement?
• Discuss some ways that men can support their wives’ goals and dreams.
• Is sexism against men an issue as well as sexism against women?
• What are some long-term goals of the feminist movement, such as equality at home and work, or improved health care access?
• Who should we thank for getting us this far in the feminist movement, and what do we need to thank them for?
• What does feminism mean to you, and how has it impacted your life?

Writing a Feminine essay Final remarks

Feminine papers are usually focused on specific aspects of feminism, and arguments for the rights of women.

Topics for a feminine paper could include the effect of feminism on American culture, the significance of feminism to female relationships, and the role feminism plays in politics.

There is a wide variety of different feminist essay topics so writers can choose whichever topic suits them best.

Whether readers are interested in looking at how feminism is portrayed in popular culture, the effects of feminism on femininity and masculinity, or exploring ways to join the movement themselves there will be something here for every type of audience member.

Finally, always follow your professor’s specific instructions for writing this kind of paper.

Some professors may ask students to discuss ideas from readings in class, while other instructors may require students to use certain resources.

It is a good idea to follow the guidelines of the instructor because if not, the student may end up receiving a lower grade for violating these instructions

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Women's Studies: Essential Writings of Feminism

• Library Databases
• Indexes & Bibliographies
• Statistical Sources
• Women's History on the Web
• eArchives of Women's Writings
• Special Topics on Women
• Biographical Resources
• Essential Writings of Feminism
• General Women's Studies Portals
• Groups and Associations
• Special Library Collections
• Selected Print and E-Book Sources

Internet Sources of Core Writings and Rhetoric on Women's Rights

Here are some links to online archives of classic feminist writings not covered elsewhere in this LibGuide.  See below box for selected print collections of feminist writings.

• Documents from the Women's Liberation Movement "The materials in this on-line archival collection document various aspects of the Women's Liberation Movement in the United States, and focus specifically on the radical origins of this movement during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Items range from radical theoretical writings to humorous plays to the minutes of an actual grassroots group. The items in this on-line collection are scanned and transcribed from original documents held in Duke's Special Collections Library. We are making these documents available on-line in order to support current teaching and research interests related to this period in U.S. history."
• Classic Feminist Writings This nice page, from the The Chicago Women's Liberation Union (CWLU) Herstory Website, provides a basic, browsable annotated list of a few primary documents. However, although the word "classic" appears in the title, all of these materials are from the 1960s and 1970s, so they are useful only in the study of the second wave. Note, too, that the group maintains files related to the "Jane" abortion activists. Click the Historical Archive link in the top frame to explore other web document options.
• Marxists Internet Archive Library of Feminist Writers Starting with Mary Wollstonecraft and Harriet Taylor, this webpage provides "Selected writings of feminists of each of the “three waves” of feminist political activity. Intellectual Property laws prevent the Marxists Internet Archive from reproducing the works of most of the major feminist writers of recent decades. However, key chapters and articles have been reproduced for educational purposes only."
• Fragen Project (Frames on Gender) Archive "For the first time, core feminist texts from the second wave of feminism in Europe have been made available to researchers in an easily accessible online database. The FRAGEN project brings together books, articles and pamphlets that were influential in the development of feminist ideas in 29 countries during the second half of the 20th century."
• Andrea Dworkin Web Site The late Andrea Dworkin was one of the most articulate, passionate and controversial voices from the second wave of American feminism. This webpage excerpts sections from a variety of her writings. Click on the large button for "Andrea Dworkin Online Library" to read selections from Intercourse, Right-Wing Women, Pornography: Men Possessing Women, Our Blood:Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics, Woman Hating, and Life and Death. The site also includes many memorial statements by other feminist leaders posted after her Spring 2005 death.
• Jo Freeman.com: Articles by Jo Freeman o Freeman is another feminist activist and scholar whose work has spanned the earliest days of the "women's movement" til today. This good-looking, well-organized website presents many of Ms. Freeman's writings, including several written under the pseudonym Joreen. (These classic pieces include "The BITCH Manifesto" and "The Tyranny of Structurelessness.")
• No Turning Back: Feminist Resource Site Designed to support this book , which we have in both print and eBook, this webpage suggests other websites, recommends appropriate films, and even links to the full-text of few classic "Primary Source Documents from Feminist History."

Print and eBook Collections of Feminist Writings and Primary Documents

Here are just a few examples of the types of anthologies Sawyer Library owns that gather and reprint interesting journalism, essays and primary documents about women's lives and feminist activism.

Subject Guide

• << Previous: Biographical Resources
• Next: General Women's Studies Portals >>
• Last Updated: Apr 4, 2024 10:24 AM
• URL: https://suffolk.libguides.com/WomensStudies

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

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• 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 .

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Essay on Feminism | Meaning, Purpose & Importance of Feminism Today

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Feminism is a social and political movement which argues that women are disadvantaged by historical, traditional and common cultural representations of gender. It is often associated with the struggle for reproductive freedom and economic independence, freedom from sexual harassment and rape, and the freedom to choose one’s own clothing.

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The following explores the feminism its meaning, brief history, purpose & importance of feminism in today’s world short & long essay for students. This essay is really helpful for school exams, test etc.

Essay on Feminism | Meaning, Purpose & Importance of Feminism Essay for Students

Feminism is the belief of the equality of the sexes (men and women). Although Feminism has many different branches, all of them are striving for this goal.  To be feminist does not mean that a person has to be female. It is about believing in equality between sexes, whether it applies to men, women, everyone or no one.

Brief History

The history of feminism dates back to the ancient times when men and women were treated differently with women being oppressed by society. But with time, women started fighting for their rights. This led to the start of Feminism in the late 19th century due to the work of some prominent feminists such as Mary Wollstonecraft. It is constantly growing and developing due to the changes that society goes through and with time, we will get better and more equal world.

>>>> Related Post: Essay on Girl Power For Students

However, the Feminism changed over time. There are many different branches of feminism that have developed throughout history. Each branch is affected by the historical, social and political climate that it exists in.

The most prominent types of feminism are Liberal feminism, Marxist feminism, Socialist/Socialist Feminism, Ecofeminism, Postmodern/Postcolonial feminism, Black feminism and Womanism. Each branch of feminism has their own focus but the main goal is to achieve equality for all sexes.

Purpose & Importance

The purpose of Feminism is to secure equal rights for women. It strives for political, social and economical equality of sexes (gender equality). Some people think feminism is about superiority so they don’t want to identify with it. But feminism does not mean superiority. It just means that men and women are equal.

The main points are that women should have the same political, social and economical rights as men. It does not mean that they were lesser then men or that they must be better then them to deserve those rights. They just want their rights!

Importance of Feminism:

Feminism is important because it ensures equal rights for everyone. It is not about superiority but equality. Everyone deserves the same opportunities and feminism strives to make that happen.

The Feminism has allowed women to step up and be leaders in their fields. It allows them to express themselves and stand up for what they believe in without fear of backlash from the people around them simply because of their gender. It ensures equal rights for everyone, both men and women. It is about how people should be given equality in all aspects of life including right, work opportunities and more.

Feminism is important because it ensures that everyone has equal rights and opportunities regardless of their sex or gender identity. Nobody has a higher value then the other simply based on their biological characteristics so they deserve to have the same rights, opportunities etc.

Feminism Today

We are still in the process of achieving equal rights for everyone. There is still a lot that needs to be done to achieve it. However, Feminism is important because it prevents inequality and fights for people’s rights regardless of their gender. We have many different genders so we need feminism to ensure equality among all sexes.

The most recent example is the ban on women entering sports stadiums in Saudi Arabia. The recent news has shown that there are many feminist movements, especially online where it allows people to be anonymous and express their opinions without fear of backlash. This is why feminism is important today because it allows equal opportunities for everyone regardless of gender.

>>>> Related Post : Essay on Dowry System & its Impacts

Feminism is important because it ensures equal rights for everyone. It strives to give women the same opportunities as men and ensure that they feel safe and comfortable in their own skin. Everyone should be treated equally regardless of sex or gender identity. It does not mean that one person is better then the other but simply that they are equal.

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487 Feminism Essay Topics

Women make up half of the world’s population. How did it happen they were oppressed?

We are living in the era of the third wave of feminism, when women fight for equal rights in their professional and personal life. Public figures say that objectification and sexualization of women are not ok. Moreover, governments adopt laws that protect equal rights and possibilities for people of all genders, races, and physical abilities. Yes, it is also about feminism.

In this article, you will find 400+ feminism essay topics for students. Some raise the problems of feminism; others approach its merits. In addition, we have added a brief nuts-and-bolts course on the history and principal aspects of this social movement.

❗ Top 15 Feminism Essay Topics

• 💻 Feminism Research Topics
• 📜 History of Feminism Topics
• 🙋‍♀️ Topics on Feminism Movements

🔥 Famous Feminists Essay Topics

• 👩‍🎓 Topics on Women’s Rights in the World
• 👸 Antifeminism Essay Topics

📚 Topics on Feminism in Literature

🔗 references.

• Compare and contrast liberal and radical feminism.
• The problem of political representation of feminism.
• Is Hillary Clinton the most prominent feminist?
• How can feministic ideas improve our world?
• What is the glass ceiling, and how does it hinder women from reaching top positions?
• What can we do to combat domestic violence?
• Unpaid domestic work: Voluntary slavery?
• Why do women traditionally do social work?
• What are the achievements of feminism?
• Why is there no unity among the currents of feminism?
• Pornographic content should be banned in a civilized society.
• Does feminism threaten men?
• What is intersectional feminism, and why is it the most comprehensive feminist movement?
• Those who are not feminists are sexists.
• Why are women the “second gender?”

💻 Feminism Research Topics & Areas

Feminism is the belief in the equality of the sexes in social, economic, and political spheres. This movement originated in the West, but it has become represented worldwide. Throughout human history, women have been confined to domestic labor. Meanwhile, public life has been men’s prerogative. Women were their husband’s property, like a house or a cow. Today this situation has vastly improved, but many problems remain unresolved.

A feminism research paper aims to analyze the existing problems of feminism through the example of famous personalities, literary works, historical events, and so on. Women’s rights essay topics dwell on one of the following issues:

Healthcare & Reproductive Rights of Women

Women should be able to decide whether they want to have children or not or whether they need an abortion or not. External pressure or disapprobation is unacceptable. In many countries, abortions are still illegal. It is a severe problem because the female population attempts abortions without medical assistance in unhygienic conditions.

Economic Rights of Women

Women’s job applications are often rejected because they are expected to become mothers and require maternity leave. Their work is underpaid on a gender basis. They are less likely to be promoted to managerial positions because of the so-called “ glass ceiling .” All these problems limit women’s economic rights.

Women’s Political Rights

Yes, women have voting rights in the majority of the world’s countries. Why isn’t that enough? Because they are still underrepresented in almost all the world’s governments. Only four countries have 50% of female parliamentarians. Laws are approved by men and for men.

Family & Parenting

The British Office for National Statistics has calculated that women spend 78% more time on childcare than men. They also perform most of the unpaid domestic work. Meanwhile, increasingly more mothers are employed or self-employed. It isn’t fair, is it?

Virginity is a myth. Still, women are encouraged to preserve it until a man decides to marry her. Any expression of female sexuality is criticized (or “ slut-shamed “). We live in the 21st century, but old fossilized prejudices persist.

📜 History of Feminism Essay Topics

First wave of feminism & earlier.

• Ancient and medieval promoters of feminist ideas.
• “Debate about women” in medieval literature and philosophy.
• The emergence of feminism as an organized movement.
• Enlightenment philosophers’ attitudes towards women.
• The legal status of women in Renaissance.
• Women’s Liberation Movement Evolution in the US.
• Mary Wollstonecraft’s views on women’s rights.
• Sociopolitical background of the suffrage movement.
• The most prominent suffrage activists.
• The Liberation Theme Concerning Women.
• “Declaration of sentiments”: key points and drawbacks.
• What was special about Sojourner Truth and her famous speech?
• The significance of the first feminist convention in Seneca Falls.
• The National Woman Suffrage Association: goals and tactics.
• The influence of abolitionism on feminism ideas.
• Why did some women prefer trade unions to feminism?
• Radical feminists’ criticism of the suffrage movement.
• The UK suffragists’ approach to gaining voting rights for women.
• Alice Paul and Emmeline Pankhurst’s role in the suffrage movement.
• The Nineteenth Amendment: the essence and significance.
• Infighting in the post-suffrage era.

Second Wave of Feminism Essay Titles

• How did second-wave feminism differ from the suffrage movement?
• The roots of the second wave of feminism.
• John Kennedy’s policies concerning women’s rights.
• Eleanor Roosevelt’s contribution to feminism.
• Debates on gender equality in the late 1960s.
• Feminism activists’ achievements in 1960-1970.
• What was the focus of second-wave feminist research?
• Why was there no comprehensive feminist ideology?
• Anarcho-, individualist, “Amazon,” and separatist feminism: key ideas.
• The nature of liberal feminism.
• How did liberal and radical feminism differ?
• Why was cultural feminism also called “difference” feminism?
• Liberal and Postmodernist Theories of Feminism.
• What is the difference between liberal and radical feminism?
• Black feminists’ challenges and input to the fight for equity.
• Sociocultural differences in views on female liberation.
• The globalization of feminism: positive and negative aspects.
• Taliban’s oppression of Afghani women.
• Women in the US Military: World War II.
• What were the main concerns of feminists from developing countries?
• Why did Third World women criticize Western feminists?
• Feminism achievements to the end of the 20th century.

Third Wave of Feminism Research Topics

• What was peculiar about the third wave of feminism?
• Why did third-wave feminists consider their predecessors’ work unfinished?
• Social, political, economic, and cultural premises of third-wave feminism.
• How did the information revolution impact feminism?
• Third Wave Foundation’s major goals.
• Women’s Rights and Changes Over the 20th Century.
• Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards’ views on feminism.
• The impact of second wavers success on third-wave feminism.
• New approaches in fighting discrimination, utilized by third-wave feminists.
• The influence of the postmodern movement on feminism.
• The concept of a gender continuum.
• How did sexist symbols turn into female empowerment tools?
• What was specific about third-wave feminist art?
• Third-wavers’ redefinition of women as powerful and assertive figures.
• “Girl power” in pop culture.
• How did the Internet impact third-wave feminism?
• Sexualized behavior: sexual liberation or oppression in disguise?
• Why was third-wave feminism criticized?
• The multifaceted nature of third-wave feminism.
• Is multivocality a strength or weakness of third-wave feminism?
• How did third wavers counter the criticism?

Fourth Wave of Feminism Essay Topics

• The premises of fourth-wave feminism.
• Feminism’s major goals after 2012.
• Peculiarities of fourth-wave feminism.
• What behavior is sexual harassment?
• Gender Equality at the Heart of Development.
• Sexual harassment: different gender-based perspectives.
• Social media: a feminist tool.
• Can social media deepen discrimination?
• Gender discrimination in video games.
• Musical Preferences: Race and Gender Influences.
• GamerGate’s alleged “men’s rights campaign.”
• Sexism in Donald Trump’s speech.
• Women’s March: reasons and significance.
• Main steps in MeToo’s development.
• Tarana Burke’s fight for justice.
• Gender Stereotypes of Superheroes.
• MeToo’s contribution to women’s rights.
• The most impactful MeToo stories.
• Harvey Weinstein’s case: outcome’s implications.
• Gender Roles in the Context of Religion.
• Sexual harassment awareness after MeToo.
• MeToo’s influence on Hollywood’s ethics.
• Reasons for criticism of MeToo.
• Social Change and the Environment.
• Are sexual violence discussions necessary?

🙋‍ Argumentative Essay Topics on Feminism Movements

Mainstream feminism topics.

• What is the focus of mainstream feminism?
• Mainstream feminism predispositions in the 19th century.
• The place of politics within mainstream feminism.
• What is males’ place in mainstream feminism?
• The correlation of mainstream feminism and social liberalism.
• The correlation between mainstream feminism and state feminism.
• Gender equality in the doctrine of mainstream feminism.
• Why sunflower is the symbol of mainstream feminism?
• Anthony Gidden’s ideas regarding liberal feminism.
• Liberal feminism, according to Catherine Rottenberg.
• Mary Wollstonecraft and her vision of liberal feminism.
• Liberal feminism through John Stuart Mill’s perspective.
• Interdependence of mainstream feminism and political liberalism.
• NOW’s activities and mainstream feminism.
• LWV’s activities and mainstream liberalism.
• LGBT’s place in mainstream liberalism’s doctrine.
• Discourse Analysis of the Me Too Movement’s Media Coverage.
• Frances Wright’s role in establishing mainstream feminism.
• Mainstream feminism and the civil rights movement in the 1960s.
• Constitutional Equity Amendment and mainstream feminism.
• International Woman Suffrage Alliance’s activities and mainstream feminism.
• Mainstream feminism and Gina Krog’s works.
• Betty Friedan’s understanding of mainstream feminism.
• Gloria Steinem’s theoretical contribution to mainstream feminism.
• Simone de Beauvoir’s ideas and the framework of mainstream feminism.
• Rebecca Walker and her vision within the scope of mainstream feminism.
• NWPC’s activities and mainstream feminism.
• WEAL’s activities and mainstream feminism.
• Catherine Mackinnon and mainstream feminism’s critique.
• “White woman’s burden” and mainstream feminism’s critique.
• The roots of mainstream feminism in Europe.

Radical Feminism Essay Titles

• Society’s order according to radical feminism.
• Sexual objectification and radical feminism.
• Gender roles according to radical feminism.
• Shulamith Firestone’s ideas regarding the feminist revolution.
• Ti-Grace Atkinson’s ideas in Radical feminism.
• The vision of radical feminism on patriarchy.
• Radical feminism’s impact on the women’s liberation movement.
• Radical feminism’s roots in the early 1960s.
• Kathie Sarachild’s role in radical feminism movements.
• Carol Hanisch’s contribution to radical feminism.
• Roxanne Dunbar and her radical feminism.
• Naomi Weisstein and her vision of radical feminism.
• Judith Brown’s activities in terms of radical feminism.
• UCLA Women’s Liberation Front role in radical feminism.
• Why have women come to be viewed as the “other?”
• Ellen Willis’s ideas regarding radical feminism.
• Redstockings’ role in radical feminism.
• The feminist’s role in radical feminism.
• Differences between The Feminists’ and Restokings’ positions.
• The protest against Miss America in 1968.
• 11-hour sit-in at the Ladies Home Journal headquarters.
• Forms of direct action in radical feminism.
• Protest of biased coverage of lesbians in 1972.
• Lisa Tuttle’s vision of radical feminism.
• Catharine MacKinnon’s position regarding pornography.
• Peculiarities of radical lesbian feminism.
• Recognition of trans women in radical feminism.
• Radical feminism in the New Left.
• Mary Daly’s vision of radical feminism.
• Robin Morgan’s vision of radical feminism.

Other Interesting Feminism Essay Topics

• Ecofeminism’s role in feminism’s popularization.
• Greta Gaard, Lori Gruen, and ecofeminism.
• Petra Kelly’s figure in ecofeminism.
• Capitalist reductionist paradigm and ecofeminism.
• Ecofeminism. How does the movement interpret modern science?
• Essentials of vegetarian ecofeminism.
• Peculiarities of materialist ecofeminism.
• Interconnection between spiritual ecofeminism and cultural ecofeminism.
• Henry David Thoreau’s influence on ecofeminism.
• Aldo Leopold’s influence on ecofeminism.
• Rachel Carson’s influence on ecofeminism.
• The social construction of gender in post-structural feminism.
• Luce Irigaray as a post-structuralist feminist.
• Julia Kristeva’s contribution to post-structuralist feminism.
• Hélène Cixous and her activities as a post-structuralist feminist.
• L’Écriture feminine in feminist theory.
• Monique Wittig’s influence on post-structuralist feminism.
• Kimberlé Crenshaw’s views on intersectionality.
• Marxist feminist critical theory.
• Representational intersectionality in feminist theory.
• Marxism and Feminism: Similarities and Differences.
• Interlocking matrix of oppression.
• Standpoint epistemology and the outsider within.
• Resisting oppression in feminist theory.
• Women’s institute of science and feminism.
• Peculiarities of the Black feminist movement.
• Equity and race and feminism.
• Pamela Abbott’s ideas regarding postmodern feminism.
• Trans-exclusionary radical feminism today.
• Lipstick feminism’s ideas in the political context.
• Stiletto feminism and fetish fashion.
• Adichie’s proof that we should all be feminists.
• Analysis of Maya Angelou’s “And still I rise.”.
• Susan Anthony – the abolitionist movement’s champion.
• Maria Eugenia Echenique’s Contribution to Women’s Emancipation.
• Patricia Arquette’s arguments on the gender pay gap topic.
• Simone de Beauvoir’s role in feminism.
• Madonna’s contribution to the female sexuality argument.
• How did Clinton rebuild US politics?
• Davis’s opinion on feminism and race.
• Dworkin’s vision of a future society.
• Friedan and feminism’s second wave.
• Gay’s description of bad feminists.
• Ruth Ginsburg – first woman champion in law.
• Hook’s answer to “Is feminism for everybody”?
• Dorothy Hughes – feminist leader of the civil rights movement.
• Themes in Lessing’s The Golden Notebook.
• Lorde’s explorations of women’s identity.
• Mock’s role in transgender women’s equality movement.
• Page’s championship in feminism.
• Pankhurst’s arguments for women’s voting rights.
• Rhimes’ strong women image in Grey’s Anatomy.
• Sandberg’s opinion about female careers.
• Sanger’s feminist ideas’ contribution to happy families.
• Walker and her fight for women of color’s rights.
• Oprah Winfrey’s role in promoting feminism.
• Eleanor Roosevelt: history of the first politician – a woman.
• Mary Wollstonecraft’s ideas about female education.
• Youngest-ever Nobel laureate – Malala.
• Emma Watson’s path from actress to feminist.
• Why is Steinem’s name feminism synonymous?
• Truth’s life from an enslaved person to activist.

🎯 Persuasive Women’s Rights Essay Topics

Healthcare and reproductive rights of women.

• Is abortion morally acceptable?
• Why is the fight for child care not over?
• Should government participate in birth control?
• Researching of Maternity Care in Haiti.
• Government’s moral right to cancel abortions.
• Should the government allow abortions?
• What are birth control and its meaning?
• Abortion rights recently disappeared in the US.
• Gender Disparity in Colorectal Cancer Screening.
• Why are women’s rights becoming less vital?
• Western world’s degradation in women’s rights issue.
• Canceling abortion endangers women’s human rights.
• Female access to healthcare in developing countries.
• Developed countries’ role in improving women’s healthcare.
• Media’s contribution to legalizing abortions.
• Middle-Aged Women’s Health and Lifestyle Choices.
• Female genital mutilation’s moral side.
• Feminism’s impact on LGBTQ healthcare rights.
• The reproductive rights of women are everyone’s problem.
• Abortion rights’ impact on country’s economy.
• Protection From Infringement and Discrimination.
• Women’s reproductive rights in developing countries.
• Abortion rights crisis and the UN’s failure in achieving SDG#4.
• UN’s contribution to achieving equal healthcare rights.
• IGO’s impact on women’s reproductive rights issue.
• Report on the Speech by Gianna Jessen.
• Is birth control already at risk?
• Why should abortions not be allowed?
• Meaning of reproductive justice.
• Reproductive rights movement’s role in the country’s development.
• Single Mothers, Poverty, and Mental Health Issues.
• The reproductive rights movement, as all social movements’ drivers.
• Abortion’s relation to healthcare rights.
• Healthcare rights’ impact on a country’s economic development.
• Political agenda behind abortion cancellation.
• Feminism’s role in national healthcare.

Economic Rights, Salaries, and Access to Education for Women

• Definition of women’s economic rights.
• Female economic rights’ impact on the economy.
• Female economic rights and education.
• Gender Prevalence in Medical Roles.
• Can women do “male jobs”?
• Gender inequality in the workplace.
• Women’s economic rights movements.
• How Wealth Inequality Affects Democracy in America.
• Barriers to gender-equal economic rights.
• Gender inequality by social classes.
• Female economic rights and poverty.
• Can equal economic rights solve SDG#1?
• Gender-Based Discrimination in the Workplace.
• Why is it important to have equal access to education?
• How did the gender pay gap appear?
• Why does the gender pay gap exist?
• Women’s economic rights and industrialization.
• Characteristics of Mayo Clinic.
• Female economic rights worldwide.
• Legal rights of women workers.
• Laws that protect women’s economic rights.
• Women as leaders in the workplace.
• The Future of Women at Work in the Age of Automation.
• Why are companies against women workers?
• Fertility’s impact on female economic rights.
• Quiet revolution’s impact female workforce.
• Reasons to monitor occupational dissimilarity index.
• Women’s Roles in Islam, Christianity, and Hinduism.
• Female economic rights in developing countries.
• Democracy and female economic rights.
• Gender pay gap as a global problem.
• ILO’s role in the fight for equal economic rights?
• Politics’ impact on female economic rights.
• Health Disparities: Solving the Problem.
• Female economic rights movement and the fight against racism.
• The best practices in achieving gender-equal economic rights.
• Democracy and gender pay gap.
• Equal Pay for Work of Equal Value.

Women’s Political Rights Essay Topics

• Women’s suffrage movement definition.
• Female suffrage movement’s significance.
• Causes of gender inequality in politics.
• Women’s suffrage movement’s role today.
• Female suffrage’s impact on democracy.
• Women’s suffrage and economy.
• Suffrage movement’s effect on politics in the US.
• Do women need the right to vote?
• Effects of gender inequality on politics.
• Suffrage movement and politics in Britain.
• Laws for gender-equal political rights.
• The correlation between gender inequality in politics and authoritarianism.
• The possible solutions to gender inequality in politics.
• The role of IGOs in solving gender inequality in politics.
• How has the UN participated in the women’s suffrage movement?
• What is women’s role in politics in developing countries?
• How can women improve politics in their countries?
• What can men do for women’s equal political rights?
• Why equal rights to vote are everyone’s problem?
• The impact of Antoinette Louisa Brown on women’s suffrage.
• The effect of equal rights to education on equal political rights.
• Are western policies for equal rights applicable in developing countries?
• The importance of equal rights to vote.
• How to eliminate the gender pay gap?
• Why had women not had equal rights in politics?
• Is politics a “male job”?
• Benefits of appearance of female leaders in politics.
• Who created the women’s suffrage movement?
• How does women’s suffrage impact racism?
• Women’s suffrage contribution to LGBTQ communities’ equal political rights.

Family and Parenting Research Titles

• Female and male roles in a family.
• Sexism in families.
• Eliminating sexism in families is the best solution to gender inequality.
• Why is feminism a pro-family movement?
• The Childbirth Process in Women’s Experiences.
• The benefits of feminist upbringing.
• The causes of sexism in families.
• How does feminism help LGBTQ parents?
• Why should sexism be legally banned?
• Healthcare Resources and Equity in Their Distribution.
• The effects of sexism in families.
• The influence of sexist customs on society.
• Why should every family be feminist?
• How can feminism help solve the domestic violence issue?
• Government’s role in creating feminist families.
• What is feminist family value?
• The relation of authoritarian parent-paradigm on politics.
• Can feminist families bring democracy?
• Teaching feminism at home vs. at school.
• Traditional vs. Feminist parenting.
• Why should women have the right to be child-free?
• The impact of bringing up feminist daughters.
• Can feminist parents bring up mentally healthy children?
• Does the government have a moral right to endorse feminist values?
• The role of media for feminist families.
• How does feminism transform parent-child relationships?
• Can feminism help families overcome poverty?
• The role of feminist families in the economy.
• The influence of hierarchal husband-wife relationships on children.
• Do IGOs have moral rights to intervene in feminist families?
• The movements endorsing feminism in families.
• The effect of different views on feminism in parents on children.

Sexuality Essay Ideas

• The views of radical feminists on women’s sexuality.
• Who are sex-positive feminists, and their values?
• Feminism’s impact on sexual orientation.
• The role of feminism in sexual identity matters.
• Gender-Based Violence Against Women and Girls.
• How does feminism help eliminate sexual violence?
• What is harassment, and why are feminists fighting it?
• The role of media in women’s sexuality.
• Traditional views on women’s sexuality.
• How is feminism transforming sexuality?
• Domestic Violence and COVID-19 Relation.
• What are feminist sex wars?
• Why are some feminists against pornography?
• What are pro-pornography feminist arguments?
• How is feminism protecting the rights of sex workers?
• Rights of sex workers in developed vs. developing countries.
• Media Promotion of Cosmetic Surgery in Women.
• Feminist critique of censorship.
• What is behind the issue of sex trafficking?
• Children’s rape problem and feminism.
• The role of feminism in solving the sex trafficking problem.
• The Influence of the Women Image in the Media.
• R v. Butler case discussion.
• How is pornography enhancing sexual objectification?
• How is poverty causing prostitution?
• Can feminism eliminate prostitution by solving poverty?
• Child Marriage in Egypt and Ways to Stop It.
• Pro-sex worker feminists and their beliefs.
• What are the perspectives of pro-sex workers?
• The consequences of violence against women.
• The role of feminism to LGBTQ sex workers.
• Why are feminists trying to decriminalize prostitution?
• Beauty Standards: “The Body Myth” by Rebecca Johnson.
• Prostitution in developed vs. developing countries.
• The effect of class and race differences on prostitution.
• Short- and long-term impacts on sex workers.

👩‍🎓 Essay Topics on Women’s Rights in the World

Essay topics on feminism in developing countries.

• Social taboos and abortion in Nigeria.
• Access to sexual healthcare in Asia.
• Human Papillomavirus Awareness in Saudi Women.
• Sexual health and access to contraception in developing countries.
• Coronavirus pandemic’s impact on gender inequalities.
• Health and education access for women in Afghanistan.
• Female Empowerment in the Islamic States.
• Does poverty result in increased sexual violence?
• Regulations on gender equality in developing countries.
• Unsafe abortion, contraceptive use, and women’s health.
• Female genital mutilation in the 21st century.
• Practicing female genital mutation in Africa.
• Gender Discrimination After the Reemergence of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
• Which countries have the highest gender gap?
• Forced and child marriages in humanitarian settings.
• The Taliban’s view: Is woman a property?
• Feminism in Latin America.
• Honor killing in Pakistan: 1000 women are killed annually.
• Women’s access to healthcare in Somalia.

Feminism Essay Topics in Developed Countries

• “Broken Rung” and the gender pay gap.
• What are the obstacles to reaching gender equality?
• Do gender stereotypes result in workplace discrimination?
• Increased educational attainment of young women.
• Culture: Women With Hijab in Western Countries.
• Ending sexual harassment and violence against women.
• Is sexual harassment a form of discrimination?
• Cracking the glass ceiling: What are the barriers and challenges?
• Domestic drama: The impact of sexual violence on women’s health.
• Socio-cultural Factors That Affected Sport in Australian Society.
• Feminism and the problem of misogyny.
• The challenges faced by women in developed counties.
• Female participation in the labor market.
• Discrimination Against Girls in Canada.
• Unequal pay for women in the workplace.
• How do developed countries improve women’s rights?
• Nations with strong women’s rights.
• Women’s employment: Obstacles and challenges.

👸 Antifeminist Essay Topics

• Antifeminism: The right to abortion.
• Gender differences in suicide.
• Manliness in American culture.
• Antifeminism view: Men are in crisis.
• The threats of society’s feminization.
• The meaning of antifeminism across time and cultures.
• Antifeminism attracts both men and women.
• Gender and Science: Origin, History, and Politics.
• Antifeminism: The opposition to women’s equality?
• How do religious and cultural norms formulate antifeminism?
• Saving masculinity or promoting gender equality?
• Traditional gender division of labor: Fair or not?
• Are feminist theories of patriarchy exaggerated?
• Oppression of men in the 21st century.
• Psychological sex differences and biological tendencies.
• Does feminism make it harder for men to succeed?
• The change of women’s roles: Impact on the family.
• How were traditional gender roles challenged in modern culture?
• History of antifeminism: The pro-family movement.
• Religion and contemporary antifeminism.
• Antifeminist on the rights of minorities.
• Heterosexual and patriarchal family: Facts behind antifeminism.
• Women against feminism in Western countries.
• Feminism versus humanism: What is the difference?
• Does feminism portray women as victims?
• Same-sex marriage: The dispute between feminists and antifeminists.
• Male-oriented values of religions and antifeminism.
• Does antifeminism threaten the independence of women?
• Men’s rights movement: Manosphere.
• Does antifeminism refer to extremism?
• The fear of being labeled as a feminist.
• A Vindication of the Right of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft.
• Jane Austen: Criticism of inequitable social rules.
• Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: Frankenstein and aborted creations.
• Undercutting female stereotypes in Jane Eyre.
• “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body” by Marion.
• Oppression of woman’s traditional roles in The Awakening.
• Virginia Woolf and her feminism.
• Orlando: A Biography. Evolving from man to woman.
• Harriet Jacobs’s Experiences as an Enslaved Black Woman.
• Feminist criticism: A Room of One’s Own.
• Social oppression in Three Guineas by Woolf.
• Rape, illegitimacy, and motherhood in The Judge by Rebecca West.
• Feminist utopias of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
• Women’s rights and societal reform views of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
• Feminist critics in a culture dominated by men.
• Black women’s aesthetic in Their Eyes Were Watching God.
• Alice Walker’s ideas on Feminist women of color.
• Female sexuality in Fear of Flying by Erica Jong.
• How do feminist novels address race and ethnicity?
• Social and emotional pressures in Love Medicine by Erdrich.
• Feminist Parenting: The Fight for Equality at Home – Psychology Today
• Feminist Parenting: An Introduction – Transformation Central Home
• Women’s suffrage – Britannica
• Only half of the women in the developing world are in charge of their own bodies – Reuters
• Gender Equality for Development – The World Bank
• How #MeToo revealed the central rift within feminism today – The Guardian
• Feminist Novels and Novelists – Literary Theory and Criticism
• Health Care & Reproductive Rights – National Women’s Law Center

The Feminist Quest of Mary Beard Essay

Introduction.

Gender inequality represents the unequal power dynamic that exists between men and women and which has traditionally shaped their social, economic, and political well-being. Accordingly, any feminist who has ever argued against gender inequality argued for men and women to have the same standing in society, to enjoy the same legal and political rights, and to have equal access to economic opportunities as men. In essence, their line of thinking and arguments for men and women to be equal are based on the standards that society measures male success.

Consequently, famous feminists such as Mary Beard quipped “We have no template for what a powerful woman looks like, except that she looks rather like a man” (Sadler, 2018, p. 57) On this quote, I am forced to completely agree with it because the underlying thought in feminist arguments on gender inequality is that a system built on patriarchy oppresses women rather than treats them as equals or how they would treat their male counterparts.

Feminism and its advocacy for gender equality are best understood by looking at the first, second, and third waves of feminism. The first wave of feminism fought for women’s right to vote and was generally referred to as the “suffragette movement.” At the beginning of the 20th century, women’s movements advocating for their rights to vote gained global popularity, especially in the United States, the United Kingdom, and countries in Europe (Tobias, 2018). Their form of advocacy involved public debates, demonstrations, the laying of the foundation for the establishment of international women’s organizations, and written articles in newspapers. By the first quarter of the 20th century, women in European countries and the United States were granted the right to vote and many were now active in socialist and democratic circles as a majority of them turned to office jobs rather than fulfilling the role of a housewife. At this point, they could have a career and a family but they were nowhere near equal to their male counterparts.

Women’s grievances in the first wave of feminism included the denial of their right to vote. At the time, the right to vote was considered a natural right for men born in European countries and the United States. However, in the United States, the right to vote was restricted for Black people and Asians. Anyway, the fight to have the same rights as men is a clear example that relates to Mary Beard’s statement that indeed the lack of a template for a strong woman lends credence that she must look like a man. White men were in charge of the democratic practices in Europe and the US and they gave themselves the right to vote. They wrongly assumed women were incapable of making responsible political choices and thus they denied them the right to vote until they demanded and fought to have the same right as men to cast their ballots and have a say in who leads them. Therefore, by gaining the right to vote, women moved closer to power parity with men.

The second wave of feminism gained traction in the 1970s with a vague goal of women’s liberation. Unlike the first wave which had a clear purpose, different groups pursued different agendas. Liberals pursued the goal of advocating for the amendment of laws and the enactment of laws that pursued equality between men and women especially as they relate to schools, media, and church. On the other hand, the hardliners argued that inequality between genders was a product of patriarchy and that men as a group were responsible for women’s oppression. They especially focused on domestic violence and rape to support their point of view on men as a group and patriarchy (Loney-Howes, 2019). Socialists went a step further and concluded that patriarchy and capitalism were responsible for women’s oppression. The second wave resulted in a shift in education where several disciplines on women were introduced and international conventions that guaranteed women’s rights were enacted.

Like the previous feminist movement, the second wave was also about making sure that women had the same political, social, and economic access as men. In essence, it was about elevating women a step higher in their efforts to become as powerful as men. However, the liberal, radical, and social feminists realized that they were still miles away from enjoying the same power and rights as men. Thus, to ensure that men did not go back on their words, they came up with international agreements that bind men to extend some of their rights to women. If there is anything the second wave of feminism achieved, it was the elevation of women’s social and economic rights to almost the same level as men’s. For example, new curriculums that included the study of women who contributed to the development of society were established in schools and higher institutions of learning. However, once again the second wave of feminism did not bring women to par with their male counterparts.

The third wave of feminism can be categorized as a knee-jerk reaction by North American feminists, especially in America to suggestions that the world was entering a post-feminist era. During the third wave of feminism, there was a realization of the issues faced by women, racial minorities, and other minority groups in America. Particular attention was paid to Black women in America and other parts of the world sparking the establishment of feminist global non-governmental organizations that focused on specific issues rather than a vague feminist ideology (Shiva, & Nosrat, 2019). This wave was characterized by the extensive use of media and pop culture to promote certain ideas. For example, they focused on writing in magazines and blogs about issues such as the gender pay gap, domestic violence, and sexual violence. Thus, while the third wave of feminism was unplanned, it focused on responding to areas where men and women did not enjoy the same rights. One can thus conclude that it was yet another attempt at making women more like men which is in line was Mary Beard’s assertion.

Mary Beard summed up the feminist quest as one aimed at making women as strong as men. The strength she was talking about is not physical strength but rather social, political, legal, and societal strength. Traditionally, men enjoyed an advantage over women in these spheres which meant that they could dictate what women could and could not do. Thus, to Mary Beard and other feminists, changing this power dynamic was essential to restoring the balance in relations between men and women. With nothing to refer to other than the historically known power of men, Mary Beard claimed that although a template for what a strong woman should look like does not exist, she was sure she would look like a man.

Loney-Howes, R. (2019). The politics of the personal: The evolution of anti-rape activism from second-wave feminism to# MeToo. In # MeToo and the politics of social change (pp. 21-35). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.

Sadler, B. J. (2018). Women & Power: A Manifesto by Mary Beard. Pleiades: Literature in Context, 38 (2), 19-22.

Shiva, N., & Nosrat K., Z. (2019). The fourth wave of feminism and the lack of social realism in cyberspace. Journal of Cyberspace Studies, 3 (2), 129-146.

Tobias, S. (2018). Faces of feminism: An activist’s reflections on the women’s movement . Routledge.

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IvyPanda. (2024, April 16). The Feminist Quest of Mary Beard. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-feminist-quest-of-mary-beard/

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Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The Feminist Quest of Mary Beard." April 16, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-feminist-quest-of-mary-beard/.

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• "The Conference of the Birds" by Farid Ud-Din Attar
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Amy Ettinger, who inspired readers with her life-affirming essays on dying, succumbs to cancer at 49

( JTA ) — Amy Ettinger,  an author and creative writing instructor who chronicled the last months of her life in articles for the Washington Post , died March 20 from cancer at her home in Santa Cruz, California. She was 49.

Ettinger’s essays focused on the things she was able to do and cherish despite her diagnosis with a rare, incurable cancer called leiomyosarcoma : seeing a live performance of “Mamma Mia!” with her 14-year-old daughter, Julianna; eating her favorite pastry from a San Francisco bakery.

“ I’ve learned that life is all about a series of moments, and I plan to spend as much remaining time as I can savoring each one, surrounded by the beauty of nature and my family and friends,”she wrote.

Ettinger was an occasional contributor to Kveller, the Jewish family website that is a Jewish Telegraphic Agency partner. There she wrote about her mother’s kugel recipe (“light brown on its crispy top, and the color of milky coffee in the middle”) , and how she, as a “non-observant Jew,” marked Yom Kippur — which in 2013 happened to fall on her 10th wedding anniversary .

“Like Yom Kippur, a wedding anniversary is a time to take a step back from your daily life — to weigh the good and bad, to contemplate your triumphs and missteps, to make a vow to do better individually and as a couple,” she wrote.

Ettinger was born in Rochester, New York, and grew up in Cupertino, California. She discovered her calling as a journalist in high school. She majored in American literature at UC Santa Cruz and earned a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University in 1999.

Her writing appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, New York Magazine, Salon, CNN and Newsweek. In a 2021 article for AARP, she wrote how her mother’s death inspired her to learn Sheila Ettinger’s favorite game: mahjong. She taught writing classes at Stanford Continuing Studies.

In 2017,  Penguin Random House published her memoir-cum-travelogue “Sweet Spot: An Ice Cream Binge Across America.” In it she wrote how she keeps “between fifteen and thirty dollars’ worth of ice cream in my freezer at all times” — not to eat, but as an “emergency backup system” in case one of her favorite shops or stores runs out.

Her follow-up story to her Washington Post article, titled  “I Have Little Time Left. I Hope My Goodbye Inspires You,” appeared on the newspaper’s homepage less than two weeks before she died.

“I am choosing to focus my limited time and energy on doing the things I love with the people I care most about. It’s a formula that works, I think, no matter where you are in your life,” she wrote.

In an article written after she died , her husband, the writer Dan White, wrote that she had dictated her last essay to him from a reading room at UC Santa Cruz with a view of a redwood forest. He said she had gotten hundreds of personal responses: A handful “unwelcome, including missives from ultrareligious people wanting my proudly Jewish wife to get saved to spare herself from hellfire,” but the vast majority saying Ettinger had inspired them to make the most of their lives no matter the cards they’d been dealt.

“Amy had no way of predicting that the lines she composed on the spot would be calls to action for readers from all over the United States, as well as Canada, Poland, France and Greece,” White wrote.

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Esther Perel on What the Other Woman Knows

The relationship expert reads one of the most controversial modern love essays ever published..

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

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From “The New York Times,” I’m Anna Martin. This is “Modern Love.” Today, I’m talking to the most famous couples therapist in the world, Esther Perel. Esther’s books, “Mating in Captivity” and “State of Affairs,” have forced so many of us, myself included, to rethink our assumptions about love. Like maybe it’s unrealistic to expect the passion and fire we feel at the beginning of a relationship to last forever. And when one partner cheats on the other, what if it could actually bring the couple closer, instead of tearing them apart?

On her podcast, “Where Should We Begin,” Esther lets us eavesdrop on sessions with real couples. People come to her with impossible problems, and she somehow guides them to a breakthrough. She gives them hope. When I listen to Esther’s podcast, I feel like I’m getting a free therapy session, so I wasn’t surprised in the slightest when she told me that people come up to her in public all the time and ask her deeply personal questions.

The grocery store is one place, but airplanes is even better.

Oh, no, Esther. If I were you, I’d be really scared to fly.

[LAUGHS]: They’re suspended in the air, and they tell you lots of things. And it is often about, can trust be repaired when it’s been broken? Can you bring a spark back when it’s gone? Can you rekindle desire when it’s been dormant for so long? What do you do when you’re angry at yourself for having stayed when you think you should have left? Or what do you do when you’re angry at yourself when you’ve left and now you think you should have stayed?

You’re like, I’m just at the grocery store, man. I need to check out.

Clearly, people are struggling so much to be happy in long-term relationships that they’re cornering this woman basically everywhere she goes. And these things people ask Esther about, they’re exactly the kinds of high-stakes, make-or-break questions that come up in the essay she chose for our show today. It’s called “What Sleeping with Married Men Taught Me About Infidelity,” by Karin Jones.

Karin’s essay was one of the most controversial pieces ever published in the history of the “Modern Love” column. But when it comes to talking about sex and relationships, nothing is too taboo for Esther.

Esther Perel, welcome to “Modern Love.”

It’s a pleasure to be here.

So you’re going to read Karin Jones’s “Modern Love” essay. We’re going to talk all about infidelity. But before we get into that, I learned something about you that I need to know more about. You are fluent in nine languages. And you conduct therapy in seven of them? Is that true?

Yes. So I grew up in Belgium, in the Flemish part of Belgium, and I was educated in Flemish for 12 years. But we also spoke French and German and Polish and Yiddish at home.

So we had five languages in the house. And then I studied Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew, and English. That comes to nine.

Would you ever do one more just to bring it to a solid 10?

I always wanted to study Arabic.

OK, in your free time, in your ample free time.

Are there certain languages that have better vocabulary for talking about the nuances of love and relationships than others?

That is a very difficult question to answer because my love language, the language in which I learned poetry, songs, novels, et cetera, was primarily French. And so, of course, I would say French. But that may be because I was inducted in it, rather than the language itself. What I can say is that certain cultures are more fluent in the language of feelings, love, relationships, and desire and sexuality than maybe English or Anglo cultures that are more pragmatic, more practical.

I think in therapy, sometimes, I find that there is certain cultures that allow me to speak differently about death, differently about the relationship of the individual to the collective. What I will say is this. In a therapy session, if a person tells me something and it needs to be said in his own language, I will ask them to translate it and to say it in their mother tongue, because you hear instantly the difference, the tone, the timber, the tremble.

And I know it. It’s like, I don’t even have to understand what they’re saying. I know that there is an authenticity and a truth to it that is very different. Sometimes, afterwards, I say, what did you say? But sometimes, I don’t even need to. I know when they say, “I feel alone,” “I ache for you,” “I miss you,” “where have you gone,” “I can’t forget you.” You don’t really need to understand the words to understand the effect.

Esther, the “Modern Love” essay you’re going to read for us today tackles a topic that I bet is very hard to talk about in almost any language. It’s called “What Sleeping with Married Men Taught Me About Infidelity” by Karin Jones. The author Karin is recently divorced, and she becomes the other woman to several men.

When I read that title, I kind of expect this story is going to be about all the sex she’s having or the secrets or how they’re hiding it. But you’ve worked with so many couples who are in the throes of dealing with cheating. So what does the word “infidelity” signal to you?

I wrote a book about infidelity. So I will say that one of my attempts in writing this book was to translate in writing the complexity of this experience that can be so shattering, that can fracture a family and an entire legacy. It needs more than just good, bad, victim, perpetrator, villain, saint. That there’s too much happening and for too many people that are involved to try to reduce it.

Infidelity is often about a lot of things, but sex. It’s about betrayal. It’s about violation of trust. It’s about lying. It’s about duplicity. It’s about deception. And sex is a piece of this, but that is not necessarily the only thing.

Oof. Esther, I am so excited to hear you read this. Whenever you’re ready.

OK. “What Sleeping with Married Men Taught Me About Infidelity” by Karin Jones.

“I’m not sure it’s possible to justify my liaison with married men, but what I learned from having them warrants discussion. Not between the wives and me, though I would be interested to hear their side. No, this discussion should happen between wives and husbands annually, the way we inspect the tire tread on the family car to avoid accidents.

A few years ago, while living in London, I dated married men for companionship while I processed the grief of being newly divorced.

When I created a profile on Tinder and on OkCupid saying I was looking for no strings attached encounters, plenty of single men messaged me, and I got together with several of them. But many married men messaged me, too.

After being married for 23 years, I wanted sex, but not a relationship. This is dicey because you can’t always control emotional attachments when body chemicals mix. But with the married man, I guess that the fact that they had wives, children, and mortgages would keep them from going overboard with their affections. And I was right. They didn’t get overly attached, and neither did I. We were safe bets for each other.

I was careful about the men I met. I wanted to make sure they had no interest in leaving their wives or otherwise threatening all they had built together. In a couple of cases, the men I met were married to women who had become disabled and could no longer be sexual, but the husbands remained devoted to them.

All told, I communicated with maybe a dozen men during that time in my life. I had sex with fewer than half. Others, I texted or talked with, which sometimes felt nearly as intimate. Before I met each man, I would ask, why are you doing this? I wanted assurance that all he desired was sex. What surprised me was that these husbands weren’t looking to have more sex. They were looking to have any sex.

I met one man whose wife had implicitly consented to her husband having a lover because she was no longer interested in sex at all. They both, to some degree, got what they needed without having to give up what they wanted. But the other husbands I met would have preferred to be having sex with their wives, and for whatever reason, that wasn’t happening.

I know what it feels like to go off sex, and I know what it’s like to want more than my partner. It’s also a tall order to have sex with the same person for more years than our ancestors ever hoped to live. Then, at menopause, a woman’s hormones suddenly drop, and her desire can wane. At 49, I was just about there myself and terrified of losing my desire for sex. Men don’t have this drastic change, so we have an imbalance, an elephant-sized problem so burdensome and shameful, we can scarcely muster the strength to talk about it.

If you read the work of Esther Perel, the author of the book ‘State of Affairs,’ you’ll learn that for many wives, sex outside of marriage is their way of breaking free from being the responsible spouses and mothers they have to be at home. Married sex for them often feels obligatory. An affair is adventure. Meanwhile, the husbands I spent time with would have been fine with obligatory sex. For them, adventure was not the main reason for their adultery.

The first time I saw my favorite married man pick up his pint of beer, the sleeve of his well-tailored suit pulled back from his wrist to reveal a geometric kaleidoscope of tattoos. He was clean shaven and well-mannered with a little rebel yell underneath. The night I saw the full canvas of his tattoo masterpiece, we drank prosecco, listened to ‘80s music, and, yes, had sex.

We also talked. I asked him, what if you said to your wife, look, I love you and the kids, but I need sex in my life? Can I just have the occasional fling or a casual affair? He sighed. If I asked her that kind of question, it would kill her, he said. So you don’t want to hurt her, but you lie to her instead? Personally, I’d rather know, I said.

It’s not necessarily a lie if you don’t confess the truth. It’s kind of to stay silent, he said. I’m just saying I couldn’t do that. I don’t want to be afraid of talking honestly about my sex life with the man I’m married to, and that includes being able to at least raise the subject of sex outside of marriage, I said. Good luck with that, he said.

I never convinced any husband that he can be honest about what he was doing, but they were mostly good-natured about it, like a patient father responding to a child who keeps asking why, why, why. Maybe I was being too pragmatic about the issues that are loaded with guilt, resentment, and fear. After all, it’s far easier to talk theoretically about marriage than to navigate it.

But my attitude is that if my spouse were to need something I couldn’t give him, I wouldn’t keep him from getting it elsewhere, as long as he did so in a way that didn’t endanger our family. I suppose I would hope his needs would involve fishing trips or beers with friends, but sex is basic.

Physical intimacy with other human beings is essential to our health and well-being. So how do we deny such a need to the one that we care about most? If our primary relationship nourishes and stabilizes us, but lacks intimacy, we shouldn’t have to destroy our marriage to get that intimacy somewhere else. Should we?

I didn’t have a full-on affair with the tattooed husband. We slept together maybe four times over a few years. More often, we talked on the phone. After our second night together, though, I could tell this was about more than sex for him. He was desperate for affection. He said he wanted to be close to his wife, but couldn’t because they were unable to get past their fundamental disconnect — lack of sex. That led to a lack of closeness, which made sex even less likely, and then turned into resentment and blame.

I’m not saying the answer is non-monogamy. That can be rife with risks and unintended entanglements. I believe the answer is honesty and dialogue, no matter how frightening. Lack of sex in marriage is common, and it shouldn’t lead to shame and silence. By the same token, an affair doesn’t have to lead to the end of a marriage. What if an affair, or ideally, simply, the urge to have one, can be the beginning of a necessary conversation about sex and intimacy?

What these husbands couldn’t do was have the difficult discussion with their wives that would force them to tackle the issues at the root of their cheating. They tried to convince me that they were being kind by keeping their affairs secret. They seemed to have convinced themselves. But deception and lying are ultimately corrosive, not kind.

In the end, I had to wonder if what these men couldn’t face was something else altogether — hearing why their wives no longer wanted to have sex with them. It’s much easier after all to set up an account on Tinder.”

Thanks so much for that reading, Esther. You know, it’s so funny because Karin Jones directly quotes you in her piece. And I feel like that is the first time ever we’ve had someone read an essay where they’re directly quoted.

Did anything jump out at you as you were reading?

What jumps out is she tackles a lot of different things — the subject of what is sexual aliveness, what is it that people actually lose when they stop being sexual with their partner, and how that loss of intimacy makes the sex even more complicated. She talked about the loss, the longing that this man has. I’ve often said that at the heart of affairs, you find duplicity and cheating and betrayal, but you also find longing and loss for the life that one had, for the parts of oneself that have been denied.

When we come back, I talk to Esther about the harsh criticism this essay got and why Esther thinks Karin Jones deserves more credit. Stay with us.

So Esther, this essay by Karin Jones was kind of a lightning rod when it was published. A ton of people were very critical of the author, saying she was sleeping with these men, but then also having conversations with them where she was like, it’s very wrong of you not to tell your wife what you’re up to. Why do you think this essay got so much backlash?

I think that the reaction to stories of infidelity are often intense. It’s a subject for which people are very quickly dogmatic because they have experienced the effects of it.

When I am in an audience, like if I was to ask, have you been affected by the experience of infidelity in your life, either because one of your parents was unfaithful or because you yourself had a child of an illicit affair, or because you had a friend on whose shoulder somebody weeping, or you had a confidant of someone who is in a complete bliss of an affair, or because you are the third person in the triangle, and about 80 percent of the people will raise their hand.

Wow. I mean, 80 percent sounds like a surprisingly large number, but when you explain it like that with different tendrils of an affair that affect everyone around the affair, not just the people in it, it makes total sense.

And it raises intense feelings in people. Karin Jones, she may have gotten the range of it, but you will hear more loudly the ones who say, you are a homewrecker, which, by the way, does not exist in the masculine.

Right, right.

The homewrecker is always a woman because the woman is the one who says yes, and therefore, if the woman hadn’t said yes, then he wouldn’t be able to do it. And then he would not be wrecking his family.

Yeah, there’s no other man either, by the way. It’s always the other woman.

Huh, there’s no other man.

Not in any of nine languages you speak.

No, because there’s never been another man who necessarily was willing to live in the shadow of a woman for his entire life.

That is so fascinating.

Her lover, [INAUDIBLE] you know her lover, but the other woman usually means that she lives in the shadow. She doesn’t just have a secret. She is the secret. That is the hardest thing about it. When people are writing to her, you can ask yourself, are they looking from the perspective of what it meant for her, or are they looking from the perspective of what it did to me, or to us?

Yeah, I mean, a lot of the criticism directed at Karin Jones, it seems, is coming from that perspective of saying, look what she did. Look at the harm she caused. Look at the pain she caused.

Which it is. Which it is.

Right, not discounting that, but it is interesting because her piece is so much about meaning making, right? That’s the whole conceit of her essay, is mining these experiences for meaning, and yet, people came with criticism. I wonder if this is like a kind of unfair question, but I wonder if there is an ethical way to be the other person. Is there a responsible way to do it without participating in hurt?

That depends. That depends. If you think the whole thing is unethical and is an egregious betrayal of trust and violation, then you will say no. I think the responsibility lies on the person who goes out, not on the lover.

Here’s what many people often say, is like, if you had asked me or if you had told me, but you made a decision without me. You made a decision about our marriage that did not involve me at all. And fair point. Of course, they know for a fact, too, that if they had been asked, they would have said no. But there is the things that you say after, and there is the things that you say before.

So, ultimately, I feel like I hear you agreeing with Karin Jones here that there are really important conversations that need to be happening between these husbands and their wives that actually don’t even have that much to do with Karin. Can you tell me more about that?

The conversation that Karin Jones would like these men to have with their wives is the conversations that take place in my book “Mating in Captivity,” because “Mating in Captivity” explored the dilemmas of desire inside relationships and why do people cease wanting. And could they want what they already have? And why does good sex fade, even in couples who still love each other as much as ever? And why do kids often deliver a fatal erotic blow?

What happens when they don’t have this conversation and they go elsewhere — and it’s not just a conversation about monogamy. It’s really a conversation of, what does sex mean to you? What do you want to experience in sex? Is it a place for connection?

Is it a place for transcendence, for spiritual union, to be naughty, to finally not be a good citizen, to be playful, to be taken care of, to surrender, to be safely dominant? What parts of you do you connect with through sexuality, rather than how often do we have sex, and we never have sex, and why don’t we do it more. So, that is a very different conversation.

But as Karin points to in her essay, and as you certainly point to in your book, those conversations are so difficult to have, even though this is the person we’re supposed to be the closest to. Why is that?

Because we grow up learning to be silent about sex and never talk about it. And then suddenly, we are expected to talk about it with the person we lov. Or in other words, sex is dirty, but save it for the one you love. It’s like we have very little practice talking about it.

We don’t get any of it in schools. Certainly, most families don’t talk about it either. And when we talk about sexuality, we talk about the dangers and the diseases and the dysfunctions. We don’t talk about intimacy. We don’t actually mix the word “sexuality” and “relationships” as one whole.

Yeah, and I mean, if we don’t talk about intimacy or the lack of it with a partner, that can, in some cases, lead to people going outside the marriage to find that intimacy they’re lacking in it. I’m thinking about Karin’s favorite married man, the one with all the tattoos. He says, it’s not necessarily a lie if you don’t confess the truth. It’s kinder to stay silent. In your experience working with couples, is he right? Is that true?

This is a very cultural question.

Because you live in a society here that believes in the moral cure of truth. But there are many societies for whom truth and honesty are not measured by the confession, but they are measured by what it will be like for the other person to walk with this on the street, meaning that they will consider the confession often as cruelty.

That, so what? So now you’ve got it off your chest. So now you’re less guilty, and now I have to live with this? Why don’t you just keep this to yourself, kind of thing. This is very cultural because in the United States, that is not the common view.

The common view is that the confession is the best state, even if you’re going to wreck the other person’s life for the next five years to come, which — and I am left with a question mark. But when I answer this question, I ask people about their own cultural codes as well. I do not impose mine. And mine fluctuates depending on the context. I think these questions are highly contextual, more than dogmatic.

We’ve talked about how there’s so many unsaid things between a couple that can lead to distance and infidelity. If a couple is feeling themselves drifting apart from each other emotionally, sexually, both, what are some things you could encourage them to do that might help?

Hmm. I like to coach people to do letter writing. Sometimes I make one person turn their back, and I make the other person write a letter on the back of the other person.

Oh, physically on the back?

Yes, but it’s a fake. You’re writing — you’re pretending to write, but you’re writing on the back. But that way, you don’t see the person.

Interesting.

Hi, Anna. This is something that I’ve been wanting to talk to you for a long time. And I give them the prompt. We never talk much about sexuality between us. For some reason, I decided a long time ago that you wouldn’t want to. But maybe it was I who didn’t know how to. And basically, they write these whole letters, in which they end up telling each other much of what they have never spoken.

I love that. What a kind and beautiful and compassionate way of easing into a conversation you’ve been afraid of having. Esther Perel, thank you so much for that idea. And thank you for talking with me today.

Thank you for having me.

Esther Perel is on tour in the US right now. Her show is called An Evening with Esther Perel, The Future of Relationships, Love, and Desire. Check her website for more details and to buy tickets. She told me she’s going to create an erotic experience in these theaters, so you do not want to miss that.

“Modern Love” is produced by Julia Botero, Chrstina Djossa, Reva Goldberg, Davis Land, and Emily Lange. It’s edited by our executive producer Jen Poyant and Davis Land. The “Modern Love” theme music is by Dan Powell. Original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, Pat McCusker, Rowan Niemisto, Carole Sabouraud, and Diane Wong.

This episode was mixed by Daniel Ramirez. Our show was recorded by Maddy Masiello. Digital production by Mahima Chablani and Nell Gallogly. The “Modern Love” column is edited by Daniel Jones. Miya Lee is the editor of “Modern Love” projects. I’m Anna Martin. Thanks for listening.

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• February 28, 2024   •   37:46 Three Powerful Lessons About Love
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• February 21, 2024   •   25:21 A Politics Reporter Walks Into a Singles Mixer
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Hosted by Anna Martin

Produced by Julia Botero ,  Christina Djossa ,  Reva Goldberg and Emily Lang

Edited by Jen Poyant and Davis Land

Engineered by Daniel Ramirez

Original music by Pat McCusker ,  Marion Lozano ,  Carole Sabouraud ,  Rowan Niemisto ,  Diane Wong and Dan Powell

Listen and follow Modern Love Apple Podcasts | Spotify

‘at the heart of affairs, you find duplicity and cheating and betrayal, but you also find longing and loss for the life that one had, for the parts of oneself that have been denied’.

Over the last two decades, Esther Perel has become a world-famous couples therapist by persistently advocating frank conversations about infidelity, sex and intimacy. Today, Perel reads one of the most provocative Modern Love essays ever published: “ What Sleeping With Married Men Taught Me About Infidelity ,” by Karin Jones.

In her 2018 essay, Jones wrote about her experience seeking out no-strings-attached flings with married men after her divorce. What she found, to her surprise, was how much the men missed having sex with their own wives, and how afraid they were to tell them.

Jones faced a heavy backlash after the essay was published. Perel reflects on why conversations around infidelity are still so difficult and why she thinks Jones deserves more credit.

Esther Perel is on tour in the U.S. Her show is called “An Evening With Esther Perel: The Future of Relationships, Love & Desire.” Check her website for more details.

Links to transcripts of episodes generally appear on these pages within a week.

Modern Love is hosted by Anna Martin and produced by Julia Botero, Reva Goldberg, Emily Lang and Christina Djossa. The show is edited by Davis Land and Jen Poyant, our executive producer. The show is mixed by Daniel Ramirez and recorded by Maddy Masiello. It features original music by Pat McCusker, Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, Carole Sabouraud, Rowan Niemisto and Diane Wong. Our theme music is by Dan Powell.

Special thanks to Larissa Anderson, Kate LoPresti, Lisa Tobin, Daniel Jones, Miya Lee, Mahima Chablani, Nell Gallogly, Jeffrey Miranda, Isabella Anderson, Reyna Desai, Renan Borelli, Nina Lassam and Julia Simon.

Thoughts? Email us at [email protected] . Want more from Modern Love ? Read past stories . Watch the TV series and sign up for the newsletter . We also have swag at the NYT Store and two books, “ Modern Love: True Stories of Love, Loss, and Redemption ” and “ Tiny Love Stories: True Tales of Love in 100 Words or Less .”

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Gig workers are writing essays for AI to learn from

• Companies are hiring highly educated gig workers to write training content for AI models .
• The shift toward more sophisticated trainers comes as tech giants scramble for new data sources.
• AI could run out of data to learn from by 2026, one research institute has warned. 

As artificial intelligence models run out of data to train themselves on, AI companies are increasingly turning to actual humans to write training content.

For years, companies have used gig workers to help train AI models on simple tasks like photo identification , data annotation, and labelling. But the rapidly advancing technology now requires more advanced people to train it.

Companies such as Scale AI and Surge AI are hiring part-timers with graduate degrees to write essays and creative prompts for the bots to gobble up, The New York Times reported . Scale AI, for example, posted a job last year looking for people with Master's degrees or PhDs, who are fluent in either English, Hindi, or Japanese and have professional writing experience in fields like poetry, journalism, and publishing.

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Their mission? To help AI bots "become better writers," Scale AI wrote in the posting.

And an army of workers are needed to do this kind of work. Scale AI has as many as tens of thousands of contractors working on its platform at a time, per the Times.

"What really makes the A.I. useful to its users is the human layer of data, and that really needs to be done by smart humans and skilled humans and humans with a particular degree of expertise and a creative bent," Willow Primack, the vice president of data operations at Scale AI, told the New York Times. "We have been focusing on contractors, particularly within North America, as a result."

The shift toward more sophisticated gig trainers comes as tech giants scramble to find new data to train their technology on. That's because the programs learn so incredibly fast that they're already running out of available resources to learn from. The vast trove of online information — everything from scientific papers to news articles to Wikipedia pages — is drying up.

Epoch, an AI research institute, has warned that AI could run out of data by 2026.

So, companies are finding more and more creative ways to make sure their systems never stop learning. Google has considered accessing its customers' data in Google Docs , Sheets, and Slides while Meta even thought about buying publishing house Simon & Schuster to harvest its book collection, Business Insider previously reported.

Watch: Nearly 50,000 tech workers have been laid off — but there's a hack to avoid layoffs

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