Feminism
Sex-based hierarchy is a political structure rather than a natural fact, and law and public policy should be used to dismantle it.
What does this mean?
Feminism holds that the subordinate position of women is produced by social and legal arrangements rather than given by nature, and that it is therefore a political question. Beyond that shared claim the tradition contains genuine disagreement, and flattening it does it no favours.
Liberal feminism seeks equal legal and civic standing — suffrage, property rights, equal pay, access to the professions, an end to sex discrimination in law — and works through legislation and the courts. Socialist feminism holds that formal equality is insufficient while unpaid domestic labour subsidises the economy and while economic dependence persists, and links women’s position to the organisation of production. Radical feminism treats male dominance as the foundational hierarchy from which others derive, rather than one among several. Later currents added the argument that sex intersects with race and class such that no single account of "women’s interests" is available.
The tradition has an unusual record: many of its early demands — the vote, property in marriage, access to education and the professions, legal recognition of marital rape — are now so completely settled in most democracies that it is easy to forget they were once contested, which is itself a reason to state where the disagreements now lie.
Where did it come from?
Runs from Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) through the suffrage campaigns that won the vote across most of the world between 1893 and 1971, to the second wave launched by de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) and Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), and the intersectional critiques that followed from the 1980s.
Major thinkers
- Mary Wollstonecraft
- Simone de Beauvoir
- Betty Friedan
- bell hooks
- Kimberlé Crenshaw
Historical figures
- Emmeline Pankhurst
- Sarojini Naidu
- Simone de Beauvoir
- Betty Friedan
What it looks like today
- Statutory parental leave shared between parents, as in the Nordic model
- Gender quotas for candidate lists and company boards in much of Europe
- Campaigns on unpaid care work and its treatment in national accounts
Where it sits on each dimension
Wealth and inequality
Varies by current. Liberal feminists seek equal access to existing structures; socialist feminists argue the structures themselves depend on unpaid domestic labour.
The state in the economy
Personal liberty
Strongly protective of bodily autonomy and personal freedom, though the tradition divides sharply over pornography and prostitution.
Tradition and change
The definitional axis: inherited arrangements around family, work and sexuality are treated as constructed and revisable rather than natural.
Nation and the world
Religion and the state
Generally secular in orientation, having contested religious authority over marriage, divorce and reproduction — though religious feminisms exist in every major tradition.
Power and its limits
Environment and growth
Crime and punishment
Its strongest arguments
- It identified as political a set of arrangements that had been treated as natural, which is the precondition of changing them.
- Its early programme — suffrage, property, education, professional access — is now so settled that opposing it is fringe in most democracies.
- Research on the economic effect of women’s workforce participation supports the claim that the arrangements were costly as well as unjust.
Its strongest criticisms
- From conservatives: policies aimed at equal outcomes can override choices that many women make freely, and treat the family as an obstacle rather than a good.
- From within the tradition: liberal feminism has been criticised for advancing professional women while leaving working-class and minority women where they were.
- The internal disagreements over sex work, pornography and gender identity are unresolved, and each side argues the other undermines the project.
Common misconceptions
- That it is a single position. Liberal, socialist and radical feminists disagree with each other on the causes of subordination and on what would count as fixing it.
- That it concerns only women. Much of the tradition analyses how the same arrangements constrain men — in caregiving, custody and emotional expression.
- That its aims are now achieved. Formal legal equality is near-universal in democracies; the current arguments are about unpaid labour, violence and representation.
A caveat
Feminism overlaps heavily with progressivism and social liberalism on this project’s axes. What separates it is the specific claim that sex-based hierarchy is foundational rather than one instance of a general problem.
Sources
- Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman · 1792
- Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex · 1949
- Kimberlé Crenshaw, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex · University of Chicago Legal Forum · 1989