Feminist Theories
• Liberal Feminism - the classic liberal point of view that women should have equal rights. The issue
is, equal to whom? Equal to men of the same color, class, ethnicity and age? Even if this were
possible, we would have gender equality in a limited sense but continued class, race, and age inequality.
Liberal feminism does not completely answer the question of equal to whom.
• Marxist Feminism - that household work be socialized – that is, taken over by the state.
• Radical Feminisms – that productivity is the real basis of women's subordination.
• Socialist Feminists - that capitalism does not adequately account for women's oppression.
• Existential Feminism - introduce by Simone de Beauvoir (1952) where human consciousness is divided into two
parts - a transcendent or observing ego (pour-soi or "for self") and a fixed self or observed ego (en-soi or
"in-itself). Nielsen points out the serious problem with de Beauvoir's analysis: "For working mothers,
women of color, and poor women, faced with the daily reality of poverty, racism, and lack of societal and
government support, the talk about pour soi consciousness is at best irrelevant and at worst
insulting".
• Postmodern Feminism - rejects the idea of a grand theory. Postmodernists are not interested in a single
explanation or formula for women's situation. They just present a series of intriguing ideas: the
advantage of being "other", to being unattached to the dominate culture - "De Beauvoir's" freer way of
being; not to emulate men, but to create their own female language, their own female sexuality, their own
female world. • The postmodern ethic is full of quandaries. For example, the female
household head who is employed in a woman's occupation and needs child support precisely because she is a woman
without a "male" salary. To treat her as if she were male is to do her a disservice. Becomes a frustrating,
no-win situation.
• Ecofeminism - the idea here is that scientific thinking itself is gendered, and that the scientific
attitude toward the natural (feminine) world parallels men's apparent interest in controlling women. This argument
is made by some but not all eco-feminists - that women are somehow better, nicer, more connected, less apt to kill,
less apt to screw up the environment.
• Psychoanalytic Feminism - key idea is from feminist sociologist Nancy Chodorow who presents the universal social
feature: everyone's first parent is female. For infant girls, interaction is with a same sex parent and for
boys it is with an opposite sex parent. The Psychoanalytic feminism theory posits that one's initial 'self'
is more female than male. That both male and female infants love and want their mothers, but at the same time
resent her because of her immense power. She can bring extreme discomfort and well as
bliss.
Feminist researcher Janet Chafetz has observed that the status of
women in late industrial societies is higher than in any other surplus-producing society in history—including the
horticultural.
In his pioneering work 'A Brief History of
Everything', integral philosopher Ken Wilber informs than mankind followed
five (5) major stages of technological/economic development: 1) foraging, 2) horticulture, 3) agrarian, 4)
industrial, 5) informational.
“The ecofeminists are quite fond of
horticultural, Great Mother societies for they perceived these societies to be in harmony with the seasonal
currents of nature and in other ways were ecologically oriented. As long as you performed that annual ritual
human sacrifice to keep the Great Mother happy and the crops growing, all was well with nature…[On the other hand,]
the ecomasculinist condemned farming as the first rape of nature, because you are no longer gathering what nature
offers; you are digging into nature and scarring her face with farming technology, you are starting to rape the
land…Who are we to point to one period and say everything past that period was a colossal error, a heinous
crime? Do we really think that the Great Mother (or Spirit) doesn’t know what She’s doing? That seems
like arrogance to me…The retrogressive Romantics – whether the ecofeminists or ecomasculinists – simply take the
problems of the subsequent level and compare them with the accomplishments of the previous level, and thus claim
everything has gone downhill pass their favorite epoch. This is pretty perverse.”
“Even though horticulture and agrarian are both
farming, the shift from hoe to plow was momentous. A digging stick can easily be handled by a pregnant woman,
an animal-drawn plow cannot. Women who attempt to do so suffer significantly higher rates of miscarriage
. In other words, it was women’s Darwinian advantage not to plow. Men didn’t want to do this, and they
did not “take away” or “oppress” the female workforce in order to do so. Both men and women decided that
heavy plowing was male work…Women are not sheep; men are not pigs. This “patriarchy” was a conscious co-creation of
men and women in the face of largely brutal circumstances. The idea that the patriarchy was an ole boys’ club
that was nothing but fun, fun, fun for men is based on the rather poor research infected with much ideology…What we
really learn from these societies is that when the sexes are heavily polarized (eg, divided, compartmentalized),
then both sexes suffer horribly. Agrarian societies have the most highly sexually polarized structure of any
known societal type (along with herding). There was no ‘plotting’ on either side. It was simply the
best that these societies could do under the technological form of their time.”
“Women who vocally condemn late industrial (and
informational) society and glowingly eulogize Great Mother horticultural societies seem to be out of touch with a
good deal of evidence, or they very selectively choose a few nice items about yesterday and ignore the rest of
yesterday’s nightmare, and compare that “Eden” with nothing but the very worst of modernity.”
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