The role of feminist political theory in addressing power and inequality

Introduction

Feminist political theory is a critical perspective in political theory, placed in Unit IV of the syllabus together with the postmodern perspective. Its distinctive contribution is to ask how power and inequality are shaped by gender. The answer first explains its meaning and development and then shows what it does with these two themes.

Feminist political theory: meaning and waves

Feminist political theory is a branch of political theory that adds the feminist dimension to a field in which women were long ignored, and it widens the boundary of what counts as political to include the concerns of women. It emerged in the late twentieth century with the Women's Liberation Movement of the West, and it asks a basic question: why are men powerful and privileged over women in any society, and how can women gain an equal status? It tries to end the domination of women by criticising and changing the theories and institutions that stand for their inferior status.

First wave (1820s to 1940s): a movement, centred in the United States and Britain and usually dated from the Seneca Falls Declaration of 1848, first for equal property rights and a dignified place for women within the household and then, in the twentieth century, for the vote. In the colonial world it was bound up with women's part in anti-colonial nationalism; in India it is traced to the Indian Women's Association formed in Madras in 1917, which asked for fairer inheritance laws, divorce and a wider franchise.

Second wave (1960s onwards): Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963) showed that legal and political rights had left women frustrated at home; Greer and Millett pushed attention to sexuality and the psychological and personal sides of oppression, and the slogan the personal is political was coined. De Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) was a forerunner.

Third wave (mid-1990s): influenced by postmodernism and post-colonialism, it responded to the neglect of class, race and sexuality by earlier feminism, celebrated differences, and was more inclusive, multicultural and global, helped by the internet.

Feminist theory on power and inequality

Feminist political theory puts a question that mainstream theory had set aside: why are men powerful and privileged over women in every given society?. Its answers reshape the understanding of power in four ways.

1. Power in the private sphere. By saying that the personal is political, it shows that women's personal lives, sexuality included, reflect the power structures of a patriarchal society. The patriarchal division of labour that leaves women the domestic sphere and men the public one is one source of the double burden.
2. Power in structures. Marxist and socialist feminists link women's subordination to capitalism and the family's role in reproducing labour, with lower wages and harassment even in paid work; radical feminists to patriarchal dominance.
3. Power and the state. Liberal feminists see the state as capable of acting for equality, for instance by increasing women's seats in parliament and extending welfare schemes to women, and they secured the vote for women in the United States in 1920; radical feminists see it as an instrument of power and contest the liberal view that it is impartial and neutral. In international politics, feminists criticise the gender-blind idea of security and the myth of the warrior and the beautiful soul.
4. Power and identity. Black and postmodern feminists show that gender intersects with class, race and sexuality, so no single remedy suffices.

Impact. Feminism has widened what counts as political to take in the concerns of women, and it has changed political theory's own vocabulary: gender, patriarchy, care, intersectionality.

Strands within feminist thought

Liberal feminism (Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792; Mill) wants equal access to education, equal economic opportunity, political rights and civil liberties, with the state as an ally; its critics say it urges women to become like men. Marxist feminism ties women's oppression to capitalism and class exploitation, and to the way labour is reproduced in the family (Engels, Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 1884). Socialist feminism adds patriarchy to capitalism as a second cause, sees oppression as the joint result of class, race, ethnicity, sexuality and gender, and stresses the caring and emotional labour of women that patriarchal society overlooks. Radical feminism puts the politics of the personal at the centre, stresses the material basis of patriarchy, and asks for sexual politics in public debate, legal abortion and an equal sharing of childcare and housework. Ecological feminism links the domination of women with the domination of nature.

In the third wave, cultural feminism values female qualities and sisterhood, black feminism (Alice Walker's "womanism") shows how class, race and gender intersect, and postmodern feminism (Judith Butler) argues that gender is constructed through language and is performative.

Conclusion

Feminist political theory has changed the way in which power and inequality are understood: power is found in the household as well as the state, inequality is traced to patriarchy and to its intersections with class, race and other differences, and the remedies range from legal equality to structural change. Its internal disagreements are a source of vitality, since they push the theory to take account of those it first neglected.