Characteristics and key limitations of the feminist perspective

Introduction

The question asks for the major characteristics of the feminist perspective and its key limitations. The perspective is part of Unit IV of the syllabus. Its characteristics can be summarised as a critique of male-centred theory, a focus on gender and patriarchy, a widening of the political, and a commitment to change; the limits concern its unity, exclusions and essentialism.

Major characteristics

1. It puts women's experience at the centre. Western political theory had for most of its history ignored women, and feminist political theory made women's experience cardinal to political analysis.
2. It treats gender inequality as socially made. Using the sex/gender distinction, it argues that patriarchy and not nature explains the inequality between men and women.
3. It widens the political. It extends politics to the family, the body and sexuality (the personal is political), and questions the public/private distinction.
4. It combines theory with a movement. It is a political movement against the political, cultural, economic and social subjugation of women, and it aims to transform the theories and institutions that stand for their inferiority.
5. It is plural. Liberal, Marxist, socialist, radical, ecological, cultural, black and postmodern strands differ on cause and remedy.
6. It is attentive to intersections. Later strands show that class, race, ethnicity and sexuality shape the experience of oppression.
7. It reaches beyond domestic politics. In international relations, it argues that politics is gendered, challenges the primacy of state-centred security and brings in human security.

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.

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.

Limitations of feminist political theory

1. Internal diversity and disagreement. Feminism is not one theory; the strands disagree on the cause of women's subordination and the remedy, and the development of feminist thought has been uneven. (2) Exclusions. The first wave was identified with white, Western, middle-class women; the second wave claimed solidarity but neglected race, class and sexuality, and the third wave arose partly in response. Black women found that neither the women's nor the black liberation movement represented them. (3) Essentialism. Some radical feminists generalise about women's nature, for instance that women stand closer to ecology, and are criticised for not tracing where the difference comes from. Cultural feminists treat women as naturally caring and lay the whole blame for oppression on the assumed maleness of men rather than on the workings of patriarchy. Radical feminists themselves do not take that last view: for them a man is not an oppressor simply because he is male, but when he claims supremacy over women on the ground of being born male. (4) Liberal feminism's assimilation. Critics say that it asks women to become like men. (5) Neglect of wage workers. Marxist feminism absorbs women wage labourers into wage labour in general and so hides their special problems. (6) Postmodern fragmentation. Postmodern feminists hold that women do not all share one experience of oppression and that no single factor explains it, which makes a common programme harder to frame.

Despite these limits, the questions feminism raised are now part of political theory, and the internal criticism that led to the third wave shows the theory's capacity to correct itself.

Conclusion

The feminist perspective has changed political theory by making gender a basic category of analysis. Its limits, internal diversity, exclusions, essentialism and the problem of an unstable category of woman, show that it is a continuing project and not a finished doctrine.