What is Feminism?
“Imagine living in a world where there is no domination, where females and males are not alike or even always equal, but where a vision of mutuality is the ethos shaping our interaction. Imagine living in a world where we can all be who we are, a world of peace and possibility.”
from Feminism is for Everybody by bell hooks
My mom was a housewife and then she became a feminist. She went to college, but married young, in her Junior year. One of my favorite stories about my grandmother is that before my mother married my dad, my grandmother took him aside and told him that he better let Mom finish college. You see, that wasn’t a given then. Although my grandmother was from a working class family, she was determined that Mom and her older sister were able to become college graduates. My grandmother herself only had an 8th grade education and got married at 16, not unusual at that time.
I am not a scholar of feminism, I have never taken a women’s study class, I don’t really understand what the term “feminist theory” means. The truth is that I became a feminist at a very young age because I was raised by a feminist. My feminist training manual was the album Free to Be, You and Me, which taught me that feminism meant that all people should be considered equally valuable, even if they were different from you. Before I could read, my Mom took children’s books with adventurous boy characters, changed their names and drew pigtails on them, because there were no good books about girls then.
My mother’s feminism was born out of a visceral conflict between living your own life, on your own terms, and the needs of your family. It’s very difficult to be an independent person when you are a mother, you have many demands on your time and a huge responsibility. Taking care of children takes a lot of resources and the burden of making sure there is enough for their children is mostly on mothers. Even if there are other adults involved in caring for children, ensuring that those relationships are there to support the children are the responsibility of the mother.
A lot of women, like my Mom, became feminists in the 70’s when they joined a women’s consciousness group. Consciousness raising groups originated in the Old Left, the pre-1960 left wing political groups, as a way to enlighten workers to their own oppression. In the early days of the Women’s Movement in New York City, women started to form groups to discuss their personal experiences of sexism. The early feminist activist and writer Anne Forer Pyne’s use of the phrase “consciousness raising groups” led to them becoming a foundational principle of the women’s rights movement. Women had been isolated from each other and thought that many of their problems were personal when they were actually caused by a system of oppression.
As a teenager and young adult in the 80’s, I felt like we were already in a post-sexist world, after all it was post-Roe v. Wade. Women were free, already liberated, it was a given that women were equal to men, we could do anything we wanted, become lawyers doctors, scientists - we could have it all. But we couldn’t just be ourselves, in order to be considered equal, we had to work harder, be better. The old backwards in heels routine. And not only were we supposed to emulate men, we were also supposed to take care of all of the traditional women’s work as well. It really hasn’t changed much since then, has it?
In order to better understand feminism, I turned to the great feminist scholar and writer, bell hooks. In her book, Feminism is for Everybody, she defines feminism as “a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.” One of her main points was that feminists are not born, but made, that feminists had to come to a greater consciousness of their inner sexism before change could occur. She also believed that it is important to understand that not only can anybody be a feminist, but also that women could be just as sexist as men. All of us, female and male, have been socialized from birth on to accept sexist thought and action
Sexism is prejudice against one sex or gender and can affect anyone, but primarily effects women and girls. It has a deep historical origin: Aristotle portrayed women as morally, intellectually and physically inferior to men. The word sexism was coined in the 60’s by Pauline M. Leet at Franklin and Marshall College. She defined it as being similar to racism, in that it judges one group of people as intrinsically inferior to another. According to the philosopher Kate Manne, sexism rationalizes and justifies patriarchal norms by making patriarchal social arrangements seem natural, good, or inevitable so there’s no reason to resist them.
Patriarchy is an ideology that upholds men’s systemic dominance over women, justifying male superiority and rejecting equal structures in both public and private life. One of the patriarchal myths is that gender inequality is justified by the biological differences between men and women and is just the natural order of things. Some scholars point to the emergence of agriculture, about six thousand years ago, as the origin of patriarchy. Steven Taylor argues that the rise of patriarchal domination was associated with the appearance of socially stratified hierarchical polities. However, as David Graeber and David Wengrow say in their book, The Dawn of Everything, “There’s no reason to believe that small scale groups are more likely to be egalitarian and large ones must be hierarchical”.
Another thing bell hooks talks about in Feminism is for Everybody is that there are two kinds of feminist movement, one which is reformist and the other revolutionary. The idea behind reformist feminism is a gradual working from within the current power structures, to support and demand that women be able to join the existing power structure. The problem with this is that it is a patriarchal power structure, and so cultural and institutional sexism is still embedded in our society. The idea of revolutionary feminism is to remake our society from the ground up, reject patriarchy, reject capitalism, embrace relational values as those that guide the structures and systems of our government and society.
People are afraid of change. We have all adapted to the environment that we live in and naturally fear not being able to survive if the underlying conditions change. Since we humans are completely enmeshed with our own culture, it is critical to our survival that we adapt to our culture. We are all insecure about our ability to live in a different system. But would it be worse than this? Our feelings of danger and insecurity and fear are used to keep us small and dull witted, to keep our amygdalas stimulated so we are unable to think creatively. Our inability to imagine a society built on values different from the patriarchal ones is a failure of our imagination, not a reflection of the truth.