Feminism and sociology: historical roots and principles

1. What is feminism?

Feminism is both a body of social theory and a political movement. As theory, it explains the position of women in society, the sources of gender inequality and the ways in which it is reproduced. As a movement, it aims to end that inequality. All feminist theories share three claims:

1. women are disadvantaged relative to men in most societies;
2. this disadvantage is social, not natural or biological, and can be changed;
3. knowledge, including sociology, has been built largely from men’s point of view.

Key concepts: sex (biological difference) and gender (socially constructed roles and identities), a distinction made familiar by Ann Oakley in Sex, Gender and Society (1972); patriarchy (a system of social structures and practices in which men dominate, oppress and exploit women, in Sylvia Walby’s definition in Theorizing Patriarchy, 1990); and the slogan “the personal is political”, which brought the family and sexuality within the scope of politics.

2. Historical development: the waves

Precursors

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), argued that women appear inferior only because they are denied education. The Enlightenment ideas of reason, rights and equality, once applied to women, became the seed of liberal feminism.

First wave (c. 1848–1920s)

• Focus on legal and political equality: the vote, property rights, access to education and professions.
• The Seneca Falls Convention (1848, USA) and its Declaration of Sentiments.
• John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor; Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869).
• The suffrage movements: women won the vote in New Zealand (1893), Britain (partly 1918, equally 1928) and the USA (1920).

Second wave (1960s–1980s)

• Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949): “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” Woman is constructed as the “Other”.
• Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963): the “problem that has no name” of the suburban housewife.
• Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (1970), and Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex (1970): radical feminism, patriarchy as the oldest form of domination.
• Issues widen to work, family, reproduction, sexuality, violence against women. Liberal, Marxist, socialist and radical schools take shape.

Third wave (1990s onwards) and after

• Critique of second-wave feminism as white, Western and middle-class.
• Black feminism and intersectionality (Kimberlé Crenshaw, 1989); postmodern feminism (Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 1990); postcolonial feminism (Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes”, 1984/1986).
• A so-called fourth wave from about 2012 uses social media against sexual harassment.

3. Indian roots

• Nineteenth-century social reform: Raja Ram Mohan Roy against sati; Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar and widow remarriage (Hindu Widows’ Remarriage Act, 1856).
• Savitribai and Jyotirao Phule opened a school for girls in Pune (1848). Tarabai Shinde, Stri Purush Tulana (1882), a direct critique of patriarchy; Pandita Ramabai, The High-Caste Hindu Woman (1887).
• Women’s organisations of the early twentieth century (Women’s Indian Association, 1917; All India Women’s Conference, 1927) and participation in the national movement.
• Towards Equality (1974), the report of the Committee on the Status of Women in India, which revived the women’s movement and women’s studies.

4. Feminism and sociology

Feminists argued that classical sociology was “malestream” (Pamela Abbott and Claire Wallace): written by men, about men, for men.

• The founders (Comte, Durkheim, Weber, Marx) took the sexual division of labour as natural; Parsons cast women in the “expressive” role in the family.
• Women’s work was invisible. Ann Oakley’s The Sociology of Housework (1974) treated housework as work for the first time.
• Early women sociologists were written out: Harriet Martineau (Society in America, 1837, and the translator of Comte) and Jane Addams.
• Dorothy Smith developed standpoint theory: knowledge is produced from a social location, and starting from women’s everyday experience reveals what the dominant view hides (The Everyday World as Problematic, 1987).

The result was new fields (gender studies, sociology of the body, of emotion, of care work) and new methods (feminist qualitative research, reflexivity about the researcher’s position).

5. Principles of feminist theory

1. Gender is a central organising principle of social life, like class.
2. Gender relations are relations of power and inequality, not mere difference.
3. Gender is socially constructed and therefore historically variable and changeable.
4. The personal is political: family, sexuality and the body are sites of power.
5. Women’s experience is a valid basis of knowledge (standpoint).
6. Theory is linked to practice (praxis): the aim is change, not only understanding.
7. Diversity among women: class, race, caste, sexuality and nation shape women’s lives differently.

How this is examined

“What is feminism? Explain the principles of feminist theory” (10 marks, October 2023): definition, sex and gender, patriarchy, the seven principles, close with the table. “What are feminist theories?” is also the opening limb of the August 2024 question on black and eco-feminism. Short notes on “origin” or “development of feminism” need the waves with one name and one date each, plus the Indian roots.