The Routledge Global History of Feminism

Bonnie G. Smith, Nova Robinson, Bonnie G. Smith, Nova Robinson

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000529470
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: Women in History

Based on the scholarship of a global team of diverse authors, this wide-ranging handbook surveys the history and current status of pro-women thought and activism over millennia.

The book traces the complex history of feminism across the globe, presenting its many identities, its heated debates, its racism, discussion of religious belief and values, commitment to social change, and the struggles of women around the world for gender justice. Authors approach past understandings and today's evolving sense of what feminism or womanism or gender justice are from multiple viewpoints. These perspectives are geographical to highlight commonalities and differences from region to region or nation to nation; they are also chronological suggesting change or continuity from the ancient world to our digital age. Across five parts, authors delve into topics such as colonialism, empire, the arts, labor activism, family, and displacement as the means to take the pulse of feminism from specific vantage points highlighting that there is no single feminist story but rather multiple portraits of a broad cast of activists and thinkers.

Comprehensive and properly global, this is the ideal volume for students and scholars of women's and gender history, women's studies, social history, political movements and feminism.

PART 1Feminism, what is it?

1DEFINITIONSAn overview

Susan Kingsley Kent

DOI: 10.4324/9781003050049-3

The term “feminism,” referring to the movement seeking “the equality of the sexes” and the “rights of the female sex,”¹ came into English from the French in the 1890, replacing the word “womanism.” Its origins in Enlightenment thinking clearly mark it as a Western ideology, though that has not prevented it from finding a foothold in places around the world, even where the term itself has no local equivalent or is rejected outright. The reception has not always been an uncomplicated one, but global feminism in its myriad manifestations has had a significant impact on the lives of men and women throughout the world, as the essays that follow attest.

Adherents of feminism have always contested the meanings of the word and its aims under whose banner they organized, for the concept of women’s equality with men is at once breathtakingly simply and dazzlingly complex. On the face of it, nothing could be more straightforward. But when one proceeds to break down the definition into its various parts, difficulties immediately arise about the nature, content, context, and constituency of the term. Equal rights to what? For all women? Who is considered a woman in the context of feminist demands? What does equality of the sexes mean? And who decides these issues? In what follows we will look at the practices, activities, aims, and goals that together constitute feminism across time and space, focusing on disputes over three areas of border crossing that have characterized feminist movements and ideologies since the late eighteenth century: the transgressive, the transnational, and the transgendered.

Feminism as transgression

Since the 1920s, feminists from all lands and of all persuasions have debated the definitions, issues, and problems contained in “feminism.” One strand of the debate centers on whether women are “similar” to men and therefore deserve equal treatment with no favor. Or are they “different” from them and therefore have special needs that deserve recognition and response? The disagreement has been reflected in histories of feminism that seek to gauge the relative success feminists in the past had in achieving their ends by referring to their “similarity” or their “difference” from men. But as a number of historians and philosophers of feminism have pointed out, attempts to categorize feminists as belonging to one side or the other ignore the fact that feminism, paradoxically and inconsistently but necessarily, embraces both equality and difference positions, which are often in tension with one another, to be sure, but productive and powerful if acknowledged and used strategically.²

A second and related source of controversy derives from the assumption in much of Western feminist thinking that women, as both subject and object of feminism’s program, share common needs, common wants, common desires, and a common oppression. Women of color in Britain and America and throughout the world have long made it clear that differences in race, sexuality, class, nationality, culture, religion, age, and ethnicity must undermine any such notions of an essential femininity or womanliness upon which feminism might rest. Post-structuralist scholars have gone further, arguing that the meanings attached to that collective body of female beings called “women” are not stable over time or across or even within cultures at a particular time. Rather, they assert, the category of “women” is a contingent one, always related to other categories that help organize and inform society and culture. In the West – that is, Europe and the United States – since the eighteenth century, those categories included concepts such as “nature,” “class,” “reason,” and “humanity,” which changed over time and thus produced change in the meanings accruing to “women” as well.³ In other parts of the world, the concepts against which “women” as a category are defined differ, and this difference often structures feminist agendas and initiatives. (This is not to say that real women do not exist, as some critics of post-structuralist thinking argue. It means that the meanings and representations of those sexed bodies change relative to other categories that establish status in societies and polities.)

Feminism connotes the equal rights of women. If it is impossible to identify a constant meaning for or a stable category of “women,” it would follow that it is impossible to define feminism in any simplistic way, either over time or across space. For that reason, scholars have come to speak of “feminisms” rather than “feminism,” acknowledging the vast complexity of women’s lives across the globe and throughout history. We can only arrive at a definition of feminism by locating the content and the activities it spawned to their precise historical contexts. In other words, “feminism” is a historically contingent concept. It, like the “women” it speaks for and about, exists only in history. Defining and articulating a feminism at any given historical time and place requires understanding what the category of “women” is positioned against at that particular time and place. Because entire worlds of women populate the universe across time and space, entire worlds of feminism exist as well.

Feminist movements arose in Europe and America in response to the exclusion of women from participation in political and public life, especially as liberal and democratic regimes obtained those rights for increasing numbers of men during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Liberalism explicitly denied women political citizenship. The potential contradiction between, on the one hand, a liberal ideology that had legitimated the dismantling of aristocratic power and authority and the enfranchisement of middle-class, and later working-class, men in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and, on the other, the denial of the claims of women to full citizenship was resolved by appeals to biological and characterological differences between the sexes.

New definitions of femininity evolved whose qualities were antithetical to those that had warranted widespread male participation in the public sphere. Men possessed the capacity for reason, action, aggression, independence, and self-interest. Women inhabited a separate, private, domestic sphere, one suitable for the so-called inherent qualities of femininity: emotion, passivity, submission, dependence, and selflessness. These notions had been extant in political thought for centuries, extending as far back as Aristotle, but a new explanation for women’s incapacities and legal and political disabilities emerged: all derived, it was claimed insistently, from women’s sexual and reproductive organization.

Upon the female as a biological entity, a sexed body, nineteenth-century theorists imposed a socially and culturally constructed femininity, a gender identity derived from ideas about what roles were appropriate for women. “Woman was what she is [sic],” insisted Horatio Storer, an American physician, in 1871, “in health, in character, in her charms, alike of body, mind and soul because of her womb alone.” This collapsing of sex and gender – of the physiological organism with the normative social creation – made it possible for women to be construed as at once pure and purely sexual; although paradoxical, these definitions excluded women from participation in the public sphere and rendered them subordinate to men in the private sphere as well. Any attempt to challenge the situation was doomed to fail, as “what was decided among the prehistoric Protozoa,” asserted two British biologists, “can not [sic] be annulled by act of Parliament.”⁴

Because women’s exclusion from political life was argued for and justified by references to their sexual differences from men – differences, it was asserted over and over again, that derived from nature – Western feminists had to answer opponents in the language used to categorize women as inferior. They had to refuse the ideology of sexual difference that established their inferiority as fact, to transgress the boundaries and practices that normalized “women.” As British suffragist Arabella Shore put it in 1877, the “great Nature argument” effectively dehumanized women, making them politically ineligible. “We are told of the peculiarities of our nature, our conditions, our duties, and our character; that is, in other words, our physical and mental inferiority.” Challenging the “great Nature argument,” she insisted on knowing “what is meant by Nature. Is it ancient usage or established convention, the law or custom of our country, training, social position, the speaker’s own particular fancy or prejudice, or what?”⁵ She refused to accept the notion of separate spheres for men and women and the idea that women’s “nature” disqualified them from political life.

Feminists also had to focus on women as a collectivity on whose behalf they advocated. Paradoxically, they had to embrace as well as refuse their identities as “women.” It is the job of historians to “recognize … that sexual difference is constructed in a variety of practices,” as theorists Parveen Adams and Jeffrey Minson put it. Moreover, it is necessary to “determine which differences and which practices are oppressive” at any particular moment and in any given culture.⁶ The activities and ideas that historians identify as feminist at any given time, then, are contingent on the discourses – the languages, systems of meaning, and practices – that construct “women” and on the discourses of resistance that feminists produce in their challenge to society. “We deny the right of any portion of the species to decide for another portion, or any individual for another individual, what is and what is not their ‘proper sphere,’” wrote Harriet Taylor Mill. “The proper sphere for all human beings is the largest and highest which they are able to attain to.”⁷

Such contentions suggest a number of prickly but vital questions for historians of feminism and feminists. When women calling themselves feminist do not contest the legitimacy of prescriptions constructing “women,” for example, when they do not challenge the dominant discourses about sexuality but embrace constructions of masculinity and femininity that delimit their identities and roles, or when they make demands for women that may be quite radical but justify them by traditional separate-sphere arguments, can their politics continue to be regarded as feminist? Or when women explicitly eschew the label “feminist,” as many did in the interwar period in Europe no matter that they shared the fundamental tenets of what other women were promoting under the banner of feminism – what then?

This is not to make a case for a right feminism and a wrong one. Rather, I wish to underscore Denise Riley’s contentions that the category of “women,” and therefore feminism, is always contingent. Because “women” is always relative to other categories, we must be careful in analyzing movements whose critiques of the gender system necessarily depend upon the definitions of “women.” We must also pay attention to the language feminists used and incorporated in advocating their positions. In addition, it is important to analyze their strategic considerations and the impact they had on achieving their ends. Feminism should be examined in the context of the discursive practices that create the gender system from which it emerged in order to discover what meanings those practices had for contemporaries.

Transnational feminism

Although feminists identified the contradictions contained in domestic ideology and liberalism as they pertained to power relations between women and men, they were blind to the implications they had for inequalities based on class and race. In the United States and Western Europe, few feminists questioned their white, bourgeois status or considered how working-class or African American women fared under their strictures. Instead, they tended to embrace the divisions and prejudices based on class and race that informed liberalism and their societies as a whole. While feminists in Western Europe and the United States pursued an agenda that more often than not excluded working-class women or women of color, women in other parts of the world began to address some of the same questions about equality with men that had been raised in Europe and the United States. In Egypt, for example, as the state began to modernize and make claims on the public lives of its citizens in areas like education, work, and health, officials looked to women as well as men to implement many of its goals. In so doing, it ran up against the power of long-standing religious and patriarchal traditions that restricted women’s activities to the home. A number of individual feminists of the educated, urban, privileged classes challenged the strictures of religion and patriarchy, demanding a change in the practices and laws that limited women’s opportunities. In 1873, the state opened a sch...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1 Feminism, what is it?
• Part 2 Historical perspectives
• Part 3 Regional thought and activism
• Part 4 Topics in feminism I: Politics and society
• Part 5 Topics in feminism II: Thought, structures, culture
• Index