Feminist Theories

Liberal feminists believe men and women should have the same rights and freedoms with the central idea of Reformism which is the need for gradual reforms in society without the need for revolution which can be achieved through:

• Laws and policies against sex discrimination to secure equal opportunities with examples being the 1970 Equal Pay Act and 1975 Sex Discrimination Act
• Cultural change as traditional prejudices and stereotypes can be a barrier to equality. They reject the idea that biological differences can make women less competent or men less emotional

Oakley distinguishes between sex which is the biological differences between men and women and gender which is the culturally constructed differences between masculine and feminine roles as gender differences vary between cultures and time. An example of this is how it is common to see women bus drivers in the UK but in Saudi Arabia women are forbidden to drive

To achieve gender equality we must change society's socialisation patterns by having more women teachers in traditionally male subjects such as Maths and encouraging men to do more housework

Liberal feminism is an optimistic theory and part of the Enlightenment project as they believe that:

• Changes in socialisation and culture are gradually leading to more rational attitudes to gender
• Political action is bringing about progress to a fairer society

Liberal feminists challenge the Functionalist view of gender roles of the husband as the instrumental role and the wife as the expressive role as they argue that women and men are equally capable of performing roles in both spheres

• Liberal feminists are too optimistic as they ignore the possibility that there are deep seated structures causing women's oppression
• Marxist and Radical feminists argue that they fail to recongise the underlying causes of women's subordination and that is naive to believe that laws will bring about equality. Instead, far reaching and revolutionary changes are needed

Radical Feminists claim that patriarchy is universal and is in all known societies. They see patriarchy as the fundamental form of inequality with all men oppressing all women as men benefit from it such as through women's sexual services

Patriarchy exists not only in the public sphere of work and politics but also in the private sphere of the family. They see the personal as political as all relationships involve power and they are political when one person dominates another so personal relationships are political because men dominate women through them

Patriarchal power is exercised through personal relationships through violence which has an effect of controlling all women, not just those against whom it is exercised as Brownmiller notes that fear of **** is a powerful deterrent against women going out alone at night

Patriarchy constructs sexuality to satisfy men's desires as women are portrayed in many films as passive sex objects with men forcing women into a compulsory heterosexuality

Personal relationships must be transformed if women want to be free. Radical feminists propose a number of solutions to achieve this:

• Separatism - living apart from men and creating a new culture of female independence with Greer arguing for the creation of matrilocal households
• Consciousness-raising - collective action such as SlutWalk marches which come about thanks to women sharing their experiences so they see that other women face the same problems
• Political lesbianism - lesbianism is the only non oppressive form of sexuality as hetereosexual relationships are oppressive because they involve sleeping with the enemy

• Marxists says that class is the primary form of inequality with capitalism being the main cause and beneficiary of women's oppression and not men
• They assume that all women are the same and ignore class and ethnic differences between women
• They don't explain why female subordination takes different forms in different societies
• Separatism and lesbianism is not an achieveable notion as women cannot change their sexuality and force themselves to be homosexual if they are hetereosexual
• Liberal feminism argues that women's position has improved greatly over recent years and is not as severe as radical feminists suggest
• They ignore women's violence against men and violence within lesbian relationships as 1 in 10 men are victims of domestic violence

For Marxist Feminists women's subordination in capitalist societies results from their primary role as unpaid homemaker. Their subordination performs a number of functions for capitalism:

• Women are a form of cheap labour for employers as they can be paid less because it is assumed that they are partially dependent on their husbands
• Women are a reserve army of labour that can be moved in and out of the labour force and treated as marginal workers as it assumed their main role is in the home, such as women going into the factories in World War II
• Women reproduce the labour force by socialising chidren to become the next generation of workers and servicing the current generation of workers, their husbands
• Women absorb anger that would otherwise be directed at capitalism. Ansley says wives are takers of sh*t who suffer domestic violence because of the exploitation men feel at work

Economic functions are important for capitalism but Barrett argues that we must give more emphasis to women's consciousness and the role of ideology in maintaining their oppression

Women marry and live in nuclear families even though it is oppressive because of the familistic ideology which presents the nuclear family and the division of labour as natural and normal and the only place where women can be fulfilled. This ideology helps to keep women subordinated

We must also overthrow the ideology of familism as well as overthrow capitalism if we want to free the sexes from restrictive stereotypes

• It fails to explain women's subordination in non capitalist societies as it is found in communist societies too showing us patriarchy cannoy be explained solely in terms of capitalism
• They do not explain why women, and not men, perform unpaid domestic labour with Hartmann arguing that Marxism is sex blind
• They ignore how working class men can also oppress women and benefit from their unpaid labour

Dual system feminism combines both Marixist and Radical Feminism into a single theory with capitalism being an economic system and patriarchy being a sex-gender system

Hartmann sees capitalism and patriarchy as two intertwined systems that form patriarchal capitalism. They accept that patriarchy is universal but they argue that it takes a specific form in capitalist societies. To understand women's subordination we must look at the relationship between their position in the division of labour and in paid work as domestic work limits women's availability for paid work but the lack of job opportunities leads women into economic dependence on a man showing how the two systems reinforce eachother

However, Pollert argues that patriarchy is not a system but a descriptive term for a range of practices such as male violence and control of women's labour

Difference Feminists don't see women as one single group but argue that women have different experiences of patriarchy, capitalism etc because of differences in class, ethnicity, sexuality etc. They say the other Feminist theories have claimed a false universality where it is only about the experiences of white, middle class, western women such as the feminist work of Emma Watson

They argue that other Feminist theories are essentialist as they see women as the same so fail to reflect the diversity of women's experiences. An example is the preoccupation of Western feminism with sexuality being irrelevant to women in poorer countries as access to healthcare, education is more important

Poststructuralist feminists offer an alternative approach as they are concerned with discourses and power/knowledge

Discourses are ways of seeing, thinking about something such as religious, scientific, medical etc which are all competing with eachother. By enabling its users to define others in certain ways, a discourse gives power over those it defines. Knowledge is the power to define the identities of others

There is no fixed essence of what it is to be a woman. Because our identities are constructed through discourses where there is many womanhood is not a single entity. For example womanhood in Saudi Arabia is constructed through Islamic law but womanhood in the west is constructed through the media

• Wally argues that women do have important similarities, they all face patriarchy. This is because compared with men women face a greater risk of domestic violence, low pay etc
• Dividing women into lots of sub groups weakens Feminism on the whole as a movement for change
• They ignore the notion of real social structures, Feminists should instead focus on the struggle for equality of wealth and income