feminist theory definition essay

Feminist Theory in Sociology

An Overview of Key Ideas and Issues

Illustration by Hugo Lin. ThoughtCo.

• Key Concepts
• Major Sociologists
• News & Issues
• Research, Samples, and Statistics
• Recommended Reading
• Archaeology

Feminist theory is a major branch of sociology that shifts its assumptions, analytic lens, and topical focus away from the male viewpoint and experience toward that of women.

In doing so, feminist theory shines a light on social problems, trends, and issues that are otherwise overlooked or misidentified by the historically dominant male perspective within social theory .

Feminist Theory Key Takeaways

Key areas of focus within feminist theory include:

• discrimination and exclusion on the basis of sex and gender
• objectification
• structural and economic inequality
• power and oppression
• gender roles and stereotypes

Feminist Theory Overview

Many people incorrectly believe that feminist theory focuses exclusively on girls and women  and that it has an inherent goal of promoting the superiority of women over men.

In reality, feminist theory has always been about viewing the social world in a way that illuminates the forces that create and support inequality, oppression, and injustice, and in doing so, promotes the pursuit of equality and justice.

That said, since the experiences and perspectives of women and girls were historically excluded for years from social theory and social science, much feminist theory has focused on their interactions and experiences within society to ensure that half the world's population is not left out of how we see and understand social forces, relations, and problems.

While most feminist theorists throughout history have been women , people of all genders can work in this discipline today. By shifting the focus of social theory away from the perspectives and experiences of men, feminist theorists have created social theories that are more inclusive and creative than those that assume the social actor is always a man.

Part of what makes feminist theory creative and inclusive is that it often considers how systems of power and oppression interact , which is to say it does not just focus on gendered power and oppression, but on how this might intersect with systemic racism , a hierarchical class system, sexuality , nationality , and (dis)ability, among other things.

Gender Differences

Some feminist theory provides an analytic framework for understanding how women's location and experience of social situations differ from men's.

For example, cultural feminists look at the different values associated with womanhood and femininity as a reason why men and women experience the social world differently. Other feminist theorists believe the roles assigned to women and men within institutions better explain gender differences, including the sexual division of labor in the household .

Existential and phenomenological feminists focus on how women have been marginalized and defined as  “other”  in patriarchal societies . Some feminist theorists focus specifically on how masculinity is developed through socialization, and how its development interacts with the process of developing femininity in girls.

Gender Inequality

Feminist theories that focus on gender inequality recognize that women's location in and experience of social situations is not only different but also unequal to men's.

Liberal feminists argue that women have the same capacity as men for moral reasoning and agency, but that patriarchy , particularly the sexist division of labor, has historically denied women the opportunity to express and practice this reasoning.

These dynamics serve to shove women into the  private sphere  of the household and exclude them from full participation in public life. Liberal feminists point out that gender inequality exists for women in a heterosexual marriage and that women do not benefit from being married.

Indeed, these feminist theorists claim that married women have higher levels of stress than unmarried women and married men. Therefore, the sexual division of labor in both the public and private spheres needs to be altered for women to achieve marriage equality.

Gender Oppression

Theories of gender oppression go further than theories of gender difference and gender inequality by arguing that not only are women different from or unequal to men, but that they are actively oppressed, subordinated, and even abused by men .

Power is the key variable in the two main theories of gender oppression: psychoanalytic feminism and  radical feminism .

Psychoanalytic feminists attempt to explain power relations between men and women by reformulating Sigmund Freud 's theories of human emotions, childhood development, and the workings of the subconscious and unconscious. They believe that conscious calculation cannot fully explain the production and reproduction of patriarchy.

Radical feminists argue that being a woman is a positive thing in and of itself, but this is not acknowledged in  patriarchal societies  where women are oppressed. They identify physical violence as being at the base of patriarchy and think patriarchy can be defeated if women recognize their value and strength, establish a sisterhood of trust with other women, confront oppression critically, and form female-based separatist networks in the private and public spheres.

Structural Oppression

Structural oppression theories posit that women's oppression and inequality are a result of capitalism , patriarchy, and racism .

Socialist feminists agree with  Karl Marx  and Friedrich Engels that the working class is exploited as a consequence of capitalism and seek to extend this exploitation not just to class but also to gender.

Intersectionality theorists seek to explain oppression and inequality across several variables, including class, gender, race, ethnicity, and age. They offer the important insight that not all women experience oppression in the same way and that the same forces that work to oppress women and girls also oppress people of color and other marginalized groups.

One way structural oppression of women, specifically the economic kind, manifests in society is in the gender wage gap , which shows that men routinely earn more for the same work than women.

An intersectional view of this situation shows that women (and men) of color are even further penalized relative to the earnings of white men.

This strain of feminist theory in the late 20th century was extended to account for the globalization of capitalism and how its methods of production and accumulating wealth center on the exploitation of women workers.

Kachel, Sven, et al. "Traditional Masculinity and Femininity: Validation of a New Scale Assessing Gender Roles." Frontiers in Psychology , vol. 7, 5 July 2016, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00956

Zosuls, Kristina M., et al. "Gender Development Research in  Sex Roles : Historical Trends and Future Directions." Sex Roles , vol. 64, no. 11-12, June 2011, pp. 826-842., doi:10.1007/s11199-010-9902-3

Norlock, Kathryn. "Feminist Ethics." Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy . 27 May 2019.

Liu, Huijun, et al. "Gender in Marriage and Life Satisfaction Under Gender Imbalance in China: The Role of Intergenerational Support and SES." Social Indicators Research , vol. 114, no. 3, Dec. 2013, pp. 915-933., doi:10.1007/s11205-012-0180-z

"Gender and Stress." American Psychological Association .

Stamarski, Cailin S., and Leanne S. Son Hing. "Gender Inequalities in the Workplace: The Effects of Organizational Structures, Processes, Practices, and Decision Makers’ Sexism." Frontiers in Psychology , 16 Sep. 2015, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01400

Barone-Chapman, Maryann . " Gender Legacies of Jung and Freud as Epistemology in Emergent Feminist Research on Late Motherhood." Behavioral Sciences , vol. 4, no. 1, 8 Jan. 2014, pp. 14-30., doi:10.3390/bs4010014

Srivastava, Kalpana, et al. "Misogyny, Feminism, and Sexual Harassment." Industrial Psychiatry Journal , vol. 26, no. 2, July-Dec. 2017, pp. 111-113., doi:10.4103/ipj.ipj_32_18

Armstrong, Elisabeth. "Marxist and Socialist Feminism." Study of Women and Gender: Faculty Publications . Smith College, 2020.

Pittman, Chavella T. "Race and Gender Oppression in the Classroom: The Experiences of Women Faculty of Color with White Male Students." Teaching Sociology , vol. 38, no. 3, 20 July 2010, pp. 183-196., doi:10.1177/0092055X10370120

Blau, Francine D., and Lawrence M. Kahn. "The Gender Wage Gap: Extent, Trends, and Explanations." Journal of Economic Literature , vol. 55, no. 3, 2017, pp. 789-865., doi:10.1257/jel.20160995

• What Is Symbolic Interactionism?
• Sociological Definition of Popular Culture
• Definition of Intersectionality
• Definition of Self-Fulfilling Prophecy in Sociology
• Understanding Functionalist Theory
• What Is Convergence Theory?
• The Major Theoretical Perspectives of Sociology
• Definition of Base and Superstructure
• Understanding Critical Theory
• Understanding Conflict Theory
• Assessing a Situation, in Terms of Sociology
• What Is the Resource Mobilization Theory?
• Kinship in Sociology: Definition in the Study of Sociology
• Overview of Sociobiology Theory
• How Expectation States Theory Explains Social Inequality
• How Our Aligning Behavior Shapes Everyday Life

Feminist Theory in Sociology: Deinition, Types & Principles

Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

Learn about our Editorial Process

Saul McLeod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul McLeod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

On This Page:

Feminist theory is a major branch of sociology. It is a set of structural conflict approaches which views society as a conflict between men and women. There is the belief that women are oppressed and/or disadvantaged by various social institutions.

Feminist theory aims to highlight the social problems and issues that are experienced by women. Some of the key areas of focus include discrimination on the basis of sex and gender, objectification, economic inequality, power, gender role, and stereotypes.

Feminists share a common goal in support of equality for men and women. Although all feminists strive for gender equality, there are various ways to approach this theory.

Some of the general features of feminism include:

An awareness that there are inequalities between men and women based on power and status.

These inequalities can create conflict between men and women.

Gender roles and inequalities are usually socially constructed.

An awareness of the importance of patriarchy: a system of social structures and practices in which men dominate, oppress, and exploit women.

Goals of Feminism

The perspectives and experiences of women and girls have historically been excluded from social theory and social science.

Thus, feminist theory aims to focus on the interactions and issues women face in society and culture, so half the population is not left out.

Feminism in general means the belief in the social, economic, and political equality of the sexes.

The different branches of feminism may disagree on several things and have varying values. Despite this, there are usually basic principles that all feminists support:

1. Increasing gender equality

Feminist theories recognize that women’s experiences are not only different from men’s but are unequal.

Feminists will oppose laws and cultural norms that mean women earn a lower income and have less educational and career opportunities than men.

2. Ending gender oppression

Gender oppression goes further than gender inequality. Oppression means that not only are women different from or unequal to men, but they are actively subordinated, exploited, and even abused by men.

2. Ending structural oppression

Feminist theories posit that gender inequality and oppression are the result of capitalism and patriarchy in which men dominate.

4. Expanding human choice

Feminists believe that both men and women should have the freedom to express themselves and develop their interests, even if this goes against cultural norms.

5. Ending sexual violence

Feminists recognize that many women suffer sexual violence and that actions should be taken to address this.

6. Promoting sexual freedom

Having sexual freedom means that women have control over their own sexuality and reproduction.

This can include ending the stigma of being promiscuous and ensuring that everyone has access to safe abortions.

The Waves of Feminism

The history of modern feminism can be divided into four parts which are termed ‘ waves .’ Each wave marks a specific cultural period in which specific feminist issues are brought to light.

First wave feminism

The first wave of feminism is believed to have started with the ‘Women’s Suffrage Movement’ in New York in 1848 under the leadership of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Those involved in this feminist movement were known as suffragettes. The main aim of this movement was to allow women to vote. During this time, members of the suffrage movement engaged in social campaigns that expressed dissatisfaction with women’s limited rights to work, education, property, and social agency, among others.

Emmeline Pankhurst was considered the leader of the suffragettes in Britain and was regarded as one of the most important figures in the movement. She founded the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), a group known for employing militant tactics in their struggle for equality.

Despite the first wave of feminism being mostly active in the United States and Western Europe, it led to international law changes regarding the right for women to vote.

It is worth noting that even after this first wave, in some countries, mostly white women from privileged backgrounds were permitted to vote, with black and minority ethnic individuals being granted this right later on.

Second wave feminism

Second-wave feminism started somewhere in the 1960s after the chaos of the Second World War.

French feminist author Simone de Beauvoir published a book in 1949 entitled ‘The Second Sex’ which outlined the definitions of womanhood and how women have historically been treated as second to men.

She determined that ‘one is not born but becomes a woman’. This book is thought to have been foundational for setting the tone for the next wave of women’s rights activism.

Feminism during this period was focused on the social roles in women’s work and family environment. It broadened the debate to include a wider range of issues such as sexuality, family, reproductive rights, legal inequalities, and divorce law.

From this wave, the movement toward women’s rights included the signing of the Equal Pay Act of 1963, which stipulated that women could no longer be paid less than men for comparable work.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 included a section which prevents employers from discriminating against employees on the basis of sex, race, religion, or national origin. Likewise, the famous Roe v. Wade decision protected a woman’s right to have an abortion from 1973.

Third wave feminism

The third wave of feminism is harder to pinpoint but it was thought to have taken off in the 1990s. Early activism in this wave involved fighting against workplace sexual harassment and working to increase the number of women in positions of power.

The work of Kimberlé Crenshaw in the 1980s is thought to have been the root. She coined the term ‘intersectionality’ to describe the ways in which different forms of oppression intersect, such as how a black woman is oppressed in two ways: for being a woman and for being black.

Since there was not a clear goal with third-wave feminism as there was with previous waves, there is no single piece of legislation or major social change that belongs to the wave.

Fourth wave feminism

Many believe that there is now a fourth wave of feminism, which began around 2012.

It is likely that the wave sparked after allegations of sexual abuse and harassment, specifically of celebrities, which gave birth to campaigns such as Everyday Sexism Project by Laura Bates and the #MeToo movement.

With the rise of the internet and social platforms, feminist issues such as discrimination, harassment, body shaming, and misogyny can be widely discussed with the emergence of new feminists.

Fourth-wave feminism is digitally driven and has become more inclusive to include those of any sexual orientation, ethnicity, and trans individuals.

Types of Feminism

Liberal feminism.

Liberal feminism is rooted in classic liberal thought and these feminists believe that equality should be brought about through education and policy changes. They see gender inequalities as rooted in the attitudes of social and cultural institutions, so they aim to change the system from within.

Liberal feminists argue that women have the same capacity for moral reasoning and agency as men, but that the patriarchy has denied them the opportunity to practice this. Due to the patriarchy, these feminists believe that women have been pushed to remain in the privacy of their household and thus have been excluded from participating in public life.

Liberal feminists focus mainly on protecting equal opportunities for women through legislation. The Equal Rights Amendment

in 1972 was impactful for liberal feminists which enforced equality on account of sex.

Marxist feminism

Marxist feminism evolved from the ideas of Karl Marx, who claimed capitalism was to blame for promoting patriarchy, meaning that power is held in the hands of a small number of men.

Marxist feminists believe that capitalism is the cause of women’s oppression and that this oppression in turn, helps to reinforce capitalism. These feminists believe that women are exploited for their unpaid labor (maintaining the household and childcare) and that capitalism reinforces that women are a reserve for the work force and they must create the next generation of workers.

According to Marxist feminists, the system and traditional family can only be replaced by a socialist revolution that creates a government to meet the needs of the family.

Radical feminism

Radical feminists posit that power is key to gender oppression. They argue that being a woman is a positive thing but that this is not acknowledged in patriarchal societies.

The main belief of radical feminists is that equality can only be achieved through gender separation and political lesbianism. They think the patriarchy can be defeated if women recognize their own value and strength, establish trust with other women, and form female-based separatist networks in the private and public spheres.

Intersectional feminism

Intersectional feminism believes that other feminist theories create an incorrect acceptance of women’s oppression based on the experiences of mostly Western, middle-class, white women.

For instance, while they may acknowledge that the work of the suffragette movement was influential, the voting rights of the working-class or minority ethnic groups were forgotten at this time.

Intersectionality considers that gender, race, sexual orientation, gender identity, and others, are not separate, but are interwoven and can bring about different levels of oppression.

This type of feminism offers insight that not all women experience oppression in the same way. For instance, the wage gap shows that women of color and men of color are penalized relative to the earnings of white men.

Feminist theory is important since it helps to address and better understand unequal and oppressive gender relations. It promotes the goal of equality and justice while providing more opportunities for women.

True feminism benefits men too and is not only applicable to women. It allows men to be who they want to be, without being tied down to their own gender roles and stereotypes.

Through feminism, men are encouraged to be free to express themselves in a way which may be considered ‘typically feminine’ such as crying when they are upset.

In this way, men’s mental health can benefit from feminism since the shame associated with talking about their emotions can be lifted without feeling the expectation to ‘man up’ and keep their feeling buried.

With the development of intersectionality, feminism does not just focus on gendered power and oppression, but on how this might intersect with race, sexuality, social class, disability, religion, and others.

Without feminism, women would have significantly less rights. More women have the right to vote, work, have equal pay, access to health care, reproductive rights, and protection from violence. While every country has its own laws and legislature, there would have been less progress in changing these without the feminist movement.

Feminist theory is also self-critical in that it recognizes that it may not have been applicable to everyone in the past. It is understood that it was not inclusive and so evolved and may still go on to evolve over time. Feminism is not a static movement, but fluid in the way it can change and adjust to suit modern times.

Some critics suggest that a main weakness of feminist theory is that it is from a woman-centered viewpoint. While the theories also mention issues which are not strictly related to women, it is argued that men and women view the world differently.

Some may call feminist theory redundant in modern day since women have the opportunity to work now, so the nature of family life has inevitably changed in response.

However, a counterpoint to this is that many women in certain cultures are still not given the right to work. Likewise, having access to work does not eradicate the other feminist issues that are still prevalent.

Some feminists may go too far into a stage where they are man-hating which causes more harm than good. It can make men feel unwelcome to feminism if they are being blamed for patriarchal oppression and inequalities that they are not directly responsible for.

Other women may not want to identify as a feminist either if they have the impression that feminists are man-haters but they themselves like men.

There are criticisms even between feminists, with some having values that can lead to others having a negative view of feminists as a whole.

For instance, radical feminists often receive criticism for ignoring race, social class, sexual orientation, and the presence of more than two genders. Thus, there are aspects of feminism which are not inclusive.

What is the main goal of feminism?

The goal of feminism is to reach social, political, and economic equality of the sexes. Feminists aim to challenge the systemic inequalities women face on a daily basis, change laws and legislature which oppress women, put an end to sexism and exploitation of women, and raise awareness of women’s issues.

However, the different types of feminists may have distinct goals within their movement and between each other.

How was feminist theory founded?

Although many early writings could be characterized as feminism or embodying the experiences of women, the history of Western feminist theory usually begins with the works of Mary Wollstonecraft.

Wollstonecraft was one of the first feminist writers, responsible for her publications such as ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’, published in 1792.

How does feminist theory relate to education?

Feminist theory helps us understand gender differences in education, gender socialization, and how the education system may be easier for boys to navigate than girls.

Many feminists believe education is an agent of secondary socialization that helps enforce patriarchy.

Feminist theory aims to promote educational opportunities for girls. It assures that they should not limit their educational aspirations because they may go against what is traditionally expected of them.

What are feminist sociologists view on family roles and relationships?

Some feminists view the function of the  nuclear family  as a place where patriarchal values are learned by individuals, which in turn add to the patriarchal society.

Young girls may be socialized to believe that inequality and oppression are a normal part of being a woman. Boys are socialized to believe they are superior and have authority over women.

Feminists often believe that the nuclear family teaches children gender roles which translates to gender roles in wider society.

For instance, girls may learn to accept that being a housewife is the only possible or acceptable role for women. Some feminists also believe that the  division of labor  is unequal in nuclear families, with women and girls accepting subservient roles in the household.

How does feminist theory relate to crime?

Feminists recognize that there is a disproportionate amount of violence and crime against women and that the reason may be due to the inequalities and oppression that women face.

Suppose the patriarchy posits that men are more powerful. In that case, this can lead them to abuse this power over women, resulting in harassment, physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, and even murder of women.

Feminists point out that there is a lot of systemic sexism in the justice system which needs to be tackled. Female victims of sexual abuse from men may often feel as if they are the ones put on trial and even experience blame for what happened to them.

Thus, many women do not report their sexual abuse for fear of not being believed or taken seriously in a system that favors men.

Therefore, many feminists would aim to fix the system so that fewer men commit these crimes and that there is proper justice for women who experience violence from men.

How far would sociologists agree that feminism has changed marriage?

Feminists often believe that the meaning of marriage is deeply rooted in  patriarchy  and gender inequality. In modern times, it would, therefore, not make sense for a woman to get married unless she has a partner willing to overturn a lot of the traditional and sexist values of marriage.

Most feminists believe that women should have the choice over whether they want to get married or even be in a relationship. Marriage for feminists can be; however, they want it to be, including their vows and values that make them and their partners equal.

A study found that having a feminist partner was linked to healthier heterosexual relationships for women (Rudman & Phelan, 2007).

They also found that men with feminist partners reported more stable relationships and greater sexual satisfaction, suggesting that feminism may predict happier relationships.

There are  differences between radical and liberal feminism  regarding ideas about the private sphere. Liberal feminists are generally not against heterosexual marriage and having children, as long as this is what the woman wants.

If the woman is treated as an equal by their partner and chooses how to raise their family, this is a feminist choice.

Even in modern marriage, radical feminists argue that women married to men are under patriarchal rule and are still made to complete much of the unpaid labor in the household compared to their husbands.

What is meant by the term malestream?

Feminists use the term malestream to highlight the need for more inclusive research methodologies and theoretical perspectives that better represent and address the experiences and issues of women and other marginalized groups.

It’s a call to move beyond the male-centric biases in various academic disciplines, including sociology.

Armstrong, E. (2020). Marxist and Socialist Feminisms.  Companion to Feminist Studies , 35-52.

Bates, L. (2016).  Everyday sexism: The project that inspired a worldwide movement . Macmillan.

Crenshaw, K. W. (2006). Intersectionality, identity politics and violence against women of color.  Kvinder, kön & forskning , (2-3).

Malinowska, A. (2020). Waves of Feminism.  The International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication,  1, 1-7.

Oxley, J. C. (2011). Liberal feminism.  Just the Arguments,  100, 258262.

Rudman, L. A., & Phelan, J. E. (2007). The interpersonal power of feminism: Is feminism good for romantic relationships?.  Sex Roles, 57 (11), 787-799.

Srivastava, K., Chaudhury, S., Bhat, P. S., & Sahu, S. (2017). Misogyny, feminism, and sexual harassment.  Industrial psychiatry journal, 26( 2), 111.

Thompson, D. (2001).  Radical feminism today . Sage.

• Subscriber Services
• For Authors
• Publications
• Archaeology
• Art & Architecture
• Bilingual dictionaries
• Classical studies
• Encyclopedias
• English Dictionaries and Thesauri
• Language reference
• Linguistics
• Media studies
• Medicine and health
• Names studies
• Performing arts
• Science and technology
• Social sciences
• Society and culture
• Overview Pages
• Subject Reference
• English Dictionaries
• Bilingual Dictionaries

Recently viewed (0)

• Save Search
• Share This Facebook LinkedIn Twitter

Related Content

Related overviews.

Michel Foucault (1926—1984) French philosopher

psychoanalysis

See all related overviews in Oxford Reference »

More Like This

Show all results sharing these subjects:

• Literary theory and cultural studies

feminist Theory

Quick reference.

The extension of feminism (understood as a practical social movement concerned to address the inequality of the sexes) into theoretical discourse. Undoubtedly one of the most important and influential intellectual currents of the 20th century (every bit the equal of Marxism and psychoanalysis), Feminist theory encompasses most disciplines from art and architecture through to science and technology, but it is predominantly concentrated in the social sciences and the humanities. As diverse as it is, and the varieties of feminist theory are almost without limit, at its core it has four principal concerns, which are to: (i) elucidate the origins and causes of gender inequality; (ii) explain the operation and persistence of this state of affairs; (iii) delineate effective strategies to either bring about full equality between the sexes or at least ameliorate the effects of ongoing inequality; and (iv) imagine a world in which sexual inequality no longer exists. Of the four, feminist theory has tended to prioritize the first two, leaving the strategic questions to women working in the field, so to speak, in the various advocacy groups like the National Organization for Women founded in the US in 1966; while the task of imagining the future has been parcelled out to creative writers, particularly those working in SF like Ursula LeGuin and Marge Piercy. The decision to prioritize one or other of these four problematics is what gives shape to the specific feminisms.

The causes of sexual inequality are almost impossible to trace since for all of recorded history it was already an established fact. Therefore it is ultimately a matter for pure speculation. The most widely accepted hypothesis is that in prehistoric times biology placed women in a subordinate position to men because pregnancy and childrearing render them vulnerable and in need of assistance both to obtain food and fend off predators. While there is probably some truth to this strand of the biological determinism hypothesis from an anthropological point of view, the practical need to protect women does not explain the widespread denigration of women and their socialization as lesser beings. By the same token, as societies became more prosperous and their technology more sophisticated women's vulnerability diminished, but if anything the positioning of them assubordinate seemed to harden. For obvious reasons, then, the issue that has exercised feminist theorists the most is the one of persistence: why does sexism continue after the principal justification for it has long since ceased to obtain?

There are three basic answers to this question: first, biology continues to be a determining factor; second, that it is in men's interest to maintain the subordination of women; and third, women have been complicit with their own oppression. Surprisingly, perhaps, radical feminists like Shulamith Firestone support the first answer, although she then uses it as a stage to call for the use of biotechnology to put an end to women's reproductive role. Not surprisingly, the second answer has very widespread support, and shows the influence of Marxism. In effect, it equates feminist struggle with class struggle. The third answer, which is perhaps the most painful inasmuch as it is a form of self-criticism, has given rise to the most debate, and perhaps for that reason has contributed the most in the way of ideas for achieving the strategic goal of equality between the sexes. Both First Wave and Second Wave feminists agree that femininity—understood as a male-imposed ideal of how women should look and act—is a major limiting factor for feminist politics. So from Mary Wollstonecraft to Germaine Greer and Kate Millett feminist writers have advocated to a greater or lesser degree the abandoning of the practice of self-denial most versions of femininity demand. Interestingly, some Third Wave feminists have argued against this, calling instead for a celebration of femininity.

From:   feminist theory   in  A Dictionary of Critical Theory »

Subjects: Literature — Literary theory and cultural studies

Related content in Oxford Reference

Reference entries, feminist theory, feminist theory.

View all related items in Oxford Reference »

Search for: 'feminist Theory' in Oxford Reference »

• Oxford University Press

PRINTED FROM OXFORD REFERENCE (www.oxfordreference.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2023. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single entry from a reference work in OR for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice ).

date: 04 September 2024

• Cookie Policy
• Privacy Policy
• Legal Notice
• Accessibility
• [185.147.128.134]
• 185.147.128.134

Character limit 500 /500

The Theoretical Framework of Feminism

• First Online: 02 April 2020

Cite this chapter

• Aleksandra Gasztold 2  

1945 Accesses

This chapter examines the general principles of feminist theory, which are presented as part of the post-positivist approach. It exposes the essence of feminism, its conceptual grid, gender variable, and the waves of development of feminist thinking and theoretical currents (factions). Moreover, author refers to the trends in feminist epistemology (feminist empiricism, feminist position, and feminist postmodernism). Focusing on theoretical feminist frameworks, this chapter also draws attention to the evolution of women’s studies and gender studies. The author demonstrates the value of the analytical feminist approach in political science, especially in consideration of the ease with which it integrates the gender perspective in the study of specific phenomena and its critical approach to the institution of the state. The chapter also includes brief comments on the specifics of feminist research within the author’ academic milieu in Poland.

Women are to be found on the periphery—on the garbage heap of the symbolic order, among the refuse of the patriarchal narrative. Iwasiów ( 2008 , p. 90)

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Subscribe and save.

• Get 10 units per month
• Download Article/Chapter or eBook
• 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
• Cancel anytime
• Available as PDF
• Read on any device
• Instant download
• Own it forever
• Available as EPUB and PDF
• Compact, lightweight edition
• Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
• Free shipping worldwide - see info
• Durable hardcover edition

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Term introduced by Laura Mulvey ( 1975 ).

This notion was introduced by Marsha Weinman Lear in The New York Magazine of March 10, 1968.

This term was adopted mainly within the medical sciences. See Giarratano ( 2016 ).

“Nurty feminizmu” In. Rudaś-Grodzka et al. ( 2014 , p. 251).

For example, the all-Polish conferences Płeć, ciało i tożsamość w dyskursach wyborczych , University of Wrocław/University of Warsaw, October 9–10, 2019; Ewolucja postaw kobiecych w przestrzeni publicznej w XX i XXI wieku , Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, March 30, 2019; Kobiety i Bezpieczeństwo , University of Warsaw, March 8, 2018. Kobiety w polskich służbach Mundurowych , April 20, 2017, University of Białystok; Feminizm , May 14–15, 2014, Maria Skłodowska Curie University in Lublin; Perspektywa gender w badaniach nad bezpieczeństwem narodowym i międzynarodowym – bezpieczeństwo bez kobiet? March 7, 2012, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań.

Within the framework of International Political Scientist Association (IPSA) a women section was created at first as a research group in 1976 was created and then in 1979 granted as a research committee Gender Politics and Policy. The section Women and Political Research was founded in 1986 in American Political Science Association (APSA).

The function of PTNP chairperson was for many years filled by women—Prof. Grażyna Ulicka (1998–2001), and Prof Teresa Sasińska-Klas (2004–2010). Presently (term of office 2016–2019), Dr. Ewelina Waśko-Owsiejczuk is the chairwoman of the PTNP Białystok branch; Dr. Alina Kaszkur of the Bydgoszcz branch; Prof. Agnieszka Kasińska-Metryka of the Kielce branch; Dr. hab. Krystyna Leszczyńska of the Lublin branch; Prof. Alicja Stępień-Kuczyńska of the Łódź branch; Prof. Teresa Astramowicz-Leyk of the Olsztyn branch; Prof. Agnieszka Pawłowska of the Rzeszów branch; Dr. Anna Chabasińska of the Gorzów Wielkopolski branch and Prof. Renata Podgórzańska of the Szczecin branch. Source: Polish Political Science Association. http://ptnp.org.pl . Accesed on 1 September 2019.

Agaciński, S. (2000). Polityka płci (M. Falski, Trans.). Warsaw: Wydawnictwo KR.

Google Scholar  

Allison, G. T. (1969). Conceptual models and the Cuban missile crisis. American Political Science Review, 63 (3), 689–718.

Anderson, E. (2005). Feminist epistemology: An interpretation and a defence. In A. E. Cudd & R. O. Andreasen (Eds.), Feminist theory: A philosophical anthology (pp. 188–209). Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Andruszkiewicz, I. (2017). Polityka równości: polskie realia . Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe WNPiD UAM.

Ashley, R. K. (1998). Untying the sovereign state: A double reading of the anarchy problematique. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 17 (2), 227–262.

Auclert, H. (1882). La Citoyenne, 54, 19-25 février.

Barry, K. (1996). Deconstructing deconstruction (or whatever happened to feminist studies). In D. Bell & R. Klein (Eds.), Radically speaking: Feminism reclaimed (pp. 188–192). Melbourne: Spinifex Press.

Basow, S. A. (1992). Gender stereotypes and roles . Pacific Grove: Books/Cole.

Bator, J. (2001). Feminizm, postmodernizm, psychoanaliza. Filozoficzne dylematy feministek drugiej fali . Gdańsk: Słowo/obraz terytoria.

Bobako, M. (2010). Demokracja wobec róźnicy. Multikulturalizm i feminizm w perspektywie polityki uznania . Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie.

Bógdał-Brzezińska, A. (2015). Postmodernizm. In R. Zięba, S. Bieleń, & J. Zając (Eds.), Teorie i podejścia badawcze w nauce o stosunkach międzynarodowych (pp. 217–239). Warsaw: Wydział Dziennikarstwa i Nauk Politycznych UW.

Butler, J. (1999). Bodies that matter. In J. Price & M. Shildrick (Eds.), Feminist theory and the body (pp. 235–245). New York: Routledge.

Butler, J. (2005). Subjects of sex/gender/desire. In A. E. Cudd & R. O. Andreasen (Eds.), Feminist theory: A philosophical anthology (pp. 145–153). Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Chołuj, B. (2001). Women’s studies a gender studies. In A. Żylińska & A. Skrendo (Eds. and Introduction). Po przełomie: przełom wieku w kulturze – kultura po przełomie (pp. 51–61). Szczecin: Wydawnictwo.

Corrin, C. (1999). Feminist perspectives on politics . London: Longman.

Cudd, A. E., & Andreasen, R. O. (2005). Introduction. Part IV: Knowledge gendered? In A. E. Cudd & R. O. Andreasen (Eds.), Feminist theory: A philosophical anthology (pp. 173–175). Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Czaputowicz, J. (2007). Teorie stosunków międzynarodowych. Krytyka i systematyzacja . Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN.

de Beauvoir, S. (1949). Le deuxième sexe, 1. Les faits and les mythes; 2. L’expérience vécue . Paris: Gallimard.

de Gouges, O. (1995). Mensch und Bürgerin “Die Rechte der Frau” . Introduction and commentarty by H. Schröder. Aachen: Ein-fach Verl.

Der Derian, J. (1987). On diplomacy: A genealogy of western estrangement . Oxford: Blackwell.

Derrida, J. (1972). Positions . Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit.

DuBois, B. (1983). Passionate scholarship: Notes on values, knowing and method in feminist social science. In G. Bowles & R. Duelli-Klein (Eds.), Theories of women’s studies (pp. 105–116). London: Routledge.

Elsthain, J. (1987). Women and war . Brighton: Harvester Press.

Enloe, C. (2000). B ananas, beaches and bases: Making feminist sense of international politics . Updated edition. Berkley: University of California Press.

Enloe, C. (2007). Feminism. In M. Griffiths (Ed.), International relations theory for the twenty first century: An introduction (pp. 99–110). New York: Routledge.

Ferguson, K. E. (1993). The man question: Visions of subjectivity in feminist theory . Berkley: University of California Press.

Flax, J. (1987, Summer). Postmodernism and gender relations in feminist theory. Signs, 21 (4), 621–643.

Foucault, M. (1969). L’archéologie du savoir . Paris: Gallimard.

Frankel, J. (1963). The making of foreign policy: An analysis of decision-making . London: Oxford University Press.

Friedan, B. (1963). The feminine mystique . New York: W.W. Norton.

Gable, S. (Ed.). (1999). The Routledge companion to feminism and postfeminism . London: Routledge.

Gardner, C. V. (2006). Historical dictionary of feminist philosophy . Lanham: The Scarecrow Press.

Gasztold, A. (2017). Teorie feministyczne w naukach o polityce. Kwartalnik Naukowy OAP UW “e-Politikon”, 22 , 138–165.

Gasztold, A. (2018). Krajowy Plan Działania na rzecz realizacji Agendy ONZ na rzecz kobiet, pokoju i bezpieczeństwa na lata 2018-2021 . Biuletyn RCB, 25. Retrieved September 1, 2019, from https://rcb.gov.pl/krajowy-plan-dzialania-na-rzecz-realizacji-agendy-onz-dotyczacej-kobiet-pokoju-i-bezpieczenstwa-na-lata-2018-2021/

Gasztold, A. (Ed.). (2019). Kwartalnik Naukowy OAP UW “e-Politikon”: Kobiety, Pokój, Bezpieczeństwo, 30 . Retrieved September 7, 2019, from http://oapuw.pl/e-politikon-nr-30-2019/

Giarratano, G. (2016). Woman-centeredness. In The Wiley Blackwell encyclopedia of gender and sexuality studies . Oxford: Wiley. Online. Retrieved August 8, 2018, from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118663219.wbegss433

Grosz, E. A. (1988). The in(ter)vention of feminist knowledges. In B. Caine, E. A. Grosz, & M. de Lepervanche (Eds.), Crossing boundaries: Feminism and the critique of knowledges (pp. 92–106). Sydney: Allen and Unwin.

Grosz, E. (1994). Volatile bodies: Toward the corporeal feminism . Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Habermas, J. (1985). Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: zwölf Vorlesungen . Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp.

Harding, S. (1986). The science questions in feminism . Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Harding, S. (1987). Introduction: Is there a feminist method? In S. Harding (Ed.), Feminism & methodology: Social science issues (pp. 1–14). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Harding, S. (1991). Whose science? Whose knowledge? Thinking from women’s lives . Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Harding, S. (2005). Rethinking standpoint epistemology: What is ‘strong objectivity’? In A. E. Cudd & R. O. Andreasen (Eds.), Feminist theory: A philosophical anthology (pp. 218–236). Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Hartsock, N. (1979). Feminist theory and the development of revolutionary strategy. In Z. R. Eisenstein (Ed.), Capitalist patriarchy and the case for socialist feminism (pp. 56–77). New York: Monthly Press Review.

Hartsock, N. C. M. (2003). The feminist standpoint: Developing the ground for a specifically feminist historical materialism. In S. Harding & M. B. Hintikka (Eds.), Discovering reality feminist perspectives on epistemology, metaphysics, methodology, and philosophy of science (pp. 283–310). New York: Kluwer Academic.

Humm, M. (1989). The dictionary of feminist theory . Hemel Hempstead: Simon & Schuster.

Hyży, E. (2003). Kobieta, ciało, tożsamość: teorie podmiotu w filozofii feministycznej końca XX wieku . Cracow: Universitas.

Irigaray, L. (1974). Speculum de l’autre femme . Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit.

Irigaray, L. (2003). Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un . Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit.

Iwasiów, I. (2008). Gender dla średnio zaawansowanych. Wykłady szczecińskie (2nd ed.). Warsaw: Wydawnictwo W.A.B.

Jaggar, A. M., & Bordo, S. R. (Eds.). (1989). Gender/body/knowledge: Feminist reconstruction of being and knowing . New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Jagodzińska, A. (2010). Czy historia ma płeć? Gender, źródła i akulturacja Żydów w Królestwie Polskim. In J. Lisek (Ed.), Nieme dusze? Kobiety w kulturze jidysz (pp. 21–42). Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego.

Jagose, A. (2001). Queer theory: An introduction . New York: New York University Press.

Janis, I. (1989). Crucial decisions: Leadership in policymaking and crisis management . New York: The Free Press.

Klejdysz, N. (2019). Przebudzenie bogini. Religijne źródła feminizmu w tradycji judeochrześcijańskiej . Poznań: Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu.

Kołodziejczak, M. (2011). Politologia wobec feminizmu, feminizm wobec politologii. Przegląd Politologiczny, 2 , 7–18.

Kratochwil, F. (1989). Rules, norms and decisions: On the conditions of practical and legal reasoning in international relations and domestic affairs . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lendzion, K., & Kotowska-Wójcik, O. (2015). Waleczny duch kobiet. Społeczno-ekonomiczne aspekty ról kobiecych . Warsaw: UKSW.

Lentner, H. H. (1974). Foreign policy analysis: A comparative and conceptual approach . Columbus: Charles E. Merrill.

Light, M., & Halliday, F. (1994). Gender and international relations. In A. J. R. Groom & M. Light (Eds.), Contemporary international relations: A guide to theory (pp. 45–55). London: Pinter.

Linklater, A. (1992, Spring). The question of the next stage in international relations theory: A critical-theoretical point of view. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 21 (1), 77–98.

Lolber, J., & Farrell, S. A. (Eds.). (1991). The social construction of gender . Newbury Park: Sage.

Longino, H. E. (1987). Can there be a feminist science? Hypatia, 2 (3), 51–64.

Maj, D., Marczewska-Rytko, M., & Pomarański, M. (2015). Feminizm . Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Majcher, A. (2008). Szklany sufit w nauce? Płeć a trajektorie karier akademickich. Societas/Communitas, 2 (6), 183–198.

Mann, M. (2005). Incoherent empire . London: Verso.

Mazur, A. G. (2002). Theorizing feminist policy . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Merz, F. (1979). Geschlechterunterschiede und ihre Entwicklung, Ergebnisse und Theorien der Psychologie (p. 9). Gӧttingen: Verlag für Psychologie.

Mies, M. (1983). Towards a methodology for feminist research. In G. Bowles & R. Duelli-Klein (Eds.), Theories of women’s studies (pp. 117–139). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Millman, M., & Kanter, R. M. (1975). Another voice feminist perspectives on social life and social science . New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday.

Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. Screen, 16 (3), 6–18.

Musiał-Karg, M. (Ed.). (2009). Kobiety we współczesnej Europie. Rola i miejsce kobiet na rynku pracy, w polityce i w społeczeństwie . Toruń: Wydawnictwo Adam Marszałek.

NAP. (2018, October 22). National actions plan on women, peace and security 2018–2021 . Warsaw: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of National Defence, Ministry of the Interior and Administration, Government Plenipotentiary for Equal Treatment. Retrieved September 7, 2019, from https://www.msz.gov.pl/resource/305234fa-004d-454d-a2db-96751bcdb645:JCR

Nicolson, M. (1998). International relations: A concise introduction . Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Oakley, A. (1972). Sex, gender, society. Towards the new society . London: Temple Smith.

Onuf, N. (1989). World of our making: Rules and rule in social theory and international relations . Columbia: University of Southern Carolina Press.

Onuf, N. (2013). Making sense, making worlds: Constructivism in social theory and international relations . New York: Routledge.

Peeters, M. (2013). Gender – światowa norma polityczna i kulturowa. Narzędzie rozeznania, [Le Gender, une norme mondiale?: Pour un discernement] . Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Sióstr Loretanek.

Peterson, V. S. (1992, Summer). Transgressing boundaries: Theories of knowledge, gender and international relations. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 21 (2), 184–190.

Peterson, V. S., & Sisson Runyan, A. (1999). Global gender issues (2nd ed.). Boulder, CO: Westview.

Pietrzak, E. (2008). Wolność, równość, siostrzeństwo . Łódź: Wydawnictwo WSHE.

Polish Political Science Association. (n.d.). Retrieved September 1, 2019, from http://ptnp.org.pl

Praktyka Teoretyczna . (2013). 4 (10). Retrieved May 4, 2017, from http://www.praktykateoretyczna.pl/numery/2013-2/pt-4102013/

Randall, V. (2010). Feminism. In D. Marsh & G. Stoker (Eds.), Theories and methods in political science (3rd ed., pp. 114–135). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Reinharz, S. (1979). On becoming a social scientist: From survey research ad participant observation to experimental analysis . San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Reiter, A. (2013). Płeć – język – kultura . Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego.

Rosenau, P. M. (1990). Once again into the fray: International relations confronts the humanities. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 19 (1), 83–110.

Rosenau, P. M. (1992). Post-modernism and the social sciences: Insights, inroads and intrusion . Princeton: Princeton Press.

Rosicki, R. (2012). Public sphere and private sphere – masculinity and femininity. In I. Andruszkiewicz & A. Balczyńska-Kosman (Eds.), Some issues on women in political, media and socio-economic space (pp. 9–19). Poznań: WNPiD UAM.

Rosicki, R. (2013). Instrumentalisation and objectification of human sexuality. Środkowoeuropejskie Studia Polityczne, 1 , 281–292.

Rudaś-Grodzka, M., et al. (2014). Encyklopedia gender. Płeć w kulturze . Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Czarna Owca.

Siemieńska, R. (1990). Płeć, zawód, polityka: kobiety w życiu publicznym w Polsce . Warsaw: Uniwersytet Warszawski Instytut Socjologii.

Siemieńska, R. (1996). Kobiety: nowe wyzwania: starcie przeszłości z teraźniejszością . Warsaw: Instytut Socjologii Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego.

Siemieńska, R. (1999). Women and men in elite: Cross national study . Warsaw: Instytut Studiów Społecznych.

Skarżyński, R. (2014). Monizm i pluralizm w rozwoju dyscyplin nauki: politologia i pseudopolitologia. In R. Skarżyński (Ed.), Przedmiot poznania politologii. Podstawy dyscypliny nauki (pp. 9–48). Białystok: Temida 2.

Skocpol, T. (1984). States and social revolutions: A comparative analysis of France, Russia, and China . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ślęczka, K. (1999). Feminizm. Ideologie i koncepcje współczesnego feminizmu . Katowice: Wydawnictwo “Książnica”.

Smith, S. (1995). The self-images of a discipline: A genealogy of international relations theory. In K. Booth & S. Smith (Eds.), International relations theory today (pp. 1–37). Cambridge: Polity Press.

Stanley, L., & Wise, S. (1990). Method, methodology and epistemology in feminist research process. In L. Stanley (Ed.), Feminist praxis: Research, theory and epistemology in feminist sociology (pp. 20–60). London: Routledge.

Steinbruner, J. (2002). The cybernetic theory of decision: New dimensions of political analysis . Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Stoller, R. J. (1968). Sex & gender: On the development of masculinity and feminity . New York: Science House.

Sylvester, C. (1994). Feminist theory and international relations in a post-modern era . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tickner, J. A. (2001). Gendering world politics . New York: Columbia University Press.

Tilly, C. (2006). Regimes and repertoires . Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Titkow, A. (2007). Tożsamość polskich kobiet. Ciągłość – zmiana – kontekst . Warsaw: Wydawnictwo IFiS PAN.

Tormey, S., & Townshend, J. (2006). Key thinkers from critical theory to post-marxism . London: Sage.

True, J. (1996). Feminism. In S. Burchill, A. Linklater, et al. (Eds.), Theories of international relations (pp. 210–251). New York: Macmillan.

Verba, S. (1961). Assumptions of rationality and non-rationality in models of the international system. In J. N. Rosenau (Ed.), International politics and foreign policy: Reader in research and theory (pp. 217–231). New York: The Free Press of Glencoe.

Walker, R. B. J. (1988). One world, many worlds: Struggles for a just world peace . Boulder: Lynne Rienner.

Walker, R. B. J. (1993). Inside/outside: International relations as political theory . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Waśko-Owsiejczuk, E. (Ed.). (2018). Kobiety w polskich służbach mundurowych . Warsaw: Aspra JR.

Wawrowski, Ł. (2015). Politologia feministyczna: fanaberia czy konieczność. In D. Maj, M. Marczewska-Rytko, & M. Pomarański (Eds.), Feminizm (pp. 31–42). Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Weber, C. (2016). Queer international relations: Sovereignty, sexuality and the will to knowledge . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wharton, A. P. (2011). The sociology of gender: An introduction to theory and research . Oxford: Willey.

Włodkowska-Bagan, A., & Winiarczyk-Kossakowska, M. (2019). A report on women in polish political science. From diagnosis to cooperation . Warsaw: Maja Rynkowska Publishing House. Retrieved March 27, 2019, from http://www.kobietywpolitologii.pl/media/10027/a_report_on_women_in_polish_science.pdf

Wollstonecraft, M. (1891). A vindication of the rights of woman: With strictures on political and moral subjects . London: T. Fisher Unwin.

Woollacott, A. (1998). Women munitions makers, war, and citizenship. In L. A. Lorentzen & J. Turpin (Eds.), The women and war reader (pp. 126–131). New York: New York University Press.

Zięba, A. (2016). Płeć terroryzmu – wprowadzenie do zagadnienia. Kwartalnik Naukowy OAP UW “e-Politikon”, 20 , 25–49.

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Faculty of Political Science and International Studies, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland

Aleksandra Gasztold

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this chapter

Gasztold, A. (2020). The Theoretical Framework of Feminism. In: Feminist Perspectives on Terrorism. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37234-7_2

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37234-7_2

Published : 02 April 2020

Publisher Name : Springer, Cham

Print ISBN : 978-3-030-37233-0

Online ISBN : 978-3-030-37234-7

eBook Packages : Political Science and International Studies Political Science and International Studies (R0)

Share this chapter

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Publish with us

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

What is feminism?: An introduction to feminist theory

Related Papers

Canadian Woman Studies Journal: Feminist Gift Economy, A Materialist Alternative to Patriarchy and Capitalism

Review of the book Feminism: A brief introduction to the ideas, debates, and politics of the movement, by D. Cameron

Hela Mornagui

Krithika Bp

, eds., What is Feminism? (New York 1986). THIS WORK CONSISTS OF A SERIES of essays, mostly retrospective, by intellectuals and academics, all veterans of the British, American, and Canadian women's movements. The overall idea is to take stock of the prospects and problems raised by the women's movement during the past two decades. It should be stated at the outset that even to raise the question "what is feminism?" is important. "Second wave feminism," like the New Left, Black Power, and Socialist movements to which—at least in the United States — it largely succeeded has developed its own shibboleths and unquestioned assumptions that make criticism from within difficult. The editors' introduction to this volume alludes without being wholly explicit to what appear to have been special problems in its compilation. They speak, for example, of the "enormous difficulty" involved in such questions as defining feminism, of the "many ... people from a wide range of social and ethnic backgrounds [who] were invited to participate and accepted but got into difficulties," at the fact that "the book developed] into something other than what we first intended" and of their determination not to "lose sight of the celebration behind the worries" but instead to make "creative use of anxiety." As in most collections, it is hard to find a unifying theme in the essays. Only a few directly address the question that gives the anthology its title — and it is mostly these that I will discuss. Before beginning, however, I wish to note that most of the essays frequently touch upon two related, but distinguishable, themes concerning feminism. The first is the fact of enormous diversity among women which raises the question of what kind of feminist perspective and practice can unify them. The second relates to the reality of internal divisions and contradictions among feminists. The most frequently cited of these divisions is between a point of view that stresses the similarities between men and women, and one that stresses the differences between the sexes. Furthermore, in several of the essays the fact of diversity and or conflicts among women is related — though rarely clearly and directly — to another question: the relationship of the women's movement to its Eli Zaretsky, "What is Feminism?," Labourite Travail, 22 (Fall 1988), 259-266.

Alison Stone

Pre-print, pre-copy edited version of the first three chapters.

Mike Grimshaw

Contemporary Sociology

Dee Ansbergs

This paper is a reflection on my experiences as I learned the history and theories of feminism which created new opportunities for me to make meaning from my lived experiences.

International Journal of Research

Javeed Ahmad Raina

Abiha Mohsin

An introduction to the main gender theories

Gulce Ozkan

Loading Preview

Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.

RELATED PAPERS

Sheila May Navarro

Dee (Deborah) D Ansbergs

Australian Social Work

Sophie Goldingay

Feminist Research Practice

Sharlene Hesse-Biber

Peter B Bisong

Ane Molina (she/they)

Wafa Mahmood

Left Feminisms: Conversations on the personal and the political

Contention: The Multidisciplinary Journal of Social Protest

Natália da Silva Perez

Doktoratsprogramm Romanistik: Methoden und Perspektiven UZH, Lateinamerika-Zentrum ​Zürich, University of Zurich

Marisa Ruiz Trejo

Barbara Franchi , Natália da Silva Perez

Andrea Doucet

md minhajuddin

Bonnie Slade , Sheila Stewart , Kwai Li , Jessica Balmer , Daniel Grace

Lenos T Gororo

Judith Lorber

Perspectives

Sociological Bulletin

Sherry Sabbarwal

Blackwell Student's Companion to Social Policy (Fifth Edition)

Shona D J Hunter

Full Stack Feminism

sharon Webb

THANDOLWAM PETER

Dtuetu Yrfuruyjh

Riyas Mytheen

Basudhara Roy

RELATED TOPICS

•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

• History & Society
• Science & Tech
• Biographies
• Animals & Nature
• Geography & Travel
• Arts & Culture
• Games & Quizzes
• On This Day
• One Good Fact
• New Articles
• Lifestyles & Social Issues
• Philosophy & Religion
• Politics, Law & Government
• World History
• Health & Medicine
• Browse Biographies
• Birds, Reptiles & Other Vertebrates
• Bugs, Mollusks & Other Invertebrates
• Environment
• Fossils & Geologic Time
• Entertainment & Pop Culture
• Sports & Recreation
• Visual Arts
• Demystified
• Image Galleries
• Infographics
• Top Questions
• Britannica Kids
• Saving Earth
• Space Next 50
• Student Center
• Introduction & Top Questions

The ancient world

Influence of the enlightenment.

• The suffrage movement
• The post-suffrage era
• Dissension and debate
• The race factor
• The globalization of feminism
• Foundations
• Manifestations
• Controversies
• The fourth wave of feminism

Who were some early feminist thinkers and activists?

What is intersectional feminism, how have feminist politics changed the world.

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

• Munich Personal RePEc Archive - An Overview on the Feminism and Its Categories
• Council of Europe - Feminism and Women’s Rights Movements
• Academia - History and Theory of Feminism
• Pressbooks @ Howard Community College - Feminism and Sexism
• National Army Museum - Women's Work?
• Social Science LibreTexts - Feminism
• EHNE Digital Encyclopedia - Feminisms and Feminist Movements in Europe
• Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University - Feminist Theory
• Pacific University, Oregon - Four Waves of Feminism
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Feminist Philosophy
• feminism - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)
• Table Of Contents

What is feminism?

At its core, feminism is the belief in full social, economic, and political equality for women. Feminism largely arose in response to Western traditions that restricted the rights of women, but feminist thought has global manifestations and variations.

In medieval France philosopher Christine de Pisan challenged the social restrictions on women and pushed for women’s education. In 18th-century England Mary Wollstonecraft ’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman became a seminal work of English-language feminist philosophy. Feminism in the United States had a number of prominent activists during the mid- to late-19th century. Notable mainstream activists included Lucretia Mott , Elizabeth Cady Stanton , and Susan B. Anthony . Less mainstream but similarly important views came from Sojourner Truth , a formerly enslaved Black woman, and Emma Goldman , the nation’s leading anarchist during the late 19th century.

Intersectionality is a term coined by professor Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 to describe how different social categories interact, sometimes resulting in compounding effects and tensions. Her paper on the subject argued that discrimination specifically against Black women is different from general anti-woman discrimination or anti-Black racism. Instead, it involves the unique compound experience of both sexism and racism. Initially used in the context of discrimination law, the concept saw a resurgence in the 21st century among left-wing activists who broadened intersectionality to include categories such as class and sexual orientation.

Feminism has provided Western women with increased educational opportunities, the right to vote, protections against workplace discrimination, and the right to make personal decisions about pregnancy. In some communities, feminism has also succeeded in challenging pervasive cultural norms about women. Outside of the Western world, activists such as Malala Yousafzai have highlighted issues such as unequal access to education for women.

feminism , the belief in social, economic, and political equality of the sexes. Although largely originating in the West, feminism is manifested worldwide and is represented by various institutions committed to activity on behalf of women’s rights and interests.

Throughout most of Western history, women were confined to the domestic sphere, while public life was reserved for men. In medieval Europe, women were denied the right to own property , to study, or to participate in public life. At the end of the 19th century in France, they were still compelled to cover their heads in public, and, in parts of Germany, a husband still had the right to sell his wife. Even as late as the early 20th century, women could neither vote nor hold elective office in Europe and in most of the United States (where several territories and states granted women’s suffrage long before the federal government did so). Women were prevented from conducting business without a male representative, be it father, brother, husband, legal agent, or even son. Married women could not exercise control over their own children without the permission of their husbands. Moreover, women had little or no access to education and were barred from most professions. In some parts of the world, such restrictions on women continue today. See also egalitarianism .

History of feminism

There is scant evidence of early organized protest against such circumscribed status. In the 3rd century bce , Roman women filled the Capitoline Hill and blocked every entrance to the Forum when consul Marcus Porcius Cato resisted attempts to repeal laws limiting women’s use of expensive goods. “If they are victorious now, what will they not attempt?” Cato cried. “As soon as they begin to be your equals, they will have become your superiors.”

That rebellion proved exceptional, however. For most of recorded history, only isolated voices spoke out against the inferior status of women, presaging the arguments to come. In late 14th- and early 15th-century France, the first feminist philosopher, Christine de Pisan , challenged prevailing attitudes toward women with a bold call for female education. Her mantle was taken up later in the century by Laura Cereta, a 15th-century Venetian woman who published Epistolae familiares (1488; “Personal Letters”; Eng. trans. Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist ), a volume of letters dealing with a panoply of women’s complaints, from denial of education and marital oppression to the frivolity of women’s attire.

The defense of women had become a literary subgenre by the end of the 16th century, when Il merito delle donne (1600; The Worth of Women ), a feminist broadside by another Venetian author, Moderata Fonte, was published posthumously. Defenders of the status quo painted women as superficial and inherently immoral, while the emerging feminists produced long lists of women of courage and accomplishment and proclaimed that women would be the intellectual equals of men if they were given equal access to education.

The so-called “debate about women” did not reach England until the late 16th century, when pamphleteers and polemicists joined battle over the true nature of womanhood. After a series of satiric pieces mocking women was published, the first feminist pamphleteer in England, writing as Jane Anger, responded with Jane Anger, Her Protection for Women (1589). This volley of opinion continued for more than a century, until another English author, Mary Astell, issued a more reasoned rejoinder in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694, 1697). The two-volume work suggested that women inclined neither toward marriage nor a religious vocation should set up secular convents where they might live, study, and teach.

The feminist voices of the Renaissance never coalesced into a coherent philosophy or movement. This happened only with the Enlightenment , when women began to demand that the new reformist rhetoric about liberty , equality, and natural rights be applied to both sexes.

Initially, Enlightenment philosophers focused on the inequities of social class and caste to the exclusion of gender . Swiss-born French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau , for example, portrayed women as silly and frivolous creatures, born to be subordinate to men. In addition, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen , which defined French citizenship after the revolution of 1789, pointedly failed to address the legal status of women.

Female intellectuals of the Enlightenment were quick to point out this lack of inclusivity and the limited scope of reformist rhetoric. Olympe de Gouges , a noted playwright, published Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne (1791; “Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the [Female] Citizen”), declaring women to be not only man’s equal but his partner. The following year Mary Wollstonecraft ’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the seminal English-language feminist work, was published in England. Challenging the notion that women exist only to please men, she proposed that women and men be given equal opportunities in education, work, and politics. Women, she wrote, are as naturally rational as men. If they are silly, it is only because society trains them to be irrelevant.

The Age of Enlightenment turned into an era of political ferment marked by revolutions in France, Germany, and Italy and the rise of abolitionism . In the United States, feminist activism took root when female abolitionists sought to apply the concepts of freedom and equality to their own social and political situations. Their work brought them in contact with female abolitionists in England who were reaching the same conclusions. By the mid-19th century, issues surrounding feminism had added to the tumult of social change , with ideas being exchanged across Europe and North America .

In the first feminist article she dared sign with her own name, Louise Otto, a German, built on the work of Charles Fourier , a French social theorist, quoting his dictum that “by the position which women hold in a land, you can see whether the air of a state is thick with dirty fog or free and clear.” And after Parisian feminists began publishing a daily newspaper entitled La Voix des femmes (“The Voice of Women”) in 1848, Luise Dittmar, a German writer, followed suit one year later with her journal, Soziale Reform .

• A-Z Publications

Annual Review of Political Science

Volume 20, 2017, review article, feminist theory today.

• Kathy E. Ferguson 1
• View Affiliations Hide Affiliations Affiliations: Departments of Political Science and Women's Studies, University of Hawai'i, Honolulu, Hawai'i 96822; email: [email protected]
• Vol. 20:269-286 (Volume publication date May 2017) https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-052715-111648
• First published as a Review in Advance on February 22, 2017
• © Annual Reviews

Feminist theory is not only about women; it is about the world, engaged through critical intersectional perspectives. Despite many significant differences, most feminist theory is reliably suspicious of dualistic thinking, generally oriented toward fluid processes of emergence rather than static entities in one-way relationships, and committed to being a political as well as an intellectual enterprise. It is rooted in and responsible to movements for equality, freedom, and justice. Three important contemporary questions within feminist theory concern ( a ) subjectivity, narrative, and materiality; ( b ) global neoliberal geopolitics; and ( c ) global ecologies. Feminist theorists employ the tools of intersectionality, interdisciplinarity, and the intertwinings of scholarship and activism to address these questions. While we labor to contribute to our academic fields, our primary responsibility is to contribute to positive social change.

Article metrics loading...

Full text loading...

Literature Cited

• Abu-Lughod L . 2013 . Do Muslim Women Need Saving? Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press [Google Scholar]
• Alaimo S . 2008 . Trans-corporeal feminisms and the ethical space of nature. Materialist Feminisms S Alaimo, S Hekman 237– 64 Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press [Google Scholar]
• Alexander MJ . 2002 . Remembering this bridge, remembering ourselves: yearning, memory and desire. This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation G Anzaldúa, A Keating 81– 103 New York: Routledge [Google Scholar]
• Alexander MJ , Mohanty CT . 1997 . Introduction: genealogies, legacies, movements. Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures MJ Alexander, CT Mohanty xiii– xlii New York: Routledge [Google Scholar]
• Barad K . 2007 . Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press [Google Scholar]
• Barstch I , DiPalma C , Sells L . 2001 . Witnessing the postmodern jeremiad: (mis)understanding Donna Haraway's method of inquiry. Configurations 9 : 1 127– 64 [Google Scholar]
• Beauvoir S . 2011 (1949) . The Second Sex Transl. C Borde, S Malovany-Chavallier New York: Vintage Books. From French [Google Scholar]
• Beltran C . 2016 . Conversations on race and other diversities: it's not just about black and white JB Cole. The Graduate Center CUNY. Video posted Apr. 7. http://www.gc.cuny.edu/Public-Programming/Calendar/Detail?id=34625 [Google Scholar]
• Bennett J . 2010 . Vital Matter: A Political Ecology of Things Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press [Google Scholar]
• Braidotti R . 2013 . The Posthuman Cambridge, UK: Polity [Google Scholar]
• Brown W . 2015 . Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution New York: Zone Books [Google Scholar]
• Butler J . 1990 . Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity New York: Routledge [Google Scholar]
• Butler J . 2015 . Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press [Google Scholar]
• Butler J , Gambetti Z , Samsay L . 2016 . Vulnerability in Resistance Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press [Google Scholar]
• Caldwell KL . 2009 . Black women and the development of intersectional health policy in Brazil. The Intersectional Approach: Transforming the Academy Through Race, Class and Gender MT Berger, K Guidroz 118– 35 Chapel Hill, NC: Univ. North Carolina Press [Google Scholar]
• Cho S , Crenshaw KW , McCall L . 2013 . Toward a field of intersectional studies: theory, applications, and praxis. Signs 38 : 4 785– 810 [Google Scholar]
• Colfer CJP , Basnett BS , Elias M . 2016 . Gender and Forests: Climate Change, Tenure, Value Chains and Emerging Issues New York: Routledge [Google Scholar]
• Collins PH . 1990 . Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment New York: Routledge [Google Scholar]
• Collins PH , Bilge S . 2016 . Intersectionality Cambridge, UK: Polity [Google Scholar]
• Crenshaw K . 1989 . Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: a black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory, and antiracist politics. Univ. Chicago Legal For. 1989 : 1 139– 67 [Google Scholar]
• Das Gupta M . 2014 . “Don't deport our daddies”: gendering state deportation practices and immigrant organizing. Gender Soc 28 : 1 83– 109 [Google Scholar]
• Davis A . 1998 . Masked racism: reflections on the prison industrial complex. Colorlines Sept. 10. http://www.colorlines.com/articles/masked-racism-reflections-prison-industrial-complex [Google Scholar]
• Deleuze G , Guattari F . 1987 . A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Transl. B Massumi Minneapolis: Univ. Minn. Press. From French [Google Scholar]
• Disch L . 2016 . Ecological democracy and the co-participation of things. The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Political Theory T Gabrielson, C Hall, JM Meyer, D Schlossberg 624– 40 Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press [Google Scholar]
• Eisenstein Z . 1981 . The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism New York: Longman [Google Scholar]
• Ferguson K . 2011 . Emma Goldman: Political Thinking in the Streets Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield [Google Scholar]
• Ferguson K . 2014 . Anarchist presses and printers: material circuits of power. Polit. Theory 42 : 4 391– 414 [Google Scholar]
• Foucault M . 1990 . The History of Sexuality I Introduction. Transl. R Hurley New York: Vintage. From French [Google Scholar]
• Fraser N . 2013 . Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis London: Verso [Google Scholar]
• Frost S . 2016 . Biocultural Creatures: Toward a New Theory of the Human Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press [Google Scholar]
• Goeman M . 2013 . Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nation Minneapolis: Univ. Minn. Press [Google Scholar]
• Goodyear-Ka'ōpua N . 2013 . The Seeds We Planted: Portraits of a Native Hawaiian Charter School Minneapolis: Univ. Minn. Press [Google Scholar]
• Grewal I . 2005 . Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press [Google Scholar]
• Griffin S . 1978 . Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her New York: Harper & Row [Google Scholar]
• Hall L . 2008 . Strategies of erasure: U.S. colonialism and native Hawaiian feminism. Am. Q . 60 : 2 273– 80 [Google Scholar]
• Hancock AM . 2016 . Intersectionality: An Intellectual History Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press [Google Scholar]
• Haraway DJ . 1988 . Situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Stud 14 : 3 575– 99 [Google Scholar]
• Haraway DJ . 2008 . When Species Meet Minneapolis: Univ. Minn. Press [Google Scholar]
• Haraway DJ . 2016 . Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press [Google Scholar]
• Hawkesworth M . 2012 . Political Worlds of Women: Activism, Advocacy, and Governance in the Twenty-First Century Boulder, CO: Westview [Google Scholar]
• Hemmings C . 2011 . Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press [Google Scholar]
• INCITE! 2016 . Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press [Google Scholar]
• Jagger AM . 1983 . Feminist Politics and Human Nature Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield [Google Scholar]
• Jaimes Guerrero MA . 1997 . Civil rights versus sovereignty: Native American women in life and land struggles. Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures MJ Alexander, CT Mohanty 101– 24 New York: Routledge [Google Scholar]
• Jetnil-Kijiner K . 2015 . I'm going to Paris because I'm fighting for my home. Clim. Home http://www.climatechangenews.com/2015/11/25/im-going-to-paris-because-im-fighting-for-my-home/ [Google Scholar]
• Jetnil-Kijiner K . 2017 . Two degrees. In Iep Jāltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter , pp. 76–79. Tucson, AZ: Univ. Ariz. Press
• Keating A . 2009 . From intersections to interconnections: lessons for transformation from This Bridge Called My Back: Radical Writings by Women of Color . The Intersectional Approach: Transforming the Academy through Race, Class and Gender MT Berger, K Guidroz 81– 99 Chapel Hill, NC: Univ. North Carolina Press [Google Scholar]
• Lazreg M . 1988 . Feminism and difference: the perils of writing as a woman on women in Algeria. Feminist Stud 14 : 1 81– 107 [Google Scholar]
• Lorde A . 1984 . Sister Outsider New York: Crossing Press [Google Scholar]
• Lorey I . 2015 . State of Insecurity; Government of the Precarious Transl. A Derieg London: Verso. From German [Google Scholar]
• Lykke N . 2011 . Intersectional analysis: black box or useful critical feminist thinking technology?. Framing Intersectionality: Debates on a Multi-Faceted Concept in Gender Studies H Lutz, MTH Vivar, L Supik 207– 20 Surrey, UK: Ashgate [Google Scholar]
• May VR . 2015 . Pursuing Intersectionality, Unsettling Dominant Imaginaries New York: Routledge [Google Scholar]
• Merchant C . 1980 . The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco [Google Scholar]
• Mohanty CT . 2003 . Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press [Google Scholar]
• Morrison T . 1993 . Nobel lecture. The Nobel Prize in literature. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1993/morrison-lecture.html
• Nagel J . 2016 . Gender and Climate Change . New York: Routledge
• Parreñas R . 2001 . Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration, and Domestic Work Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press [Google Scholar]
• Precarias a la Deriva. 2010 . Close encounters in the second phase: the communication continuum: care-sex-attention. Caring Labor: An Archive https://caringlabor.wordpress.com/2010/12/14/precarias-a-la-deriva-close-encounters-in-the-second-phase-the-communication-continuum-care-sex-attention/#more-1006 [Google Scholar]
• Puar J . 2007 . Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press [Google Scholar]
• Puri J . 2016 . Sexual States: Governance and the Struggle over the Antisodomy Law in India Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press [Google Scholar]
• Rottenberg C . 2014 . The rise of neoliberal feminism. Cult. Stud. 28 : 3 418– 37 [Google Scholar]
• Sampaio A . 2015 . Terrorizing Latina/o Immigrants: Race, Gender, and Immigration Politics in the Age of Security Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press [Google Scholar]
• Saraswati LA . 2013 . Seeing Beauty, Sensing Race in Transnational Indonesia Honolulu: Univ. Hawai'i Press [Google Scholar]
• Scott JW . 1991 . The evidence of experience. Crit. Inq. 17 : 4 773– 97 [Google Scholar]
• Sheldon R . 2015 . Form/matter/chora: object oriented ontology and feminist new materialism. The Nonhuman Turn R Grusin 193– 222 Minneapolis: Univ. Minn. Press [Google Scholar]
• Silva N . 2004 . Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press [Google Scholar]
• Simpson A . 2014 . Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press [Google Scholar]
• Smith A , Kauanui JK . 2008 . Native feminisms engage American studies. Am. Q . 60 : 2 241– 49 [Google Scholar]
• Stoller A . 2002 . Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule Berkeley: Univ. Calif. Press [Google Scholar]
• Tamboukou M . 2016 . Sewing, Fighting and Writing: Radical Practices in Work, Politics and Culture London: Rowman & Littlefield [Google Scholar]
• Tronto JC . 2013 . Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality, and Justice New York: New York Univ. Press [Google Scholar]
• Tuana N . 2008 . Viscous porosity: witnessing Katrina. Materialist Feminisms S Alaimo, S Hekman 188– 213 Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press [Google Scholar]
• Walters S . 2016 . A new Signs initiative. Signs 41 : 3 701– 2 [Google Scholar]
• Weeks K . 2011 . The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press [Google Scholar]
• Wilson E . 2015 . Gut Feminism Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press [Google Scholar]
• Wingrove E . 2016 . Materialisms. The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory L Disch, M Hawkesworth 454– 71 Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press [Google Scholar]
• Article Type: Review Article

Most Read This Month

Most cited most cited rss feed, framing theory, discursive institutionalism: the explanatory power of ideas and discourse, historical institutionalism in comparative politics, the origins and consequences of affective polarization in the united states, political trust and trustworthiness, public attitudes toward immigration, what do we know about democratization after twenty years, what have we learned about the causes of corruption from ten years of cross-national empirical research, economic determinants of electoral outcomes, public deliberation, discursive participation, and citizen engagement: a review of the empirical literature.

Feminist Film Theory: An Introductory Reading List

Evolving from the analysis of representations of women in film, feminist film theory asks questions about identity, sexuality, and the politics of spectatorship.

Not unlike the emergence of feminist theory and criticism in the domains of art and literature, the women’s movement of the late 1960s and 1970s sparked a focused interrogation of images of women in film and of women’s participation in film production.  The 1970s witnessed the authorship of massively influential texts by writers such as Claire Johnston, Molly Haskell, and Laura Mulvey in the United Kingdom and the United States, and psychoanalysis was a reigning method of inquiry, though Marxism and semiotics also informed the field.

Feminist film theory has provoked debates about the representations of female bodies, sexuality, and femininity on screen while posing questions concerning identity, desire, and the politics of spectatorship, among other topics. Crucially, an increasing amount of attention has been paid by theorists to intersectionality, as scholars investigate the presence and absence of marginalized and oppressed film subjects and producers. This reading list surveys a dozen articles, presented chronologically, as a starting point for readers interested in the lines of inquiry that have fueled the field over the last fifty years.

Laura Mulvey, “ Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema ,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18.

To put it most simply, Mulvey’s 1975 essay is nothing short of iconic. A cornerstone of psychoanalytic feminist film theory, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” describes the ways in which women are displayed on screen for the pleasure of the male spectator. Many of the essays listed below engage explicitly with Mulvey’s essay and the notion of the male gaze, illustrating what Corrin Columpar (2002, see below) describes as a “near compulsive return” to this pioneering work. But even Mulvey herself would later push back on some of her most provocative claims , including her positioning of the spectator as male, as well as her omission of female protagonists.

“ Feminism and Film: Critical Approaches ,” Camera Obscura 1, no. 1 (1976): 3–10.

Established in 1976, Camera Obscura was (and remains) a groundbreaking venue for feminist film studies. This introductory essay to the first issue contextualizes the necessity of such a journal in a scholarly and cultural environment in which there is a true “need” for the feminist study of film. Camera Obscura was, in part, an American response to the wave of British contributions to the field, often published in the journal Screen (the home of Mulvey’s essay). The editors spend much of this essay unpacking the camera obscura, an image projection device, as a metaphor for feminist film theory, as it functions as a symbol of contradiction that “emphasizes the points of convergence of ideology and representation, of ideology as representation.”

Weekly Newsletter

Get your fix of JSTOR Daily’s best stories in your inbox each Thursday.

Privacy Policy   Contact Us You may unsubscribe at any time by clicking on the provided link on any marketing message.

Michelle Criton, Julia Lesage, Judith Mayne, B. Ruby Rich, and Anna Marie Taylor, “ Women and Film: A Discussion of Feminist Aesthetics ,” New German Critique no. 13 (1978): 83–107.

What makes film an enticing object of study for feminists in the first place? As Criton et al. attest, the answers lie in the social rather than individual or private dimensions of film as well as in its accessibility and synthesis of “art, life, politics, sex, etc.” The conversation featured here provides a glimpse into contemporary conversations about the work of Claire Johnston and Laura Mulvey and psychoanalysis as a shaping force of early feminist film theory. Additionally, they consider how a feminist filmmaking aesthetic can reveal and critique the ideologies that underpin the oppression of women.

Judith Mayne, “ Feminist Film Theory and Criticism ,” Signs 11, no. 1 (1985): 81–100.

Acknowledging the profound impact of “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Mayne surveys the development of feminist film theory, including both its historical contexts and its fixations upon psychoanalysis and the notions of spectacle and the gaze. Mayne outlines how contradiction—variously construed—is “ the central issue in feminist film theory and criticism” (emphasis added). Additionally, the author calls into question the historiography of women’s cinema, noting the “risk of romanticizing women’s exclusion from the actual production of films.” She urges scholars to, certainly, continue the necessary exploration of forgotten and understudied female filmmakers but to also open up the conception of women’s cinema to include not just the work of female directors but also their peripheral roles as critics and audience members.

Jane Gaines, “ White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory ,” Cultural Critique , no. 4 (1986): 59–79.

What, Gaines asks, are the limitations of feminist theory’s early fixation on gender at the expense of nuanced understandings of race, class, and sexuality? While feminist theory may, in its earliest years, have opened up possibilities for interrogating the gendered politics of spectatorship, it was largely exclusionary of diverse perspectives, including, as Gaines notes, lesbians and women of color. In doing so, “feminist theory has helped to reinforce white middle-class [normative] values, and to the extent that it works to keep women from seeing other structures of oppression, it functions ideologically.” Through an analysis of the 1975 film Mahogany and informed by black feminist theorists and writers such as bell hooks, Mayne argues that psychoanalysis ultimately results in erroneous readings of films about race.

Noël Carroll, “ The Image of Women in Film: A Defense of a Paradigm ,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48, no. 4 (1990): 349–60.

Carroll theorizes why psychoanalysis was so attractive to feminists in the 1970s and 1980s: by providing a theoretical framework, he argues, psychoanalysis was a means to “incorporate” and “organize” the “scattered insights of the image of women in film approach.” Taking issue with Mulvey’s perspective on voyeurism, Carroll positions the image approach, or the study of the image of women in film—in this case with an emphasis on theories of emotion— as a “rival research program” to psychoanalysis. He argues that paradigm scenarios, or cases in which emotions are learned behavioral responses, influence spectatorship and how audiences respond emotionally to women on screen.

Karen Hollinger, “ Theorizing Mainstream Female Spectatorship: The Case of the Popular Lesbian Film ,” Cinema Journal 37, no. 2 (1998): 3–17.

Hollinger surveys theoretical responses to lesbian subjectivity and the female spectatorship of popular lesbian film narratives. She articulates the subversive power of the lesbian look as a challenge to Mulvey’s notion of the male gaze, asserting its potential to empower female spectators as agents of desire.

Corinn Columpar, “ The Gaze As Theoretical Touchstone: The Intersection of Film Studies, Feminist Theory, and Postcolonial Theory ,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 30, no. 1/2 (2002): 25–44.

The male gaze is not, as Columpar articulates, the sole tool “in the contemporary feminist film critic’s box”: so are the ethnographic and colonial gazes, brought to film theory from postcolonial studies. Columpar reiterates that the early fixation upon gender and the male gaze “failed to account for other key determinants of social power and position.” Interdisciplinary perspectives, such as those informed by postcolonial theory, are better equipped to unpack “issues of racial and national difference and acknowledge the role that race and ethnicity play in looking relations.”

Janell Hobson, “ Viewing in the Dark: Toward a Black Feminist Approach to Film ,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 30, no. 1/2 (2002): 45–59.

Hobson illuminates the absence and/or disembodied presence of Black female bodies in Hollywood cinema. She argues that the invisibility of Black women’s bodies on screen was a defense mechanism against the disruption of “whites as beautiful, as the norm.” By turning away from the gaze and toward the sound of Black women’s disembodied voices in speech and song, viewers are better equipped to recognize how their voices are “used in mainstream cinema by way of supporting and defining the normalized (white) male body,” therefore “ensur[ing] the identity of white masculinity.”

E. Ann Kaplan, “ Global Feminisms and the State of Feminist Film Theory ,” Signs 30, no. 1 (2004): 1236–48.

Kaplan reflects on her trajectory as a pioneering feminist film theorist, illuminating her shift from cinema’s depictions of the “oppressions of white Western women” to the study of trauma in global and indigenous cinema. Importantly, she notes that in her earlier research, she failed to “confront the really tough questions of my own positionality.” In doing so, she invites readers to consider the ethics of witnessing and white, Western feminist participation in the development of multicultural approaches.

Jane M. Gaines, “ Film History and the Two Presents of Feminist Film Theory ,” Cinema Journal 44, no. 1 (2004): 113–19.

It may come as a surprise to many that, internationally speaking, women were indeed undertaking various forms of creative labor in the world of film production during the silent era, including screenwriting, producing, directing, etc. The question, then, is not just “why these women were forgotten” but also “why we forgot them.” Gaines considers the “historical turn” in feminist film studies, arguing that scholars must be mindful of how they narrativize and rewrite the rediscovered facts of women’s work in cinema.

Sangita Gopal, “ Feminism and the Big Picture: Conversations ,” Cinema Journal 57, no. 2 (2018): 131–36.

In this fascinating article, Gopal synthesizes responses to a series of questions posed to film scholars regarding feminist theory, praxis, and pedagogy, as well as feminism as “an unfinished project” and feminist media studies as a “boundless” field. Where theory is concerned, Gopal usefully highlights Lingzhen Wang’s and Priya Jaikumar’s suggestions for more explicitly linking and situating feminist media studies within “the big picture.” Notably, Jaikumar ponders the possibilities of feminism creating a framework such that “it is not possible to ask a question if it is absent of a politics.”

Support JSTOR Daily! Join our new membership program on Patreon today.

JSTOR is a digital library for scholars, researchers, and students. JSTOR Daily readers can access the original research behind our articles for free on JSTOR.

Get Our Newsletter

More stories.

• Labor Day: A Celebration of Working in America

Playing It Straight and Catching a Break

A Selection of Student Confessions

The Bawdy House Riots of 1668

Recent posts.

• Japanese Tourists at the Dancehall
• Tree of Peace, Spark of War
• Street Shrines, Bug Photos, and Revolutionary Women
• How Sports Shaped Glacier Science

Support JSTOR Daily

Sign up for our weekly newsletter.

• Table of Contents
• Random Entry
• Chronological
• Editorial Information
• About the SEP
• Editorial Board
• How to Cite the SEP
• Special Characters
• Advanced Tools
• Support the SEP
• PDFs for SEP Friends
• Make a Donation
• SEPIA for Libraries
• Entry Contents

Bibliography

Academic tools.

• Friends PDF Preview
• Author and Citation Info
• Back to Top

Feminist Ethics

Feminist Ethics aims “to understand, criticize, and correct” how gender operates within our moral beliefs and practices (Lindemann 2005, 11) and our methodological approaches to ethical theory. More specifically, feminist ethicists aim to understand, criticize, and correct: (1) the binary view of gender, (2) the privilege historically available to men, and/or (3) the ways that views about gender maintain oppressive social orders or practices that harm others, especially girls and women who historically have been subordinated, along gendered dimensions including sexuality and gender-identity. Since oppression often involves ignoring the perspectives of the marginalized, different approaches to feminist ethics have in common a commitment to better understand the experiences of persons oppressed in gendered ways. That commitment results in a tendency, in feminist ethics, to take into account empirical information and material actualities.

Not all feminist ethicists correct all of (1) through (3). Some have assumed or upheld the gender binary (Wollstonecraft 1792; Firestone 1970). They criticize and aim to correct the privileging of men as the more morally worthy half of the binary, or argue against the maintenance of a social order that oppresses others in gendered ways. More recently, feminist ethicists have commonly criticized the gender binary itself, arguing that upholding a fixed conception of the world as constituted only by “biological” men and women contributes to the maintenance of oppressive and gendered social orders, especially when doing so marginalizes those who do not conform to gender binaries (Butler 1990; Bettcher 2014; Dea 2016a). Feminist ethicists who are attentive to the intersections of multiple aspects of identity including race, class, and disability, in addition to gender, criticize and correct assumptions that men simpliciter are historically privileged, as if privilege distributes equally among all men regardless of how they are socially situated. They instead focus more on criticizing and correcting oppressive practices that harm and marginalize others who live at these intersections in order to account for the distinctive experiences of women whose experiences are not those of members of culturally dominant groups (Crenshaw 1991; Khader 2013). Whatever the focus of feminist ethicists, a widely shared characteristic of their works is at least some overt attention to power, privilege, or limited access to social goods. In a broad sense, then, feminist ethics is fundamentally political (Tong 1993, 160). This is not necessarily a feature of feminist ethics that distinguishes it from “mainstream” ethics, however, since feminist analyses of ethical theory as arising from material and nonideal contexts suggest that all ethics is political whether its being so is recognized by the theorist or not.

Since feminist ethics is not merely a branch of ethics, but is instead “a way of doing ethics” (Lindemann 2005, 4), philosophers engaged in the above tasks can be concerned with any branch of ethics, including meta-ethics, normative theory, and practical or applied ethics. The point of feminist ethics is, ideally, to change ethics for the better by improving ethical theorizing and offering better approaches to issues including those involving gender. Feminist ethics is not limited to gendered issues because the insights of feminist ethics are often applicable to analyses of moral experiences that share features with gendered issues or that reflect the intersection of gender with other bases of oppression. Feminist philosophical endeavors include bringing investigations motivated by feminist ethics to bear on ethical issues, broadly conceived.

1.1 Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Forerunners of Feminist Ethics

1.2 nineteenth-century influences and issues, 1.3 twentieth-century influences and issues, 2.1 gender binarism, essentialism, and separatism, 2.2 ethic of care as a feminine or gendered approach to morality, 2.3 intersectionality, 2.4 feminist criticisms and expansions of traditional moral theories, 2.5 rejections of absolutism: pragmatism, transnational feminism, and nonideal theory, other internet resources, related entries, 1. feminist ethics: historical background.

Feminist ethics as an academic area of study in the field of philosophy dates to the 1970s, when philosophical journals started more frequently publishing articles specifically concerned with feminism and sexism (Korsmeyer 1973; Rosenthal 1973; Jaggar 1974), and after curricular programs of Women’s Studies began to be established in some universities (Young 1977; Tuana 2011). Readers interested in themes evident in the fifty years of feminist ethics in philosophy will find this discussion in section (2) below, “Themes in Feminist Ethics.”

Prior to 1970, “there was no recognized body of feminist philosophy” (Card 2008, 90). Of course, throughout history, philosophers have attempted to understand the roles that gender may play in moral life. Yet such philosophers presumably were addressing male readers, and their accounts of women’s moral capacities did not usually aim to disrupt the subordination of women. Rarely in the history of philosophy will one find philosophical works that notice gender in order to criticize and correct men’s historical privileges or to disrupt the social orders and practices that subordinate groups on gendered dimensions. An understanding that sex matters to one’s ethical theorizing in some way is necessary to, but not sufficient for, feminist ethics.

Some philosophers and writers in almost every century, however, constitute forerunners to feminist ethics. Representative authors writing in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries discussed below explicitly address what they perceive to be moral wrongs resulting from either oppression on the basis of sex, or metaethical errors on the part of public intellectuals in believing ideal forms of moral reasoning to be within the capacities of men and not women. In the early-to-mid-twentieth century, at the same time that feminism became a more popularly used term in Europe and the Americas, more theorists argued influentially for ending unjust discrimination on the basis of sex. Some authors concertedly argued that philosophers and theorists erred in their understanding of what seemed to be gendered differences in ethical and moral reasoning.

In the seventeenth century, some public intellectuals published treatises arguing that women were as rational as men and should be afforded the education that would allow them to develop their moral character. They argued that since females are rational, their unequal access to learning was immoral and unjustifiable. They explored meta-ethical questions about the preconditions for morality, including what sorts of agents can be moral and whether morality is equally possible for different sexes. For example, in 1694, Mary Astell’s first edition of A Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest was published, advocating for access to education. It was controversial enough that Astell issued a sequel three years later, A Serious Proposal, Part II , that challenged “those deep background philosophical and theological assumptions which deny women the capacity for improvement of the mind” (Springborg, “Introduction,” in Astell 2002, 21). At the time, some apparently attributed the first Serious Proposal not to Astell, but to Damaris Cudworth Masham, a one-time companion of John Locke, since such criticisms of the injustice of women’s lot and the background assumptions maintaining their subordinate situation were familiar to Masham (Springborg, “Introduction,” in Astell 2002, 17). Although Masham sharply disagreed with aspects of Astell’s work, she too would later come to be credited with “explicitly feminist claims,” including objections to “the inferior education accorded women” (Frankel 1989, 84), especially when such obstacles were due to “the ignorance of men” (Masham 1705, 169, quoted in Frankel 1989, 85). Masham also deplored “the double standard of morality imposed on women and men, especially … the claim that women's ‘virtue’ consists primarily in chastity” (Frankel 1989, 85).

A century later, Mary Wollstonecraft, in her Vindication of the Rights of Women ([1792] 1988), renewed attention to girls’ lack of access to education. Criticizing the philosophical assumptions underpinning practices that denied girls adequate education, Wollstonecraft articulated an Enlightenment ideal of the social and moral rights of women as the equal of men. Wollstonecraft also broadened her critique of social structures to encompass ethical theory, especially in resistance to the arguments of influential men that women’s virtues are different from men’s and appropriate to perceived feminine duties. Wollstonecraft asserted: “I here throw down my gauntlet, and deny the existence of sexual virtues,” adding that “women, I allow, may have different duties to fulfil; but they are human duties, and the principles that should regulate the discharge of them … must be the same” (51). The revolutions of the Enlightenment age motivated some men as well as women to reconsider inequities in education at a time when notions of universal human rights were gaining prominence. As Joan Landes observes, Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet was an extraordinary advocate for the rights of women in France during the same period who argued in 1790 for “the admission of women to the rights of citizenship” and “woman's equal humanity on the grounds of reason and justice” (Landes 2016). Like many theorists of their time and places, including Catherine Macaulay (Tomaselli 2016), Olympe de Gouges, and Madame de Staël (Landes 2016), Wollstonecraft and Condorcet granted that there were material differences between the sexes, but advanced moral arguments against ethical double-standards on the basis of universal humanism. Yet the notion of universal humanism tended to prioritize virtues traditionally seen as masculine. Wollstonecraft, for example, argued against perceptions that women lacked men’s capacities for morality, but praised rationality and “masculinity” as preconditions for morality (Tong 1993, 44).

In Europe and North America, nineteenth-century moral arguments coalesced around material issues that would later be appreciated by feminist ethicists as importantly intersecting. A remarkably diverse array of activist women and public intellectuals advanced recognizably feminist arguments for women’s moral leadership and greater freedoms as moral imperatives. The resistance of enslaved women and the political activism of their descendants, the anti-slavery organizations of women in Europe and North America, the attention to inequity in women’s access to income, property, sexual freedom, full citizenship, and enfranchisement, and the rise of Marxist and Socialist theories contributed to women’s participation in arguments for the reductions of militarism, unfettered capitalism, domestic violence and the related abuse of drugs and alcohol, among other concerns.

Offering the first occurrence of the term feminisme (Offen 1988), the nineteenth century is characterized by a plurality of approaches to protofeminist ethics, that is, ethical theorizing that anticipated and created the groundwork for modern feminist concepts. These include some theories consistent with the universal humanism of Wollstonecraft and Condorcet and others emphasizing the differences between the sexes in order to argue for the superiority of feminine morality. The most well-known of the former in philosophy are John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women ([1869] 1987), which he credits Harriet Taylor Mill with co-authoring, and Harriet Taylor Mill’s essay, “The Enfranchisement of Women” (H. T. Mill [1851] 1998). Like their Enlightenment forerunners, Mill and Taylor argue that women ought to have equal rights and equal access to political and social opportunities. As a utilitarian philosopher, Mill further emphasizes the benefits to society and to the human species of improving women’s lives and social situations. Mill expresses skepticism about claims that women are morally superior to men, as well as claims that women have “greater liability to moral bias,” emotionality, and poor judgment in ethical decision-making ([1869] 1987, 518 and 519). Mill and Taylor tend to overemphasize the roles of women who are wives. They grant some differences between men and women that are controversial today; Mill’s works especially emphasize the benefits to family and domestic life as reasons to support the liberation of women from subjugation. Despite these views, both argue for the benefits of women’s liberation to scholarly and political spheres. For example, they describe differences in achievement and behavior to be the result mainly of women’s social situations and education, making their view consistent with the arguments of both the Enlightenment scholars noted above, and some, but not all, of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors discussed below.

Attitudes about the reasons for the moral goodness of such achievements differed. Some early utopian and Socialist movements in Europe that influenced women’s rights activists in America and would later influence British thinkers, including John Stuart Mill, lauded feminine virtues and women’s importance, but did so in ways that would reinforce views of women as “superior” because of innate qualities of gentleness, love, spirituality, and sentimentality (Moses 1982). In contrast, other Socialist movements expressed radical views of the equality of men and women not by attributing distinctive or greater moral virtues to women, but by challenging systems of privilege due to sex, race, and class (Taylor 1993). Although Mill and Taylor would later argue that “sexual inequality is an impediment to the cultivation of moral virtue,” some American activists such as Catherine Beecher forwarded a “separate-but-equal” vision of men and women as psychologically and essentially different, a view “according to which female virtue is ultimately better than male virtue” (Tong 1993, 36 and 37). In the pivotal year of 1848, Frederick Douglass insisted that “all that distinguishes man as an intelligent and accountable being, is equally true of woman” (quoted in Davis 2011, 51). In the same year, the Declaration of Sentiments was signed at a women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, and socialist and anarchist revolutions took place in Europe. The revolutionaries included public thinkers who advocated communal property and sexual equality, and who criticized the involvement of state and church in marriage. Their arguments about practical and feminist ethics influenced Emma Goldman and other turn-of-the-century thinkers.

Philosophical thinkers of different backgrounds gained greater access to education and printing presses in the nineteenth century, resulting in a plurality of approaches to the project of understanding, criticizing, and correcting how gender operates within our moral beliefs and practices. For example, the attachment of some protofeminist thinkers to the domestic virtues shaped their ethical recommendations. Some white and middle-class activists argued for the end of slavery and, later, against the subordination of emancipated women of color precisely on the grounds that they wished to extend the privileges that white and middle-class women enjoyed in the domestic and private sphere, maintaining the social order while valorizing domestic feminine goodness. As Clare Midgley says, “Women’s role was discussed in terms of family life. Emancipation would mark the end of the sexual exploitation of women and of the disruption of family life, and the creation of a society in which the black woman was able to occupy her proper station as a Daughter, a Wife, and a Mother” (Midgley 1993, 351).

In contrast, some former slaves including Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and descendants of slaves including Mary Church Terrell, grounded their work for women’s rights and arguments for women’s moral and sociopolitical equality in rather different priorities, asserting more interest in equal protection of the laws, economic liberation, political representation, and in Wells-Barnett’s case, self-defense and the exertion of the right to bear arms, as necessary to the very survival and liberation of Black Americans (Giddings 2007). Cooper, who rightly criticized white feminists for racist (and female-supremacist) statements when they were offered as reasons to work for white women’s voting rights rather than Black men’s, advanced a view of virtues and truth as having masculine and feminine sides. A century before care ethics would become a strain of academic feminist ethics, Cooper urged that both masculine reason and feminine sympathy “are needed to be worked into the training of children, in order that our boys may supplement their virility by tenderness and sensibility, and our girls may round out their gentleness by strength and self-reliance” (Cooper [1892] 2000, 60). Her timeless concern for the U.S. was that a nation or a people “will degenerate into mere emotionalism on the one hand, or bullyism on the other, if dominated by either exclusively” (61). Hers is a normative argument for appreciating the contributions that both traditionally feminine and masculine values could offer to a well-balanced ethics.

Explicitly arguing that standpoints matter to knowledge claims and moral theorizing, Cooper insisted that historical knowledge necessary to a nation’s self-understanding depends on the representation of Black Americans’ voices, and especially the “open-eyed but hitherto voiceless Black Woman of America” (Cooper [1892] 2000, 2; Gines 2015). Manifesting Cooper’s call for representations, Wells-Barnett determinedly included accounts of girls and women killed by lynching along with the narratives of murdered men and boys, and challenged the “racial-sexual apologies for lynching to trample the twin myths of white (female) sexual purity and black (male) sexual savagery” (James 1997, 80). Wells-Barnett’s investigative journalism led her to the blunt suggestion that some of the sexual relationships giving rise to cover stories of rape as justifications for lynching were consensual relationships between white women and Black men, while rapes of Black women and girls, “which began in slavery days, still continues without reproof from church, state or press” (quoted in Sterling 1979, 81).

Like Wells-Barnett, anarchist and socialist writers, some from working-class backgrounds, advanced frank arguments for differently understanding women’s capacities and desires as sexual beings with their own moral agency. Leaders included Emma Goldman, whose anarchism was developed as a response to Marx and Marxism (Fiala 2018). Goldman argued for broader understandings of love, sexuality, and family, because she believed that traditional social codes of morality resulted in the corruption of women’s sexual self-understanding (112). Like Wells-Barnett, Goldman coupled arguments against feminine sexual purity with attention to the sexual exploitation of, and trafficking in, women who did not enjoy the state’s protection (Goldman 2012). Some suffragists’ “emphasis on female morality repulsed Goldman. Yet, while she ridiculed the claim that women were morally superior to men … she also emphasized that women should be allowed and encouraged to express freely their ‘true’ femininity” (Marso 2010, 76).

Although early twentieth-century protofeminists differed in their beliefs as to whether men and women were morally different in character, they generally shared a belief in Progressive ideals of moral and social improvement if only humankind brought fair and rational thinking to bear on ethical issues. Progressive-era pragmatists, including Wells-Barnett, Charlotte Perkins-Gilman, Jane Addams, and Alice Paul, “saw the social environment as malleable, capable of improvement through human action and philosophic thought” (Whipps and Lake 2016). The beginning of the century was characterized by remarkably optimistic thinking even on the part of more radical theorists who appreciated the deep harms of oppressive social organizations. Most of the Progressive activists and suffragists of this era never described themselves with the new term, “feminist,” but as the immediate forerunners of feminism, they are described as feminists today.

Although belief in the possibilities for change seems widely shared, Progressive-era feminists did not always share common ground regarding women’s moral natures or how to achieve moral progress as a nation. For example, both Goldman and pro-suffrage Charlotte Perkins-Gilman argued for individual self-transformation and self-understanding as keys to women’s better moral characters (Goldman 2012), while maintaining that a person’s efforts were best supported by a less individualistic and more communitarian social and political framework (Gilman 1966). While Goldman included greater access to birth control and reproductive choice among the morally urgent routes to women’s individual self-discovery, Gilman and many feminists argued for women’s access to contraception in ways that reflected increasingly popular policies of eugenics in North and South America and Europe (Gilman 1932). Eugenics-friendly white women’s contributions of feminist ethical arguments to disrupt oppressive pronatalism or to avert the measurable costs of parenthood in sexist societies often took the form of deepening other forms of marginalization, including those based on race, disability, and class (Lamp and Cleigh 2011).

In the U.S., the centrality of sex and gender issues in public ethics reached a high-water mark during the Progressive Era, moving one magazine to write in 1914 that “The time has come to define feminism; it is no longer possible to ignore it” (Cott 1987, 13). Unfortunately, this sentiment would decline with the start of World War I and the consequent demise of optimistic beliefs in the powers of human rationality to bring about moral progress. Yet throughout the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, as economic difficulties, military conflicts, and wealth disparity fluctuated internationally, women’s groups and feminist activists in many countries would advance, with some success, feminist and moral arguments for workplace, professional, electoral, and educational access, for the liberalization of contraception, marriage, and divorce laws, and against militarism. Some of their gains in greater access to voting, education, and prosperity may have contributed to the wide audience that was receptive to Simone de Beauvoir’s publications in Europe and, after translations were available, in North America.

Beauvoir first self-identified as a feminist in 1972 (Schwarzer 1984, 32), and consistently refused the label of a philosopher despite having taught courses in philosophy (Card 2003, 9). Yet beginning in the 1950s, both her Ethics of Ambiguity ([1947] 1976) and The Second Sex ([1949] 2010) were widely read and quickly appreciated as important to feminist ethics (Card 2003, 1). As works of existentialist morality, they emphasized that we are not all simply subjects and individual choosers but also objects shaped by the forces of oppression (Andrew 2003, 37). Like the protofeminists described above, Beauvoir focused on the embodied experiences and social situations of women. In these pivotal works, she advanced the case that embodiment and social situatedness are not only relevant to human existence, but are the stuff of human existence, so crucial that philosophy ought not ignore them (Andrew 2003, 34). In The Second Sex , she argued that some men in philosophy managed the bad-faith project of both ignoring their own sex-situatedness and yet describing women as the Other and men as the Self. Because men in philosophy take themselves to be paradigmatically human and take it upon themselves to characterize the nature of womankind as different from men, Beauvoir said that men socially construct woman as the Other. Famously, Beauvoir said, “one is not born, but rather becomes, woman,” that is, one may be born a human female, but “the figure that the human female takes on in society,” that of a “woman,” results from “the mediation of another [that] can constitute an individual as an Other” (Beauvoir [1949] 2010, 329). The embodied human female may be a subject of her own experiences and perceptions, but “being a woman would mean being an object, the Other” (83), that is, the objectified recipient of the speculations and perceptions of men. Beauvoir described a woman who would transcend this situation “as hesitating between the role of object, of Other that is proposed to her, and her claim for freedom” (84), that is, her freedom to assert her own subjectivity, to make her own choices as to who she is, especially when she is not defined in relation to men. A woman’s position is therefore so deeply ambiguous—one of navigating “a human condition as defined in its relation with the Other” (196)—that if one is to philosophize about women, “it is indispensable to understand the economic and social structure” in which women aim to be authentic or ethical, necessitating “an existential point of view, taking into account her total situation” (84). In other words, philosophers speculating about women ought to take into account the obstacles to women’s opportunities for subjecthood and choice that are created by those who constructed an oppressive situation for women to navigate.

Beauvoir’s positions—that woman has been defined by men and in men’s terms, that ethical theory must attend to women’s social situation and their capacity to be moral decision-makers, and that women’s oppression impedes their knowing themselves and changing their situation—reflect the concerns of many forerunners of feminist ethics. Beauvoir’s work profoundly shaped the emergence of feminist ethics as a subfield of philosophy at a time when philosophers more generally had moved away from the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tendencies to describe women as lacking morally worthy rational capacities. Instead, by the middle of the twentieth century, some influential philosophers in Europe and the Americas had moved toward approaches that often led to describing both gender and ethics as irrelevant to philosophical discourse (Garry 2017).

2. Themes in feminist ethics

In the fifty years that feminist ethics has been a subject of philosophical scholarship in (initially) Western and (increasingly) international discourse, theorists have considered metaethical, theoretical, and practical questions. Questions that occupied scholars in preceding centuries, especially those regarding moral agents’ natural (and gendered) capacities for moral deliberation, are critically reconsidered in debates that arose in the 1970s and 1980s. One main area of inquiry addresses whether and why there may be meaningful differences in feminine and masculine priorities of care and justice in normative theory. Concern about feminist methods of articulating ethical theories arise during this time and continue. These debates can be found in the scholarship of intersectionality, Black feminist thought and women of color feminism, transnational feminism, queer theory, disability studies, and twenty-first century criticisms of feminist ethics. They are of special concern whenever feminist ethicists seem to uphold a gender binary and simplistic conceptualizations of woman as a category. Questions about the shortcomings of traditional ethical theories, about which virtues constitute morally good character in contexts of oppression, and about which kinds of ethical theories will ameliorate gendered oppressions and evils generate critical scholarship in every decade.

Gender binarism, which is the view that there are only two genders—male and female—and that everyone is only one of them (Dea 2016a, 108), is assumed by most feminist ethicists in the 1970s and 1980s (Jaggar 1974; Daly 1979). Some of these feminists criticize male supremacy without thereby preferring female supremacy (Frye 1983; Card 1986; Hoagland 1988). They argue that although the categories of “men” and “women” are physiologically distinct, the potential of feminism to liberate both men and women from oppressive gendered social arrangements suggests that men and women do not have different moralities or separate realities, and that we do not need to articulate separate capacities for ethics (Jaggar 1974; Davion 1998).

Other feminist ethicists offer radically different views. Mary Daly, for example, argues in Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism that women were traditionally defined throughout intellectual history as being subversive of rationality, impartiality, and morality as traditionally conceived. Daly argues that women ought to embrace, as essential to women’s natures and good, some of the very qualities that she says men have ascribed to women as essential to women’s natures and bad. Daly suggests valuing both women’s capacities for childbearing and birth (as opposed to capacities to engage in war and killing) and women’s emotionality (versus rationality) (Daly 1979).

Radical feminists and lesbian feminists who disagree with Daly as to whether women’s moral natures are innately better than men’s agree with Daly in arguing either for essentialism (Griffin 1978; cf. Spelman 1988 and Witt 1995) or for women’s separation from men (Card 1988; Hoagland 1988). Some of them argue that separatism allows a setting in which to create alternative ethics, rather than merely responding to the male-dominated ethical theories traditionally discussed in the academy. They also argue that separatism better fosters women’s increased connection to each other and denies men the access to women that men might expect (Daly 1979; Frye 1983; Hoagland 1988).

In deep disagreement, philosophers such as Alison Jaggar argue against separatism as being in any way productive of a different and morally better world. Jaggar maintains that “what we must do instead is to create a new androgynous culture which incorporates the best elements of both …, which values both personal relationships and efficiency, both emotion and rationality. This result cannot be achieved through sexual separation” (Jaggar 1974, 288). Related arguments for androgynous approaches to ethics are influential in arguments supporting androgyny, gender bending, and gender-blending that are prevalent in the 1990s (Butler 1990; Butler 1993), and gender-eliminativist and humanist approaches to feminist ethics and social philosophy that are prevalent in the twenty-first century (LaBrada 2016; Mikkola 2016; Ayala and Vasilyeva 2015; Haslanger 2012).

One criticism of gender binarism is that its assumption marginalizes nonconforming individuals. In efforts described as promoting coalition between trans activists and non-trans feminists, some feminists argue that we ought to examine the gender privilege inherent in presuming a binary that reflects one’s own experience better than the experiences of others (Dea 2016a; Bettcher 2014). Yet such “beyond-the-binary” approaches, in turn, have been cautioned against as well-intentioned but, at times, invalidating trans identities, “by invalidating the self-identities of trans people who do not regard their genitals as wrong” or “by representing all trans people as problematically positioned with regard to the binary” (Bettcher 2013). Recognition of “reality enforcement” and its interconnection with racist and sexist oppression may better defray the harms of normalizing a gender binary (Bettcher 2013).

Jaggar argues against separatism or separate gendered realities, noting that there is no reason “to believe in a sexual polarity which transcends the physiological distinction” (Jaggar 1974, 283). The work of psychologist Carol Gilligan therefore has great influence on philosophers interested in just such evidence for substantial sex differences in moral reasoning, despite the fact that Gilligan herself does not describe these differences as polar. In her landmark work, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (1982), Gilligan disputes accounts of moral development that do not take into account girls’ moral experiences (18–19), or that describe women as stuck at an interpersonal stage short of full moral development as in the theories of Lawrence Kohlberg (30). Gilligan argues that Kohlberg wrongly prioritizes a “morality of rights” and independence from others as better than, rather than merely different from, a “morality of responsibility” and intimate relationships with others (19).

Gilligan’s research follows Nancy Chodorow’s in suggesting that for boys and men, “separation and individuation are critically tied to gender identity” (Gilligan 1982, 8). Further, the development of masculinity typically involves valuing autonomy, rights, disconnection from others, and independence, while seeing other persons and intimate relationships as dangers or obstacles to pursuing those values. This perspective is referred to as the “perspective of justice” (Held 1995; Blum 1988). Women, in Gilligan’s studies, were as likely to express the perspective of justice as they were to express a perspective that valued intimacy, responsibility, relationships, and caring for others, while seeing autonomy as “the illusory and dangerous quest” (Gilligan 1982, 48), in tension with the values of attachment. This perspective is known as the perspective of “care” (Friedman 1991; Driver 2005).

Philosophers who apply Gilligan’s empirical results to ethical theory differ about the role that a care perspective should play in normative recommendations. Nel Noddings’s influential work, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (1984), argues for the moral preferability of a care perspective as both feminine and, as she later says explicitly, feminist (Noddings 2013, xxiv), orienting moral agents to focus on the needs of those one cares for in relational contexts rather than on abstract, universal principles. Like her historical predecessors discussed above, Noddings emphasizes the feminine “to direct attention to centuries of experience more typical of women than men” (xxiv), in part to correct the extent to which “the mother’s voice has been silent” (1). Noddings’s normative theory endorses the moral value of partiality that justifies prioritizing interpersonal relationships over more distant connections. Virginia Held’s (1993; 2006) and Joan Tronto’s (1993) different applications of the perspective of care endorse care as social and political rather than limited to interpersonal relationships, and suggest that an ethic of care provides a route to realizing better societies as well as better treatment of distant others. Both Held and Sara Ruddick (1989) urge societal shifts to prioritize children’s vulnerabilities and the perspectives of mothers as necessary correctives to moral and political neglect of policies that would ensure the well-being of vulnerable people in relationships requiring care. This concern is further elaborated in Eva Feder Kittay’s attention to caregivers as “secondarily” or “derivatively dependent” (1999). In normative theory and applied ethics, care-work and caring in workplace relationships have come to receive more attention in twenty-first century philosophy than previously, as appreciation for the ethical demands of relational support-provision and client-centered or helping professions come to be influenced by variations on the ethic of care (Kittay 1999; Feder and Kittay 2002; Tronto 2005; Lanoix 2010; Reiheld 2015).

Robin Dillon observes that, “Care ethics was for some time the dominant approach in feminist ethics and so feminist discussions of virtue” (2017b, 574). Although the ethic of care continues to be strongly associated with feminist ethics, Gilligan’s work in psychology and Noddings’s work in philosophy were immediately contested (Superson 2012). Some feminist ethicists have argued that the ethic of care valorizes the burdened history of femininity associated with caring (Card 1996). The complex history of femininity and caregiving practices were shaped in contexts of oppression that may permit “moral damage” to women’s agency (Tessman 2005). If that burdened feminine history includes attention to particular relationships at the expense of attention to wider social institutions and systematic political injustice, then the ethic of care runs the risk of lacking a feminist vision for changing systematic and institutional forms of oppression (Hoagland 1990; Bell 1993). Further worries about the ethic of care include whether unidirectional caring enables the exploitation of caregivers (Houston 1990; Card 1990; Davion 1993), and whether such caring excludes moral responsibilities to strangers and individuals we may affect without meeting interpersonally (Card 1990), thereby risking an insular ethic that ignores political and material realities (Hoagland 1990). Another concern is whether we risk generalizing some women’s prioritizing caring to all women, which disregards the complex pluralism of many women’s voices (Moody-Adams 1991). Finally, preoccupation with women’s kinder and gentler feelings may prevent or distract from attention to women’s capacities for harm and injustice, especially the injustices borne of racial and class privilege (Spelman 1991).

The above criticisms tend to proceed from a view that it is problematic that an ethic of care is predicated on seeing femininity as valuable. They suggest that critical feminist perspectives require us to doubt the value of femininity. However, it remains controversial whether femininity is necessarily defined in relationship to masculinity and is thereby an inauthentic or insufficiently critical perspective for feminist ethics, or whether femininity is a distinctive contribution of moral and valuing agents to a feminist project that rejects or corrects some of the errors and excesses of legacies of masculinity (Irigaray 1985; Harding 1987; Tong 1993; Bartky 1990).

One way that some philosophers offer to resolve the possible tension between conceptions of femininity and feminism is to bring intersectional approaches to the question as to whose femininity is being discussed. Concerns that femininity is antithetical to a critical feminist perspective seem to presuppose a conception of femininity as passive, gentle, obedient, emotional, and dependent, in contrast with a conception of masculinity as its opposite. In a philosophical tradition dominated by white and masculine philosophers, describing femininity as necessarily the opposite of one’s conception of masculinity in a gender binary makes limited sense. Scholars of intersectionality point out, however, that identities are not binary: “the masculinity and femininity in play here are not racially unmarked (if only for the reason that gender is never racially unmarked)” (James 2013, 752). The insights of philosophers of Black Feminism, intersectionality, queer theory, critical race theory, disability studies, and transfeminism, among others, contribute to a view that there is no universal definition of femininity or of the category of woman that neatly applies to all women. Some of these philosophers suggest that the distinctive moral and valuing experiences of women and individuals of all genders may be unjustly ignored or denied by a conception of women or femininity that turns out to be white, ableist, and cisgender (Crenshaw 1991; Collins 1990; Wendell 1996; hooks 1992; Tremain 2000; Serano 2007; McKinnon 2014). Intersectional approaches reject binaries such as “masculinity/femininity” that tend to take the social positions of privileged people as generic. Minimally, intersectionality is “the predominant way of conceptualizing the relation between systems of oppression which construct our multiple identities and our social locations in hierarchies of power and privilege,” offering a remedy to histories of exclusions in feminist theory (Carastathis 2014, 304).

Although intersectional insights can be found in the works of writers even from the distant past, the predominance of intersectionality in feminist ethics today is largely owed to Black feminists and critical race theorists, who were the first to argue for the significance of intersectionality (Crenshaw 1989; Collins 1990; Gines 2014; Bailey 2009). Kimberlé Crenshaw describes intersectionality in different senses: as an experience, an approach, and a problem (Crenshaw 1989; Crenshaw 1991). Crenshaw’s description of intersectionality as an experience includes the phenomena of oppressive practices and harms that occur at, and because of, intersections of aspects of identity. For example, when Black men, but not any women, were permitted to work on a General Motors factory floor, and white women, but not any Black persons, were permitted to work in the General Motors secretarial pool, then Black women were discriminated against as Black women. That is, they were not permitted to have any job at General Motors due to living at an intersection of categories of identity that are treated separately in the law (Crenshaw 1989). Crenshaw’s description of intersectionality as an approach includes centering the lives and testimony of those whose experiences with living at intersections of oppressions have been ignored or denied in traditional philosophical and political theories (Crenshaw 1989; Crenshaw 1991; hooks 1984; Dotson 2014; Lorde 1990; Lugones 1987; Lugones 2014). Crenshaw’s description of intersectionality as a problem includes disrupting the traditional overlooking of Black women’s experiences, and offering the experiences and the approaches described above as challenges to the doctrine that discrimination occurs only along one axis of identity (Crenshaw 1989, 141). Intersectionality is pursued in the interests of expanding understandings of differences and accounting for the experiences of people previously spoken for, if addressed at all, rather than consulted.

Not all philosophers who embrace appreciation of the insights of intersectionality agree on whether it yields a distinct methodology, or a starting point for better inquiry, or a better conception of experiences of oppression (Khader 2013; Garry 2011). Serene Khader suggests that intersectional theories “are united by a critique of what Crenshaw (1991) calls ‘additive’ models of identity” that assume that individuals at intersections of traditionally oppressed identity categories are “necessarily worse off than the individual facing a single oppression,” as if each dimension on which one can be oppressed is easily separable in categories traditionally conceived in isolation (Khader 2013, 75). Instead, “intersectional theorists argue that the oppressions facing multiply oppressed women co-constitute one another and situate those women such that attempts to advance the interests of ‘all women’ may fail to advance theirs” (Khader 2013, 75).

Intersectionality is not without its critics in feminist ethics. For example, Naomi Zack (2005) argues that an intersectional approach to concepts such as that of woman successfully demonstrates problems with essentialism with respect to women’s natures, but degrades the category of woman, “multiplying axes of analysis and thus gender categories beyond necessity” (Bailey 2009, 21) to an extent that may thereby fragment attempts to advocate for women (Zack 2005; Ludvig 2006; Sengupta 2006). Some feminists who support intersectionality have responded to Zack’s concerns by arguing that everyday concepts such as woman include an array of identities, including distinct gender identities that bear a family resemblance and include a range of manifestations (Garry 2011). Other feminists have responded to Zack’s concerns for feminist movement or solidarity by arguing for the possibilities of working in coalitions that do not require widely shared commonality, working to learn from and about positions of difference, and cultivating more humility and less arrogance in theorizing (Lorde 1984; Lugones 1987; Reagon 2000; Bailey 2009; Carastathis 2014; Sheth 2014; Ruíz and Dotson 2017). Other feminist ethicists raise tensions in intersectional theory that are not intended to undermine the approach but to ask for elaboration of its details, including its very definition (Nash 2008). The appeal for these clarifications, however, may reflect traditions that intersectionality is dedicated to disrupting, since it is made in the context of the pursuit of justification, habits of opposition, and a narrow sense of definitional work that is typical in philosophy, a field that has a reputation for lacking appreciation for diverse practitioners (Dotson 2013).

If there is a commonality between all of the above feminist ethicists, it is their interest in provoking reconsideration of ethical theories that failed either to notice or to care when the perspective of the philosopher so criticized was taken for either a generic truth about moral theory or a gender-specific and false description of human nature. Elena Flores Ruíz observes that “professional philosophy sleepwalks ; its somnambulatory practices stroll silently, policing checkpoints without the burden of consciousness of its actions and practices” (2014, 199). In other words, philosophers have at times presumed that they speak for many without sufficient attention to their own presumptions. Ruíz’s claim is akin to Rosemarie Tong’s observation made decades earlier, that traditional ethical theory demonstrates “a sleepy inattentiveness to women’s concerns” (1993, 160). The provocation to alertness is evident in feminist critiques of traditional ethical theories such as deontology, consequentialism, social contract theory, and virtue ethics. Some feminist ethicists sympathetically extend canonical work to concerns that male theorists did not address, while other feminist ethicists resoundingly reject traditional ethical theories because the theories rely on a conception of moral agency or moral value with which they disagree.

2.4.1 Deontology, rights, and duties

Some feminist ethicists endorse deontological moral theories on the grounds that granting women—who have been subordinated in private and public spheres—the same rights routinely granted to men in positions of power would enable women’s freedom and flourishing, especially in contexts of political liberalism. Feminist ethicists have long argued that we should acknowledge women’s equal capacities for moral agency and extend human rights to them (Astell 1694; Wollstonecraft 1792; Stanton [1848] 1997; Mill [1869] 1987; Nussbaum 1999; Baehr 2004; Stone-Mediatore 2004; Hay 2013). While building on existing frameworks of liberalism, rights theory, and deontology, feminist ethicists have argued for granting rights where they have been previously neglected (Brennan 2010). They have argued for rights in the issues of enfranchisement (Truth [1867] 1995), reproduction (Steinbock 1994), abortion (Thomson 1971), bodily integrity (Varden 2012), women’s and non-heterosexual people’s sexuality (Goldman 2012; Cuomo 2007), sexual harassment (Superson 1993), pornography (Easton 1995), violence against women (Dauer and Gomez 2006), rape (MacKinnon 2006), and more. While recognizing limits to the universality of women’s experiences, feminist philosophers have argued for global human rights as a remedy for gendered oppression and dehumanization (Cudd 2005; Meyers 2016).

Feminist criticism of duty-centered frameworks, or, deontology, include those articulated by authors of the ethic of care, who argue against an ethic of duty, especially Kantian ethics, on several grounds. First, they claim that it proceeds from absolutist and universal principles which are unduly prioritized over consideration of the material contexts informing embodied experiences, particularities, and relationships. Second, they claim that it inaccurately separates capacities for rationality from capacities for emotion, and that it wrongly describes the latter as morally uninformative or worthless most likely because of their traditional association with women or femininity (Noddings 1984; Held 1993; Slote 2007). Moreover, an ethic of duty is likely to overly idealize moral agents’ capacities for rationality and choice (Tronto 1995; Tessman 2015). Some feminist ethicists embrace forms of obligation yet reject Kantian deontology when it denies the possibility of moral dilemmas (Tessman 2015). Feminists who argue that duties are socially constructed, rather than a priori, ground the nature of obligations in the normative practices of the nonideal world (Walker 1998; Walker 2003).

Transnational feminists, scholars of intersectionality, and postcolonial feminists argue that feminist advocates of global human rights routinely impose their own cultural expectations and regional practices upon the women who are purportedly the objects of their concern (Mohanty 1997; Narayan 1997; Narayan 2002; Silvey 2009; Narayan 2013; Khader 2018a; Khader 2018b). Critical analyses of some feminist deontologists’ concerns include arguments that universal morals, rights, and duties are not the best bulwark against relativist condonation of any and all possible treatments of women and subordinated people (Khader 2018b) and suggest that advocacy of human rights is perhaps well-intentioned but “entangled with imperialist precommitments in the contemporary West” (Khader 2018a, 19).

2.4.2 Consequentialism and utilitarianism

Since John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill argued both for utilitarianism and against the subjection of women, one could say that there have been feminists as long as there have been utilitarians. In The Subjection of Women ([1869] 1987), Mill argues that the desirable outcome of human moral progress generally is hindered by women’s legal and social subordination. He adds that not only each woman’s, but each man’s personal moral character is directly harmed by the injustice of unequal social arrangements (Okin 2005). Mill expresses special concern that “the object of being attractive to men had … become the polar star of feminine education and formation of character,” an immoral “influence over the minds of women” (Mill [1869] 1987, 28–29), as well as an immoral influence on the understandings of the boys and girls that such women raise. Consistent with the utilitarian principle that everyone counts equally and no single person’s preferences count more than another’s, Mill argues that men and women are fundamentally equal in their capacities for higher and lower pleasures and, arguably, in their responsibilities and interests (Mendus 1994). Harriet Taylor likewise argues in The Enfranchisement of Women for the moral improvement of humankind generally and “the elevation of character [and] intellect” that would permit each woman and man to be both morally better and happier, which are overlapping and important considerations to Taylor (1998, 65).

Contemporary feminist ethicists who address utilitarianism either critique Mill’s work in particular (Annas 1977; Mendus 1994; Morales 2005), or defend a feminist version of consequentialism (Driver 2005; Gardner 2012), or apply consequentialist aims to feminist issues (Tulloch 2005; Dea 2016b). Some consequentialist feminists provide reasons for thinking that utilitarianism can accommodate feminist aims because it is responsive to empirical information, can accommodate the value of relationships in good lives, and is appreciative of distinctive vulnerabilities (Driver 2005).

Critics of utilitarianism include those who specifically resist the expectation of utilitarian impartiality, insofar as impartiality in decision-making ignores emotional connections or personal relationships with particular beings. Feminists have advanced criticisms of impartiality from the points of view of care ethics (Noddings 1984; Held 2006; Ruddick 1989), ecofeminist or environmental ethics (Adams 1990; Donovan 1990; George 1994; Warren 2000), and analytical social ethics (Baier 1994; Friedman 1994). Impartiality may yield implausible requirements to value the well-being of all equally regardless of one’s commitments, material circumstances in a nonideal world, or obligations of caring (Walker 1998; Walker 2003). Impartiality as a desirable quality of moral agents may overly idealize moral agency (Tessman 2015) or tacitly presume a biased perspective in favor of adult, racially privileged, masculine agents in a formal or public sphere whose decisions are unencumbered by relationships of unequal power (Kittay 1999).

Some feminists criticize consequentialism for failing to capture the qualitatively problematic nature of oppressions that are not reducible to harms (Frye 1983; Card 1996; Young 2009). For example, Card argues that even if certain behavior does not produce more harm than good, its symbolism could violate one’s dignity. Her example is the case of women being barred from Harvard’s Lamont Law library even when helpful male classmates provided them photocopies of course readings (2002, 104–105). Card also objects on Rawlsian grounds that the wrongness of slavery was not the balance of benefits and harms, contra consequentialism, but the fact that trade-offs could never justify slavery (2002, 57).

Anti-imperialist and non-Western feminists argue that Mill’s views in particular purport to be universal but include “Western European biases and instrumental reasoning” that establish “problematic rhetorical models for women’s rights arguments” (Botting and Kronewitter 2012). For example, Eileen Botting and Sean Kronewitter argue that The Subjection of Women contains several examples of primitivist and Orientalist rhetorical moves, such as associating “the barbarism of patriarchal marriage with Eastern cultures and religions” (2012, 471). They also object that Mill offers instrumental arguments for women’s rights, such as favoring the reduction of men’s selfishness and the increase in men’s intellectual stimulation in marriage, as well as doubling mental resources for the higher service of humanity (2012, 470), suggesting that women’s liberation is secondary to greater purposes.

2.4.3 Moral contractarianism

Some feminist ethicists argue for forms of contractarian ethics, that is, the view “that moral norms derive their normative force from the idea of contract or mutual agreement” (Cudd and Eftekhari 2018). Contractarian ethics permit moral agents to critically assess the value of any relationship, especially family relationships that may be oppressive on gendered dimensions (Okin 1989; Hampton 1993; Sample 2002; Radzik 2005). Other feminist contractarians appreciate Hobbes’s social contract theory for its applicability to women in positions of vulnerability. For example, Jean Hampton endorses Hobbes’s view that “you are under no obligation to make yourself prey to others” (Hampton 1998, 236). Hampton combines insights of both Kant and Hobbes in her version of feminist contractarianism, “building in the Kantian assumption that all persons have intrinsic value and thus must have their interests respected” (Superson 2012; see also Richardson 2007). Contractarianism arguably corrects gross injustices and inequities traceable to gendered oppressions and the most serious evils that are socially constructed (Anderson 1999; Hartley and Watson 2010).

Some feminists argue for the usefulness of contractarian ethics to evaluate one’s adaptive preferences, that is, “preferences formed in unconscious response to oppression” (Walsh 2015, 829). For example, Mary Barbara Walsh argues that social contract theory models “the conditions of autonomous choice, independence and dialogical reflection,” and therefore “exposes preferences that fail to meet” the conditions of autonomy. Feminist contractarianism may thereby generate new understandings of social contracts grounded in appreciation of material conditions, commitments, and consent (Stark 2007; Welch 2012). Feminist contractarians whose moral theories are influenced by John Rawls’s political philosophy suggest that his methodology, which involves reasoning from behind a veil of ignorance to decide which rules persons are rational to agree to, promotes critical appraisal of preferences that one would not hold in a better world (Richardson 2007, 414).

Feminist critics of contractarianism also raise concerns about adaptive preferences. In the actual, nonideal conditions in which individuals and groups develop, dominant perspectives and oppressive social arrangements can make persons come to prefer things that they would not otherwise prefer, such that the resultant preferences, when satisfied, are not for the agent’s own good, and may even contribute to her group’s oppression (Superson 2012). Feminists who are concerned that not all moral agents can meaningfully consent to contracts point to examples of women who are denied access to the public sphere, the market, education, and information (Held 1987; Pateman 1988). Others point out that traditionally, social contract theory has not attended to the inclusion of the needs of children, disabled community members, or their caregivers (Held 1987; Kittay 1999; Edenberg and Friedman 2013). Feminist critics of contractarianism tend to argue both for full consideration of needs born of differences between bodies and social locations, and against describing gender, embodiment, or dependency as a mere secondary characteristic irrelevant to what a body in need of care requires to flourish and thus what a “reasonable man” would choose behind a veil of ignorance (Nussbaum 2006; Pateman and Mills 2007).

2.4.4 Virtue ethics

Some feminist ethicists contend that virtue ethics, which focuses on living a good life or flourishing, offers the best approach to ensuring that ethical theory correctly represents the conditions permitting vulnerable bodies to flourish in oppressive contexts. Although virtue ethics is most notably associated with Aristotle, whose idealized and masculine agent is not generally considered paradigmatically feminist (Berges 2015, 3–4), feminists and their forerunners have engaged critically for several centuries with questions about which virtues and qualities of character would promote a good life in the context of what we now describe as women’s subordination. Philosophers who argue for feminist ethical virtues raise concerns that sexist oppression presents challenges to the exercise of virtues on the part of women and gender non-conforming people. Robin Dillon observes that feminist virtue ethics “identifies problems for character in contexts of domination and subordination and proposes ways of addressing those problems, and it identifies problems of unreflective theory and proposes power-conscious alternatives” (2017a, 381). Because the history of traditional virtue ethics is freighted with past characterizations of virtues as either gendered or as universal but less accessible to women, Dillon proposes what she calls “feminist critical character ethics” as an alternative to feminist virtue ethics (2017a, 380). Advocates of feminist virtue ethics and critical character ethics consider the relationships of gender to accounts of character, virtues, vices, and good lives (Baier 1994; Card 1996; Cuomo 1998; Calhoun 1999; Dillon 2017a; Snow 2002; Tessman 2005; Green and Mews 2011; Berges 2015; Broad 2015; Harvey 2018).

Like the ethic of care, virtue ethics is often described as offering a theory that is not beholden to abstract and universal principles (Groenhout 2014), but instead acknowledges “that moral reasoning might be an extraordinarily complex phenomenon …, a view on which what the ethical life requires of us cannot be codified or reduced to a single principle or set of principles” (Moody-Adams 1991, 209–210). A further commonality between care and virtue that is of interest to feminists is that “virtue theory, like care ethics, rejects a simplistic dichotomy between reason and emotion, and does not begin from the assumption that all human beings are essentially equal” (Groenhout 2014, 487). Ethical theories of virtue or character tend to appreciate the importance of emotions and interpersonal relationships to a person’s moral development. Some virtue ethics also focus on what opportunities for virtue are available to agents in particular social contexts, which is useful in feminist ethics when it comes to delineating our responsibilities as relational beings and as characters who may exhibit vices resulting from oppression (Bartky 1990; Potter 2001; Bell 2009; Tessman 2009a; Slote 2011; Boryczka 2012).

Indeed, the ethic of care bears so many important similarities to virtue ethics that some authors have argued that a feminist ethic of care just is a form or a subset of virtue ethics (Groenhout 1998; Slote 1998; McLaren 2001; Halwani 2003). Others believe that at a minimum, care and virtue ethics should inform each other and are compatible with each other (Benner 1997; Sander-Staudt 2006). Here, too, however, feminist ethicists disagree. Some contend that lumping together care and virtue might render the complexity of moral experiences and available moral responses less understandable rather than more articulate (Groenhout 2014). Others suggest that this consolidation might overlook important theoretical distinctions, including the capacity for virtue ethics to be gender-neutral while the ethic of care maintains a commitment to embodied, particular, and gendered experiences (Sander-Staudt 2006).

Virtue ethics provides wider opportunities for feminist ethics to attend to virtues such as integrity and courage in oppressive contexts that the ethic of care tends not to prioritize (Davion 1993; Sander-Staudt 2006). Resistance itself may be a “burdened virtue,” which is Lisa Tessman’s term for virtues that allow moral agents, even ones damaged by oppression, to endure and resist oppression, permitting a form of nobility that falls short of eudaimonia (Tessman 2005). Tessman argues that when agents live under conditions of systemic injustice, their opportunities to flourish are blocked and their pursuits may even be hopeless. She suggests that “the burdened virtues include all those traits that make a contribution to human flourishing—if they succeed in doing so at all—only because they enable survival of or resistance to oppression …, while in other ways they detract from their bearer's well-being, in some cases so deeply that their bearer may be said to lead a wretched life” (Tessman 2005, 95). Feminist ethicists have explored virtues that permit the sort of “conditioned flourishing” that Tessman describes (2009, 14), extending discussion of the virtues to specific applications in nonideal circumstances in which vulnerability is fundamental to the nature of a moral agent (Nussbaum 1986; Card 1996; Walker 2003). For example, feminists have argued for distinctive virtues in contexts such as whistleblowing and organizational resistance (DesAutels 2009), healthcare (Tong 1998), and ecological activism (Cuomo 1998).

Feminist criticisms of the limits of virtue ethics point to its emphasis on the personal as potentially problematic when it comes to “accounting for the possibility of social criticism and resistance on the part of the self who is constituted by the very social relationships and cultural traditions that would be the target of her resistance” (Friedman 1993). Virtue ethics may also include intrusive requirements to self-evaluate one’s every feeling or practice to an extent that an ethic of duty, for example, would not require (Conly 2001). Some care ethicists, most notably Nel Noddings (1984), argue that virtue ethics can be overly self-regarding rather than attentive to the point of view of another, and that it locates moral motivation in rational, abstract, and idealized conceptions of the good life rather than in the natural well-spring of moral motivation that is generated by encounters with particular persons.

As is evident from the foregoing, feminist ethics is not monolithic. Feminists have sometimes clashed over being essentialist or anti-essentialist. Some feminist work is authored by members of privileged groups, while other feminist work is written by and attends to concerns of those in marginalized groups. Some feminists have located solidarity in commonality, while others advocate coalition in the presence of intersectionality. The different approaches of feminists to ethics raise questions as to whether feminist ethics can be either universalist or absolutist. Feminists have observed that just as some men in the history of philosophy have falsely universalized from their own experience to describe the experiences of all humans, some feminists have presumed false universal categories of women or feminists that elide differences between women or presume to speak for all women (Grimshaw 1996; Herr 2014; Tremain 2015). Relatedly, some feminist philosophers have criticized absolutism in ethical theory, that is, the prioritization of rigorous applications of principles to ethical situations regardless of the particularities of context or the motivations of the individuals affected, in part because absolutism, like universalism, takes the absolutists’ priorities to be rational for all (Noddings 1984; Baier 1994). Feminist ethicists who have endorsed visions of universal human rights as liberating for all women have been criticized by other feminists as engaging in absolutism in ways that may prescribe solutions for women in different locations and social situations rather than attending to the perspectives of the women described as needing such rights (Khader 2018b; Herr 2014).

The predominant association of feminist ethics with an ethic of care, which is dichotomous with traditional ethical theories on many levels, together with decades of feminist critiques of the work of canonical absolutist theorists, might lead to a perception that feminist ethics is fundamentally opposed to universalism and absolutism in ethics. This perception, however, is not built into the nature of feminist ethics, which has been employed to understand, criticize, and correct the role of gender in our moral beliefs and practices by deontologists, utilitarians, contractarians, and virtue ethicists, who hold some universal principles or absolute requirements to be basic to their views. However, it is evident that the preponderance of scholarship in feminist ethics tends to prioritize all of the following: the moral contexts in which differently situated and differently gendered agents operate, the testimony and perspectives of the situated agent, the power relationships and political relationships manifest in moral encounters, the vulnerabilities of embodied actors that yield a plurality of approaches to ethical situations, and the degrees of agency or capacity that are shaped by experiences with oppression and misogyny. Such priorities tend not to result in relativism, though they certainly depart from rigid forms of absolutism. Feminist ethics is often expressed in morally plural ways, including pragmatism (Hamington and Bardwell-Jones 2012), transnationalism (Jaggar 2013; Herr 2014; McLaren 2017; Khader 2018b), nonideal theory (Mills 2005; Schwartzman 2006; Tessman 2009b; Norlock 2016), and disability theory (Wendell 1996; Garland-Thomson 2011; Tremain 2015).

The following sub-entries included under “feminism (topics)” in the Table of Contents to this Encyclopedia are relevant to the multiplicity of applications of feminist ethics:

• feminist perspectives on autonomy
• feminist perspectives on class and work
• feminist perspectives on disability
• feminist perspectives on globalization
• feminist perspectives on objectification
• feminist perspectives on power
• feminist perspectives on rape
• feminist perspectives on reproduction and the family
• feminist perspectives on science
• feminist perspectives on sex and gender
• feminist perspectives on sex markets
• feminist perspectives on the body
• feminist perspectives on the self
• feminist perspectives on trans issues

See also the entries in the Related Entries section below.

• Adams, Carol J., 1990, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory , London: Bloomsbury.
• Anderson, Elizabeth S., 1999, “What is the Point of Equality?”, Ethics , 109: 287–337
• Andrew, Barbara S., 2003, “Beauvoir’s Place in Philosophical Thought,” in C. Card (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 22–44.
• Annas, Julia, 1977, “Mill and the Subjection of Women,” Philosophy , 52 (200): pp. 179–194.
• Astell, Mary, and P. Springborg (ed.), 1694, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies , Broadview Press, 2002.
• Ayala, Saray, and Nadya Vasilyeva, 2015, “Extended Sex: An Account of Sex for a More Just Society,” Hypatia , 30 (4): 725–742.
• Baehr, Amy R. (ed.), 2004, Varieties of Feminist Liberalism , Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.
• Baier, Annette, 1994, Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics , Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Bailey, Alison, 2009, “On Intersectionality, Empathy, and Feminist Solidarity: A Reply to Naomi Zack,” in The Journal for Peace and Justice Studies , 19 (1): 14–36.
• Bartky, Sandra L., 1990, Femininity and Domination Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression , New York: Routledge.
• Beauvoir, Simone, The Ethics of Ambiguity , New York: Citadel Press, 1976; reference is to the translation by B. Frechtman, 1976.
• –––, 1949, The Second Sex , New York: Vintage, 2011; reference is to the reprint in Borde and Malovany, 2011.
• Bell, Linda, 1993, Rethinking Ethics in the Midst of Violence: A Feminist Approach to Freedom , Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.
• Bell, Macalester, 2009, “Anger, Oppression, and Virtue,” in L. Tessman (ed.), Feminist Ethics and Social and Political Philosophy: Theorizing the Non-Ideal , New York: Springer, pp. 165-183.
• Benner, Patricia, 1997, “A Dialogue Between Virtue Ethics and Care Ethics,” Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics , 18 (1–2): 47–61.
• Berges, Sandrine, 2015, A Feminist Perspective on Virtue Ethics , London: Palgrave-Macmillan.
• Bettcher, Talia, 2014, “Feminist Perspectives on Trans Issues,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/feminism-trans/ >.
• –––, 2013, “Trans Women and ‘Interpretive Intimacy’: Some Initial Reflections,” in D. M. Castañeda (ed.), The Essential Handbook of Women's Sexuality , Santa Barbara: Praeger, pp. 51–68.
• Blum, Lawrence A., 1988, “Gilligan and Kohlberg: Implications for Moral Theory,” Ethics, 98 (3): 472–491.
• Boryczka, Jocelyn, 2012, Suspect Citizens: Women, Virtue, and Vice in Backlash Politics , Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
• Botting, Eileen H., and Sean Kronewitter, 2012, “Westernization and Women's Rights: Non-Western European Responses to Mill's Subjection of Women, 1869–1908,” Political Theory , 40 (4): 466–496.
• Brennan, Samantha, 2010, “Feminist Ethics,” in J. Skorupski (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Ethics , London: Routledge.
• Broad, Jacqueline, 2015, The Philosophy of Mary Astell: An Early Modern Theory of Virtue , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Butler, Judith, 1993, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” , London: Routledge.
• –––, 1990, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity , London: Routledge.
• Calhoun, Cheshire, 1999, “Moral Failure,” in C. Card (ed.), On Feminist Ethics and Politics , Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, pp. 81–99.
• Carastathis, Anna, 2014, “The Concept of Intersectionality in Feminist Theory,” in Philosophy Compass , 9 (5): 304–314.
• Card, Claudia, 1988, “Female Friendships: Separation and Continua,” Hypatia , 3 (2): 123–130.
• –––, 1990, “Review: Caring and Evil,” Hypatia , 5 (1): 101–108.
• –––, 1986, “Review: Oppression and Resistance: Frye's Politics of Reality,” Hypatia , 1 (1): 149–166.
• –––, 2003, The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 1996, The Unnatural Lottery: Character and Moral Luck , Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
• –––, 2008, “Unnatural Lotteries and Diversity in Philosophy,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association , 82 (2): 85–99.
• Collins, Patricia Hill, 1990, Black Feminist Thought , Boston: Unwin Hyman.
• Conly, Sarah, 2001, “Why Feminists Should Oppose Feminist Virtue Ethics,” Philosophy Now , 33: 12–14.
• Cooper, Anna J., 1892, A Voice From the South , Xenia: The Aldine Printing House, 2000, available online .
• Cott, Nancy F., 1987, The Grounding of Modern Feminism , New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Crenshaw, Kimberlé, 1989, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” The University of Chicago Legal Forum , 140: 139–67.
• –––, 1991, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review , 43 (6): 1241–1299.
• Cudd, Ann E., 2005, “Missionary Positions,” Hypatia , 20 (4): 164–182.
• Cudd, Ann and Eftekhari, Seena, “Contractarianism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/contractarianism/ >.
• Cuomo, Chris, 2007, “Dignity and the Right To Be Lesbian or Gay,” in Philosophical Studies , 132 (1): 75–85.
• –––, 1998, Feminism and Ecological Communities: An Ethic of Flourishing , New York: Routledge.
• Daly, Mary, 1979, Gyn /Ecology the Metaethics of Radical Feminism , Boston: Beacon Press.
• Davion, Victoria, 1993, “Autonomy, Integrity, and Care,” Social Theory and Practice , 19(2): 161–182.
• –––, 1998, “How Feminist is Ecofeminism?”, in D. V. Veer and C. Pierce (eds.), The Environmental Ethics and Policy Book , Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing, pp. 278–284.
• Davis, Angela Y., 2011, Women, Race, and Class , New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
• Dauer, Sheila, and Mayra Gomez, 2006, “Violence Against Women and Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in Africa,” Human Rights Review , 7 (2): 49–58.
• Dea, Shannon, 2016a, Beyond the Binary: Thinking About Sex and Gender , Broadview Press.
• –––, 2016b, “A Harm Reduction Approach to Abortion,” in S. Stettner (ed.), Without Apology: Writings on Abortion in Canada , Edmonton: Athabasca University Press, pp. 317–332.
• DesAutels, Peggy, 2009, “Resisting Organizational Power,” in L. Tessman (ed.), Feminist Ethics and Social and Political Philosophy: Theorizing the Non-Ideal , New York: Springer. pp. 223-236.
• Dillon, Robin, 2017a, “Feminist Approaches to Virtue Ethics,” in Nancy E. Snow (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Virtue, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 377–397.
• –––, 2017b, “Feminist Virtue Ethics,” in Ann Garry, Serene J. Khader, and Alison Stone (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy , New York: Routledge, pp. 568–578.
• Donovan, Josephine, 1990, “Animal Rights and Feminist Theory,” Signs , 15 (2), 350–375.
• Dotson, Kristie, 2013, “How is this Paper Philosophy?” in Comparative Philosophy , 3 (1): 3–29.
• –––, 2014, “Thinking Familiar with the Interstitial: An Introduction,” Hypatia , 29 (1): 1–17.
• Driver, Julia, 2005, “Consequentialism and Feminist Ethics,” Hypatia , 20 (4): 183–199.
• Easton, Susan, 1995, “Taking Women's Rights Seriously: Integrity and the ‘Right’ to Consume Pornography,” Res Publica , 1 (2): 183–198.
• Edenberg, Elizabeth, and Marilyn Friedman, 2013, “Debate: Unequal Consenters and Political Illegitimacy,” Journal of Political Philosophy , 21 (3): 347–360.
• Firestone, Shulamith, 1970, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case For Feminist Revolution , New York: Morrow.
• Fiala, Andrew, 2018, “Anarchism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2018/entries/anarchism/ >.
• Frankel, Lois, 1989, “Damaris Cudworth Masham: A Seventeenth Century Feminist Philosopher,” Hypatia , 4 (1): 80–90.
• Friedman, Marilyn, 1991, “The Practice of Partiality,” Ethics , 101 (4): 818–835.
• –––, 1993, What Are Friends For? Feminist Perspectives on Personal Relationships and Moral Theory , Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
• Frye, Marilyn, 1983, The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory , Trumansburg: Crossing Press.
• Gardner, Catherine Villanueva, 2012, Empowerment and Interconnectivity: Toward a Feminist History of Utilitarian Philosophy , University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
• Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie, 2011, “Misfits: A Feminist Materialist Disability Concept,” Hypatia , 26 (3): 591–609.
• Garry, Ann, 2017, "Analytic Feminism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2017/entries/femapproach-analytic/ > .
• –––, 2011, “Intersectionality, Metaphors, and the Multiplicity of Gender,” in Hypatia , 26 (4): 826–850.
• George, Kathryn P., 1994, “Discrimination and Bias in the Vegan Ideal,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics , 7 (1): 19–28.
• Giddings, Paula J., 2007, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America , New York: HarperCollins.
• Gilligan, Carol, 1982, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development , Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 1932, “Birth Control, Religion and the Unfit,” thenation.com , January 27, available online .
• –––, 1966, Women and Economics , New York: Harper and Row.
• Gines, Kathryn T., 2015, “Anna Julia Cooper,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2015 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2015/entries/anna-julia-cooper/ >
• –––, 2014, “Race Women, Race Men and Early Expressions of Proto-Intersectionality, 1930s-1930s,” in O. Goswami and L. Yount (eds.), Why Race and Gender Still Matter: An Intersectional Approach , New York: Routledge.
• Goldman, Emma, and R. Drinnon (ed.), 1969, Anarchism and Other Essays , New York: Dover Publications, 2012.
• Green, Karen, and Constant J. Mews, 2011, Virtue Ethics for Women 1250–1500 , New York: Springer.
• Griffin, Susan, 1978, Woman and Nature , New York: Harper and Row.
• Grimshaw, Jean, 1996, “Philosophy, feminism and universalism,” Radical Philosophy , 76: 19–28.
• Groenhout, Ruth E., 1998, “The Virtue of Care: Aristotelian Ethics and Contemporary Ethics of Care,” in C. Freeland (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle , University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 171–200.
• –––, 2014, “Virtue and a Feminist Ethics of Care,” in K. Timpe and C. Boyd (eds.), Virtues and Their Vices , Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 481–501.
• Gruen, Lori, 2015, Entangled Empathy: An Alternative Ethic for Our Relationships with Animals , New York: Lantern Books.
• Halwani, Raja, 2003, “Care Ethics and Virtue Ethics,” Hypatia , 18 (3): 161–192.
• Hamington, Maurice, and Celia Bardwell-Jones, 2012, Contemporary Feminist Pragmatism , London: Routledge.
• Hampton, Jean, 1993, “Feminist Contractarianism,” in L. Antony and C. Witt (eds.), A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity , Boulder: Westview.
• Harding, Sandra, 1987, “The Curious Coincidence of Feminine and African Moralities: Challenges for Feminist Theory,” in Kittay, E. F. and D. T. Meyers (eds.), Women and Moral Theory , Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. pp. 296–315.
• –––, 1986, The Science Question in Feminism , Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
• Hartley, Christie, and Lori Watson, 2010, “Is Feminist Political Liberalism Possible?”, Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy , 5 (1): 121–148.
• Harvey, Celeste, 2018, “Eudaimonism, Human Nature, and the Burdened Virtues,” Hypatia , 33 (1): 40–55.
• Haslanger, Sally, 2012, Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Hay, Carol, 2013, Kantianism, Liberalism, and Feminism: Resisting Oppression , London: Palgrave-Macmillan.
• Held, Virginia, 1993, Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics , Chicago: University of Chicago Press
• –––, (ed.), 1995, Justice and Care: Essential Readings in Feminist Ethics , Boulder: Westview Press.
• –––, 1987, “Non-Contractual Society: A Feminist View,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy , 17 (1): 111–137.
• –––, 2006, The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Herr, Ranjoo S., 2014, “Reclaiming Third World Feminism: Or Why Transnational Feminism Needs Third World Feminism,” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism , 12 (1): 1–30. 10.2979/meridians.12.1.1
• Hoagland, Sarah L., 1988, Lesbian Ethics , Palo Alto: Institute of Lesbian Studies.
• –––, 1990, “Review: Some Concerns about Nel Noddings' ‘Caring’,” in Hypatia , 5 (1): 109–114.
• hooks, bell, 1984, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center , New York: Routledge.
• –––, 1992, “Is Paris Burning?”, Black Looks: Race and Representation , Boston: South End Press, pp. 145–156.
• Houston, Barbara, 1987, “Rescuing Womanly Virtues: Some Dangers of Moral Reclamation,” in M. Hanen and K. Nielsen (eds.), Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Calgary: University of Calgary Press, pp. 237–262.
• Houston, Barbara, 1990, “Review: Caring and Exploitation,” Hypatia , 5 (1): 115–119.
• Irigaray, Luce, 1985, This Sex Which Is Not One , Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
• Jaggar, Alison M., 2013, “Does Poverty Wear a Woman's Face? Some Moral Dimensions of a Transnational Feminist Research Project,” Hypatia , 28 (2): 240–256.
• –––, 1991, “Feminist Ethics: Project, Problems, Prospects,” in Card, C. (ed.) Feminist Ethics , Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, pp. 78–104.
• –––, 1974, “On Sexual Equality,” Ethics , Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 84 (4): 275–291.
• James, Joy, 1997, “Sexual Politics,” Transcending the Talented Tenth: Black Leaders and American Intellectuals , New York: Routledge, pp. 61–82.
• James, Robin, 2013, “Race and the Feminized Popular in Nietzsche and Beyond,” Hypatia , 28 (4): 749–766.
• Khader, Serene J., 2018a, “Victims' Stories and the Postcolonial Politics of Empathy,” Metaphilosophy , 49 (1–2): 13–26.
• –––, 2018b, Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2013, “Intersectionality and the Ethics of Transnational Commercial Surrogacy,” International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics , Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 6 (1): 68–90.
• Kittay, Eva F., 1999, Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency , New York: Routledge.
• Kittay, Eva F., and Ellen K. Feder (eds.), 2002, The Subject of Care: Feminist Perspectives on Dependency , Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.
• Kohlberg, Lawrence, 1982, “A Reply to Owen Flanagan,” Ethics , 92: 513–528.
• Korsmeyer, Carolyn, 1973, “Reason and Morals in the Early Feminist Movement: Mary Wollstonecraft,” in Philosophical Forum (Boston) , 5: 97–111.
• LaBrada, Eloy, 2016, “Categories We Die For: Ameliorating Gender in Analytic Feminist Philosophy,” PMLA , 131 (2): 449–459.
• Lamp, Sharon, and W. Carol Cleigh, (2011), “A Heritage of Ableist Rhetoric in American Feminism from the Eugenics Period,” in Kim Q. Hall, (ed.), Feminist Disability Studies , Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 175–189.
• Landes, Joan, 2016, “The History of Feminism: Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2016/entries/histfem-condorcet/ >.
• Lanoix, Monique, 2010, “Triangulating Care,” International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics , 3 (1): 138–157.
• Lindemann, Hilde (ed.), 2005, An Invitation to Feminist Ethics , McGraw-Hill.
• Lorde, Audre, 1984, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches , Berkeley: Crossing Press.
• –––, 1990, Foreword, In Wild Women in the Whirlwind: Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance , J. Braxton and A. McLaughlin (eds.,), New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
• Ludvig, Alice, 2006, “Differences Between Women? Intersecting Voices in a Female Narrative,” European Journal of Women’s Studies , 13 (3): 245–258.
• Lugones, Maria, 2014, “Musing: Reading the Nondiasporic From Within Diasporas,” Hypatia , 29 (1): 18–22.
• –––, 1987, “Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception,” Hypatia , 2 (2): 3–19.
• MacKinnon, Catharine A., 2006, Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues , Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 1989, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State , Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Marso, Lori J., 2010, “A Feminist Search for Love: Emma Goldman on the Politics of Marriage, Love, Sexuality, and the Feminine,” in P. A. Weiss and L. Kensinger (eds.), Feminist Interpretations of Emma Goldman , University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
• McKinnon, Rachel, 2014, “Stereotype Threat and Attributional Ambiguity for Trans Women,” Hypatia , 29 (1): 857–872.
• McLaren, Margaret A., (ed.), 2017, Decolonizing Feminism , Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.
• –––, 2001, “Feminist Ethics: Care as a Virtue,” in P. DesAutels and J. Waugh (eds.), Feminists Doing Ethics , Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 101–118.
• Mendus, Susan, 1994, “John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor on Women and Marriage,” Utilitas , 6 (2): 287–299.
• Meyers, Diana T., 2016, Victims’ Stories and the Advancement of Human Rights , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Midgley, Clare, 1993, “Anti-Slavery and Feminism,” Gender & History , 5 (3): 343–362.
• Mikkola, Mari, 2016, The Wrong of Injustice: Dehumanization and its Role in Feminist Philosophy , New York: Oxford University Press USA.
• Mill, Harriet Taylor, 1851, The Complete Works of Harriet Taylor Mill , in J. E. Jacobs (ed.), Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.
• Mill, John S., 1869, Three Essays: On Liberty, Representative Government, The Subjection of Women , R. Wollheim, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.
• Mills, Charles W., 2005, “‘Ideal theory’ as Ideology,” Hypatia , 20 (3): 165–183.
• Mohanty, Chandra T., 1997, “Women Workers and Capitalist Scripts: Ideologies of Domination, Common Interests, and the Politics of Solidarity,” in M. J. Alexander and C. T. Mohanty (eds.), Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures , New York: Routledge.
• Moody-Adams, Michele M., 1991, “Gender and the Complexity of Moral Voices,” in C. Card (ed.), Feminist Ethics , Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, pp. 195–212.
• Morales, Maria H, 2005, Mill's The Subjection of Women: Critical Essays , Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.
• Moses, Claire G., 1982, “Saint-Simonian Men/Saint-Simonian Women: The Transformation of Feminist Thought in 1830s' France,” The Journal of Modern History , 54 (2): 240–267.
• Narayan, Uma, 1997, Dislocating Cultures , New York: Routledge.
• –––, 2013, Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third World Feminism , New York: Routledge.
• –––, 2002, “Minds of Their Own: Choices, Autonomy, Cultural Practices, and Other Women,” in L. Antony and C. Witt (eds.), A Mind of One's Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity , Boulder: Westview, pp. 418–432.
• Nash, Jennifer C., 2008, “Rethinking Intersectionality,” Feminist Review , 89 (1): 1–15.
• Noddings, Nel, 1984, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education , Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
• –––, 2013, Caring: A Relational Approach to Ethics and Moral Education , Second Edition, Updated, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
• Norlock, Kathryn J., 2016, “The Challenges of Extreme Moral Stress: Claudia Card's Contributions to the Formation of Nonideal Ethical Theory,” Metaphilosophy , 47 (4–5): 488–503.
• Nussbaum, Martha, 1986, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, (ed.), 2006, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership , Cambridge: Belknap Press.
• –––, 1999, Sex and Social Justice , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Offen, Karen, 1988, “On the French Origin of the Words Feminism and Feminist,” Feminist Issues , 8 (2): 45–51.
• Okin, Susan Moller, 1989, Justice, Gender, and the Family , New York: Basic Books Inc.
• –––, 2005, “The Subjection of Women and the Improvement of Mankind,” in M. H. Morales (ed.), Mill's The Subjection of Women: Critical Essays , Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 24–51.
• Pateman, Carol,1988, The Sexual Contract , Stanford: Stanford University Press.
• Pateman, Carol and Charles Mills, 2007, Contract and Domination , Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Potter, Nancy, 2001, “Is Refusing to Forgive a Vice?”, in P. DesAutels and J. Waugh (eds.), Feminists Doing Ethics , Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 135–150.
• Radzik, Linda, 2005, “Justice in the Family: A Defence of Feminist Contractarianism,” Journal of Applied Philosophy , 22 (1): 45–54.
• Reagon, Bernice J., 2000, “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century,” in B. Smith (ed.), Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology , New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, pp. 343–356.
• Reiheld, Alison, 2015, “Just Caring for Caregivers: What Society and the State Owe to Those Who Render Care,” Feminist Philosophy Quarterly , 1 (2): pp. 1–24.
• Richardson, Janice, 2007, “Contemporary Feminist Perspectives on Social Contract Theory,” Ratio Juris , 20 (3): 402–423.
• Rosenthal, Abigail L., 1973, “Feminism Without Contradictions,” Monist: An International Quarterly Journal of General Philosophical Inquiry , 15: 28–42.
• Ruddick, Sara, 1989, “Maternal Thinking,” in Trebilcot, A. (ed.), Mothering: Essays in Feminist Theory , Totowa: Rowman and Allanheld, pp. 213–230.
• Ruíz, Elena, and Kristie Dotson, 2017, “On the Politics of Coalition,” Feminist Philosophy Quarterly , 3 (2). doi:10.5206/fpq/2017.2.4
• Ruíz, Elena F., 2014, “Musing: Spectral Phenomenologies: Dwelling Poetically in Professional Philosophy,” Hypatia , 29 (1): 196–204.
• Sample, Ruth, 2002, “Why Feminist Contractarianism?”, Journal of Social Philosophy , 33 (2): 257–281.
• Sander-Staudt, Maureen, 2006, “The Unhappy Marriage of Care Ethics and Virtue Ethics,” Hypatia , 21 (4), Indiana: Indiana University Press, pp. 21–39.
• Schwartzman, Lisa H., 2006, Challenging Liberalism: Feminism as Political Critique , University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
• Schwarzer, Alice, and Beauvoir, Simone de, 1984, Simone De Beauvoir Today: Conversations, 1972–1982 , London: Chatto and Windus, Hogarth Press.
• Sengupta, Shuddhabrata, 2006, “I/Me/Mine: Intersectional Identities as Negotiated Minefields,” Signs , 31 (3): 629–639.
• Serano, Julia, 2007, Whipping Girl , Berkeley: Seal Press.
• Sheth, Falguni A., 2014, “Interstitiality: Making Space for Migration, Diaspora, and Racial Complexity,” Hypatia , 29 (1): 1–17.
• Silvey, Rachel, 2009, “Transnational Rights and Wrongs: Moral Geographies of Gender and Migration,” Philosophical Topics , 37 (2): 75–91.
• Slote, Michael, 2007, The Ethics of Care and Empathy , London: Routledge.
• –––, 2011, The Impossibility of Perfection: Aristotle, Feminism, and the Complexities of Ethics , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 1998, “The Justice of Caring,” in E. F. Paul, F. D. Miller and J. Paul (eds.), Virtues and Vice , New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Snow, Nancy, 2002, “Virtue and the Oppression of Women,” in S. Brennan (ed.), Feminist Moral Philosophy , Calgary: University of Calgary Press.
• Spelman, Elizabeth V., 1988, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought , Boston: Beacon Press.
• –––, 1991, “The Virtue of Feeling and the Feeling of Virtue,” in C. Card (ed.), Feminist Ethics , Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, pp 213–232.
• Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, Susan B. Anthony and Ann D. Gordon (ed.), 1997, The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony: In the School of Anti-Slavery, 1840 to 1866 , New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
• Stark, Cynthia A., 2007, “How to Include the Severely Disabled in a Contractarian Theory of Justice,” Journal of Political Philosophy , 15: 127–145.
• –––, 2009, “Respecting Human Dignity: Contract Versus Capabilities,” Metaphilosophy , 40 (3–4): 366–381.
• Steinbock, Bonnie, 1994, “Reproductive Rights and Responsibilities,” Hastings Center Report , 24 (3): 15–16.
• Sterling, Dorothy, 1979, Black Foremothers, Three Lives , New York: The Feminist Press.
• Stone-Mediatore, Shari, 2004, “Women's Rights and Cultural Differences,” Studies in Practical Philosophy , 4 (2): 111–133.
• Superson, Anita M., 1993, “A Feminist Definition of Sexual Harassment,” Journal of Social Philosophy , 24 (1): 46–64.
• –––, 2012, “Feminist Moral Psychology”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2014/entries/feminism-moralpsych/ >.
• Taylor, Barbara, 1993, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century , Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Tessman, Lisa, 2005, Burdened Virtues: Virtue Ethics for Liberatory Struggles , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2009a, “Expecting Bad Luck,” Hypatia , 24 (1): 9–28.
• –––, (ed.), 2009b, Feminist Ethics and Social and Political Philosophy: Theorizing the Non-Ideal , New York: Springer.
• –––, 2015, Moral Failure: On the Impossible Demands of Morality , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Thomson, Judith J., 1971, “A Defense of Abortion,” Philosophy and Public Affairs , 1 (1): 47–66.
• Tomaselli, Sylvana, 2016, “Mary Wollstonecraft,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2016/entries/wollstonecraft/ >.
• Tong, Rosemarie, 1993, Feminine and Feminist Ethics , Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Company.
• –––, 1998, “The Ethics of Care: A Feminist Virtue Ethics of Care for Healthcare Practitioners,” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy , 23 (2): 131–152.
• Tremain, Shelley, 2015, “This is What a Historicist and Relativist Feminist Philosophy of Disability Looks Like,” Foucault Studies , 19: 7–42.
• –––, 2000, “Queering Disabled Sexuality Studies,” Sexuality and Disability , 18 (4): 291–299.
• Tronto, Joan C., 1995, “Care as a Basis for Radical Political Judgments,” Hypatia , 10 (2): pp. 141–149.
• –––, 2005, “Care as the Work of Citizens: A Modest Proposal,” in M. Friedman (ed.), Women and Citizenship , Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 130–145.
• –––, 1993, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care , New York: Routledge.
• Truth, Sojourner, 1867, “When Woman Gets Her Rights Man Will Be Right,” in B. Guy-Sheftall (ed.), Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought , New York: The New Press, 1995.
• Tuana, Nancy, 2018, “Approaches to Feminism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2018/entries/feminism-approaches/ >.
• Tulloch, Gail, 2005, “A Feminist Utilitarian Perspective on Euthanasia: From Nancy Crick to Terri Schiavo,” Nursing Inquiry , 12 (2): 155–160.
• Varden, Helga, 2012, “A Feminist, Kantian Conception of the Right to Bodily Integrity: the Cases of Abortion and Homosexuality,” in S. Crasnow and A. Superson (eds.), Out of the Shadows: Analytical Feminist Contributions to Traditional Philosophy , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Walker, Margaret U., 2003, Moral Contexts , Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.
• –––, 1998, Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics , New York: Routledge.
• Walsh, Mary B., 2015, “Feminism, Adaptive Preferences, and Social Contract Theory,” Hypatia , 30 (4): 829–845.
• Warren, Karren J., 2000, Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What It is and Why It Matters , Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.
• Welch, Shay, 2012, “A Theory of Freedom: Feminism and the Social Contract,” London: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Wendell, Susan, 1996, The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability , London: Routledge.
• Whipps, Judy, and Danielle Lake, 2017, “Pragmatist Feminism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/femapproach-pragmatism/ >.
• Witt, Charlotte, 1995, “Anti-Essentialism in Feminist Theory,” in O. Norman (ed.), Philosophical Topics , 23 (2): 321–344.
• Wolf, Susan, 2015, The Variety of Values: Essays on Morality, Meaning, and Love , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Wollstonecraft, Mary, 1792, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman , Poston, C., (ed.), New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company, 1988.
• Young, Iris M., 2009, “Five Faces of Oppression,” in G. L. Henderson and M. Waterstone (eds.), Geographic Thought: A Praxis Perspective , New York: Routledge, pp. 55–71.
• –––, 1977, “Women and Philosophy,” Teaching Philosophy , 2 (2): 177–183.
• Zack, Naomi, 2005, Inclusive Feminism: A Third Wave Theory of Women’s Commonality , Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Tong, Rosemarie and Williams, Nancy, “Feminist Ethics”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2019/entries/feminism-ethics/ >. [This was the previous entry on Feminist Ethics in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — see the version history .]
• Feminist Ethics category, edited by Shay Welch, at PhilPapers.
• Feminist Philosophy Quarterly , edited by Samantha Brennan, Carla Fehr, Alice MacLachlan, and Kathryn Norlock, ISSN 2371-2570.
• Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy
• UPDirectory , Directory of Philosophers from Underrepresented Groups in Philosophy, a publication of the American Philosophical Association.

feminist philosophy | feminist philosophy, interventions: history of philosophy | feminist philosophy, interventions: moral psychology | feminist philosophy, interventions: political philosophy | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on autonomy | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on class and work | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on disability | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on globalization | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on objectification | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on power | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on rape | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on reproduction and the family | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on science | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on sex and gender

Acknowledgments

This entry exists thanks to the steady work of Research Assistant Collin Chepeka and the funds of the Kenneth Mark Drain Chair in Ethics at Trent University. Thanks to Noëlle McAfee for helpful comments on a first draft, and thanks to Anita Superson for extensive comments on every section of this entry.

Copyright © 2019 by Kathryn Norlock < kathrynnorlock @ trentu . ca >

• Accessibility

Support SEP

Mirror sites.

View this site from another server:

• Info about mirror sites

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright © 2024 by The Metaphysics Research Lab , Department of Philosophy, Stanford University

Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Post-Feminism: An Essay

Post-Feminism: An Essay

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on October 25, 2017 • ( 2 )

It must first be stated that there is no agreement about how postfeminism can be defined and consequently definitions essentially contradict each other in what they say about the term. At its most straightforward, the prefix ‘post’ in this context appears to mean ‘going beyond’ or ‘superseding’: it could therefore be seen as a confident announcement that feminism has achieved its key aims and that there is full equality for all women and a blurring of the boundaries between traditional ascriptions of gender. Given that a brief scrutiny of our current social formation does not support this view, we might, however, imagine that a post-feminist position is one formulated due to dissatisfaction with existing feminist politics and is to be located in an entirely new area or set of propositions altogether. Part of this dissatisfaction might be an awareness that even in its heyday, second wave feminism did not achieve its aim of speaking to the majority of women.

Either of these definitions seems possible and the notion of superseding or going beyond has been widely utilised in popular culture, and to some extent in academic discourse. Given that ‘feminism’ remains within the term post-feminism, albeit problematised by the prefix of ‘post’, this illustrates that ‘feminism is portrayed as a territory over which various women have to fight to gain their ground; it has become so unwieldy as a term that it threatens to implode under the weight of its own contradictions’ ( Whelehan 2000 : 78). The ‘post’ is not the end of feminism : actually feminism is constantly to be picked over only to be rapidly set aside again or dismissed as old hat. For Myra Macdonald , ‘post-feminism takes the sting out of feminism’ ( 1995 : 100); it removes the politics and claims the territory of self-empowerment.

There are some more complex and challenging definitions of the term and according to writers such as Sopia Phoca who co-produced an introductory guide to it, ‘post-feminism is considered as a different manifestation of feminism – not as being anti-feminist’ (quoted in Ashby 1999: 34) and as being associated with the development of post-Lacanian psychoanalysis , French feminism and post-structuralist theory , suggesting perhaps a permanent fracturation between second wave-style personal politics and ‘high’ theory. Ann Brooks (1997), however, would argue that it is not a question of depoliticising feminism, but of marking a conceptual shift between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ – from a model based on equality, to debates around the revivified and theorised concept of difference. For Brooks the term ‘post-feminism’ ‘is now understood as a useful conceptual frame of reference encompassing the intersection of feminism with a number of other anti-foundational movements including postmodernism, post-structuralism and post-colonialism’ ( Brooks 1997 : 1).

Other critics would argue that the ‘post’ prefix added to modernism , structuralism or colonialism seems to unproblematically connote the ‘going beyond’ both spatially and chronologically that has occurred in modern theory; yet Brooks asserts that post-feminism used in this theoretical context signifies feminism ’s maturity. She reflects that rather than ‘post’ meaning going beyond or breaking with, in these contexts it means ‘a process of ongoing transformation and change’ (Brooks 1997: 1). Other kinds of ‘rebranding’ for feminism of course include the use of ‘third wave’ feminism where again the prefix is used to imply key shifts in the meaning of ‘feminism’ itself and in this theoretically-informed definition of post-feminism there might be seen to be common ground between third wave and post-feminism, although third wavers would certainly reject any suggestion that feminism is over. Brooks herself acknowledges the way post-feminism is associated with a negative portrayal of feminism in the mass media – particularly in the way the rhetoric of post-feminism is summoned in the backlash against feminism (see also Faludi 1992 ).

One of the reasons it is argued that the move to post-feminism is essential is because of the influence of postmodern thinking which refuses the ‘grand narrative’ of gender difference, so that it becomes increasingly impossible to lay claim to the identity ‘woman’, because of the impact of ‘difference’ theories and the contestation of knowledges about how ‘woman’ is constructed. Ann Brooks ’s version of post-feminism puts ‘woman’ under erasure; of course one could argue that this denies any political agency to a feminist who cannot lay claim to that identity, ‘modernist’ as it is, suggesting as it does a retreat to the self and ultimately the individualist framing of identity so favoured by enlightenment liberalism. The category ‘woman’, no matter how unsatisfactory as a means to summon up the wealth and diversity of women’s experiences and identities, allows at least a space to lay claim to a wealth of shared experiences (gendered pay differentials, the impact of sexual violence, the relationship of nation to gender for instance) which permits a collective oppositional response to injustices against women.

For critics who are still happy to call themselves ‘feminist’ without any prefixes, such a model of feminism does not readily allow for an acknowledgement of some highly productive shifts in feminism since the 1970s. Feminist politics has not remained static, and many of the central issues, so radical in the 1970s, are now accepted as part of mainstream politics. As Sylvia Walby notes, ‘Who would now call someone who believes in equal pay feminist? Yet before 1975 this was not law and was controversial’ ( 1997 : 163). Rene Denfeld , in her critique of second wave feminism, The New Victorians , bears this out when she points out that while the next generation has problems with the epithet ‘feminist’, they have no problem supporting the principles of equal pay and educational opportunities (Denfeld 1995: 4). For Denfeld this change from broad support of feminism to scepticism and alienation is a response to a change in the terms of second wave feminism itself: ‘It has become bogged down in an extremist moral and spiritual crusade that has little to do with women’s lives. It has climbed out on a limb of academic theory that is all but inaccessible to the uninitiated . . . feminism has become as confining as what it pretends to combat’ (Denfeld 1995: 5). Denfeld is pointing to widely aired anxieties that feminism has become just one more arcane theory – stemming from what she perceives to be a majority of cultural feminist writers creating and delivering women’s studies curricula in American universities, containing an alleged anti-male agenda. It is as if she actually doesn’t want to dismiss feminism but rather to take it ‘back’ from whoever she feels has stolen it. The irony is that ‘post-feminism’ from both Phoca and Wright’s and Brooks’s perspective is in many ways just such another ‘inaccessible’ theory for the uninitiated.

Tania Modleski is more concerned that while ‘woman’ is being put under erasure in the debates about difference, conceptual shifts such as the ‘men in feminism’ debate (a debate about whether men should call themselves feminists or be feminist critics independently of women) might make women disappear from feminism altogether. Talking about one particular anthology of ‘male feminist’ criticism she observes that ‘[i]n an unusually strong post-feminist irony, the final essay of this volume which banishes women from its list of contributors is a complaint about the way heterosexual men have become invisible within feminism!’ ( Modleski, 1991: 12). Modleski’s dissection of post-feminism in the critical sphere in many ways anticipates Susan Faludi ’s arguments in Backlash where it is the appropriation of the language of feminism which is seen to be used against itself in popular culture. Modleski’s combination of questioning theory and using examples of popular film, television and news, suggests that this appropriation goes much deeper and, she would argue, drives us straight back to male-centred discourse and critical authority.

There is still the accusation that second wave feminism failed to cede the hegemony of white middle-class heterosexual women to other groups of women, and there is clearly some truth in this claim. But nonetheless it is clear that many feminists (particularly at the level of grassroots politics) did acknowledge the common links between different sites of oppression; and the growth in political and critical perspectives by women of colour, working-class women and lesbians suggests that for them the struggle is not over. One can think of key voices in black American feminism, such as bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins who emphatically lay claim to ‘feminism’ as a term which still has political resonance, and this suggests that not all proponents of feminist discourse are ready yet to cede the ground to post-feminism, but would rather address the gaps, in the belief that there might be some consensus about what feminism can do.

Source: Fifty Key Concepts in Gender Studies Jane Pilcher and Imelda Whelehan Sage Publications, 2004.

FURTHER READING Ann Brooks (1997) gives a fairly comprehensive account of what ‘postfeminism’ means in a theoretical context; for those still struggling with French feminism, post-structuralism and Lacan. Phoca and Wright (1999) offer a crisp and concise account, liberally using illustrations and graphic narrative. Modleski (1991) and Faludi (1992) offer challenges which provide illuminating comparison.

Share this:

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Ann Brooks , Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women , Feminism , Feminism without women , Imelda Whelehan , Introducing Postfeminism , Literary Theory , Myra Macdonald , Overloaded: Popular Culture and the Future of Feminism , Patricia Hill Collins , postfeminism , Rene Denfeld , Representing Women: Myths of Femininity in the Popular Media , second wave feminism , Susan Faludi , Sylvia Walby , Tania Modleski , The New Victorians , The New Victorians: A Young Woman's Challenge to the Old Feminist Order

Related Articles

• Third Wave Feminism – Literary Theory and Criticism Notes
• Postfeminism and Its Entanglement with the Fourth Wave – Literary Theory and Criticism

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

• Tools and Resources
• Customer Services
• Original Language Spotlight
• Alternative and Non-formal Education 
• Cognition, Emotion, and Learning
• Curriculum and Pedagogy
• Education and Society
• Education, Change, and Development
• Education, Cultures, and Ethnicities
• Education, Gender, and Sexualities
• Education, Health, and Social Services
• Educational Administration and Leadership
• Educational History
• Educational Politics and Policy
• Educational Purposes and Ideals
• Educational Systems
• Educational Theories and Philosophies
• Globalization, Economics, and Education
• Languages and Literacies
• Professional Learning and Development
• Research and Assessment Methods
• Technology and Education
• Share This Facebook LinkedIn Twitter

Article contents

Feminist theory and its use in qualitative research in education.

• Emily Freeman Emily Freeman University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.1193
• Published online: 28 August 2019

Feminist theory rose in prominence in educational research during the 1980s and experienced a resurgence in popularity during the late 1990s−2010s. Standpoint epistemologies, intersectionality, and feminist poststructuralism are the most prevalent theories, but feminist researchers often work across feminist theoretical thought. Feminist qualitative research in education encompasses a myriad of methods and methodologies, but projects share a commitment to feminist ethics and theories. Among the commitments are the understanding that knowledge is situated in the subjectivities and lived experiences of both researcher and participants and research is deeply reflexive. Feminist theory informs both research questions and the methodology of a project in addition to serving as a foundation for analysis. The goals of feminist educational research include dismantling systems of oppression, highlighting gender-based disparities, and seeking new ways of constructing knowledge.

• feminist theories
• qualitative research
• educational research
• positionality
• methodology

Introduction

Feminist qualitative research begins with the understanding that all knowledge is situated in the bodies and subjectivities of people, particularly women and historically marginalized groups. Donna Haraway ( 1988 ) wrote,

I am arguing for politics and epistemologies of location, position, and situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims. These are claims on people’s lives I’m arguing for the view from a body, always a complex, contradictory, structuring, and structured body, versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity. Only the god trick is forbidden. . . . Feminism is about a critical vision consequent upon a critical positioning in unhomogeneous gendered social space. (p. 589)

By arguing that “politics and epistemologies” are always interpretive and partial, Haraway offered feminist qualitative researchers in education a way to understand all research as potentially political and always interpretive and partial. Because all humans bring their own histories, biases, and subjectivities with them to a research space or project, it is naïve to think that the written product of research could ever be considered neutral, but what does research with a strong commitment to feminism look like in the context of education?

Writing specifically about the ways researchers of both genders can use feminist ethnographic methods while conducting research on schools and schooling, Levinson ( 1998 ) stated, “I define feminist ethnography as intensive qualitative research, aimed toward the description and analysis of the gendered construction and representation of experience, which is informed by a political and intellectual commitment to the empowerment of women and the creation of more equitable arrangements between and among specific, culturally defined genders” (p. 339). The core of Levinson’s definition is helpful for understanding the ways that feminist educational anthropologists engage with schools as gendered and political constructs and the larger questions of feminist qualitative research in education. His message also extends to other forms of feminist qualitative research. By focusing on description, analysis, and representation of gendered constructs, educational researchers can move beyond simple binary analyses to more nuanced understandings of the myriad ways gender operates within educational contexts.

Feminist qualitative research spans the range of qualitative methodologies, but much early research emerged out of the feminist postmodern turn in anthropology (Behar & Gordon, 1995 ), which was a response to male anthropologists who ignored the gendered implications of ethnographic research (e.g., Clifford & Marcus, 1986 ). Historically, most of the work on feminist education was conducted in the 1980s and 1990s, with a resurgence in the late 2010s (Culley & Portuges, 1985 ; DuBois, Kelly, Kennedy, Korsmeyer, & Robinson, 1985 ; Gottesman, 2016 ; Maher & Tetreault, 1994 ; Thayer-Bacon, Stone, & Sprecher, 2013 ). Within this body of research, the majority focuses on higher education (Coffey & Delamont, 2000 ; Digiovanni & Liston, 2005 ; Diller, Houston, Morgan, & Ayim, 1996 ; Gabriel & Smithson, 1990 ; Mayberry & Rose, 1999 ). Even leading journals, such as Feminist Teacher ( 1984 −present), focus mostly on the challenges of teaching about and to women in higher education, although more scholarship on P–12 education has emerged in recent issues.

There is also a large collection of work on the links between gender, achievement, and self-esteem (American Association of University Women, 1992 , 1999 ; Digiovanni & Liston, 2005 ; Gilligan, 1982 ; Hancock, 1989 ; Jackson, Paechter, & Renold, 2010 ; National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education, 2002 ; Orenstein, 1994 ; Pipher, 1994 ; Sadker & Sadker, 1994 ). However, just because research examines gender does not mean that it is feminist. Simply using gender as a category of analysis does not mean the research project is informed by feminist theory, ethics, or methods, but it is often a starting point for researchers who are interested in the complex ways gender is constructed and the ways it operates in education.

This article examines the histories and theories of U.S.–based feminism, the tenets of feminist qualitative research and methodologies, examples of feminist qualitative studies, and the possibilities for feminist qualitative research in education to provide feminist educational researchers context and methods for engaging in transformative and subversive research. Each section provides a brief overview of the major concepts and conversations, along with examples from educational research to highlight the ways feminist theory has informed educational scholarship. Some examples are given limited attention and serve as entry points into a more detailed analysis of a few key examples. While there is a large body of non-Western feminist theory (e.g., the works of Lila Abu-Lughod, Sara Ahmed, Raewyn Connell, Saba Mahmood, Chandra Mohanty, and Gayatri Spivak), much of the educational research using feminist theory draws on Western feminist theory. This article focuses on U.S.–based research to show the ways that the utilization of feminist theory has changed since the 1980s.

Histories, Origins, and Theories of U.S.–Based Feminism

The normative historiography of feminist theory and activism in the United States is broken into three waves. First-wave feminism (1830s−1920s) primarily focused on women’s suffrage and women’s rights to legally exist in public spaces. During this time period, there were major schisms between feminist groups concerning abolition, rights for African American women, and the erasure of marginalized voices from larger feminist debates. The second wave (1960s and 1980s) worked to extend some of the rights won during the first wave. Activists of this time period focused on women’s rights to enter the workforce, sexual harassment, educational equality, and abortion rights. During this wave, colleges and universities started creating women’s studies departments and those scholars provided much of the theoretical work that informs feminist research and activism today. While there were major feminist victories during second-wave feminism, notably Title IX and Roe v. Wade , issues concerning the marginalization of race, sexual orientation, and gender identity led many feminists of color to separate from mainstream white feminist groups. The third wave (1990s to the present) is often characterized as the intersectional wave, as some feminist groups began utilizing Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality ( 1991 ) to understand that oppression operates via multiple categories (e.g., gender, race, class, age, ability) and that intersecting oppressions lead to different lived experiences.

Historians and scholars of feminism argue that dividing feminist activism into three waves flattens and erases the major contributions of women of color and gender-nonconforming people. Thompson ( 2002 ) called this history a history of hegemonic feminism and proposed that we look at the contributions of multiracial feminism when discussing history. Her work, along with that of Allen ( 1984 ) about the indigenous roots of U.S. feminism, raised many questions about the ways that feminism operates within the public and academic spheres. For those who wish to engage in feminist research, it is vital to spend time understanding the historical, theoretical, and political ways that feminism(s) can both liberate and oppress, depending on the scholar’s understandings of, and orientations to, feminist projects.

Standpoint Epistemology

Much of the theoretical work that informs feminist qualitative research today emerged out of second-wave feminist scholarship. Standpoint epistemology, according to Harding ( 1991 , 2004 ), posits that knowledge comes from one’s particular social location, that it is subjective, and the further one is from the hegemonic norm, the clearer one can see oppression. This was a major challenge to androcentric and Enlightenment theories of knowledge because standpoint theory acknowledges that there is no universal understanding of the world. This theory aligns with the second-wave feminist slogan, “The personal is political,” and advocates for a view of knowledge that is produced from the body.

Greene ( 1994 ) wrote from a feminist postmodernist epistemology and attacked Enlightenment thinking by using standpoint theory as her starting point. Her work serves as an example of one way that educational scholars can use standpoint theory in their work. She theorized encounters with “imaginative literature” to help educators conceptualize new ways of using reading and writing in the classroom and called for teachers to think of literature as “a harbinger of the possible.” (Greene, 1994 , p. 218). Greene wrote from an explicitly feminist perspective and moved beyond simple analyses of gender to a larger critique of the ways that knowledge is constructed in classrooms.

Intersectionality

Crenshaw ( 1991 ) and Collins ( 2000 ) challenged and expanded standpoint theory to move it beyond an individual understanding of knowledge to a group-based theory of oppression. Their work, and that of other black and womanist feminists, opened up multiple spaces of possibility for feminist scholars and researchers because it challenged hegemonic feminist thought. For those interested in conducting feminist research in educational settings, their work is especially pertinent because they advocate for feminists to attend to all aspects of oppression rather than flattening them to one of simple gender-based oppression.

Haddix, McArthur, Muhammad, Price-Dennis, and Sealey-Ruiz ( 2016 ), all women-of-color feminist educators, wrote a provocateur piece in a special issue of English Education on black girls’ literacy. The four authors drew on black feminist thought and conducted a virtual kitchen-table conversation. By symbolically representing their conversations as one from the kitchen, this article pays homage to women-of-color feminism and pushes educators who read English Education to reconsider elements of their own subjectivities. Third-wave feminism and black feminism emphasize intersectionality, in that different demographic details like race, class, and gender are inextricably linked in power structures. Intersectionality is an important frame for educational research because identifying the unique experiences, realities, and narratives of those involved in educational systems can highlight the ways that power and oppression operate in society.

Feminist Poststructural Theory

Feminist poststructural theory has greatly informed many feminist projects in educational research. Deconstruction is

a critical practice that aims to ‘dismantle [ déconstruire ] the metaphysical and rhetorical structures that are at work, not in order to reject or discard them, but to reinscribe them in another way,’ (Derrida, quoted in Spivak, 1974 , p. lxxv). Thus, deconstruction is not about tearing down, but about looking at how a structure has been constructed, what holds it together, and what it produces. (St. Pierre, 2000 , p. 482)

Reality, subjectivity, knowledge, and truth are constructed through language and discourse (cultural practices, power relations, etc.), so truth is local and diverse, rather than a universal experience (St. Pierre, 2000 ). Feminist poststructuralist theory may be used to question structural inequality that is maintained in education through dominant discourses.

In Go Be a Writer! Expanding the Curricular Boundaries of Literacy Learning with Children , Kuby and Rucker ( 2016 ) explored early elementary literacy practices using poststructural and posthumanist theories. Their book drew on hours of classroom observations, student interviews and work, and their own musings on ways to de-standardize literacy instruction and curriculum. Through the process of pedagogical documentation, Kuby and Rucker drew on the works of Barad, Deleuze and Guattari, and Derrida to explore the ways they saw children engaging in what they call “literacy desiring(s).” One aim of the book is to find practical and applicable ways to “Disrupt literacy in ways that rewrite the curriculum, the interactions, and the power dynamics of the classroom even begetting a new kind of energy that spirals and bounces and explodes” (Kuby & Rucker, 2016 , p. 5). The second goal of their book is not only to understand what happened in Rucker’s classroom using the theories, but also to unbound the links between “teaching↔learning” (p. 202) and to write with the theories, rather than separating theory from the methodology and classroom enactments (p. 45) because “knowing/being/doing were not separate” (p. 28). This work engages with key tenets of feminist poststructuralist theory and adds to both the theoretical and pedagogical conversations about what counts as a literacy practice.

While the discussion in this section provides an overview of the histories and major feminist theories, it is by no means exhaustive. Scholars who wish to engage in feminist educational research need to spend time doing the work of understanding the various theories and trajectories that constitute feminist work so they are able to ground their projects and theories in a particular tradition that will inform the ethics and methods of research.

Tenets of Feminist Qualitative Research

Why engage in feminist qualitative research.

Evans and Spivak ( 2016 ) stated, “The only real and effective way you can sabotage something this way is when you are working intimately within it.” Feminist researchers are in the classroom and the academy, working intimately within curricular, pedagogical, and methodological constraints that serve neoliberal ideologies, so it is vital to better understand the ways that we can engage in affirmative sabotage to build a more just and equitable world. Spivak’s ( 2014 ) notion of affirmative sabotage has become a cornerstone for understanding feminist qualitative research and teaching. She borrowed and built on Gramsci’s role of the organic intellectual and stated that they/we need to engage in affirmative sabotage to transform the humanities.

I used the term “affirmative sabotage” to gloss on the usual meaning of sabotage: the deliberate ruining of the master’s machine from the inside. Affirmative sabotage doesn’t just ruin; the idea is of entering the discourse that you are criticizing fully, so that you can turn it around from inside. The only real and effective way you can sabotage something this way is when you are working intimately within it. (Evans & Spivak, 2016 )

While Spivak has been mostly concerned with literary education, her writings provide teachers and researchers numerous lines of inquiry into projects that can explode androcentric universal notions of knowledge and resist reproductive heteronormativity.

Spivak’s pedagogical musings center on deconstruction, primarily Derridean notions of deconstruction (Derrida, 2016 ; Jackson & Mazzei, 2012 ; Spivak, 2006 , 2009 , 2012 ) that seek to destabilize existing categories and to call into question previously unquestioned beliefs about the goals of education. Her works provide an excellent starting point for examining the links between feminism and educational research. The desire to create new worlds within classrooms, worlds that are fluid, interpretive, and inclusive in order to interrogate power structures, lies at the core of what it means to be a feminist education researcher. As researchers, we must seriously engage with feminist theory and include it in our research so that feminism is not seen as a dirty word, but as a movement/pedagogy/methodology that seeks the liberation of all (Davis, 2016 ).

Feminist research and feminist teaching are intrinsically linked. As Kerkhoff ( 2015 ) wrote, “Feminist pedagogy requires students to challenge the norms and to question whether existing practices privilege certain groups and marginalize others” (p. 444), and this is exactly what feminist educational research should do. Bailey ( 2001 ) called on teachers, particularly those who identify as feminists, to be activists, “The values of one’s teaching should not be separated sharply from the values one expresses outside the classroom, because teaching is not inherently pure or laboratory practice” (p. 126); however, we have to be careful not to glorify teachers as activists because that leads to the risk of misinterpreting actions. Bailey argued that teaching critical thinking is not enough if it is not coupled with curriculums and pedagogies that are antiheteronormative, antisexist, and antiracist. As Bailey warned, just using feminist theory or identifying as a feminist is not enough. It is very easy to use the language and theories of feminism without being actively feminist in one’s research. There are ethical and methodological issues that feminist scholars must consider when conducting research.

Feminist research requires one to discuss ethics, not as a bureaucratic move, but as a reflexive move that shows the researchers understand that, no matter how much they wish it didn’t, power always plays a role in the process. According to Davies ( 2014 ), “Ethics, as Barad defines it, is a matter of questioning what is being made to matter and how that mattering affects what it is possible to do and to think” (p. 11). In other words, ethics is what is made to matter in a particular time and place.

Davies ( 2016 ) extended her definition of ethics to the interactions one has with others.

This is not ethics as a matter of separate individuals following a set of rules. Ethical practice, as both Barad and Deleuze define it, requires thinking beyond the already known, being open in the moment of the encounter, pausing at the threshold and crossing over. Ethical practice is emergent in encounters with others, in emergent listening with others. It is a matter of questioning what is being made to matter and how that mattering affects what it is possible to do and to think. Ethics is emergent in the intra-active encounters in which knowing, being, and doing (epistemology, ontology, and ethics) are inextricably linked. (Barad, 2007 , p. 83)

The ethics of any project must be negotiated and contested before, during, and after the process of conducting research in conjunction with the participants. Feminist research is highly reflexive and should be conducted in ways that challenge power dynamics between individuals and social institutions. Educational researchers must heed the warning to avoid the “god-trick” (Haraway, 1988 ) and to continually question and re-question the ways we seek to define and present subjugated knowledge (Hesse-Biber, 2012 ).

Positionalities and Reflexivity

According to feminist ethnographer Noelle Stout, “Positionality isn’t meant to be a few sentences at the beginning of a work” (personal communication, April 5, 2016 ). In order to move to new ways of experiencing and studying the world, it is vital that scholars examine the ways that reflexivity and positionality are constructed. In a glorious footnote, Margery Wolf ( 1992 ) related reflexivity in anthropological writing to a bureaucratic procedure (p. 136), and that resonates with how positionality often operates in the field of education.

The current trend in educational research is to include a positionality statement that fixes the identity of the author in a particular place and time and is derived from feminist standpoint theory. Researchers should make their biases and the identities of the authors clear in a text, but there are serious issues with the way that positionality functions as a boundary around the authors. Examining how the researchers exert authority within a text allows the reader the opportunity to determine the intent and philosophy behind the text. If positionality were used in an embedded and reflexive manner, then educational research would be much richer and allow more nuanced views of schools, in addition to being more feminist in nature. The rest of this section briefly discussrs articles that engage with feminist ethics regarding researcher subjectivities and positionality, and two articles are examined in greater depth.

When looking for examples of research that includes deeply reflexive and embedded positionality, one finds that they mostly deal with issues of race, equity, and diversity. The highlighted articles provide examples of positionality statements that are deeply reflexive and represent the ways that feminist researchers can attend to the ethics of being part of a research project. These examples all come from feminist ethnographic projects, but they are applicable to a wide variety of feminist qualitative projects.

Martinez ( 2016 ) examined how research methods are or are not appropriate for specific contexts. Calderon ( 2016 ) examined autoethnography and the reproduction of “settler colonial understandings of marginalized communities” (p. 5). Similarly, Wissman, Staples, Vasudevan, and Nichols ( 2015 ) discussed how to research with adolescents through engaged participation and collaborative inquiry, and Ceglowski and Makovsky ( 2012 ) discussed the ways researchers can engage in duoethnography with young children.

Abajian ( 2016 ) uncovered the ways military recruiters operate in high schools and paid particular attention to the politics of remaining neutral while also working to subvert school militarization. She wrote,

Because of the sensitive and also controversial nature of my research, it was not possible to have a collaborative process with students, teachers, and parents. Purposefully intervening would have made documentation impossible because that would have (rightfully) aligned me with anti-war and counter-recruitment activists who were usually not welcomed on school campuses (Abajian & Guzman, 2013 ). It was difficult enough to find an administrator who gave me consent to conduct my research within her school, as I had explicitly stated in my participant recruitment letters and consent forms that I was going to research the promotion of post-secondary paths including the military. Hence, any purposeful intervention on my part would have resulted in the termination of my research project. At the same time, my documentation was, in essence, an intervention. I hoped that my presence as an observer positively shaped the context of my observation and also contributed to the larger struggle against the militarization of schools. (p. 26)

Her positionality played a vital role in the creation, implementation, and analysis of military recruitment, but it also forced her into unexpected silences in order to carry out her research. Abajian’s positionality statement brings up many questions about the ways researchers have to use or silence their positionality to further their research, especially if they are working in ostensibly “neutral” and “politically free” zones, such as schools. Her work drew on engaged anthropology (Low & Merry, 2010 ) and critical reflexivity (Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008 ) to highlight how researchers’ subjectivities shape ethnographic projects. Questions of subjectivity and positionality in her work reflect the larger discourses around these topics in feminist theory and qualitative research.

Brown ( 2011 ) provided another example of embedded and reflexive positionality of the articles surveyed. Her entire study engaged with questions about how her positionality influenced the study during the field-work portion of her ethnography on how race and racism operate in ethnographic field-work. This excerpt from her study highlights how she conceived of positionality and how it informed her work and her process.

Next, I provide a brief overview of the research study from which this paper emerged and I follow this with a presentation of four, first-person narratives from key encounters I experienced while doing ethnographic field research. Each of these stories centres the role race played as I negotiated my multiple, complex positionality vis-á-vis different informants and participants in my study. These stories highlight the emotional pressures that race work has on the researcher and the research process, thus reaffirming why one needs to recognise the role race plays, and may play, in research prior to, during, and after conducting one’s study (Milner, 2007 ). I conclude by discussing the implications these insights have on preparing researchers of color to conduct cross-racial qualitative research. (Brown, 2011 , p. 98)

Brown centered the roles of race and subjectivity, both hers and her participants, by focusing her analysis on the four narratives. The researchers highlighted in this section thought deeply about the ethics of their projects and the ways that their positionality informed their choice of methods.

Methods and Challenges

Feminist qualitative research can take many forms, but the most common data collection methods include interviews, observations, and narrative or discourse analysis. For the purposes of this article, methods refer to the tools and techniques researchers use, while methodology refers to the larger philosophical and epistemological approaches to conducting research. It is also important to note that these are not fixed terms, and that there continues to be much debate about what constitutes feminist theory and feminist research methods among feminist qualitative researchers. This section discusses some of the tensions and constraints of using feminist theory in educational research.

Jackson and Mazzei ( 2012 ) called on researchers to think through their data with theory at all stages of the collection and analysis process. They also reminded us that all data collection is partial and informed by the researcher’s own beliefs (Koro-Ljungberg, Löytönen, & Tesar, 2017 ). Interviews are sites of power and critiques because they show the power of stories and serve as a method of worlding, the process of “making a world, turning insight into instrument, through and into a possible act of freedom” (Spivak, 2014 , p. xiii). Interviews allow researchers and participants ways to engage in new ways of understanding past experiences and connecting them to feminist theories. The narratives serve as data, but it is worth noting that the data collected from interviews are “partial, incomplete, and always being re-told and re-membered” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012 , p. 3), much like the lived experiences of both researcher and participant.

Research, data collection, and interpretation are not neutral endeavors, particularly with interviews (Jackson & Mazzei, 2009 ; Mazzei, 2007 , 2013 ). Since education research emerged out of educational psychology (Lather, 1991 ; St. Pierre, 2016 ), historically there has been an emphasis on generalizability and positivist data collection methods. Most feminist research makes no claims of generalizability or truth; indeed, to do so would negate the hyperpersonal and particular nature of this type of research (Love, 2017 ). St. Pierre ( 2016 ) viewed the lack of generalizability as an asset of feminist and poststructural research, rather than a limitation, because it creates a space of resistance against positivist research methodologies.

Denzin and Giardina ( 2016 ) urged researchers to “consider an alternative mode of thinking about the critical turn in qualitative inquiry and posit the following suggestion: perhaps it is time we turned away from ‘methodology’ altogether ” (p. 5, italics original). Despite the contention over the term critical among some feminist scholars (e.g. Ellsworth, 1989 ), their suggestion is valid and has been picked up by feminist and poststructural scholars who examine the tensions between following a strict research method/ology and the theoretical systems out of which they operate because precision in method obscures the messy and human nature of research (Koro-Ljungberg, 2016 ; Koro-Ljungberg et al., 2017 ; Love, 2017 ; St. Pierre & Pillow, 2000 ). Feminist qualitative researchers should seek to complicate the question of what method and methodology mean when conducting feminist research (Lather, 1991 ), due to the feminist emphasis on reflexive and situated research methods (Hesse-Biber, 2012 ).

Examples of Feminist Qualitative Research in Education

A complete overview of the literature is not possible here, due to considerations of length, but the articles and books selected represent the various debates within feminist educational research. They also show how research preoccupations have changed over the course of feminist work in education. The literature review is divided into three broad categories: Power, canons, and gender; feminist pedagogies, curriculums, and classrooms; and teacher education, identities, and knowledge. Each section provides a broad overview of the literature to demonstrate the breadth of work using feminist theory, with some examples more deeply explicated to describe how feminist theories inform the scholarship.

Power, Canons, and Gender

The literature in this category contests disciplinary practices that are androcentric in both content and form, while asserting the value of using feminist knowledge to construct knowledge. The majority of the work was written in the 1980s and supported the creation of feminist ways of knowing, particularly via the creation of women’s studies programs or courses in existing departments that centered female voices and experiences.

Questioning the canon has long been a focus of feminist scholarship, as has the attempt to subvert its power in the disciplines. Bezucha ( 1985 ) focused on the ways that departments of history resist the inclusion of both women and feminism in the historical canon. Similarly, Miller ( 1985 ) discussed feminism as subversion when seeking to expand the canon of French literature in higher education.

Lauter and Dieterich ( 1972 ) examined a report by ERIC, “Women’s Place in Academe,” a collection of articles about the discrepancies by gender in jobs and tenure-track positions and the lack of inclusion of women authors in literature classes. They also found that women were relegated to “softer” disciplines and that feminist knowledge was not acknowledged as valid work. Culley and Portuges ( 1985 ) expanded the focus beyond disciplines to the larger structures of higher education and noted the varies ways that professors subvert from within their disciplines. DuBois et al. ( 1985 ) chronicled the development of feminist scholarship in the disciplines of anthropology, education, history, literature, and philosophy. They explained that the institutions of higher education often prevent feminist scholars from working across disciplines in an attempt to keep them separate. Raymond ( 1985 ) also critiqued the academy for not encouraging relationships across disciplines and offered the development of women’s, gender, and feminist studies as one solution to greater interdisciplinary work.

Parson ( 2016 ) examined the ways that STEM syllabi reinforce gendered norms in higher education. She specifically looked at eight syllabi from math, chemistry, biology, physics, and geology classes to determine how modal verbs showing stance, pronouns, intertextuality, interdiscursivity, and gender showed power relations in higher education. She framed the study through poststructuralist feminist critical discourse analysis to uncover “the ways that gendered practices that favor men are represented and replicated in the syllabus” (p. 103). She found that all the syllabi positioned knowledge as something that is, rather than something that can be co-constructed. Additionally, the syllabi also favored individual and masculine notions of what it means to learn by stressing the competitive and difficult nature of the classroom and content.

When reading newer work on feminism in higher education and the construction of knowledge, it is easy to feel that, while the conversations might have shifted somewhat, the challenge of conducting interdisciplinary feminist work in institutions of higher education remains as present as it was during the creation of women’s and gender studies departments. The articles all point to the fact that simply including women’s and marginalized voices in the academy does not erase or mitigate the larger issues of gender discrimination and androcentricity within the silos of the academy.

Feminist Pedagogies, Curricula, and Classrooms

This category of literature has many similarities to the previous one, but all the works focus more specifically on questions of curriculum and pedagogy. A review of the literature shows that the earliest conversations were about the role of women in academia and knowledge construction, and this selection builds on that work to emphasize the ways that feminism can influence the events within classes and expands the focus to more levels of education.

Rich ( 1985 ) explained that curriculum in higher education courses needs to validate gender identities while resisting patriarchal canons. Maher ( 1985 ) narrowed the focus to a critique of the lecture as a pedagogical technique that reinforces androcentric ways of learning and knowing. She called for classes in higher education to be “collaborative, cooperative, and interactive” (p. 30), a cry that still echoes across many college campuses today, especially from students in large lecture-based courses. Maher and Tetreault ( 1994 ) provided a collection of essays that are rooted in feminist classroom practice and moved from the classroom into theoretical possibilities for feminist education. Warren ( 1998 ) recommended using Peggy McIntosh’s five phases of curriculum development ( 1990 ) and extending it to include feminist pedagogies that challenge patriarchal ways of teaching. Exploring the relational encounters that exist in feminist classrooms, Sánchez-Pardo ( 2017 ) discussed the ethics of pedagogy as a politics of visibility and investigated the ways that democratic classrooms relate to feminist classrooms.

While all of the previously cited literature is U.S.–based, the next two works focus on the ways that feminist pedagogies and curriculum operate in a European context. Weiner ( 1994 ) used autobiography and narrative methodologies to provide an introduction to how feminism has influenced educational research and pedagogy in Britain. Revelles-Benavente and Ramos ( 2017 ) collected a series of studies about how situated feminist knowledge challenges the problems of neoliberal education across Europe. These two, among many European feminist works, demonstrate the range of scholarship and show the trans-Atlantic links between how feminism has been received in educational settings. However, much more work needs to be done in looking at the broader global context, and particularly by feminist scholars who come from non-Western contexts.

The following literature moves us into P–12 classrooms. DiGiovanni and Liston ( 2005 ) called for a new research agenda in K–5 education that explores the hidden curriculums surrounding gender and gender identity. One source of the hidden curriculum is classroom literature, which both Davies ( 2003 ) and Vandergrift ( 1995 ) discussed in their works. Davies ( 2003 ) used feminist ethnography to understand how children who were exposed to feminist picture books talked about gender and gender roles. Vandergrift ( 1995 ) presented a theoretical piece that explored the ways picture books reinforce or resist canons. She laid out a future research agenda using reader response theory to better comprehend how young children question gender in literature. Willinsky ( 1987 ) explored the ways that dictionary definitions reinforced constructions of gender. He looked at the definitions of the words clitoris, penis , and vagina in six school dictionaries and then compared them with A Feminist Dictionary to see how the definitions varied across texts. He found a stark difference in the treatment of the words vagina and penis ; definitions of the word vagina were treated as medical or anatomical and devoid of sexuality, while definitions of the term penis were linked to sex (p. 151).

Weisner ( 2004 ) addressed middle school classrooms and highlighted the various ways her school discouraged unconventional and feminist ways of teaching. She also brought up issues of silence, on the part of both teachers and students, regarding sexuality. By including students in the curriculum planning process, Weisner provided more possibilities for challenging power in classrooms. Wallace ( 1999 ) returned to the realm of higher education and pushed literature professors to expand pedagogy to be about more than just the texts that are read. She challenged the metaphoric dichotomy of classrooms as places of love or battlefields; in doing so, she “advocate[d] active ignorance and attention to resistances” (p. 194) as a method of subverting transference from students to teachers.

The works discussed in this section cover topics ranging from the place of women in curriculum to the gendered encounters teachers and students have with curriculums and pedagogies. They offer current feminist scholars many directions for future research, particularly in the arena of P–12 education.

Teacher Education, Identities, and Knowledge

The third subset of literature examines the ways that teachers exist in classrooms and some possibilities for feminist teacher education. The majority of the literature in this section starts from the premise that the teachers are engaged in feminist projects. The selections concerning teacher education offer critiques of existing heteropatriarchal normative teacher education and include possibilities for weaving feminism and feminist pedagogies into the education of preservice teachers.

Holzman ( 1986 ) explored the role of multicultural teaching and how it can challenge systematic oppression; however, she complicated the process with her personal narrative of being a lesbian and working to find a place within the school for her sexual identity. She questioned how teachers can protect their identities while also engaging in the fight for justice and equity. Hoffman ( 1985 ) discussed the ways teacher power operates in the classroom and how to balance the personal and political while still engaging in disciplinary curriculums. She contended that teachers can work from personal knowledge and connect it to the larger curricular concerns of their discipline. Golden ( 1998 ) used teacher narratives to unpack how teachers can become radicalized in the higher education classroom when faced with unrelenting patriarchal and heteronormative messages.

Extending this work, Bailey ( 2001 ) discussed teachers as activists within the classroom. She focused on three aspects of teaching: integrity with regard to relationships, course content, and teaching strategies. She concluded that teachers cannot separate their values from their profession. Simon ( 2007 ) conducted a case study of a secondary teacher and communities of inquiry to see how they impacted her work in the classroom. The teacher, Laura, explicitly tied her inquiry activities to activist teacher education and critical pedagogy, “For this study, inquiry is fundamental to critical pedagogy, shaped by power and ideology, relationships within and outside of the classroom, as well as teachers’ and students’ autochthonous histories and epistemologies” (Simon, 2007 , p. 47). Laura’s experiences during her teacher education program continued during her years in the classroom, leading her to create a larger activism-oriented teacher organization.

Collecting educational autobiographies from 17 college-level feminist professors, Maher and Tetreault ( 1994 ) worried that educators often conflated “the experience and values of white middle-class women like ourselves for gendered universals” (p. 15). They complicated the idea of a democratic feminist teacher, raised issues regarding the problematic ways hegemonic feminism flattens experience to that of just white women, and pushed feminist professors to pay particular attention to the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality when teaching.

Cheira ( 2017 ) called for gender-conscious teaching and literature-based teaching to confront the gender stereotypes she encountered in Portuguese secondary schools. Papoulis and Smith ( 1992 ) conducted summer sessions where teachers experienced writing activities they could teach their students. Conceptualized as an experiential professional development course, the article revolved around an incident where the seminar was reading Emily Dickinson and the men in the course asked the two female instructors why they had to read feminist literature and the conversations that arose. The stories the women told tie into Papoulis and Smith’s call for teacher educators to interrogate their underlying beliefs and ideologies about gender, race, and class, so they are able to foster communities of study that can purposefully and consciously address feminist inquiry.

McWilliam ( 1994 ) collected stories of preservice teachers in Australia to understand how feminism can influence teacher education. She explored how textual practices affect how preservice teachers understand teaching and their role. Robertson ( 1994 ) tackled the issue of teacher education and challenged teachers to move beyond the two metaphors of banking and midwifery when discussing feminist ways of teaching. She called for teacher educators to use feminist pedagogies within schools of education so that preservice teachers experience a feminist education. Maher and Rathbone ( 1986 ) explored the scholarship on women’s and girls’ educational experiences and used their findings to call for changes in teacher education. They argued that schools reinforce the notion that female qualities are inferior due to androcentric curriculums and ways of showing knowledge. Justice-oriented teacher education is a more recent iteration of this debate, and Jones and Hughes ( 2016 ) called for community-based practices to expand the traditional definitions of schooling and education. They called for preservice teachers to be conversant with, and open to, feminist storylines that defy existing gendered, raced, and classed stereotypes.

Bieler ( 2010 ) drew on feminist and critical definitions of dialogue (e.g., those by Bakhtin, Freire, Ellsworth, hooks, and Burbules) to reframe mentoring discourse in university supervision and dialogic praxis. She concluded by calling on university supervisors to change their methods of working with preservice teachers to “Explicitly and transparently cultivat[e] dialogic praxis-oriented mentoring relationships so that the newest members of our field can ‘feel their own strength at last,’ as Homer’s Telemachus aspired to do” (Bieler, 2010 , p. 422).

Johnson ( 2004 ) also examined the role of teacher educators, but she focused on the bodies and sexualities of preservice teachers. She explored the dynamics of sexual tension in secondary classrooms, the role of the body in teaching, and concerns about clothing when teaching. She explicitly worked to resist and undermine Cartesian dualities and, instead, explored the erotic power of teaching and seducing students into a love of subject matter. “But empowered women threaten the patriarchal structure of this society. Therefore, women have been acculturated to distrust erotic power” (Johnson, 2004 , p. 7). Like Bieler ( 2010 ), Johnson ( 2004 ) concluded that, “Teacher educators could play a role in creating a space within the larger framework of teacher education discourse such that bodily knowledge is considered along with pedagogical and content knowledge as a necessary component of teacher training and professional development” (p. 24). The articles about teacher education all sought to provoke questions about how we engage in the preparation and continuing development of educators.

Teacher identity and teacher education constitute how teachers construct knowledge, as both students and teachers. The works in this section raise issues of what identities are “acceptable” in the classroom, ways teachers and teacher educators can disrupt oppressive storylines and practices, and the challenges of utilizing feminist pedagogies without falling into hegemonic feminist practices.

Possibilities for Feminist Qualitative Research

Spivak ( 2012 ) believed that “gender is our first instrument of abstraction” (p. 30) and is often overlooked in a desire to understand political, curricular, or cultural moments. More work needs to be done to center gender and intersecting identities in educational research. One way is by using feminist qualitative methods. Classrooms and educational systems need to be examined through their gendered components, and the ways students operate within and negotiate systems of power and oppression need to be explored. We need to see if and how teachers are actively challenging patriarchal and heteronormative curriculums and to learn new methods for engaging in affirmative sabotage (Spivak, 2014 ). Given the historical emphasis on higher education, more work is needed regarding P–12 education, because it is in P–12 classrooms that affirmative sabotage may be the most necessary to subvert systems of oppression.

In order to engage in affirmative sabotage, it is vital that qualitative researchers who wish to use feminist theory spend time grappling with the complexity and multiplicity of feminist theory. It is only by doing this thought work that researchers will be able to understand the ongoing debates within feminist theory and to use it in a way that leads to a more equitable and just world. Simply using feminist theory because it may be trendy ignores the very real political nature of feminist activism. Researchers need to consider which theories they draw on and why they use those theories in their projects. One way of doing this is to explicitly think with theory (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012 ) at all stages of the research project and to consider which voices are being heard and which are being silenced (Gilligan, 2011 ; Spivak, 1988 ) in educational research. More consideration also needs to be given to non-U.S. and non-Western feminist theories and research to expand our understanding of education and schooling.

Paying close attention to feminist debates about method and methodology provides another possibility for qualitative research. The very process of challenging positivist research methods opens up new spaces and places for feminist qualitative research in education. It also allows researchers room to explore subjectivities that are often marginalized. When researchers engage in the deeply reflexive work that feminist research requires, it leads to acts of affirmative sabotage within the academy. These discussions create the spaces that lead to new visions and new worlds. Spivak ( 2006 ) once declared, “I am helpless before the fact that all my essays these days seem to end with projects for future work” (p. 35), but this is precisely the beauty of feminist qualitative research. We are setting ourselves and other feminist researchers up for future work, future questions, and actively changing the nature of qualitative research.

Acknowledgements

Dr. George Noblit provided the author with the opportunity to think deeply about qualitative methods and to write this article, for which the author is extremely grateful. Dr. Lynda Stone and Dr. Tanya Shields are thanked for encouraging the author’s passion for feminist theory and for providing many hours of fruitful conversation and book lists. A final thank you is owed to the author’s partner, Ben Skelton, for hours of listening to her talk about feminist methods, for always being a first reader, and for taking care of their infant while the author finished writing this article.

• Abajian, S. M. (2016). Documenting militarism: Challenges of researching highly contested practices within urban schools. Anthropology & Education Quarterly , 47 (1), 25–41.
• Abajian, S. M. , and Guzman, M. (2013). Moving beyond slogans: Possibilities for a more connected and humanizing “counter-recruitment” pedagogy in militarized urban schools. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing , 29 (2), 191–205.
• Allen, P. G. (1984). Who is your mother? Red roots of white feminism. Sinister Wisdom , 25 (Winter), 34–46.
• American Association of University Women . (1992). How schools shortchange girls: The AAUW report: A study of major findings on girls and education . Washington, DC.
• AAUW . (1999). Gender gaps: Where schools still fail our children . New York, NY: Marlowe.
• Bailey, C. (2001). Teaching as activism and excuse: A reconsideration of the theory−practice dichotomy. Feminist Teacher , 13 (2), 125–133.
• Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
• Behar, R. , & Gordon, D. A. (Eds.). (1995). Women writing culture . Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Bezucha, R. J. (1985). Feminist pedagogy as a subversive activity. In M. Culley & C. Portuges (Eds.), Gendered subjects: The dynamics of feminist teaching (pp. 81–95). Boston, MA: Routledge.
• Bieler, D. (2010). Dialogic praxis in teacher preparation: A discourse analysis of mentoring talk. English Education , 42 (4), 391–426.
• Brown, K. D. (2011). Elevating the role of race in ethnographic research: Navigating race relations in the field. Ethnography and Education , 6 (1), 97–111.
• Calderon, D. (2016). Moving from damage-centered research through unsettling reflexivity. Anthropology & Education Quarterly , 47 (1), 5–24.
• Ceglowski, D. , & Makovsky, T. (2012) Duoethnography with children. Ethnography and Education , 7 (3), 283–295.
• Cheira, A. (2017). (Fostering) princesses that can stand on their own two feet: Using wonder tale narratives to change teenage gendered stereotypes in Portuguese EFL classrooms. In B. Revelles-Benavente & A. M. Ramos (Eds.), Teaching gender: Feminist pedagogy and responsibility in times of political crisis (pp. 146–162). London, U.K.: Routledge.
• Clifford, J. , & Marcus, G. (Eds.). (1986). Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography . Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Coffey, A. , & Delamont, S. (2000). Feminism and the classroom teacher: Research, praxis, and pedagogy . New York, NY: Routledge.
• Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color . Stanford Law Review , 43 (6), 1241–1299.
• Culley, M. , & Portuges, C. (Eds.). (1985). Gendered subjects: The dynamics of feminist teaching . Boston, MA: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
• Davies, B. (2003). Frogs and snails and feminist tales: Preschool children and gender . Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.
• Davies, B. (2014). Listening to children: Being and becoming . New York, NY: Routledge.
• Davies, B. (2016). Emergent listening. In N. K. Denzin & M. D. Giardina (Eds.), Qualitative inquiry through a critical lens (pp. 73–84). New York, NY: Routledge.
• Davis, A. Y. (2016). Freedom is a constant struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the foundations of a movement . Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.
• Denzin, N. K. , & Giardina, M. D. (Eds.). (2016). Qualitative inquiry through a critical lens . New York, NY: Routledge.
• Derrida, J. (2016). Of grammatology ( G. C. Spivak , Trans.). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Digiovanni, L. W. , & Liston, D. D. (2005). Feminist pedagogy in the elementary classroom: An agenda for practice. Feminist Teacher , 15 (2), 123–131.
• Diller, A. , Houston, B. , Morgan, K. P. , & Ayim, M. (1996). The gender question in education: Theory, pedagogy, and politics . Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
• DuBois, E. C. , Kelly, G. P. , Kennedy, E. L. , Korsmeyer, C. W. , & Robinson, L. S. (1985). Feminist scholarship: Kindling in the groves of the academe . Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
• Duncan-Andrade, J. M. , & Morrell, E. (2008). The art of critical pedagogy: Possibilities for moving from theory to practice in urban schools . New York, NY: Peter Lang.
• Ellsworth, E. (1989). Why doesn’t this feel empowering? Working through the repressive myths of critical pedagogy. Harvard Educational Review , 59 (3), 297–324.
• Evans, B. , & Spivak, G. C. (2016, July 13). When law is not justice. New York Times (online).
• Gabriel, S. L. , & Smithson, I. (1990). Gender in the classroom: Power and pedagogy . Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
• Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice: Psychological theory and women’s development . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Gilligan, C. (2011). Joining the resistance . Malden, MA: Polity Press.
• Golden, C. (1998). The radicalization of a teacher. In G. E. Cohee , E. Däumer , T. D. Kemp , P. M. Krebs , S. Lafky , & S. Runzo (Eds.), The feminist teacher anthology . New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
• Gottesman, I. H. (2016). The critical turn in education: From Marxist critique to poststructuralist feminism to critical theories of race . New York, NY: Routledge.
• Greene, M. (1994). Postmodernism and the crisis of representation. English Education , 26 (4), 206–219.
• Haddix, M. , McArthur, S. A. , Muhammad, G. E. , Price-Dennis, D. , & Sealey-Ruiz, Y. (2016). At the kitchen table: Black women English educators speaking our truths. English Education , 48 (4), 380–395.
• Hancock, E. (1989). The girl within . New York, NY: Fawcett Columbine.
• Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies , 14 (3), 575–599.
• Harding, S. (1991). Whose science/Whose knowledge? Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
• Harding, S. (Ed.). (2004). The feminist standpoint theory reader . New York, NY: Routledge.
• Hesse-Biber, S. N. (Ed.). (2012). Handbook of feminist research: Theory and praxis . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Hill Collins, P. (2000). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment . New York, NY: Routledge.
• Hoffman, N. J. (1985). Breaking silences: Life in the feminist classroom. In M. Culley & C. Portuges (Eds.), Gendered subjects: The dynamics of feminist teaching (pp. 147–154). Boston, MA: Routledge.
• Holzman, L. (1986). What do teachers have to teach? Feminist Teacher , 2 (3), 23–24.
• Jackson, A. , & Mazzei, L. (2009). Voice in qualitative inquiry: Challenging conventional, interpretive, and critical conceptions in qualitative research . New York, NY: Routledge.
• Jackson, A. Y. , & Mazzei, L. A. (2012). Thinking with theory in qualitative research: Viewing data across multiple perspectives . New York, NY: Routledge.
• Jackson, C. , Paechter, C. , & Renold, E. (2010). Girls and education 3–16: Continuing concerns, new agendas . Maidenhead, U.K.: Open University Press.
• Johnson, T. S. (2004). “It’s pointless to deny that that dynamic is there”: Sexual tensions in secondary classrooms. English Education , 37 (1), 5–29.
• Jones, S. , & Hughes, H. E. (2016). Changing the place of teacher education: Feminism, fear, and pedagogical paradoxes . Harvard Educational Review , 86 (2), 161–182.
• Kerkhoff, S. N. (2015). Dialogism: Feminist revision of argumentative writing instruction . Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice , 64 (1), 443–460.
• Koro-Ljungberg, M. (2016). Reconceptualizing qualitiative research: Methodologies without methodology . Los Angeles, CA: SAGE.
• Koro-Ljungberg, M. , Löytönen, T. , & Tesar, M. (Eds.). (2017). Disrupting data in qualitative inquiry: Entanglements with the post-critical and post-anthropocentric . New York, NY: Peter Lang.
• Kuby, C. R. , & Rucker, T. G. (2016). Go be a writer! Expanding the curricular boundaries of literacy learning with children . New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
• Lather, P. (1991). Feminist research in education: Within/against . Geelong, Victoria: Deakin University Press.
• Lauter, N. A. , & Dieterich, D. (1972). “Woman’s place in academe”: An ERIC Report. English Education , 3 (3), 169–173.
• Levinson, B. A. (1998). (How) can a man do feminist ethnography of education? Qualitative Inquiry , 4 (3), 337–368.
• Love, B. L. (2017). A ratchet lens: Black queer youth, agency, hip hop, and the Black ratchet imagination . Educational Researcher , 46 (9), 539–547.
• Low, S. M. , & Merry, S. E. (2010). Engaged anthropology: Diversity and dilemmas. Current Anthropology 51 (S2), S203–S226.
• Maher, F. (1985). Classroom pedagogy and the new scholarship on women. In M. Culley & C. Portuges (Eds.), Gendered subjects: The dynamics of feminist teaching (pp. 29–48). Boston, MA: Routledge.
• Maher, F. A. , & Rathbone, C. H. (1986). Teacher education and feminist theory: Some implications for practice. American Journal of Education , 94 (2), 214–235.
• Maher, F. A. , & Tetreault, M. K. T. (1994). The feminist classroom: An inside look a how professors and students are transforming higher education for a diverse society . New York, NY: Basic Books.
• Martinez, D. C. (2016). “This ain’t the projects”: A researcher’s reflections on the local appropriateness of our research tools. Anthropology & Education Quarterly , 47 (1), 59–77.
• Mayberry, M. , & Rose, E. C. (1999). Meeting the challenge: Innovative feminist pedagogies in action . New York, NY: Routledge.
• Mazzei, L. A. (2007). Inhabited silence in qualitative research: Putting poststructural theory to work . New York, NY: Peter Lang.
• Mazzei, L. A. (2013). A voice without organs: interviewing in posthumanist research . International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education , 26 (6), 732–740.
• McIntosh, P. (1990). Interactive phases of curricular and personal revision with regard to race . New York: State University of New York Press.
• McWilliam, E. (1994). In broken images: Feminist tales for a different teacher education . New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
• Miller, N. K. (1985). Mastery, identity and the politics of work: A feminist teacher in the graduate classroom. In M. Culley & C. Portuges (Eds.), Gendered subjects: The dynamics of feminist teaching (pp. 195–202). Boston, MA: Routledge.
• Milner, H. R. (2007). Race, culture, and researcher positionality: Working through dangers seen, unseen, and unforeseen. Educational Researcher , 36 , 388–400.
• National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education . (2002). Title IX at thirty: Report card on gender equity .
• Orenstein, P. (1994). Schoolgirls: Young women, self-esteem, and the confidence gap . New York, NY: Anchor Books.
• Papoulis, I. , & Smith, C. A. (1992). Could Cherryl or Irene just take a few minutes to explain this feminist view of literature? English Education , 24 (1), 52–60.
• Parson, L. (2016). Are STEM syllabi gendered? A feminist critical discourse analysis. Qualitative Report , 21 (1), 102–116.
• Pipher, M. (1994). Reviving Ophelia: Saving the selves of adolescent girls . New York, NY: Ballentine.
• Raymond, J. G. (1985). Women’s studies: A knowledge of one’s own. In M. Culley & C. Portuges (Eds.), Gendered subjects: The dynamics of feminist teaching (pp. 49–63). Boston, MA: Routledge.
• Revelles-Benavente, B. , & Ramos, A. M. (Eds.). (2017). Teaching gender: Feminist pedagogy and responsiblity in times of political crisis . London, U.K.: Routledge.
• Rich, A. (1985). Taking women students seriously. In M. Culley & C. Portuges (Eds.), Gendered subjects: The dynamics of feminist teaching (pp. 21–28). Boston, MA: Routledge.
• Robertson, L. (1994). Feminist teacher education: Applying feminist pedagogies to the preparation of new teachers. Feminist Teacher , 8 (1), 11–15.
• Sadker, M. , & Sadker, D. (1994). Failing at fairness: How our schools cheat girls . New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
• Sánchez-Pardo, E. (2017). “It’s a hell of a responsibilty to be yourself”: Troubling the personal and the political in feminist pedagogy. In B. Revelles-Benavente & A. M. Ramos (Eds.), Teaching gender: Feminist pedagogy and responsibility in times of political crisis (pp. 64–80). London, U.K.: Routledge.
• Simon, L. (2007). Expanding literacies: Teachers’ inquiry research and multigenre texts. English Education , 39 (2), 146–176.
• Spivak, G. C. (1974). Translator’s preface. In J. Derrida Of grammatology ( G. C. Spivak , Trans.). (pp. ix–xc). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? Speculations on widow-sacrifice. Wedge , 7 (8), 120–130.
• Spivak, G. C. (2006). In other worlds: Essays in cultural politics . New York, NY: Routledge.
• Spivak, G. C. (2009). Outside in the teaching machine . New York, NY: Routledge.
• Spivak, G. C. (2012). An aesthetic education in the era of globalization . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Spivak, G. C. (2014). Readings . New York, NY: Seagull Books.
• St. Pierre, E. A. (2000). Poststructural feminism in education: An overview . International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education , 13 (5), 477–515.
• St. Pierre, E. A. (2016). The long reach of logical positivism/logical empiricism. In N. K. Denzin & M. D. Giardina (Eds.), Qualitative inquiry through a critical lens (pp. 19–30). New York, NY: Routledge.
• St. Pierre, E. A. , & Pillow, W. S. (Eds.). (2000). Working the ruins: Feminist poststructural theory and methods in education . New York, NY: Routledge.
• Thayer-Bacon, B. J. , Stone, L. , & Sprecher, K. M. (2013). Education feminism: Classic and contemporary readings . Albany: State University of New York Press.
• Thompson, B. (2002). Multiracial feminism: Recasting the chronology of second wave feminism . Feminist Studies , 28 (2), 337–360.
• Vandergrift, K. E. (1995). Female protagonists and beyond: Picture books for future feminists. Feminist Teacher , 9 (2), 61–69.
• Wallace, M. L. (1999). Beyond love and battle: Practicing feminist pedagogy. Feminist Teacher , 12 (3), 184–197.
• Warren, K. J. (1998). Rewriting the future: The feminist challenge to the malestream curriculum. In G. E. Cohee , E. Däumer , T. D. Kemp , P. M. Krebs , S. Lafky , & S. Runzo (Eds.), The feminist teacher anthology . New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
• Weiner, G. (1994). Feminisms in education: An introduction . Buckingham, U.K.: Open University Press.
• Weisner, J. (2004). Awakening teacher voice and student voice: The development of a feminist pedagogy. Feminist Teacher , 15 (1), 34–47.
• Willinsky, J. (1987). Learning the language of difference: The dictionary in the high school. English Education , 19 (3), 146–158.
• Wissman, K. K. , Staples, J. M. , Vasudevan, L. , & Nichols, R. E. (2015). Cultivating research pedagogies with adolescents: Created spaces, engaged participation, and embodied inquiry. Anthropology & Education Quarterly , 46 (2), 186–197.
• Wolf, M. (1992). A thrice-told tale: Feminism, postmodernism, and ethnographic responsibility . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Related Articles

• Gender, Justice, and Equity in Education
• Education, Women, and the Politics of Curriculum
• Risky Truth-Making in Qualitative Inquiry
• Ecofeminism and Education
• Qualitative Approaches to Studying Marginalized Communities
• Poststructural Temporalities in School Ethnography
• Gender and Technology in Education
• Gender and the Superintendency
• Activism and Social Movement Building in Curriculum
• Gender Equitable Education and Technological Innovation

Printed from Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Education. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 04 September 2024

• Cookie Policy
• Privacy Policy
• Legal Notice
• Accessibility
• [185.147.128.134]
• 185.147.128.134

Character limit 500 /500