by Phil Parvin
D It maximizes motorcycle riding
8 What sorts of cultures are particularly difficult for multiculturalist theory to accommodate?
A Homogeneous cultures
B Community-based cultures
C Illiberal cultures
D Minority cultures
9 What is cosmopolitanism as defended by Waldron?
A The view that cultures are irrelevant
B The view that cultures are essential
C The view that identity comes from many different cultures
D The view that identity comes from a specific, single culture
10 Which of the following is most compatible with multiculturalism?
A Valuing individuals and not groups
B Subsidizing groups to ensure their survival
C Ranking groups according to their merits
D Allowing the market to determine which groups survive
17
Feminism
The vast majority of societies contain profound inequality between men and women – even liberal democratic societies that supposedly enshrine equality. Millions of women currently live in societies which deny them freedom and accord them second-class status. In Saudi Arabia, for example, women are banned from driving cars, are required to cover all but their hands and eyes in public, and must have permission from their ‘male guardian’ to receive an education, open a bank account, travel, or get married or divorced. Orthodox Judaism forbids women from divorcing their husbands, but allows men to divorce their wives for any reason. In some states such as Afghanistan, rape victims can be required to marry their rapists in order to mitigate the shame that the victims have purportedly brought upon their families. Death by stoning is still a punishment for women found guilty of adultery in several states, including Iraq, Iran, Indonesia, Nigeria, Somalia and the Sudan. There are many more examples of the ways in which states violate the equality and freedom of women.
‘I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a door mat or a prostitute.’
Rebecca West, ‘Mr Chesterton in Hysterics: A Study in Prejudice’, The Clarion 14 November 1913.
Furthermore, it is wrong to assume that the subordination of women is peculiar to non-liberal states. Liberal states have also historically denied women equal rights. In Britain and the USA, for example, women could not vote, pursue careers on equal terms with men, or have an abortion until relatively recently. Progress has been made in many of these areas, and some of the most egregious forms of gender inequality in liberal societies have been addressed. However, it is a common mistake to assume that sexism is a thing of the past. Sexism remains a principal form of injustice in societies throughout the world, as shown in the statistics contained in boxes in this chapter. We still live in a world in which women are given lower status than men and are forced to endure indignities and inequalities not imposed on men. Equality between the sexes has not been achieved; feminists are those women and men who believe that it must be. There are many forms of feminism. However, for the sake of this chapter, it is possible to identify four principal themes which unite feminists. We discuss these in the next four sections.
Case study: Feminist diversity
While feminists are united in their general aim of alleviating the social, political, legal and economic inequalities which arise out of patriarchy, they have disagreed as to the ways in which this should be done, and what the priorities are for feminist academics and activists.
Feminism can be understood as having two distinct ‘waves’. First-wave feminism occurred predominantly in the nineteenth century. One of its earliest advocates is Mary Wollstonecraft. Against the common wisdom of the time, Wollstonecraft argued that women possessed equal reason to men and that they should possess the same rights, in particular the right to vote (which was not granted to all women over 21 in Britain until 1928, over a century later). The work of first-wave feminists like Wollstonecraft significantly influenced equality movements like the Suffragettes who used direct political action as a means of securing greater equality for women. First-wave feminism was thus primarily concerned to secure equal political rights and formal equality.
Second-wave feminism emerged in the 1960s and 1970s and is associated with the Women’s Movement and the work of feminists like Germaine Greer, Marilyn French, Betty Friedan, Simone de Beauvoir, Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. Second-wave feminism grew out of the realization that gender inequality continued in liberal democratic states even though women in those states had largely won equal legal rights. Second-wave feminists thus focus less on establishing equal rights and equality of opportunity, and more on revealing and reforming those implicit social, political, legal and cultural forces which conspire to discourage women from availing themselves of their rights or taking up the opportunities available to them: the social forces which discourage women from pursuing a career on an equal basis with men even though they have the right to do so, for example. Hence, second-wave feminism focuses not so much on the reform of legal rules and policies, but on the wider social attitudes and norms which guide our actions.
A further important division in contemporary feminism is between liberal and radical feminists. Liberal feminists, such as Susan Moller Okin and Martha Nussbaum, have argued that feminist aims can and should be achieved through an application of mainstream liberal ideas of justice, rights, and economic redistribution. The principal aim for feminists, they argue, is to secure greater justice for women, which means making sure that men and women do not suffer unjust inequalities on account of their sex.
Radical feminists, like Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon and Sheila Jeffreys, urge that we reject the dominant liberal discourse concerning justice for its failure to address many of the most profound examples of gender inequality in the world, such as rape, sexual harassment, trafficking, domestic abuse, and female sexuality. They focus instead on reforming unequal power relationships and ending violence against women.
The existence of patriarchy
Translated literally as ‘rule by the father’, patriarchy is the term feminists use to describe the system of values, norms and practices which encourage and perpetuate the subordination of women. Feminists do not see the patriarchal subordination of women as something done by all men to all women. Rather, they see it as something which shapes the lives of men and women.
Men and women learn who they are, what they believe, and what forms of behaviour are appropriate in the context of the society in which they live. From birth boys and girls are taught how to behave and what it means to be a success or a failure. We learn quickly what kind of behaviour is worthy of praise and reward, and what kind is worthy of punishment, and we learn too that we can be rewarded and punished by many different people in many different ways: our parents, our teachers, our peers, our friends, our work colleagues, the police, community leaders, religious leaders, and countless others. All, in their own ways, influence our actions and shape our choices. Consequently, feminists argue, if the overarching values of a society are sexist (as they have been throughout the majority of human history), then men and women will internalize sexist attitudes. If society shapes our identities, then the people produced by sexist societies will be sexist.
Patriarchy (and, hence, sexism) is not simply the fault of men, then. It is something which works to the benefit of men, but which is internalized and strengthened by men and women. Women and men are both encouraged, through explicit and implicit means, to adopt certain kinds of identity, to make certain kinds of choices, and to behave in particular ways. However, the roles that men are encouraged to adopt tend to have a much higher social status than those that women are encouraged to adopt. This is patriarchy. It is the idea that men and women are encouraged by society to adopt certain roles but that, overwhelmingly, male roles are accorded much higher status, respect, and economic worth than those of women.
Feminism aims to (a) reveal the nature and extent of patriarchy, and (b) undermine patriarchy. Feminism promotes gender-neutral social and political attitudes, values, and practices which do not systematically demean the views and activities of women.
Spotlight: Evidence for patriarchy
✽ On average, women in Britain earn around 10 per cent less than men for doing the same jobs. In the USA, they earn 20 per cent less.
✽ Less than a quarter of UK MPs are women, and less than one-fifth of representatives in the US Senate and House of Representatives are women. Only 1 out of 52 British Prime Ministers has been a woman. There have been no female US Presidents.
✽ Women are the victims in 77 per cent of reported cases of domestic violence (British Crime Survey 2009). Domestic violence is 25 per cent of all crimes reported. According to Amnesty International, one in four women will be a victim of domestic violence at some point in her lifetime.
Sex and gender
Throughout history social roles have often been justified by an appeal to biological differences between men and women. For example, Kant and Aristotle both argued that women were ‘naturally’ unsuited to certain kinds of life: both believed that women were incapable of engaging in the kind of reasoning required by politics and, hence, that women should not be consulted about political matters. Nietzsche believed that women were ‘naturally’ weak and, hence, were inferior to men. And Hegel, in The Philosophy of Right, argued that women ‘are not made for activities which demand a universal faculty such as the advanced sciences, philosophy, and certain forms of artistic production’ (Hegel [1820] 1973: p. 263).
Extreme claims of this kind are less common now, but the idea that women and men are ‘naturally’ suited to different occupations or lifestyles persists. For example, the relative lack of women in top jobs in many liberal democratic states has been attributed to the purported fact that women are naturally less competitive than men, and the fact that women still take on the vast majority of child care and domestic duties in the household (while their partners pursue their careers) has been attributed to the ‘fact’ that women are naturally more caring and men are more ambitious.
Feminists respond in two ways. Firstly, they argue that essentialism of this kind is bound up with historically antiquated, patronizing and offensive perceptions of what men and women can or cannot do and, hence, what they should or should not be allowed to do. They point out that we no longer justify unequal treatment of other social groups on the basis of essentialist arguments. Historically, racists have claimed that black people are naturally aggressive or lazy, or that Jews are naturally greedy. However, egalitarians rightly reject these claims and the unjust policies associated with them. Feminists argue that justifying unequal treatment of women by an appeal to natural difference should be rejected for the same reasons.
Secondly, feminists argue, even if there are entrenched differences between the sexes, society and politics should be reconfigured so as to value women. It is one thing (and very controversial) to say that, for example, women engage in politics in a different way to men. It is quite another, however, to say that in doing so they engage in politics in the wrong way and that, therefore, women should not be accommodated in political debates. Put bluntly, if women engage in politics differently to men, feminists insist that the appropriate response is to change the male-centric way that politics has been conducted, a bias based on centuries of male dominance and female oppression.
Spotlight: More evidence for patriarchy
✽ At least 47,000 women are raped in Britain every year (Fawcett Society). More than a quarter of the British public believe that women are either partially or totally responsible for being raped if they wear ‘sexy or revealing clothing’. In Britain, two women every week are killed by their partners or ex-partners. At least 1,500 women are illegally trafficked into Britain every year, most of whom are forced to work in the sex industry. Globally, one in three women has been beaten, raped, or abused in her lifetime (Amnesty International).
✽ 1.9 million cosmetic surgery operations were conducted in one year (2009) in one country alone (the USA). Of these, 90 per cent were conducted on women.
Many feminists thus insist on a distinction between sex and gender. Sex refers to the biological differences between women and men: differences in body parts, chromosomes and reproductive biology. Gender refers to the differences between women and men that are social: differences in appearance norms, career choices and so on. Feminists argue that most observable differences between women and men are differences of gender rather than sex. Since gender differences are social they can be reduced, or at least made fairer, by social action.
For example, it is a difference of sex and not gender that only women can gestate and breastfeed. But it is a difference of gender and not sex that women’s careers are disproportionately affected by parenthood. It is society and not nature that structures paid work in such a way as to be incompatible with caring for children, and that imposes stronger norms on mothers than on fathers to be available to their children. This gender inequality could be reduced by social policies such as changing ideals of paid work and promoting fathers’ parenting, without affecting sex differences of gestating and breastfeeding.
Feminists therefore argue that we should not try and explain gender differences purely in terms of biology. Millions of women undergo painful and invasive cosmetic surgery operations not because of some biological urge, but to conform to social standards of beauty. Women are under-represented in top jobs because of enduring attitudes about the ‘natural’ role of women, and their natural strengths and weaknesses. It is not because of some biological predisposition toward raising children rather than engaging in paid work that women have historically devoted their lives to domesticity and motherhood while men have not. And it is not a genetic need to procreate which leads so many men to rape so many women every year, but widespread social attitudes about male and female sexuality.
The importance of power
Feminists emphasize the importance of power. In particular, they criticize the liberal view of power as something possessed primarily by the state. For feminists, power is exercised not only in a one-dimensional sense (to use Lukes’s terminology) but also in a three-dimensional sense: social norms powerfully shape our lives by shaping our choices. Power is often invisible and exerted in ways which we might not easily see or understand: power is not just about making us do what we do not want to do, but about making us actually want to do certain things.
Consider again the example of cosmetic surgery. Hundreds of thousands of women a year willingly pay surgeons huge amounts of money to have them increase the size of their breasts, eradicate wrinkles, or remove fat from their abdomens. Cosmetic surgery is a multi-million dollar global industry, and the reason for this is that there is a genuine market demand for it. Women who undergo cosmetic surgery procedures do not do so, on the whole, against their will: they do so because they feel that it would make them happier or more confident. But why is confidence and happiness linked so strongly to body image for so many women? How does a situation arise in which, in order to feel confident and happy, so many women feel the need to pay someone to cut them open, insert foreign objects in their bodies, or inject chemicals into them? Norms about body image, beauty, and sexiness are powerful motivators to action: they encourage men and women to make choices and adopt certain kinds of lifestyles, and to reject others.
Social norms exert pressure on us in countless other ways. They shape our attitudes about what to wear, how to act, what to say and when to say it, what jobs to pursue, and so on. Every social context has a set of norms which shape our choices. And, again, if these norms are sexist, then women will be encouraged to act, and to understand the world, on sexist terms. Patriarchy has the power to make women complicit in their own subordination by encouraging them to want things and to develop views about themselves and the world which further entrench their own inequality.
Societies which reward women for being thin and youthful, for example, create in their female members a desire to be thin and youthful which is real, not imagined. Similarly, societies which reward women for giving up their independence in favour of marriage, or subordinating their careers to those of their husbands, create in women a genuine, not imaginary, desire to get married and to put their husbands’ careers before their own. Thus, gender roles are internalized by men and women, and handed on to future generations through socialization, peer pressure and tradition not because men and women are consciously seeking to keep women ‘in their place’ (although some might do this), but because social norms have a power over us which we feel but do not always recognize.
Given this, many feminists have criticized liberalism’s approach to equality. While liberal feminists like Susan Moller Okin and Martha Nussbaum try to address gender inequality within the liberal tradition, radical feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, and post-structuralist feminists like Iris Marion Young, argue that in holding ‘justice’ to be the principal subject of political inquiry liberals miss the point, and shift normative debates in a direction that makes them unable to deal with the most devastating aspects of gender inequality.
Radical feminists argue that inequality is important not simply because there are not enough female chief executives or Members of Parliament, but because women are subjected to violence. For feminists like MacKinnon and Dworkin, the point is that the three-dimensional power embodied in social norms translates very quickly into the use of one-dimensional power by men over women. Men are more likely to rape and abuse women if women are routinely portrayed in the media and elsewhere as submissive, sexually available, and subordinate.