Feminist Perspectives on Womanhood, Equality, and Rights
Feminist Perspectives on Womanhood
Key Thinkers and Concepts
The notion of WOMAN is central to all authors studied in this course. This analysis explains how they articulate a conceptualization of womanhood as related to equality, freedom, rights, education, sexuality, work, religion, independence, difference, subjectivity, and politics.
The notion of womanhood is perhaps the most relevant issue that feminism can cover. Because of this, all authors analyzed throughout this semester have a clear notion and conceptualization of womanhood as related to equality in all aspects.
Gerda Lerner and the Creation of Feminist Consciousness
Gerda Lerner, in her work The Creation of Feminist Consciousness, traces the rise of feminist consciousness, mainly in Western Europe. In her work, patriarchy plays a relevant role in the dehumanization of women, in a way imposed by philosophical systems that defined women as inferior and marginal. Those philosophical (we could say cultural) assumptions, their lack of change, and universal acceptance reinforced the culture of subordination of women and have a terrible impact on their struggle for emancipation.
Lerner also sees women as an oppressed collective, disadvantaged mainly in culture and education, which directly influences their vision of themselves as an oppressed group. Apart from that, she also highlights the idea of women helping women to build feminist consciousness, which requires women to be economically independent of men. Lerner states the need to fight for the right to learn and how and what to be taught.
Mary Wollstonecraft and the Vindication of Rights
It is in the first feminist wave when one finds the first feminist philosophical work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft. In her work, apart from trying to establish equality between men and women, Wollstonecraft proposes an education reform that would give girls and boys free and equal education. Wollstonecraft also introduces the nature vs nurture debate. She questions whether boys and girls are systematically and naturally attracted by certain things (e.g., Do boys like cars and girls dolls? Or is it just that you give boys cars and girls dolls?).
Simone de Beauvoir and The Second Sex
In the second wave, Simone de Beauvoir and her work The Second Sex should be highlighted. She sees men as oppressors by characterizing women as the Other, the opposition to men. While man plays the role of self or subject, woman is seen as the object. Bearing this in mind, woman is seen as a complement to the man, and womanhood acquires a clear inequality to what being a man means.
Beauvoir establishes that women are in a subordinate position in every aspect of society and seeks a reason to explain it. Using different disciplines, she finds various essential and indisputable differences between men and women, but none of them explained the unequal position of women. Beauvoir also delves into economic and religious aspects to prove how these are part of the process of leaving women in a subordinate position.
The author defends that women should forget about being like men to be free and about undergoing the process of being a passive human in society. Women must be socialized to engage the world and allowed to discover the unique ways in which their embodiment engages the world. In short, the myth of woman must be dismantled.
Shared Perspectives and Conclusion
All of the authors named above coincide and agree with the idea that women have constantly been acquiring a passive, secondary, or subordinate role in society. Major factors controlled mainly by patriarchal models throughout history, such as economy, religion, and education, have impregnated the notion of womanhood with a sentiment of inferiority. According to the authors, both men and women should have the same rights to have the same possibilities and opportunities. In trying to reach this task, the right to education is key for women since it is the major factor that has been positioning them as culturally inferior in society throughout history.