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B. Feminist Theory
Feminist theory is the extension of feminism into theoretical, or philosophical ground.
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Feminist theory aims to understand the nature of inequality and focuses on gender politics, power relations and sexuality. While generally providing a critique of
social relations, much of feminist theory also focuses on analyzing gender inequality and the promotion of womens rights, interests, and issues. Themes explored in
feminism include discrimination, stereotyping, objectification especially sexual objectification, oppression, and patriarchy.
Feminist theory emerged from these feminist movements. Feminist theory is based on a series of assumptions. First, it assumes that men and women have different
experiences; that the world is not the same for men and women. Some women think the experiences of women should be identical to the experiences of men. Secondly,
feminist theory assumes that women’s oppression is not a subset of some other social relationship.
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Feminist theory assumes that women’s oppression is a unique constellation of social problems and has to be understood in itself, and not as a subset of class or any
other structure. So feminist theory assumes that the oppression of women is part of the way the structure of the world is organized, and that one task of feminist theory is
to explain about how and why this structure evolved.
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http:www.istheory.yorku.caFeminism.htm, accessed on January 2, 2009.
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Alison M. Jaggar and Paula S. Rothenberg, Feminist Frameworks Alternative Theoretical Accounts of the Relations between Women and Men Third Edition,
New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc, 1995, p. 81
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Feminist theory names this structure “patriarchy,” and assumes that a historical force that has a material and psychological base. Patriarchy is the system in
which men have more power than women have, and have more access to whatever society esteems. What society esteems obviously various from culture to culture; but
if you look at the spheres of power, you will find that all who have it are male.
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This is a long-term historical fact rooted in real things. It is not question of bad attitudes; it
is not a historical accident - there are real advantages to men in retaining control over women.
Feminist theory has several purposes. The first is to understand the power differential between men and women. Secondly, the purpose is to understand
women’s oppression-how it evolved, how it changes over times, how it is related to other forms of oppression, and finally, how to change our oppression. A third purpose
of feminist theory is to overcome oppression. Feminist theory is the foundation of action and there is no pretense that theory can be neutral.
Within feminist theory is a commitment to charge oppressive structures and to connect abstract ideas with concrete problems for political action. It is senseless to
study the situation of women without a concomitant commitment to do something about it. The theorist has to draw out the consequence of the theory and use life
experience as a part of her basis for understanding, for feeding into the development of theory.
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Ibid. h. 82
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C. History of Feminism
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