Review of Related Studies

rooted in a set of customary and legal constraints that blocks women’s entrance to and success in the so-called public world . To the extent that society holds the false belief that women are, by nature, less intellectually and physically capable than men, it tends to discriminate against women in Tong, 2009: 2 . Its long history is a testament to how well it has been able to adapt and change to the many issues confronting women . Mary Wollstonecraft represents the beginning of the liberal feminist movement . According to Tong, she wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in which she makes the case that women need to be educated just as well as men so that they can grow up to be moral and autonomous human beings 2009: 12- 13 . Then in the 19th century John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor wrote about women needing to be more involved in society . While Harriet Taylor called for women to work outside the household as well as raise children, John Stuart Mill believed that women should be recognized as fully rational and worthy of the same civil liberties and economic opportunities as men in Tong, 2009: 17 . Though many of their thoughts differed, both Mill and Taylor supported the suffrage movement . After the passage of the 19th amendment liberal feminism was quiet until the 1960s when it awoke during the civil rights movement by realizing that similar to race discrimination there was a great deal of sex discrimination in the system . There are several critiques of liberal feminism. One is that liberal feminism focuses too much on women becoming like men and it unnecessarily denigrates the importance of traditional female roles 2009: 35 . Another critique attacks liberal feminism because it emphasizes the rational above the emotional while humans need both . It also questioned liberal feminisms focus on the individual and not on the community 2009: 38 . A combination of historical approach and liberal feminism focuses on its racist, classist and heterosexist past 2009: 40 . It concerns on the past lives of women in the society. Mainly, liberal feminism focuses on gender justice . Liberal feminists believe that their philosophy positively answers each of these critiques and though liberal feminism at one time was racist, classist, and heterosexist, it has overcome these issues .

4. Theory of Gender Hierarchy

Before the 1950s, the term “gender was used only in terms of grammar, and only to distinguish a category of words that are called feminine nouns from other words that are masculine nouns . Many European languages that come from Latin like Spanish, French, and Italian have nouns that are either feminine or masculine in gender . For example, in Spanish, house casa is feminine, and day día is masculine . Some languages like German even have three genders. Outside of their grammatical category, the word gender was not used to refer to people . At that time, when one spoke about someone being either male or female, the word used was sex . In 1955, the word gender is used referring to people. It refers to their sex, but not quite the same . According to Jabbra, the meaning of the word gender began to change in 1955 . A scientist studying the similarities and differences between men and women began to use the word gender in new ways that referred to peoples behavior 2008: 229 . John Money created the term gender role and began to use it to mean something different from sex . As mentioned earlier, there is a difference between sex and gender . According to Money, the word sex describes the body . Sex organs and sex chromosomes show what sex someone is. The word gender describes someones personality or character in Jabbra, 2008: 229 . It says if someone feels or acts more like a female feminine or more like a male masculine . In response to this, Peterson Runyan assert that gender should be understood as a social, not physiological, construction: femininity and masculinity, the terms that denote one’s gender, refer to a complex set of characteristics and behaviors prescribed for a particular sex by society and learned through the socialization process 1993: 17 . In other words, society confines males and females to particular masculine and feminine character profiles, not biology . This means that gender is not fixed. Gender should be considered an adjustable and flexible concept, as opposed to the more static tendency of biology . The nature of hierarchy in general requires ones to be dominant and the others to be subordinate . Different people performing different functions in cooperation with each other will form themselves into a hierarchy. As it is clearly stated that men and women are different and they cannot be compared to one