femaleness is a general term, but is often used as shorthand for human femaleness. Distaff is an archaic adjective derived from womens conventional
role as a spinner, now used only as a deliberate archaism. Multiversity is a neologism derived from the Latin meant to provide a female counterpart of
virility, but used very loosely, sometimes to mean merely womanhood, sometimes femininity, and sometimes even as a collective term for women.
2.1.2 Feminism
Feminism is a relatively recent term for the politics of equal rights for
women. It came into use in English only in the 1890s, and many languages do not have this noun at all. It is also a system of critique and has as its central focus the
concept of patriarchy, which can be described as a system of male authority, which oppresses women through its social, political, and economic institutions.
Feminism is therefore a critique of patriarchy, on the one hand, and an ideology committed to womens emancipation on the other.
Feminist theology is a movement that reconsiders the traditions, practices,
scriptures, and theologies of religions from a feminist perspective. Some of the goals of feminist theology include increasing the role of women among the clergy
and religious authorities, reinterpreting male-dominated imagery and language about God, determining womens place in relation to career and motherhood, and
studying images of women in the religions sacred texts.
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The most far-reaching social development of modern times is the revolt of women against sexual servitude Margaret Sanger, 1920. While feminism takes
many forms and cannot be characterized in any seamless way, it nonetheless encompasses the struggles of women to secure their economic and political
agency. From the Womens Suffrage Movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the Womens Liberation Movement of the 1960s and 1970s,
feminism is typically associated with particular historical moments when a coalition of women succeeds in bringing issues of gender equality, sexual
oppression, and sex discrimination into the public arena. Whether it takes the form of an explicit demand for the vote as did the Suffrage Movements or a more
generalized demand for womens freedom as did the Womens Liberation Movement, feminism is invariably engaged in resistance to prevailing notions of
women’s’ nature’.
Feminism often consolidates into a political movement as a result of womens participation in other radical, reformist, or revolutionary activities. For
example, women were active in the anti-slavery movements of the nineteenth century. Yet, at a World Anti-Slavery Convention held in London in 1840,
Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were forced to sit in the gallery because the conventions organizers had determined that women could not be delegates.
Eight years later, Mott and Stanton convened the Seneca Falls Womens Rights Convention, which adopted a platform explicitly revising the US Declaration of
Independence to accord women the same guarantees that it granted to men. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal …’
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In addition, it specified a set of grievances regarding the usurping by men of womens political, legal, and economic autonomy. It would not be the last time
that the hypocrisy of demanding rights for some while denying them to others would initiate a womens movement. Womens experience as coffee makers,
typists, and sexual attendants to men in the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s similarly activated both the demand for womens full participation in the
public sphere and denunciation of masculine sexual prerogatives.
The Womens Liberation Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the backdrop to contemporary feminism, is characterized by two intersecting trajectories. On
the one hand, in spite of the liberalization of non-marital sex occasioned in part by the wide distribution of the birth control pill, women remained mens sexual
subordinates. Feminists challenged ‘sexist’ images of women in popular culture and in the pornography industry in relation to a growing understanding of
“womens political subordination under patriarchy”. Womens bodies, then, became the ground on which the struggle for liberation was waged. On the other
hand, a connection was made between womens ‘consciousness’ and their sexual subordination.
While feminists like Margaret Sanger had long before identified womens complicity in perpetuating their own subordination, the concept of ‘consciousness
raising’ as an instrument of liberation emerged only in this later period. Consciousness raising, a collective activity of mutual support and critique,
encouraged individual women to see the ways in which their habits of thought
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conformed to a particular set of ideological presuppositions about womens nature and womens roles.
Though this characterization of consciousness raising might appear a parody of the concerns of middle-class married women, the fact that such women
were drawn into the movement in large numbers was crucial to the widespread recognition that women were no longer content to sit on the sidelines of
politicalpublic life. The slogan ‘the personal is political’ captured the Movements insistence that what goes on behind the closed doors of the domestic
sphere has everything to do with what goes on outside it. On this basis, despite serious differences among feminists as to whether the goal was equality with men
or freedom from them, a broad agenda for change could be articulated.
The womens health movement demanded everything from an increase in the number of women doctors, to access to abortion and contraception, to freedom
from sterilization abuse, to a full understanding and celebration of womens bodies in feminist terms. Our BodiesOurselves, still the principal womens health
handbook, was first published in 1971 More generally, women demanded ready access to the political arena, to economic self-sufficiency, to childcare, to freedom
from male violence, to divorce, and to workplaces free from sexual harassment
While feminism must be seen as an activist demand for political and economic reform, it has always been informed by serious reflection on the nature
of sexual difference and the mechanisms by means of which sexual difference is enmeshed in, even created out of, relations of power and oppression. Mary
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Wollstonecraft A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792, John Stuart Mill The Subjection of Women, 1869, Margaret Sanger Women and the New Race,
1920, Simone de Beauvoir The Second Sex, 1949, Betty Friedan The Feminine Mystique, 1974, and bell hooks Aint I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism,
1981 are among the many feminists who have endeavored to understand the causes and forms of womens oppression, and to reconceptualize sexual
difference.
Contemporary feminism has achieved more systematic interventions into the arenas that authorize representations of sexual difference, in large part because
feminists have secured a greater presence in academia and in elite domains of business, politics, medicine, science, and the mass media. For example, feminist
historians have unmasked the assumption that history is determined by great wars and great men, and have succeeded in drawing attention to the ways in which
womens work has significantly affected historical developments.
At the heart of feminist social and political analysis is the challenging of the publicprivate divide in politics, which has historically denied women access
to the public political space and therefore representation of their interests. Starting from a point of unity—‘sisterhood is global’—feminism today is an ideology with
many practitioners that have situated themselves on various theoretical intersections—Marxist feminists, anarchist feminists, radical feminists, liberal
feminists. Feminism, however, is a critique or an extension of, traditional
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ideologies but has also made a significant contribution of its own in the field of theory and praxis.
Feminist methodology, which arose from a tradition of ‘consciousness raising’ in the womens movement and by drawing upon womens subject
experience to extend the boundaries of theory has, for example, found an important place in the field of methodological analysis. Issues such as race,
sexuality, class, and ethnicity have served to disperse the idea of an essential ‘woman’ in which all women would recognize as themselves. Critiques of first-
and second-wave Western feminism by black and Third World women, and lesbian groups, have introduced a diversity of approaches to appear within the
feminist discourse.
This tendency has been further reinforced by feminisms encounters with post-structuralism and post-modernism. Feminism today is not simply an ideology
but a growing academic discipline. While this is making issues of gender accessible to women in education in a systematic way, its incorporation into
academic curricula is also causing concern among many women who see the cutting edge of feminism—its political activism—being blunted in this process.
Feminism In France has shared many features familiar to the Anglophone world through the feminist movements in the United Kingdom and the USA: on
the one hand, the desire and the struggle to attain equal rights for women; on the other, involvement with political movements that contested the republican state
and believed that womens oppression would only end with the end of patriarchy.
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The influence of feminism on socialism, or the effect of socialist feminism on womens lives and status, is harder to gauge, as it cannot be judged by concrete
achievement. The struggle of socialist women meant that they engaged with the Republic, which oppressed them as workers and as women, with the theory of
Marx, which ignores gender, and with the misogyny of their socialist brothers. This multiple struggle continues within all the parties of the Left on the level of
theory and in daily practice.
Feminist epistemology has asked whether different ways of knowing, for instance with different criteria of justification, and different emphases on logic
and imagination, characterize male and female attempts to understand the world. Such concerns include awareness of the ‘masculine’ self-image, itself a socially
variable and potentially distorting picture of what thought and action should be. A particular target of much feminist epistemology is a Kantian or Enlightenment
conception of rationality, which is seen as a device for claiming mastery and control, and for refusing to acknowledge differing perspectives and different
relations to life and nature. Although extreme claims have been made, such as that logic is a phallic and patriarchal device for coercing other people, it is still unclear
how capacities, training, and culturally reinforced aspirations, work together in explaining how people acquire knowledge. Again there is a spectrum of concern,
from the highly theoretical to the relatively practical. In this latter area particular attention is given to the institutional biases that stand in the way of equal
opportunities in science and other academic pursuits, or the ideologies that stand
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in the way of women seeing themselves as leading contributors to various disciplines.
However, to more radical feminists such concerns merely exhibit women wanting for themselves the same power and rights over others that men have
claimed, and failing to confront the real problem, which is how to live without such asymmetrical powers and rights Disagreements between feminist reformers
and radicals were present from the beginning. At first these conflicts were more over lifestyle than politics. Reformers observed existing social codes dress,
comportment, family obligations, respectability.
Although feminism is a nineteenth-century neologism, it is now generally accepted in Anglophone historiography as a shorthand label for
discourses that criticize misogyny and male dominance, argue for an improvement of the female condition, and demand a public voice for women speaking on behalf
of their sex. A large corpus of writings, published all over Europe from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, can be considered feminist in this sense.
The first systematic feminist treatise is probably Christine de Pizans Le livre de la cité des dames 1404–1405; Book of the city of ladies. Womens
reason and sense of justice were in no way inferior to those of men”, she contended. Pizans City of Ladies, built on the field of Letters and consecrated
by the Virgin Mary, is an allegory of the female voice in history, which, once raised, will never be silenced. The opposition of feminine piety, virtue, and
refinement to male profanity, vice, and vulgarity is found in much feminist
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literature. Another popular genre, found all over Europe from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, is the galleries of illustrious women, proving by historical
example that they could equal men in every respect.
Finally, different feminisms and feminist moments should be interpreted in the context of struggles over particular practices, such as literary
authorship and taste, elite sociability, female networks, university politics, forms of religious worship, marriage laws and customs, and social and political issues.
Many feminist utterances that seem outlandish at first sight only disclose their real meaning and significance when read in their specific context. The feminism of the
early.
Feminist theory is an extension of feminism into theoretical or philosophical fields. It encompasses work in a variety of disciplines, including
anthropology, sociology, economics, womens studies, literary criticism, art history, psychoanalysis and philosophy. Feminist theory aims to understand
gender inequality and focuses on gender politics, power relations, and sexuality. While providing a critique of these social and political relations, much of feminist
theory also focuses on the promotion of womens rights and interests. Themes explored in feminist theory include discrimination, stereotyping, objectification
especially sexual objectification, oppression, and patriarchy.
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2.2 GENERAL CONCEPT OF AMBITION
