Feminism

Feminism originally was an expression used by suffragettes to obtain the right for women to vote in the early 1900s in the United States and the United Kingdom. By the 1970s, however, liberals had changed the meaning to represent people who favored identical roles for men and women in society as a whole. An excerpt from Elizabeth Cady Stanton's speech 'Our Girls' aptly sums up a central tenet of the philosophy of feminism: "I would have girls regard themselves not as adjectives but as nouns." There are several schools of feminism, the most radical being that of militant feminism, whose beliefs are not necessarily shared by feminists as a whole. Specifically, modern radical feminists tend to:

• believe that there are no inherent differences between men and women. The most significant belief underlying contemporary feminism is that there are no sex differences; therefore advocacy for equal rights must be extended to advocacy for equal results or outcomes. [4]</ref>
• view traditional marriage as unacceptably patriarchal
• allow role-reversal, like girls playing football, if they wish, and boys being cheerleaders for it, if they wish, or men baking cookies for women
• seek to abolish the institutionalized objectification of women
• insist that childrearing activities be shared equally by men and women
• support affirmative action for women
• feel that women who are happy in traditional roles, such as housewife, are selling short their potential
• prefer that women be able to wear pants, as well as dresses
• seek women in combat in the military just like men, and coed submarines
• refuse to take the husband's last name when marrying, as an assertion of their own identity

History

Roots of the movement in the United States and the United Kingdom include the Women's Suffrage movement of the early 1900's and the Women's Liberation (or "Second Wave Feminist") movement of the 1960's and 1970's.

The Equal Rights Amendment, which proponents claimed would address the inadequacies of the Fourteenth Amendment concerning women and citizenship, was proposed in the US in 1923. The amendment passed Congress in 1972 but was ultimately defeated, falling just three states short of the required three-quarters majority on June 30, 1982. The majority of Americans felt that its passage would entail several consequences, including making girls subject to the military draft, the integration of single-sex schools, the possible recognition of homosexual marriage.

The feminist movement in the West evolved in the 1980s with the rise of so-called Post-Feminism (also called "Third-Wave" feminism), which stresses that women have many rights that go unrecognized, often by women themselves, in everyday life, and in the American legal structure. Most members of the feminist movement support reproductive rights currently guaranteed by American law, including the legal right to abortion. This stance is opposed by many conservatives, leading political commentator Rush Limbaugh to coin the intolerant and bigoted term "Femi-nazis" to refer to extreme feminist activists.

During the administration of Bill Clinton, feminism made a partial resurgence, but feminist leadership largely failed to criticize President Clinton's sexist behavior toward female employees as both Arkansas Governor and U.S. President.

Quotations

Robin Morgan

• "I feel that 'man-hating' is an honourable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them."

• "I haven't the faintest notion what possible revolutionary role white hetero-sexual men could fulfill, since they are the very embodiment of reactionary-vested-interest-power. But then, I have great difficulty examining what men in general could possibly do about all this. In addition to doing the sh*twork that women have been doing for generations, possibly not exist? No, I really don't mean that. Yes, I really do."

• "We can't destroy the inequities between men and women until we destroy marriage."

• "I claim that rape exists any time sexual intercourse occurs when it has not been initiated by the woman, out of her own genuine affection and desire."

Andrea Dworkin

• "Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice."

• "Heterosexual intercourse is the pure, formalized expression of contempt for women's bodies."

• "In my own life, I don't have intercourse. That is my choice."

• Q: People think you are very hostile to men. A: "I am."

• "Men use the night to erase us."

• "The annihilation of a woman's personality, individuality, will, character, is prerequisite to male sexuality."

Marilyn French

• "As long as some men use physical force to subjugate females, all men need not. The knowledge that some men do suffices to threaten all women. He can beat or kill the woman he claims to love; he can rape women ... he can sexually molest his daughters ... THE VAST MAJORITY OF MEN IN THE WORLD DO ONE OR MORE OF THE ABOVE" - The War Against Women, p. 182 (her emphasis)

• "All patriarchists exalt the home and family as sacred, demanding it remain inviolate from prying eyes. Men want privacy for their violations of women ... All women learn in childhood that women as a sex are men's prey" - The War Against Women, p. 186

• "The media treat male assaults on women like rape, beating, and murder of wives and female lovers, or male incest with children, as individual aberrations ... obscuring the fact that all male violence toward women is part of a concerted campaign" - The War Against Women, p. 21

Other

• "The nuclear family must be destroyed ... Whatever its ultimate meaning, the break-up of families now is an objectively revolutionary process" - Linda Gordon

• "Marriage has existed for the benefit of men; and has been a legally sanctioned method of control over women ... We must work to destroy it. The end of the institution of marriage is a necessary condition for the liberation of women. Therefore it is important for us to encourage women to leave their husbands and not to live individually with men ... All of history must be re-written in terms of oppression of women. We must go back to ancient female religions like witchcraft" (from "The Declaration of Feminism" November, 1971)

• "The feminista agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians" - Pat Robertson, fundraising letter, 1992

• "The people I'm furious with are the Women's Liberationists. They keep getting up on soapboxes and proclaiming women are brighter than men. That's true, but it should be kept quiet or it ruins the whole racket" - Anita Loos

• "Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation, and destroy the male sex" - Valerie Solanas, SCUM founder (Society for Cutting Up Men)

• "The male is a domestic animal which, if treated with firmness...can be trained to do most things" - Jilly Cooper, SCUM (Society For Cutting Up Men, started by Valerie Solanas)

• "Since marriage constitutes slavery for women, it is clear that the women's movement must concentrate on attacking this institution. Freedom for women cannot be won without the abolition of marriage" - Sheila Cronin, the leader of the feminist organization NOW

• "The institution of sexual intercourse is anti-feminist" - Ti-Grace Atkinson

• "Feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice" - Ti-Grace Atkinson

• "It matters more what's in a woman's face than what's on it." - Claudette Colbert, quoted in Kindling the Spirit by Lois P. Frankel

• "Rape is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear" - Susan Brownmiller; Authoress of Against Our Will p.6

• "When a woman reaches orgasm with a man she is only collaborating with the patriarchal system, eroticizing her own oppression" - Sheila Jeffrys

• "Politically, I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated" - Catharine MacKinnon

• "All sex, even consensual sex between a married couple, is an act of violence perpetrated against a woman" - Catharine MacKinnon

• "You grow up with your father holding you down and covering your mouth so another man can make a horrible searing pain between your legs" - Catharine MacKinnon (Prominent legal feminist scholar; Universities of Michigan & Yale)

• "In a patriarchal society, all heterosexual intercourse is rape because women, as a group, are not strong enough to give meaningful consent" - Catharine MacKinnon, quoted in Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales from the Strange World of Women's Studies

• "The more famous and powerful I get the more power I have to hurt men" - Sharon Stone, Actress

• "Ninety-five percent of women's experiences are about being a victim. Or about being an underdog, or having to survive ... women didn't go to Vietnam and blow things up. They are not Rambo" - Jodie Foster, Actress - as quoted in The New York Times Magazine

• "The proportion of men must be reduced to and maintained at approximately 10% of the human race" - Sally Miller Gearhart, in The Future - If There Is One - Is Female

• "And if the professional rapist is to be separated from the average dominant heterosexual (male), it may be mainly a quantitative difference" - Susan Griffin, Rape: The All-American Crime

• "If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males" - Mary Daly, former Professor at Boston College, 2001

• "If anyone is prosecuted for filing a false report, then victims of real attacks will be less likely to report them" - David Angier

• "To use the word [rape] carefully would be to be careful for the sake of the violator, and the survivors don't care a hoot about him. … They [men unjustly accused of rape] have a lot of pain, but it is not a pain that I would necessarily have spared them. I think it ideally initiates a process of self-exploration. 'How do I see women?' 'If I didn't violate her, could I have?' 'Do I have the potential to do to her what they say I did?' Those are good questions." - Catherine Comins, assistant dean of student life at Vassar in 1991

• "I believe that women have a capacity for understanding and compassion which man structurally does not have, does not have it because he cannot have it. He's just incapable of it" - Barbara Jordan, former congresswoman

• "Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release" - Germaine Greer

• "Man-hating is everywhere, but everywhere it is twisted and transformed, disguised, tranquilized, and qualified. It coexists, never peacefully, with the love, desire, respect, and need women also feel for men. Always man-hating is shadowed by its milder, more diplomatic and doubtful twin, ambivalence" - Judith Levine, Authoress

• "I feel what they feel: man-hating, that volatile admixture of pity, contempt, disgust, envy, alienation, fear, and rage at men. It is hatred not only for the anonymous man who makes sucking noises on the street, not only for the rapist or the judge who acquits him, but for what the Greeks called philo-aphilos, 'hate in love' for the men women share their lives with - husbands, lovers, friends, fathers, brothers, sons, co-workers." - Judith Levine, Authoress of My Enemy, My love

• "There are no boundaries between affectionate sex and slavery in (the male) world. Distinctions between pleasure and danger are academic; the dirty-laundrylist of 'sex acts' ... includes rape, foot binding, fellatio, intercourse, auto eroticism, incest, anal intercourse, use and production of pornography, cunnilingus, sexual harassment, and murder" - Judith Levine; summarizing comment on the WAS document (A Southern Women's Writing Collective: Women Against Sex)

• ((Delaney Nickerson, of the American Coalition for ABUSE AWARENESS, refers to the False Memory Syndrome Foundation as "The F---ing Molesters Society" (Miami Herald, April 3, 1995) The ACAA is a lobbying group, which includes Ellen Bass (co-author of THE COURAGE TO HEAL), and Rene Frederickson, leading feminist psychotherapist and strong proponent of repressed memory theory))

• ((At the STONE ANGELS satanic ritual abuse conference in Thunder Bay in February, 1995, the following was contained in the handouts at a conference supported financially by the Ontario Government: FMS stands for: FULL OF MOSTLY SH*T; FOR MORE SADISM; FELONS, MURDERERS, SCUMBALLS; FREQUENT MOLESTERS SOCIETY))

• "Women have their faults / men have only two: / everything they say / everything they do"^{[Citation Needed]} -- Popular Feminist Graffiti

• "I was, in reality, bred by my parents as my father's concubine... What we take for granted as the stability of family life may well depend on the sexual slavery of our children. What's more, this is a cynical arrangement our institutions have colluded to conceal" - Sylvia Fraser, Journalist

• Catharine MacKinnon maintains that "the private is a sphere of battery, marital rape and women's exploited labor." In this way, privacy and family are reduced to nothing more than aspects of the master plan, which is male domination. Democratic freedoms and the need to keep the state's nose out of our personal affairs are rendered meaningless. The real reason our society cherishes privacy is because men have invented it as an excuse to conceal their criminality. If people still insist that the traditional family is about love and mutual aid - ideals which, admittedly, are sometimes betrayed - they're "hiding from the truth" The family isn't a place where battery and marital rape sometimes happen but where little else apparently does. Sick men don't simply molest their daughters, they operate in league with their wives to "breed" them for that purpose - Donna Laframboise; The Princess at the Window (in a critical explication of the Catharine MacKinnon, Gloria Steinem et al, tenets of misandric belief)

• "If the classroom situation is very heteropatriarchal - a large beginning class of 50 to 60 students, say, with few feminist students - I am likely to define my task as largely one of recruitment ... of persuading students that women are oppressed" - Professor Joyce Trebilcot of Washington University, as quoted in Who Stole Feminism: How Women Have Betrayed Women

• "Men, as a group, tend to be abusive, either verbally, sexually or emotionally. There are always the exceptions, but they are few and far between (I am married to one of them). There are different levels of violence and abuse and individual men buy into this system by varying degrees. But the male power structure always remains intact." - Message on FEMISA, responding to a request for arguments that men are unnecessary for a child to grow into mature adulthood.

• Another posting on FEMISA: "Considering the nature and pervasiveness of men's violence, I would say that without question, children are better off being raised without the presence of men. Assaults on women and children are mostly perpetrated by men whom they are supposed to love and trust: fathers, brothers, uncles, grandfathers, step-fathers." (Both above quotes taken from Daphne Patai's excellent critical work, Heterophobia)

• "At Brandies I discovered Feminism. And I instantly became a convert... writing brilliant papers in my Myths of Patriarchy class, in which I likened my fate as a woman to other victims throughout the ages."^{[Citation Needed]} - Heather Hart 7

• "Women's chains have been forged by men, not by anatomy." - Estelle R. Ramey

• "I would have girls regard themselves not as adjectives but as nouns." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton, "Our Girls"

• "We are, as a sex, infinitely superior to men" - Elizabeth Cady Stanton, from her diary of December 27, 1890, quoting a letter she wrote.

From 'A feminist Dictionary; ed. Kramarae and Triechler, Pandora Press, 1985:

• MALE: ... represents a variant of or deviation from the category of female. The first males were mutants ... the male sex represents a degeneration and deformity of the female

• MAN: ... an obsolete life form ... an ordinary creature who needs to be watched ...a contradictory baby-man ...

• TESTOSTERONE POISONING: ... 'Until now it has been though that the level of testosterone in men is normal simply because they have it. But if you consider how abnormal their behavior is, then you are led to the hypothesis that almost all men are suffering from "testosterone poisoning"

• Letter to editor: "Women's Turn to Dominate" "... Clearly you are not yet a free-thinking feminist but rather one of those women who bounce off the male-dominated, male-controlled social structures. Who cares how men feel or what they do or whether they suffer? They have had over 2000 years to dominate and made a complete hash of it. Now it is our turn. My only comment to men is: if you don't like it, bad luck - and if you get in my way I'll run you down" Signed: Liberated Women, Boronia Herald-Sun, Melbourne, Australia. 9 February, 1996

• “Feminism, Socialism, and Communism are one in the same, and Socialist/Communist government is the goal of feminism” - Catharine MacKinnon

• The English novelist and critic Rebecca West said  :

• "I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute."

See also

• Feminist style
• Gender police
• Gender equality
• Anti-Feminism

External Links

• The Feminist eZine Archive of articles about Feminist History.
• Gloria Steinem and the CIA, The New York Times, February 21, 1967.
• Inside the CIA with Gloria Steinem, Nancy Borman, The Village Voice.
• Why Can't a Woman Be More Like a Man?, Christina Hoff Sommers, The American March/April 2008.