Human Rights Careers

5 Essays About Feminism

On the surface, the definition of feminism is simple. It’s the belief that women should be politically, socially, and economically equal to men. Over the years, the movement expanded from a focus on voting rights to worker rights, reproductive rights, gender roles, and beyond. Modern feminism is moving to a more inclusive and intersectional place. Here are five essays about feminism that tackle topics like trans activism, progress, and privilege:

“Trickle-Down Feminism” – Sarah Jaffe

Feminists celebrate successful women who have seemingly smashed through the glass ceiling, but the reality is that most women are still under it. Even in fast-growing fields where women dominate (retail sales, food service, etc), women make less money than men. In this essay from Dissent Magazine, author Sarah Jaffe argues that when the fastest-growing fields are low-wage, it isn’t a victory for women. At the same time, it does present an opportunity to change the way we value service work. It isn’t enough to focus only on “equal pay for equal work” as that argument mostly focuses on jobs where someone can negotiate their salary. This essay explores how feminism can’t succeed if only the concerns of the wealthiest, most privileged women are prioritized.

Sarah Jaffe writes about organizing, social movements, and the economy with publications like Dissent, the Nation, Jacobin, and others. She is the former labor editor at Alternet.

“What No One Else Will Tell You About Feminism” – Lindy West

Written in Lindy West’s distinct voice, this essay provides a clear, condensed history of feminism’s different “waves.” The first wave focused on the right to vote, which established women as equal citizens. In the second wave, after WWII, women began taking on issues that couldn’t be legally-challenged, like gender roles. As the third wave began, the scope of feminism began to encompass others besides middle-class white women. Women should be allowed to define their womanhood for themselves. West also points out that “waves” may not even exist since history is a continuum. She concludes the essay by declaring if you believe all people are equal, you are a feminist.

Jezebel reprinted this essay with permission from How To Be A Person, The Stranger’s Guide to College by Lindy West, Dan Savage, Christopher Frizelle, and Bethany Jean Clement. Lindy West is an activist, comedian, and writer who focuses on topics like feminism, pop culture, and fat acceptance.

“Toward a Trans* Feminism” – Jack Halberstam

The history of transactivsm and feminism is messy. This essay begins with the author’s personal experience with gender and terms like trans*, which Halberstam prefers. The asterisk serves to “open the meaning,” allowing people to choose their categorization as they see fit. The main body of the essay focuses on the less-known history of feminists and trans* folks. He references essays from the 1970s and other literature that help paint a more complete picture. In current times, the tension between radical feminism and trans* feminism remains, but changes that are good for trans* women are good for everyone.

This essay was adapted from Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability by Jack Halberstam. Halberstam is the Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Gender Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. He is also the author of several books.

“Rebecca Solnit: How Change Happens” – Rebecca Solnit

The world is changing. Rebecca Solnit describes this transformation as an assembly of ideas, visions, values, essays, books, protests, and more. It has many layers involving race, class, gender, power, climate, justice, etc, as well as many voices. This has led to more clarity about injustice. Solnit describes watching the transformation and how progress and “ wokeness ” are part of a historical process. Progress is hard work. Not exclusively about feminism, this essay takes a more intersectional look at how progress as a whole occurs.

“How Change Happens” was adapted from the introduction to Whose Story Is it? Rebecca Solnit is a writer, activist, and historian. She’s the author of over 20 books on art, politics, feminism, and more.

“Bad Feminist” extract – Roxane Gay

People are complicated and imperfect. In this excerpt from her book Bad Feminist: Essays , Roxane Gay explores her contradictions. The opening sentence is, “I am failing as a woman.” She goes on to describe how she wants to be independent, but also to be taken care of. She wants to be strong and in charge, but she also wants to surrender sometimes. For a long time, she denied that she was human and flawed. However, the work it took to deny her humanness is harder than accepting who she is. While Gay might be a “bad feminist,” she is also deeply committed to issues that are important to feminism. This is a must-read essay for any feminists who worry that they aren’t perfect.

Roxane Gay is a professor, speaker, editor, writer, and social commentator. She is the author of Bad Feminist , a New York Times bestseller, Hunger (a memoir), and works of fiction.

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About the author, emmaline soken-huberty.

Emmaline Soken-Huberty is a freelance writer based in Portland, Oregon. She started to become interested in human rights while attending college, eventually getting a concentration in human rights and humanitarianism. LGBTQ+ rights, women’s rights, and climate change are of special concern to her. In her spare time, she can be found reading or enjoying Oregon’s natural beauty with her husband and dog.

Democracy Is Feminist

Women's Equality Day

A ugust 26, 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of Women’s Equality Day . Proposed in 1971 by Bella Abzug , the formidable feminist organizer and federal lawmaker from New York, and passed as a joint resolution by Congress in 1973, Women’s Equality Day recognizes the fight for women’s suffrage and hard won ratification of the 19th Amendment.

Around the time Women’s Equality Day was first envisioned, Abzug joined forces with other leaders and activists—Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisolm, and Fannie Lou Hamer among them—to form the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC). Through both endeavors they sought to acknowledge that political representation belongs at the center of the quest for gender justice—and, according to the NWPC archives , that “legal, economic, and social equity would come about only when women were equally represented among the nation’s political decision-makers.”

Historically, women in the United States have participated voraciously in civic life, registering and voting at higher rates than men in every presidential election since 1980. Black women show up at the polls and in voter mobilization efforts in even greater numbers, with turnout rates of upward of 66% in 2020. In July 1972, Steinem wrote for the newly launched Ms . magazine, “Black women come out stronger on just about every feminist issue, whether it is voting for a woman candidate, ending violence and militarism, or believing that women are just as rational as men and have more human values.”

The same article by Steinem forecasted, “We’ve been delivering our votes [and] now women want something in return. Nineteen seventy-two is just the beginning …” And in many ways, it was. That year, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) handily passed the U.S. Senate and seemed destined for swift ratification. Chisolm’s public service—as the first Black Congresswoman, followed by her groundbreaking 1972 presidential campaign—altered the discourse about whether “White Male Only” remained a qualifier to lead the nation. And by January 1973, the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, affirming a constitutional right to abortion.

Read More: Women's Equality Day Is a Reminder That the Fight for Women’s Rights Didn’t End With the 19th Amendment

Fast forward half a century, and Vice President Kamala Harris shattered the White House glass ceiling. Women’s overall leadership on Capitol Hill has continued to climb, reaching an all-time high in the 118th Congress—just over 28% (149 members). In the House, women broke records in the 2022 midterms, with 124 now serving, 27 of whom are Black and 18 are Latin. Women now comprise nearly a third of all legislators and elected executives, including a record 12 serving as governor.

And still, the U.S. remains far from achieving fully representative governance compared to women’s actual population footprint; this is especially so for women of color. The U.S.  pales  in comparison to women’s political authority in much of the world, too, including among peer democracies.

As for the other advances on the 1972 agenda? The ERA remains unfinished business and is still not enshrined in the Constitution. And Roe was overturned on June 24, 2022 by the Supreme Court’s new conservative supermajority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization .

Backlash to the ERA, and the very text of the Dobbs decision, crudely distort the principles undergirding Women’s Equality Day and the goals of the NWPC. Justice Samuel Alito, who authored the majority opinion for Dobbs , claimed women’s political advancement itself is an antidote to the Court’s reversal of a fundamental right. Of this, he wrote, “Women are not without electoral or political power. It is noteworthy that the percentage of women who register to vote and cast ballots is consistently higher than the percentage of men who do so.”

Yes, women are now doing exactly that: running for office on, and voting consistently, overwhelmingly, and successfully for abortion rights everywhere the issue has appeared on the ballot since Dobbs . But there are obvious flaws in Justice Alito’s appeal to women’s electoral and political power—and, for that matter, to the NWPC’s founding documents—suggesting gender parity alone should be a singular or even sufficient metric for achieving feminist goals.

It is exponentially hard to out-run and out-vote anti-democratic maneuvers like partisan gerrymandering, voter suppression—or, as we just saw in Ohio, an attempt to raise the threshold for winning a citizen-led ballot initiative as a way to stymie abortion rights. (The Ohio measure was soundly defeated on August 8 in a special election.) These are not examples of one-off transgressions or piecemeal degradation of our democratic systems, but rather deliberate and systemic mechanisms for defying the popular will. It is why decidedly anti-feminist policy outcomes persist, like book bans in the name of parental rights or the maddening inability to advance common sense gun safety measures. It is how 14 state legislatures succeeded in outlawing abortion since Dobbs , despite public polling in favor of abortion rights reaching record highs .

Women’s Equality Day was initially a way to express the belief that, as noted in public policy scholars Zoe Marks and Erica Chenoweth's 2023 article in Ms . , a democracy in which "half the population is subordinated—politically, socially, economically—is not a true democracy at all." 50 years later, we must be clear that women’s autonomy, well-being, and rights are inextricably tied to the integrity and durability of our democratic systems.

As we look ahead, two states , Michigan and Minnesota, offer hope. Both have committed to reforms that increase voter participation, fair representation, and direct democracy; in turn, both have seen feminist priorities thrive, from codifying reproductive care and establishing green energy goals, to expanding paid family leave and protecting trans youth.

As we trace the 50-year arc of Women’s Equality Day, among the lessons we might glean today: women’s voices and votes surely matter, transformative change is possible—and the fight for robust democracy is, at its core, a central and urgent feminist goal.

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Essays by women: ‘How do you use your rage?’

There has been a surge in powerful essays by women published in 2019

In the past few years there has been an explosion of women’s writing. It’s a particular kind of writing that explores the politicisation of the personal, often blending with autobiography. While the essay form is usually considered to be objective, feminists have argued that the female subject has often been excluded from the picture and needs to be put back. Feminism is taking on and adapting conventional wisdom.

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The old adage ‘the personal is political’ is finding truly exciting new applications. The feminist women’s essays of 2019 combine stringent forensic analysis with fearless movement in and out of autobiography. The personal is elbowing its way rudely into the discourse, and altering the definition of being rude. In the process, new kinds of personhood are being created.

Rachel Cusk has written about motherhood and divorce, and has been vilified for her honesty (Credit: Getty Images)

Rachel Cusk has written about motherhood and divorce, and has been vilified for her honesty (Credit: Getty Images)

As Rebecca Solnit says in The Mother of All Questions , 2017: “There is no good answer to how to be a woman; the art may instead lie in how we refuse the question.” Feminism is also increasingly agitating the status quo of masculinity, which is starting to seem like an untenable position. Take Solnit’s advice, and consider refusing the stupid, stultifying old questions.

In 2019 Rachel Cusk published a collection of essays called Coventry , which spans about a decade of her work. I have come to see each new publication by Cusk as thrilling. Although she is arguably a literary giant, she has won few awards, probably because she very wilfully sidesteps categories. (She once joked that she is getting accustomed to being a bridesmaid rather than a bride.)

Cusk is strongly emblematic. Her career began with a series of finely written and relatively conventional novels. But she really began to catch fire, in both senses, when she started writing autobiography. The first of these volumes was an honest look at motherhood. Really honest. She writes of “the sacking and slow rebuilding of every last corner of my private world that motherhood has entailed”. It got her into trouble for many reasons, but mostly for not being ‘motherly’ in the ‘right’ way. Volume two was a portrait of a woman on shaky ground masquerading as a superb work of art criticism. Volume three was an unflinching look at the aftermath of divorce, truly a sidestep too far. She writes that what others call “cruelty” she calls “the discipline of self-criticism”. The third book got such an ugly response that she mused about her “ creative death . . . I was heading into total silence ”. The cruellest of her critics accused her of being cruel.

There has been a surge in powerful essays by women published in 2019

Almost mockingly, in the Outline trilogy, her latest set of books, she embraces silence and passivity. Faye, the anti-heroine of those novels, is like a radio dish, absorbing everything around her in what has been called ‘violent’ detail, and giving almost nothing back. This non-personality throws everyone around her into relief, and especially men, who cannot resist a feminine vacuum. Faye is no-one, but Cusk’s life is woven into her in playful ways. No more presenting an easy target. In Coventry, the title essay of her book of essays, Cusk considers what it is like to be treated as a non-person, and decides there is liberation in it. In the Outline trilogy femininity implodes into a neutron star, invisible and exerting a pull on the essence of everything that approaches it. The effect is profound, dismaying, and liberating.

#MeToo was not the beginning of women speaking up, but of people listening – Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit, who published the collection of essays Whose Story Is This? in 2019, has been a superb essay writer for decades, and is certainly one of the most eminent feminist writers alive. She has written on many subjects other than gender politics; she is an environmentalist, political activist, art critic, historian. She is a genuine public intellectual. One of her better-known essays is the sardonic Men Explain Things to Me (2008), which gave rise to the term ‘mansplaining’.

New York Times journalists Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey wrote the book She Said, an account of the Harvey Weinstein scandal (Credit: Getty Images)

New York Times journalists Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey wrote the book She Said, an account of the Harvey Weinstein scandal (Credit: Getty Images)

Her anger seems to be modulating, maybe because feminism has made leaps of progress in the past few years. In the opening essay of her 2019 book, Solnit talks about how women have been negated and reduced to a footnote in the male story. The position that Cusk weaponises. Women are striving to take control of their own stories, to expand their personhood. “To change who tells the story, and who decides, is to change whose story it is,” she says. New stories are being born; but also, pivotally, new audiences. She observes that “#MeToo was not the beginning of women speaking up, but of people listening… One measure of how much power these voices and stories have is how frantically others try to stop them.”

Mirror, mirror

Speaking of which, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, the New York Times journalists who broke the Harvey Weinstein story and helped catalyse the #MeToo movement, published their account of it this year as a book entitled She Said . They were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for their investigative work. The book is a detailed anatomisation of how Weinstein used the corporate and legal framework around him to silence his alleged victims, to “manipulate, pressure, and terrorise women” – but also how he attempted to use the same framework on the NYT itself, even up to the last moment. ‘Non-disclosure agreements’ are emerging as the legal vehicle of choice for male supervillains who want to de-personalise their female targets and stop them from telling their stories. That lid, and many others, blew off volcanically on social media.

The word ‘confessional’ is often trotted out, as if the personal mode is a sort of confession of sins, like a purging

Irish writer Emilie Pine’s unassuming courage and clarity of thought has enchanted me. Notes to Self is her book of “personal essays” that critics have heaped superlatives on – they said it would make me cry, and it did. She resolves to write about things “you never tell anyone”, to invite us deep into her head, and yet somehow she holds the ship steady. In a chapter on her self-centred, self-destructive father, in whose orbit she has been trapped for most of her life, she comes to a realisation: “I need to write my own narrative”.

Pine’s words are transformative. The word ‘confessional’ is often trotted out at these moments, as if the personal mode, and especially the one in recent use by women, is a sort of confession of sins, like a purging after which one can wipe one’s mouth and get on with the day. But Pine doesn’t want to expiate her sins; she is annexing the hidden parts of her story and giving herself permission to live in them.

In Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino writes about identity, the internet and womanhood (Credit: Elena Mudd/ Penguin Random House)

In Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino writes about identity, the internet and womanhood (Credit: Elena Mudd/ Penguin Random House)

By far the most exciting essay collection I’ve read this year is Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion . She is a 31-year-old US-Filipino millennial who has worked for feminist websites like The Hairpin and Jezebel, and now writes for The New Yorker. She brings her exceedingly powerful mind to bear on problems of identity, particularly those associated with late capitalism and the internet. Her signature approach is to dig into things (the architecture of the internet, female self-optimisation as a form of marketing, the US’s scam culture), and nuance them relentlessly. Although she is a digital native, and up to her neck in social media, she has also said that she put a blocking app on her phone that prevents her from using it more than two hours a day.

If feminism this year was about letting the personal into the political, then Tolentino questions how the personal is constructed in the digital age. Is sharing the personal on social media really being personal, or just corporate manipulation? Is #MeToo also partly a phenomenon created by the trick mirror of the internet? How are we encouraged to package and perform ourselves, and for whom? From her point of view, feminism is in danger of being reduced to “ideological pattern recognition”.

Audre Lorde’s books Zami, 1982, and Sister Outsider, 1984, have recently been re-issued (Credit: Penguin)

Audre Lorde’s books Zami, 1982, and Sister Outsider, 1984, have recently been re-issued (Credit: Penguin)

Tolentino refers to “this dead-end sense of my own ethical brokenness”. The challenge as she sees it is to navigate through the millennial experience. She doesn’t seem convinced that the world can be fixed, though her unstoppable intelligence and gallows humour say otherwise.

There were many other extraordinary women’s essay collections published in 2019:  all are intensely ‘personal’, but it is personality as a process of radical re-definition. Michelle Tea is a fierce, elemental, foul-mouthed intelligence on the loose, and she pulls us after her in Against Memoir . The title is ironic: at one point she talks about getting interested in Buddhism but then realising this involves negation of the self, she observes: “I refuse to drop my storyline”.

Samantha Irby runs the torrential blog Bitches Gotta Eat, and writes about her life, transmuting gold into even more gold. Her collection of essays, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life , is grounded, hilarious, and diamond sharp. Last but not least, Meghan Daum’s The Problem with Everything  is an entertaining collection of essays about the culture wars, and about how identity politics is beginning to eat itself. Only Daum would have the courage to write a book like this – she’s a free thinker in the truest sense, a master of the unspeakable (the title of another of her collections).

Author Audre Lorde described herself as a ‘black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet’ (Credit: Getty Images)

Author Audre Lorde described herself as a ‘black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet’ (Credit: Getty Images)

And with a synchronicity that can’t be accidental, Penguin this year reissued Sister Outsider , a collection of Audre Lorde’s essays. She described herself as a “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet”, and firmly grounded her politics in personal honesty. Her strange, lyrical, visceral prose defines her as one of the gods of feminism and political activism. In one of her essays she asks, “How do you use your rage?”

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feminist opinion essay

Essay on Feminism

500 words essay on feminism.

Feminism is a social and political movement that advocates for the rights of women on the grounds of equality of sexes. It does not deny the biological differences between the sexes but demands equality in opportunities. It covers everything from social and political to economic arenas. In fact, feminist campaigns have been a crucial part of history in women empowerment. The feminist campaigns of the twentieth century made the right to vote, public property, work and education possible. Thus, an essay on feminism will discuss its importance and impact.

essay on feminism

Importance of Feminism

Feminism is not just important for women but for every sex, gender, caste, creed and more. It empowers the people and society as a whole. A very common misconception is that only women can be feminists.

It is absolutely wrong but feminism does not just benefit women. It strives for equality of the sexes, not the superiority of women. Feminism takes the gender roles which have been around for many years and tries to deconstruct them.

This allows people to live freely and empower lives without getting tied down by traditional restrictions. In other words, it benefits women as well as men. For instance, while it advocates that women must be free to earn it also advocates that why should men be the sole breadwinner of the family? It tries to give freedom to all.

Most importantly, it is essential for young people to get involved in the feminist movement. This way, we can achieve faster results. It is no less than a dream to live in a world full of equality.

Thus, we must all look at our own cultures and communities for making this dream a reality. We have not yet reached the result but we are on the journey, so we must continue on this mission to achieve successful results.

Impact of Feminism

Feminism has had a life-changing impact on everyone, especially women. If we look at history, we see that it is what gave women the right to vote. It was no small feat but was achieved successfully by women.

Further, if we look at modern feminism, we see how feminism involves in life-altering campaigns. For instance, campaigns that support the abortion of unwanted pregnancy and reproductive rights allow women to have freedom of choice.

Moreover, feminism constantly questions patriarchy and strives to renounce gender roles. It allows men to be whoever they wish to be without getting judged. It is not taboo for men to cry anymore because they must be allowed to express themselves freely.

Similarly, it also helps the LGBTQ community greatly as it advocates for their right too. Feminism gives a place for everyone and it is best to practice intersectional feminism to understand everyone’s struggle.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Conclusion of the Essay on Feminism

The key message of feminism must be to highlight the choice in bringing personal meaning to feminism. It is to recognize other’s right for doing the same thing. The sad part is that despite feminism being a strong movement, there are still parts of the world where inequality and exploitation of women take places. Thus, we must all try to practice intersectional feminism.

FAQ of Essay on Feminism

Question 1: What are feminist beliefs?

Answer 1: Feminist beliefs are the desire for equality between the sexes. It is the belief that men and women must have equal rights and opportunities. Thus, it covers everything from social and political to economic equality.

Question 2: What started feminism?

Answer 2: The first wave of feminism occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It emerged out of an environment of urban industrialism and liberal, socialist politics. This wave aimed to open up new doors for women with a focus on suffrage.

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Why I Call Myself a Feminist

I still vividly remember the first time I openly stated that I am a feminist, during a class in high school. My Theory of Knowledge teacher instructed his students, “If you think you’re a feminist, raise your hand.” The question caught everyone off guard — there was a brief moment of silence when my classmates and I just looked at each other, unsure of what to do. As feminism was not a topic that we often discussed in our daily conversations, we were all taken aback. To make sure what I vaguely knew about feminism was correct, I asked, “Isn’t feminism essentially advocating for gender equality?” My teacher smiled and looked at me. Another student said, “Well, if feminism means that, shouldn’t we all be feminists?” That was when people in the classroom started raising their hands one by one, until every hand was raised.

If this open and step-by-step approach were the attitude that most people held when they talk about feminism, the number of people who identify as feminists would be much larger than it is now. Unfortunately, the reality is that the public often has preformed ideas about feminism, misconceptions that hinder them from engaging in informed conversations about this topic. For example, when talking with a group of friends back home in Korea, a peer started to say that he doesn’t really like feminism. Another friend responded, telling the whole group that we should stray from political conversations. These two comments struck me as particularly problematic, for feminism is not something that should be simply “liked” or “disliked,” nor should it be strictly defined as a political issue that people can take sides on.

Misconceptions about feminism vary, but some recurring themes are the association of feminism with the perceived desire of women to bring men down and their ostensible hatred of men. Yet the dictionary definition of feminism is as follows: “The theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes; or organized activity on behalf of women's rights and interests.” Nowhere in the official definition listed does it say that feminism is a vicious movement led by women who hate men and desire to subjugate them.

If so many of the misconceptions of feminism have to do with the bias associated with feminist women, should feminism be called something neutral like a “gender equality movement?” Not only does this seemingly neutral term sound a lot more wordy, it also takes out the emphasis on the female identity that has made feminism so powerful. Yes, some types of feminism such as radical feminism , which emphasizes the patriarchal roots of inequality and aims to dismantle the patriarchy, do have an element of women being angry — not at the entire male population, but at the systems of gender inequality in this world. Whether people like it or not, feminism originated from women who found existing patriarchal societies problematic, and we need to respect that women are core constituents of feminism. Yet, this does not at all mean that feminism should only be for women. In fact, there is a dire need for more, if not all, men to become feminists as well.

On the surface, there seems to be less of an incentive for men to be feminists because they do not have much to risk compared to women. But for the feminist movement to succeed in dismantling patriarchal social systems and giving everyone regardless of their sex and gender equal opportunities, men must become feminist. I believe feminism at its core is the acknowledgement of the fact that the world is not at all fair. Gender inequality is prevalent everywhere , ranging from the pay gap between men and women to work-life balance. This constitutes the first argument for why men should be feminists: The world is problematic, and it is just not right for men to sit back and continue the unjust social structure that discriminates against women.

The next argument is that feminism actually liberates both men and women from social pressures. Some may question this argument, thinking that men already have the power to pursue whichever role in society they want. But in reality, gender stereotypes and social conditioning pressure people to take on or avoid certain jobs. For example, men are told not to be hair stylists or flight attendants, while women are told not to have military careers or take on any “dangerous” work. Feminism can bring us closer to a society with no gender inequality, in which everyone can choose to take on roles they fit best in, not ones they are pressured into.

Finally, feminism has tangible economic benefits for the world as a whole. According to a McKinsey Global Institute report , $12 trillion could be added to global GDP by 2025 by advancing women’s equality. If everyone regardless of gender identity can contribute to the economy and occupy various positions in society, the world can truly become a better place.

I’d like to admit that I still have a lot to learn about the history of the feminist movement and what it means to be a feminist. However, I still believe with confidence that I am a feminist. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie puts it , “a feminist is a man or a woman who says, ‘Yes, there's a problem with gender as it is today, and we must fix it. We must do better.’” I think the world today is plagued with gender inequality, and I want this to change. Therefore, I am a feminist. And you, especially if you’re a man, should be one too.

Daniel Kim ’21, a Crimson Associate Editorial Editor, is a Government concentrator in Leverett House.

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Feminist approaches to literature.

This essay offers a very basic introduction to feminist literary theory, and a compendium of Great Writers Inspire resources that can be approached from a feminist perspective. It provides suggestions for how material on the Great Writers Inspire site can be used as a starting point for exploration of or classroom discussion about feminist approaches to literature. Questions for reflection or discussion are highlighted in the text. Links in the text point to resources in the Great Writers Inspire site. The resources can also be found via the ' Feminist Approaches to Literature' start page . Further material can be found via our library and via the various authors and theme pages.

The Traditions of Feminist Criticism

According to Yale Professor Paul Fry in his lecture The Classical Feminist Tradition from 25:07, there have been several prominent schools of thought in modern feminist literary criticism:

  • First Wave Feminism: Men's Treatment of Women In this early stage of feminist criticism, critics consider male novelists' demeaning treatment or marginalisation of female characters. First wave feminist criticism includes books like Marry Ellman's Thinking About Women (1968) Kate Millet's Sexual Politics (1969), and Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch (1970). An example of first wave feminist literary analysis would be a critique of William Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew for Petruchio's abuse of Katherina.
  • The 'Feminine' Phase - in the feminine phase, female writers tried to adhere to male values, writing as men, and usually did not enter into debate regarding women's place in society. Female writers often employed male pseudonyms during this period.
  • The 'Feminist' Phase - in the feminist phase, the central theme of works by female writers was the criticism of the role of women in society and the oppression of women.
  • The 'Female' Phase - during the 'female' phase, women writers were no longer trying to prove the legitimacy of a woman's perspective. Rather, it was assumed that the works of a women writer were authentic and valid. The female phase lacked the anger and combative consciousness of the feminist phase.

Do you agree with Showalter's 'phases'? How does your favourite female writer fit into these phases?

Read Jane Eyre with the madwoman thesis in mind. Are there connections between Jane's subversive thoughts and Bertha's appearances in the text? How does it change your view of the novel to consider Bertha as an alter ego for Jane, unencumbered by societal norms? Look closely at Rochester's explanation of the early symptoms of Bertha's madness. How do they differ from his licentious behaviour?

How does Jane Austen fit into French Feminism? She uses very concise language, yet speaks from a woman's perspective with confidence. Can she be placed in Showalter's phases of women's writing?

Dr. Simon Swift of the University of Leeds gives a podcast titled 'How Words, Form, and Structure Create Meaning: Women and Writing' that uses the works of Virginia Woolf and Silvia Plath to analyse the form and structural aspects of texts to ask whether or not women writers have a voice inherently different from that of men (podcast part 1 and part 2 ).

In Professor Deborah Cameron's podcast English and Gender , Cameron discusses the differences and similarities in use of the English language between men and women.

In another of Professor Paul Fry's podcasts, Queer Theory and Gender Performativity , Fry discusses sexuality, the nature of performing gender (14:53), and gendered reading (46:20).

How do more modern A-level set texts, like those of Margaret Atwood, Zora Neale Hurston, or Maya Angelou, fit into any of these traditions of criticism?

Depictions of Women by Men

Students could begin approaching Great Writers Inspire by considering the range of women depicted in early English literature: from Chaucer's bawdy 'Wife of Bath' in The Canterbury Tales to Spenser's interminably pure Una in The Faerie Queene .

How might the reign of Queen Elizabeth I have dictated the way Elizabethan writers were permitted to present women? How did each male poet handle the challenge of depicting women?

By 1610 Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker's The Roaring Girl presented at The Fortune a play based on the life of Mary Firth. The heroine was a man playing a woman dressed as a man. In Dr. Emma Smith's podcast on The Roaring Girl , Smith breaks down both the gender issues of the play and of the real life accusations against Mary Frith.

In Dr. Emma Smith's podcast on John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi , a frequent A-level set text, Smith discusses Webster's treatment of female autonomy. Placing Middleton or Webster's female characters against those of Shakespeare could be brought to bear on A-level Paper 4 on Drama or Paper 5 on Shakespeare and other pre-20th Century Texts.

Smith's podcast on The Comedy of Errors from 11:21 alludes to the valuation of Elizabethan comedy as a commentary on gender and sexuality, and how The Comedy of Errors at first seems to defy this tradition.

What are the differences between depictions of women written by male and female novelists?

Students can compare the works of Charlotte and Emily Brontë or Jane Austen with, for example, Hardy's Tess of the d'Ubervilles or D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover or Women in Love .

How do Lawrence's sexually charged novels compare with what Emma Smith said about Webster's treatment of women's sexuality in The Duchess of Malfi ?

Dr. Abigail Williams' podcast on Jonathan Swift's The Lady's Dressing-Room discusses the ways in which Swift uses and complicates contemporary stereotypes about the vanity of women.

Rise of the Woman Writer

With the movement from Renaissance to Restoration theatre, the depiction of women on stage changed dramatically, in no small part because women could portray women for the first time. Dr. Abigail Williams' adapted lecture, Behn and the Restoration Theatre , discusses Behn's use and abuse of the woman on stage.

What were the feminist advantages and disadvantages to women's introduction to the stage?

The essay Who is Aphra Behn? addresses the transformation of Behn into a feminist icon by later writers, especially Bloomsbury Group member Virginia Woolf in her novella/essay A Room of One's Own .

How might Woolf's description and analysis of Behn indicate her own feminist agenda?

Behn created an obstacle for later women writers in that her scandalous life did little to undermine the perception that women writing for money were little better than whores.

In what position did that place chaste female novelists like Frances Burney or Jane Austen ?

To what extent was the perception of women and the literary vogue for female heroines impacted by Samuel Richardson's Pamela ? Students could examine a passage from Pamela and evaluate Richardson's success and failures, and look for his influence in novels with which they are more familiar, like those of Austen or the Brontë sisters.

In Dr. Catherine's Brown's podcast on Eliot's Reception History , Dr. Brown discusses feminist criticism of Eliot's novels. In the podcast Genre and Justice , she discusses Eliot's use of women as scapegoats to illustrate the injustice of the distribution of happiness in Victorian England.

Professor Sir Richard Evans' Gresham College lecture The Victorians: Gender and Sexuality can provide crucial background for any study of women in Victorian literature.

Women Writers and Class

Can women's financial and social plights be separated? How do Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë bring to bear financial concerns regarding literature depicting women in the 18th and 19th century?

How did class barriers affect the work of 18th century kitchen maid and poet Mary Leapor ?

Listen to the podcast by Yale's Professor Paul Fry titled "The Classical Feminist Tradition" . At 9:20, Fry questions whether or not any novel can be evaluated without consideration of financial and class concerns, and to what extent Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own suggests a female novelist can only create successful work if she is of independent means.

What are the different problems faced by a wealthy character like Austen's Emma , as opposed to a poor character like Brontë's Jane Eyre ?

Also see sections on the following writers:

  • Jane Austen
  • Charlotte Brontë
  • George Eliot
  • Thomas Hardy
  • D.H. Lawrence
  • Mary Leapor
  • Thomas Middleton
  • Katherine Mansfield
  • Olive Schreiner
  • William Shakespeare
  • John Webster
  • Virginina Woolf

If reusing this resource please attribute as follows: Feminist Approaches to Literature at http://writersinspire.org/content/feminist-approaches-literature by Kate O'Connor, licensed as Creative Commons BY-NC-SA (2.0 UK).

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41 Student Essay Example: Feminist Criticism

The following student essay example of femnist criticism is taken from Beginnings and Endings: A Critical Edition . This is the publication created by students in English 211. This essay discusses Ray Bradbury’s short story ”There Will Come Soft Rains.”

Burning Stereotypes in Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains”

By Karley McCarthy

Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” takes place in the fallout of a nuclear war. The author chooses to tell the story though a technologically advanced house and its animatronic inhabitants instead of a traditional protagonist. The house goes about its day-to-day as if no war had struck. It functions as though its deceased family is still residing in its walls, taking care of the maintenance, happiness, and safety of itself and the long dead family. On the surface, Bradbury’s story seems like a clear-cut warning about technology and humanity’s permissiveness. Given that the short story was written in the 1940s, it’s easy to analyze the themes present and how they related to women of the time. Bradbury’s apt precautionary tale can be used as a metaphor for women’s expectations and role in society after World War II and how some women may have dealt with the fallout of their husbands coming back home with psychological trauma.

To experience “There Will Come Soft Rains” from a feminist perspective, readers must be aware of the societal norms that would have shaped Bradbury’s writing. “Soft Rains” takes place in the year 2026. Yet the house and norms found throughout were, “modeled after concept homes that showed society’s expectations of technological advancement” (Mambrol). This can be seen in the stereotypical nuclear family that once inhabited the house as well as their cliché white home and the hobbies present. According to writer Elaine Tyler May’s book Homeward Bound, America’s view of women’s role in society undertook a massive pendulum swing during the World War II era as the country transitioned through pre-war to post-war life. For example, in a matter of decades support for women joining the workforce shifted from 80% in opposition to only 13% (May 59). Despite this shift, the men coming back from the war still expected women to position themselves as the happy housewife they had left behind, not the newfound career woman architype. Prominent figures of the 40s, such as actress Joan Crawford, portrayed a caricature of womanhood that is subservient to patriarchal gender roles, attempting to abandon the modern idea of a self-sufficient working-class woman (May 62-63). Keeping this in mind, how can this image of the 1940s woman be seen in Bradbury’s work?

Throughout Bradbury’s life he worked towards dismantling clichés in his own writing. A biography titled simply “Ray Bradbury” mentions that even in his earlier work, he was always attempting to “escape the constrictions of stereotypes” found in early science fiction (Seed 13). An example of him breaking constrictions could be his use of a nonhuman protagonist. Instead, Bradbury relies on the personification of the house and its robotic counterparts. Bradbury describes the house as having “electric eyes” and emotions such as a, “preoccupation with self-protection which bordered on a mechanical paranoia,” something that would make the house quiver at the sounds of the outside world (2-3). While these descriptions are interesting, Bradbury’s use of personification here is a thought-provoking choice when one breaks down what exactly the house is meant to personify.

One analysis of this story notes that the house’s personification, “replaces the most human aspects of life,” for its inhabitants (Mambrol). Throughout the story, the house acts as a caretaker, records a schedule, cooks, cleans, and even attempts to extinguish an all-consuming fire. While firefighting is not a traditionally feminine career or expectation from the 1940s (more on that later), most of the house’s daily tasks are replacing jobs that were traditionally held by a household’s matriarch. Expanding further on this dichotomy of male/woman tasks, a chore mentioned in the story that is ‘traditionally’ accepted as a masculine household duty—mowing the law—is still assigned as a male task. This is feels intentional to the house’s design as Bradbury is, “a social critic, and his work is pertinent to real problems on earth” (Dominianni 49). Bradbury’s story is not meant to commentate on just an apocalypse, but society at large.  Bradbury describes the west face of the house as, “black, save for five places” (Bradbury 1-2). These “five places” are the silhouettes of the family who had been incinerated by a nuclear bomb. The family’s two children are included playing with a ball, but the mother and father’s descriptions are most important. The mother is seen in a passive role, picking flowers, while the father mows the lawn. The subtext here is that the man is not replaceable in his mundane and tedious task. Only the woman is replaced. While this is a small flash into the owners’ lives, what “human aspect” or autonomy of the father’s life has been replaced by the house’s actions if the house is mainly personifying only the traditional 1940s female-held positions? The message here is that a man’s position in society is irreplaceable while a woman’s is one of mere support.

While this dynamic of husband vs subordinate is harmful, wives supporting their partners is nothing new. Homeward Bound explains that life after World War II for many women meant a return to their previous position as a housewife while many men came home irreparably damaged by years of warfare. PTSD, known then as shellshock, affected countless men returning from the war. Women were often expected to mend the psychological damage as part of their domestic responsibilities, even if they were unprepared for the realities of the severe trauma their husbands had faced (May 64-65). The psychological effects of the war came crashing into women’s lives the same way that the tree fell into the autonomous house in “Soft Rains”. As mentioned earlier, firefighting is not a task someone from the 40s would expect of women, but the house’s combustion and its scramble to save itself can be seen as a metaphor for women attempting to reverse the cold reality that the war had left them with. The picturesque family they had dreamed of would forever be scarred by the casualties that took place overseas. While Bradbury may not have meant for women to be invoked specifically from this precautionary tale, it’s obvious that him wanting his science fiction to act as, “a cumulative early warning system against unforeseen consequences,” would have impacted women of the time as much as men (Seed 22). The unforeseen consequences here is the trauma the war inflicted on families.

While men were fighting on the front lines, women back home and in noncombat positions would still feel the war’s ripples. In “Soft Rains” the nuclear tragedy had left, “a radioactive glow which could be seen for miles” (Bradbury 1). Despite the destruction, the house continues its routine as though nothing had happened. This can be seen as a metaphor for how women responded to the trauma their husbands brought back from the war. Women were urged to, “preserve for him the essence of the girl he fell in love with, the girl he longs to come back to. . .The least we can do as women is to try to live up to some of those expectations” (May 64). Following this, many could have put their desires and personal growth to the side to act as a secondary character in their husband’s lives.

The final line can be read as the culmination of similarities between post-war women and Bradbury’s house. The violence and destruction that fell upon the house in its final moments leaves little standing. What’s remarkable is how the house still attempts to continue despite its destruction. The final lines of the short story exemplify this: “Within the wall, a last voice said, over and over again and again, even as the sun rose to shine upon the heaped rubble and steam: ‘Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is…’” (Bradbury 5). The house is acting just like the women from the 40s, clinging to their past in an attempt to preserve something that had already been lost, society’s innocence. One analysis points out that, “The house is depicted in this way because it represents both humanity and humanity’s failure to save itself” (Mambrol). While it might be wrong to say that women were unable to save themselves in this situation, this quote does touch on an idea present in the feminist metaphor for “Soft Rains”. The preservation of “the essence of the girl he fell in love with, the girl he longs to come back to” was a failure (May 64). The same way that the house cannot preserve itself from destruction, women cannot preserve an image of themselves that had already dissolved. As mentioned earlier, women had already entered the workforce, a huge step towards removing sexist stereotypes around women’s worth. After garnering work-based independence, it seems impossible that the idea of women solely as men’s support would not immolate.

While Bradbury’s “Soft Rains” can be viewed as an apt precautionary tale with real modern world issues at hand, in many ways it is a period piece. As a writer in the 1940s, it’s hard to imagine that Bradbury’s story would not have been influenced by the framework of a nuclear family and the stereotypical expectations of this time. Bradbury’s use of personification opens dialogue about gender roles in the 1940s and how war had complicated patriarchal expectations. Despite his attempt to bypass science fiction stereotypes, his story is full of metaphor for gender stereotypes. Using a feminist lens to analyze the story allows it to be read as a metaphor for war and its effects on married women. The standard analysis appears to say that, “machine no longer served humanity in “There Will Come Soft Rains”; there humanity is subservient to machinery” (Dominianni 49). From a feminist perspective, instead of machine, the house represents patriarchy and gender norms. While men suffered greatly during World War II, women often put their wants and futures on hold to support their husbands. This is a selfless act that shows the resilience of women despite their society’s wish to downplay their potential and turn them into mere support.

Works Cited

Bradbury, Ray. “August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains.” Broome-Tioga BOCES, 1950, pp. 1-5. btboces.org/Downloads/7_There%20Will%20Come%20Soft%20Rains%20by%20Ray%20Bradbury.pdf.

Dominianni, Robert. “Ray Bradbury’s 2026: A Year with Current Value.” The English Journal , vol. 73, no. 7, 1984, pp. 49–51. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/817806

Mambrol, Nasrullah. “Analysis of Ray Bradbury’s There Will Come Soft Rains.” Literary Theory and Criticism , 17 Jan. 2022.

May, Elaine Tyler. “War and Peace: Fanning the Home Fires.”  Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era.  20th ed., Basic Books, 2008, pp. 58-88.

Seed, David. “Out of the Science Fiction Ghetto.”  Ray Bradbury (Modern Masters of Science Fiction).  University of Illinois, 2015, pp. 1-45.

Critical Worlds Copyright © 2024 by Liza Long is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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feminist criticism

Quick reference.

A modern tradition of literary commentary and polemic devoted to the defence of women's writing or of fictional female characters against the condescensions of a predominantly male literary establishment.

The beginnings of this movement are to be found in the journalism of R. West from about 1910. More influential as founding documents are the essays of V. Woolf, notably A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938), and S. de Beauvoir's Le Deuxième Sexe (1949, translated as The Second Sex, 1953). In its developed form, the tradition was reborn amid the cultural ferment of the post‐1968 period, especially in the United States. The misogynist or belittling attitudes of male critics and novelists were subjected to ironic scrutiny in Mary Ellmann's Thinking About Women (1968) and to iconoclastic rage in Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970), the latter work berating D. H. Lawrence and Mailer in particular. Many feminist academics continued the investigation into stereotyped representations of female characters, for example in S. Cornillon (ed.), Images of Women in Fiction (1972).

Concentration upon the offences of male writers tended to give way in the later 1970s to woman‐centred literary histories seeking to trace an autonomous tradition of women's literature and to redeem neglected female authors. Influential examples of such work in America were Ellen Moers, Literary Women (1976), Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own (1977), and Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979). By the beginning of the 1980s, feminist criticism was becoming more self‐critical and internally differentiated: the mainstream of American feminist criticism eschewed ‘male’ literary theory and saw its purpose as the affirmation of distinctly female ‘experience’ as reflected in writing; but black‐feminist and lesbian‐feminist critics objected that their own experiences were being overlooked. Meanwhile the value of ‘experience’ as a clue to women's writing was doubted by feminists allied to Marxist criticism, psychoanalytic criticism, and post‐structuralism, especially but not exclusively in Britain and France. One such school, led by the French writers Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray, sought to define an écriture féminine (for which ‘feminine writing’ would be a misleading translation) on the basis of a psychological ‘politics’ of language itself: if language belongs not to women but to masculine social order, the distinctive female literary strategy will be to subvert it with bodily, even orgasmic, pulsations. British feminist criticism, although drawing upon both American and French approaches, has usually been more historical and sociological.

Feminist criticism has thus become a varied field of debate rather than an agreed position. Its substantial achievements are seen in the re‐admission of temporarily forgotten women authors to the literary canon, in modern reprints and newly commissioned studies by feminist publishing houses such as Virago (1977) and the Women's Press (1978), in anthologies and academic courses.

From:   feminist criticism   in  The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature »

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277 Feminism Topics & Women’s Rights Essay Topics

18 January 2024

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Feminism topics encompass a comprehensive range of themes centered on advocating for gender equality. These themes critically address the social, political, and economic injustices primarily faced by females, aiming to dismantle patriarchal norms. Feminism topics may span from intersectional feminism, which underscores the diverse experiences of women across various intersections of race, class, and sexuality, to reproductive rights that advocate for women’s bodily autonomy and healthcare accessibility. They also involve the examination of workplace discrimination through concepts, such as the gender wage gap and the glass ceiling. Violence against women, including work and domestic abuse, sexual assault, and harassment, is a hot aspect, providing many discussions. In turn, one may explore the representation of women in media, politics, and STEM fields. Explorations of gender roles, gender identity, and the significance of male feminism are integral parts of these discussions. As society continues to evolve, feminism topics persistently adapt to confront and address emerging forms of gender inequality.

Best Feminism & Women’s Rights Topics

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  • Intersectionality: Examining its Role in Feminism
  • Unpacking Feminism in Third-World Countries
  • Dissecting Misogyny in Classical Literature
  • Influence of Religion on Women’s Rights Worldwide
  • Unveiling Bias in STEM Fields: Female Experiences
  • Gender Pay Gap: Global Comparisons and Solutions
  • Probing the Historical Evolution of Feminism
  • Reshaping Beauty Standards Through Feminist Discourse
  • Importance of Reproductive Rights in Women’s Health
  • Exploring Women’s Role in Environmental Activism
  • Glass Ceiling Phenomenon: Women in Corporate Leadership
  • Trans Women’s Struggles in Feminist Movements
  • Empowering Girls: The Role of Education
  • Intersection of Race, Class, and Feminism
  • Effects of Feminism on Modern Art
  • Impacts of Social Media on Women’s Rights Movements
  • Deconstructing Patriarchy in Traditional Societies
  • Single Mothers’ Challenges: A Feminist Perspective
  • Dynamics of Feminism in Post-Colonial Societies
  • Queer Women’s Struggles for Recognition and Rights
  • Women’s Contributions to Scientific Discovery: An Underrated History
  • Cybersecurity: Ensuring Women’s Safety in the Digital Age
  • Exploring the Misrepresentation of Feminism in Popular Culture
  • Repositioning Sexuality: The Role of Feminism in Health Discourse
  • Women’s Economic Empowerment: The Impact of Microfinance
  • Investigating Sexism in Video Gaming Industry
  • Female Leadership During Global Crises: Case Studies

Feminism Topics & Women’s Rights Essay Topics

Easy Feminism & Women’s Rights Topics

  • Power of Women’s Protest: A Historical Study
  • Feminist Movements’ Role in Shaping Public Policy
  • Body Autonomy: A Key Aspect of Feminist Ideology
  • Cyber Feminism: Women’s Rights in Digital Spaces
  • Violence Against Women: International Legal Measures
  • Feminist Pedagogy: Its Impact on Education
  • Depiction of Women in Graphic Novels: A Feminist Lens
  • Comparing Western and Eastern Feminist Movements
  • Men’s Roles in Supporting Feminist Movements
  • Impacts of Feminism on Marriage Institutions
  • Rural Women’s Rights: Challenges and Progress
  • Understanding Feminist Waves: From First to Fourth
  • Inclusion of Women in Peace Negotiation Processes
  • Influence of Feminism on Modern Advertising
  • Indigenous Women’s Movements and Rights
  • Reclaiming Public Spaces: Women’s Safety Concerns
  • Roles of Feminist Literature in Social Change
  • Women in Sports: Overcoming Stereotypes and Bias
  • Feminism in the Context of Refugee Rights
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  • Rise of Female Entrepreneurship: A Feminist View
  • Young Feminists: Shaping the Future of Women’s Rights

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  • Aging and Women’s Rights: An Overlooked Dimension
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  • Women’s Rights in Military Service: Progress and Challenges
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  • Masculinity in Crisis: Understanding the Feminist Perspective
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  • Unheard Stories: Women in the Global Space Race
  • Effects of Migration on Women’s Rights and Opportunities
  • Women’s Land Rights: A Global Issue
  • Intersection of Feminism and Disability Rights
  • Portrayal of Women in Science Fiction: A Feminist Review
  • Analyzing Post-Feminism: Its Origins and Implications
  • Cyberbullying and Its Impact on Women: Measures for Protection
  • Unveiling Gender Bias in Artificial Intelligence
  • Reimagining Domestic Work Through the Lens of Feminism
  • Black Women’s Hair Politics: A Feminist Perspective
  • Feminist Ethical Considerations in Biomedical Research
  • Promoting Gender Sensitivity in Children’s Literature
  • Understanding the Phenomenon of Toxic Femininity
  • Reconsidering Women’s Rights in the Context of Climate Migration
  • Advancing Women’s Participation in Political Activism

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  • Intersectionality’s Impact on Modern Feminism
  • Evolution of Feminist Thought: From First-Wave to Fourth-Wave
  • Gender Wage Gap: Myths and Realities
  • Workplace Discrimination: Tackling Unconscious Bias
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  • Feminism in the Classroom: The Role of Education
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  • Transgender Rights: An Extension of Feminism
  • Intersection of Feminism and Racial Justice
  • Body Shaming Culture: A Feminist Viewpoint
  • Feminism’s Influence on Modern Advertising
  • Patriarchy and Religion: A Feminist Critique
  • Domestic Labor: Feminist Perspectives on Unpaid Work
  • Sexism in Sports: The Need for Feminist Intervention
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  • Feminism and the Fight for Equal Representation in Politics
  • Women’s Rights in the Digital Age: A Feminist Examination
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  • Globalization and Its Effects on Women’s Rights
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  • Representation of Women in High-Powered Political Roles
  • Cultural Appropriation Within the Feminist Movement: An Inquiry
  • The Role of Feminism in Defining Beauty Standards
  • Women’s Reproductive Rights: A Debate of Autonomy
  • Feminism and Religion: The Question of Compatibility
  • Male Allies in the Feminist Movement: An Evaluation
  • Shift in Traditional Gender Roles: Feminist Perspective
  • Impacts of Media on Perceptions of Feminism
  • Dissecting the Wage Gap: A Feminist Examination
  • Menstrual Equity: A Battle for Feminist Activists
  • Feminism in Popular Music: Power or Appropriation?
  • Climate Change: The Unseen Feminist Issue
  • Education’s Role in Shaping Feminist Beliefs
  • Power Dynamics in the Workplace: A Feminist Scrutiny
  • Cyber-Feminism: Harnessing Digital Spaces for Activism
  • Healthcare Disparities Faced by Women: An Analysis
  • Transgender Women in Feminist Discourse: An Exploration
  • Feminist Perspectives on Monogamy and Polyamory
  • Feminist Analysis of Modern Advertising Campaigns
  • Exploring Sexism in the Film Industry through a Feminist Lens
  • Debunking Myths Surrounding the Feminist Movement
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  • Women’s Sports: Evaluating Equity and Feminist Advocacy

Feminist Research Paper Topics in Feminism Studies

  • Evaluating Feminist Theories: From Radical to Liberal
  • Women’s Health Care: Policies and Disparities
  • Maternal Mortality: A Global Women’s Rights Issue
  • Uncovering Sexism in the Tech Industry
  • Critique of Binary Gender Roles in Children’s Toys
  • Body Positivity Movement’s Influence on Feminism
  • Relevance of Feminism in the Fight Against Human Trafficking
  • Women in Coding: Breaking Stereotypes
  • The Role of Women in Sustainable Agriculture
  • Feminism in the Cosmetics Industry: A Dual-Edged Sword
  • The Influence of Feminism on Modern Architecture
  • Bridging the Gap: Women in Higher Education Leadership
  • The Role of Feminism in Advancing LGBTQ+ Rights
  • Menstrual Equity: A Key Women’s Rights Issue
  • Women in Classical Music: Breaking Barriers
  • Analyzing Gendered Language: A Feminist Approach
  • Women’s Rights and Humanitarian Aid: The Interconnection
  • Exploring the Role of Women in Graphic Design
  • Addressing the Lack of Women in Venture Capitalism
  • Impact of Feminism on Urban Planning and Design
  • Maternal Labor in the Informal Economy: A Feminist Analysis
  • Feminism’s Influence on Modern Dance Forms
  • Exploring the Role of Women in the Renewable Energy Sector
  • Women in Esports: An Emerging Frontier
  • Child Marriage: A Grave Violation of Women’s Rights

Feminist Topics for Discussion

  • Feminist Criticism of the Fashion Modelling Industry
  • Domestic Violence: Feminist Legal Responses
  • Analyzing the Success of Women-Only Workspaces
  • Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting: A Human Rights Issue
  • Women’s Role in the Evolution of Cryptocurrency
  • Women and the Right to Water: A Feminist Perspective
  • Gender Stereotypes in Comedy: A Feminist View
  • Intersection of Animal Rights and Feminist Theory
  • Roles of Feminism in the Fight Against Child Labor
  • Representation of Women in Folklore and Mythology
  • Women’s Rights in the Gig Economy: Issues and Solutions
  • Revisiting Feminism in Post-Soviet Countries
  • Women in the Space Industry: Present Status and Future Trends
  • The Influence of Feminism on Culinary Arts
  • Unraveling the Impact of Fast Fashion on Women Workers
  • Feminist Perspectives on Genetic Engineering and Reproduction
  • Assessing the Progress of Women’s Financial Literacy
  • Sex Work and Feminism: A Controversial Discourse
  • Women in Cybernetics: An Untapped Potential
  • Uncovering the Women Behind Major Historical Events
  • The Impact of the #MeToo Movement Globally
  • Women’s Rights in the Cannabis Industry: Challenges and Progress
  • Redefining Motherhood: The Intersection of Feminism and Adoption
  • Roles of Feminist Movements in Combatting Child Abuse

Women’s Rights Essay Topics for Feminism

  • Evolution of Women’s Rights in the 20th Century
  • Roles of Women in World War II: Catalyst for Change
  • Suffrage Movement: Driving Force Behind Women’s Empowerment
  • Cultural Differences in Women’s Rights: A Comparative Study
  • Feminist Movements and Their Global Impact
  • Women’s Rights in Islamic Societies: Perceptions and Realities
  • Glass Ceiling Phenomenon: Analysis and Impacts
  • Pioneering Women in Science: Trailblazers for Equality
  • Impacts of Media Portrayal on Women’s Rights
  • Economic Autonomy for Women: Pathway to Empowerment
  • Women’s Rights in Education: Global Perspective
  • Gender Equality in Politics: Global Progress
  • Intersectionality and Women’s Rights: Race, Class, and Gender
  • Legal Milestones in Women’s Rights History
  • Inequities in Healthcare: A Women’s Rights Issue
  • Modern-Day Slavery: Women and Human Trafficking
  • Climate Change: A Unique Threat to Women’s Rights
  • Body Autonomy and Reproductive Rights: A Feminist Analysis
  • Globalization’s Effect on Women’s Rights: Opportunities and Threats
  • Gender Violence: An Erosion of Women’s Rights
  • Indigenous Women’s Rights: Struggles and Triumphs
  • Women’s Rights Activists: Unsung Heroes of History
  • Empowerment Through Sports: Women’s Struggle and Success
  • Balancing Act: Motherhood and Career in the 21st Century
  • LGBTQ+ Women: Rights and Recognition in Different Societies

Women’s Rights Research Questions

  • Evolution of Feminism: How Has the Movement Shifted Over Time?
  • The Workplace and Gender Equality: How Effective Are Current Measures?
  • Intersectionality’s Influence: How Does It Shape Women’s Rights Advocacy?
  • Reproductive Rights: What Is the Global Impact on Women’s Health?
  • Media Representation: Does It Affect Women’s Rights Perception?
  • Gender Stereotypes: How Do They Impede Women’s Empowerment?
  • Global Disparities: Why Do Women’s Rights Vary So Widely?
  • Maternal Mortality: How Does It Reflect on Women’s Healthcare Rights?
  • Education for Girls: How Does It Contribute to Gender Equality?
  • Cultural Norms: How Do They Influence Women’s Rights?
  • Leadership Roles: Are Women Adequately Represented in Positions of Power?
  • Domestic Violence Laws: Are They Sufficient to Protect Women’s Rights?
  • Roles of Technology: How Does It Impact Women’s Rights?
  • Sexual Harassment Policies: How Effective Are They in Protecting Women?
  • Pay Equity: How Can It Be Ensured for Women Globally?
  • Politics and Gender: How Does Women’s Representation Shape Policy-Making?
  • Child Marriage: How Does It Violate Girls’ Rights?
  • Climate Change: How Does It Disproportionately Affect Women?
  • Trafficking Scourge: How Can Women’s Rights Combat This Issue?
  • Female Genital Mutilation: How Does It Contradict Women’s Rights?
  • Armed Conflicts: How Do They Impact Women’s Rights?
  • Body Autonomy: How Can It Be Safeguarded for Women?
  • Women’s Suffrage: How Did It Pave the Way for Modern Women’s Rights?
  • Men’s Role: How Can They Contribute to Women’s Rights Advocacy?
  • Legal Frameworks: How Do They Support or Hinder Women’s Rights?

History of Women’s Rights Topics

  • Emergence of Feminism in the 19th Century
  • Roles of Women in the Abolitionist Movement
  • Suffragette Movements: Triumphs and Challenges
  • Eleanor Roosevelt and Her Advocacy for Women’s Rights
  • Impacts of World War II on Women’s Liberation
  • Radical Feminism in the 1960s and 1970s
  • Pioneering Women in Politics: The First Female Senators
  • Inception of the Equal Rights Amendment
  • Revolutionary Women’s Health Activism
  • Struggle for Reproductive Freedom: Roe vs. Wade
  • Birth of the Women’s Liberation Movement
  • Challenges Women Faced in the Civil Rights Movement
  • Women’s Roles in the Trade Union Movement
  • Intersectionality and Feminism: Examining the Role of Women of Color
  • How Did the Women’s Rights Movement Impact Education?
  • Sexuality, Identity, and Feminism: Stonewall Riots’ Impact
  • Influence of Religion on Women’s Rights Activism
  • Women’s Empowerment: The UN Conferences
  • Impact of Globalization on Women’s Rights
  • Women’s Movements in Non-Western Countries
  • Women in Space: The Fight for Equality in NASA
  • Achievements of Feminist Literature and Arts
  • Evolution of the Women’s Sports Movement
  • Advancement of Women’s Rights in the Digital Age
  • Cultural Shifts: The Media’s Role in Promoting Women’s Rights

Feminism Essay Topics on Women’s Issues

  • Career Challenges: The Gender Wage Gap in Contemporary Society
  • Examining Microfinance: An Empowering Tool for Women in Developing Countries
  • Pioneers of Change: The Role of Women in the Space Industry
  • Exploring Beauty Standards: An Analysis of Global Perspectives
  • Impacts of Legislation: Progress in Women’s Health Policies
  • Maternity Leave Policies: A Comparative Study of Different Countries
  • Resilience Through Struggles: The Plight of Female Refugees
  • Technology’s Influence: Addressing the Digital Gender Divide
  • Dissecting Stereotypes: Gender Roles in Children’s Media
  • Influence of Female Leaders: A Look at Political Empowerment
  • Social Media and Women: Effects on Mental Health
  • Understanding Intersectionality: The Complexity of Women’s Rights
  • Single Mothers: Balancing Parenthood and Economic Challenges
  • Gaining Ground in Sports: A Look at Female Athletes’ Struggles
  • Maternal Mortality: The Hidden Health Crisis
  • Reproductive Rights: Women’s Control Over Their Bodies
  • Feminism in Literature: Portrayal of Women in Classic Novels
  • Deconstructing Patriarchy: The Impact of Gender Inequality
  • Body Autonomy: The Battle for Abortion Rights
  • Women in STEM: Barriers and Breakthroughs
  • Female Soldiers: Their Role in Military Conflicts
  • Human Trafficking: The Disproportionate Impact on Women
  • Silent Victims: Domestic Violence and Women’s Health

To Learn More, Read Relevant Articles

385 odyssey essay topics & ideas, 415 rogerian essay topics & good ideas.

New York University's independent student newspaper, established in 1973.

Washington Square News

A group of students posing for a group photo in front of N.Y.U.’s Bobst Library. Some students on the right are holding a white banner with the red, green and red words “CUT the CONTRACT with STARBUCKS” written on it. A student beside the banner is holding a yellow envelope.

Guest Essay: Palestinian lives ignored as students fight for free speech protection

People+are+standing+in+front+of+the+Washington+Square+Arch+beneath+a+large+Palestinian+flag.

Guest essays reflect opinions from writers beyond WSN. If you’d like to submit a guest essay for consideration, please email [email protected] .

It took President Linda Mills 44 days to say “Palestinian” in all-university communications. In that time, nearly 13,000 Palestinians were murdered by Israeli violence. President Mills has never said the word, “Gaza,” in her numerous statements and the university has yet to recognize the current death toll of over 29,000 men , women and children. President Mills has not even offered to meet with Students for Justice in Palestine and has only spoken to two Palestinian students in a single meeting back in October. 

As the assault on Gaza continues and members of NYU have expressed solidarity with Palestine, students, faculty and staff members have to navigate surveillance, threats, repression and retaliation on our campus and universities across the country . The negligence of our university’s decision-makers has decentered Palestinian student voices and has made solidarity with their grief an act subject to sanction. 

Since the fall semester, the university has continuously released ambiguous emails and statements with intimidating language that threatens suspensions or disciplinary measures for unspecified actions. While the emails appear to be vague, they clearly have the subtext of targeting pro-Palestinian student activity, such as in President Mills’ latest statement calling for students to be “ circumspect about sloganeering ,” a clear reference to the phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” As the university attempts to cover more ground by being ambiguous with such language, it is inequitable to label protests and speech in support of Palestine as “provocative” or “antagonizing,” especially as the consequences of the ongoing violence in Gaza, human and environmental , have been shown to be too large. Given that the university has historically stood against the apartheid in South Africa and continues to reckon with the historical injustices of racism and colonialism in the United States, one would assume the university can make that distinction. 

NYU is adamant that it fosters a “critically engaged student body” yet employs the 10-Point Plan , antithetical to its policies on academic freedom . Last semester, President Mills stated the Office of Student Conduct was reviewing over 90 cases related to “current concerns.” Continuing into the spring semester, multiple students and faculty members have been threatened with disciplinary action over their participation in a poetry reading. Only two weeks in, professors with pro-Palestine views have been suspended with no clear indication of whether or not their positions will be terminated. Rather than promoting open dialogue, the plan stifles dissenting opinions and limits the ability of students, staff and faculty to actively engage. The disconnect between the university’s rhetoric and actions raises questions about NYU’s dedication to fostering a commitment to justice, human rights and academic freedom.

This extends beyond the immediate campus community as we have witnessed how repression and vilification of pro-Palestinian speech has led to the militarization of police on campus — directly putting students at risk of danger. Just a few miles away at Columbia University, peaceful student protestors have been arrested and violently assaulted. 

Despite loud calls against the New York City Police Department, which has historically assaulted Black and brown communities, we have seen an escalation of NYPD presence not only on campus, but inside university buildings. During Students for Justice in Palestine and Shut It Down’s “de-occupation” of the Paulson Center, students were met with increased security, including an overwhelming presence of NYPD and Campus Safety officers. During the demonstration, NYPD vans surrounded the building and Campus Safety officers had a video camera directed straight at these student activists. Even when counter protestors came into the lobby, the camera was still pointed only at pro-Palestinian activists, perpetuating selective surveillance of those expressing solidarity with Palestine.

Because the university has not equitably protected nor has it acknowledged the Palestinian students affected by the siege on Gaza, I proposed a resolution that calls for NYU to reaffirm protection of Pro-Palestine speech and civic activity on campus . The resolution demands that the university protect pro-Palestinian students’ rights to free expression and that there be greater transparency and clarity on what protected dissent looks like on campus. It further advocates for the safety and protection of students from harassment, intimidation, doxxing and threats through increased safety measures. 

This resolution is clearly something that the student body needs as it has passed the Student Government Assembly , which is representative of marginalized and underrepresented constituencies and all NYU schools: undergraduate, graduate, professional, NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU Shanghai. Additionally, it has nearly 500 signatures from students, faculty, staff and alumni from all NYU schools, along with a wide variety of student organizations. But more importantly, this resolution is something that is needed because it aims to protect the students who are currently most vulnerable to harassment, intimidation and suppression. 

If you want to show your support, I encourage you to sign on to the resolution , whether you are an individual student or a student organization. The greater the support and signatures, the louder the message of centering Palestinian student voices is conveyed to the university. 

WSN’s Opinion section strives to publish ideas worth discussing. The views presented in the Opinion section are solely the views of the writer.

Contact Lamisa Khan at [email protected] .

An N.Y.U. flag hangs above the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development. Cars line the road to the right of the building and an entrance to Washington Square Park can be seen in the background.

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Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender

Feminism is said to be the movement to end women’s oppression (hooks 2000, 26). One possible way to understand ‘woman’ in this claim is to take it as a sex term: ‘woman’ picks out human females and being a human female depends on various biological and anatomical features (like genitalia). Historically many feminists have understood ‘woman’ differently: not as a sex term, but as a gender term that depends on social and cultural factors (like social position). In so doing, they distinguished sex (being female or male) from gender (being a woman or a man), although most ordinary language users appear to treat the two interchangeably. In feminist philosophy, this distinction has generated a lively debate. Central questions include: What does it mean for gender to be distinct from sex, if anything at all? How should we understand the claim that gender depends on social and/or cultural factors? What does it mean to be gendered woman, man, or genderqueer? This entry outlines and discusses distinctly feminist debates on sex and gender considering both historical and more contemporary positions.

1.1 Biological determinism

1.2 gender terminology, 2.1 gender socialisation, 2.2 gender as feminine and masculine personality, 2.3 gender as feminine and masculine sexuality, 3.1.1 particularity argument, 3.1.2 normativity argument, 3.2 is sex classification solely a matter of biology, 3.3 are sex and gender distinct, 3.4 is the sex/gender distinction useful, 4.1.1 gendered social series, 4.1.2 resemblance nominalism, 4.2.1 social subordination and gender, 4.2.2 gender uniessentialism, 4.2.3 gender as positionality, 5. beyond the binary, 6. conclusion, other internet resources, related entries, 1. the sex/gender distinction..

The terms ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ mean different things to different feminist theorists and neither are easy or straightforward to characterise. Sketching out some feminist history of the terms provides a helpful starting point.

Most people ordinarily seem to think that sex and gender are coextensive: women are human females, men are human males. Many feminists have historically disagreed and have endorsed the sex/ gender distinction. Provisionally: ‘sex’ denotes human females and males depending on biological features (chromosomes, sex organs, hormones and other physical features); ‘gender’ denotes women and men depending on social factors (social role, position, behaviour or identity). The main feminist motivation for making this distinction was to counter biological determinism or the view that biology is destiny.

A typical example of a biological determinist view is that of Geddes and Thompson who, in 1889, argued that social, psychological and behavioural traits were caused by metabolic state. Women supposedly conserve energy (being ‘anabolic’) and this makes them passive, conservative, sluggish, stable and uninterested in politics. Men expend their surplus energy (being ‘katabolic’) and this makes them eager, energetic, passionate, variable and, thereby, interested in political and social matters. These biological ‘facts’ about metabolic states were used not only to explain behavioural differences between women and men but also to justify what our social and political arrangements ought to be. More specifically, they were used to argue for withholding from women political rights accorded to men because (according to Geddes and Thompson) “what was decided among the prehistoric Protozoa cannot be annulled by Act of Parliament” (quoted from Moi 1999, 18). It would be inappropriate to grant women political rights, as they are simply not suited to have those rights; it would also be futile since women (due to their biology) would simply not be interested in exercising their political rights. To counter this kind of biological determinism, feminists have argued that behavioural and psychological differences have social, rather than biological, causes. For instance, Simone de Beauvoir famously claimed that one is not born, but rather becomes a woman, and that “social discrimination produces in women moral and intellectual effects so profound that they appear to be caused by nature” (Beauvoir 1972 [original 1949], 18; for more, see the entry on Simone de Beauvoir ). Commonly observed behavioural traits associated with women and men, then, are not caused by anatomy or chromosomes. Rather, they are culturally learned or acquired.

Although biological determinism of the kind endorsed by Geddes and Thompson is nowadays uncommon, the idea that behavioural and psychological differences between women and men have biological causes has not disappeared. In the 1970s, sex differences were used to argue that women should not become airline pilots since they will be hormonally unstable once a month and, therefore, unable to perform their duties as well as men (Rogers 1999, 11). More recently, differences in male and female brains have been said to explain behavioural differences; in particular, the anatomy of corpus callosum, a bundle of nerves that connects the right and left cerebral hemispheres, is thought to be responsible for various psychological and behavioural differences. For instance, in 1992, a Time magazine article surveyed then prominent biological explanations of differences between women and men claiming that women’s thicker corpus callosums could explain what ‘women’s intuition’ is based on and impair women’s ability to perform some specialised visual-spatial skills, like reading maps (Gorman 1992). Anne Fausto-Sterling has questioned the idea that differences in corpus callosums cause behavioural and psychological differences. First, the corpus callosum is a highly variable piece of anatomy; as a result, generalisations about its size, shape and thickness that hold for women and men in general should be viewed with caution. Second, differences in adult human corpus callosums are not found in infants; this may suggest that physical brain differences actually develop as responses to differential treatment. Third, given that visual-spatial skills (like map reading) can be improved by practice, even if women and men’s corpus callosums differ, this does not make the resulting behavioural differences immutable. (Fausto-Sterling 2000b, chapter 5).

In order to distinguish biological differences from social/psychological ones and to talk about the latter, feminists appropriated the term ‘gender’. Psychologists writing on transsexuality were the first to employ gender terminology in this sense. Until the 1960s, ‘gender’ was often used to refer to masculine and feminine words, like le and la in French. However, in order to explain why some people felt that they were ‘trapped in the wrong bodies’, the psychologist Robert Stoller (1968) began using the terms ‘sex’ to pick out biological traits and ‘gender’ to pick out the amount of femininity and masculinity a person exhibited. Although (by and large) a person’s sex and gender complemented each other, separating out these terms seemed to make theoretical sense allowing Stoller to explain the phenomenon of transsexuality: transsexuals’ sex and gender simply don’t match.

Along with psychologists like Stoller, feminists found it useful to distinguish sex and gender. This enabled them to argue that many differences between women and men were socially produced and, therefore, changeable. Gayle Rubin (for instance) uses the phrase ‘sex/gender system’ in order to describe “a set of arrangements by which the biological raw material of human sex and procreation is shaped by human, social intervention” (1975, 165). Rubin employed this system to articulate that “part of social life which is the locus of the oppression of women” (1975, 159) describing gender as the “socially imposed division of the sexes” (1975, 179). Rubin’s thought was that although biological differences are fixed, gender differences are the oppressive results of social interventions that dictate how women and men should behave. Women are oppressed as women and “by having to be women” (Rubin 1975, 204). However, since gender is social, it is thought to be mutable and alterable by political and social reform that would ultimately bring an end to women’s subordination. Feminism should aim to create a “genderless (though not sexless) society, in which one’s sexual anatomy is irrelevant to who one is, what one does, and with whom one makes love” (Rubin 1975, 204).

In some earlier interpretations, like Rubin’s, sex and gender were thought to complement one another. The slogan ‘Gender is the social interpretation of sex’ captures this view. Nicholson calls this ‘the coat-rack view’ of gender: our sexed bodies are like coat racks and “provide the site upon which gender [is] constructed” (1994, 81). Gender conceived of as masculinity and femininity is superimposed upon the ‘coat-rack’ of sex as each society imposes on sexed bodies their cultural conceptions of how males and females should behave. This socially constructs gender differences – or the amount of femininity/masculinity of a person – upon our sexed bodies. That is, according to this interpretation, all humans are either male or female; their sex is fixed. But cultures interpret sexed bodies differently and project different norms on those bodies thereby creating feminine and masculine persons. Distinguishing sex and gender, however, also enables the two to come apart: they are separable in that one can be sexed male and yet be gendered a woman, or vice versa (Haslanger 2000b; Stoljar 1995).

So, this group of feminist arguments against biological determinism suggested that gender differences result from cultural practices and social expectations. Nowadays it is more common to denote this by saying that gender is socially constructed. This means that genders (women and men) and gendered traits (like being nurturing or ambitious) are the “intended or unintended product[s] of a social practice” (Haslanger 1995, 97). But which social practices construct gender, what social construction is and what being of a certain gender amounts to are major feminist controversies. There is no consensus on these issues. (See the entry on intersections between analytic and continental feminism for more on different ways to understand gender.)

2. Gender as socially constructed

One way to interpret Beauvoir’s claim that one is not born but rather becomes a woman is to take it as a claim about gender socialisation: females become women through a process whereby they acquire feminine traits and learn feminine behaviour. Masculinity and femininity are thought to be products of nurture or how individuals are brought up. They are causally constructed (Haslanger 1995, 98): social forces either have a causal role in bringing gendered individuals into existence or (to some substantial sense) shape the way we are qua women and men. And the mechanism of construction is social learning. For instance, Kate Millett takes gender differences to have “essentially cultural, rather than biological bases” that result from differential treatment (1971, 28–9). For her, gender is “the sum total of the parents’, the peers’, and the culture’s notions of what is appropriate to each gender by way of temperament, character, interests, status, worth, gesture, and expression” (Millett 1971, 31). Feminine and masculine gender-norms, however, are problematic in that gendered behaviour conveniently fits with and reinforces women’s subordination so that women are socialised into subordinate social roles: they learn to be passive, ignorant, docile, emotional helpmeets for men (Millett 1971, 26). However, since these roles are simply learned, we can create more equal societies by ‘unlearning’ social roles. That is, feminists should aim to diminish the influence of socialisation.

Social learning theorists hold that a huge array of different influences socialise us as women and men. This being the case, it is extremely difficult to counter gender socialisation. For instance, parents often unconsciously treat their female and male children differently. When parents have been asked to describe their 24- hour old infants, they have done so using gender-stereotypic language: boys are describes as strong, alert and coordinated and girls as tiny, soft and delicate. Parents’ treatment of their infants further reflects these descriptions whether they are aware of this or not (Renzetti & Curran 1992, 32). Some socialisation is more overt: children are often dressed in gender stereotypical clothes and colours (boys are dressed in blue, girls in pink) and parents tend to buy their children gender stereotypical toys. They also (intentionally or not) tend to reinforce certain ‘appropriate’ behaviours. While the precise form of gender socialization has changed since the onset of second-wave feminism, even today girls are discouraged from playing sports like football or from playing ‘rough and tumble’ games and are more likely than boys to be given dolls or cooking toys to play with; boys are told not to ‘cry like a baby’ and are more likely to be given masculine toys like trucks and guns (for more, see Kimmel 2000, 122–126). [ 1 ]

According to social learning theorists, children are also influenced by what they observe in the world around them. This, again, makes countering gender socialisation difficult. For one, children’s books have portrayed males and females in blatantly stereotypical ways: for instance, males as adventurers and leaders, and females as helpers and followers. One way to address gender stereotyping in children’s books has been to portray females in independent roles and males as non-aggressive and nurturing (Renzetti & Curran 1992, 35). Some publishers have attempted an alternative approach by making their characters, for instance, gender-neutral animals or genderless imaginary creatures (like TV’s Teletubbies). However, parents reading books with gender-neutral or genderless characters often undermine the publishers’ efforts by reading them to their children in ways that depict the characters as either feminine or masculine. According to Renzetti and Curran, parents labelled the overwhelming majority of gender-neutral characters masculine whereas those characters that fit feminine gender stereotypes (for instance, by being helpful and caring) were labelled feminine (1992, 35). Socialising influences like these are still thought to send implicit messages regarding how females and males should act and are expected to act shaping us into feminine and masculine persons.

Nancy Chodorow (1978; 1995) has criticised social learning theory as too simplistic to explain gender differences (see also Deaux & Major 1990; Gatens 1996). Instead, she holds that gender is a matter of having feminine and masculine personalities that develop in early infancy as responses to prevalent parenting practices. In particular, gendered personalities develop because women tend to be the primary caretakers of small children. Chodorow holds that because mothers (or other prominent females) tend to care for infants, infant male and female psychic development differs. Crudely put: the mother-daughter relationship differs from the mother-son relationship because mothers are more likely to identify with their daughters than their sons. This unconsciously prompts the mother to encourage her son to psychologically individuate himself from her thereby prompting him to develop well defined and rigid ego boundaries. However, the mother unconsciously discourages the daughter from individuating herself thereby prompting the daughter to develop flexible and blurry ego boundaries. Childhood gender socialisation further builds on and reinforces these unconsciously developed ego boundaries finally producing feminine and masculine persons (1995, 202–206). This perspective has its roots in Freudian psychoanalytic theory, although Chodorow’s approach differs in many ways from Freud’s.

Gendered personalities are supposedly manifested in common gender stereotypical behaviour. Take emotional dependency. Women are stereotypically more emotional and emotionally dependent upon others around them, supposedly finding it difficult to distinguish their own interests and wellbeing from the interests and wellbeing of their children and partners. This is said to be because of their blurry and (somewhat) confused ego boundaries: women find it hard to distinguish their own needs from the needs of those around them because they cannot sufficiently individuate themselves from those close to them. By contrast, men are stereotypically emotionally detached, preferring a career where dispassionate and distanced thinking are virtues. These traits are said to result from men’s well-defined ego boundaries that enable them to prioritise their own needs and interests sometimes at the expense of others’ needs and interests.

Chodorow thinks that these gender differences should and can be changed. Feminine and masculine personalities play a crucial role in women’s oppression since they make females overly attentive to the needs of others and males emotionally deficient. In order to correct the situation, both male and female parents should be equally involved in parenting (Chodorow 1995, 214). This would help in ensuring that children develop sufficiently individuated senses of selves without becoming overly detached, which in turn helps to eradicate common gender stereotypical behaviours.

Catharine MacKinnon develops her theory of gender as a theory of sexuality. Very roughly: the social meaning of sex (gender) is created by sexual objectification of women whereby women are viewed and treated as objects for satisfying men’s desires (MacKinnon 1989). Masculinity is defined as sexual dominance, femininity as sexual submissiveness: genders are “created through the eroticization of dominance and submission. The man/woman difference and the dominance/submission dynamic define each other. This is the social meaning of sex” (MacKinnon 1989, 113). For MacKinnon, gender is constitutively constructed : in defining genders (or masculinity and femininity) we must make reference to social factors (see Haslanger 1995, 98). In particular, we must make reference to the position one occupies in the sexualised dominance/submission dynamic: men occupy the sexually dominant position, women the sexually submissive one. As a result, genders are by definition hierarchical and this hierarchy is fundamentally tied to sexualised power relations. The notion of ‘gender equality’, then, does not make sense to MacKinnon. If sexuality ceased to be a manifestation of dominance, hierarchical genders (that are defined in terms of sexuality) would cease to exist.

So, gender difference for MacKinnon is not a matter of having a particular psychological orientation or behavioural pattern; rather, it is a function of sexuality that is hierarchal in patriarchal societies. This is not to say that men are naturally disposed to sexually objectify women or that women are naturally submissive. Instead, male and female sexualities are socially conditioned: men have been conditioned to find women’s subordination sexy and women have been conditioned to find a particular male version of female sexuality as erotic – one in which it is erotic to be sexually submissive. For MacKinnon, both female and male sexual desires are defined from a male point of view that is conditioned by pornography (MacKinnon 1989, chapter 7). Bluntly put: pornography portrays a false picture of ‘what women want’ suggesting that women in actual fact are and want to be submissive. This conditions men’s sexuality so that they view women’s submission as sexy. And male dominance enforces this male version of sexuality onto women, sometimes by force. MacKinnon’s thought is not that male dominance is a result of social learning (see 2.1.); rather, socialization is an expression of power. That is, socialized differences in masculine and feminine traits, behaviour, and roles are not responsible for power inequalities. Females and males (roughly put) are socialised differently because there are underlying power inequalities. As MacKinnon puts it, ‘dominance’ (power relations) is prior to ‘difference’ (traits, behaviour and roles) (see, MacKinnon 1989, chapter 12). MacKinnon, then, sees legal restrictions on pornography as paramount to ending women’s subordinate status that stems from their gender.

3. Problems with the sex/gender distinction

3.1 is gender uniform.

The positions outlined above share an underlying metaphysical perspective on gender: gender realism . [ 2 ] That is, women as a group are assumed to share some characteristic feature, experience, common condition or criterion that defines their gender and the possession of which makes some individuals women (as opposed to, say, men). All women are thought to differ from all men in this respect (or respects). For example, MacKinnon thought that being treated in sexually objectifying ways is the common condition that defines women’s gender and what women as women share. All women differ from all men in this respect. Further, pointing out females who are not sexually objectified does not provide a counterexample to MacKinnon’s view. Being sexually objectified is constitutive of being a woman; a female who escapes sexual objectification, then, would not count as a woman.

One may want to critique the three accounts outlined by rejecting the particular details of each account. (For instance, see Spelman [1988, chapter 4] for a critique of the details of Chodorow’s view.) A more thoroughgoing critique has been levelled at the general metaphysical perspective of gender realism that underlies these positions. It has come under sustained attack on two grounds: first, that it fails to take into account racial, cultural and class differences between women (particularity argument); second, that it posits a normative ideal of womanhood (normativity argument).

Elizabeth Spelman (1988) has influentially argued against gender realism with her particularity argument. Roughly: gender realists mistakenly assume that gender is constructed independently of race, class, ethnicity and nationality. If gender were separable from, for example, race and class in this manner, all women would experience womanhood in the same way. And this is clearly false. For instance, Harris (1993) and Stone (2007) criticise MacKinnon’s view, that sexual objectification is the common condition that defines women’s gender, for failing to take into account differences in women’s backgrounds that shape their sexuality. The history of racist oppression illustrates that during slavery black women were ‘hypersexualised’ and thought to be always sexually available whereas white women were thought to be pure and sexually virtuous. In fact, the rape of a black woman was thought to be impossible (Harris 1993). So, (the argument goes) sexual objectification cannot serve as the common condition for womanhood since it varies considerably depending on one’s race and class. [ 3 ]

For Spelman, the perspective of ‘white solipsism’ underlies gender realists’ mistake. They assumed that all women share some “golden nugget of womanness” (Spelman 1988, 159) and that the features constitutive of such a nugget are the same for all women regardless of their particular cultural backgrounds. Next, white Western middle-class feminists accounted for the shared features simply by reflecting on the cultural features that condition their gender as women thus supposing that “the womanness underneath the Black woman’s skin is a white woman’s, and deep down inside the Latina woman is an Anglo woman waiting to burst through an obscuring cultural shroud” (Spelman 1988, 13). In so doing, Spelman claims, white middle-class Western feminists passed off their particular view of gender as “a metaphysical truth” (1988, 180) thereby privileging some women while marginalising others. In failing to see the importance of race and class in gender construction, white middle-class Western feminists conflated “the condition of one group of women with the condition of all” (Spelman 1988, 3).

Betty Friedan’s (1963) well-known work is a case in point of white solipsism. [ 4 ] Friedan saw domesticity as the main vehicle of gender oppression and called upon women in general to find jobs outside the home. But she failed to realize that women from less privileged backgrounds, often poor and non-white, already worked outside the home to support their families. Friedan’s suggestion, then, was applicable only to a particular sub-group of women (white middle-class Western housewives). But it was mistakenly taken to apply to all women’s lives — a mistake that was generated by Friedan’s failure to take women’s racial and class differences into account (hooks 2000, 1–3).

Spelman further holds that since social conditioning creates femininity and societies (and sub-groups) that condition it differ from one another, femininity must be differently conditioned in different societies. For her, “females become not simply women but particular kinds of women” (Spelman 1988, 113): white working-class women, black middle-class women, poor Jewish women, wealthy aristocratic European women, and so on.

This line of thought has been extremely influential in feminist philosophy. For instance, Young holds that Spelman has definitively shown that gender realism is untenable (1997, 13). Mikkola (2006) argues that this isn’t so. The arguments Spelman makes do not undermine the idea that there is some characteristic feature, experience, common condition or criterion that defines women’s gender; they simply point out that some particular ways of cashing out what defines womanhood are misguided. So, although Spelman is right to reject those accounts that falsely take the feature that conditions white middle-class Western feminists’ gender to condition women’s gender in general, this leaves open the possibility that women qua women do share something that defines their gender. (See also Haslanger [2000a] for a discussion of why gender realism is not necessarily untenable, and Stoljar [2011] for a discussion of Mikkola’s critique of Spelman.)

Judith Butler critiques the sex/gender distinction on two grounds. They critique gender realism with their normativity argument (1999 [original 1990], chapter 1); they also hold that the sex/gender distinction is unintelligible (this will be discussed in section 3.3.). Butler’s normativity argument is not straightforwardly directed at the metaphysical perspective of gender realism, but rather at its political counterpart: identity politics. This is a form of political mobilization based on membership in some group (e.g. racial, ethnic, cultural, gender) and group membership is thought to be delimited by some common experiences, conditions or features that define the group (Heyes 2000, 58; see also the entry on Identity Politics ). Feminist identity politics, then, presupposes gender realism in that feminist politics is said to be mobilized around women as a group (or category) where membership in this group is fixed by some condition, experience or feature that women supposedly share and that defines their gender.

Butler’s normativity argument makes two claims. The first is akin to Spelman’s particularity argument: unitary gender notions fail to take differences amongst women into account thus failing to recognise “the multiplicity of cultural, social, and political intersections in which the concrete array of ‘women’ are constructed” (Butler 1999, 19–20). In their attempt to undercut biologically deterministic ways of defining what it means to be a woman, feminists inadvertently created new socially constructed accounts of supposedly shared femininity. Butler’s second claim is that such false gender realist accounts are normative. That is, in their attempt to fix feminism’s subject matter, feminists unwittingly defined the term ‘woman’ in a way that implies there is some correct way to be gendered a woman (Butler 1999, 5). That the definition of the term ‘woman’ is fixed supposedly “operates as a policing force which generates and legitimizes certain practices, experiences, etc., and curtails and delegitimizes others” (Nicholson 1998, 293). Following this line of thought, one could say that, for instance, Chodorow’s view of gender suggests that ‘real’ women have feminine personalities and that these are the women feminism should be concerned about. If one does not exhibit a distinctly feminine personality, the implication is that one is not ‘really’ a member of women’s category nor does one properly qualify for feminist political representation.

Butler’s second claim is based on their view that“[i]dentity categories [like that of women] are never merely descriptive, but always normative, and as such, exclusionary” (Butler 1991, 160). That is, the mistake of those feminists Butler critiques was not that they provided the incorrect definition of ‘woman’. Rather, (the argument goes) their mistake was to attempt to define the term ‘woman’ at all. Butler’s view is that ‘woman’ can never be defined in a way that does not prescribe some “unspoken normative requirements” (like having a feminine personality) that women should conform to (Butler 1999, 9). Butler takes this to be a feature of terms like ‘woman’ that purport to pick out (what they call) ‘identity categories’. They seem to assume that ‘woman’ can never be used in a non-ideological way (Moi 1999, 43) and that it will always encode conditions that are not satisfied by everyone we think of as women. Some explanation for this comes from Butler’s view that all processes of drawing categorical distinctions involve evaluative and normative commitments; these in turn involve the exercise of power and reflect the conditions of those who are socially powerful (Witt 1995).

In order to better understand Butler’s critique, consider their account of gender performativity. For them, standard feminist accounts take gendered individuals to have some essential properties qua gendered individuals or a gender core by virtue of which one is either a man or a woman. This view assumes that women and men, qua women and men, are bearers of various essential and accidental attributes where the former secure gendered persons’ persistence through time as so gendered. But according to Butler this view is false: (i) there are no such essential properties, and (ii) gender is an illusion maintained by prevalent power structures. First, feminists are said to think that genders are socially constructed in that they have the following essential attributes (Butler 1999, 24): women are females with feminine behavioural traits, being heterosexuals whose desire is directed at men; men are males with masculine behavioural traits, being heterosexuals whose desire is directed at women. These are the attributes necessary for gendered individuals and those that enable women and men to persist through time as women and men. Individuals have “intelligible genders” (Butler 1999, 23) if they exhibit this sequence of traits in a coherent manner (where sexual desire follows from sexual orientation that in turn follows from feminine/ masculine behaviours thought to follow from biological sex). Social forces in general deem individuals who exhibit in coherent gender sequences (like lesbians) to be doing their gender ‘wrong’ and they actively discourage such sequencing of traits, for instance, via name-calling and overt homophobic discrimination. Think back to what was said above: having a certain conception of what women are like that mirrors the conditions of socially powerful (white, middle-class, heterosexual, Western) women functions to marginalize and police those who do not fit this conception.

These gender cores, supposedly encoding the above traits, however, are nothing more than illusions created by ideals and practices that seek to render gender uniform through heterosexism, the view that heterosexuality is natural and homosexuality is deviant (Butler 1999, 42). Gender cores are constructed as if they somehow naturally belong to women and men thereby creating gender dimorphism or the belief that one must be either a masculine male or a feminine female. But gender dimorphism only serves a heterosexist social order by implying that since women and men are sharply opposed, it is natural to sexually desire the opposite sex or gender.

Further, being feminine and desiring men (for instance) are standardly assumed to be expressions of one’s gender as a woman. Butler denies this and holds that gender is really performative. It is not “a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is … instituted … through a stylized repetition of [habitual] acts ” (Butler 1999, 179): through wearing certain gender-coded clothing, walking and sitting in certain gender-coded ways, styling one’s hair in gender-coded manner and so on. Gender is not something one is, it is something one does; it is a sequence of acts, a doing rather than a being. And repeatedly engaging in ‘feminising’ and ‘masculinising’ acts congeals gender thereby making people falsely think of gender as something they naturally are . Gender only comes into being through these gendering acts: a female who has sex with men does not express her gender as a woman. This activity (amongst others) makes her gendered a woman.

The constitutive acts that gender individuals create genders as “compelling illusion[s]” (Butler 1990, 271). Our gendered classification scheme is a strong pragmatic construction : social factors wholly determine our use of the scheme and the scheme fails to represent accurately any ‘facts of the matter’ (Haslanger 1995, 100). People think that there are true and real genders, and those deemed to be doing their gender ‘wrong’ are not socially sanctioned. But, genders are true and real only to the extent that they are performed (Butler 1990, 278–9). It does not make sense, then, to say of a male-to-female trans person that s/he is really a man who only appears to be a woman. Instead, males dressing up and acting in ways that are associated with femininity “show that [as Butler suggests] ‘being’ feminine is just a matter of doing certain activities” (Stone 2007, 64). As a result, the trans person’s gender is just as real or true as anyone else’s who is a ‘traditionally’ feminine female or masculine male (Butler 1990, 278). [ 5 ] Without heterosexism that compels people to engage in certain gendering acts, there would not be any genders at all. And ultimately the aim should be to abolish norms that compel people to act in these gendering ways.

For Butler, given that gender is performative, the appropriate response to feminist identity politics involves two things. First, feminists should understand ‘woman’ as open-ended and “a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or end … it is open to intervention and resignification” (Butler 1999, 43). That is, feminists should not try to define ‘woman’ at all. Second, the category of women “ought not to be the foundation of feminist politics” (Butler 1999, 9). Rather, feminists should focus on providing an account of how power functions and shapes our understandings of womanhood not only in the society at large but also within the feminist movement.

Many people, including many feminists, have ordinarily taken sex ascriptions to be solely a matter of biology with no social or cultural dimension. It is commonplace to think that there are only two sexes and that biological sex classifications are utterly unproblematic. By contrast, some feminists have argued that sex classifications are not unproblematic and that they are not solely a matter of biology. In order to make sense of this, it is helpful to distinguish object- and idea-construction (see Haslanger 2003b for more): social forces can be said to construct certain kinds of objects (e.g. sexed bodies or gendered individuals) and certain kinds of ideas (e.g. sex or gender concepts). First, take the object-construction of sexed bodies. Secondary sex characteristics, or the physiological and biological features commonly associated with males and females, are affected by social practices. In some societies, females’ lower social status has meant that they have been fed less and so, the lack of nutrition has had the effect of making them smaller in size (Jaggar 1983, 37). Uniformity in muscular shape, size and strength within sex categories is not caused entirely by biological factors, but depends heavily on exercise opportunities: if males and females were allowed the same exercise opportunities and equal encouragement to exercise, it is thought that bodily dimorphism would diminish (Fausto-Sterling 1993a, 218). A number of medical phenomena involving bones (like osteoporosis) have social causes directly related to expectations about gender, women’s diet and their exercise opportunities (Fausto-Sterling 2005). These examples suggest that physiological features thought to be sex-specific traits not affected by social and cultural factors are, after all, to some extent products of social conditioning. Social conditioning, then, shapes our biology.

Second, take the idea-construction of sex concepts. Our concept of sex is said to be a product of social forces in the sense that what counts as sex is shaped by social meanings. Standardly, those with XX-chromosomes, ovaries that produce large egg cells, female genitalia, a relatively high proportion of ‘female’ hormones, and other secondary sex characteristics (relatively small body size, less body hair) count as biologically female. Those with XY-chromosomes, testes that produce small sperm cells, male genitalia, a relatively high proportion of ‘male’ hormones and other secondary sex traits (relatively large body size, significant amounts of body hair) count as male. This understanding is fairly recent. The prevalent scientific view from Ancient Greeks until the late 18 th century, did not consider female and male sexes to be distinct categories with specific traits; instead, a ‘one-sex model’ held that males and females were members of the same sex category. Females’ genitals were thought to be the same as males’ but simply directed inside the body; ovaries and testes (for instance) were referred to by the same term and whether the term referred to the former or the latter was made clear by the context (Laqueur 1990, 4). It was not until the late 1700s that scientists began to think of female and male anatomies as radically different moving away from the ‘one-sex model’ of a single sex spectrum to the (nowadays prevalent) ‘two-sex model’ of sexual dimorphism. (For an alternative view, see King 2013.)

Fausto-Sterling has argued that this ‘two-sex model’ isn’t straightforward either (1993b; 2000a; 2000b). Based on a meta-study of empirical medical research, she estimates that 1.7% of population fail to neatly fall within the usual sex classifications possessing various combinations of different sex characteristics (Fausto-Sterling 2000a, 20). In her earlier work, she claimed that intersex individuals make up (at least) three further sex classes: ‘herms’ who possess one testis and one ovary; ‘merms’ who possess testes, some aspects of female genitalia but no ovaries; and ‘ferms’ who have ovaries, some aspects of male genitalia but no testes (Fausto-Sterling 1993b, 21). (In her [2000a], Fausto-Sterling notes that these labels were put forward tongue–in–cheek.) Recognition of intersex people suggests that feminists (and society at large) are wrong to think that humans are either female or male.

To illustrate further the idea-construction of sex, consider the case of the athlete Maria Patiño. Patiño has female genitalia, has always considered herself to be female and was considered so by others. However, she was discovered to have XY chromosomes and was barred from competing in women’s sports (Fausto-Sterling 2000b, 1–3). Patiño’s genitalia were at odds with her chromosomes and the latter were taken to determine her sex. Patiño successfully fought to be recognised as a female athlete arguing that her chromosomes alone were not sufficient to not make her female. Intersex people, like Patiño, illustrate that our understandings of sex differ and suggest that there is no immediately obvious way to settle what sex amounts to purely biologically or scientifically. Deciding what sex is involves evaluative judgements that are influenced by social factors.

Insofar as our cultural conceptions affect our understandings of sex, feminists must be much more careful about sex classifications and rethink what sex amounts to (Stone 2007, chapter 1). More specifically, intersex people illustrate that sex traits associated with females and males need not always go together and that individuals can have some mixture of these traits. This suggests to Stone that sex is a cluster concept: it is sufficient to satisfy enough of the sex features that tend to cluster together in order to count as being of a particular sex. But, one need not satisfy all of those features or some arbitrarily chosen supposedly necessary sex feature, like chromosomes (Stone 2007, 44). This makes sex a matter of degree and sex classifications should take place on a spectrum: one can be more or less female/male but there is no sharp distinction between the two. Further, intersex people (along with trans people) are located at the centre of the sex spectrum and in many cases their sex will be indeterminate (Stone 2007).

More recently, Ayala and Vasilyeva (2015) have argued for an inclusive and extended conception of sex: just as certain tools can be seen to extend our minds beyond the limits of our brains (e.g. white canes), other tools (like dildos) can extend our sex beyond our bodily boundaries. This view aims to motivate the idea that what counts as sex should not be determined by looking inwards at genitalia or other anatomical features. In a different vein, Ásta (2018) argues that sex is a conferred social property. This follows her more general conferralist framework to analyse all social properties: properties that are conferred by others thereby generating a social status that consists in contextually specific constraints and enablements on individual behaviour. The general schema for conferred properties is as follows (Ásta 2018, 8):

Conferred property: what property is conferred. Who: who the subjects are. What: what attitude, state, or action of the subjects matter. When: under what conditions the conferral takes place. Base property: what the subjects are attempting to track (consciously or not), if anything.

With being of a certain sex (e.g. male, female) in mind, Ásta holds that it is a conferred property that merely aims to track physical features. Hence sex is a social – or in fact, an institutional – property rather than a natural one. The schema for sex goes as follows (72):

Conferred property: being female, male. Who: legal authorities, drawing on the expert opinion of doctors, other medical personnel. What: “the recording of a sex in official documents ... The judgment of the doctors (and others) as to what sex role might be the most fitting, given the biological characteristics present.” When: at birth or after surgery/ hormonal treatment. Base property: “the aim is to track as many sex-stereotypical characteristics as possible, and doctors perform surgery in cases where that might help bring the physical characteristics more in line with the stereotype of male and female.”

This (among other things) offers a debunking analysis of sex: it may appear to be a natural property, but on the conferralist analysis is better understood as a conferred legal status. Ásta holds that gender too is a conferred property, but contra the discussion in the following section, she does not think that this collapses the distinction between sex and gender: sex and gender are differently conferred albeit both satisfying the general schema noted above. Nonetheless, on the conferralist framework what underlies both sex and gender is the idea of social construction as social significance: sex-stereotypical characteristics are taken to be socially significant context specifically, whereby they become the basis for conferring sex onto individuals and this brings with it various constraints and enablements on individuals and their behaviour. This fits object- and idea-constructions introduced above, although offers a different general framework to analyse the matter at hand.

In addition to arguing against identity politics and for gender performativity, Butler holds that distinguishing biological sex from social gender is unintelligible. For them, both are socially constructed:

If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all. (Butler 1999, 10–11)

(Butler is not alone in claiming that there are no tenable distinctions between nature/culture, biology/construction and sex/gender. See also: Antony 1998; Gatens 1996; Grosz 1994; Prokhovnik 1999.) Butler makes two different claims in the passage cited: that sex is a social construction, and that sex is gender. To unpack their view, consider the two claims in turn. First, the idea that sex is a social construct, for Butler, boils down to the view that our sexed bodies are also performative and, so, they have “no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute [their] reality” (1999, 173). Prima facie , this implausibly implies that female and male bodies do not have independent existence and that if gendering activities ceased, so would physical bodies. This is not Butler’s claim; rather, their position is that bodies viewed as the material foundations on which gender is constructed, are themselves constructed as if they provide such material foundations (Butler 1993). Cultural conceptions about gender figure in “the very apparatus of production whereby sexes themselves are established” (Butler 1999, 11).

For Butler, sexed bodies never exist outside social meanings and how we understand gender shapes how we understand sex (1999, 139). Sexed bodies are not empty matter on which gender is constructed and sex categories are not picked out on the basis of objective features of the world. Instead, our sexed bodies are themselves discursively constructed : they are the way they are, at least to a substantial extent, because of what is attributed to sexed bodies and how they are classified (for discursive construction, see Haslanger 1995, 99). Sex assignment (calling someone female or male) is normative (Butler 1993, 1). [ 6 ] When the doctor calls a newly born infant a girl or a boy, s/he is not making a descriptive claim, but a normative one. In fact, the doctor is performing an illocutionary speech act (see the entry on Speech Acts ). In effect, the doctor’s utterance makes infants into girls or boys. We, then, engage in activities that make it seem as if sexes naturally come in two and that being female or male is an objective feature of the world, rather than being a consequence of certain constitutive acts (that is, rather than being performative). And this is what Butler means in saying that physical bodies never exist outside cultural and social meanings, and that sex is as socially constructed as gender. They do not deny that physical bodies exist. But, they take our understanding of this existence to be a product of social conditioning: social conditioning makes the existence of physical bodies intelligible to us by discursively constructing sexed bodies through certain constitutive acts. (For a helpful introduction to Butler’s views, see Salih 2002.)

For Butler, sex assignment is always in some sense oppressive. Again, this appears to be because of Butler’s general suspicion of classification: sex classification can never be merely descriptive but always has a normative element reflecting evaluative claims of those who are powerful. Conducting a feminist genealogy of the body (or examining why sexed bodies are thought to come naturally as female and male), then, should ground feminist practice (Butler 1993, 28–9). Feminists should examine and uncover ways in which social construction and certain acts that constitute sex shape our understandings of sexed bodies, what kinds of meanings bodies acquire and which practices and illocutionary speech acts ‘make’ our bodies into sexes. Doing so enables feminists to identity how sexed bodies are socially constructed in order to resist such construction.

However, given what was said above, it is far from obvious what we should make of Butler’s claim that sex “was always already gender” (1999, 11). Stone (2007) takes this to mean that sex is gender but goes on to question it arguing that the social construction of both sex and gender does not make sex identical to gender. According to Stone, it would be more accurate for Butler to say that claims about sex imply gender norms. That is, many claims about sex traits (like ‘females are physically weaker than males’) actually carry implications about how women and men are expected to behave. To some extent the claim describes certain facts. But, it also implies that females are not expected to do much heavy lifting and that they would probably not be good at it. So, claims about sex are not identical to claims about gender; rather, they imply claims about gender norms (Stone 2007, 70).

Some feminists hold that the sex/gender distinction is not useful. For a start, it is thought to reflect politically problematic dualistic thinking that undercuts feminist aims: the distinction is taken to reflect and replicate androcentric oppositions between (for instance) mind/body, culture/nature and reason/emotion that have been used to justify women’s oppression (e.g. Grosz 1994; Prokhovnik 1999). The thought is that in oppositions like these, one term is always superior to the other and that the devalued term is usually associated with women (Lloyd 1993). For instance, human subjectivity and agency are identified with the mind but since women are usually identified with their bodies, they are devalued as human subjects and agents. The opposition between mind and body is said to further map on to other distinctions, like reason/emotion, culture/nature, rational/irrational, where one side of each distinction is devalued (one’s bodily features are usually valued less that one’s mind, rationality is usually valued more than irrationality) and women are associated with the devalued terms: they are thought to be closer to bodily features and nature than men, to be irrational, emotional and so on. This is said to be evident (for instance) in job interviews. Men are treated as gender-neutral persons and not asked whether they are planning to take time off to have a family. By contrast, that women face such queries illustrates that they are associated more closely than men with bodily features to do with procreation (Prokhovnik 1999, 126). The opposition between mind and body, then, is thought to map onto the opposition between men and women.

Now, the mind/body dualism is also said to map onto the sex/gender distinction (Grosz 1994; Prokhovnik 1999). The idea is that gender maps onto mind, sex onto body. Although not used by those endorsing this view, the basic idea can be summed by the slogan ‘Gender is between the ears, sex is between the legs’: the implication is that, while sex is immutable, gender is something individuals have control over – it is something we can alter and change through individual choices. However, since women are said to be more closely associated with biological features (and so, to map onto the body side of the mind/body distinction) and men are treated as gender-neutral persons (mapping onto the mind side), the implication is that “man equals gender, which is associated with mind and choice, freedom from body, autonomy, and with the public real; while woman equals sex, associated with the body, reproduction, ‘natural’ rhythms and the private realm” (Prokhovnik 1999, 103). This is said to render the sex/gender distinction inherently repressive and to drain it of any potential for emancipation: rather than facilitating gender role choice for women, it “actually functions to reinforce their association with body, sex, and involuntary ‘natural’ rhythms” (Prokhovnik 1999, 103). Contrary to what feminists like Rubin argued, the sex/gender distinction cannot be used as a theoretical tool that dissociates conceptions of womanhood from biological and reproductive features.

Moi has further argued that the sex/gender distinction is useless given certain theoretical goals (1999, chapter 1). This is not to say that it is utterly worthless; according to Moi, the sex/gender distinction worked well to show that the historically prevalent biological determinism was false. However, for her, the distinction does no useful work “when it comes to producing a good theory of subjectivity” (1999, 6) and “a concrete, historical understanding of what it means to be a woman (or a man) in a given society” (1999, 4–5). That is, the 1960s distinction understood sex as fixed by biology without any cultural or historical dimensions. This understanding, however, ignores lived experiences and embodiment as aspects of womanhood (and manhood) by separating sex from gender and insisting that womanhood is to do with the latter. Rather, embodiment must be included in one’s theory that tries to figure out what it is to be a woman (or a man).

Mikkola (2011) argues that the sex/gender distinction, which underlies views like Rubin’s and MacKinnon’s, has certain unintuitive and undesirable ontological commitments that render the distinction politically unhelpful. First, claiming that gender is socially constructed implies that the existence of women and men is a mind-dependent matter. This suggests that we can do away with women and men simply by altering some social practices, conventions or conditions on which gender depends (whatever those are). However, ordinary social agents find this unintuitive given that (ordinarily) sex and gender are not distinguished. Second, claiming that gender is a product of oppressive social forces suggests that doing away with women and men should be feminism’s political goal. But this harbours ontologically undesirable commitments since many ordinary social agents view their gender to be a source of positive value. So, feminism seems to want to do away with something that should not be done away with, which is unlikely to motivate social agents to act in ways that aim at gender justice. Given these problems, Mikkola argues that feminists should give up the distinction on practical political grounds.

Tomas Bogardus (2020) has argued in an even more radical sense against the sex/gender distinction: as things stand, he holds, feminist philosophers have merely assumed and asserted that the distinction exists, instead of having offered good arguments for the distinction. In other words, feminist philosophers allegedly have yet to offer good reasons to think that ‘woman’ does not simply pick out adult human females. Alex Byrne (2020) argues in a similar vein: the term ‘woman’ does not pick out a social kind as feminist philosophers have “assumed”. Instead, “women are adult human females–nothing more, and nothing less” (2020, 3801). Byrne offers six considerations to ground this AHF (adult, human, female) conception.

  • It reproduces the dictionary definition of ‘woman’.
  • One would expect English to have a word that picks out the category adult human female, and ‘woman’ is the only candidate.
  • AHF explains how we sometimes know that an individual is a woman, despite knowing nothing else relevant about her other than the fact that she is an adult human female.
  • AHF stands or falls with the analogous thesis for girls, which can be supported independently.
  • AHF predicts the correct verdict in cases of gender role reversal.
  • AHF is supported by the fact that ‘woman’ and ‘female’ are often appropriately used as stylistic variants of each other, even in hyperintensional contexts.

Robin Dembroff (2021) responds to Byrne and highlights various problems with Byrne’s argument. First, framing: Byrne assumes from the start that gender terms like ‘woman’ have a single invariant meaning thereby failing to discuss the possibility of terms like ‘woman’ having multiple meanings – something that is a familiar claim made by feminist theorists from various disciplines. Moreover, Byrne (according to Dembroff) assumes without argument that there is a single, universal category of woman – again, something that has been extensively discussed and critiqued by feminist philosophers and theorists. Second, Byrne’s conception of the ‘dominant’ meaning of woman is said to be cherry-picked and it ignores a wealth of contexts outside of philosophy (like the media and the law) where ‘woman’ has a meaning other than AHF . Third, Byrne’s own distinction between biological and social categories fails to establish what he intended to establish: namely, that ‘woman’ picks out a biological rather than a social kind. Hence, Dembroff holds, Byrne’s case fails by its own lights. Byrne (2021) responds to Dembroff’s critique.

Others such as ‘gender critical feminists’ also hold views about the sex/gender distinction in a spirit similar to Bogardus and Byrne. For example, Holly Lawford-Smith (2021) takes the prevalent sex/gender distinction, where ‘female’/‘male’ are used as sex terms and ‘woman’/’man’ as gender terms, not to be helpful. Instead, she takes all of these to be sex terms and holds that (the norms of) femininity/masculinity refer to gender normativity. Because much of the gender critical feminists’ discussion that philosophers have engaged in has taken place in social media, public fora, and other sources outside academic philosophy, this entry will not focus on these discussions.

4. Women as a group

The various critiques of the sex/gender distinction have called into question the viability of the category women . Feminism is the movement to end the oppression women as a group face. But, how should the category of women be understood if feminists accept the above arguments that gender construction is not uniform, that a sharp distinction between biological sex and social gender is false or (at least) not useful, and that various features associated with women play a role in what it is to be a woman, none of which are individually necessary and jointly sufficient (like a variety of social roles, positions, behaviours, traits, bodily features and experiences)? Feminists must be able to address cultural and social differences in gender construction if feminism is to be a genuinely inclusive movement and be careful not to posit commonalities that mask important ways in which women qua women differ. These concerns (among others) have generated a situation where (as Linda Alcoff puts it) feminists aim to speak and make political demands in the name of women, at the same time rejecting the idea that there is a unified category of women (2006, 152). If feminist critiques of the category women are successful, then what (if anything) binds women together, what is it to be a woman, and what kinds of demands can feminists make on behalf of women?

Many have found the fragmentation of the category of women problematic for political reasons (e.g. Alcoff 2006; Bach 2012; Benhabib 1992; Frye 1996; Haslanger 2000b; Heyes 2000; Martin 1994; Mikkola 2007; Stoljar 1995; Stone 2004; Tanesini 1996; Young 1997; Zack 2005). For instance, Young holds that accounts like Spelman’s reduce the category of women to a gerrymandered collection of individuals with nothing to bind them together (1997, 20). Black women differ from white women but members of both groups also differ from one another with respect to nationality, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation and economic position; that is, wealthy white women differ from working-class white women due to their economic and class positions. These sub-groups are themselves diverse: for instance, some working-class white women in Northern Ireland are starkly divided along religious lines. So if we accept Spelman’s position, we risk ending up with individual women and nothing to bind them together. And this is problematic: in order to respond to oppression of women in general, feminists must understand them as a category in some sense. Young writes that without doing so “it is not possible to conceptualize oppression as a systematic, structured, institutional process” (1997, 17). Some, then, take the articulation of an inclusive category of women to be the prerequisite for effective feminist politics and a rich literature has emerged that aims to conceptualise women as a group or a collective (e.g. Alcoff 2006; Ásta 2011; Frye 1996; 2011; Haslanger 2000b; Heyes 2000; Stoljar 1995, 2011; Young 1997; Zack 2005). Articulations of this category can be divided into those that are: (a) gender nominalist — positions that deny there is something women qua women share and that seek to unify women’s social kind by appealing to something external to women; and (b) gender realist — positions that take there to be something women qua women share (although these realist positions differ significantly from those outlined in Section 2). Below we will review some influential gender nominalist and gender realist positions. Before doing so, it is worth noting that not everyone is convinced that attempts to articulate an inclusive category of women can succeed or that worries about what it is to be a woman are in need of being resolved. Mikkola (2016) argues that feminist politics need not rely on overcoming (what she calls) the ‘gender controversy’: that feminists must settle the meaning of gender concepts and articulate a way to ground women’s social kind membership. As she sees it, disputes about ‘what it is to be a woman’ have become theoretically bankrupt and intractable, which has generated an analytical impasse that looks unsurpassable. Instead, Mikkola argues for giving up the quest, which in any case in her view poses no serious political obstacles.

Elizabeth Barnes (2020) responds to the need to offer an inclusive conception of gender somewhat differently, although she endorses the need for feminism to be inclusive particularly of trans people. Barnes holds that typically philosophical theories of gender aim to offer an account of what it is to be a woman (or man, genderqueer, etc.), where such an account is presumed to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for being a woman or an account of our gender terms’ extensions. But, she holds, it is a mistake to expect our theories of gender to do so. For Barnes, a project that offers a metaphysics of gender “should be understood as the project of theorizing what it is —if anything— about the social world that ultimately explains gender” (2020, 706). This project is not equivalent to one that aims to define gender terms or elucidate the application conditions for natural language gender terms though.

4.1 Gender nominalism

Iris Young argues that unless there is “some sense in which ‘woman’ is the name of a social collective [that feminism represents], there is nothing specific to feminist politics” (1997, 13). In order to make the category women intelligible, she argues that women make up a series: a particular kind of social collective “whose members are unified passively by the objects their actions are oriented around and/or by the objectified results of the material effects of the actions of the other” (Young 1997, 23). A series is distinct from a group in that, whereas members of groups are thought to self-consciously share certain goals, projects, traits and/ or self-conceptions, members of series pursue their own individual ends without necessarily having anything at all in common. Young holds that women are not bound together by a shared feature or experience (or set of features and experiences) since she takes Spelman’s particularity argument to have established definitely that no such feature exists (1997, 13; see also: Frye 1996; Heyes 2000). Instead, women’s category is unified by certain practico-inert realities or the ways in which women’s lives and their actions are oriented around certain objects and everyday realities (Young 1997, 23–4). For example, bus commuters make up a series unified through their individual actions being organised around the same practico-inert objects of the bus and the practice of public transport. Women make up a series unified through women’s lives and actions being organised around certain practico-inert objects and realities that position them as women .

Young identifies two broad groups of such practico-inert objects and realities. First, phenomena associated with female bodies (physical facts), biological processes that take place in female bodies (menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth) and social rules associated with these biological processes (social rules of menstruation, for instance). Second, gender-coded objects and practices: pronouns, verbal and visual representations of gender, gender-coded artefacts and social spaces, clothes, cosmetics, tools and furniture. So, women make up a series since their lives and actions are organised around female bodies and certain gender-coded objects. Their series is bound together passively and the unity is “not one that arises from the individuals called women” (Young 1997, 32).

Although Young’s proposal purports to be a response to Spelman’s worries, Stone has questioned whether it is, after all, susceptible to the particularity argument: ultimately, on Young’s view, something women as women share (their practico-inert realities) binds them together (Stone 2004).

Natalie Stoljar holds that unless the category of women is unified, feminist action on behalf of women cannot be justified (1995, 282). Stoljar too is persuaded by the thought that women qua women do not share anything unitary. This prompts her to argue for resemblance nominalism. This is the view that a certain kind of resemblance relation holds between entities of a particular type (for more on resemblance nominalism, see Armstrong 1989, 39–58). Stoljar is not alone in arguing for resemblance relations to make sense of women as a category; others have also done so, usually appealing to Wittgenstein’s ‘family resemblance’ relations (Alcoff 1988; Green & Radford Curry 1991; Heyes 2000; Munro 2006). Stoljar relies more on Price’s resemblance nominalism whereby x is a member of some type F only if x resembles some paradigm or exemplar of F sufficiently closely (Price 1953, 20). For instance, the type of red entities is unified by some chosen red paradigms so that only those entities that sufficiently resemble the paradigms count as red. The type (or category) of women, then, is unified by some chosen woman paradigms so that those who sufficiently resemble the woman paradigms count as women (Stoljar 1995, 284).

Semantic considerations about the concept woman suggest to Stoljar that resemblance nominalism should be endorsed (Stoljar 2000, 28). It seems unlikely that the concept is applied on the basis of some single social feature all and only women possess. By contrast, woman is a cluster concept and our attributions of womanhood pick out “different arrangements of features in different individuals” (Stoljar 2000, 27). More specifically, they pick out the following clusters of features: (a) Female sex; (b) Phenomenological features: menstruation, female sexual experience, child-birth, breast-feeding, fear of walking on the streets at night or fear of rape; (c) Certain roles: wearing typically female clothing, being oppressed on the basis of one’s sex or undertaking care-work; (d) Gender attribution: “calling oneself a woman, being called a woman” (Stoljar 1995, 283–4). For Stoljar, attributions of womanhood are to do with a variety of traits and experiences: those that feminists have historically termed ‘gender traits’ (like social, behavioural, psychological traits) and those termed ‘sex traits’. Nonetheless, she holds that since the concept woman applies to (at least some) trans persons, one can be a woman without being female (Stoljar 1995, 282).

The cluster concept woman does not, however, straightforwardly provide the criterion for picking out the category of women. Rather, the four clusters of features that the concept picks out help single out woman paradigms that in turn help single out the category of women. First, any individual who possesses a feature from at least three of the four clusters mentioned will count as an exemplar of the category. For instance, an African-American with primary and secondary female sex characteristics, who describes herself as a woman and is oppressed on the basis of her sex, along with a white European hermaphrodite brought up ‘as a girl’, who engages in female roles and has female phenomenological features despite lacking female sex characteristics, will count as woman paradigms (Stoljar 1995, 284). [ 7 ] Second, any individual who resembles “any of the paradigms sufficiently closely (on Price’s account, as closely as [the paradigms] resemble each other) will be a member of the resemblance class ‘woman’” (Stoljar 1995, 284). That is, what delimits membership in the category of women is that one resembles sufficiently a woman paradigm.

4.2 Neo-gender realism

In a series of articles collected in her 2012 book, Sally Haslanger argues for a way to define the concept woman that is politically useful, serving as a tool in feminist fights against sexism, and that shows woman to be a social (not a biological) notion. More specifically, Haslanger argues that gender is a matter of occupying either a subordinate or a privileged social position. In some articles, Haslanger is arguing for a revisionary analysis of the concept woman (2000b; 2003a; 2003b). Elsewhere she suggests that her analysis may not be that revisionary after all (2005; 2006). Consider the former argument first. Haslanger’s analysis is, in her terms, ameliorative: it aims to elucidate which gender concepts best help feminists achieve their legitimate purposes thereby elucidating those concepts feminists should be using (Haslanger 2000b, 33). [ 8 ] Now, feminists need gender terminology in order to fight sexist injustices (Haslanger 2000b, 36). In particular, they need gender terms to identify, explain and talk about persistent social inequalities between males and females. Haslanger’s analysis of gender begins with the recognition that females and males differ in two respects: physically and in their social positions. Societies in general tend to “privilege individuals with male bodies” (Haslanger 2000b, 38) so that the social positions they subsequently occupy are better than the social positions of those with female bodies. And this generates persistent sexist injustices. With this in mind, Haslanger specifies how she understands genders:

S is a woman iff [by definition] S is systematically subordinated along some dimension (economic, political, legal, social, etc.), and S is ‘marked’ as a target for this treatment by observed or imagined bodily features presumed to be evidence of a female’s biological role in reproduction.
S is a man iff [by definition] S is systematically privileged along some dimension (economic, political, legal, social, etc.), and S is ‘marked’ as a target for this treatment by observed or imagined bodily features presumed to be evidence of a male’s biological role in reproduction. (2003a, 6–7)

These are constitutive of being a woman and a man: what makes calling S a woman apt, is that S is oppressed on sex-marked grounds; what makes calling S a man apt, is that S is privileged on sex-marked grounds.

Haslanger’s ameliorative analysis is counterintuitive in that females who are not sex-marked for oppression, do not count as women. At least arguably, the Queen of England is not oppressed on sex-marked grounds and so, would not count as a woman on Haslanger’s definition. And, similarly, all males who are not privileged would not count as men. This might suggest that Haslanger’s analysis should be rejected in that it does not capture what language users have in mind when applying gender terms. However, Haslanger argues that this is not a reason to reject the definitions, which she takes to be revisionary: they are not meant to capture our intuitive gender terms. In response, Mikkola (2009) has argued that revisionary analyses of gender concepts, like Haslanger’s, are both politically unhelpful and philosophically unnecessary.

Note also that Haslanger’s proposal is eliminativist: gender justice would eradicate gender, since it would abolish those sexist social structures responsible for sex-marked oppression and privilege. If sexist oppression were to cease, women and men would no longer exist (although there would still be males and females). Not all feminists endorse such an eliminativist view though. Stone holds that Haslanger does not leave any room for positively revaluing what it is to be a woman: since Haslanger defines woman in terms of subordination,

any woman who challenges her subordinate status must by definition be challenging her status as a woman, even if she does not intend to … positive change to our gender norms would involve getting rid of the (necessarily subordinate) feminine gender. (Stone 2007, 160)

But according to Stone this is not only undesirable – one should be able to challenge subordination without having to challenge one’s status as a woman. It is also false: “because norms of femininity can be and constantly are being revised, women can be women without thereby being subordinate” (Stone 2007, 162; Mikkola [2016] too argues that Haslanger’s eliminativism is troublesome).

Theodore Bach holds that Haslanger’s eliminativism is undesirable on other grounds, and that Haslanger’s position faces another more serious problem. Feminism faces the following worries (among others):

Representation problem : “if there is no real group of ‘women’, then it is incoherent to make moral claims and advance political policies on behalf of women” (Bach 2012, 234). Commonality problems : (1) There is no feature that all women cross-culturally and transhistorically share. (2) Delimiting women’s social kind with the help of some essential property privileges those who possess it, and marginalizes those who do not (Bach 2012, 235).

According to Bach, Haslanger’s strategy to resolve these problems appeals to ‘social objectivism’. First, we define women “according to a suitably abstract relational property” (Bach 2012, 236), which avoids the commonality problems. Second, Haslanger employs “an ontologically thin notion of ‘objectivity’” (Bach 2012, 236) that answers the representation problem. Haslanger’s solution (Bach holds) is specifically to argue that women make up an objective type because women are objectively similar to one another, and not simply classified together given our background conceptual schemes. Bach claims though that Haslanger’s account is not objective enough, and we should on political grounds “provide a stronger ontological characterization of the genders men and women according to which they are natural kinds with explanatory essences” (Bach 2012, 238). He thus proposes that women make up a natural kind with a historical essence:

The essential property of women, in virtue of which an individual is a member of the kind ‘women,’ is participation in a lineage of women. In order to exemplify this relational property, an individual must be a reproduction of ancestral women, in which case she must have undergone the ontogenetic processes through which a historical gender system replicates women. (Bach 2012, 271)

In short, one is not a woman due to shared surface properties with other women (like occupying a subordinate social position). Rather, one is a woman because one has the right history: one has undergone the ubiquitous ontogenetic process of gender socialization. Thinking about gender in this way supposedly provides a stronger kind unity than Haslanger’s that simply appeals to shared surface properties.

Not everyone agrees; Mikkola (2020) argues that Bach’s metaphysical picture has internal tensions that render it puzzling and that Bach’s metaphysics does not provide good responses to the commonality and presentation problems. The historically essentialist view also has anti-trans implications. After all, trans women who have not undergone female gender socialization won’t count as women on his view (Mikkola [2016, 2020] develops this line of critique in more detail). More worryingly, trans women will count as men contrary to their self-identification. Both Bettcher (2013) and Jenkins (2016) consider the importance of gender self-identification. Bettcher argues that there is more than one ‘correct’ way to understand womanhood: at the very least, the dominant (mainstream), and the resistant (trans) conceptions. Dominant views like that of Bach’s tend to erase trans people’s experiences and to marginalize trans women within feminist movements. Rather than trans women having to defend their self-identifying claims, these claims should be taken at face value right from the start. And so, Bettcher holds, “in analyzing the meaning of terms such as ‘woman,’ it is inappropriate to dismiss alternative ways in which those terms are actually used in trans subcultures; such usage needs to be taken into consideration as part of the analysis” (2013, 235).

Specifically with Haslanger in mind and in a similar vein, Jenkins (2016) discusses how Haslanger’s revisionary approach unduly excludes some trans women from women’s social kind. On Jenkins’s view, Haslanger’s ameliorative methodology in fact yields more than one satisfying target concept: one that “corresponds to Haslanger’s proposed concept and captures the sense of gender as an imposed social class”; another that “captures the sense of gender as a lived identity” (Jenkins 2016, 397). The latter of these allows us to include trans women into women’s social kind, who on Haslanger’s social class approach to gender would inappropriately have been excluded. (See Andler 2017 for the view that Jenkins’s purportedly inclusive conception of gender is still not fully inclusive. Jenkins 2018 responds to this charge and develops the notion of gender identity still further.)

In addition to her revisionary argument, Haslanger has suggested that her ameliorative analysis of woman may not be as revisionary as it first seems (2005, 2006). Although successful in their reference fixing, ordinary language users do not always know precisely what they are talking about. Our language use may be skewed by oppressive ideologies that can “mislead us about the content of our own thoughts” (Haslanger 2005, 12). Although her gender terminology is not intuitive, this could simply be because oppressive ideologies mislead us about the meanings of our gender terms. Our everyday gender terminology might mean something utterly different from what we think it means; and we could be entirely ignorant of this. Perhaps Haslanger’s analysis, then, has captured our everyday gender vocabulary revealing to us the terms that we actually employ: we may be applying ‘woman’ in our everyday language on the basis of sex-marked subordination whether we take ourselves to be doing so or not. If this is so, Haslanger’s gender terminology is not radically revisionist.

Saul (2006) argues that, despite it being possible that we unknowingly apply ‘woman’ on the basis of social subordination, it is extremely difficult to show that this is the case. This would require showing that the gender terminology we in fact employ is Haslanger’s proposed gender terminology. But discovering the grounds on which we apply everyday gender terms is extremely difficult precisely because they are applied in various and idiosyncratic ways (Saul 2006, 129). Haslanger, then, needs to do more in order to show that her analysis is non-revisionary.

Charlotte Witt (2011a; 2011b) argues for a particular sort of gender essentialism, which Witt terms ‘uniessentialism’. Her motivation and starting point is the following: many ordinary social agents report gender being essential to them and claim that they would be a different person were they of a different sex/gender. Uniessentialism attempts to understand and articulate this. However, Witt’s work departs in important respects from the earlier (so-called) essentialist or gender realist positions discussed in Section 2: Witt does not posit some essential property of womanhood of the kind discussed above, which failed to take women’s differences into account. Further, uniessentialism differs significantly from those position developed in response to the problem of how we should conceive of women’s social kind. It is not about solving the standard dispute between gender nominalists and gender realists, or about articulating some supposedly shared property that binds women together and provides a theoretical ground for feminist political solidarity. Rather, uniessentialism aims to make good the widely held belief that gender is constitutive of who we are. [ 9 ]

Uniessentialism is a sort of individual essentialism. Traditionally philosophers distinguish between kind and individual essentialisms: the former examines what binds members of a kind together and what do all members of some kind have in common qua members of that kind. The latter asks: what makes an individual the individual it is. We can further distinguish two sorts of individual essentialisms: Kripkean identity essentialism and Aristotelian uniessentialism. The former asks: what makes an individual that individual? The latter, however, asks a slightly different question: what explains the unity of individuals? What explains that an individual entity exists over and above the sum total of its constituent parts? (The standard feminist debate over gender nominalism and gender realism has largely been about kind essentialism. Being about individual essentialism, Witt’s uniessentialism departs in an important way from the standard debate.) From the two individual essentialisms, Witt endorses the Aristotelian one. On this view, certain functional essences have a unifying role: these essences are responsible for the fact that material parts constitute a new individual, rather than just a lump of stuff or a collection of particles. Witt’s example is of a house: the essential house-functional property (what the entity is for, what its purpose is) unifies the different material parts of a house so that there is a house, and not just a collection of house-constituting particles (2011a, 6). Gender (being a woman/a man) functions in a similar fashion and provides “the principle of normative unity” that organizes, unifies and determines the roles of social individuals (Witt 2011a, 73). Due to this, gender is a uniessential property of social individuals.

It is important to clarify the notions of gender and social individuality that Witt employs. First, gender is a social position that “cluster[s] around the engendering function … women conceive and bear … men beget” (Witt 2011a, 40). These are women and men’s socially mediated reproductive functions (Witt 2011a, 29) and they differ from the biological function of reproduction, which roughly corresponds to sex on the standard sex/gender distinction. Witt writes: “to be a woman is to be recognized to have a particular function in engendering, to be a man is to be recognized to have a different function in engendering” (2011a, 39). Second, Witt distinguishes persons (those who possess self-consciousness), human beings (those who are biologically human) and social individuals (those who occupy social positions synchronically and diachronically). These ontological categories are not equivalent in that they possess different persistence and identity conditions. Social individuals are bound by social normativity, human beings by biological normativity. These normativities differ in two respects: first, social norms differ from one culture to the next whereas biological norms do not; second, unlike biological normativity, social normativity requires “the recognition by others that an agent is both responsive to and evaluable under a social norm” (Witt 2011a, 19). Thus, being a social individual is not equivalent to being a human being. Further, Witt takes personhood to be defined in terms of intrinsic psychological states of self-awareness and self-consciousness. However, social individuality is defined in terms of the extrinsic feature of occupying a social position, which depends for its existence on a social world. So, the two are not equivalent: personhood is essentially about intrinsic features and could exist without a social world, whereas social individuality is essentially about extrinsic features that could not exist without a social world.

Witt’s gender essentialist argument crucially pertains to social individuals , not to persons or human beings: saying that persons or human beings are gendered would be a category mistake. But why is gender essential to social individuals? For Witt, social individuals are those who occupy positions in social reality. Further, “social positions have norms or social roles associated with them; a social role is what an individual who occupies a given social position is responsive to and evaluable under” (Witt 2011a, 59). However, qua social individuals, we occupy multiple social positions at once and over time: we can be women, mothers, immigrants, sisters, academics, wives, community organisers and team-sport coaches synchronically and diachronically. Now, the issue for Witt is what unifies these positions so that a social individual is constituted. After all, a bundle of social position occupancies does not make for an individual (just as a bundle of properties like being white , cube-shaped and sweet do not make for a sugar cube). For Witt, this unifying role is undertaken by gender (being a woman or a man): it is

a pervasive and fundamental social position that unifies and determines all other social positions both synchronically and diachronically. It unifies them not physically, but by providing a principle of normative unity. (2011a, 19–20)

By ‘normative unity’, Witt means the following: given our social roles and social position occupancies, we are responsive to various sets of social norms. These norms are “complex patterns of behaviour and practices that constitute what one ought to do in a situation given one’s social position(s) and one’s social context” (Witt 2011a, 82). The sets of norms can conflict: the norms of motherhood can (and do) conflict with the norms of being an academic philosopher. However, in order for this conflict to exist, the norms must be binding on a single social individual. Witt, then, asks: what explains the existence and unity of the social individual who is subject to conflicting social norms? The answer is gender.

Gender is not just a social role that unifies social individuals. Witt takes it to be the social role — as she puts it, it is the mega social role that unifies social agents. First, gender is a mega social role if it satisfies two conditions (and Witt claims that it does): (1) if it provides the principle of synchronic and diachronic unity of social individuals, and (2) if it inflects and defines a broad range of other social roles. Gender satisfies the first in usually being a life-long social position: a social individual persists just as long as their gendered social position persists. Further, Witt maintains, trans people are not counterexamples to this claim: transitioning entails that the old social individual has ceased to exist and a new one has come into being. And this is consistent with the same person persisting and undergoing social individual change via transitioning. Gender satisfies the second condition too. It inflects other social roles, like being a parent or a professional. The expectations attached to these social roles differ depending on the agent’s gender, since gender imposes different social norms to govern the execution of the further social roles. Now, gender — as opposed to some other social category, like race — is not just a mega social role; it is the unifying mega social role. Cross-cultural and trans-historical considerations support this view. Witt claims that patriarchy is a social universal (2011a, 98). By contrast, racial categorisation varies historically and cross-culturally, and racial oppression is not a universal feature of human cultures. Thus, gender has a better claim to being the social role that is uniessential to social individuals. This account of gender essentialism not only explains social agents’ connectedness to their gender, but it also provides a helpful way to conceive of women’s agency — something that is central to feminist politics.

Linda Alcoff holds that feminism faces an identity crisis: the category of women is feminism’s starting point, but various critiques about gender have fragmented the category and it is not clear how feminists should understand what it is to be a woman (2006, chapter 5). In response, Alcoff develops an account of gender as positionality whereby “gender is, among other things, a position one occupies and from which one can act politically” (2006, 148). In particular, she takes one’s social position to foster the development of specifically gendered identities (or self-conceptions): “The very subjectivity (or subjective experience of being a woman) and the very identity of women are constituted by women’s position” (Alcoff 2006, 148). Alcoff holds that there is an objective basis for distinguishing individuals on the grounds of (actual or expected) reproductive roles:

Women and men are differentiated by virtue of their different relationship of possibility to biological reproduction, with biological reproduction referring to conceiving, giving birth, and breast-feeding, involving one’s body . (Alcoff 2006, 172, italics in original)

The thought is that those standardly classified as biologically female, although they may not actually be able to reproduce, will encounter “a different set of practices, expectations, and feelings in regard to reproduction” than those standardly classified as male (Alcoff 2006, 172). Further, this differential relation to the possibility of reproduction is used as the basis for many cultural and social phenomena that position women and men: it can be

the basis of a variety of social segregations, it can engender the development of differential forms of embodiment experienced throughout life, and it can generate a wide variety of affective responses, from pride, delight, shame, guilt, regret, or great relief from having successfully avoided reproduction. (Alcoff 2006, 172)

Reproduction, then, is an objective basis for distinguishing individuals that takes on a cultural dimension in that it positions women and men differently: depending on the kind of body one has, one’s lived experience will differ. And this fosters the construction of gendered social identities: one’s role in reproduction helps configure how one is socially positioned and this conditions the development of specifically gendered social identities.

Since women are socially positioned in various different contexts, “there is no gender essence all women share” (Alcoff 2006, 147–8). Nonetheless, Alcoff acknowledges that her account is akin to the original 1960s sex/gender distinction insofar as sex difference (understood in terms of the objective division of reproductive labour) provides the foundation for certain cultural arrangements (the development of a gendered social identity). But, with the benefit of hindsight

we can see that maintaining a distinction between the objective category of sexed identity and the varied and culturally contingent practices of gender does not presume an absolute distinction of the old-fashioned sort between culture and a reified nature. (Alcoff 2006, 175)

That is, her view avoids the implausible claim that sex is exclusively to do with nature and gender with culture. Rather, the distinction on the basis of reproductive possibilities shapes and is shaped by the sorts of cultural and social phenomena (like varieties of social segregation) these possibilities gives rise to. For instance, technological interventions can alter sex differences illustrating that this is the case (Alcoff 2006, 175). Women’s specifically gendered social identities that are constituted by their context dependent positions, then, provide the starting point for feminist politics.

Recently Robin Dembroff (2020) has argued that existing metaphysical accounts of gender fail to address non-binary gender identities. This generates two concerns. First, metaphysical accounts of gender (like the ones outlined in previous sections) are insufficient for capturing those who reject binary gender categorisation where people are either men or women. In so doing, these accounts are not satisfying as explanations of gender understood in a more expansive sense that goes beyond the binary. Second, the failure to understand non-binary gender identities contributes to a form of epistemic injustice called ‘hermeneutical injustice’: it feeds into a collective failure to comprehend and analyse concepts and practices that undergird non-binary classification schemes, thereby impeding on one’s ability to fully understand themselves. To overcome these problems, Dembroff suggests an account of genderqueer that they call ‘critical gender kind’:

a kind whose members collectively destabilize one or more elements of dominant gender ideology. Genderqueer, on my proposed model, is a category whose members collectively destabilize the binary axis, or the idea that the only possible genders are the exclusive and exhaustive kinds men and women. (2020, 2)

Note that Dembroff’s position is not to be confused with ‘gender critical feminist’ positions like those noted above, which are critical of the prevalent feminist focus on gender, as opposed to sex, kinds. Dembroff understands genderqueer as a gender kind, but one that is critical of dominant binary understandings of gender.

Dembroff identifies two modes of destabilising the gender binary: principled and existential. Principled destabilising “stems from or otherwise expresses individuals’ social or political commitments regarding gender norms, practices, and structures”, while existential destabilising “stems from or otherwise expresses individuals’ felt or desired gender roles, embodiment, and/or categorization” (2020, 13). These modes are not mutually exclusive, and they can help us understand the difference between allies and members of genderqueer kinds: “While both resist dominant gender ideology, members of [genderqueer] kinds resist (at least in part) due to felt or desired gender categorization that deviates from dominant expectations, norms, and assumptions” (2020, 14). These modes of destabilisation also enable us to formulate an understanding of non-critical gender kinds that binary understandings of women and men’s kinds exemplify. Dembroff defines these kinds as follows:

For a given kind X , X is a non-critical gender kind relative to a given society iff X ’s members collectively restabilize one or more elements of the dominant gender ideology in that society. (2020, 14)

Dembroff’s understanding of critical and non-critical gender kinds importantly makes gender kind membership something more and other than a mere psychological phenomenon. To engage in collectively destabilising or restabilising dominant gender normativity and ideology, we need more than mere attitudes or mental states – resisting or maintaining such normativity requires action as well. In so doing, Dembroff puts their position forward as an alternative to two existing internalist positions about gender. First, to Jennifer McKitrick’s (2015) view whereby gender is dispositional: in a context where someone is disposed to behave in ways that would be taken by others to be indicative of (e.g.) womanhood, the person has a woman’s gender identity. Second, to Jenkin’s (2016, 2018) position that takes an individual’s gender identity to be dependent on which gender-specific norms the person experiences as being relevant to them. On this view, someone is a woman if the person experiences norms associated with women to be relevant to the person in the particular social context that they are in. Neither of these positions well-captures non-binary identities, Dembroff argues, which motivates the account of genderqueer identities as critical gender kinds.

As Dembroff acknowledges, substantive philosophical work on non-binary gender identities is still developing. However, it is important to note that analytic philosophers are beginning to engage in gender metaphysics that goes beyond the binary.

This entry first looked at feminist objections to biological determinism and the claim that gender is socially constructed. Next, it examined feminist critiques of prevalent understandings of gender and sex, and the distinction itself. In response to these concerns, the entry looked at how a unified women’s category could be articulated for feminist political purposes. This illustrated that gender metaphysics — or what it is to be a woman or a man or a genderqueer person — is still very much a live issue. And although contemporary feminist philosophical debates have questioned some of the tenets and details of the original 1960s sex/gender distinction, most still hold onto the view that gender is about social factors and that it is (in some sense) distinct from biological sex. The jury is still out on what the best, the most useful, or (even) the correct definition of gender is.

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Beauvoir, Simone de | feminist philosophy, approaches: intersections between analytic and continental philosophy | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on reproduction and the family | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on the self | homosexuality | identity politics | speech acts

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to Tuukka Asplund, Jenny Saul, Alison Stone and Nancy Tuana for their extremely helpful and detailed comments when writing this entry.

Copyright © 2022 by Mari Mikkola < m . mikkola @ uva . nl >

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Opinion: We know how voters feel about Trump and Biden. But how do the experts rank their presidencies?

Wax figures of nine American presidents.

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Presidents Day occurs at a crucial moment this year, with the presidency on the cusp of crisis as we inexorably shuffle toward a rematch between the incumbent and his predecessor. It’s the sort of contest we haven’t seen since the 19th century, and judging by public opinion of President Biden and former President Trump, most Americans would have preferred to keep it that way.

But the third installment of our Presidential Greatness Project , a poll of presidential experts released this weekend, shows that scholars don’t share American voters’ roughly equal distaste for both candidates.

Biden, in fact, makes his debut in our rankings at No. 14, putting him in the top third of American presidents. Trump, meanwhile, maintains the position he held six years ago: dead last, trailing such historically calamitous chief executives as James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson. In that and other respects, Trump’s radical departure from political, institutional and legal norms has affected knowledgeable assessments not just of him but also of Biden and several other presidents.

Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump greets supporters as he arrives at a campaign stop in Londonderry, N.H., Tuesday, Jan. 23, 2024. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

Opinion: Panicking over polls showing Donald Trump ahead of President Biden? Please stop

Like Biden, Obama and Reagan had rough reelection polls. Too many journalists treat polls as predictive, but political professionals use them to inform campaigns.

Jan. 24, 2024

The overall survey results reveal stability as well as change in the way scholars assess our nation’s most important and controversial political office. Great presidents have traditionally been viewed as those who presided over moments of national transformation, led the country through major crises and expanded the institution of the presidency. Military victories, economic growth, assassinations and scandals also affect expert assessments of presidential performance.

The presidents at the top of our rankings, and others like ours, reflect this. Hallowed leaders such as Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and George Washington consistently lead the list.

Our latest rankings also show that the experts’ assessments are driven not only by traditional notions of greatness but also by the evolving values of our time.

Donald Trump speaks at a rally in Las Vegas.

Op-Ed: Worst. President. Ever.

President Trump’s final grade will be in the hands of scholars. It doesn’t look good.

Jan. 13, 2021

One example is the continuing decline in esteem for two important presidents, Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson. Their reputations have consistently suffered in recent years as modern politics lead scholars to assess their early 19th and 20th century presidencies ever more harshly, especially their unacceptable treatment of marginalized people.

More acutely, this survey has seen a pronounced partisan dynamic emerge, arguably in response to the Trump presidency and the Trumpification of presidential politics.

Proponents of the Biden presidency have strong arguments in their arsenal, but his high placement within the top 15 suggests a powerful anti-Trump factor at work. So far, Biden’s record does not include the military victories or institutional expansion that have typically driven higher rankings, and a family scandal such as the one involving his son Hunter normally diminishes a president’s ranking.

Biden’s most important achievements may be that he rescued the presidency from Trump, resumed a more traditional style of presidential leadership and is gearing up to keep the office out of his predecessor’s hands this fall.

Trump’s position at the bottom of our rankings, meanwhile, puts him behind not only Buchanan and Johnson but also such lowlights as Franklin Pierce, Warren Harding and William Henry Harrison, who died a mere 31 days after taking office.

Trump’s impact goes well beyond his own ranking and Biden’s. Every contemporary Democratic president has moved up in the ranks — Barack Obama (No. 7), Bill Clinton (No. 12) and even Jimmy Carter (No. 22).

Yes, these presidents had great accomplishments such as expanding healthcare access and working to end conflict in the Middle East, and they have two Nobel Prizes among them. But given their shortcomings and failures, their rise seems to be less about reassessments of their administrations than it is a bonus for being neither Trump nor a member of his party.

Indeed, every modern Republican president has dropped in the survey, including the transformational Ronald Reagan (No. 16) and George H.W. Bush (No. 19), who led the nation’s last decisive military victory.

Academics do lean left, but that hasn’t changed since our previous surveys. What these results suggest is not just an added emphasis on a president’s political affiliation, but also the emergence of a president’s fealty to political and institutional norms as a criterion for what makes a president “great” to the scholars who study them.

As for the Americans casting a ballot for the next president, they are in the historically rare position of knowing how both candidates have performed in the job. Whether they will consider each president’s commitment to the norms of presidential leadership, and come to rate them as differently as our experts, remains to be seen.

Justin Vaughn is an associate professor of political science at Coastal Carolina University. Brandon Rottinghaus is a professor of political science at the University of Houston.

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A photo illustration of a letter from Elizabeth Gloucester to John Brown. The letter obscures the portrait of an unidentified Black woman from the 19th century.

The Lost Story of New York’s Most Powerful Black Woman

Elizabeth Gloucester was born into slavery. By the end of her life, she embodied a new model of Black, feminist capitalism.

A photo illustration composed of a letter that Elizabeth Gloucester wrote to the abolitionist John Brown and a contemporaneous photo of an anonymous woman. No known photos of Ms. Gloucester exist. Credit... Photo illustration by Alanna Fields for The New York Times

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Mr. Staples is a member of the editorial board.

  • Feb. 16, 2024

Elizabeth Amelia Gloucester appeared in the census for the final time on June 8, 1880. The census enumerators who crisscrossed Brooklyn Heights were no doubt surprised to find a wealthy Black woman presiding over Remsen House, the grand boarding hotel not far from Brooklyn City Hall that served the white professional classes.

Ms. Gloucester was a pillar of the Black elites who had prospered during the decades before the Civil War, when nine-tenths of African Americans were still enslaved. Remsen House was the jewel of the real estate portfolio she had established when she was a struggling young shopkeeper in bare-knuckled Lower Manhattan. By the spring of 1880, she was an aging Heights eminence, running her empire from the Remsen House residence she shared with her husband and children.

The exterior of the Remsen House, located at the corner of Clinton and Remsen streets.

Census workers were accustomed to listing women as the heads of households in which husbands had died. The decision to grant Ms. Gloucester this same designation — even though the Rev. James Gloucester was very much alive and present — reflected a rare recognition that she was the author of the family’s wealth and master of its financial destiny. This represented a victory for a woman who had come of age during a time when husbands subsumed their wives and their assets .

Ms. Gloucester was probably 63 years old on census day — not 60, as the census taker reported — and suffering from the heart disease that would kill her in August 1883. The residence at 144 Remsen Street was brimming with flowers on her funeral day. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle described the mourners as a “congregation of people such as has seldom before come together in Brooklyn.” Fashionably dressed white people mingled with a who’s who of the colored world, including several prominent ministers.

Testimonials offered a glimpse of how the “wealthiest colored woman in the United States” had dispensed her largess. She aided the colored poor in both the North and South; conspired with forces that plotted the armed overthrow of slavery; she contributed to the Union effort during the war. The Daily Eagle praised her “marked energy and shrewdness in investing her earnings,” then reverted to the antifeminist dogma of the day, endorsing the view that women “in the broader sense” were “better fitted” for the emotional rather than the practical side of life.

The coffin with the gleaming silver fittings was conveyed to the family plot at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, bucolic showplace of the affluent dead. The inscription on the monument read: “The undying love of a mother is a thing to cherish and keep. We must guard her memory closer now that she has fallen asleep.” But these pastoral sentiments would soon be eclipsed by a bitter legal fight over the matriarch’s will.

Historians have often cast Ms. Gloucester as a minor player in a story of famous abolitionist men. This essay rescues her from the margins by drawing on hundreds of pages of archival material — including real estate transactions, banking records and genealogical research conducted across three states. The woman who emerges from these long-buried documents hails from a school of feminist heroes who gave no radical speeches, but pioneered women’s rights in their daily lives. Her feminist capitalism is evident in her real estate transactions and in the way she defended her interests from all comers, including her husband.

Nineteenth-century obituary writers can be forgiven for believing that a wealthy Black woman had to have gotten her start as a child of the free Black elite. But a newly uncovered emancipation document makes clear that she came into world as human property around 1817, in the Richmond, Va., household of a general store operator named John Parkhill.

Much of what we know of Parkhill’s temperament comes from a biography of his favorite enslaved person, James Page , who recalls a mainly happy childhood and revels in the fact that the master trusted him to run the general store.

This idyll takes a savage turn when Parkhill sells Page’s mother and younger brother to raise capital for a new venture. He requires the young man to attend the auction — to illustrate the fate that would befall him should he step out of line.

Parkhill acted out of character in the fall of 1823 when he emancipated two of his Negroes: Beckey — a woman of “middle stature” and about 30 years old — and Jane, a child of about 7 years old. These were not the actions of a man who had renounced the slave trade. Indeed, the 1830 census would show him enslaving even more souls than he had in 1820.

Elizabeth Gloucester was born a slave around 1817, in the Richmond, Va. household of a general store operator named John Parkhill.

feminist opinion essay

Elizabeth Gloucester’s name appears in a signature book from the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society.

feminist opinion essay

One of Ms. Gloucester’s first purchases was a strategically placed lot in Seneca Village. Her property was located on block 789, lot 20.

feminist opinion essay

Elizabeth Gloucester was offered four-and-a-half times the $100 purchase price of her Seneca Village lot.

feminist opinion essay

John Brown stayed with the Gloucesters before his raid on Harpers Ferry in October 1849. This is a letter Ms. Gloucester wrote to Mr. Brown earlier that summer.

feminist opinion essay

Ms. Gloucester’s will signed in 1861 reveals she concluded long before her death that her family was incapable of managing her holdings. 

feminist opinion essay

In 1885, Emma Gloucester, who had been disinherited by her mother, died in a fire at a store where she was working, as shown by her death certificate.

Virginia planters were notorious for fathering children with women they owned. When these guilt-ridden progenitors got religion or approached the grave, they sometimes freed their colored offspring, providing what the historian Annette Gordon-Reed describes as a “head start on Emancipation.”

The children born to Thomas Jefferson and his enslaved surrogate wife, Sally Hemings, are the most familiar beneficiaries of this early exit from bondage. Hemings and Jefferson were still in residence at Monticello when Parkhill emancipated Jane — who was almost certainly the person we know today as Elizabeth Gloucester. That she was listed in the census as “mulatto” and chose to keep the Parkhill name up to the time she married James Gloucester suggests that she may have been the master’s child, as was reported in the press several years after her death.

It is reasonable to conclude that the Beckey listed in the courthouse emancipation was Elizabeth’s mother. It is also significant that the Gloucester burial plot in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery includes a young woman named Rebecca — who was almost certainly Elizabeth’s daughter and who could well have been named for Beckey.

The story of how Elizabeth was transplanted from Richmond to Pennsylvania is shrouded in myth. An account in which Parkhill arranges for an African American minister, the Rev. John Gloucester, to raise the child seems out of character for both parties. Aside from that, John died a year before the courthouse emancipation. Nevertheless, Elizabeth was somehow delivered from Virginia, where slavery would persist for decades to come, to Pennsylvania, where a gradual emancipation law had been passed in 1780.

The Gloucester family was now presided over by John’s son Jeremiah and his widow, Rhoda. Growing up in such a household, Elizabeth would have come of age immersed in the gospel of abolitionism. Her connections to an esteemed ministerial family — four Gloucester sons followed their father into the pulpit — would also have given her standing in the community. James, the youngest of the Gloucester sons, would later become her husband.

Elizabeth was a teenager when she entered domestic service in the home of the Quaker gentleman John Cook. The family is said to have paid her 10 shillings a week while teaching her how to handle money. The following version of a conversation between Elizabeth and Ms. Cook appeared in a newspaper story and was probably furnished by the Gloucester family.

“What does thee do with thy money, daughter?” Ms. Cook asked.

“I spend it,” was the reply.

“Well, thee ought to save it,” Ms. Cook is quoted as saying. “I would advise thee to get a bank-book and put thy money in bank.”

The 1832 signature book at the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society shows Elizabeth Parkhill taking Ms. Cook’s advice. It also shows that Elizabeth was illiterate at the time. She made the mark of an X under a version of her name written, perhaps, by Ms. Cook, or by a clerk.

The Savings Fund Society record reflects Elizabeth’s progress toward literacy. In 1834, she was no longer signing with an X, but the signature was drawn with great concentration, as though by someone new to writing. By 1835, her penmanship was more natural, though less sophisticated than it would be two decades later in the records of New York City’s Chemical Bank.

The Philadelphia streets through which Elizabeth passed while running errands for her employers placed her on intimate terms with the most important free Black community in the United States . African American women in particular were busily engaged in philanthropic organizations and mutual aid societies that laid the groundwork for political engagement.

The city featured a great deal of Black destitution, but also an emerging working class and a small but highly visible elite that was anchored by the family of the wealthy sailmaker and antislavery activist James Forten, his wife, Charlotte Vandine Forten, and their three daughters .

The Gloucesters were stationed below the Fortens on the social ladder and had reason to hold them in high regard. In 1810, James Forten had helped the Rev. John Gloucester to buy his wife and children out of slavery in Tennessee. This was one of many gestures that reflected the well-documented Forten commitment to strengthening the free Black community.

Elizabeth’s young adulthood coincided with an extraordinary moment in the antislavery movement and the women’s rights movement that was emerging from it. In December 1833, abolitionists from around the country convened in Philadelphia for the gathering that created the American Antislavery Society. The founders marginalized women by confining them to female auxiliaries.

The Forten daughters joined with white women in the Philadelphia Female Antislavery Society , an organization that would move women closer to formal politics. That was hazardous duty at a time when white mobs responded with murderous violence — and hysterical charges of racial “amalgamation” — when Black and white men and women addressed large crowds about the immorality of slavery.

The Gloucesters and others who had come to know Elizabeth would have warned her of how easily the city’s anti-Blackness could escalate from insults to rock throwing to murderous pogroms like the one that erupted on a balmy August evening in 1834.

It all began with white men who congregated on Seventh Street, between Shippen and Fitzwater, murmuring among themselves about “hunting the nigs.” As the historian Kerri K. Greenidge explains in her recent book, “The Grimkes,” the horde targeted a popular carousel ride known as the Flying Horses.

As the mob grew “with brickbats, broom handles and wooden planks at the ready, it began to spill in ‘one inhuman mass’ down the street, its members screaming as they unleashed violent rage onto the Black people and institutions in their path.”

The Fortens watched from their Lombard Street home as the rioters ravaged institutions they had devoted their lives to building, including St. Thomas Church, where their children had attended Sunday school. Elizabeth lived outside the riot area but understood that the life she was working hard to build could be obliterated without warning.

Black Gotham

Elizabeth Amelia Parkhill and James Gloucester married in Philadelphia, probably about 1836, and moved to New York not long afterward. The couple’s entry into Manhattan colored society would have been eased by their membership in an esteemed family of churchmen.

James’s father, the Rev. John Gloucester , had emerged from slavery to establish the First African Presbyterian Church. James’s brother Jeremiah — a celebrity preacher in his own right — had already made a favorable impression on New York’s colored upper classes during a visit to the city in 1837.

The couple landed at the most auspicious address in Black Gotham. An 1841 city directory lists them at 93 West Broadway, which housed the pharmacy and medical offices of Dr. James McCune Smith , the first Black American to earn a medical degree and a leading intellectual of the antislavery movement.

Dr. Smith received his early education at New York City’s vaunted African Free School, whose graduates included some the best-educated Black men and women in the United States. Rejected by American medical schools for reasons of race, he had excelled at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. He returned to a hero’s welcome in Black New York and established an unusual practice that included white patients. He devoted his literary gifts to debunking “scientific” theories of racial inferiority .

Dr. Smith’s backroom library served as an epicenter of activism, where Black Gothamites gathered to strategize about how to defeat slavery in the South and advance the cause of racial justice in the North. At the turn of the 1840s, the group would have been intently focused on the predations of a kidnapping club that was abducting and trafficking African Americans into slave states. This danger reinforced the sense that African Americans would remain at risk as long as slavery existed anywhere in the country.

The Gloucesters established themselves in Manhattan as the library conclave was parting company with the belief that moral argument would persuade white Americans to dismantle slavery. Dr. Smith’s friend Henry Highland Garnet broke dramatically with pacifism in his 1843 “call to rebellion” speech , delivered at the Colored Convention in Buffalo, where he urged four million enslaved people to revolt, even if it meant certain death and rivers of blood.

Ms. Gloucester plunged into Manhattan’s merchant class. The city clerk granted her a license to sell used goods in October 1845. She was soon running a furniture business at 76 West Broadway, in rough-and-tumble Lower Manhattan.

Within a few years, she was pursuing deals with Black landholders who were eager to turn a profit while also keeping as much wealth as possible in colored hands. One of her first purchases brought her a modest but strategically placed lot on West 88th Street in Seneca Village, the uptown settlement established in 1825 by African Americans who were fleeing racial terrorism in Lower Manhattan.

She was unable to buy the West 88th Street property directly and instead acquired it through James. The transfer from him to her reflected her resistance to remnants of a legal tradition that regarded husband and wife as the same person. The couple got around this obstacle by selling the lot to their lawyer for the nominal sum of $10. The lawyer then transferred the land to Ms. Gloucester alone for the same sum.

As the historian Sara Cedar Miller has pointed out, the deed that cemented Ms. Gloucester’s control over the West 88th Street lot reflected a wariness of property laws that favored husbands. The deed specifically precluded the possibility of a claim by her husband — declaring that she held title “forever and free clear and discharged of and from the debts obligation and control of her said husband, the said James N. Gloucester, and in like manner and to all intents and purposes as if she were a feme sole . ”

In Anglo-American law, the term “feme sole” refers to a woman who is widowed, divorced, never married or no longer legally subordinate to a husband. Ms. Gloucester’s lawyer may have used the phrase as a reference to New York’s recently passed married women’s property act . But this assertion of independence would have had a personal meaning for his client.

Ms. Gloucester was a novice investor when she took possession of the Seneca Village lot in the summer of 1848. Several years later, the city notified hundreds of people that their land would be seized to make way for Central Park. By this time, she held properties that were spread among Manhattan, Brooklyn and Suffolk County, Long Island.

The Seneca Village lot came to her from William A. Smith and his wife, Sarah, an African American farming couple from Franklin County, N.Y., near the Canadian border. She purchased yet another valuable property, on Sixth Avenue in the 50s, from her friend and mentor Dr. McCune Smith. The transaction that gave birth to Siloam Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn, where her husband served as the founding minister, shows how she combined philanthropy and money making: She rented land to the congregation — with an option to buy if the church was still extant five years later.

The stewards of eminent domain were singing her song when they offered four-and-a-half times the purchase price of the Seneca Village lot. Our real estate baroness-to-be was ready to close out that investment and move on to the next deal. But imagine her vexation when city records mistakenly attributed ownership of the lot to the Rev. James Gloucester.

Some wives would have let the matter ride and worked out a handshake deal with their spouses. But Ms. Gloucester was not inclined to settle the matter privately. Her lawyer filed a petition of clarification that stands out in the municipal record to this day. The document made clear to all concerned that Ms. Gloucester, not James, owned the property.

A Voice for Radical Abolitionism

Records show that Ms. Gloucester gave birth to 10 children — not eight or nine, as has been reported. Two died quite young, and three others, including Rebecca, expired in their teens. Of the offspring who lived to the age of majority, five attended college and three — Emma, Eloise, and Adelaide — graduated from Oberlin, in Ohio. The school’s antislavery and gender fairness policies made it a preferred destination for members of the leadership class that W.E.B. Du Bois would later describe as “the Talented Tenth.”

New York was a fiercely proslavery city, where abolitionists were always one riot away from being driven from their homes. Children of prominent antislavery households grew up with a keen sense of danger — but they also understood that families of means had an obligation to place themselves at the forefront of the fight. Abolitionism was the civic religion of the class.

The Gloucester brood learned this lesson more directly than most. Their mother frequented Plymouth Church in Brooklyn Heights and would surely have taken the older children to hear its pastor, Henry Ward Beecher, the pre-eminent antislavery preacher of his day. A charismatic performer, Beecher dramatized the evils of slavery with mock auctions through which the congregation purchased the freedom of enslaved persons. The church is known today as “the Grand Central Depot” of the Underground Railroad.

The great voices of radical abolitionism convened in the Gloucester living room. The Gloucester children knew Frederick Douglass. They were fond of his fiery friend John Brown, who stayed with their home family while preparing his assault on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry , which he hoped would spark a sweeping slave rebellion.

The Gloucesters gave Brown access to a network of African Americans who might be induced to support his cause. But for Brown, passing time with Black people was emotionally fortifying. African Americans who embraced his invasion plan reinforced his sense of himself as the avenging hand of God on earth.

Brown was a keen judge of human nature and could see that Elizabeth exercised authority both in her domestic life and in the public sphere. He referred to her as “sister” and is often quoted as saying that he wished she were a man — so that she could ride along with his invasion band.

The quote as James recalled it conveyed a more nuanced meaning. When Brown told him, “I wish your wife were the man of you two,” he was expressing a belief that Elizabeth would have joined the invasion in a heartbeat had gender not been an obstacle. He was also revealing his disappointment that James would not take up arms, even though he was free to do so.

Elizabeth’s interests included charity. In 1860, she served as “first directress” of a fund-raising project for the Colored Orphan Asylum, a refuge for parentless Negro children throughout the Northeast. That she led the effort suggests that she was the wealthiest, best connected member of a group that included widely known members of the Northeastern colored elite.

The Weekly Anglo-African reported that Beecher had “generously given up his church on his regular lecture night” to make way for a fund-raiser; the church trustees granted free use of the building instead of charging rent. Beecher’s celebrity ensured an interracial crowd so large that people were turned away at the door.

Elizabeth and her fellow directresses stood out in their striped calico gowns and were “as busy as the most industrious of bees” as they circulated through the crowd at the benefit. Among the Black business owners who contributed food to the event was the Oyster King Thomas Downing, whose popular Manhattan restaurant catered to wealthy white patrons while concealing fugitives from slavery in the basement.

The colored elites viewed the evening as more than a charitable endeavor. A celebrant interviewed by The Weekly Anglo-African wished for a magical means through which “the entire white population” could see the gathering. His hope was that white people who experienced splendid Negro company would be divested of the racial hostility that hemmed in African Americans at every turn.

The colored orphanage to which Ms. Gloucester devoted her attention was housed in a handsome Greek Revival building perched atop a small hill set between West 43rd and 44th Streets on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. The white men who looted and torched the edifice in the summer of 1863 announced themselves with cries of “Burn the niggers’ nest!” The mob carried away rugs, food, furniture and clothing in a prelude to a campaign of terror that targeted African Americans.

A number of people were lynched during the carnage. Mary and Albro Lyons tried to defend their home, but were driven away. When it was over, they returned to find the house in ruins and the furniture broken or stolen. As the couple’s daughter Maritcha Lyons later wrote : “From basement to attic evidences of the worst vandalism prevailed. A fire, kindled in one of the upper rooms, was discovered in time to prevent a conflagration.”

This act of racial terrorism, known as the Draft Riots , reminded Negro aristocrats that they were no more secure in their homes than the poorest street vendor. By this time, the Gloucesters had moved to Brooklyn, outside the radius of destruction. The matriarch’s thoughts on the orgy of violence went unrecorded, but she could not have been surprised. After all, she had experienced similar horrors during her formative years in Philadelphia.

Ms. Gloucester concluded long before her death that her family was incapable of managing her holdings as she had so ably done. Moreover, she did not trust James to administer the estate fairly and in accordance with her wishes. Those views were reflected in the will she signed on June 19, 1861. The document placed the estate in the hands of outside trustees — a move that would have angered James no end — and ordered them to liquidate her assets and divide the proceeds into seven equal parts, to be distributed among James and the couple’s six children.

This version of the will stood until 1866, when she filed a brutally worded codicil disinheriting Emma “in consequence of undutiful conduct.” Mrs. Gloucester could have left it at that — but clearly intended to wound Emma and cast her out of the family. To that end, she instructed the executors to pay her wayward daughter the witheringly paltry “sum of ten dollars” and barred siblings who might precede her to the grave from leaving her any portion of the estate.

The will reflected a dramatic fall from grace for the family’s golden daughter. Emma had graduated from Oberlin with a specialty in literature in 1856, when there were probably no more than a few dozen Black college graduates in all of the United States. Her betrothal to another luminary, Dr. Thomas Joiner White — one of the first African Americans to receive an M.D. from an American university — was the best conceivable match for a daughter of the colored upper classes. This union was meant to solidify the class gains that Elizabeth and James hoped to pass on to their descendants.

But Thomas died of cholera not long after the couple settled in Chatham, Ontario, a community at the terminus of the Underground Railroad known as the “Black Mecca.” Once back in Brooklyn, Emma appears to have either cohabited with or married a man of lower station. This choice touched on a primal fear of the colored elites — that their daughters would squander hard-won social capital and succumb to downward mobility.

Emma’s misfortunes persisted after her mother’s death. In 1885, she was working as a storekeeper in Manhattan when her clothing went up in flames. When she died, James laid her to rest in Green-Wood, which might not have been possible had her mother still been alive. Five years later, James took his own place in the shadow of Elizabeth’s burial monument.

The prosperity that Ms. Gloucester wanted for her descendants failed to materialize. The wealth she bequeathed to her children seems to have dissipated fairly quickly. Genealogical records strongly suggest that the family line died out in 1981, when the last surviving heir came to rest in the family plot at Green-Wood.

The Lady of Remsen House seems not to have confided her thoughts to diaries or letters. Her remarkable life expresses itself through the business transactions that made her wealthy and influential, allowing her to champion the abolitionist movement and charities that cared for indigent children. Her story serves as a reminder that many wives and mothers who deserve to be seen as women’s rights pioneers never climbed the steps of a speaker’s platform, but succeeded in making the rights of women real in their daily lives.

Aaron Goodwin contributed research.

Source images for photo illustrations: “Cabinet Card of a Woman,” William Kuebler/National Museum of African American History & Culture; Historical Society of Pennsylvania; New York City Municipal Archives; Brooklyn Daily Eagle/Brooklyn Public Library and the Center for Brooklyn History; Amir Hamja/The New York Times.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram .

Brent Staples has been a member of The Times editorial board since 1990. He was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 2019. @ BrentNYT

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