Feminists against the Traditional Family and Dimensions of Gender, Race and Class - Term Paper Example

Bodies are Political Introduction Over the past twenty years the ways in which gender and gender divisions are theorized have undergonesubstantial changes. Earlier assumptions of a shared oppression uniting women have given way to recognition of difference and diversity, while the notions of human subjectivity and progress on which the political project of feminism is allegedly premised have been challenged. Our trouble is not our womanhood, but the artificial trammels of custom under false conditions. We are, as a sex, infinitely superior to men, and if we were free and developed, healthy in body and mind, as we should be under natural conditions, our motherhood would be our glory. That function gives women such wisdom and power as no male ever can possess. When women can support themselves, have their entry to all the trades and professions, with a house of their own over their heads and a bank account, they will own their bodies and be dictators in the social realm. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1890 (Banner, 1980) The activists for women's rights in the nineteenth century may have read Godey's Lady's Book and the same domestic novels as their neighbors, but they believed that women's moral superiority justified their working for women's equality inside and outside the home. Why did they challenge the prevailing restrictions on women How did their own experiences in the family lead them to a feminist consciousness How did their domestic experiences shape their feminist thought and action Family issues--women's property rights, child custody, marriage, reproductive control, and divorce--were central to the early women's rights advocates' understanding of women's oppression. The Declaration of Sentiments passed in 1848 at Seneca Falls, New York, as well as the resolutions passed at other women's rights conventions, reflected the centrality of these concerns. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, along with many Quakers and Spiritualists, were the strongest advocates for marriage reform, both before and after the Civil War, when the women's rights movement as a whole narrowed its platform to concentrate on the vote. This emphasis on family issues stemmed from the supporters' own domestic experiences--empowering as well as restrictive--and from their outrage over the victimization of other women by abusive husbands. Aware of the precariousness of women's covert domestic power, many early activists for women's rights forged a feminist agenda designed to benefit women and their families. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, and other notable feminists who were dismayed by the slow progress of achieving public power sought to apply feminist principles in their own lives. They pursued two major alternative strategies: combining marriage, motherhood, and careers; or choosing single celibate lives dedicated to reform (Banner, 1980). Many early advocates for women's rights came to a feminist consciousness as they perceived the disparities between their own experiences as wives and mothers and the cultural ideals of true womanhood. Some of them came to an awareness of their subordination when they were discriminated against in the abolitionist and temperance movements. In these movements they gained valuable political organizing experience through public speaking, lobbying, and petition campaigns. For others their feminist consciousness stemmed from their experiences as Quakers and Spiritualists. Women spoke in Quaker meetings, became ministers, held separate business meetings, and had equal educational opportunities. Feminists against the Traditional Family Certain topics were almost universally taboo in nineteenth-century America. Even husbands and their wives avoided discussing sex, homosexuality, prostitution, insanity, illegitimate children, birth control, and suicide. In a time when nudity was considered indecent, Hiram Powers's statue of a nude female titled Greek Slave caused uproar. Some museums had a "ladies hour" when women could view the statue without the "blush-producing presence of men." An enterprising curator in Cincinnati put a calico blouse and flannel drawers on the statue to protect the viewer's modesty. Within this atmosphere of reserve, sex radicals like Frances Wright, Victoria Woodhull, Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger, and the Greenwich Village radicals rejected the belief in female passionlessness and fought for women's control over their bodies and their sexuality. In contrast to most feminists, who saw marriage as a potential source of women's primary power and wanted men to live up to higher moral standards, the sex radicals represented a distinct minority. Because they believed that the institution of marriage trapped women economically and sexually, their views were considered dangerous to the mainstream feminists, who were afraid that the women's rights movement might come to be associated with encouraging sexual libertinism and thus be regarded as a threat to marriage and the family (Cott, 1977). For some women like the Quakers, covert domestic power nurtured feminism. As we have seen, many advocates for women's rights throughout the nineteenth century focused on family issues because they were outraged over the victimization of women by intemperate, violent, and "overly sensual" men. In contrast, the sex radicals recognized that women fundamentally lacked power over crucial domestic sexual relations and therefore called for a radical feminist transformation of marriage and sexuality. Caught between opponents of women's rights who argued that the vote for women would destroy the family on one side, and the sex radicals on the other, moderate feminists may have been encouraged to take a more traditional, profamily stance. The radicals damaged the movement by alienating some prospective supporters; they made the reformers appear less radical, however, and thus made their views more acceptable. To the moderates' chagrin, many of the radicals' ideas were assimilated by American society by the 1920s, when female sexuality was celebrated. Coming from diverse ethnic and class backgrounds and different time periods, the radicals were part of an underground tradition espousing free love, sexual liberation from marriage, and women's full sexual expression and reproductive control. Not only did they foreshadow developments of the 1920s and the sexual liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s, but they also challenged the capitalist system. Despite the radicalism of these women, they too were unable to escape fully the specter of the angel in the house, and they had great difficulty resolving the central dilemma of their lives--combining love and achievement. But their advocacy of birth control, freer sexuality, and the removal of sexuality from the confines of marriage eventually became a kind of sexual orthodoxy years later (Scott, 1973). The origins of free-love ideas lay in the utopian, communitarian movement of the early nineteenth century. Free-love advocates argued that women ought to be able to share their bodies with whomever they wished, without necessarily being married to that person. But they did not believe in indiscriminate, unemotional sexual relationships. Like Rousseau and other Enlightenment thinkers, they believed in the innate goodness of human beings and believed that institutions corrupted people. Applying these ideas to sexuality, they believed that repressive society caused people to develop obsessional sexual practices and that the natural state was that of self-regulating moderation. They had a romantic, idealized conception of the connection between love and sexuality and believed that traditional marriage tended to restrict one's natural desires. Dimensions of gender, 'race' and class In a western context, feminists continue to emphasize the importance of women's personal experiences as a basis for the development of theoretical analysis and political practice. The crux of this argument is that feminist political theory is not an abstract, impersonal project, but a subjective enterprise resting on, and emerging out of women's concrete experiences and knowledge. For feminist politics, this both challenges the distinction between abstract theory and concrete praxis, and implies that women's experiences form an important basis for feminist analyses. What is now commonly referred to as feminist-standpoint theory argues that oppressed groups are epistemologically privileged in that they have more direct access to accurate knowledge about the conditions of their subordination, but this knowledge is systematically ignored or invalidated by the dominant institutions of knowledge reproduction. Feminist-standpoint theory advocates that knowledge production and validation should be grounded in one's everyday life, and especially the everyday lives of the oppressed. In this sense, 'the personal is the political' can refer to the argument that women's experiences allow more direct access to the nature of power differentials in patriarchal social relations. As the impact of feminism grew (slowly) within psychology, one point emerged to distinguish feminist psychology from the continuation of 'male stream' traditions. That is, the extent to which gender was addressed in terms of a set of power relations, or as social relations structured in dominance rather than as a product of primarily psychological phenomena such as gender stereotyping or sex-role socialization. Although the analysis of power can be seen to distinguish feminist psychology from male-stream psychology, this has often been a restricted concern with gender in isolation from 'race', class, sexuality, age or disability (Evans, 1989). The other area of social psychology that is relevant to these questions concerns the study of identity, and especially 'social identity', or identity seen in a social context as opposed to an individual set of personality characteristics. Social categories, according to which individuals are classified or class themselves, are assumed to be assigned to individual subjects through a process that is divorced from any political context. One might almost imagine that racism, ageism, sexism and anti-lesbianism (to take four examples) are inevitable, since they emerge from this process of social categorization which can appear to be an unavoidable part of human psychological functioning. Why should power appear to be such an important concern for a number of feminists in and out of western psychology at this point Why does the operation of power appear at once so draconian, and almost amorphous, invisible Postmodern perspectives on contemporary western cultures have speculated on the manner in which 'power' appears to be simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, but these debates also raise important questions about the understanding of difference, identity and experience in a feminist context (Cott, 1977). The threat of sexual violence is not illusory, but it can also be used to scare women and to restrict our movements. Despite identifying as a feminist and a lesbian, the representation of herself as 'strong woman' in individual terms did not rest easily with conventional feminist discourses of gender and power. Some feminist analyses would position women as relatively powerless in situations where a man (or men) try to 'chat them up' repeatedly, without denying that women might resist such overtures. Analyses that position women as oppressed do not necessarily cast them as victims-feminist work on rape and sexual abuse developed the terminology of 'survivors' after all. Feminist-standpoint theory does however; encourage us to read relations between women and men in terms of power differentials, domination and subordination, including the operation of heterosexual relationships and institutions. What was notable about respondent 30Is perspective was that she viewed social relationships between women and men within patriarchal society as imbued with power differences at the general level, whilst experiencing herself as a powerful or powerless person due to her individual qualities of assertiveness, appearance and so on. Her perceived power was not gendered, and nor was her refusal to adopt the position of helpless (female) victim when a man tried to chat her up (Scott, 1973). In pro-feminist critical work on masculinity, power appears as a multifaceted concept. It can refer to financial resources, physical prowess, influence and the ability to control others. These male respondents did not talk about themselves in these terms: they felt scared of other men (but not able to admit it), and at the mercy of wider institutional forces in their jobs. For most of these men, the benefits that might accrue from a patriarchal society are relatively invisible to them, although their masculinity was not totally invisible in the way that 'whiteness' appeared invisible to most of the white respondents. These men have relatively secure jobs and someone else (usually female) did most of their domestic work and child care, whether paid or unpaid. They may have 'felt' the threat of physical violence from other men, but they would not necessarily read about this month's rape in the papers and 'feel' a sense of personalized, gendered threat as women might do. There was little sense of engagement with women's experiences of heterosexual assault and harassment. The point here is that (white/male) attackers are always someone else, but the next (black/female) person to be attacked could be you. In this sense power is frequently recognized by its absence: the privileges it can bring are relatively invisible to those in positions of power. This stems in part from the 'common-sense' definition of power used by most respondents (which they expected me to share): that of an authoritarian exercise of power over another person or group of people. The notion of power as a capacity, a potential, or a route of access to systems of privilege was less pervasive. So if many women reported feeling powerless when they walked home alone at night due to the threat of sexual assault, few men reported feeling powerful because they could walk home without the threat of sexual assault by a woman. In this sense men's relative privilege was invisible to them because they had little awareness of the impact and frequency of the threat of sexual assault on women (Cott, 1977). Whilst most men constructed themselves as feeling powerless as individual male subjects, they also reported a sense of gendered powerlessness in situations where other men were being sexist or 'macho'. This was not necessarily because they felt under threat themselves, but because they felt excluded from all-male groups by their (unspoken) objections to other men's sexism. Conclusion So what are the implications of this project for feminism and social psychology First, we cannot necessarily read off positions of power directly from personal individualized experience or vice versa, but 'experience' can provide the basis for political work in some contexts. In addition, 'women' and 'men' are not monolithic categories, and a feminism which is only or mainly about sex/gender relations is only telling part of the story. It is important not to lose sight of what is specific to the operation of patriarchal power relations nor to the ways in which sex and gender intersect with other social relations around 'race', class, age and disability. Those in dominant groups or positions can refuse to identify themselves (as white or heterosexual), and/or they can experience themselves as powerless (men), but this does not erase the force of social relations that are structured in dominance. It is not possible, then, to view power as inherently 'male', in the sense that all men are not positioned in an identical manner, and they may not experience their structural neither positions in a direct way, nor feel themselves to be particularly powerful. Although power is a distinctly gendered concept, that does not imply that all men 'have' power in any straightforward sense, nor that can they use it in the same ways. Their structural position as men imbues them with the capacity to mobilize certain forms of power and to benefit from that position in certain circumstances, but this never operates outside of a class specific, sexualized, racialised and age-graded context. To view power (or violence) as somehow inherently and solely masculine (or white or heterosexual or middle class) also denies those many occasions in which some women can use and benefit from power relations through racism, heterosexism and class relations. At the same time it is important to examine the conditions in which men can and do mobilize specifically patriarchal forms of power (Cott, 1977). It is relevant that over half of the female respondents mentioned the threat of, or incidents of, heterosexual assault as situations that had made them feel powerless as women. This has been the basis of some important feminist organizing, and it is an area where women's experiences are different from men's at a general level, although such differences are also shaped by relations of class, age, 'race', sexuality and disability. This study is not an exercise in discovering the proportion of women and men who actually are powerful or powerless in particular contexts, but an investigation of the ways in which we locate ourselves with respect to the major social categories of gender, 'race' and class in terms of the concepts of power and experience. The main implications of this project for anti-sexist and anti-racist programs and similar radical initiatives, is that models of individual attitude change will always be limited if they do not address structural inequalities and the construction of specific social categories in particular political and historical contexts. Social change is not simply a matter of attitude change: the construction of social categories around gender, 'race', sexuality, age, class and disability also need to be addressed. Such categories do not appear magically in the minds of individual subjects: they emerge from specific historical and political contexts and structural power relations (Evans, 1989). The feminist-standpoint theorists dominated groups are 'epistemologically privileged', with access to a more accurate reflection of power relations than dominant group members. This study lends some support to this argument whilst illustrating the complexity of the relationship between experience, identity and power. Finally, feminist programs and analyses need to recognize the limitations of a narrow focus on sex/gender which operates at the expense of appreciating relations of age, 'race', class and disability. Power relations around sex and gender never operate in isolation. There are some contexts in which experientially based consciousness-raising groups will work well, and sexual violence is the obvious example here, but as feminists, we need to keep reminding ourselves that all women's experiences are not necessarily identical. There are real debates about theories that construct women as oppressed, and as passive victims, and the importance of appreciating women's resistances and means of survival. Looking at 'experience' and 'power' in terms of gender, 'race', and class illustrates the complexity of that debate for feminism, and the need to understand the various discursive constructions of such social categories as well as the intersections between them. Reference: Banner, Lois W. Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Radical for Woman's Rights. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1998. Cott, 1977. The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press) Scott, 1973. "Family Limitation, Sexual Control, and Domestic Feminism in Victorian America," Feminist Studies 1 (Winter-Spring) Sara M. Evans, 1989. Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America (New York: Free Press) Read More