Lesson Two

So what is Feminism , anyway?

How many times have you heard a woman say “ I'm not a feminist, but …” and go on to identify with some feminist position? So what does “being a feminist” really mean? What, exactly, is feminism?

There really is no single definition for what feminism means. This is both the beauty and the challenge of feminism- it is fluid and encompasses a range of different issues . There are some common themes that run through the various definitions that people have given feminism. Here's the short version: feminism is a movement to end all forms of domination in society, it's a perspective that encourages one to think critically about society and it's a theory or set of theories that help us understand power and privilege in society.

And now for the longer version:

Part 1. Feminism is a social movement whose goal is to eliminate the oppression of women in all its forms. This involves making major social, economic, political and cultural changes in our society. And though it may seem overwhelming, feminists have done a good bit of the work already—winning us a number of inalienable rights like voting and birth control pills. We are definitely standing on the shoulders of giants!

Part 2. Feminism is a critical perspective or a new way of looking at the world. Think of this in conjunction with ‘Part 1. Feminism as a social movement' and it makes more sense. For the last century, feminists have agitated against gender inequality in society, and recognizing this unfair treatment of the ‘fairer sex' left them seeing the world in a new light. One of the most powerful revelations that has grown out of the feminist movement is the realization that “the personal is political. Feminists learned early that women's private lives reflect the larger power relations and inequality that exist in society. Issues that have long been thought of as “private matters” such as domestic violence or sexual harassment are actually public issues—they indicate a larger social problem that needs to be address. This is a strategy that we'll be regularly using in this class; we will use women's personal experiences to examine the inequalities in society more generally.

Part 3. Feminism as a set of theories. So how have feminist scholars used the feminist movement and feminism as a critical perspective to inform a feminist theory or set of theories? Well, the first thing that they have done is to recognize that our everyday vocabulary is inadequate and confusing. For example, take the word ‘sex.' For the longest time, sex referred to the differences in anatomy, but also to the differences in social behavior—there was no separating the two. So, for example, it was thought ( and today is still thought by some ) that women's loathing of math and science was actually caused by the mysteries of female biology. Feminists, however, introduced the term ‘gender' to refer to the fact that there are a number of socially constructed behaviors and characteristics that are associated with each sex. Feminists made this distinction to say that our behaviors are constructed by our society, not determined by our anatomy. Gender is ‘what you do' to be a man or a woman—how you sit, what you say, why you do what you do. The distinction between sex and gender allows us to see that the particular expectations for women and men in our culture are neither absolute nor universal. Things can be changed if we change the way girls and boys/ women and men are socialized. We will be learning a variety of new words, concepts and theories over the course of the semester to help us investigate inequality. This new vocabulary and conceptual framework will become instrumental in shaping the ways in which we think about the experiences of women and girls in our society. It'll allow us to make interventions into society, and this is how the theory comes back to being a movement

It's important to remember that feminism is always a movement as well as a perspective as well as a set of theories, and each of these fuels the other. Lessons from the movement are used to generate theory and feminist theory makes interventions and directs the movement in new directions. To me, feminism is being interested about the world around you. I see this class as a journey towards developing our feminist curiosity—like children who as too many questions, we will dig deep and uncover the answers to the hard questions we'll be asking. Feminism is not about being an angry, fat, ugly, lesbian man-hater . It's also not about any set of conclusions about life, society, or women or men. Instead, it's more about giving you the tools you need to ask questions, draw conclusions and make changes