why is feminism good 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.

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.

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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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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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61% of U.S. women say ‘feminist’ describes them well; many see feminism as empowering, polarizing

Since the early days of the U.S. women’s rights movement, the term “feminist” has been a source of much debate . Even in 2020 – 100 years after the passage of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote – Americans differ over how well the term describes them and how they see the movement, according to a new Pew Research Center survey .

Pew Research Center conducted this study to understand Americans’ views on feminism around the 100th anniversary of women getting the right to vote. For this analysis, we surveyed 3,143 U.S. adults in March and April 2020, including an oversample of Black and Hispanic respondents. The adults surveyed are members of Ipsos Public Affairs’ KnowledgePanel, an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses and landline and cellphone numbers. KnowledgePanel provides internet access for those who do not have it and, if needed, a device to access the internet when they join the panel. To ensure that the results of this survey reflect a balanced cross section of the nation, the data is weighted to match the U.S. adult population by gender, age, education, race and ethnicity and other categories. The survey was conducted in English and Spanish.

Here are  the questions used  for this report, along with responses, and  its methodology .

About six-in-ten U.S. women today say “feminist” describes them very (19%) or somewhat (42%) well. But the degree to which women consider themselves feminist differs substantially by age, education and political party, according to the survey.

Majorities of women across age groups say “feminist” describes them at least somewhat well, but those ages 50 to 64 are the least likely to say it describes them very well. Only 12% in this age group say this, compared with 27% of women ages 18 to 29, 19% of women ages 30 to 49 and 20% of women 65 and older.

About seven-in-ten women with at least a bachelor’s degree (72%) say the term feminist describes them very or somewhat well, compared with 56% of women with less education.

There are sharp partisan divides among women as well. Three-quarters of Democratic and Democratic-leaning women say the term feminist describes them very or somewhat well, compared with 42% of Republican and Republican-leaning women.

Among Democratic women, those with a bachelor’s degree or higher are more likely than those with less education to say feminist describes them well. In fact, 37% say the term describes them very well. Among Republican women, those with at least a bachelor’s degree are no more likely than those with less education to consider themselves feminists.

Women are not the only ones who identify with the term feminist. Four-in-ten men in the United States say this term describes them at least somewhat well. Democratic men are more than twice as likely as their Republican counterparts to say feminist describes them well (54% vs. 26%). And, like women, men with a bachelor’s degree or higher are more likely than those with less education to say the term describes them at least somewhat well (46% vs. 37%).

Most Americans say feminism is empowering, but many also see it as polarizing

Overall, the public says the feminist movement has contributed to the advancement of women’s rights in the U.S.: 22% say it’s done a great deal and 48% say it’s done a fair amount. But the public has mixed views on what feminism looks like today. A majority of Americans (64%) say feminism is empowering and 42% see it as inclusive. At the same time, 45% say it is polarizing and 30% say it’s outdated.

Notably, many of those who identify as feminist are critical of the feminist movement. For example, 43% of adults who say feminism describes them very or somewhat well also say feminism is polarizing, and 45% would not describe it as inclusive.

Women are more likely than men to associate feminism with positive attributes like empowering and inclusive, while men are more likely than women to see feminism as polarizing and outdated. Even so, six-in-ten men say feminism is empowering.

Among women, there are some key differences across demographic groups. Women younger than 50 are more likely than their older counterparts to say feminism is empowering (73% vs. 63%). Women younger than 30 stand out for being the most likely to say feminism is inclusive (56% say it is) and the least likely to say it’s outdated (only 17% say it is).

Women with a college degree have somewhat different views on feminism than women with less education. Those with a bachelor’s degree or more education are more likely to say feminism is empowering (76% vs. 64% of those with some college education or less) and inclusive (54% vs. 41%), but they’re also more likely to see it as polarizing (50% vs. 34%).

There are large partisan gaps in views about feminism, too. While 76% of Democrats say feminism is empowering, only 49% of Republicans say the same. Similarly, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to say feminism is inclusive (51% vs. 32%). For their part, Republicans are more likely than their Democratic counterparts to say feminism is polarizing (51% vs. 40%) and about twice as likely to say it’s outdated (42% vs. 20%).

These partisan patterns play out similarly among women and men. Democratic women are much more likely than Republican women to see feminism as empowering (77% vs. 56%) and inclusive (53% vs. 36%). Republican women are twice as likely as Democratic women to say feminism is outdated (36% vs. 18%).

There are racial and ethnic differences, too, in how people view feminism. White adults are more likely than Black and Hispanic adults to associate feminism with negative characteristics. Roughly half of white adults (49%) say feminism is polarizing, compared with 34% of Black and 36% of Hispanic adults. Similarly, while about a third (32%) of whites say feminism is outdated, roughly one-in-four Black (24%) and Hispanic (26%) adults say the same. When accounting for both race and gender, similar patterns remain.

Note: Here are the questions used for this report, along with responses, and its methodology .

CORRECTION (March 10, 2021): The subheads in the charts “Women more likely than men to assign positive characteristics to feminism” and “Democratic women more likely than Republican women to have a positive view of feminism” have been corrected to more accurately reflect survey question wording.

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Amanda Barroso is a former writer/editor focusing on social trends at Pew Research Center .

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Feminist Ethics

Feminist Ethics aims “to understand, criticize, and correct” how gender operates within our moral beliefs and practices (Lindemann 2005, 11) and our methodological approaches to ethical theory. More specifically, feminist ethicists aim to understand, criticize, and correct: (1) the binary view of gender, (2) the privilege historically available to men, and/or (3) the ways that views about gender maintain oppressive social orders or practices that harm others, especially girls and women who historically have been subordinated, along gendered dimensions including sexuality and gender-identity. Since oppression often involves ignoring the perspectives of the marginalized, different approaches to feminist ethics have in common a commitment to better understand the experiences of persons oppressed in gendered ways. That commitment results in a tendency, in feminist ethics, to take into account empirical information and material actualities.

Not all feminist ethicists correct all of (1) through (3). Some have assumed or upheld the gender binary (Wollstonecraft 1792; Firestone 1970). They criticize and aim to correct the privileging of men as the more morally worthy half of the binary, or argue against the maintenance of a social order that oppresses others in gendered ways. More recently, feminist ethicists have commonly criticized the gender binary itself, arguing that upholding a fixed conception of the world as constituted only by “biological” men and women contributes to the maintenance of oppressive and gendered social orders, especially when doing so marginalizes those who do not conform to gender binaries (Butler 1990; Bettcher 2014; Dea 2016a). Feminist ethicists who are attentive to the intersections of multiple aspects of identity including race, class, and disability, in addition to gender, criticize and correct assumptions that men simpliciter are historically privileged, as if privilege distributes equally among all men regardless of how they are socially situated. They instead focus more on criticizing and correcting oppressive practices that harm and marginalize others who live at these intersections in order to account for the distinctive experiences of women whose experiences are not those of members of culturally dominant groups (Crenshaw 1991; Khader 2013). Whatever the focus of feminist ethicists, a widely shared characteristic of their works is at least some overt attention to power, privilege, or limited access to social goods. In a broad sense, then, feminist ethics is fundamentally political (Tong 1993, 160). This is not necessarily a feature of feminist ethics that distinguishes it from “mainstream” ethics, however, since feminist analyses of ethical theory as arising from material and nonideal contexts suggest that all ethics is political whether its being so is recognized by the theorist or not.

Since feminist ethics is not merely a branch of ethics, but is instead “a way of doing ethics” (Lindemann 2005, 4), philosophers engaged in the above tasks can be concerned with any branch of ethics, including meta-ethics, normative theory, and practical or applied ethics. The point of feminist ethics is, ideally, to change ethics for the better by improving ethical theorizing and offering better approaches to issues including those involving gender. Feminist ethics is not limited to gendered issues because the insights of feminist ethics are often applicable to analyses of moral experiences that share features with gendered issues or that reflect the intersection of gender with other bases of oppression. Feminist philosophical endeavors include bringing investigations motivated by feminist ethics to bear on ethical issues, broadly conceived.

1.1 Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Forerunners of Feminist Ethics

1.2 nineteenth-century influences and issues, 1.3 twentieth-century influences and issues, 2.1 gender binarism, essentialism, and separatism, 2.2 ethic of care as a feminine or gendered approach to morality, 2.3 intersectionality, 2.4 feminist criticisms and expansions of traditional moral theories, 2.5 rejections of absolutism: pragmatism, transnational feminism, and nonideal theory, other internet resources, related entries, 1. feminist ethics: historical background.

Feminist ethics as an academic area of study in the field of philosophy dates to the 1970s, when philosophical journals started more frequently publishing articles specifically concerned with feminism and sexism (Korsmeyer 1973; Rosenthal 1973; Jaggar 1974), and after curricular programs of Women’s Studies began to be established in some universities (Young 1977; Tuana 2011). Readers interested in themes evident in the fifty years of feminist ethics in philosophy will find this discussion in section (2) below, “Themes in Feminist Ethics.”

Prior to 1970, “there was no recognized body of feminist philosophy” (Card 2008, 90). Of course, throughout history, philosophers have attempted to understand the roles that gender may play in moral life. Yet such philosophers presumably were addressing male readers, and their accounts of women’s moral capacities did not usually aim to disrupt the subordination of women. Rarely in the history of philosophy will one find philosophical works that notice gender in order to criticize and correct men’s historical privileges or to disrupt the social orders and practices that subordinate groups on gendered dimensions. An understanding that sex matters to one’s ethical theorizing in some way is necessary to, but not sufficient for, feminist ethics.

Some philosophers and writers in almost every century, however, constitute forerunners to feminist ethics. Representative authors writing in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries discussed below explicitly address what they perceive to be moral wrongs resulting from either oppression on the basis of sex, or metaethical errors on the part of public intellectuals in believing ideal forms of moral reasoning to be within the capacities of men and not women. In the early-to-mid-twentieth century, at the same time that feminism became a more popularly used term in Europe and the Americas, more theorists argued influentially for ending unjust discrimination on the basis of sex. Some authors concertedly argued that philosophers and theorists erred in their understanding of what seemed to be gendered differences in ethical and moral reasoning.

In the seventeenth century, some public intellectuals published treatises arguing that women were as rational as men and should be afforded the education that would allow them to develop their moral character. They argued that since females are rational, their unequal access to learning was immoral and unjustifiable. They explored meta-ethical questions about the preconditions for morality, including what sorts of agents can be moral and whether morality is equally possible for different sexes. For example, in 1694, Mary Astell’s first edition of A Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest was published, advocating for access to education. It was controversial enough that Astell issued a sequel three years later, A Serious Proposal, Part II , that challenged “those deep background philosophical and theological assumptions which deny women the capacity for improvement of the mind” (Springborg, “Introduction,” in Astell 2002, 21). At the time, some apparently attributed the first Serious Proposal not to Astell, but to Damaris Cudworth Masham, a one-time companion of John Locke, since such criticisms of the injustice of women’s lot and the background assumptions maintaining their subordinate situation were familiar to Masham (Springborg, “Introduction,” in Astell 2002, 17). Although Masham sharply disagreed with aspects of Astell’s work, she too would later come to be credited with “explicitly feminist claims,” including objections to “the inferior education accorded women” (Frankel 1989, 84), especially when such obstacles were due to “the ignorance of men” (Masham 1705, 169, quoted in Frankel 1989, 85). Masham also deplored “the double standard of morality imposed on women and men, especially … the claim that women's ‘virtue’ consists primarily in chastity” (Frankel 1989, 85).

A century later, Mary Wollstonecraft, in her Vindication of the Rights of Women ([1792] 1988), renewed attention to girls’ lack of access to education. Criticizing the philosophical assumptions underpinning practices that denied girls adequate education, Wollstonecraft articulated an Enlightenment ideal of the social and moral rights of women as the equal of men. Wollstonecraft also broadened her critique of social structures to encompass ethical theory, especially in resistance to the arguments of influential men that women’s virtues are different from men’s and appropriate to perceived feminine duties. Wollstonecraft asserted: “I here throw down my gauntlet, and deny the existence of sexual virtues,” adding that “women, I allow, may have different duties to fulfil; but they are human duties, and the principles that should regulate the discharge of them … must be the same” (51). The revolutions of the Enlightenment age motivated some men as well as women to reconsider inequities in education at a time when notions of universal human rights were gaining prominence. As Joan Landes observes, Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet was an extraordinary advocate for the rights of women in France during the same period who argued in 1790 for “the admission of women to the rights of citizenship” and “woman's equal humanity on the grounds of reason and justice” (Landes 2016). Like many theorists of their time and places, including Catherine Macaulay (Tomaselli 2016), Olympe de Gouges, and Madame de Staël (Landes 2016), Wollstonecraft and Condorcet granted that there were material differences between the sexes, but advanced moral arguments against ethical double-standards on the basis of universal humanism. Yet the notion of universal humanism tended to prioritize virtues traditionally seen as masculine. Wollstonecraft, for example, argued against perceptions that women lacked men’s capacities for morality, but praised rationality and “masculinity” as preconditions for morality (Tong 1993, 44).

In Europe and North America, nineteenth-century moral arguments coalesced around material issues that would later be appreciated by feminist ethicists as importantly intersecting. A remarkably diverse array of activist women and public intellectuals advanced recognizably feminist arguments for women’s moral leadership and greater freedoms as moral imperatives. The resistance of enslaved women and the political activism of their descendants, the anti-slavery organizations of women in Europe and North America, the attention to inequity in women’s access to income, property, sexual freedom, full citizenship, and enfranchisement, and the rise of Marxist and Socialist theories contributed to women’s participation in arguments for the reductions of militarism, unfettered capitalism, domestic violence and the related abuse of drugs and alcohol, among other concerns.

Offering the first occurrence of the term feminisme (Offen 1988), the nineteenth century is characterized by a plurality of approaches to protofeminist ethics, that is, ethical theorizing that anticipated and created the groundwork for modern feminist concepts. These include some theories consistent with the universal humanism of Wollstonecraft and Condorcet and others emphasizing the differences between the sexes in order to argue for the superiority of feminine morality. The most well-known of the former in philosophy are John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women ([1869] 1987), which he credits Harriet Taylor Mill with co-authoring, and Harriet Taylor Mill’s essay, “The Enfranchisement of Women” (H. T. Mill [1851] 1998). Like their Enlightenment forerunners, Mill and Taylor argue that women ought to have equal rights and equal access to political and social opportunities. As a utilitarian philosopher, Mill further emphasizes the benefits to society and to the human species of improving women’s lives and social situations. Mill expresses skepticism about claims that women are morally superior to men, as well as claims that women have “greater liability to moral bias,” emotionality, and poor judgment in ethical decision-making ([1869] 1987, 518 and 519). Mill and Taylor tend to overemphasize the roles of women who are wives. They grant some differences between men and women that are controversial today; Mill’s works especially emphasize the benefits to family and domestic life as reasons to support the liberation of women from subjugation. Despite these views, both argue for the benefits of women’s liberation to scholarly and political spheres. For example, they describe differences in achievement and behavior to be the result mainly of women’s social situations and education, making their view consistent with the arguments of both the Enlightenment scholars noted above, and some, but not all, of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors discussed below.

Attitudes about the reasons for the moral goodness of such achievements differed. Some early utopian and Socialist movements in Europe that influenced women’s rights activists in America and would later influence British thinkers, including John Stuart Mill, lauded feminine virtues and women’s importance, but did so in ways that would reinforce views of women as “superior” because of innate qualities of gentleness, love, spirituality, and sentimentality (Moses 1982). In contrast, other Socialist movements expressed radical views of the equality of men and women not by attributing distinctive or greater moral virtues to women, but by challenging systems of privilege due to sex, race, and class (Taylor 1993). Although Mill and Taylor would later argue that “sexual inequality is an impediment to the cultivation of moral virtue,” some American activists such as Catherine Beecher forwarded a “separate-but-equal” vision of men and women as psychologically and essentially different, a view “according to which female virtue is ultimately better than male virtue” (Tong 1993, 36 and 37). In the pivotal year of 1848, Frederick Douglass insisted that “all that distinguishes man as an intelligent and accountable being, is equally true of woman” (quoted in Davis 2011, 51). In the same year, the Declaration of Sentiments was signed at a women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, and socialist and anarchist revolutions took place in Europe. The revolutionaries included public thinkers who advocated communal property and sexual equality, and who criticized the involvement of state and church in marriage. Their arguments about practical and feminist ethics influenced Emma Goldman and other turn-of-the-century thinkers.

Philosophical thinkers of different backgrounds gained greater access to education and printing presses in the nineteenth century, resulting in a plurality of approaches to the project of understanding, criticizing, and correcting how gender operates within our moral beliefs and practices. For example, the attachment of some protofeminist thinkers to the domestic virtues shaped their ethical recommendations. Some white and middle-class activists argued for the end of slavery and, later, against the subordination of emancipated women of color precisely on the grounds that they wished to extend the privileges that white and middle-class women enjoyed in the domestic and private sphere, maintaining the social order while valorizing domestic feminine goodness. As Clare Midgley says, “Women’s role was discussed in terms of family life. Emancipation would mark the end of the sexual exploitation of women and of the disruption of family life, and the creation of a society in which the black woman was able to occupy her proper station as a Daughter, a Wife, and a Mother” (Midgley 1993, 351).

In contrast, some former slaves including Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and descendants of slaves including Mary Church Terrell, grounded their work for women’s rights and arguments for women’s moral and sociopolitical equality in rather different priorities, asserting more interest in equal protection of the laws, economic liberation, political representation, and in Wells-Barnett’s case, self-defense and the exertion of the right to bear arms, as necessary to the very survival and liberation of Black Americans (Giddings 2007). Cooper, who rightly criticized white feminists for racist (and female-supremacist) statements when they were offered as reasons to work for white women’s voting rights rather than Black men’s, advanced a view of virtues and truth as having masculine and feminine sides. A century before care ethics would become a strain of academic feminist ethics, Cooper urged that both masculine reason and feminine sympathy “are needed to be worked into the training of children, in order that our boys may supplement their virility by tenderness and sensibility, and our girls may round out their gentleness by strength and self-reliance” (Cooper [1892] 2000, 60). Her timeless concern for the U.S. was that a nation or a people “will degenerate into mere emotionalism on the one hand, or bullyism on the other, if dominated by either exclusively” (61). Hers is a normative argument for appreciating the contributions that both traditionally feminine and masculine values could offer to a well-balanced ethics.

Explicitly arguing that standpoints matter to knowledge claims and moral theorizing, Cooper insisted that historical knowledge necessary to a nation’s self-understanding depends on the representation of Black Americans’ voices, and especially the “open-eyed but hitherto voiceless Black Woman of America” (Cooper [1892] 2000, 2; Gines 2015). Manifesting Cooper’s call for representations, Wells-Barnett determinedly included accounts of girls and women killed by lynching along with the narratives of murdered men and boys, and challenged the “racial-sexual apologies for lynching to trample the twin myths of white (female) sexual purity and black (male) sexual savagery” (James 1997, 80). Wells-Barnett’s investigative journalism led her to the blunt suggestion that some of the sexual relationships giving rise to cover stories of rape as justifications for lynching were consensual relationships between white women and Black men, while rapes of Black women and girls, “which began in slavery days, still continues without reproof from church, state or press” (quoted in Sterling 1979, 81).

Like Wells-Barnett, anarchist and socialist writers, some from working-class backgrounds, advanced frank arguments for differently understanding women’s capacities and desires as sexual beings with their own moral agency. Leaders included Emma Goldman, whose anarchism was developed as a response to Marx and Marxism (Fiala 2018). Goldman argued for broader understandings of love, sexuality, and family, because she believed that traditional social codes of morality resulted in the corruption of women’s sexual self-understanding (112). Like Wells-Barnett, Goldman coupled arguments against feminine sexual purity with attention to the sexual exploitation of, and trafficking in, women who did not enjoy the state’s protection (Goldman 2012). Some suffragists’ “emphasis on female morality repulsed Goldman. Yet, while she ridiculed the claim that women were morally superior to men … she also emphasized that women should be allowed and encouraged to express freely their ‘true’ femininity” (Marso 2010, 76).

Although early twentieth-century protofeminists differed in their beliefs as to whether men and women were morally different in character, they generally shared a belief in Progressive ideals of moral and social improvement if only humankind brought fair and rational thinking to bear on ethical issues. Progressive-era pragmatists, including Wells-Barnett, Charlotte Perkins-Gilman, Jane Addams, and Alice Paul, “saw the social environment as malleable, capable of improvement through human action and philosophic thought” (Whipps and Lake 2016). The beginning of the century was characterized by remarkably optimistic thinking even on the part of more radical theorists who appreciated the deep harms of oppressive social organizations. Most of the Progressive activists and suffragists of this era never described themselves with the new term, “feminist,” but as the immediate forerunners of feminism, they are described as feminists today.

Although belief in the possibilities for change seems widely shared, Progressive-era feminists did not always share common ground regarding women’s moral natures or how to achieve moral progress as a nation. For example, both Goldman and pro-suffrage Charlotte Perkins-Gilman argued for individual self-transformation and self-understanding as keys to women’s better moral characters (Goldman 2012), while maintaining that a person’s efforts were best supported by a less individualistic and more communitarian social and political framework (Gilman 1966). While Goldman included greater access to birth control and reproductive choice among the morally urgent routes to women’s individual self-discovery, Gilman and many feminists argued for women’s access to contraception in ways that reflected increasingly popular policies of eugenics in North and South America and Europe (Gilman 1932). Eugenics-friendly white women’s contributions of feminist ethical arguments to disrupt oppressive pronatalism or to avert the measurable costs of parenthood in sexist societies often took the form of deepening other forms of marginalization, including those based on race, disability, and class (Lamp and Cleigh 2011).

In the U.S., the centrality of sex and gender issues in public ethics reached a high-water mark during the Progressive Era, moving one magazine to write in 1914 that “The time has come to define feminism; it is no longer possible to ignore it” (Cott 1987, 13). Unfortunately, this sentiment would decline with the start of World War I and the consequent demise of optimistic beliefs in the powers of human rationality to bring about moral progress. Yet throughout the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, as economic difficulties, military conflicts, and wealth disparity fluctuated internationally, women’s groups and feminist activists in many countries would advance, with some success, feminist and moral arguments for workplace, professional, electoral, and educational access, for the liberalization of contraception, marriage, and divorce laws, and against militarism. Some of their gains in greater access to voting, education, and prosperity may have contributed to the wide audience that was receptive to Simone de Beauvoir’s publications in Europe and, after translations were available, in North America.

Beauvoir first self-identified as a feminist in 1972 (Schwarzer 1984, 32), and consistently refused the label of a philosopher despite having taught courses in philosophy (Card 2003, 9). Yet beginning in the 1950s, both her Ethics of Ambiguity ([1947] 1976) and The Second Sex ([1949] 2010) were widely read and quickly appreciated as important to feminist ethics (Card 2003, 1). As works of existentialist morality, they emphasized that we are not all simply subjects and individual choosers but also objects shaped by the forces of oppression (Andrew 2003, 37). Like the protofeminists described above, Beauvoir focused on the embodied experiences and social situations of women. In these pivotal works, she advanced the case that embodiment and social situatedness are not only relevant to human existence, but are the stuff of human existence, so crucial that philosophy ought not ignore them (Andrew 2003, 34). In The Second Sex , she argued that some men in philosophy managed the bad-faith project of both ignoring their own sex-situatedness and yet describing women as the Other and men as the Self. Because men in philosophy take themselves to be paradigmatically human and take it upon themselves to characterize the nature of womankind as different from men, Beauvoir said that men socially construct woman as the Other. Famously, Beauvoir said, “one is not born, but rather becomes, woman,” that is, one may be born a human female, but “the figure that the human female takes on in society,” that of a “woman,” results from “the mediation of another [that] can constitute an individual as an Other” (Beauvoir [1949] 2010, 329). The embodied human female may be a subject of her own experiences and perceptions, but “being a woman would mean being an object, the Other” (83), that is, the objectified recipient of the speculations and perceptions of men. Beauvoir described a woman who would transcend this situation “as hesitating between the role of object, of Other that is proposed to her, and her claim for freedom” (84), that is, her freedom to assert her own subjectivity, to make her own choices as to who she is, especially when she is not defined in relation to men. A woman’s position is therefore so deeply ambiguous—one of navigating “a human condition as defined in its relation with the Other” (196)—that if one is to philosophize about women, “it is indispensable to understand the economic and social structure” in which women aim to be authentic or ethical, necessitating “an existential point of view, taking into account her total situation” (84). In other words, philosophers speculating about women ought to take into account the obstacles to women’s opportunities for subjecthood and choice that are created by those who constructed an oppressive situation for women to navigate.

Beauvoir’s positions—that woman has been defined by men and in men’s terms, that ethical theory must attend to women’s social situation and their capacity to be moral decision-makers, and that women’s oppression impedes their knowing themselves and changing their situation—reflect the concerns of many forerunners of feminist ethics. Beauvoir’s work profoundly shaped the emergence of feminist ethics as a subfield of philosophy at a time when philosophers more generally had moved away from the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tendencies to describe women as lacking morally worthy rational capacities. Instead, by the middle of the twentieth century, some influential philosophers in Europe and the Americas had moved toward approaches that often led to describing both gender and ethics as irrelevant to philosophical discourse (Garry 2017).

2. Themes in feminist ethics

In the fifty years that feminist ethics has been a subject of philosophical scholarship in (initially) Western and (increasingly) international discourse, theorists have considered metaethical, theoretical, and practical questions. Questions that occupied scholars in preceding centuries, especially those regarding moral agents’ natural (and gendered) capacities for moral deliberation, are critically reconsidered in debates that arose in the 1970s and 1980s. One main area of inquiry addresses whether and why there may be meaningful differences in feminine and masculine priorities of care and justice in normative theory. Concern about feminist methods of articulating ethical theories arise during this time and continue. These debates can be found in the scholarship of intersectionality, Black feminist thought and women of color feminism, transnational feminism, queer theory, disability studies, and twenty-first century criticisms of feminist ethics. They are of special concern whenever feminist ethicists seem to uphold a gender binary and simplistic conceptualizations of woman as a category. Questions about the shortcomings of traditional ethical theories, about which virtues constitute morally good character in contexts of oppression, and about which kinds of ethical theories will ameliorate gendered oppressions and evils generate critical scholarship in every decade.

Gender binarism, which is the view that there are only two genders—male and female—and that everyone is only one of them (Dea 2016a, 108), is assumed by most feminist ethicists in the 1970s and 1980s (Jaggar 1974; Daly 1979). Some of these feminists criticize male supremacy without thereby preferring female supremacy (Frye 1983; Card 1986; Hoagland 1988). They argue that although the categories of “men” and “women” are physiologically distinct, the potential of feminism to liberate both men and women from oppressive gendered social arrangements suggests that men and women do not have different moralities or separate realities, and that we do not need to articulate separate capacities for ethics (Jaggar 1974; Davion 1998).

Other feminist ethicists offer radically different views. Mary Daly, for example, argues in Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism that women were traditionally defined throughout intellectual history as being subversive of rationality, impartiality, and morality as traditionally conceived. Daly argues that women ought to embrace, as essential to women’s natures and good, some of the very qualities that she says men have ascribed to women as essential to women’s natures and bad. Daly suggests valuing both women’s capacities for childbearing and birth (as opposed to capacities to engage in war and killing) and women’s emotionality (versus rationality) (Daly 1979).

Radical feminists and lesbian feminists who disagree with Daly as to whether women’s moral natures are innately better than men’s agree with Daly in arguing either for essentialism (Griffin 1978; cf. Spelman 1988 and Witt 1995) or for women’s separation from men (Card 1988; Hoagland 1988). Some of them argue that separatism allows a setting in which to create alternative ethics, rather than merely responding to the male-dominated ethical theories traditionally discussed in the academy. They also argue that separatism better fosters women’s increased connection to each other and denies men the access to women that men might expect (Daly 1979; Frye 1983; Hoagland 1988).

In deep disagreement, philosophers such as Alison Jaggar argue against separatism as being in any way productive of a different and morally better world. Jaggar maintains that “what we must do instead is to create a new androgynous culture which incorporates the best elements of both …, which values both personal relationships and efficiency, both emotion and rationality. This result cannot be achieved through sexual separation” (Jaggar 1974, 288). Related arguments for androgynous approaches to ethics are influential in arguments supporting androgyny, gender bending, and gender-blending that are prevalent in the 1990s (Butler 1990; Butler 1993), and gender-eliminativist and humanist approaches to feminist ethics and social philosophy that are prevalent in the twenty-first century (LaBrada 2016; Mikkola 2016; Ayala and Vasilyeva 2015; Haslanger 2012).

One criticism of gender binarism is that its assumption marginalizes nonconforming individuals. In efforts described as promoting coalition between trans activists and non-trans feminists, some feminists argue that we ought to examine the gender privilege inherent in presuming a binary that reflects one’s own experience better than the experiences of others (Dea 2016a; Bettcher 2014). Yet such “beyond-the-binary” approaches, in turn, have been cautioned against as well-intentioned but, at times, invalidating trans identities, “by invalidating the self-identities of trans people who do not regard their genitals as wrong” or “by representing all trans people as problematically positioned with regard to the binary” (Bettcher 2013). Recognition of “reality enforcement” and its interconnection with racist and sexist oppression may better defray the harms of normalizing a gender binary (Bettcher 2013).

Jaggar argues against separatism or separate gendered realities, noting that there is no reason “to believe in a sexual polarity which transcends the physiological distinction” (Jaggar 1974, 283). The work of psychologist Carol Gilligan therefore has great influence on philosophers interested in just such evidence for substantial sex differences in moral reasoning, despite the fact that Gilligan herself does not describe these differences as polar. In her landmark work, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (1982), Gilligan disputes accounts of moral development that do not take into account girls’ moral experiences (18–19), or that describe women as stuck at an interpersonal stage short of full moral development as in the theories of Lawrence Kohlberg (30). Gilligan argues that Kohlberg wrongly prioritizes a “morality of rights” and independence from others as better than, rather than merely different from, a “morality of responsibility” and intimate relationships with others (19).

Gilligan’s research follows Nancy Chodorow’s in suggesting that for boys and men, “separation and individuation are critically tied to gender identity” (Gilligan 1982, 8). Further, the development of masculinity typically involves valuing autonomy, rights, disconnection from others, and independence, while seeing other persons and intimate relationships as dangers or obstacles to pursuing those values. This perspective is referred to as the “perspective of justice” (Held 1995; Blum 1988). Women, in Gilligan’s studies, were as likely to express the perspective of justice as they were to express a perspective that valued intimacy, responsibility, relationships, and caring for others, while seeing autonomy as “the illusory and dangerous quest” (Gilligan 1982, 48), in tension with the values of attachment. This perspective is known as the perspective of “care” (Friedman 1991; Driver 2005).

Philosophers who apply Gilligan’s empirical results to ethical theory differ about the role that a care perspective should play in normative recommendations. Nel Noddings’s influential work, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (1984), argues for the moral preferability of a care perspective as both feminine and, as she later says explicitly, feminist (Noddings 2013, xxiv), orienting moral agents to focus on the needs of those one cares for in relational contexts rather than on abstract, universal principles. Like her historical predecessors discussed above, Noddings emphasizes the feminine “to direct attention to centuries of experience more typical of women than men” (xxiv), in part to correct the extent to which “the mother’s voice has been silent” (1). Noddings’s normative theory endorses the moral value of partiality that justifies prioritizing interpersonal relationships over more distant connections. Virginia Held’s (1993; 2006) and Joan Tronto’s (1993) different applications of the perspective of care endorse care as social and political rather than limited to interpersonal relationships, and suggest that an ethic of care provides a route to realizing better societies as well as better treatment of distant others. Both Held and Sara Ruddick (1989) urge societal shifts to prioritize children’s vulnerabilities and the perspectives of mothers as necessary correctives to moral and political neglect of policies that would ensure the well-being of vulnerable people in relationships requiring care. This concern is further elaborated in Eva Feder Kittay’s attention to caregivers as “secondarily” or “derivatively dependent” (1999). In normative theory and applied ethics, care-work and caring in workplace relationships have come to receive more attention in twenty-first century philosophy than previously, as appreciation for the ethical demands of relational support-provision and client-centered or helping professions come to be influenced by variations on the ethic of care (Kittay 1999; Feder and Kittay 2002; Tronto 2005; Lanoix 2010; Reiheld 2015).

Robin Dillon observes that, “Care ethics was for some time the dominant approach in feminist ethics and so feminist discussions of virtue” (2017b, 574). Although the ethic of care continues to be strongly associated with feminist ethics, Gilligan’s work in psychology and Noddings’s work in philosophy were immediately contested (Superson 2012). Some feminist ethicists have argued that the ethic of care valorizes the burdened history of femininity associated with caring (Card 1996). The complex history of femininity and caregiving practices were shaped in contexts of oppression that may permit “moral damage” to women’s agency (Tessman 2005). If that burdened feminine history includes attention to particular relationships at the expense of attention to wider social institutions and systematic political injustice, then the ethic of care runs the risk of lacking a feminist vision for changing systematic and institutional forms of oppression (Hoagland 1990; Bell 1993). Further worries about the ethic of care include whether unidirectional caring enables the exploitation of caregivers (Houston 1990; Card 1990; Davion 1993), and whether such caring excludes moral responsibilities to strangers and individuals we may affect without meeting interpersonally (Card 1990), thereby risking an insular ethic that ignores political and material realities (Hoagland 1990). Another concern is whether we risk generalizing some women’s prioritizing caring to all women, which disregards the complex pluralism of many women’s voices (Moody-Adams 1991). Finally, preoccupation with women’s kinder and gentler feelings may prevent or distract from attention to women’s capacities for harm and injustice, especially the injustices borne of racial and class privilege (Spelman 1991).

The above criticisms tend to proceed from a view that it is problematic that an ethic of care is predicated on seeing femininity as valuable. They suggest that critical feminist perspectives require us to doubt the value of femininity. However, it remains controversial whether femininity is necessarily defined in relationship to masculinity and is thereby an inauthentic or insufficiently critical perspective for feminist ethics, or whether femininity is a distinctive contribution of moral and valuing agents to a feminist project that rejects or corrects some of the errors and excesses of legacies of masculinity (Irigaray 1985; Harding 1987; Tong 1993; Bartky 1990).

One way that some philosophers offer to resolve the possible tension between conceptions of femininity and feminism is to bring intersectional approaches to the question as to whose femininity is being discussed. Concerns that femininity is antithetical to a critical feminist perspective seem to presuppose a conception of femininity as passive, gentle, obedient, emotional, and dependent, in contrast with a conception of masculinity as its opposite. In a philosophical tradition dominated by white and masculine philosophers, describing femininity as necessarily the opposite of one’s conception of masculinity in a gender binary makes limited sense. Scholars of intersectionality point out, however, that identities are not binary: “the masculinity and femininity in play here are not racially unmarked (if only for the reason that gender is never racially unmarked)” (James 2013, 752). The insights of philosophers of Black Feminism, intersectionality, queer theory, critical race theory, disability studies, and transfeminism, among others, contribute to a view that there is no universal definition of femininity or of the category of woman that neatly applies to all women. Some of these philosophers suggest that the distinctive moral and valuing experiences of women and individuals of all genders may be unjustly ignored or denied by a conception of women or femininity that turns out to be white, ableist, and cisgender (Crenshaw 1991; Collins 1990; Wendell 1996; hooks 1992; Tremain 2000; Serano 2007; McKinnon 2014). Intersectional approaches reject binaries such as “masculinity/femininity” that tend to take the social positions of privileged people as generic. Minimally, intersectionality is “the predominant way of conceptualizing the relation between systems of oppression which construct our multiple identities and our social locations in hierarchies of power and privilege,” offering a remedy to histories of exclusions in feminist theory (Carastathis 2014, 304).

Although intersectional insights can be found in the works of writers even from the distant past, the predominance of intersectionality in feminist ethics today is largely owed to Black feminists and critical race theorists, who were the first to argue for the significance of intersectionality (Crenshaw 1989; Collins 1990; Gines 2014; Bailey 2009). Kimberlé Crenshaw describes intersectionality in different senses: as an experience, an approach, and a problem (Crenshaw 1989; Crenshaw 1991). Crenshaw’s description of intersectionality as an experience includes the phenomena of oppressive practices and harms that occur at, and because of, intersections of aspects of identity. For example, when Black men, but not any women, were permitted to work on a General Motors factory floor, and white women, but not any Black persons, were permitted to work in the General Motors secretarial pool, then Black women were discriminated against as Black women. That is, they were not permitted to have any job at General Motors due to living at an intersection of categories of identity that are treated separately in the law (Crenshaw 1989). Crenshaw’s description of intersectionality as an approach includes centering the lives and testimony of those whose experiences with living at intersections of oppressions have been ignored or denied in traditional philosophical and political theories (Crenshaw 1989; Crenshaw 1991; hooks 1984; Dotson 2014; Lorde 1990; Lugones 1987; Lugones 2014). Crenshaw’s description of intersectionality as a problem includes disrupting the traditional overlooking of Black women’s experiences, and offering the experiences and the approaches described above as challenges to the doctrine that discrimination occurs only along one axis of identity (Crenshaw 1989, 141). Intersectionality is pursued in the interests of expanding understandings of differences and accounting for the experiences of people previously spoken for, if addressed at all, rather than consulted.

Not all philosophers who embrace appreciation of the insights of intersectionality agree on whether it yields a distinct methodology, or a starting point for better inquiry, or a better conception of experiences of oppression (Khader 2013; Garry 2011). Serene Khader suggests that intersectional theories “are united by a critique of what Crenshaw (1991) calls ‘additive’ models of identity” that assume that individuals at intersections of traditionally oppressed identity categories are “necessarily worse off than the individual facing a single oppression,” as if each dimension on which one can be oppressed is easily separable in categories traditionally conceived in isolation (Khader 2013, 75). Instead, “intersectional theorists argue that the oppressions facing multiply oppressed women co-constitute one another and situate those women such that attempts to advance the interests of ‘all women’ may fail to advance theirs” (Khader 2013, 75).

Intersectionality is not without its critics in feminist ethics. For example, Naomi Zack (2005) argues that an intersectional approach to concepts such as that of woman successfully demonstrates problems with essentialism with respect to women’s natures, but degrades the category of woman, “multiplying axes of analysis and thus gender categories beyond necessity” (Bailey 2009, 21) to an extent that may thereby fragment attempts to advocate for women (Zack 2005; Ludvig 2006; Sengupta 2006). Some feminists who support intersectionality have responded to Zack’s concerns by arguing that everyday concepts such as woman include an array of identities, including distinct gender identities that bear a family resemblance and include a range of manifestations (Garry 2011). Other feminists have responded to Zack’s concerns for feminist movement or solidarity by arguing for the possibilities of working in coalitions that do not require widely shared commonality, working to learn from and about positions of difference, and cultivating more humility and less arrogance in theorizing (Lorde 1984; Lugones 1987; Reagon 2000; Bailey 2009; Carastathis 2014; Sheth 2014; Ruíz and Dotson 2017). Other feminist ethicists raise tensions in intersectional theory that are not intended to undermine the approach but to ask for elaboration of its details, including its very definition (Nash 2008). The appeal for these clarifications, however, may reflect traditions that intersectionality is dedicated to disrupting, since it is made in the context of the pursuit of justification, habits of opposition, and a narrow sense of definitional work that is typical in philosophy, a field that has a reputation for lacking appreciation for diverse practitioners (Dotson 2013).

If there is a commonality between all of the above feminist ethicists, it is their interest in provoking reconsideration of ethical theories that failed either to notice or to care when the perspective of the philosopher so criticized was taken for either a generic truth about moral theory or a gender-specific and false description of human nature. Elena Flores Ruíz observes that “professional philosophy sleepwalks ; its somnambulatory practices stroll silently, policing checkpoints without the burden of consciousness of its actions and practices” (2014, 199). In other words, philosophers have at times presumed that they speak for many without sufficient attention to their own presumptions. Ruíz’s claim is akin to Rosemarie Tong’s observation made decades earlier, that traditional ethical theory demonstrates “a sleepy inattentiveness to women’s concerns” (1993, 160). The provocation to alertness is evident in feminist critiques of traditional ethical theories such as deontology, consequentialism, social contract theory, and virtue ethics. Some feminist ethicists sympathetically extend canonical work to concerns that male theorists did not address, while other feminist ethicists resoundingly reject traditional ethical theories because the theories rely on a conception of moral agency or moral value with which they disagree.

2.4.1 Deontology, rights, and duties

Some feminist ethicists endorse deontological moral theories on the grounds that granting women—who have been subordinated in private and public spheres—the same rights routinely granted to men in positions of power would enable women’s freedom and flourishing, especially in contexts of political liberalism. Feminist ethicists have long argued that we should acknowledge women’s equal capacities for moral agency and extend human rights to them (Astell 1694; Wollstonecraft 1792; Stanton [1848] 1997; Mill [1869] 1987; Nussbaum 1999; Baehr 2004; Stone-Mediatore 2004; Hay 2013). While building on existing frameworks of liberalism, rights theory, and deontology, feminist ethicists have argued for granting rights where they have been previously neglected (Brennan 2010). They have argued for rights in the issues of enfranchisement (Truth [1867] 1995), reproduction (Steinbock 1994), abortion (Thomson 1971), bodily integrity (Varden 2012), women’s and non-heterosexual people’s sexuality (Goldman 2012; Cuomo 2007), sexual harassment (Superson 1993), pornography (Easton 1995), violence against women (Dauer and Gomez 2006), rape (MacKinnon 2006), and more. While recognizing limits to the universality of women’s experiences, feminist philosophers have argued for global human rights as a remedy for gendered oppression and dehumanization (Cudd 2005; Meyers 2016).

Feminist criticism of duty-centered frameworks, or, deontology, include those articulated by authors of the ethic of care, who argue against an ethic of duty, especially Kantian ethics, on several grounds. First, they claim that it proceeds from absolutist and universal principles which are unduly prioritized over consideration of the material contexts informing embodied experiences, particularities, and relationships. Second, they claim that it inaccurately separates capacities for rationality from capacities for emotion, and that it wrongly describes the latter as morally uninformative or worthless most likely because of their traditional association with women or femininity (Noddings 1984; Held 1993; Slote 2007). Moreover, an ethic of duty is likely to overly idealize moral agents’ capacities for rationality and choice (Tronto 1995; Tessman 2015). Some feminist ethicists embrace forms of obligation yet reject Kantian deontology when it denies the possibility of moral dilemmas (Tessman 2015). Feminists who argue that duties are socially constructed, rather than a priori, ground the nature of obligations in the normative practices of the nonideal world (Walker 1998; Walker 2003).

Transnational feminists, scholars of intersectionality, and postcolonial feminists argue that feminist advocates of global human rights routinely impose their own cultural expectations and regional practices upon the women who are purportedly the objects of their concern (Mohanty 1997; Narayan 1997; Narayan 2002; Silvey 2009; Narayan 2013; Khader 2018a; Khader 2018b). Critical analyses of some feminist deontologists’ concerns include arguments that universal morals, rights, and duties are not the best bulwark against relativist condonation of any and all possible treatments of women and subordinated people (Khader 2018b) and suggest that advocacy of human rights is perhaps well-intentioned but “entangled with imperialist precommitments in the contemporary West” (Khader 2018a, 19).

2.4.2 Consequentialism and utilitarianism

Since John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill argued both for utilitarianism and against the subjection of women, one could say that there have been feminists as long as there have been utilitarians. In The Subjection of Women ([1869] 1987), Mill argues that the desirable outcome of human moral progress generally is hindered by women’s legal and social subordination. He adds that not only each woman’s, but each man’s personal moral character is directly harmed by the injustice of unequal social arrangements (Okin 2005). Mill expresses special concern that “the object of being attractive to men had … become the polar star of feminine education and formation of character,” an immoral “influence over the minds of women” (Mill [1869] 1987, 28–29), as well as an immoral influence on the understandings of the boys and girls that such women raise. Consistent with the utilitarian principle that everyone counts equally and no single person’s preferences count more than another’s, Mill argues that men and women are fundamentally equal in their capacities for higher and lower pleasures and, arguably, in their responsibilities and interests (Mendus 1994). Harriet Taylor likewise argues in The Enfranchisement of Women for the moral improvement of humankind generally and “the elevation of character [and] intellect” that would permit each woman and man to be both morally better and happier, which are overlapping and important considerations to Taylor (1998, 65).

Contemporary feminist ethicists who address utilitarianism either critique Mill’s work in particular (Annas 1977; Mendus 1994; Morales 2005), or defend a feminist version of consequentialism (Driver 2005; Gardner 2012), or apply consequentialist aims to feminist issues (Tulloch 2005; Dea 2016b). Some consequentialist feminists provide reasons for thinking that utilitarianism can accommodate feminist aims because it is responsive to empirical information, can accommodate the value of relationships in good lives, and is appreciative of distinctive vulnerabilities (Driver 2005).

Critics of utilitarianism include those who specifically resist the expectation of utilitarian impartiality, insofar as impartiality in decision-making ignores emotional connections or personal relationships with particular beings. Feminists have advanced criticisms of impartiality from the points of view of care ethics (Noddings 1984; Held 2006; Ruddick 1989), ecofeminist or environmental ethics (Adams 1990; Donovan 1990; George 1994; Warren 2000), and analytical social ethics (Baier 1994; Friedman 1994). Impartiality may yield implausible requirements to value the well-being of all equally regardless of one’s commitments, material circumstances in a nonideal world, or obligations of caring (Walker 1998; Walker 2003). Impartiality as a desirable quality of moral agents may overly idealize moral agency (Tessman 2015) or tacitly presume a biased perspective in favor of adult, racially privileged, masculine agents in a formal or public sphere whose decisions are unencumbered by relationships of unequal power (Kittay 1999).

Some feminists criticize consequentialism for failing to capture the qualitatively problematic nature of oppressions that are not reducible to harms (Frye 1983; Card 1996; Young 2009). For example, Card argues that even if certain behavior does not produce more harm than good, its symbolism could violate one’s dignity. Her example is the case of women being barred from Harvard’s Lamont Law library even when helpful male classmates provided them photocopies of course readings (2002, 104–105). Card also objects on Rawlsian grounds that the wrongness of slavery was not the balance of benefits and harms, contra consequentialism, but the fact that trade-offs could never justify slavery (2002, 57).

Anti-imperialist and non-Western feminists argue that Mill’s views in particular purport to be universal but include “Western European biases and instrumental reasoning” that establish “problematic rhetorical models for women’s rights arguments” (Botting and Kronewitter 2012). For example, Eileen Botting and Sean Kronewitter argue that The Subjection of Women contains several examples of primitivist and Orientalist rhetorical moves, such as associating “the barbarism of patriarchal marriage with Eastern cultures and religions” (2012, 471). They also object that Mill offers instrumental arguments for women’s rights, such as favoring the reduction of men’s selfishness and the increase in men’s intellectual stimulation in marriage, as well as doubling mental resources for the higher service of humanity (2012, 470), suggesting that women’s liberation is secondary to greater purposes.

2.4.3 Moral contractarianism

Some feminist ethicists argue for forms of contractarian ethics, that is, the view “that moral norms derive their normative force from the idea of contract or mutual agreement” (Cudd and Eftekhari 2018). Contractarian ethics permit moral agents to critically assess the value of any relationship, especially family relationships that may be oppressive on gendered dimensions (Okin 1989; Hampton 1993; Sample 2002; Radzik 2005). Other feminist contractarians appreciate Hobbes’s social contract theory for its applicability to women in positions of vulnerability. For example, Jean Hampton endorses Hobbes’s view that “you are under no obligation to make yourself prey to others” (Hampton 1998, 236). Hampton combines insights of both Kant and Hobbes in her version of feminist contractarianism, “building in the Kantian assumption that all persons have intrinsic value and thus must have their interests respected” (Superson 2012; see also Richardson 2007). Contractarianism arguably corrects gross injustices and inequities traceable to gendered oppressions and the most serious evils that are socially constructed (Anderson 1999; Hartley and Watson 2010).

Some feminists argue for the usefulness of contractarian ethics to evaluate one’s adaptive preferences, that is, “preferences formed in unconscious response to oppression” (Walsh 2015, 829). For example, Mary Barbara Walsh argues that social contract theory models “the conditions of autonomous choice, independence and dialogical reflection,” and therefore “exposes preferences that fail to meet” the conditions of autonomy. Feminist contractarianism may thereby generate new understandings of social contracts grounded in appreciation of material conditions, commitments, and consent (Stark 2007; Welch 2012). Feminist contractarians whose moral theories are influenced by John Rawls’s political philosophy suggest that his methodology, which involves reasoning from behind a veil of ignorance to decide which rules persons are rational to agree to, promotes critical appraisal of preferences that one would not hold in a better world (Richardson 2007, 414).

Feminist critics of contractarianism also raise concerns about adaptive preferences. In the actual, nonideal conditions in which individuals and groups develop, dominant perspectives and oppressive social arrangements can make persons come to prefer things that they would not otherwise prefer, such that the resultant preferences, when satisfied, are not for the agent’s own good, and may even contribute to her group’s oppression (Superson 2012). Feminists who are concerned that not all moral agents can meaningfully consent to contracts point to examples of women who are denied access to the public sphere, the market, education, and information (Held 1987; Pateman 1988). Others point out that traditionally, social contract theory has not attended to the inclusion of the needs of children, disabled community members, or their caregivers (Held 1987; Kittay 1999; Edenberg and Friedman 2013). Feminist critics of contractarianism tend to argue both for full consideration of needs born of differences between bodies and social locations, and against describing gender, embodiment, or dependency as a mere secondary characteristic irrelevant to what a body in need of care requires to flourish and thus what a “reasonable man” would choose behind a veil of ignorance (Nussbaum 2006; Pateman and Mills 2007).

2.4.4 Virtue ethics

Some feminist ethicists contend that virtue ethics, which focuses on living a good life or flourishing, offers the best approach to ensuring that ethical theory correctly represents the conditions permitting vulnerable bodies to flourish in oppressive contexts. Although virtue ethics is most notably associated with Aristotle, whose idealized and masculine agent is not generally considered paradigmatically feminist (Berges 2015, 3–4), feminists and their forerunners have engaged critically for several centuries with questions about which virtues and qualities of character would promote a good life in the context of what we now describe as women’s subordination. Philosophers who argue for feminist ethical virtues raise concerns that sexist oppression presents challenges to the exercise of virtues on the part of women and gender non-conforming people. Robin Dillon observes that feminist virtue ethics “identifies problems for character in contexts of domination and subordination and proposes ways of addressing those problems, and it identifies problems of unreflective theory and proposes power-conscious alternatives” (2017a, 381). Because the history of traditional virtue ethics is freighted with past characterizations of virtues as either gendered or as universal but less accessible to women, Dillon proposes what she calls “feminist critical character ethics” as an alternative to feminist virtue ethics (2017a, 380). Advocates of feminist virtue ethics and critical character ethics consider the relationships of gender to accounts of character, virtues, vices, and good lives (Baier 1994; Card 1996; Cuomo 1998; Calhoun 1999; Dillon 2017a; Snow 2002; Tessman 2005; Green and Mews 2011; Berges 2015; Broad 2015; Harvey 2018).

Like the ethic of care, virtue ethics is often described as offering a theory that is not beholden to abstract and universal principles (Groenhout 2014), but instead acknowledges “that moral reasoning might be an extraordinarily complex phenomenon …, a view on which what the ethical life requires of us cannot be codified or reduced to a single principle or set of principles” (Moody-Adams 1991, 209–210). A further commonality between care and virtue that is of interest to feminists is that “virtue theory, like care ethics, rejects a simplistic dichotomy between reason and emotion, and does not begin from the assumption that all human beings are essentially equal” (Groenhout 2014, 487). Ethical theories of virtue or character tend to appreciate the importance of emotions and interpersonal relationships to a person’s moral development. Some virtue ethics also focus on what opportunities for virtue are available to agents in particular social contexts, which is useful in feminist ethics when it comes to delineating our responsibilities as relational beings and as characters who may exhibit vices resulting from oppression (Bartky 1990; Potter 2001; Bell 2009; Tessman 2009a; Slote 2011; Boryczka 2012).

Indeed, the ethic of care bears so many important similarities to virtue ethics that some authors have argued that a feminist ethic of care just is a form or a subset of virtue ethics (Groenhout 1998; Slote 1998; McLaren 2001; Halwani 2003). Others believe that at a minimum, care and virtue ethics should inform each other and are compatible with each other (Benner 1997; Sander-Staudt 2006). Here, too, however, feminist ethicists disagree. Some contend that lumping together care and virtue might render the complexity of moral experiences and available moral responses less understandable rather than more articulate (Groenhout 2014). Others suggest that this consolidation might overlook important theoretical distinctions, including the capacity for virtue ethics to be gender-neutral while the ethic of care maintains a commitment to embodied, particular, and gendered experiences (Sander-Staudt 2006).

Virtue ethics provides wider opportunities for feminist ethics to attend to virtues such as integrity and courage in oppressive contexts that the ethic of care tends not to prioritize (Davion 1993; Sander-Staudt 2006). Resistance itself may be a “burdened virtue,” which is Lisa Tessman’s term for virtues that allow moral agents, even ones damaged by oppression, to endure and resist oppression, permitting a form of nobility that falls short of eudaimonia (Tessman 2005). Tessman argues that when agents live under conditions of systemic injustice, their opportunities to flourish are blocked and their pursuits may even be hopeless. She suggests that “the burdened virtues include all those traits that make a contribution to human flourishing—if they succeed in doing so at all—only because they enable survival of or resistance to oppression …, while in other ways they detract from their bearer's well-being, in some cases so deeply that their bearer may be said to lead a wretched life” (Tessman 2005, 95). Feminist ethicists have explored virtues that permit the sort of “conditioned flourishing” that Tessman describes (2009, 14), extending discussion of the virtues to specific applications in nonideal circumstances in which vulnerability is fundamental to the nature of a moral agent (Nussbaum 1986; Card 1996; Walker 2003). For example, feminists have argued for distinctive virtues in contexts such as whistleblowing and organizational resistance (DesAutels 2009), healthcare (Tong 1998), and ecological activism (Cuomo 1998).

Feminist criticisms of the limits of virtue ethics point to its emphasis on the personal as potentially problematic when it comes to “accounting for the possibility of social criticism and resistance on the part of the self who is constituted by the very social relationships and cultural traditions that would be the target of her resistance” (Friedman 1993). Virtue ethics may also include intrusive requirements to self-evaluate one’s every feeling or practice to an extent that an ethic of duty, for example, would not require (Conly 2001). Some care ethicists, most notably Nel Noddings (1984), argue that virtue ethics can be overly self-regarding rather than attentive to the point of view of another, and that it locates moral motivation in rational, abstract, and idealized conceptions of the good life rather than in the natural well-spring of moral motivation that is generated by encounters with particular persons.

As is evident from the foregoing, feminist ethics is not monolithic. Feminists have sometimes clashed over being essentialist or anti-essentialist. Some feminist work is authored by members of privileged groups, while other feminist work is written by and attends to concerns of those in marginalized groups. Some feminists have located solidarity in commonality, while others advocate coalition in the presence of intersectionality. The different approaches of feminists to ethics raise questions as to whether feminist ethics can be either universalist or absolutist. Feminists have observed that just as some men in the history of philosophy have falsely universalized from their own experience to describe the experiences of all humans, some feminists have presumed false universal categories of women or feminists that elide differences between women or presume to speak for all women (Grimshaw 1996; Herr 2014; Tremain 2015). Relatedly, some feminist philosophers have criticized absolutism in ethical theory, that is, the prioritization of rigorous applications of principles to ethical situations regardless of the particularities of context or the motivations of the individuals affected, in part because absolutism, like universalism, takes the absolutists’ priorities to be rational for all (Noddings 1984; Baier 1994). Feminist ethicists who have endorsed visions of universal human rights as liberating for all women have been criticized by other feminists as engaging in absolutism in ways that may prescribe solutions for women in different locations and social situations rather than attending to the perspectives of the women described as needing such rights (Khader 2018b; Herr 2014).

The predominant association of feminist ethics with an ethic of care, which is dichotomous with traditional ethical theories on many levels, together with decades of feminist critiques of the work of canonical absolutist theorists, might lead to a perception that feminist ethics is fundamentally opposed to universalism and absolutism in ethics. This perception, however, is not built into the nature of feminist ethics, which has been employed to understand, criticize, and correct the role of gender in our moral beliefs and practices by deontologists, utilitarians, contractarians, and virtue ethicists, who hold some universal principles or absolute requirements to be basic to their views. However, it is evident that the preponderance of scholarship in feminist ethics tends to prioritize all of the following: the moral contexts in which differently situated and differently gendered agents operate, the testimony and perspectives of the situated agent, the power relationships and political relationships manifest in moral encounters, the vulnerabilities of embodied actors that yield a plurality of approaches to ethical situations, and the degrees of agency or capacity that are shaped by experiences with oppression and misogyny. Such priorities tend not to result in relativism, though they certainly depart from rigid forms of absolutism. Feminist ethics is often expressed in morally plural ways, including pragmatism (Hamington and Bardwell-Jones 2012), transnationalism (Jaggar 2013; Herr 2014; McLaren 2017; Khader 2018b), nonideal theory (Mills 2005; Schwartzman 2006; Tessman 2009b; Norlock 2016), and disability theory (Wendell 1996; Garland-Thomson 2011; Tremain 2015).

The following sub-entries included under “feminism (topics)” in the Table of Contents to this Encyclopedia are relevant to the multiplicity of applications of feminist ethics:

• feminist perspectives on autonomy
• feminist perspectives on class and work
• feminist perspectives on disability
• feminist perspectives on globalization
• feminist perspectives on objectification
• feminist perspectives on power
• feminist perspectives on rape
• feminist perspectives on reproduction and the family
• feminist perspectives on science
• feminist perspectives on sex and gender
• feminist perspectives on sex markets
• feminist perspectives on the body
• feminist perspectives on the self
• feminist perspectives on trans issues

See also the entries in the Related Entries section below.

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feminist philosophy | feminist philosophy, interventions: history of philosophy | feminist philosophy, interventions: moral psychology | feminist philosophy, interventions: political philosophy | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on autonomy | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on class and work | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on disability | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on globalization | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on objectification | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on power | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on rape | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on reproduction and the family | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on science | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on sex and gender

Acknowledgments

This entry exists thanks to the steady work of Research Assistant Collin Chepeka and the funds of the Kenneth Mark Drain Chair in Ethics at Trent University. Thanks to Noëlle McAfee for helpful comments on a first draft, and thanks to Anita Superson for extensive comments on every section of this entry.

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Why feminism still matters to young people

Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Trust, Peace & Social Relations, Coventry University

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Kristin Aune does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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It has been 100 years since women won the right to vote in Britain. More accurately, it’s 90 years since young women were able to vote; 2018 actually celebrates 100 years since suffrage was given to women over 30.

Feminism is held up as one of the most successful social movements of the 20th century. But ten years ago, when Catherine Redfern and I were planning our book on reclaiming feminism, some said young people just weren’t interested in “the f word” anymore.

Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, young women were portrayed smashing glass ceilings in Louboutin heels, and feminism seemed rather outmoded. Many women thought of themselves as post-feminist , feeling there was no need for feminism, since gender equality had been achieved. But this wasn’t really true, and a lot of the fear about calling yourself a feminist came from the negative stereotyping of feminists as bitter “ killjoys ”.

It’s still needed

Things have changed. Feminism is now less despised because it’s more obviously needed. Women in the UK have been living under a regime of austerity since the 2008 economic crisis. They have shouldered 86% of the income loss from changes to the tax and benefits systems since 2010, simply because they are more likely to be welfare recipients in the first place.

Meanwhile, the resurgence of the far right has led to violence and harassment against ethnic minority women, with Muslim women bearing the brunt of virulent Islamophobia. There is a stubborn gender pay gap (now 14% for full-time workers ), and women pensioners in the UK face one of the worst gender income gaps in Europe .

The list goes on: gender-based violence is alarmingly high. Crime statistics show that one in four women, and one in seven men aged 16 to 59 have experience domestic abuse. The most harmful forms of abuse – sexual violence, especially – affect mostly women. Yet three-quarters of councils have cut funds to domestic violence services due to government budget cuts, and a third of referrals to refuges are now being turned away because of a lack of room.

It’s gaining popularity

These examples of gender inequality explain why more people are identifying as feminists – especially young women. A 2013 Girlguiding survey found that 35% of girls and young women aged 11 to 21 were happy to call themselves feminists. In 2017, this was the case for 43% of 18 to 34-year-old women, according to a poll by Plan International, or 54% of 18 to 24-year-old women, according to UM London.

Today’s feminist movement is more diverse than ever before. Feminism has become more attentive to the wider range of experiences of those oppressed by gender norms and stereotypes, including men, non-binary and trans people.

There’s also greater awareness of the way that racism, anti-religious hatred, disablism or homophobia work alongside sexism, creating complex forms of prejudice and oppression. It’s not so much that feminism has moved “beyond” sexism. Rather, a wider range of voices is now being counted as feminist. The HeForShe campaign , which encourages men to become advocates for gender equality, and Muslimah Media Watch , a forum where Muslim women critique how they are presented in the media and popular culture, are examples of this.

It’s already happening

If the current situation has anything positive to show, it’s that where there’s injustice, there’s also resistance. Young people are already challenging the forces feminist author bell hooks calls “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” with style and skill – they don’t need to be told how by older feminists. What’s crucial now is to recognise the work they are doing and draw even more people to the cause.

Campaigns such as #TimesUp in the US and #tystnadtagning in Sweden have used the star power of famous actors – many of whom are young women – to draw a line under sexual harassment and abuse in the workplace, across all industries. Yet even worldwide movements can start with the actions of a single person: activist Tarana Burke has been credited with starting the #metoo movement more than ten years ago, based on her experiences as a youth camp director for Just Be Inc.

As these examples show, feminist activism takes many forms, from a single person signing a petition, to group protests on local issues such as the campaign to close Yarl’s Wood detention centre in Bedfordshire , right through to large-scale actions coordinated by women’s organisations, such as Women’s March . Feminist acts can be taken through formal political routes. For example, by lobbying a local member of parliament, or by informal means, such as sharing information about a topic on social media or boycotting a company known for exploiting women employees.

Individuals can make a difference by working for a women’s charity, becoming a local councillor or calling out sexual harassment wherever they encounter it. Even the conversations we have with our friends in our spare time can be a productive way to raise awareness about sexism.

There is no “right” form of activism and no one issue of greatest importance. A century ago, women’s rights activists weren’t all fighting for suffrage – some of them were working on other campaigns, such as equal access to university education, or a decent wage for working-class women. Nor did getting the vote solve other instances of gender injustice. So this 100-year anniversary is about much more than just “the vote”. Feminism is a movement for gender justice, and it needs to be fought by many different people, in many different ways.

This article has been corrected to reflect the fact that Tarana Burke started the #metoo movement based on her experiences as a youth camp director for Just Be Inc, not Brooklyn-based Girls for Gender Equity, of which she is now senior director.

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Intersectional feminism: what it means and why it matters right now

Date: Wednesday, 1 July 2020

Originally published on Medium.com/@UN_Women

From the disparate impacts of the COVID-19 crisis in communities around the globe to international protests against racism and discrimination, current events have shown that we are far from achieving equality. Trying to interpret and battle a multitude of injustices right now may feel overwhelming. How do we take on all these issues, and why should we? Intersectional feminism offers a lens through which we can better understand one another and strive towards a more just future for all.

Kimberlé Crenshaw , an American law professor who coined the term in 1989 explained Intersectional feminism as, “a prism for seeing the way in which various forms of inequality often operate together and exacerbate each other,” in a recent interview with Time .

“All inequality is not created equal,” she says. An intersectional approach shows the way that people’s social identities can overlap, creating compounding experiences of discrimination.

“We tend to talk about race inequality as separate from inequality based on gender, class, sexuality or immigrant status. What’s often missing is how some people are subject to all of these, and the experience is not just the sum of its parts,” Crenshaw said.

Intersectional feminism centres the voices of those experiencing overlapping, concurrent forms of oppression in order to understand the depths of the inequalities and the relationships among them in any given context.

In Brazil, Valdecir Nascimento , a prominent women’s rights activist, says that, “The dialogue to advance black women’s rights should put them in the centre.” For 40 years, Nascimento has been fighting for equal rights, “Black women from Brazil have never stopped fighting,” she says, noting that black women were part of the feminist movement, the black movement, and other progressive movements. “We don’t want others to speak for black feminists—neither white feminists nor black men. It’s necessary for young black women to take on this fight. We are the solution in Brazil, not the problem,” she says.

Using an intersectional lens also means recognizing the historical contexts surrounding an issue. Long histories of violence and systematic discrimination have created deep inequities that disadvantage some from the outset. These inequalities intersect with each other, for example, poverty, caste systems, racism and sexism, denying people their rights and equal opportunities. The impacts extend across generations.

Sonia Maribel Sontay Herrera is an indigenous woman and human rights defender from Guatemala where systematic discrimination against indigenous women has gone on for decades. Herrera has felt the consequences of these historical injustices since she was a girl.

At ten years old, she moved to a city to attend school, an opportunity most indigenous girls don’t get, she says. However, Herrera was forced to abandon her native language, K'iche', and learn in Spanish, which she experienced as an unjust burden for an indigenous woman, since it was the language of the colonizer. After finishing her studies, as Herrera searched for professional work, she immediately encountered racism and sexist stereotypes. Since she was an indigenous woman, some said that they only had work for her in the home.

“They see us as domestic workers; when they see an indigenous woman, they assume that’s all we can do,” she explains, outlining the ways in which she experiences compounding forms of discrimination based on her identity.

“Those who are most impacted by gender-based violence, and by gender inequalities, are also the most impoverished and marginalized—black and brown women, indigenous women, women in rural areas, young girls, girls living with disabilities, trans youth and gender non-conforming youth,” explains Majandra Rodriguez Acha , a youth leader and climate justice advocate from Lima, Peru. That marginalized communities are the most impacted by natural disasters and the devastating effects of climate change is not a mere coincidence, she stresses.

While issues ranging from discrimination based on gender identity to disparate environmental burdens may seem separate at first, intersectional feminism illuminates the connections between all fights for justice and liberation. It shows us that fighting for equality means not only turning the tables on gender injustices, but rooting out all forms of oppression. It serves as a framework through which to build inclusive, robust movements that work to solve overlapping forms of discrimination, simultaneously.

As concurrent, ongoing crises unfold across the globe today, we can use an intersectional feminist lens to understand their linkages and build back better.

Intersectional feminism matters today because:

The impacts of crises are not uniform.

Countries and communities around the world are facing multiple, compounding threats. While the sets of issues vary from place to place, they share the effect of magnifying pre-existing needs such as housing, food, education, care , employment, and protection .

Yet crises responses often fail to protect the most vulnerable. “If you are invisible in everyday life, your needs will not be thought of, let alone addressed, in a crisis situation,” says Matcha Phorn-In , a lesbian feminist human-rights defender from Thailand who works to address the unique needs of LGBTIQ+ people, many of whom are indigenous, in crisis settings.

In the context of the coronavirus pandemic, the challenges of the virus have exacerbated long standing inequities and decades of discriminatory practices, leading to unequal trajectories.

Rather than fragmenting our fights, taking on board the experiences and challenges faced by different groups has a unifying effect; we are better able to understand the issues at hand and, therefore, find solutions that work for all.

Injustices must not go unnamed or unchallenged.

Looking through an intersectional feminist lens, we see how different communities are battling various, interconnected issues, all at once. Standing in solidarity with one another, questioning power structures, and speaking out against the root causes of inequalities are critical actions for building a future that leaves no one behind.

“If you see inequality as a “them” problem or “unfortunate other” problem, that is a problem,” says Crenshaw . “We’ve got to be open to looking at all of the ways our systems reproduce these inequalities, and that includes the privileges as well as the harms.”

A new ‘normal’ must be fair for all.

Because crises lay bare the structural inequalities that shape our lives, they are also moments of big resets – catalysts for rebuilding societies that offer justice and safety to everyone. They provide a chance to redefine ‘normal’ rather than return to business as usual.

Taking an intersectional feminist approach to the crises of today helps us seize the opportunity to build back better, stronger, resilient, and equal societies.

“COVID-19 has presented us... with a rare opportunity,” says Silliniu Lina Chang, President of the Samoa Victim Support Group, who has been advocating for improved services for victims of domestic violence during the pandemic. “[It is] a time for all of us to reset. Think outside of our comfort zone and look beyond to the neighbour that is in need.”

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The Perspective on Feminism: Is it still relevant today?

• the perspective on feminism: is it still relevant today?

* Updated 2023

Gender inequality has been a big issue throughout us history. while feminism was always seen as a growing movement, it has certainly grown increasingly vocal over the last decade, in response to the  trump presidential  victory in 2016, the  #metoo  movement taking off in 2017,  supreme court justice ruth bader ginsberg’s  death in 2020 and the supreme court overturning roe v. wade in 2022. that being said, there is also some resistance toward the feminism movement in society. although fighting for an important and just cause, at times, feminists have been perceived by some as overly aggressive. the question arises as to whether gender-based inequality in america is as rampant as is often portrayed. to what extent is feminism still relevant, or does it need to change to take the cause forward, here are three arguments for feminism and three against it:, arguing for feminism:.

Body-shaming, while very real for men, is a rampant issue for women

Women are  more likely  to be affected by an eating disorder than men. The fashion and entertainment industries – and  social media  – have long contributed to the objectification of women. This is reflected in society, where female celebrities are body-shamed for not having what’s considered the ideal body type (and this also includes  men !). It’s gotten so normalized that there are endless articles about celebrities “ fighting back .” However, their replies do not cancel out the  negative cultural messages  to young and older women. Even being too thin  breeds criticism  and  skinny shaming , as some have learned.

Women still face unequal treatment in the workplace

While some women have managed to break the glass ceiling, they are few and far between. For example, the  Fortune 500 list  of companies released in 2022 included just 44 companies with female CEOs – yet this was considered a record number. Also, in addition to getting paid less ( 82 cents  for every dollar a man earns), women are still often given – and expected to do – menial tasks in the workplace. In  office meetings  as well as in  online meetings , women are discouraged from voicing their opinions and are listened to less than men are. In fact, women employees were experiencing condescension from their male coworkers so much that a new term was coined for it:  mansplaining . Apparently, women get mansplained to  six times a week . With such a negative, sexist office culture, we can’t claim to have a society that treats women equally.

Violence against women is still a huge issue

Every 9 seconds , a woman in the U.S. is beaten or assaulted.  One in three women  has been the victim of severe violence by their intimate partner. Also,  one in five women  will be raped at some point in their lives. Global campaigns like the  #MeToo Movement  and Time’s Up have brought more attention to the issue of sexual assault, especially in the workplace, but it’s not enough to stop the violence; many women still don’t get the help that they need due to lack of funding. While the trials and convictions of Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein and R. Kelly brought much-needed awareness, justice and condemnation about systematic sexual assault, women still don’t always  feel safe to come forward (especially not after Cosby’s conviction was overturned ). Feminism can contribute to efforts to make society even more aware of violence against women.

Arguing against Feminism:

More women than men go to college and graduate from high school

According to the  Pew Research Center , more American women enroll and graduate from college than their male counterparts. Additionally, according to the U.S. Department of Education, high school graduation rates are in girls’ favor as well. Having a better education as well as a degree are key factors in obtaining well-paid and stable jobs. Good jobs, which allow for richer lives, tend to require better job experiences and degrees. If these trends continue, the average woman will have far more career opportunities and therefore a higher standard of living than the average man. It seems that it’s better to focus time and energy on female empowerment through education than through any feminism movement itself.

Some efforts hurt the feminist cause by being perceived as ‘anti-man’

When Dr. Matt Taylor gave an interview about the progress of the Rosetta space probe, he attracted a wave of feminist criticism for his shirt, which depicted semi-clad women. Taylor ended up  tearfully apologizing in a video . Some responded by claiming that a scientist being brought to tears over a t-shirt design is perhaps not the best way to fight for women’s rights. Similar mixed emotions were raised as a result of the crack of “Manspreading,” the practice of sitting with one’s legs spread apart. Seen as a display of male posturing and ego, journalists and  bloggers  attacked it as a patriarchal issue. Many argue that when feminists fixate on men’s poor behavior, especially when unintentional, it  hurts the feminist movement  and distracts from tackling more fundamental issues.

Is Feminism focusing on the right topics that are most in need of attention?

India’s horrendous female infanticide rate , the fact that  28% of Niger’s girls are forced into marriage before the age of 15, or that  female genital mutilation  is still globally widespread are all critical issues that require movements to fight in their name. Not to mention that human trafficking is still prominent, throughout Europe and even in  America . If the feminist effort being made in the West went into more pressing female-oppression issues also in other countries, perhaps an actual life-saving and -changing difference could be made, which would more easily unite the nation around the “feminist” flag.

The Bottom Line:  Issues like workplace inequality, sexual harassment and body-shaming show that we are not beyond the need for feminism, but the movement shouldn’t come at the price of hurting men. Where do you stand on feminism? Would you call yourself a feminist?

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The waves of feminism, and why people keep fighting over them, explained

If you have no idea which wave of feminism we’re in right now, read this.

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by Constance Grady

If one thing’s for sure, it’s that the second-wave feminists are at war with the third-wave feminists.

No, wait, the second-wavers are at war with the fourth-wave feminists.

No, it’s not the second-wavers, it’s the Gen X-ers.

Are we still cool with the first-wavers? Are they all racists now?

Is there actually intergenerational fighting about feminist waves? Is that a real thing?

Do we even use the wave metaphor anymore?

As the #MeToo movement barrels forward, as record numbers of women seek office, and as the Women’s March drives the resistance against the Trump administration, feminism is reaching a level of cultural relevance it hasn’t enjoyed in years. It’s now a major object of cultural discourse — which has led to some very confusing conversations because not everyone is familiar with or agrees on the basic terminology of feminism. And one of the most basic and most confusing terms has to do with waves of feminism.

People began talking about feminism as a series of waves in 1968 when a New York Times article by Martha Weinman Lear ran under the headline “ The Second Feminist Wave .” “Feminism, which one might have supposed as dead as a Polish question, is again an issue,” Lear wrote. “Proponents call it the Second Feminist Wave, the first having ebbed after the glorious victory of suffrage and disappeared, finally, into the sandbar of Togetherness.”

The wave metaphor caught on: It became a useful way of linking the women’s movement of the ’60s and ’70s to the women’s movement of the suffragettes, and to suggest that the women’s libbers weren’t a bizarre historical aberration, as their detractors sneered, but a new chapter in a grand history of women fighting together for their rights. Over time, the wave metaphor became a way to describe and distinguish between different eras and generations of feminism.

It’s not a perfect metaphor. “The wave metaphor tends to have built into it an important metaphorical implication that is historically misleading and not helpful politically,” argued feminist historian Linda Nicholson in 2010 . “That implication is that underlying certain historical differences, there is one phenomenon, feminism, that unites gender activism in the history of the United States, and that like a wave, peaks at certain times and recedes at others. In sum, the wave metaphor suggests the idea that gender activism in the history of the United States has been for the most part unified around one set of ideas, and that set of ideas can be called feminism.”

The wave metaphor can be reductive. It can suggest that each wave of feminism is a monolith with a single unified agenda, when in fact the history of feminism is a history of different ideas in wild conflict.

It can reduce each wave to a stereotype and suggest that there’s a sharp division between generations of feminism, when in fact there’s a fairly strong continuity between each wave — and since no wave is a monolith, the theories that are fashionable in one wave are often grounded in the work that someone was doing on the sidelines of a previous wave. And the wave metaphor can suggest that mainstream feminism is the only kind of feminism there is, when feminism is full of splinter movements.

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And as waves pile upon waves in feminist discourse, it’s become unclear that the wave metaphor is useful for understanding where we are right now. “I don’t think we are in a wave right now,” gender studies scholar April Sizemore-Barber told Vox in January. “I think that now feminism is inherently intersectional feminism — we are in a place of multiple feminisms.”

But the wave metaphor is also probably the best tool we have for understanding the history of feminism in the US, where it came from and how it developed. And it’s become a fundamental part of how we talk about feminism — so even if we end up deciding to discard it, it’s worth understanding exactly what we’re discarding.

Here is an overview of the waves of feminism in the US, from the suffragettes to #MeToo. This is a broad overview, and it won’t capture every nuance of the movement in each era. Think of it as a Feminism 101 explainer, here to give you a framework to understand the feminist conversation that’s happening right now, how we got here, and where we go next.

The first wave: 1848 to 1920

People have been suggesting things along the line of “Hmmm, are women maybe human beings?” for all of history, so first-wave feminism doesn’t refer to the first feminist thinkers in history. It refers to the West’s first sustained political movement dedicated to achieving political equality for women: the suffragettes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

For 70 years, the first-wavers would march, lecture, and protest, and face arrest, ridicule, and violence as they fought tooth and nail for the right to vote. As Susan B. Anthony’s biographer Ida Husted Harper would put it , suffrage was the right that, once a woman had won it, “would secure to her all others.”

The first wave basically begins with the Seneca Falls convention of 1848 . There, almost 200 women met in a church in upstate New York to discuss “the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women.” Attendees discussed their grievances and passed a list of 12 resolutions calling for specific equal rights — including, after much debate, the right to vote.

The whole thing was organized by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who were both active abolitionists. (They met when they were both barred from the floor of the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London; no women were allowed.)

At the time, the nascent women’s movement was firmly integrated with the abolitionist movement: The leaders were all abolitionists, and Frederick Douglass spoke at the Seneca Falls Convention, arguing for women’s suffrage. Women of color like Sojourner Truth , Maria Stewart , and Frances E.W. Harper were major forces in the movement, working not just for women’s suffrage but for universal suffrage.

But despite the immense work of women of color for the women’s movement, the movement of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony eventually established itself as a movement specifically for white women, one that used racial animus as fuel for its work.

The 15th Amendment’s passage in 1870 , granting black men the right to vote, became a spur that politicized white women and turned them into suffragettes. Were they truly not going to be granted the vote before former slaves were?

“If educated women are not as fit to decide who shall be the rulers of this country, as ‘field hands,’ then where’s the use of culture, or any brain at all?” demanded one white woman who wrote in to Stanton and Anthony’s newspaper, the Revolution. “One might as well have been ‘born on the plantation.’” Black women were barred from some demonstrations or forced to walk behind white women in others.

Despite its racism, the women’s movement developed radical goals for its members. First-wavers fought not only for white women’s suffrage but also for equal opportunities to education and employment, and for the right to own property.

And as the movement developed, it began to turn to the question of reproductive rights. In 1916, Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the US, in defiance of a New York state law that forbade the distribution of contraception. She would later go on to establish the clinic that became Planned Parenthood.

In 1920, Congress passed the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote. (In theory, it granted the right to women of all races, but in practice, it remained difficult for black women to vote , especially in the South.)

The 19th Amendment was the grand legislative achievement of the first wave. Although individual groups continued to work — for reproductive freedom, for equality in education and employment, for voting rights for black women — the movement as a whole began to splinter. It no longer had a unified goal with strong cultural momentum behind it, and it would not find another until the second wave began to take off in the 1960s.

Further reading: first-wave feminism

A Vindication of the Rights of Women , Mary Wollstonecraft (1791)

Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions , Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1848)

Ain’t I a Woman? Sojourner Truth (1851)

Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors: Is the Classification Sound? A Discussion on the Laws Concerning the Property of Married Women , Frances Power Cobbe (1868)

Remarks by Susan B. Anthony at her trial for illegal voting (1873)

A Room of One’s Own , Virginia Woolf (1929)

Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings , edited by Miriam Schneir (1994)

The second wave: 1963 to the 1980s

The second wave of feminism begins with Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique , which came out in 1963. There were prominent feminist thinkers before Friedan who would come to be associated with the second wave — most importantly Simone de Beauvoir, whose Second Sex came out in France in 1949 and in the US in 1953 — but The Feminine Mystique was a phenomenon. It sold 3 million copies in three years .

The Feminine Mystique rails against “the problem that has no name”: the systemic sexism that taught women that their place was in the home and that if they were unhappy as housewives, it was only because they were broken and perverse. “I thought there was something wrong with me because I didn’t have an orgasm waxing the kitchen floor,” Friedan later quipped .

But, she argued, the fault didn’t truly lie with women, but rather with the world that refused to allow them to exercise their creative and intellectual faculties. Women were right to be unhappy; they were being ripped off.

The Feminine Mystique was not revolutionary in its thinking, as many of Friedan’s ideas were already being discussed by academics and feminist intellectuals. Instead, it was revolutionary in its reach . It made its way into the hands of housewives, who gave it to their friends, who passed it along through a whole chain of well-educated middle-class white women with beautiful homes and families. And it gave them permission to be angry.

And once those 3 million readers realized that they were angry, feminism once again had cultural momentum behind it. It had a unifying goal, too: not just political equality, which the first-wavers had fought for, but social equality.

“The personal is political,” said the second-wavers. (The phrase cannot be traced back to any individual woman but was popularized by Carol Hanisch .) They would go on to argue that problems that seemed to be individual and petty — about sex, and relationships, and access to abortions, and domestic labor — were in fact systemic and political, and fundamental to the fight for women’s equality.

So the movement won some major legislative and legal victories: The Equal Pay Act of 1963 theoretically outlawed the gender pay gap; a series of landmark Supreme Court cases through the ’60s and ’70s gave married and unmarried women the right to use birth control; Title IX gave women the right to educational equality; and in 1973, Roe v. Wade guaranteed women reproductive freedom.

The second wave worked on getting women the right to hold credit cards under their own names and to apply for mortgages. It worked to outlaw marital rape, to raise awareness about domestic violence and build shelters for women fleeing rape and domestic violence. It worked to name and legislate against sexual harassment in the workplace.

But perhaps just as central was the second wave’s focus on changing the way society thought about women. The second wave cared deeply about the casual, systemic sexism ingrained into society — the belief that women’s highest purposes were domestic and decorative, and the social standards that reinforced that belief — and in naming that sexism and ripping it apart.

The second wave cared about racism too, but it could be clumsy in working with people of color. As the women’s movement developed, it was rooted in the anti-capitalist and anti-racist civil rights movements, but black women increasingly found themselves alienated from the central platforms of the mainstream women’s movement.

The Feminine Mystique and its “problem that has no name” was specifically for white middle-class women: Women who had to work to support themselves experienced their oppression very differently from women who were socially discouraged from working.

Earning the right to work outside the home was not a major concern for black women, many of whom had to work outside the home anyway. And while black women and white women both advocated for reproductive freedom, black women wanted to fight not just for the right to contraception and abortions but also to stop the forced sterilization of people of color and people with disabilities , which was not a priority for the mainstream women’s movement. In response, some black feminists decamped from feminism to create womanism. (“Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender,” Alice Walker wrote in 1983 .)

Even with its limited scope, second-wave feminism at its height was plenty radical enough to scare people — hence the myth of the bra burners. Despite the popular story, there was no mass burning of bras among second-wave feminists .

But women did gather together in 1968 to protest the Miss America pageant and its demeaning, patriarchal treatment of women. And as part of the protest, participants ceremoniously threw away objects that they considered to be symbols of women’s objectification, including bras and copies of Playboy.

That the Miss America protest has long lingered in the popular imagination as a bra-burning, and that bra-burning has become a metonym for postwar American feminism, says a lot about the backlash to the second wave that would soon ensue.

In the 1980s, the comfortable conservatism of the Reagan era managed to successfully position second-wave feminists as humorless, hairy-legged shrews who cared only about petty bullshit like bras instead of real problems, probably to distract themselves from the loneliness of their lives, since no man would ever want a ( shudder ) feminist.

“I don’t think of myself as a feminist,” a young woman told Susan Bolotin in 1982 for the New York Times Magazine. “Not for me, but for the guy next door that would mean that I’m a lesbian and I hate men.”

Another young woman chimed in, agreeing. “Look around and you’ll see some happy women, and then you’ll see all these bitter, bitter women,” she said. “The unhappy women are all feminists. You’ll find very few happy, enthusiastic, relaxed people who are ardent supporters of feminism.”

That image of feminists as angry and man-hating and lonely would become canonical as the second wave began to lose its momentum, and it continues to haunt the way we talk about feminism today. It would also become foundational to the way the third wave would position itself as it emerged.

Further reading: second-wave feminism

The Second Sex , Simone de Beauvoir (1949)

The Feminine Mystique , Betty Friedan (1963)

Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape , Susan Brownmiller (1975)

Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sex Discrimination , Catharine A. MacKinnon (1979)

The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination , Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1979)

Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism , bell hooks (1981)

In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose , Alice Walker (1983)

Sister Outsider , Audre Lorde (1984)

The third wave: 1991(?) to ????

It is almost impossible to talk with any clarity about the third wave because few people agree on exactly what the third wave is, when it started, or if it’s still going on. “The confusion surrounding what constitutes third wave feminism,” writes feminist scholar Elizabeth Evans , “is in some respects its defining feature.”

But generally, the beginning of the third wave is pegged to two things: the Anita Hill case in 1991, and the emergence of the riot grrrl groups in the music scene of the early 1990s.

In 1991, Anita Hill testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her at work. Thomas made his way to the Supreme Court anyway, but Hill’s testimony sparked an avalanche of sexual harassment complaints , in much the same way that last fall’s Harvey Weinstein accusations were followed by a litany of sexual misconduct accusations against other powerful men.

And Congress’s decision to send Thomas to the Supreme Court despite Hill’s testimony led to a national conversation about the overrepresentation of men in national leadership roles. The following year, 1992, would be dubbed “ the Year of the Woman ” after 24 women won seats in the House of Representatives and three more won seats in the Senate.

And for the young women watching the Anita Hill case in real time, it would become an awakening. “I am not a postfeminism feminist,” declared Rebecca Walker (Alice Walker’s daughter) for Ms. after watching Thomas get sworn into the Supreme Court. “I am the Third Wave.”

Early third-wave activism tended to involve fighting against workplace sexual harassment and working to increase the number of women in positions of power. Intellectually, it was rooted in the work of theorists of the ’80s: Kimberlé Crenshaw , a scholar of gender and critical race theory who coined the term intersectionality to describe the ways in which different forms of oppression intersect; and Judith Butler , who argued that gender and sex are separate and that gender is performative. Crenshaw and Butler’s combined influence would become foundational to the third wave’s embrace of the fight for trans rights as a fundamental part of intersectional feminism.

Aesthetically, the third wave is deeply influenced by the rise of the riot grrrls, the girl groups who stomped their Doc Martens onto the music scene in the 1990s.

“BECAUSE doing/reading/seeing/hearing cool things that validate and challenge us can help us gain the strength and sense of community that we need in order to figure out how bullshit like racism, able-bodieism, ageism, speciesism, classism, thinism, sexism, anti-semitism and heterosexism figures in our own lives,” wrote Bikini Kill lead singer Kathleen Hanna in the Riot Grrrl Manifesto in 1991. “BECAUSE we are angry at a society that tells us Girl = Dumb, Girl = Bad, Girl = Weak.”

The word girl here points to one of the major differences between second- and third-wave feminism. Second-wavers fought to be called women rather than girls : They weren’t children, they were fully grown adults, and they demanded to be treated with according dignity. There should be no more college girls or coeds: only college women, learning alongside college men.

But third-wavers liked being girls. They embraced the word; they wanted to make it empowering, even threatening — hence grrrl . And as it developed, that trend would continue: The third wave would go on to embrace all kinds of ideas and language and aesthetics that the second wave had worked to reject: makeup and high heels and high-femme girliness.

In part, the third-wave embrace of girliness was a response to the anti-feminist backlash of the 1980s, the one that said the second-wavers were shrill, hairy, and unfeminine and that no man would ever want them. And in part, it was born out of a belief that the rejection of girliness was in itself misogynistic: girliness, third-wavers argued, was not inherently less valuable than masculinity or androgyny.

And it was rooted in a growing belief that effective feminism had to recognize both the dangers and the pleasures of the patriarchal structures that create the beauty standard and that it was pointless to punish and censure individual women for doing things that brought them pleasure.

Third-wave feminism had an entirely different way of talking and thinking than the second wave did — but it also lacked the strong cultural momentum that was behind the grand achievements of the second wave. (Even the Year of Women turned out to be a blip, as the number of women entering national politics plateaued rapidly after 1992.)

The third wave was a diffuse movement without a central goal, and as such, there’s no single piece of legislation or major social change that belongs to the third wave the way the 19th Amendment belongs to the first wave or Roe v. Wade belongs to the second.

Depending on how you count the waves, that might be changing now, as the #MeToo moment develops with no signs of stopping — or we might be kicking off an entirely new wave.

Further reading: third-wave feminism

Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity , Judith Butler (1990)

The Beauty Myth , Naomi Woolf (1991)

“ Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color ,” Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991)

“ The Riot GRRRL Manifesto ,” Kathleen Hanna (1991)

Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women , Susan Faludi (1991)

The Bust Guide to the New Girl Order , edited by Marcelle Karp and‎ Debbie Stoller (1999)

Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics , bell hooks (2000)

Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture , Ariel Levy (2005)

The present day: a fourth wave?

Feminists have been anticipating the arrival of a fourth wave since at least 1986, when a letter writer to the Wilson Quarterly opined that the fourth wave was already building. Internet trolls actually tried to launch their own fourth wave in 2014 , planning to create a “pro-sexualization, pro-skinny, anti-fat” feminist movement that the third wave would revile, ultimately miring the entire feminist community in bloody civil war. (It didn’t work out.)

But over the past few years, as #MeToo and Time’s Up pick up momentum, the Women’s March floods Washington with pussy hats every year, and a record number of women prepare to run for office , it’s beginning to seem that the long-heralded fourth wave might actually be here.

While a lot of media coverage of #MeToo describes it as a movement dominated by third-wave feminism, it actually seems to be centered in a movement that lacks the characteristic diffusion of the third wave. It feels different.

“Maybe the fourth wave is online,” said feminist Jessica Valenti in 2009 , and that’s come to be one of the major ideas of fourth-wave feminism. Online is where activists meet and plan their activism, and it’s where feminist discourse and debate takes place. Sometimes fourth-wave activism can even take place on the internet (the “#MeToo” tweets), and sometimes it takes place on the streets (the Women’s March), but it’s conceived and propagated online.

As such, the fourth wave’s beginnings are often loosely pegged to around 2008, when Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were firmly entrenched in the cultural fabric and feminist blogs like Jezebel and Feministing were spreading across the web. By 2013, the idea that we had entered a fourth wave was widespread enough that it was getting written up in the Guardian . “What’s happening now feels like something new again,” wrote Kira Cochrane.

Currently, the fourth-wavers are driving the movement behind #MeToo and Time’s Up, but in previous years they were responsible for the cultural impact of projects like Emma Sulkowicz’s Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight) , in which a rape victim at Columbia University committed to carrying their mattress around campus until the university expelled their rapist.

The trending hashtag #YesAllWomen after the UC Santa Barbara shooting was a fourth-wave campaign, and so was the trending hashtag #StandWithWendy when Wendy Davis filibustered a Texas abortion law. Arguably, the SlutWalks that began in 2011 — in protest of the idea that the way to prevent rape is for women to “stop dressing like sluts” — are fourth-wave campaigns.

Like all of feminism, the fourth wave is not a monolith. It means different things to different people. But these tentpole positions that Bustle identified as belonging to fourth-wave feminism in 2015 do tend to hold true for a lot of fourth-wavers; namely, that fourth-wave feminism is queer, sex-positive, trans-inclusive, body-positive, and digitally driven. (Bustle also claims that fourth-wave feminism is anti-misandry, but given the glee with which fourth-wavers across the internet riff on ironic misandry , that may be more prescriptivist than descriptivist on their part.)

And now the fourth wave has begun to hold our culture’s most powerful men accountable for their behavior. It has begun a radical critique of the systems of power that allow predators to target women with impunity.

Further reading: fourth-wave feminism

The Purity Myth , Jessica Valenti (2009)

How to Be a Woman , Caitlin Moran (2012)

Men Explain Things to Me , Rebecca Solnit (2014)

We Should All Be Feminists , Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2014)

Bad Feminist , Roxane Gay (2014)

So is there a generational war between feminists?

As the fourth wave begins to establish itself, and as #MeToo goes on, we’ve begun to develop a narrative that says the fourth wave’s biggest obstacles are its predecessors — the feminists of the second wave.

“The backlash to #MeToo is indeed here,” wrote Jezebel’s Stassa Edwards in January , “and it’s liberal second-wave feminism.”

Writing with a lot less nuance, Katie Way, the reporter who broke the Aziz Ansari story , smeared one of her critics as a “burgundy-lipstick, bad-highlights, second-wave-feminist has-been.”

And there certainly are second-wave feminists pushing a #MeToo backlash. “If you spread your legs because he said ‘be nice to me and I’ll give you a job in a movie’ then I’m afraid that’s tantamount to consent,” second-wave feminist icon Germaine Greer remarked as the accusations about Weinstein mounted, “and it’s too late now to start whingeing about that.” (Greer, who has also said on the record that she doesn’t believe trans women are “real women,” has become something of a poster child for the worst impulses of the second wave. Die a hero or live long enough to become a villain, etc.)

But some of the most prominent voices speaking out against #MeToo, like Katie Roiphe and Bari Weiss , are too young to have been part of the second wave. Roiphe is a Gen X-er who was pushing back against both the second and the third waves in the 1990s and has managed to stick around long enough to push back against the fourth wave today. Weiss, 33, is a millennial. Other prominent #MeToo critics, like Caitlin Flanagan and Daphne Merkin , are old enough to have been around for the second wave but have always been on the conservative end of the spectrum.

“In the 1990s and 2000s, second-wavers were cast as the shrill, militant, man-hating mothers and grandmothers who got in the way of their daughters’ sexual liberation. Now they’re the dull, hidebound relics who are too timid to push for the real revolution,” writes Sady Doyle at Elle . “And of course, while young women have been telling their forebears to shut up and fade into the sunset, older women have been stereotyping and slamming younger activists as feather-headed, boy-crazy pseudo-feminists who squander their mothers’ feminist gains by taking them for granted.”

It is not particularly useful to think of the #MeToo debates as a war between generations of feminists — or, more creepily, as some sort of Freudian Electra complex in action. And the data from our polling shows that these supposed generational gaps largely don’t exist . It is perhaps more useful to think of it as part of what has always been the history of feminism: passionate disagreement between different schools of thought, which history will later smooth out into a single overarching “wave” of discourse (if the wave metaphor holds on that long).

The history of feminism is filled with radicals and progressives and liberals and centrists. It’s filled with splinter movements and reactionary counter-movements. That’s part of what it means to be both an intellectual tradition and a social movement, and right now feminism is functioning as both with a gorgeous and monumental vitality. Rather than devouring their own, feminists should recognize the enormous work that each wave has done for the movement, and get ready to keep doing more work.

After all, the past is past. We’re in the middle of the third wave now.

Or is it the fourth?

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Mapping a global view of feminism

Search online for the terms “feminism” and “global feminism,” and you’ll discover that feminism today comes in a variety of flavors, largely dictated by differences in the causes, concerns and condition of women around the world. Yet, while culture, politics, education and society may differ from one country to another, the commitment to obtain equal rights and freedom of choice for women remains constant among feminists no matter where they are.

In an interview with “Gender News,” noted research scholar Dr. Zilka Spahić-Šiljak discusses her views on global feminism and why “we need to bring the discussion about feminism back to the issue of social justice for women and all other marginalized groups.” Šiljak, who was born in Bosnia-Herzegovina, has dedicated the past two decades of her career to advocating for women’s rights as a research scholar and human rights activist in non-governmental organizations. Her most recent research at Stanford University focuses on the intersection of leadership, gender and building peace.

GN: Is global feminism really moving forward? Does it mean the same thing in Bosnia-Herzegovina as it does in the U.S.?

ZS: Global feminism is not a special type of feminism, separate from others. It’s the result of the world’s global economy, and enables women from different contexts to be connected and networked, and to learn from one another’s experience. As such, it should not focus exclusively on the predominantly liberal discourse on politics and economy of the West. It needs to be open and sensitive to the problems of women from third-world countries.

Feminism is obviously affected by the social and political realities of our respective societies and cultures. Feminism in the U.S., for example, differs greatly from feminism in a post-war, impoverished and ethically divided region like Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Balkans, which suffer from injustice, oppression, exclusion and ethno-nationalist exploitation. It’s important to distinguish between the concepts of global feminism and what I would call liberal feminism.

While global feminism has improved women’s lives in terms of their rights to education, economic and reproductive rights, and freedom of movement, women outside of liberal societies continue to suffer other forms of oppression like racial, class and religious persecution. Liberal feminism might work for developed, stable Western societies and for women who enjoy economic independence and comfort, but it does not take into account the oppression of marginal groups.

I would say that the main ideas of feminism--a project of social justice and equality--are being betrayed. Some women built careers that benefitted from globalization and the corporate world. They became proponents of the meritocracy in patriarchal neoliberal political and business structures that made women preoccupied with competing in the existing neoliberal political and economic frameworks. Today in the Western world, feminist studies are focused on the themes of identity, sexuality and our bodies, while the key social justice questions remain outside of their horizons.

GN: What makes you optimistic about feminism in your country?

ZS: It’s hard to be an optimist in a country where everything is falling apart due to the ethno-national divisions that resulted from the war between 1992 and 1995. In that context, the women’s movement is fragmented and divided across ethno-national lines. 

The good news is that feminism is still alive and vibrant in various forms and resists ethno-national divisions. I think that feminists in Bosnia have done a great job: they provided a “safe space” to survivors of war traumas and torture in shelters and therapy centers; they did an incredible job building peace and reconciliation and re-building communities and relationships. They struggled hard to lay legal foundations for gender equality, anti-discrimination and protection from domestic violence. Women’s groups and organizations became a reference point on the civil scene of Bosnia and Herzegovina as the strongest voice for equality and justice.

Gender equality can no longer be avoided in any discussion regarding politics, business and even constitutional reforms.

GN: For you, what has been an important turning point for feminism in the last three years?

ZS: Particularly in 2014, feminism became part of the discussion in art, sports, business, politics, fashion, music and world media. Newspapers and broadcast companies brought us stories about celebrities and successful businesswomen and men who supported gender equality and feminism. 

It is important to see celebrities like Emma Watson, Daniel Radcliffe and Benedict Cumberbatch support feminism, to learn that a woman became chairperson of the United States Federal Reserve for the first time in history, or to celebrate Malala Yousafzai as a Nobel Prize winner. But we have not seen profound changes. 

These stories did not help women in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Ukraine or Bosnia, or women in Chile or Sudan to get more political and economic stability and prosperity. However, they certainly initiated a discussion about these issues, and reminded all of us that women still face discrimination, gender-based violence, human trafficking and glass ceilings in politics and business.

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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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The Pros and Cons of Feminism

The difference between benevolent feminism and hostile feminism..

Posted August 10, 2009 | Reviewed by Hara Estroff Marano

I read the recent postings by Regina Barreca and other bloggers on feminism with interest, as they highlight how sensitive and charged this topic is. In today's post, I wish to contribute to the debate by pointing out the pros and cons of feminism. In so doing, I hope to disambiguate the worthy form of feminism (as a movement fighting injustice) from its counterpart (as an academic discipline capable of apparently contributing to fields as varied as psychology, ecology, physics, biology, chemistry, and mathematics, as well as being a source of misandry).

Women have faced countless brutal forms of institutionalized discrimination since time immemorial and in all sorts of cultural settings. This is an undeniable and morally reprehensible truth. Accordingly, feminism as a movement, in seeking to create equality for women in the social, political, economic, and occupational spheres (to name a few domains), is laudable. There is no moral reason that a woman should not be allowed to vote, should not have equal access to education and health care, should not make the same amount of money as a man performing the same job, etc. Feminism has been singularly responsible for redressing these deeply sexist social injustices. This is what I would call benevolent feminism and under this rubric I would proudly call myself a feminist, as I abhor all forms of injustice and intolerance.

Now let's turn to the harmful forms of feminism, which I coin hostile feminism. I shall restrict my discussion to four key issues.

1. From the onset of the movement, many radical feminists rapidly converged on the erroneous idea that if women are to be treated equally in all walks of life, it is important to demonstrate that men and women are indistinguishable beings. Hence, all sex differences short of one's genitalia were attributed to socialization. See Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales from the Strange World of Women's Studies by Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge for endless examples.

Men and women should be equal under the law, albeit they are distinguishable biological beings. Wishing away sex differences, and creating imaginary narratives about the power of socialization in shaping all sex differences, does not make them disappear. It does not take a sophisticated Darwinist to recognize that we are a sexually dimorphic and sexually reproducing species. By definition, this implies that men and women possess some innate biological-based differences.

2. Some forms of feminism have been harmful in that they have built an ideological foundation that is anti-male. Apparently, misogyny is reprehensible and evil but misandry is virtuous and laudable. I am sure that most readers are familiar with the words of Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon to the effect that all men are rapists, and that heterosexual sex is nothing short of rape. And according to many feminists, men who consume pornography are at the very least "rapists-in-training." I wonder how we might go about reproducing given that heterosexual mating is apparently "violently penetrative."

3. In the strange world of academic feminism, the knowledge bases of venerable scientific fields are suspect if not incomplete because men have been the major contributors in those fields. I am not talking about Film Studies and Literary Criticism wherein one might argue that interpretive texts and other cultural products might benefit in being analyzed from multiple ideological viewpoints. Unbeknownst to natural scientists, the hard sciences including physics, chemistry, and biology, apparently need to be infused with feminist theory. And apparently mathematics (the purest of all fields) is incomplete and biased, as it lacks a feminist perspective. Having been trained in mathematics, I wondered what feminist mathematics might be. I had to read Higher Superstition : The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science coauthored by Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt to get my answer. Apparently, arithmetic word problems are inherently sexist in their content, and hence can be "liberated" by a feminist lens. Take for example the following word problem: "Bob is a fireman who makes $40,000 a year. His boss, Fire Chief Larry has advised him that he will be receiving a 5% salary increase next year. What will his new yearly salary be?" Feminist mathematics would alter fireman to firewoman (or perhaps fireperson ); it would change the name Bob to Barbara . It would also alter Larry to Linda .

Not satisfied at having "liberated" mathematics from its “sexist” shackles, academic feminists have enlightened us about the sexist properties of DNA . Specifically, feminist biochemistry proposes that DNA is an instrument of male dominance as evidenced by its "master molecule" narrative ( McElroy, 1996 ).

4. The feminist movement has created confusion regarding the permissible dynamics between the sexes. Men and women no longer trust their Darwinian instincts; instead they seek to adhere to new "feminist" rules of intersexual conduct, as they are highly fearful of being accused of being "sexist pigs" or "tools of the patriarchy." See my earlier posts regarding benevolent sexism here and here , as it very much relates to this point. Am I allowed to compliment my female colleague about her beautiful dress or would this be harassment? Can she compliment me on how smart I look in my new suit or would she be objectifying me as man-meat? Hence, most individuals now thread very carefully in their daily dynamics.

To recapitulate, let us applaud feminism for its contributions in making our societies more equitable and just, and less sexist (although more work remains). However, let's stamp out the nonsense that is promulgated by a number of feminist theorists.

Gad Saad, Ph.D., is a professor of marketing at Concordia University and the author of The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption and The Consuming Instinct.

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✍️Essay on Feminism for Students: Samples 150, 250 Words

• Updated on  
• Nov 2, 2023

In a society, men and women should be considered equal in every aspect. This thought is advocated by a social and political movement i.e. feminism . The word feminism was coined by the French Philosopher Charles Fourier in 1837. He was known for his strong belief in equal rights for women as men in every sector, be it the right to vote, right to work, right to decide, right to participate in public life, right to own property, etc. Feminism advocates the rights of women with respect to the equality of gender . There are different types of feminism i.e. liberal, radical, Marxist, cultural, and eco-feminism. Stay tuned and have a look at the following sample essay on feminism!

Also Read: Popular Struggles and Movements

Essay on Feminism 150 Words

India is a land of diversity of which 52.2% are women as per an estimate for the year 2023. This doesn’t mean that every woman is getting basic fundamental rights in society. We should not neglect the rights of women and treat them as a weaker sex. Women are equally strong and capable as men. To advocate this thought a movement called Feminism came into existence in 1837. Feminism is a movement that advocates the equality of women in social, political, and economic areas. 

India is up eight notches in #WorldEconomicForum ’s annual gender ranking. And Iceland is #1 for women, again, for the 14th year in a row. @namitabhandare ’s newsletter, #HTMindtheGap looks at why. Plus the week’s other gender stories https://t.co/9Fen6TaEnb Subscribe here… pic.twitter.com/r6XfFMINO0 — Hindustan Times (@htTweets) June 25, 2023

Traditionally, women were believed to stay at home and there were severe restrictions imposed on them. They were not allowed to go out, study, work, vote, own property, etc. However, with the passage of time, people are becoming aware of the objective of feminism. Any person who supports feminism and is a proponent of equal human rights for women is considered a feminist. 

Feminism is a challenge to the patriarchal systems existing in society. Despite this strong movement burning in high flames to burn the orthodox and dominant culture, there are still some parts of the world that are facing gender inequality. So, it is our duty to make a world free of any discrimination. 

Essay on Feminism 250 Words

Talking about feminism in a broader sense, then, it is not restricted only to women. It refers to the equality of every sex or gender. Some people feel offended by the concept of feminism as they take it in the wrong way. There is a misconception that only women are feminists. But this is not the case. Feminists can be anyone who supports the noble cause of supporting the concept of providing equal rights to women.

Feminism is not restricted to single-sex i.e. women, but it advocates for every person irrespective of caste, creed, colour, sex, or gender. As an individual, it is our duty to help every person achieve equal status in society and eradicate any kind of gender discrimination . 

Equality helps people to live freely without any traditional restrictions. At present, the Government of India is also contributing to providing equal rights to the female sector through various Government schemes like Beti Bachao Beti Padhao, Pradhan Mantri Mahila Shakti Kendra, One Stop Center, and many more. 

Apart from these Government policies, campaigns like reproductive rights or abortion of unwanted pregnancy also give women the right to choose and lead their life without any external authority of a male. 

Feminism has also supported the LGBTIQA+ community so that people belonging to this community could come out and reveal their identity without any shame. The concept of feminism also helped them to ask for equal rights as men and women. Thus, it could be concluded that feminism is for all genders and a true feminist will support every person to achieve equal rights and hold a respectable position in society.

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Feminism is a movement which has gained momentum to advocate against gender discrimination. It supports the thought that women should get equal rights as men in society.

The five main principles of feminism are gender equality, elimination of sex discrimination, speaking against sexual violence against women, increasing human choice and promoting sexual freedom.

The main point of feminism is that there should be collective efforts to end sexism and raise our voices against female sex exploitation. It is crucial to attain complete gender equality and remove any restrictions on the female sex.

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The Case Against Contemporary Feminism

By Jia Tolentino

It’s the same with feminism as it is with women in general: there are always, seemingly, infinite ways to fail. On the one hand, feminism has never been more widely proclaimed or marketable than it is now. On the other hand, its last ten years of mainstream prominence and acceptability culminated in the election of President Donald Trump. (The Times published an essay at the end of December under the headline “ Feminism Lost. Now What? ”) Since November 9th, the two main arguments against contemporary feminism have emerged in near-exact opposition to each other: either feminism has become too strict an ideology or it has softened to the point of uselessness. On one side, there is, for instance, Kellyanne Conway, who, in her apparent dislike of words that denote principles, has labelled herself a “post-feminist.” Among those on the other side is the writer Jessa Crispin, who believes that the push to make feminism universally palatable has negated the meaning of the ideology writ large.

Crispin has written a new book-length polemic on the subject, called “Why I Am Not a Feminist,” in which she offers definitions of feminism that are considerably more barbed than the earnest, cheeky slogans that have become de rigueur—“The future is female,” for example, as Hillary Clinton  declared  in her first video statement since the election, or “Girls just want to have fun-damental rights,” or “Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.” The dissidence at the root of these catchphrases has been obscured by their ubiquity on tote bags and T-shirts, and for Crispin the decline of feminism is visible in how easy the label is to claim. Feminism, she tells us, has become a self-serving brand popularized by C.E.O.s and beauty companies, a “fight to allow women to participate equally in the oppression of the powerless and the poor.” It’s a “narcissistic reflexive thought process: I define myself as feminist and so everything I do is a feminist act.” It’s an “attack dog posing as a kitten,” and—in what might be Crispin’s most biting entry—a “decade-long conversation about which television show is a good television show and which television show is a bad show.”

Crispin is the founder of Bookslut , a literary Web site that she started, in 2002, when she was a full-time employee at Planned Parenthood, in Austin, Texas. (She was ahead of the word-reclamation curve that culminated in the Slutwalk marches, which were first held in 2011.) After accumulating a modest but enthusiastic following, Crispin closed down Bookslut in 2016, with minimal ceremony. “I didn’t want to become a professional,” she told Vulture, adding, “I just don’t find American literature interesting. I find MFA culture terrible. Everyone is super-cheerful because they’re trying to sell you something, and I find it really repulsive.” Crispin is happy to take the contrarian stance, particularly within spheres that lend themselves to suppressive positivity. The point of “Why I Am Not a Feminist” isn’t really that Crispin is not a feminist; it’s that she has no interest in being a part of a club that has opened its doors and lost sight of its politics—a club that would, if she weren’t so busy disavowing it, invite Kellyanne Conway in.

The effect of the catchy title stands regardless. Crispin’s argument is bracing, and a rare counterbalance; where feminism is concerned, broad acceptability is almost always framed as an unquestioned good. “Somewhere along the way toward female liberation, it was decided that the most effective method was for feminism to become universal,” Crispin writes. And the people who decided this “forgot that for something to be universally accepted, it must become as banal, as non-threatening and ineffective as possible.” Another, and perhaps less fatalistic, way of framing the matter: feminism is a political argument of such obvious reason and power that it has been co-opted as an aesthetic and transformed into merchandise by a series of influential profiteers.

Crispin notes, accurately, that feminism’s history has been marked by a “small number of radical, heavily invested women who did the hard work of dragging women’s position forward, usually through shocking acts and words,” and that the “majority of women benefited from the work of these few, while often quickly trying to disassociate themselves from them.” Reading that second line, I immediately thought of an irksome scene in Megyn Kelly’s memoir , in which Kelly tells Sheryl Sandberg that she’s not a feminist, and Sandberg—whose entire feminist initiative is based on making the movement palatable to people like Kelly, and whose awkward accommodation of the Trump Administration should surprise no one—“passed no judgment” on Kelly’s distaste for the term. Crispin mostly focusses on younger and newer feminists, castigating them as selfish and timid, afraid of the second wave. They make Andrea Dworkin into a scapegoat, she writes; they “distance themselves from the bra-burning, hairy-armpitted bogeywomen.”

Here, and in some other places where Crispin’s argument requires her to take a precise measure of contemporary feminism, she—or this book’s production schedule—can’t quite account for the complexity of the times. From 2014 to 2016, I worked as an editor at Jezebel, a site that, when it was founded, in 2007, helped to define online feminism—and served ever afterward as a somewhat abstracted target for women who criticized contemporary feminism from the left. These critics didn’t usually recognize how quickly the center is always moving, and Crispin has the same problem. Much of what she denounces—“outrage culture,” empowerment marketing , the stranglehold that white women have on the public conversation—has already been critiqued at length by the young feminist mainstream. Her imagined Dworkin-hating dilettante, discussing the politics of bikini waxing and “giving blow jobs like it’s missionary work,” has long been passé. It’s far more common these days for young feminists to adopt a radical veneer. Lena Dunham’s newsletter sells “ Dismantle the Patriarchy ” patches; last fall, a Dior runway show included a T-shirt reading, “We Should All Be Feminists.” (The shirt is not yet on sale in the United States; it reportedly costs five hundred and fifty euros in France .) The inside threat to feminism in 2017 is less a disavowal of radical ideas than an empty co-option of radical appearances—a superficial, market-based alignment that is more likely to make a woman feel good and righteous than lead her to the political action that feminism is meant to spur.

The most vital strain of thought in “Why I Am Not a Feminist” is Crispin’s unforgiving indictment of individualism and capitalism, value systems that she argues have severely warped feminism, encouraging women to think of the movement only insofar as it leads to individual gains. We have misinterpreted the old adage that the personal is political, she writes—inflecting our personal desires and decisions with political righteousness while neatly avoiding political accountability. We may understand that “the corporations we work for poison the earth, fleece the poor, make the super rich more rich, but hey. Fuck it,” Crispin writes. “We like our apartments, we can subscribe to both Netflix and Hulu, the health insurance covers my SSRI prescription, and the white noise machine I just bought helps me sleep at night.”

That this line of argument seems like a plausible next step for contemporary feminism reflects the recent and rapid leftward turn of liberal politics. Socialism and anti-capitalism, as foils to Donald Trump’s me-first ideology, have taken an accelerated path into the mainstream. “Why I Am Not a Feminist” comes at a time when some portion of liberal women in America might be ready for a major shift—inclined, suddenly, toward a belief system that does not hallow the “markers of success in patriarchal capitalism . . . money and power,” as Crispin puts it. There is, it seems, a growing hunger for a feminism concerned more with the lives of low-income women than with the number of female C.E.O.s.

The opposing view—that feminism is not just broadly compatible with capitalism but actually served by it—has certainly enjoyed its share of prominence. This is the message that has been passed down by the vast majority of self-styled feminist role models over the past ten years: that feminism is what you call it when an individual woman gets enough money to do whatever she wants. Crispin is ruthless in dissecting this brand of feminism. It means simply buying one’s way out of oppression and then perpetuating it, she argues; it embraces the patriarchal model of happiness, which depends on “having someone else subject to your will.” Women, exploited for centuries, have grown subconsciously eager to exploit others, Crispin believes. “Once we are a part of the system and benefiting from it on the same level that men are, we won’t care, as a group, about whose turn it is to get hurt.”

A question of audience tugs at “Why I Am Not a Feminist.” It seemed, at points, as though anyone who understands the terms of Crispin’s argument would already agree with her. I also wondered how the book might land if Hillary Clinton had won—if the insufficiently radical feminism Crispin rails against had triumphed rather than absorbed a staggering blow. Instead, her book arrives at a useful and perhaps unexpected cultural inflection point: a time when political accommodation appears fruitless, and when, as Amanda Hess noted in the _Times Magazine _this week, many middle-class white women have marched in closer proximity to far-left ideas than perhaps they ever would have guessed. Exhortations to “transform culture, not just respond to it” are what many of us want to hear.

Of course, this being a polemic, there’s not much space given to how , exactly, the total disengagement with our individualist and capitalist society might be achieved. “Burn it down”—another nascent feminist slogan—is generally received as an abstract, metaphorical directive. The final chapter of Crispin’s book, titled “Where We Go From Here,” is four pages. In an earlier section of “Why I Am Not a Feminist,” Crispin rails against feminist flippancy toward men, writing, “It is always easier to find your sense of value by demeaning another’s value. It is easier to define yourself as ‘not that,’ rather than do an actual accounting of your own qualities and put them on the scale.” I agree.

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Why Feminist Economics is Necessary

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Pluralist Showcase

In the pluralist showcase series by Rethinking Economics, Cahal Moran explores non-mainstream ideas in economics and how they are useful for explaining, understanding and predicting things in economics.

By Cahal Moran

Feminist economics is a key component of the movement for pluralism in economics and one that has, to some extent, been acknowledged by the mainstream of the profession. It seeks to highlight issues which affect women because (it claims) they have not traditionally been recognised in a field dominated by men. On top of this, it seeks to carve out a space for women in the discipline, both for intrinsic reasons of fairness and diversity and because it means that women’s issues are more likely to be highlighted going forward.

As far as I can see there are two major themes of feminist economics. First is the degree of unpaid labour done by women, of which the canonical example work in the household but which also includes lesser known issues like affective, cognitive and emotional labour, all of which I will explain later in this post. Second is the discrimination women face in the economy, particularly in employment and pay, which can take many forms. Each of these deserves its own post, so in a two-part edition of the pluralist showcase I will discuss the empirical work establishing the existence and extent of these in turn.

Unpaid Labour

Feminist economists argue that women perform a lot of labour which goes unpaid and unnoticed but which keeps the economy, society, and individual families afloat. Whether this is work in the household, which is simply not remunerated because it is not in the market, or whether is the gendered expectations which push women into certain tasks and occupations, women tend to do work which is not rewarded as much as men’s work - either socially or financially. By focusing on work for wages – and with many textbook examples classically men’s jobs, such as those in manufacturing or construction - economic theory has harbours an implicit male-centred bias.

It was Marylin Waring’s 1988 book If Women Counted which brought women’s work into the view of the profession and policymakers, arguably even marking the birth of feminist economics itself. Previously women had been thought not to work at all but as Waring meticulously detailed, women perform a vast array of tasks, mostly in the home, which are obviously work: cooking, cleaning, childcare, travel, adult care, and more. This was reflected in national income accounts across the world, which went on to influence policy. Not too long ago the ONS finally started measuring these things with time-use surveys. These measure how long members of a household spend performing each activity, and this time is then multiplied by a comparable wage were such activity to be done in the private sector. As of 2016 their estimated value to the UK economy is a not-to-be-sniffed at £1.24 trillion, or 63% of GDP, as shown by Figure 1.

Although the UK data have too short a time frame to draw many conclusions, studies from the USA go back much further and they show that unpaid labour affects our interpretation of growth in interesting ways. It tends to be counter-cyclical, rising in recessions to offset the decline in the market economy and making the economy appear less volatile. This is because in recessions people tend to eat at home instead of going out; repair things instead of replacing them; and some even start to grow their own food. Adding household production to GDP also reduces income inequality, since low-income households engage in it more. The value of unpaid labour usually grows at the same rate as standard GDP (almost by construction) so it does not much affect overall growth, although including it does make the entry of women into the workforce less noticeable and so reduces long-term growth over the latter half of the 20th century.

How we consider different types of labour affects our interpretation of policy, too: the always excellent Women’s Budget Group produced a report in 2017 showing that austerity disproportionately affects women. On the other hand, men tend to bear the brunt of recessions themselves. This much is obvious when you think about who does market and who does home labour: recessions spell a decline in the remuneration of the former, while austerity spells a decline in remuneration of the latter. Another, even more subtle point about how male versus female labour is valued is whether childcare and education should be considered ‘investment’, as opposed to physical infrastructure projects typically done by men: after all, they surely create wealth for the future, right?

Unpaid Labour at Work

It would be wrong to believe that unpaid labour stops at home, though. Modern research has looked at the ‘emotional labour’ performed by women at work. In particular, women are expected to do little, menial tasks that do not advance their careers but are necessary to keep the workplace going. These range from literally doing the housework in the office, too – keeping the place tidy, bringing in food – to taking minutes, supporting others, creating schedules and the like. Echoing household labour, this work is not as visible as, say, giving a presentation or leading a project. The latter is more likely to be done by men, and this is one explanation for the so-called glass ceiling. One in-depth study of 335 households showed that emotional labour was primarily done by women because they are generally more likely to be concerned about whether people feel valued, whether messages have been communicated properly, and whether teams are progressing as a whole. This is perhaps best summed up by the phrase “if I don’t do it, no one will”.

At the risk of introducing too many new concepts with pretentious names, there are a couple of other types of labour worth mentioning, both of which are inseparable from the rest. One is the Marxist concept of affective labour , which in plain English means ‘being nice, pleasant and accommodating’ and also ‘looking good’: think customer service as an archetypal example. Everyone has to do these things but once again, the burden tends to fall on women – consider the disproportionate time and money women spend on their appearance versus men both in leisure and in work.

Finally, there is the mental load, an idea popularized by French cartoonist Emma last year. This is simply the burden of not only having to perform all of the tasks detailed above but of knowing that they need to be done. It is primarily women who have a more complete awareness of the range of necessary tasks at work and at home, and whether they are finished or unfinished. This is cognitively taxing and should not be underestimated: according to the charity Bright Horizons , 86% of women “cop the mental load” at home, including mums who are the primary earners, and 52% say they are burning out from it.

A common response to all of this is to ask if women simply prefer to do these tasks or are better at them. This is an inherently difficult question to answer because it’s a chicken-and-egg problem: if women are socialised into doing these things, they will get better at them and also appear to have a ‘preference’ for them. Another way to look at the problem is to ask how it affects women and their careers, and the results are not encouraging. A review of 183 studies on exhaustion concluded that women are more likely to feel exhausted than men and their rates of burnout are 80 per 1,000 higher. Furthermore, an experiment showed that emotional labour is not only expected of women; it is necessary for them to attain the same evaluations as men who haven’t done them! In summary, the fact that women are measurably exhausted and are asymmetrically punished for not doing this labour makes it hard to believe it is all a result of voluntary choices.

It would certainly be nice to get some more systematic statistics on all of this since many – albeit not all - of the cited studies above are detailed studies of relatively small numbers of people (not that I’m one to denigrate qualitative analysis, which is crucial for social science). That such data has not typically been collected is perhaps a reflection of the gender bias in the first place. I would bet good money that was such data to be gathered, it would simply confirm that women do most of this work. A moment’s reflection on your own workplace will likely support this point, but I’m happy to be proved wrong.

Women do large amounts of labour which is rendered invisible by social and financial conventions, and economic theory has traditionally failed to recognise this. Better data and incorporation of these concepts into economists’ and society’s ideas of ‘labour’ would be a huge step forward. But the need for feminist economics doesn’t end there, and in the next post I will look at the discrimination women face in the economy and how it affects both their pay and career choices, including within the economics profession itself.

 Discrimination and the Gender Pay Gap

One does not have to look far to find self-reports of discrimination by women, and the broad statistics show that women are underrepresented in the top paid professions such as lawyers, doctors, and tech executives; and even more so in positions of power such as politicians, CEOs, and judges. These facts are enough to make us sit up and take notice and for some, they may be sufficient to show there is a problem. Nevertheless, it is worth diving into the issue in more detail to show beyond any reasonable doubt that women’s position in the economy is harmed by discrimination.

Proving Discrimination

There are several clever approaches that have been taken in the literature to detect discrimination at each stage of employment and education, most of which involve modifying reported gender to see how it alters perceptions and outcomes. For example, researchers sent out CVs which were exactly the same except that one had a male while the other had a female name, and the CVs with a male name had a 50 percentage point higher chance of being offered a job at a more expensive restaurant. Similarly, students taking an online course (where you cannot see or hear the professor) were misinformed that their professor was a woman, and they evaluated them more negatively than those who took the same course but were (correctly) informed their professor was a man. Though it is impossible to blind people at every stage of most job application processes, an orchestra which was able to do so boosted female employment substantially.

Not only are women less likely to get employed; they are rated less favourably and offered lower salaries should they be employed. A study of science professors found that prospective academics were rated as more competent, hireable, and less desirable as mentees. Subsequently, the women were offered $26,500 on average while men were offered $30,200, and the women were less likely to be hired in the first place. Another study replicated this finding while showing that both men and women were just as likely to engage in this type of discrimination. My favourite example is quite meta: when presented with research like this, men are more likely to criticise it than women. This one is not as carefully controlled as other studies (and both men and women could be biased here), but it’s a good example of motivated reasoning nonetheless.

One more thing to emerge from the literature recently is the Implicit Association Test (IAT), otherwise known as the unconscious bias test, which you can take online . It is a less direct test of discrimination in practice than the above examples, but it is worth mentioning because it attempts to measure the subtle biases that cause the behaviour above by associating men and women with career versus home, or science versus the arts. Though one could fill an entire post discussing the IAT as it pertains to much more than just gender, is quite new and has been subject to some debate, there are some results worth noting. Generally speaking, IATs correlate with explicit measures of bias they retain additional predictive power for behaviour, especially in socially sensitive topics. In the case of gender, people are found to be biased toward traditional gender roles, and though one study found that using half a million IATs across 34 countries, the IAT predicted national sex-differences on grades for science and maths. 

As this post pertains to economics, it is worth mentioning the issues that academia and especially academic economics has with discrimination against women. A recent essay demonstrated in meticulous detail how, despite aggregate gains in women’s representation in academia, they are still less likely to be cited (including self-citations), more likely to be in junior positions, more likely to drop out, rated lower by students, more likely to be expected to nurture and support others, and more likely to be victims of harassment. Economics is one of the worst subjects, with widespread reports of harassment and discrimination and underrepresentation which increases at every level. According to a 2018 AEA report , in the US females make up 36% of undergraduate economics students, 27% of PhDs, 14% of full professors, and of course, only 1 (out of 49) woman has ever won the biggest prize in the discipline . This has been dubbed the ‘leaky pipeline’.

Gender Pay Gap

What is the combined impact of these subtle but substantial setbacks on women’s position in the economy? One indicator of this is the gender pay gap , which is how much women are paid when compared to men. The gender pay gap can have different definitions, but the most cited statistic is that women are paid 79% as much as men, which comes from comparing women and men in full-time employment. One can use alternatives which swing this percentage in either direction: if one only compares men and women in exactly the same jobs, it is closer to 90%. If one simply compares how much the average woman is paid to the average man regardless of whether they work or not, the number goes down to 61%. How one views this depends on whether one views the choices made by women – around childcare, occupation, seniority, education and more – as free or as a result of discrimination. The above would suggest that discrimination plays a major role, though it’s difficult to put a number on its importance. Regardless, the question of which of these things drive the gender pay gap is an interesting empirical exercise.

The most prominent contemporary gender pay gap scholar is Claudia Goldin, who has used unique data to come to some intuitive but unexpected conclusions. She uses US Census data to show that women sorting into different occupations and education levels is much less important than it used to be - the equalisation of education, in particular, has narrowed the pay gap, which was $0.56 on the dollar as recently as 1980. Nowadays the gender pay gap is mostly driven by caring for children with an important mediator: the flexibility of work, and it seems to have stalled. Occupations such as law require constant availability, which is more difficult for a primary caregiver to offer, and as such women tend not to do as well in them. What’s more, sometimes this work is rewarded in a nonlinear fashion – somebody who can offer the law firm 70 hours a week will do more than twice as well as somebody who can offer 35 hours a week. Men are much more likely to be in the former category.

Goldin’s uses detailed data on MBA graduates – an example of a demanding and inflexible career path – to explore the lifetime earnings of men versus women in more depth. Her data show the pay gap is small (though not zero) among young women but widens around the time people usually have children. It then proceeds to grow even further, and Goldin conjectures that many women try to have both children and a career but gradually give up and drop out. As corroborating evidence, the gap is much smaller for women without children. Finally, it is also smaller in occupations which allow flexibility, such as pharmacists. Goldin’s solution is surprisingly dovish: companies themselves need to make effort to make occupations less like law and more like pharmacy to reduce the gap. On the other hand, she does note that a greater role for men in childcare “wouldn’t hurt”.

The story is fairly similar across Western countries. In an IFS working paper, the UK pay gap is shown to be about 10% before the arrival of children which widens to 33% by the time the first child is 12 years old. Furthermore, women who work part-time see less wage growth, though the data do not permit investigating Goldin’s theory about flexibility in as much detail as she does. In a (slightly older) review of 11 European countries from 1995-2001, researchers found a pay gap in every country even after adding a number of controls (though excluding occupation). The average is close to 20% but there was a lot of variation, with Ireland and Austria having the highest pay gaps and Denmark and the Netherlands have the lowest. The paper also considers the pay gap across the distribution and finds it wider at each end: both: a ‘glass ceiling’ and ‘sticky floor’ effect. The glass ceiling is consistent with Goldin’s data on MBAs, though she could fairly be accused of paying less attention to lower-paid work.

Feminist economics is an entire school of thought which covers a wide range of topics and changes our understanding of existing topics. In both this post and the previous one I have empirically established the differing experiences of women and the effect this has on their role in the economy by focusing on unpaid labour, discrimination and pay. There are topics I’ve not covered including the feminist critique of economic rationality and the role of women in development (I accept that these posts have been quite Western-centric), and you can find out about these and more on both the Exploring Economics and Economics Education websites. Despite some progress in recent years, these topics are not covered enough in economics and there is a lot we’ve yet to understand.

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American progressives better learn what a feminist is

Democrats may pay a high price for their refusal to recognise the difference between the feminist criticism of gender ideology and right-wing bigotry.

At the 2014 MTV Video Music Awards, American superstar Beyonce performed in front of a giant screen blazoned with the word “Feminist” in huge lettering. She said she did it because “people don’t really know or understand what a feminist is”.

She was right. Since then, we have seen over and over again how much of America have no idea what a feminist is and what feminism really stands for.

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Over the past 10 years, we have heard of self-professed “feminists” who proudly declared their support for misogynist-in-chief Donald Trump. Newspapers ran think pieces on how there are many different ways of being a feminist, and how women can still be “feminists” while opposing the most basic tenets of feminism or supporting men who objectively harm women. Sex work became feminist. Objectification of the female body became feminist. Surrogacy, as it helped certain women “have it all”, was also declared feminist. In fact, it became clear that in the American discourse, “feminist” was any woman – or man – who claimed to be one, for whatever reason. People who clashed with sexist, conservative men on any given subject, no matter their positions on any other issue relating to women and girls, were also immediately accepted and celebrated as “feminists”.

Mainstream US “feminism” has become so individualised that every single woman there appears to define it only in terms of what the term means for her. This type of “feminism” does not translate into a collective movement, and therefore develops no principles, ethics or goals. “Feminist” in the current US context has become just another empty identity tag that serves no other purpose than political posturing and virtue signalling.

This is partly the reason why American progressive intelligentsia appears to be struggling to make sense of the left-wing, feminist backlash to the rapid mainstreamisation of “gender ideology” in the United Kingdom.

They are unable to distinguish between British feminists’ reasoned opposition to the erasure of women’s sex-based rights under the guise of “trans inclusion” and the bigotry of those on the American right who view trans-identified people with the same derision with which they have always viewed gay men and lesbians.

These so-called “progressives” do not see the rise of “gender ideology”, which argues that an individual’s internal sense of gender should supersede their sex in all aspects of life and under law, as a threat to themselves, and thus conclude that it is no threat to women as a collective.

Furthermore, they perceive trans rights activists, who show no regard for women’s rights and concerns in their advocacy, as true feminists simply because they are targeted by the American right as part of the culture wars.

These so-called “progressives” in America wonder why so many left-wing feminists, many of whom are lesbians, seem to have suddenly turned into right-wing bigots on this side of the Atlantic. They are unable to comprehend that we have not moved to the right, and are not targeting a marginalised minority out of hate, like right-wing homophobes, but taking a principled position in defence of women’s rights.

This apparent disconnect stems also from the fact that there is no true left in the US. Today the American left is dominated by the adherents of a performative brand of identity politics focussed on often right-coded values like personal liberty and freedom of speech. Left-wing politics in America, at least in the mainstream, is reduced to loud but inconsequential shouting about bigotry and prejudice. As there is little or no working-class mobilisation, the “left-wing” elites are left to speak of “oppression” on their own, without knowing much about it at all.

This sad state of the American “left” translates to trans-rights activists – who claim to be fighting for the most vulnerable and oppressed group among all identity groups – being celebrated as brave feminists, while real feminists concerned about women and girls’ wellbeing are condemned for their alleged prejudice.

There are, of course, many women in the US who do know what a feminist is, and reject gender ideology, not out of any bigotry but genuine concern for women’s rights, in the same way we do in the UK. Regrettably, they too are swiftly branded as bigots.

Take the infamous Wi Spa incident in Los Angeles in 2021 where women who complained about a trans-identifying male exposing his penis to women and girls in a female changing room. Most of the left-wing US media, led by the Guardian US, presented the issue as an attack on the unnamed trans-identifying man, and accused women who object to his presence in the changing room of being transphobic liars. As the controversy grew, and far-right groups like the Proud Boys got involved in the consequent protests outside the spa, the supposed alliance between “transphobic women” and bigoted, right-wing thugs became the focus of the entire story. Eventually, the man in question was revealed to be a convicted sex offender and was further charged with indecent exposure in relation to his behaviour in the spa changing room, but neither the media, nor the “left-wing” commentators and politicians offered the women they accused of being bigots and Nazis an apology.

The attitudes of this so-called progressive “left” in America towards women concerned about gender ideology are also having an impact back here in the UK. Many British progressives in media, academia and politics who eagerly follow the lead of the Americans on culture war issues are also dismissing feminist concerns over gender ideology as bigotry and trying to push us out of the national conversation over this issue. Countless feminists across the country have been silenced and shamed, have lost jobs and opportunities, and have been accused of allying themselves with the worst of the global right for the “crime” of speaking up for women.

Regardless of the abuse we face, we will continue our fight for what is right, and we will not let British feminist and left-wing spaces be captured by faux feminists, fake leftists and their performative politics imported from America.

The situation in the US, however, is much more critical.

Women and men anywhere to the left of the Republican Party who are concerned about gender ideology have nowhere to turn to. Democrats are not only refusing to listen to their concerns, but branding them as bigots and even fascists for daring to question their accepted hierarchies of oppression. The Democratic Party is in no way guaranteed a victory in the upcoming presidential election.  If they don’t change course, and stop accusing people of being bigoted for raising the alarm about gender ideology, some women, and men, may decide to vote on this issue alone and plump for Trump – who has been clear about his opposition to gender ideology, albeit not on feminist grounds – in November.

If the Democrats lose the election, and it is determined that their stance on this issue has contributed to the outcome, however, they should not dare blame women critical of gender ideology. They should understand that they have no one else to blame but themselves, and that they have alienated countless potential Democratic voters by branding them as right-wing bigots for defending women’s rights. American progressives may genuinely believe they are on the “right side of history”, but if they don’t make the effort to truly “understand what a feminist is”, and believe us when we say gender ideology is a threat to women, come November, they may themselves be history.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

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June 2024 Reads for the Rest of Us

The Feminist Know-It-All : You know her. You can’t stand her. Good thing she’s not here! Instead, this column by gender and women’s studies librarian Karla Strand will amplify stories of the creation, access, use and preservation of knowledge by women and girls around the world; share innovative projects and initiatives that focus on information, literacies, libraries and more; and, of course, talk about all of the books.

Each month , I provide Ms. readers with a list of new books being published by writers from historically excluded groups.

The aims of these lists are threefold:

• I want to do my part in the disruption of what has been the acceptable “norm” in the book world for far too long—white, cis, heterosexual, male;
• I want to amplify indie publishers and amazing works by writers who are women, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, APIA/AAPI, international, queer, trans, nonbinary, disabled, fat, immigrant, Muslim, neurodivergent, sex-positive or of other historically marginalized identities—you know, the rest of us; and
• I want to challenge and encourage you all to buy, borrow and read them! 

My dear feminist readers,

I want to thank those of you who reached out with such kind words about the introduction to last month’s column . I had no idea that others felt so similarly to the sentiments I expressed. It helps me to know that I’m not alone, so thank you for being in touch via email or on socials. 

Let’s keep up that level of engagement, inspiration and support for one another! I know we all need it. 

This month, I’m recommending 21 books that stood out to me for various reasons. The topics are diverse, from strange and spell-binding fiction, to nurturing and necessary nonfiction. 

As always, let me know what you’re reading, and thanks for your continued support. 

On Our Own Terms: Indigenous Histories of School Funding and Policy

By Meredith McCoy (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe descent). University of Nebraska Press. 252 pages. Out now. 

This necessary examination of Indigenous education dives deep into elements not yet explored with this level of rigor and research. Meredith McCoy uncovers schools as colonizing tools, even down to their funding. Likewise, McCoy clearly illustrates the resistance of Indigenous peoples in their commitment to making education their own despite the barriers. 

Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind

By Annalee Newitz ( @ghidorahnotweak ). W. W. Norton & Company. 272 pages. Out Jun. 4.

ICYMI, Annalee Newitz isn’t just a fantastic science fiction writer, but they are a damn fine journalist as well. In their latest, they examine how stories have been weaponized to sow chaos and confusion in service to a perilous “digital psywar.” Luckily, they also provide us with the deeply researched and well-reasoned exit strategy we desperately need.

We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance

By Kellie Carter Jackson ( @kelliecarterjackson ). Seal Press. 304 pages. Out Jun. 4.

Historian Kellie Carter Jackson has outdone herself with this masterfully researched and endlessly readable exploration—and celebration—of Black refusal to racism and oppression. Shedding light on stories formerly hidden, Carter Jackson examines various forms of resistance, from truancy to flight to simply recovering joy in the everyday.

Tiananmen Square: A Novel

By Lai Wen. Spiegel & Grau. 528 pages. Out Jun. 4.

Don’t let the size of this one deter you; it’s a deceptively quick read. This character-driven historical novel reflects on growing up, friendship and idealism in China during the 1970s and 1980s. Culminating in the iconic student demonstration in 1989, this story provides a unique and compelling perspective.

Beginning Again: Stories of Movement and Migration in Appalachia

By Katrina M. Powell . Haymarket Books. 352 pages. Out Jun. 11.

The latest volume in the Voice of Witness series, Beginning Again includes 12 compelling stories from people with histories or personal accounts of migration to or relocation within Appalachia. Each narrative disrupts stereotypes and provides an authentic voice to the diversity of experiences in the region.

Out of the Sierra: A Story of Rarámuri Resistance

By Victoria Blanco . Coffee House Press. 328 pages. Out Jun. 11. 

Through her ten years of oral histories and participatory research with the Rarámuri people of Chihuahua, Mexico, Victoria Blanco has given readers the gift of intimate testimony of Indigenous knowledge and tradition. In powerful narrative nonfiction, Blanco explores the Rarámuri through one family’s removal, resilience and resistance.

Written by Lau Yee-Wa . Translated by Jennifer Feeley. Feminist Press. 280 pages. Out Jun. 11.

This translation, set in Hong Kong, explores the urgency and gravity of language and culture in contemporary society. In a secondary school where teachers must switch from teaching in Cantonese to Mandarin, two rival teachers deal with the mandate in shocking ways.  

Why Would Feminists Trust the Police?

By Leah Cowan ( @leahacowan ). Verso. 240 pages. Out Jun. 11.

Through frameworks of Black British feminism and abolition, writer and editor Leah Cowan disrupts the notion that women could—or should—ever trust or depend on the police. While some women still hold out for police protection, Cowan dispels this myth and provides clear-eyed and convincing alternatives to keeping ourselves safe.

Zan: Stories

By Suzi Ehtesham-Zadeh . Dzanc Books. Out Jun. 11. 

Suzi Ehtesham-Zadeh has written this rich and evocative collection of short stories honoring the Zan, Zendegi, Azadi (Woman, Life Freedom) movement in Iran. It aptly illustrates the diversity, agency and power of women who fiercely love their country and its people, even in the face of an oppressive empire. 

Breaking the Curse: A Memoir About Trauma, Healing, and Italian Witchcraft

By Alex DiFrancesco ( @Alex_JKPGender ). Seven Stories Press. 192 pages. Out June 18.

With Breaking the Curse , writer and editor Alex DiFrancesco ups the ante on memoirs. In their candid and irreverent voice, DiFrancesco calls on readers to struggle along with them from rape and addiction through tarot, magic and spirituality to security, hope and, ultimately, healing. Content warning for suicide, addiction and sexual violence .

Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil

By Ananda Lima ( @anandalima ). Tor Books. 192 pages. Out June 18.  

After sleeping with the devil in 1999, “the writer” began crafting stories for him, some of which are included in this divine debut collection. Some are weird, some are wondrous, but all will have you reflecting on belonging, home, creativity, fear and more. 

Hood Wellness: Tales of Communal Care from People Who Drowned on Dry Land

By Tamela J. Gordon ( @shewritestolive ). Row House Publishing. 312 pages. Out June 18.

This powerful and reflective exploration of health and wellness is just what we need in our current moment. Weaving in personal narratives, self-help and social justice, Tamela J. Gordon provides us with a transformative perspective of self and community care, one that replaces a white heteronormative wellness industry with one centering inclusivity, justice and collectivity. 

Little Rot: A Novel

By Akwaeke Emezi . Riverhead Books. 288 pages. Out June 18. 

From the ever-unpredictable Akwaeke Emezi comes this erotic thriller not for the faint of heart. Emezi is a genius, IMHO, but an acquired taste, so if you’ve never tried them, don’t start with Little Rot . Super queer, disturbing and unflinching, Emezi’s latest will leave you uncomfortably questioning morality, power, sex and, well, humanity as a whole. Content warning for sexual violence.  

Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People

By Tiya Miles ( @TiyaMiles ). Penguin. 336 pages. Out Jun. 18. 

Well-researched and endlessly readable, Night Flyer invites readers to experience the many sides of Harriet Tubman, most of which we’ve not fully understood until now. Miles focuses on her mysticism, knowledge of the natural world and boundless dedication to truth and liberation. 

Perennial Ceremony: Lessons and Gifts from a Dakota Garden

By Teresa Peterson (Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota). University of Minnesota Press. 224 pages. Out Jun. 18.

I read this lovely collection while sitting in my backyard overlooking my pollinator garden on one of the first warm days of spring. Through stories, memories, recipes, essays and poems, Peterson lovingly honors healing and wholeness through the seasonal ceremonies of the everyday. 

Rooted: The American Legacy of Land Theft and the Modern Movement for Black Land Ownership

By Brea Baker ( @freckledwhileblack ). One World. 320 pages. Out Jun. 18.

Brea Baker’s brilliant debut history is unapologetically focused on the effect land theft has had on Black farming, land ownership and legacies of wealth. Rigorously examining land in Indigenous and Black communities, Baker draws a line from stolen land to stolen bodies to the commodification of both and through to the staggering racial wealth gaps we see today.

Systemic: How Racism is Making Us Sick

By Layal Liverpool ( @layallivs ). Astra House. 320 pages. Out June 18.

In this necessary volume, science journalist Layal Liverpool dispels the oft-repeated myth that biological or genetic differences among racial groups can explain health disparities. The fact is that we can more often blame racism – not race itself – in health care as the culprit to harmful health outcomes. 

Children of Anguish and Anarchy

By Tomi Adeyemi ( @tomiadeyemi ). Henry Holt and Co. BYR. 368 pages. Out Jun. 25.

There’s not really much to say about this one except IT’S THE LEGACY OF ORISHA FINALE! IYKYK—and if you don’t, what are you even doing with your life? I urge you to spend the summer reading one of the most imaginative, captivating, refreshing and important fantasy series ever.

The Eyes Are the Best Part

By Monika Kim ( @monikakimauthor ). Erewhon Books. 288 pages. Out June 25.

Monika Kim’s debut is scary, gross and gripping. With themes of immigration, racism, sexism and family trauma, it centers on a woman’s descent into a dark, hungry and violent obsession. This is feminist serial killer horror not to be missed.

Namesake: Reflections on a Warrior Woman

By N.S. Nuseibeh ( @nswriting.bsky.social) . Olive Branch Press. 288 pages. Out June 25. 

This collection of personal and interwoven essays offers a unique look into the delicate entanglements of the past and the contemporary. Exploring themes of feminism, colonialism, Palestinian heritage and home, Nuseibeh has gifted readers the reflection on history that our present moment so desperately needs.  

Please Stop Trying to Leave Me: A Novel

By Alana Saab ( @alana.saab ). Vintage. 384 pages. Out June 25.

This debut will appeal to readers—and writers—of unreliable narrators and meta realism. Sharp and contemporary, it centers on a lesbian writer struggling with mental health, relationships and finishing her manuscript. Saab’s unique style is darkly funny, tender and queer AF. 

‘My Life as a Feminist Punk’: An Interview With Kathleen Hanna

‘This Book Won’t Burn’: Celebrating Young People’s Bravery in the Face of Book Bans

Three New Best-Selling Books on Menopause

U.S. democracy is at a dangerous inflection point—from the demise of abortion rights, to a lack of pay equity and parental leave, to skyrocketing maternal mortality, and attacks on trans health. Left unchecked, these crises will lead to wider gaps in political participation and representation. For 50 years, Ms . has been forging feminist journalism—reporting, rebelling and truth-telling from the front-lines, championing the Equal Rights Amendment, and centering the stories of those most impacted. With all that’s at stake for equality, we are redoubling our commitment for the next 50 years. In turn, we need your help, Support Ms . today with a donation—any amount that is meaningful to you . For as little as $5 each month , you’ll receive the print magazine along with our e-newsletters, action alerts, and invitations to Ms . Studios events and podcasts . We are grateful for your loyalty and ferocity .

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The Meaning of Mexico’s First Female President

B eing a woman in Mexico is tough—if not dangerous. Women earn 16% less than men, and the gender gap in labor force participation is one of the highest in Latin America. But perhaps the most shocking statistic is that every hour, at least one woman disappears , and every day, 11 women die violently .

Few would imagine that this same country has just elected a female President. Claudia Sheinbaum, former mayor of Mexico City and loyal successor to the left-wing incumbent, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), has come out on top following the June 2 vote .

The question is how in the world this happened. In a county where 90% of Mexicans harbor negative biases against women, and 58% hold such biases specifically against female politicians, tens of millions have voted for women. That includes not just Sheinbaum but Xóchitl Gálvez , a senator and businesswoman, who the opposition rallied behind.

This is no small puzzle . Mexico’s negative biases against female leaders nearly double those of the U.S. or Canada. Yet, Mexico has become the first North American nation to elect a female leader. The results are still streaming in, but Mexico is also expected to boast the fourth largest contingent of congresswomen in the world and to have women governing nearly half of its 32 states.

The empowerment of women in Mexican politics did not occur haphazardly. It stemmed from a deliberate, albeit gradual, construction of a legal framework fostering gender parity—most notably through mandatory gender quotas. It all started in 1996 when a law recommending that at least 30% of candidates should be female was passed. In 2002, a congress that was 84% male made it mandatory, but with the big exception that voters could elect men in primaries. “That was what took us to court to demand that the exception be eliminated,” Silvia Hernández, the only Mexican female that has been senator for three terms, told me about the lawsuit Mexican women launched in response. Many more women accompanied the process. In 2011, the court ruled in their favor.

Things moved fast from then. Mexico went from having 26% congresswomen in 2011, to 42% in 2015, and 48% just ahead of the Sunday vote. And that is not all. The expected success of women at the governor-level is no doubt helped by Mexican electoral authorities mandating that more than half or each party’s gubernatorial candidates be female, and that they not be fielded in areas where their party is expected to fare poorly.

Yet voters wonder whether a President Sheinbaum will make things better for Mexican women. There is some hope. She has outlined a bold vision for creating a “national care system” to establish nurseries, nursing homes, and sick care facilities to alleviate the burden of unpaid care work, which is primarily carried out by women.

Still, recent history has demonstrated that female leadership does not always translate into better policies for women. According to my own research , Mexico’s women legislators consistently support federal budgets that underfund the amount of money allocated to gender equality programs.

Sheinbaum’s rise to power excites many women who will identify with a female leader. Yet AMLO did not have a good relationship with the feminist organizations that criticized him. The fear is that Sheinbaum doesn’t have it either.

Concerns also linger over how Mexican voters might respond to a President Sheinbaum, especially when she inevitably makes errors, as all politicians do. Studies indicate that female leaders often endure harsher backlash than their male counterparts, a phenomenon exacerbated in Mexico by prevailing societal sexism. Being a female President won’t be easy. A survey by Enkoll in February found that a third of Mexicans feel “the country is not prepared” for one, and 14% openly say they would prefer a man in the job.

That sexism has and will come from women. During the campaign, opposition parties astutely dog whistled at latent Mexican sexism. In the first presidential debate, Gálvez nicknamed Sheinbaum “the ice lady,” casting her as cold and heartless—a direct affront to societal expectations that women be warm and nurturing. In another debate, Sheinbaum was criticized by Galvez on her choice of attire, implying that her “lack of religiosity” rendered her unfit for office. A famous female Mexican intellectual, Guadalupe Loaeza, also criticized her curly hair ahead of the vote, arguing it was evidence that Sheinbaum was “an envious little girl.”

Outside of politics, Sheinbaum will have to contend with pundits who have frequently called her AMLO’s “clon,” “protégé,” “favorite subordinate,” “spoiled girl,” or “little flower.” These critics assume that she is being manipulated or controlled by AMLO, rather than, what is more probably happening, which is that Sheinbaum is part of a political movement that is broadly popular and whose policies have been successful in attracting voters. It is only strategic to continue advancing this popular program.

She is also frequently accused of being arrogant due to her disciplined and sober personality, as well as her ability to dodge difficult questions from the press. “I have no doubt that in a male politician, these traits would likely be hailed as signs of professionalism and power,” Marta Lamas, a recognized feminist and professor from Mexico’s National Autonomous University, told me. In Sheinbaum’s case, they morph into liabilities, inviting accusations of haughtiness and conceit.

Sheinbaum is a capable politician in her own right. She won Morena’s primary against four men and had previously won two elections. As mayor of Mexico City, she demonstrated the ability to distance herself from AMLO in areas that she deemed relevant. Unlike him, she wore a mask during the COVID-19 pandemic, spearheaded major clean energy projects, and avoided the militarization of state police.

Polls ahead of the vote showed that Sheinbaum’s campaign was supported by more women than men. But in a country where being a woman is so difficult, support will only last if she delivers as President. The feminist struggle to put women in power does not end with Sheinbaum’s victory. The most important challenge is translating gender equality into reality. Success won’t come easily.

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All Thing Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess - It all gets a bit too much in the end

Becca rothfeld’s collection is energetic and charmingly verbose, but her tendency to demystify everything wears thin.

Becca Rothfeld: Moments of clear insight and great beauty

Towards the end of All Things Are Too Small, Becca’s Rothfeld’s defence of maximalism, she reproduces a quotation that she has “so thoroughly digested and metabolised” that it is now an essential fixture of her “mental repertoire”.

“I love a demystified thing inordinately.”

Yes, I thought, that’s it. That’s the problem with this book: Rothfeld’s tendency towards such relentless demystification of her subjects that they’re pallid and lifeless by the time she’s through.

This is not true of all the essays in the collection. It opens promisingly and with astounding energy and vigour. Initially, one forgives Rothfeld’s immediately evident habit of making grand, inaccurate statements, such as: “Desire is as good a guide to truth as anything else.” If anything, her verbosity and inexactitude seem charming – she’s wrong because she’s passionate. Reading, I felt myself at a dinner table surrounded by voices stridently debating all manner of interesting things: literature, meaning, mindfulness, feminism, sex, sex and more sex (to give an idea of the topics of these essays).

The End of Everything by Victor Davis Hanson: Splendid and compulsively readable despite one weakness

Mouthing by Orla Mackey: An engrossing and adept work of fiction about a rural Irish community like any other

‘I miss my solitude’: Booker winner Paul Lynch says he is a ‘social introvert’

Willy Vlautin: ‘I can’t quit alcohol because of my nerves. I’ve never been strong enough to not have that in my back pocket’

My God, though, did I want that dinner to end, so I could return somewhere peaceful and reflective, to cease the ringing in my ears of all this terribly intelligent demystifying. The humour, too, wears thin. Yes, it’s hilarious to mock the bourgeois aesthetic of Marie Kondo (I laughed aloud at “the declutterer dreams of a house without f**king or sh**ting”), but by the end of the collection, these knowing asides and the unremitting sarcasm made me feel like I was trying to converse with a surly, unimpressed teenager.

Also, Rothfeld’s attempts at love-writing made me physically cringe. At one point, she tells us that her husband loves reading so much, he does so in the shower. The impossible logistics of this image will never, I fear, cease to irritate me.

Yet, there are moments of clear insight, and of great beauty. Rothfeld’s capacious vocabulary left me stunned, and exquisite phrases such as “the gleaming purity of a history” almost made up for her agonising attempts at poeticism.

“The night was cool as mint. Behind him, the light from the streetlamp became butter melting. His voice was flat and nasal, mouthy as saltwater toffee.”

Ultimately, this collection’s great weakness is that these pieces have been gathered into a collection at all. I can see that, taken one at a time, Rothfeld’s tone would be pithy and gratifying, and these qualities would make up for her prolix, excessive demystification and broad, questionable statements. Alas, reading her thoughts over and over, all in a row, I grew frustrated, tired and harried. By the end, I wanted to leave the dinner party, to run out into the street, to regain the relief of a little mystery.

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15 Signs You Secretly Believe In Feminism

Posted: May 28, 2024 | Last updated: May 28, 2024

Could you be a secret feminist, or do you already know you are one? From believing in equality and human rights for all to breaking down boundaries around mental health, being a feminist ain’t all bad! 

What Is Feminism?

Simply put, feminism aims to empower all women through realizing the extent of their rights. By advocating for equal rights and opportunities, the feminist movement respects a diverse range of female and gendered experiences. The movement strives for a better, fairer, and more inclusive society.

It’s Not A Dirty Word

Feminism has gotten a bad rep over the years. However, despite what some think, feminists don’t believe in female world domination whereby white men are forced into slavery. 

The term feminist only exists because some people don’t believe in equality. If you support equal rights, equal pay, and ending rape culture, then safe to say you are a feminist.

Let’s look at the telltale signs and beliefs of modern-day feminism to help you decipher what it is you believe in. 

You Believe Men And Women Deserve Equal Opportunities

If you believe that opportunities should given based on merit and not on gender, then congratulations, you’re a feminist!

You Believe Women’s Jobs Are Just As Important As Men’s

If you don’t think that women’s careers should end when they get married and start a family or that motherhood is their destiny, then chances are you’re a feminist. Women are immensely valuable contributors to society, and while motherhood is incredible, it’s not for everyone. 

You Believe In Shared Domestic Labor

No one person’s time is more valuable than another’s. Domestic labor should not be placed solely on one person by fault of being a woman. Rather, it should be shared accordingly.

Looking Good Is About Feeling Good

If you’ve realized looking good is all about feeling good and that people, especially women, don’t dress up for men, you may be a feminist. You also know that a woman is not “asking for it” by looking nice.

You Hate The Phrase “Boys Will Be Boys”

If you believe this phrase is utter rubbish, that boys are not naturally born to harass women or become aggressive, but rather, they are conditioned by society, you’re a feminist. 

Believing that boys should be raised to respect and appreciate everyone, including women, rather than just teaching girls to be cautious or distrusting of men is a core belief amongst feminists today. 

You Don’t Ask For Praise For Doing The Simplest Tasks

Loading the dishwasher, looking after your child for the day, or doing the laundry should be shared responsibilities.

If you have the initiative to contribute to domestic labor, including caring for your own child, without having to be asked, reminded, or praised, then you may well be a feminist. 

You Actively Contribute To Childcare

If you have a child with someone, it’s not one person’s responsibility to look after it. You should also know that you can’t “babysit” your own child. 

Sharing the pressures of childcare and helping out when your partner is stressed or exhausted is a pretty good sign that you believe in equal partnerships and have a high level of respect and appreciation for each other.

You Hate Being Told How You Should Look

From being told how to look, what to wear, what to eat, or what colors you should or shouldn’t wear, feminists believe every individual has a right to look however they want. 

Whether that be wearing a head covering for personal or religious reasons or a bikini. Dressing up or dressing down so long as you’re happy, comfortable, and respectful we should all be free to choose who we are and reinvent ourselves as often as we deem fit. 

You Hate Being Told How You Should Behave

No one should be expected to act a certain way just because it’s what has been expected of their gender in the past. It’s the 21st century; people can act how they like and pursue whatever dreams they want. Besides, being told you’ve done something “like a girl” or that you need to act “like a man” isn’t exactly an insult these days. 

You Hate Categorization

If you hate the idea of being put into an identity box, you’re likely a feminist. A lot of feminists believe that categorizing people by their gender, race, or ethnicity is incredibly damaging. Some even argue it’s a patriarchal tool used to subjugate individuals by associating them with an identity that may elicit prejudice towards them.  

You Support LGBTQ+

Rights for women include rights for all women, and feminism demands equality for all genders and identities. It calls for the end of prejudice in any form, which covers all people, no matter their gender, religious, cultural, or ethnic identities

You Believe in Bodily Autonomy

If you believe that everyone should have full autonomy over their bodies, you’re a feminist. Decisions on how you should look, act, feel, and be treated should be made by the individual, not someone who has no understanding of their experience. 

This includes supporting laws and legislation around safeguarding individuals from sexual assault, physical and verbal harassment, and abuse throughout their lives.

You Believe In Equal Pay

You’re probably a feminist if you believe that pay should be based on merit, not gender.

Birth Control

One guaranteed sign you’re a feminist is that you believe everyone should have access to affordable contraception. However, this is not just for women. Feminists advocate for greater awareness of male contraceptives that are less damaging and, in some cases, more effective. 

From a vasectomy to male contraceptive pills, you believe the responsibility should be just as much on men as it is on women. 

You Believe In Equality For All

Ultimately, the most obvious sign you’re secretly a feminist is if you genuinely believe in the equality of the sexes and the pursuit of a fairer, more accepting world. 

What Does It Mean If You’re Not A Feminist?

The word feminist may seem scary for those who haven’t fully grasped the concept. However, whether you assign the word to yourself or not, it doesn’t matter, provided you believe in the same principles of justice and equality. 

Whatever your beliefs, so long as you’re doing your best to make the world a better place, it doesn’t matter what you call them.

We Should All Be Feminists

Feminism is about promoting equality and universal human rights for everyone to create a better, safer, and more accepting world to live in. Surely, that’s something we should all aspire to achieve?

Could You Be An Undercover Feminist?

Whether you admit it or not, most decent people are. 

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What to Know About Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s Newly Elected President

Here are five key insights into Mexico’s new president as people wonder whether she will diverge from Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s policies or focus on cementing his legacy.

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By Natalie Kitroeff

Reporting from Mexico City

Claudia Sheinbaum’s list of accolades is long: She has a Ph.D in energy engineering, participated in a United Nations panel of climate scientists awarded a Nobel Peace Prize and governed the capital, one of the largest cities in the hemisphere.

On Sunday, she added another achievement to her résumé: becoming the first woman elected president of Mexico.

Ms. Sheinbaum, 61, captured at least 58 percent of the vote in a landmark election on Sunday that featured two women competing for the nation’s highest office — a groundbreaking contest in a country long known for a culture of machismo and rampant violence against women.

Mexico Election Results: Sheinbaum Wins

See results and maps for Mexico’s 2024 presidential election.

“For the first time in 200 years of the republic, I will become the first female president of Mexico,” she said. “And as I have said on other occasions, I do not arrive alone. We all arrived, with our heroines who gave us our homeland, with our ancestors, our mothers, our daughters and our granddaughters.”

Now that she has clinched the presidency, Ms. Sheinbaum’s next hurdle will be stepping out of the shadow of her predecessor and longtime mentor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the outgoing president.

She and Mr. López Obrador are “different people,” she said in an interview. He’s an oilman who invested in environmentally questionable projects; she’s a climate scientist. Yet Ms. Sheinbaum has appealed to voters mainly by promising to cement his legacy, backing moves like his big bet on the national oil company and proposed constitutional changes that critics call antidemocratic.

Their alliance has also left many Mexicans asking: Can Ms. Sheinbaum be her own leader? Or will she just be his pawn?

“There’s this idea, because a lot of columnists say it, that I don’t have a personality,” Ms. Sheinbaum complained to reporters earlier this year. “That President Andrés Manuel López Obrador tells me what to do.”

She insists she will govern independently from Mr. López Obrador and has some different priorities. But veering too far from his agenda could be very risky.

Here are five things to know about the newly elected president of Mexico that help inform whether she will stray from Mr. López Obrador’s policies or dedicate herself to cementing his legacy.

1. Sheinbaum will inherit a host of challenges.

A former ballet dancer, Ms. Sheinbaum calls herself “obsessive” and “disciplined.” But discipline may not be enough, analysts say.

As president, she already stands to inherit a long list of troubles. The state-owned oil company is buckling under debt, migration through the country has reached historical highs and cartel violence continues to torment the country.

She has said she would continue Mr. López Obrador’s policy of addressing the drivers of violence instead of waging war on the criminal groups, but will also work to lower rates of impunity and build up the national guard.

With a U.S. presidential election just months away, she told The New York Times that she was prepared to work with whichever candidate wins. Publicly, she has echoed Mr. López Obrador’s emphasis on tackling migration by addressing its root causes.

In a hint of potential change, she said in a recent debate that she would seek to reform the c ountry’s migration authority , an agency often accused of corruption.

2. She’s seen as reserved, even aloof.

The Times spoke with two dozen people who have worked with or know Ms. Sheinbaum and also visited campaign events, reviewed her writings and her media appearances and interviewed her, once in 2020 and again this year.

What became clear is that Ms. Sheinbaum, (pronounced SHANE-balm), has long seemed more comfortable quietly getting things done than selling herself or her achievements.

The granddaughter of Jewish immigrants who fled Europe, she rarely discusses being Jewish or almost anything about her personal life, colleagues say. When interviewers ask her about the Nobel Prize she shared with a panel of climate researchers, she notes how many others were involved in the work.

She is known as a tough boss with a quick temper who can inspire in her staff fear and adoration at the same time. Publicly, though, her affect is so controlled it verges on aloof.

Some say her professorial demeanor could pose a challenge in a political landscape defined by Mr. López Obrador, who built his party into a juggernaut by relying on the force of his personality.

“She needs him,” said Carlos Heredia, a Mexican political analyst. “She doesn’t have the charisma, she doesn’t have the popularity, she doesn’t have the political stamina of her own, so she needs to borrow that from López Obrador.”

For some Mexicans, however, a thrills-free woman may be an ideal antidote to an entertaining man who plunged the country into partisan turmoil.

3. She’s long sought to keep Mr. López Obrador happy.

The candidate’s political career began when Mr. López Obrador was elected mayor of Mexico City in 2000 and invited her to a meeting at a diner. “What I want is to reduce pollution,” she recalled Mr. López Obrador telling her. “Do you know how to do that?”

Ms. Sheinbaum, who by then had written more than a dozen reports on energy use and carbon emissions, said yes. She became his environment minister. In meetings, she seemed willing to do almost anything to make her boss happy, according to several people who worked with her.

“The phrase she used over and over again was ‘The mayor said to,’” said Mr. Heredia, who worked with her in city government under Mr. López Obrador. What that meant, according to Mr. Heredia: “We are not a cabinet for giving ideas,” he said. “We are a group of people here to execute what he decides.”

In the years that followed, Ms. Sheinbaum straddled academia and politics, but she always stayed close to Mr. López Obrador. When he founded his Morena party in 2014, he asked her to run on the party’s ticket to become mayor of Tlalpan, a borough of Mexico City. With his backing, she won.

4. She is known for being a demanding boss.

In 2018, Mr. López Obrador was swept into the presidency in a landslide and Ms. Sheinbaum became Mexico City’s mayor. She quickly gained a reputation as an exacting boss.

“One doesn’t go to her meetings to tell her, ‘I’m working on it,’” said Soledad Aragón, a former member of Ms. Sheinbaum’s cabinet. When she walked into a room, Ms. Aragón said, everyone sat up straight.

As mayor, she could remember specific numbers mentioned in a meeting weeks after it occurred, Ms. Aragón said, calling her “brilliant” and “demanding,” especially of herself, adding: “It has gotten results.”

Five officials who have worked with Ms. Sheinbaum, who were not authorized to speak publicly, said that she was quick to anger at times and would yell at her subordinates in front of large groups. Through a spokesman, Ms. Sheinbaum declined to comment on the accusation.

Her defenders say some people merely reacted badly to a woman in charge.

“I know that in her government, sometimes people got offended or felt bad because she yelled at them,” said Marta Lamas, a longtime feminist activist who has been close to Ms. Sheinbaum and her team. “But if a man yells, it wouldn’t be an issue because culturally, it’s different.”

“People say it in a critical way: ‘She’s tough,’” Ms. Aragón said. “What do you want, someone soft in charge of the city?”

5. She is a true believer in Mr. López Obrador’s vision.

For years, Ms. Sheinbaum has tried to explain how she can be so in step with Mr. López Obrador while also being herself. The answer, she says, is simple: She genuinely believes in him.

In 2022, a radio host asked her a pointed question from a female listener: “Why don’t you choose to be a woman who governs with her own ideas? Why don’t you get out of AMLO’s circus?” she asked, using Mr. López Obrador’s nickname. “Why have the same rhetoric with the same words?”

Ms. Sheinbaum didn’t hesitate.

“If you think the same as another person, it’s not that you’re copying them; you just agree with the ideas,” she said. “You can’t deny what you believe.”

Emiliano Rodríguez Mega contributed reporting.

Natalie Kitroeff is the Mexico City bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. More about Natalie Kitroeff