What is Liberal feminism? Explained

In the previous post we learned about Gender Equality and Equity This blog outlines one of the major liberal feminism ideas. It traces the development of feminist politics historically, as well as its impact on the modern world. At the end of this post the reader will be able to:

Comprehend the role that liberal feminism plays in resolving gender issues
Allow for a critical assessment of liberal feminism's effectiveness in addressing the issues faced by women across all sexes.

Introduction
Some Key terms
Defining liberal feminism
Characteristics of liberal feminism
Types of liberal feminism
Historical background
Contemporary Direction in Liberal Feminism
Contribution of National Organization for Women (NOW)
Contribution of the Women's Equity Action League (WEAL)
Contribution of The National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC)
Critiques of liberal Feminism
Summary

Introduction

Liberals hold that a just state protects people's right to freedom as a basic value. This is the viewpoint held by liberal feminists, who support promoting women's freedom. The liberal feminism, which sprang from the liberalism school of political thought, is currently being rethought and restructured as a result of its ongoing evolution. The essential principle of liberalism, which emerged in the seventeenth century, is the value and autonomy of the individual. Liberal feminists firmly believe that since all women are capable of claiming their right to equality, change is achievable without changing the way society is organised.

Some Key terms

Theory

A theory is a collection of related ideas, terms, and propositions that, by outlining the relationships between variables, explain or forecast certain occurrences or circumstances.

Feminist theory

One way to view feminist theory is as

Attempts to create a thorough analysis of women's subordination, including its alleged nature and origin;
Is a requirement for creating efficient plans to liberate women;
The root causes of women's subordination are identified.

Feminist theory, according to Rosemarie Tong (2009), aims to characterise women's oppression, explain its sources and effects, and provide methods for its emancipation.

Feminism can be seen as an ideology, an analytical framework, and a strategic framework.

As an ideology, feminism today stands not only for gender equality, but for the transformation of all social relations of power that oppress, exploit, or marginalize any set of people, on the basis of their gender, age, sexual orientation, ability, race, religion, nationality, location, class, caste, or ethnicity.

As an analytical framework, it has created a range of analytical tools and methods for unpacking the hidden and normalized power imbalances between men and women in various social institutions and structures

As a social change strategy, feminism prioritizes the empowerment of women, the transformation of gender power relations, and the advancement of gender equality within all change interventions. Women suffrage movement was the struggle for the right of women to vote and run for office and part of the overall women’s rights movement.in the mid-nineteenth century, women in many countries, especially in U.S. and Britain, formed organizations to fight for suffrage. The work of an organization called International Women Suffrage Alliance (IWSA) formed by British Women’s rights activist Millicent Fawcett, American activist Carrie Chapman Catt and other leading women’s rights activists contributed to the women suffrage movemen

Defining liberal feminism

Liberal feminism is a specific strategy for achieving gender equality that places an emphasis on a person's ability to change negative stereotypes about women. A more independent kind of feminism, liberal feminism encourages people to use their skills and the democratic process to advance gender equality in the workplace, in society, and before the law.

The liberal feminism is an individualistic variety that emphasises women's ability to uphold their equality by taking ownership of their own decisions and actions. They adhere to the ideology that women will change society through their interpersonal interactions with people of the other sex. They also think that because all women are capable of claiming their right to equality, change can occur without changing the way society is organised. They believe that political and legal reform must be changed in order to attain gender equality for men and women, hence they want institutional prejudice to be eliminated and laws that treat women fairly to be implemented. They raise concerns about reproductive and abortion rights, domestic and sexual assault, voting rights, education, and access to affordable health care and childcare.

Characteristics of liberal feminism

See through the lens of gender and gender equality
Emphasis on traditional understanding of human nature and personhood: rationality, individual autonomy, self-fulfillment
Sex and gender neutral; all human beings possess a common nature.
A just society is a society that allows individuals to exercise their freedom and fulfill themselves.
Emphasis on equality of opportunity: all persons deserve an equal chance to develop their rational and moral capacities so that they can achieve personhood.
Because society has the false belief that women are by nature less intellectually and physically capable than men it excludes women from many opportunities and the true potential of women goes unfulfilled.
Liberal feminists argue that women share the same rational human nature men do and so should be given the same educational opportunities and civil rights as men are given.
The goal of women’s liberation is freeing women from oppressive gender roles, sexual and gender equality.
Liberal feminism led to advances in the economic sphere, in equality of opportunity and in civil rights.

Types of liberal feminism

Liberal feminists can be classified as either classical or libertarian liberals or welfare or egalitarian liberals. Classical liberals believe that the state should limit its protection of civil liberties, such as the right to own property, the right to vote, the right to free speech, and the right to practise one's religion. They contend that the state ought to simply provide each person an equal opportunity to choose how much they want to accumulate within the free market, rather than meddling with it. Welfare liberals, however, contend that in addition to protecting civil freedoms, the government also needs to address economic inequality. They believe that people come into the market with differences based on initial privilege, innate aptitude, and pure luck, and that these discrepancies will prevent some people from taking a fair share of what the market has to offer. Welfare liberals advocate for governmental economic initiatives to address this problem.

Historical background

The liberal feminist philosophy has a long history. It was first advanced by thinkers including Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), Harriet Taylor (1807–1873), John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (1815-1902). The liberal feminist movement got its start with Mary Wollstonecraft.

In reality, liberal political theory arose alongside acceptance of one patriarchal structure, the patriarchal household in which wives are subservient to their husbands. Liberal political theory was initially a critique of patriarchal political philosophy.

When Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in the eighteenth century, women in Europe were losing ground in both the social and economic spheres. The famous work "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" by Mary Wollstonecraft, published in 1791, shows how wealth operated against this married, bourgeois woman in the eighteenth century. She contested the exclusion of women from the revolutionaries in her Declaration of the Rights of Women (1791). The middle-class women were not allowed to make their own decisions, according to Wollstonecraft. They lacked freedom and made sacrifices for the prestige, pleasure, and power their husband might give in exchange for their health, freedom, and morality.

Equal liberty became important in the eighteenth century. The academics John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor embraced Wollstonecraft's ideas and firmly believed that women must have the right to vote in order to be treated equally with men. They believed that in order to achieve sexual equality in society or gender justice, society must grant women the same political rights, economic opportunities, and educational opportunities that men enjoy. They also believed that rationality is not only conceptualised morally as autonomous decision-making, but also as calculative. In their view, women required the right to vote in order to be treated on an equal footing with men. They believed that voting gave individuals the ability to express their political opinions as well as change the systems, institutions, and mindsets that contribute to their own and others' oppression.

Black and white working-class women both made contributions to the women's rights movements in the nineteenth century. The end of the Civil War did not result in the liberation of women, which led to the establishment of the Equal Rights Association, which was co-chaired by Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, at the 1866 National Women's Rights Convention. It stated the motivation behind the black women's suffrage movements' association. After the Equal Rights Association was dissolved, Anthony and Stanton founded the National Woman Suffrage Association. Because of her profound philosophical disagreement with Stanton and Anthony's views on the contributions of organised religion to women's oppression, Lucy Stone founded the American Woman Suffrage Association, which resulted in the division of the women's rights movement in the United States into two.

While the American Woman Suffrage Association promoted a reformist feminist programme, the National Woman Suffrage Association advanced a revolutionary feminist agenda for women. The National American Woman Suffrage Association was created in 1890 through the merger of two organisations. The National American Woman Suffrage Association held back almost all of its efforts to get the vote for women until the nineteenth Amendment was passed in 1920.

The 20th century made progress toward equal rights. Following the ratification of the 19th Amendment, feminists quietly carry on their work in the US. Women need economic chances, sexual freedoms, and civil liberties in addition to them in order to be truly emancipated, according to the 1960s rebellious generation of feminists. While some advocated for a reformist, liberal agenda, others fought for a more extreme, revolutionary course of action.

The National Organization for Women (NOW), The National Women's Political Caucus (NWPC), and Women's Equity Action League were some of the developing women's rights organisations that the majority of liberal feminists belonged to by the middle of the 1960s (WEAL). the shared goal of these organisations is elevate women's standing. The Citizens Advisory Council, numerous State Commissions on the Status of Women, the establishment of the Equal Pay Act, and the Commission on the Status of Women were all founded in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy. Women's rights organisations concentrated on the implications of the sameness-differences debate during the 20th century.

In her seminal essay "Feminine Mystique," first President of NOW Betty Friedan argued that modern women needed to find meaningful employment in the full-time, public workforce. The book failed to describe the situation of suburban, white, educated, middle-class, heterosexual housewives in the United States, despite the fact that it showed why motherhood and marriage are insufficient for some types of women. Twenty years after publishing her first book, "The Feminine Mystique," she wrote "The Second Stage," observing women's dual roles as mothers and full-time housewives. The second stage urged women to be like women, while the feminine mystique urged them to become more like men.

Contemporary Direction in Liberal Feminism

Sexual equality and the desire to liberate women from repressive gender norms are two of the key objectives of women's liberation. While welfare liberal feminists support reimbursing women and providing social assistance, traditional liberal feminists work to repeal discriminatory laws and policies. Friedan advocated for androgyny as a counterargument to discrimination. The discussion of sex differences and androgyny as gender roles has honed liberal feminists' commitment to liberty, equality, and justice for everyone. Terms like "sex roles" and "gender attributes" refer to behaviour patterns that people of different sexes are socialised, encouraged, or pressured to acquire, including things like "sex-appropriate" personalities, interests, and occupations, according to Jane English. Given all of these considerations, liberal feminists generally concur that a person's psychological and social gender should not be based solely on their biological sex.

Contribution of National Organization for Women (NOW)

It is the first overtly feminist organisation to take on sexism in the social, political, economic, and personal spheres of life in the United States in the 20th century. The underlying agenda and character of NOW were liberal.

The major purposes are:

women's rights as "truly equal partnership with men," "fully equal partnership of the sexes"
focused on activism: "confront, with concrete action, the conditions that now prevent women from enjoying the equality of opportunity and freedom of choice which is their right as individual Americans, as human beings"
women's rights seen in the context of "the world-wide revolution of human rights"; equality of women as an opportunity to "develop their fullest human potentials"
purpose to put women in the "mainstream of American political, economic and social life"
NOW's commitment "equality, freedom, and dignity for women" specifically defined as not being about "special privilege" for women or "enmity towards men"

Contribution of the Women's Equity Action League (WEAL)

Betty Boyer was chosen by the members of WEAL to be their first president when it was established in Cleveland, Ohio. The Women's Equity Action League was a national membership group with state chapters and divisions that was committed to enhancing the status and quality of life for all women, particularly through advocacy, legal action, and legislative change. Its sibling organisation, the WEAL Fund, was established in 1972 "to take on educational and research programmes on sex discrimination and to help obtain legal rights for women."

Contribution of The National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC)

NWPC was established in 1971 and is the only national organisation solely committed to boosting the representation of women in all spheres of political and public life, including as candidates for office, elected and appointed officials, delegates to national party conventions, judges in state and federal courts, lobbyists, voters, and campaign managers. The founders include well-known women like Shirley Chisholm, Dorothy Height, and Gloria Steinem, an author, lecturer, and the first editor of Ms. Magazine, among others.

Critiques of liberal Feminism

The major critiques of liberal feminism are follows:

The main problem of liberal feminism is its tendency to accept male values as universal values. All women should want to become like men, to aspire to masculine values. Liberal feminism often did not include an analysis of class or sexuality (the sex/gender system).
Liberal feminism of judging women and their success by male standards.
Alison Jaggar criticized as the claimed rational, free and autonomous self that liberates favour are not sex-neutral and on the contrary it is a male self.
Individual assumptions make it difficult to see ways in which underlying social structures and values disadvantage women
Even if a woman is no longer dependent on an individual man, they still be living in a patriarchal state. Thus institutional changes alone are insufficient to give women equality in society.
The liberal feminism ignored the dilemma of other women of different races, cultures or class as it only focused on white, middle-class, heterosexual women.
Elshtain criticized the liberal feminists for putting an apparently high premium on socalled male values.

Summary

Liberal feminism is a mainstream feminist movement that emphasises gender equality and takes an individualised approach to feminism. Liberal feminism was criticised for measuring women's achievement by male standards and for being a bourgeois white movement, but it was also credited for helping women gain access to civic, educational, occupational, and reproductive rights. It aided in the social change of the society.

Reference

Brookes, L. (2008) What is Liberal Feminism? http://ezinearticles,com/?expert=Lucy_Brookes. Retrieved 20 May 2017.
Eisenstein, Z. R. (1993). The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism. University Press of New England.
Jaggar, A. M. (1988). Feminist Politics and Human Nature (Philosophy and Society.
Lewis, J. J. (2016, October 31). ThoughtCo. Retrieved May 20, 2017, from A ThoughtCo Website: https://www.thoughtco.com/liberal-feminism-3529177
Nancy Tuana, R. T. (Ed.). (1995). Feminism and Philosophy: Essential Readings in Theory, Reinterpretation, and Application. Westview Press.
Phillips, A. (2002, December). Feminism and Liberalism Revisited: Has Martha Nussbaum Got It Right? Constellations, 8(2). Retrieved May 20, 2017, from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227994417
Tong, R. (2009). Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction (Third ed.). Philadelphia: Westview Press. Retrieved May 19, 2017, from https://excoradfeminisms.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/feminist_thought_a_more_compr ehensive_intro.pdf