What is feminism? An introduction to three core feminist ideas

What better time to talk about feminism than ahead of International Women’s Day on 8th March 2023?! In this blog, I’ll explain the basics of feminism, and the core values and beliefs shared by all feminists. Here’s what I’ll be covering:

• Feminism or feminisms?

• Gender, gendered, and sex;

• Sexism;

• Activism.

Feminism or feminisms?

It’s important to start by saying that there are several different strands of feminism. Liberal feminism, radical feminism, black feminism, Marxist feminism, socialist feminism to name just a few. When we’re looking at feminism, it’s a broad church with lots of denominations.

However, trying to learn about all of them from the outset can get confusing, so the best place to start is by taking a step back and saying, “Okay, what do all of these strands have in common?”. What do they all share? What are they all built upon and around?

Let’s begin with gender, gendering and sex.

Gender, gendering and sex

All feminists believe that gender has a significant impact on people’s experiences in life. Like what other people think of you, the way they behave towards you, the kind of opportunities and limitations you encounter in the family, in the education system, in the economy, religion and politics. All of this will be shaped - at least in part - by your gender.

If you’ve heard people describing things as gendered, “The criminal justice system is gendered”, “The promotions track at this company is gendered”, what they mean is that people’s experiences of that thing, whether positive or negative, are influenced by their gender.

What we mean by ‘gender’ is how people come to understand others based on their biological sex.

If someone is biologically female, for example, we make assumptions about them based on what we think is acceptable and desirable for someone who is biologically female. That’s going to depend on the type of society and community we’ve grown up in, but in many societies and communities, it has been assumed - and it is expected - that females are caregivers and nurturers, they bear children, whom they create with one male partner, they take on the bulk of the responsibility for raising those children by staying at home with them whilst their male partner goes out to work, they aren’t violent or aggressive, they’re quiet and passive, and compliant.

Now, those characteristics are not inevitable, people with female bodies don’t automatically become those things, but there are social expectations that they will become those things because they have female bodies.

We do the same for people who are biologically male. We make assumptions about them and place expectations on them based on what our society and community believe is acceptable for males. Many societies see men as the protectors, the providers, the dominant figure in the family. It’s believed that they should go out and leave the home to work, to earn a living. That the other members of the family unit are dependent upon them to do so.

That is what we mean by gendered - that we have attached particular expectations and standards to people based on their biological sex. We have come to associate specific desirable characteristics with a particular biological sex.

And all feminists believe that we need to a) recognise that this gendering is happening, b) challenge it.

Next up, we’re looking at sexism.

Sexism

All feminists believe that sexism exists. Sexism is a thing.

What sexism means is that we take people’s biological sex - and the gendered expectations that are attached to that sex - and we treat them differently because of those things.

We put people in an order, a hierarchy, where one gender is more important than others, and feminists believe that this is not fair, it is unequal, unjust and discriminatory.

A key word here is patriarchy. What we mean by patriarchy is a society made by men, for men, in the interests of men.

Accordingly, in a society like this, feminists believe that women get a raw deal and do not have the same opportunities, rights and life chances as men. But – and this is something that often gets left out of explanations of feminism - we also find that men who don’t live up to the ideals and expectations that society currently attaches to male biological sex – are also treated pretty badly, as are people who don’t identify as male or female.

Raewyn Connell’s work on hegemonic masculinity is super interesting here. Connell argues that there are a whole different range of masculinities in society, but at any given time, one of them will be dominant - hegemonic masculinity - and all the others will be seen an inferior to that one.

Accordingly, patriarchy isn’t only bad for women, it’s also bad for men. Unless men meet the ‘gold standard’ of hegemonic masculinity, they too will be seen as inferior. For example, if hegemonic masculinity is middle class, white and heterosexual, a working class, black, gay man will be accorded less status by virtue of not meeting these ‘standards’. Feminists believe that patriarchy isn’t just bad for women, it’s bad for everyone.

All feminists believe that sexism is unacceptable - people’s experiences of life should not be determined by either their biology or the gendered expectations that have come to be associated with that biology. This leads us onto the third common feature: activism.

Activism

Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847-1929). Leading figure in the suffrage movement during First Wave Feminism.

Feminism is not just a theory. It’s more than simply a way of making sense of the social world. Feminists don’t just believe the things that I’ve mentioned so far are happening, they feel compelled to take action to change them.

Feminism is a social movement, it aims to move the social world, to shift and change it to make things better. The nature and the extent of the change feminists demand will vary depending on what particular strand of feminism we’re looking at, but all feminists want to see social change. We can see examples of this that by looking at what feminists were calling for during the key ‘movements’ of feminism.

First Wave Feminists

First Wave Feminism is often associated with the Suffragettes of the late 1800s and early 1900s. One of the things they demanded were changes to the law. They wanted to enable women to vote in democratic elections. They drew attention to the fact that women could not own property or inherit wealth or property from their families if they were not married. They argued that the law should support and protect women’s rights over their own bodies, because some of what the law allowed was pretty shocking.

For example, in England and Wales, it was lawful for a man to rape his wife at this time, and indeed rape within marriage was not criminalised in England and Wales until 1991.

First Wave Feminists also highlighted inequalities in the workplace – that women were not being paid equivalent wages to men for doing the same job and they campaigned for this to change.

They organised large scale marches and demonstrations. They supported working women to form and join trade unions and engage in industrial action and direct action, sometimes getting arrested for doing so and serving time in prison.

Second Wave Feminists

The Second Wave Feminists of the 1960s and 1970s also demanded social change, focusing not just upon the law but on culture too – on the values, attitudes and beliefs that people held around sex and gender.

They were particularly critical of what went on behind closed doors, in the private sphere, within homes and families. Feminists sought to expose the domestic and sexual violence and child abuse that went on in some homes, challening the notion that the family was ‘private’ and beyond the scope of state intervention.

They argued that the personal is political. What happens at home, in the lives of individuals, reflects and reinforces the wider power structures that exist in society more generally.

Second Wave Feminists established shelters for women fleeing abuse. They set up rape crisis centres for women who had been sexually violated. They saw the institution of the family as something that was failing women, and they put in place structures to support and empower women, challenging the idea of traditional authority and the notion that women needed to be ‘looked after’, either by men or the state.

As such, feminism is so much more than just a theory, it’s a social movement. It not only says that change should happen, it takes action to bring about that change.

That brings us to the end of this basic introduction to feminism, let’s have a quick recap.

Recap

Firstly, we established that there are different strands of feminism.

However despite this, they all share some core values.

Next up, we looked at what those shared values are, starting with the belief that gender is a central principle around which social life is organised.

The expectations and assumptions that come to be associated with someone’s biological sex result in different experiences of social life, experiences which are gendered and result in sexism.

Then we learned that feminism isn’t simply a theory that takes a particular view of the world, but a social movement that aims to change things, and we looked at examples of activism within First Wave and Second Wave Feminism.

Further reading

I hope you’ve found this interesting and if you want to learn more about feminism, check out the resources below.

The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Feminism, by Tasha Oren and Andrea Press.

A Century of Women: The History of Women in Britain and the United States, by Sheila Rowbotham.

Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, by Gloria Steinem.

Feminism: A Very Short Introduction, by Margaret Walters.

Masculinities, by Raewyn Connell.

Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights, by Helen Lewis.

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