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feminist Theory

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The extension of feminism (understood as a practical social movement concerned to address the inequality of the sexes) into theoretical discourse. Undoubtedly one of the most important and influential intellectual currents of the 20th century (every bit the equal of Marxism and psychoanalysis), Feminist theory encompasses most disciplines from art and architecture through to science and technology, but it is predominantly concentrated in the social sciences and the humanities. As diverse as it is, and the varieties of feminist theory are almost without limit, at its core it has four principal concerns, which are to: (i) elucidate the origins and causes of gender inequality; (ii) explain the operation and persistence of this state of affairs; (iii) delineate effective strategies to either bring about full equality between the sexes or at least ameliorate the effects of ongoing inequality; and (iv) imagine a world in which sexual inequality no longer exists. Of the four, feminist theory has tended to prioritize the first two, leaving the strategic questions to women working in the field, so to speak, in the various advocacy groups like the National Organization for Women founded in the US in 1966; while the task of imagining the future has been parcelled out to creative writers, particularly those working in SF like Ursula LeGuin and Marge Piercy. The decision to prioritize one or other of these four problematics is what gives shape to the specific feminisms.

The causes of sexual inequality are almost impossible to trace since for all of recorded history it was already an established fact. Therefore it is ultimately a matter for pure speculation. The most widely accepted hypothesis is that in prehistoric times biology placed women in a subordinate position to men because pregnancy and childrearing render them vulnerable and in need of assistance both to obtain food and fend off predators. While there is probably some truth to this strand of the biological determinism hypothesis from an anthropological point of view, the practical need to protect women does not explain the widespread denigration of women and their socialization as lesser beings. By the same token, as societies became more prosperous and their technology more sophisticated women's vulnerability diminished, but if anything the positioning of them assubordinate seemed to harden. For obvious reasons, then, the issue that has exercised feminist theorists the most is the one of persistence: why does sexism continue after the principal justification for it has long since ceased to obtain?

There are three basic answers to this question: first, biology continues to be a determining factor; second, that it is in men's interest to maintain the subordination of women; and third, women have been complicit with their own oppression. Surprisingly, perhaps, radical feminists like Shulamith Firestone support the first answer, although she then uses it as a stage to call for the use of biotechnology to put an end to women's reproductive role. Not surprisingly, the second answer has very widespread support, and shows the influence of Marxism. In effect, it equates feminist struggle with class struggle. The third answer, which is perhaps the most painful inasmuch as it is a form of self-criticism, has given rise to the most debate, and perhaps for that reason has contributed the most in the way of ideas for achieving the strategic goal of equality between the sexes. Both First Wave and Second Wave feminists agree that femininity—understood as a male-imposed ideal of how women should look and act—is a major limiting factor for feminist politics. So from Mary Wollstonecraft to Germaine Greer and Kate Millett feminist writers have advocated to a greater or lesser degree the abandoning of the practice of self-denial most versions of femininity demand. Interestingly, some Third Wave feminists have argued against this, calling instead for a celebration of femininity.

From: feminist theory in A Dictionary of Critical Theory »

Subjects: Literature — Literary theory and cultural studies

On the Importance of Feminist Theories: Gender, Race, Sexuality and IPV

Clare Cannon ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5507-5312 3 , 2
First Online: 29 May 2020

1777 Accesses

4 Citations

Feminist theory is a collection of feminist approaches that have provided important insights to understanding how power and violence operate in intimate partner relationships. Often credited with ending a husband’s right to abuse , second wave feminist theory upheld that women—specifically in (heterosexual) marriages—have the right not to be assaulted regardless of whether the perpetrator is their legal spouse. Recent advances in feminist theory—such as intersectionality , black feminist thought, poststructuralist feminist and queer theories—have sought to center the experiences of women of color and LGBT people. In doing so, they have shed light on the innerworkings of particular systems of oppression (namely racism, homophobia, and transphobia), increasing our knowledge of how power and violence are shaped, and how they shape intimate relationships. This chapter will trace a history of feminist theories from the second wave through black feminist thought to intersectionality and poststructuralist feminist theories to queer theory to illustrate their contributions to knowledge of IPV . Specifically, the chapter will explore how different feminist theories’ conceptions of power and identity enhance our understanding of intimate partner violence .

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Cannon, C. (2020). On the Importance of Feminist Theories: Gender, Race, Sexuality and IPV. In: Russell, B. (eds) Intimate Partner Violence and the LGBT+ Community. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44762-5_3

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Feminist Theory in Sociology

An Overview of Key Ideas and Issues

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Key Concepts
Major Sociologists
News & Issues
Research, Samples, and Statistics
Recommended Reading
Archaeology

Feminist theory is a major branch within sociology that shifts its assumptions, analytic lens, and topical focus away from the male viewpoint and experience toward that of women.

In doing so, feminist theory shines a light on social problems, trends, and issues that are otherwise overlooked or misidentified by the historically dominant male perspective within social theory .

Key Takeaways

Key areas of focus within feminist theory include:

discrimination and exclusion on the basis of sex and gender
objectification
structural and economic inequality
power and oppression
gender roles and stereotypes

Many people incorrectly believe that feminist theory focuses exclusively on girls and women and that it has an inherent goal of promoting the superiority of women over men.

In reality, feminist theory has always been about viewing the social world in a way that illuminates the forces that create and support inequality, oppression, and injustice, and in doing so, promotes the pursuit of equality and justice.

That said, since the experiences and perspectives of women and girls were historically excluded for years from social theory and social science, much feminist theory has focused on their interactions and experiences within society to ensure that half the world's population is not left out of how we see and understand social forces, relations, and problems.

While most feminist theorists throughout history have been women, people of all genders can be found working in the discipline today. By shifting the focus of social theory away from the perspectives and experiences of men, feminist theorists have created social theories that are more inclusive and creative than those that assume the social actor to always be a man.

Part of what makes feminist theory creative and inclusive is that it often considers how systems of power and oppression interact , which is to say it does not just focus on gendered power and oppression, but on how this might intersect with systemic racism, a hierarchical class system, sexuality, nationality, and (dis)ability, among other things.

Gender Differences

Some feminist theory provides an analytic framework for understanding how women's location in and experience of social situations differ from men's.

For example, cultural feminists look at the different values associated with womanhood and femininity as a reason for why men and women experience the social world differently. Other feminist theorists believe that the different roles assigned to women and men within institutions better explain gender differences, including the sexual division of labor in the household .

Existential and phenomenological feminists focus on how women have been marginalized and defined as “other” in patriarchal societies . Some feminist theorists focus specifically on how masculinity is developed through socialization, and how its development interacts with the process of developing femininity in girls.

Gender Inequality

Feminist theories that focus on gender inequality recognize that women's location in and experience of social situations are not only different but also unequal to men's.

Liberal feminists argue that women have the same capacity as men for moral reasoning and agency, but that patriarchy , particularly the sexist division of labor, has historically denied women the opportunity to express and practice this reasoning.

These dynamics serve to shove women into the private sphere of the household and to exclude them from full participation in public life. Liberal feminists point out that gender inequality exists for women in a heterosexual marriage and that women do not benefit from being married.

Indeed, these feminist theorists claim, married women have higher levels of stress than unmarried women and married men. Therefore, the sexual division of labor in both the public and private spheres needs to be altered for women to achieve equality in marriage.

Gender Oppression

Theories of gender oppression go further than theories of gender difference and gender inequality by arguing that not only are women different from or unequal to men, but that they are actively oppressed, subordinated, and even abused by men .

Power is the key variable in the two main theories of gender oppression: psychoanalytic feminism and radical feminism .

Psychoanalytic feminists attempt to explain power relations between men and women by reformulating Sigmund Freud's theories of human emotions, childhood development, and the workings of the subconscious and unconscious. They believe that conscious calculation cannot fully explain the production and reproduction of patriarchy.

Radical feminists argue that being a woman is a positive thing in and of itself, but that this is not acknowledged in patriarchal societies where women are oppressed. They identify physical violence as being at the base of patriarchy, but they think that patriarchy can be defeated if women recognize their own value and strength, establish a sisterhood of trust with other women, confront oppression critically, and form female-based separatist networks in the private and public spheres.

Structural Oppression

Structural oppression theories posit that women's oppression and inequality are a result of capitalism , patriarchy, and racism .

Socialist feminists agree with Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels that the working class is exploited as a consequence of capitalism, but they seek to extend this exploitation not just to class but also to gender.

Intersectionality theorists seek to explain oppression and inequality across a variety of variables, including class, gender, race, ethnicity, and age. They offer the important insight that not all women experience oppression in the same way, and that the same forces that work to oppress women and girls also oppress people of color and other marginalized groups.

One way structural oppression of women, specifically the economic kind, manifests in society is in the gender wage gap , which shows that men routinely earn more for the same work than women.

An intersectional view of this situation shows that women of color, and men of color, too, are even further penalized relative to the earnings of white men.

In the late 20th century, this strain of feminist theory was extended to account for the globalization of capitalism and how its methods of production and of accumulating wealth center on the exploitation of women workers around the world.

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Socialist Feminism vs. Other Types of Feminism
Patriarchal Society According to Feminism
The Sociology of Gender
Definition of Intersectionality
What Is Sexism? Defining a Key Feminist Term
Cultural Feminism
6 Quotes from ‘Female Liberation as the Basis for Social Revolution’
Socialist Feminism Definition and Comparisons
The Core Ideas and Beliefs of Feminism
What Is Radical Feminism?
Top 20 Influential Modern Feminist Theorists
What Is Feminism Really All About?
10 Important Feminist Beliefs
Liberal Feminism
Biography of Patricia Hill Collins, Esteemed Sociologist
Feminist Literary Criticism

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Perspective

With the death of bell hooks, a generation of feminists lost a foundational figure.

Lisa B. Thompson

Author and cultural critic bell hooks poses for a portrait on December 16, 1996 in New York City, New York. Karjean Levine/Getty Images hide caption

Author and cultural critic bell hooks poses for a portrait on December 16, 1996 in New York City, New York.

"We black women who advocate feminist ideology, are pioneers. We are clearing a path for ourselves and our sisters. We hope that as they see us reach our goal – no longer victimized, no longer unrecognized, no longer afraid – they will take courage and follow." bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman

Arts & Life

Trailblazing feminist author, critic and activist bell hooks has died at 69.

There are well-worn bell hooks books scattered throughout my library. She's in nearly every section – race, class, film, cultural studies – and, as expected, her books take up an entire shelf in the feminism section. I doubt I would have survived this long without her work, and the work of other Black feminist thinkers of her generation, to guide me. I've retrieved every bell hooks book today, and the unwieldy stack comforts me as I assess the impact of her loss.

If you ever heard hooks speak, it would come as no surprise that she first attended college to study drama, as she recounted in a 1992 essay. In the 1990s she blessed my college campus for a week, and I was mesmerized by lectures that were deliciously brilliant yet full of humor. Her banter with the audience during the Q&A floated easily between thoughtful answers, deep questioning and sly quips that kept us at rapt attention. Her words garner just as much attention on the page. She was a prolific writer, and her intellectual curiosity was boundless.

Discovering bell hooks changed the lives of countless Black women and girls. After picking up one of her many titles – Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center; Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics; Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism – the world suddenly made sense. She reordered the universe by boldly gifting us with the language and theories to understand who we were in an often hostile and alienating society.

She also made clear that, as Black women, we belonged to no one but ourselves. A bad feminist from the start, hooks was clearly uninterested in being safe, respectable or acceptable, and charted a career on her own terms. She implored us to transgress and struggle, but to do so with love and fearlessness. Her brave, bold and beautiful words not only spoke truth to power, but also risked speaking that same truth to and about our beloved icons and culture.

As we traversed hostile spaces in academia, corporate America, the arts, medicine and sometimes our own families, hooks not only taught us how to love ourselves, but also insisted that we seek justice. She helped us to better understand and, if necessary, forgive the women who birthed and raised us. She claimed feminism without apology, and encouraged Black women in particular to embrace feminism, and to do more than simply identify their oppression, but to envision new ways of being in the world. She called on us to honor early pioneers such as Anna Julia Cooper and Mary Church Terrell, who first claimed the mantle of women's rights.

The lower-case name bell hooks published under challenged a system of academic writing that historically belittled and ignored the work of Black scholars. She also used language that was as plain and as clear as her politics. While her writing was deeply personal, often carved from her own experiences, her ideas were relentlessly rigorous and full of citations—even though she eschewed footnotes, another refusal of the academy's standards that endeared her to those of us determined to remake intellectual traditions that denied our very humanity.

Rejecting footnotes seemed to symbolize the fact that the knowledge hooks most valued could not fit into those tiny spaces. Her writing style hinted at the fact that her ideas were always more expansive than even her books could hold. While there were no footnotes, her books were love notes to a people she loved fiercely.

No matter where she taught or lived, bell hooks always kept Kentucky and her family ties close. She frequently claimed her southern Black working-class background and an abiding love for her home. Although she was educated at prestigious schools, she always spoke with the wisdom and wit of our mothers, grandmothers and aunties. Her return to the Bluegrass State and Berea College towards the end of her career has a narrative elegance. A generation of feminists has lost a foundational figure and a beloved icon, but her legacy lives on in her writing, which will provide sustenance for generations to come.

Lisa B. Thompson is a playwright and the Bobby and Sherri Patton Professor of African & African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Follow her @drlisabthompson on Twitter and Instagram .

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31 Feminist Theory

Jean Mills is Associate Professor of English Literature at John Jay College/CUNY. She is the author of Virginia Woolf, Jane Ellen Harrison, and the Spirit of Modernist Classicism (2014) and is currently at work on her second book Literary Approaches to Peace. She recently edited and wrote the Introduction and Afterword for the late Jane Marcus’s unfinished manuscript, Nancy Cunard: Perfect Stranger (2020).

Published: 11 August 2021
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This chapter examines Virginia Woolf’s foundational role in the development of feminist theory, placing her theoretical positions on women’s lives and life-writing, privacy, the body, and self-expression in dialogue with a diverse and actively changing continuum of feminist thought. Focusing on the return of rage to the forefront of feminist discourse and social media’s effect upon feminist politics, the chapter chronicles the changing critical responses to Woolf’s feminisms, in relation to her positions on feminist identities and feminist community. The chapter also investigates the ways in which women of colour feminists disclosed Woolf’s racialized self and racist thinking to assess the place of Woolf’s feminism in contemporary political thought. From issues seeking to reconcile and value difference and diversity with the uses of ambivalence and calls for unity and integration, the chapter places the concepts and vocabulary of feminist theory within the context of Virginia Woolf’s work and example.

Whether as an icon, an invocation, or in the replication of her own work, Virginia Woolf has guided or been central to key conversations in feminist theory. In the discourses of women’s sexual liberation, Black and Latinx feminisms, lesbian feminism, trans feminism, and feminist pacifism, Virginia Woolf’s theoretical positions outlined in both her fiction and non-fiction work continue to shape feminist thought in relation to gender, sexuality, race, class, and the potential for peace. With a focus on Woolf’s inquiries into feminist identity, the limits and possibilities of feminist community, and the uses of feminist anger, this chapter delineates the arc of her influence on feminist theory as it also investigates the relevance and efficacy of her ideas in a twenty-first-century digital landscape across which much of feminist theory is now mediated and produced.

The historical trajectory of Virginia Woolf’s influence has been evident in feminist thinking generated in work by Simone de Beauvoir, Doris Lessing, Carolyn Heilbrun, Adrienne Rich, and Sara Ahmed, as representative examples, from the 1940s to today. In documenting women’s cultural, sexual, social, and historical experiences in her classic, The Second Sex (1949), Beauvoir relied on Woolf’s fictional portrayal of Shakespeare’s sister in A Room of One’s Own (1929) to point to the disparities between ‘the meager and restricted life’ of a woman and Shakespeare’s ‘life of learning and adventure’. 1 In addition to her use of Woolf’s essay, Beauvoir deployed narrative examples from Woolf’s fiction, as well—Jinny in The Waves (1931) for her discussion of adolescent girls whose ‘dreams of the future hide its futility’, 2 and Woolf’s heroines in Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), to investigate the condition of women in relation to religion and revelation. In her analysis of women’s character and sense of identity in relation to spirituality within the context of patriarchal society, Beauvoir writes:

There is a justification, a supreme compensation, which society is ever wont to bestow upon woman: that is, religion. There must be religion for woman as there must be one for the common people, and for exactly the same reasons. When a sex or a class is condemned to immanence, it is necessary to offer it the mirage of some form of transcendence. 3

Revelations and spiritual ownership for women, as for many of Woolf’s protagonists in her novels, according to Beauvoir, ‘are those in which they discover their accord with a static and self-sufficient reality: those luminous moments of happiness [ … ] of supreme recompense’, are joy experienced not ‘in the free surge of liberty’ as men often experience religion, but in ‘a quiet sense of smiling plenitude’. 4 Man, Beauvoir writes, ‘enjoys the great advantage of having a God endorse the codes he writes; and since man exercises a sovereign authority over woman, it is especially fortunate that this authority has been vested in him by the Supreme Being’. 5 While Beauvoir sees religion and a woman’s turn towards religion as filling ‘a profound need’, she also argues that it is ‘much less an instrument of constraint than an instrument of deception’, 6 and she frames her discussion with allusions to Woolf’s fiction. In Mrs Dalloway , Clarissa loathes not so much Miss Kilman, her daughter’s tutor, herself, but Miss Kilman’s unquestioning devotion to God, ‘it being [Clarissa’s] experience that the religious ecstasy made people callous (so did causes)’ ( MD 10). She views Miss Kilman’s attentions towards her daughter, Elizabeth, with jealousy and suspicion, accusing her of deceptively trying to convert her young mind to her religious beliefs. Highly critical of the institution of religion, Woolf nonetheless often explored the nature of her characters’ spirituality. Indeed, much of the spiritual joy experienced in Mrs Dalloway occurs between same-sex unions—the adolescent kiss between Clarissa and Sally Seton, for example, which she describes as ‘the revelation, the religious feeling!’ ( MD 32) or the bond between the traumatized war veteran Septimus Smith and his friend Evans. Written in the language of the spiritual ecstatic, these scenes offer examples of radical trespass and violations of patriarchal hierarchies, which helped guide Beauvoir in constructing her feminist positions on women and religion in The Second Sex .

In terms of feminist identity, Virginia Woolf has also been central to the work of Doris Lessing and her inquiries into sexual liberation and to Carolyn Heilbrun’s investigations into the implications of androgyny. Useful comparisons have been made between Lessing’s character Anna Wulf in The Golden Notebook (1962) and Woolf’s Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse , each independent creative women whose struggles to maintain independence and establish a sense of identity in a male-dominated world are key themes to their respective narratives. In Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (1964) , Carolyn Heilbrun characterized androgyny as ‘a condition under which the characteristics of the sexes and the human impulses expressed by men and women are not rigidly assigned’, 7 a position that built upon Woolf’s exploration of the mind as potentially androgynous, possessive of ‘no single state of being’ in A Room of One’s Own ( ARO 73). Heilbrun also deployed Woolf’s biography as a means to rethink the genres of biography, memoir, and life-writing as a feminist methodology in Writing a Woman’s Life (1988). She drew upon Woolf’s writing career to demonstrate the pressure women writers experience to conform to a literary and cultural climate dominated by men, and the ways in which women writers, such as Woolf, rejected gendered scripts of women’s roles under patriarchy to develop and shape narratives more true to women’s lived experiences.

More recently, Sara Ahmed, whose work builds on decades of women of colour feminist research, also found Woolf’s fiction to be instructive in how one acquires a ‘feminist consciousness’. 8 Like Beauvoir, Ahmed uses the narrative arc of Mrs Dalloway herself as one example of a feminist path—one often filled with false starts, disappointments, obstacles, and changes in purpose and momentum. She counts Mrs Dalloway as a ‘feminist classic’ and a key component of her feminist ‘killjoy survival kit’. 9 Indeed, Ahmed’s blog The Feminist Killjoy resonates with Woolf’s Angel in the House, in A Room of One’s Own , whom Woolf argued women had metaphorically to kill in order to carve out the space and time to write. Like Woolf, Ahmed questions gendered prescriptions and expectations assigned to the trajectories of women’s lives. In The Promise of Happiness , she cautions that the processional path of women’s narratives from girlhood to adulthood must include ‘refusing to follow other people’s goods, or [ … ] refusing to make others happy’. 10 Ahmed’s plea insists that our negative feelings, be they rage, anger, or unhappiness, be deployed repeatedly by ‘the feminist killjoy’, to achieve feminist aims, maintain and sustain vigilance over women’s rights, and lead a feminist life.

In one of her more comedic and fantastical novels, the mock-biography, Orlando: A Biography , Woolf upends many of the assumptions about gender performance and expectations, across four centuries of historical context. She connects the relationship between women’s experiences in the home and the pressure to marry and bear children with the reach, both domestically and abroad, of state power. Woolf notes that England of the nineteenth century rises out of the damp, as the muffin and crumpet were invented and coffee replaced the drinking of port after dinner, but ‘[t]he sexes drew further and further apart’ ( O 209). Her biographer/narrator reports that, ‘The life of the average woman was a succession of childbirths. She married at nineteen and had fifteen or eighteen children by the time she was thirty; for twins abounded. Thus the British Empire came into existence’ ( O 209). Orlando, who has by this point in the novel transitioned into a woman, feels, but balks at, the social pressure to conform, repeat, and find a husband. She envisions ‘ “Life! A Lover!” not “Life! A Husband!” ’ ( O 222), challenging the predetermined progression of a woman’s life, which Ahmed and others have argued feminists need to re-examine and disrupt.

The novel, which depicts a gender transformation, while not a trans novel, has nevertheless been a notable part of new developments in feminist and trans theory for the ways in which it illustrates ideas of gender fluidity and outlines anti-patriarchal positions in favour of multiple perspectives. Though not a trans-authored text, nor a text with a trans protagonist, the novel can and has been read through a transgender theoretical lens. Pamela Caughie’s comparison between Woolf’s fantastical parodic novel and the real-life memoir of transsexual Elnar Wegener offers a pointed analysis of literature’s capabilities in an era of scientific experimentation to shape our understanding of feminist identities. She writes that, ‘By focusing on the nexus of scientific experimentation with the real and aesthetic experimentation with representation as reciprocal cultural forms, I uphold the power of literature, not just the promise of science, to reshape notions of gender and identity in the modernist era.’ 11 Enjoying a resurgence in attention, in 2019 the novel was also the focus of an edition of the fine art photography journal Aperture , entitled Orlando , and guest edited by Tilda Swinton, who played the lead in Sally Potter’s film version of the novel in 1992. The edition included ‘Inspired by Virginia Woolf’, which featured trans artists and trans subjects in conversation with the novel. Orlando continues to generate and guide discourses on notions of selfhood.

In the ever-changing evolution of feminist thought, Virginia Woolf’s exploration of feminist identity has raised questions about her own positionality and feminist politics in relation to class and race. Critics such as Jane Marcus have argued in favour of Woolf’s working-class credentials reading her depictions of charwomen in her novels such as Mrs McNab in To the Lighthouse and Crosby in The Years (1937), as not speaking for the working class, but in concert with them, and as blistering critiques of the ruling classes that created them. In a generative analysis, Marcus writes:

[T]he voices of the charwomen, the cooks and maids, the violet sellers and the caretaker’s children in The Years , [ … ] act as chorus in all her novels. We hear it in the ‘ee um fah um so/foo swee too eem oo’ of the tube station ancient singer in Mrs Dalloway to the pidgin Greek of the janitor’s children in The Years : ‘Etho passo tanno hai,/Fai donk to tu do,/Mai to, kai to, lai to see/To dom to tuh do.’ If women’s language, then lesbian language, is being made out of ‘words that are hardly syllabled yet’, every Woolf text suggests that other oppressed voices of race and class, of difference and colonial subjectivity, are beginning to syllable themselves, like the Kreemo, Glaxo, Toffe or KEY spelled by the mysterious sky-writing airplane in Mrs Dalloway . 12

Although highly critical of her own class, Woolf and her relationship to the servants she grew up with in the late Victorian age and the ones she reluctantly managed in her own intellectual middle-class British household have been the focus of studies, which have found Woolf’s positions on class to be problematic and indicative of the ways in which one’s politics can sometimes be at odds with one’s personal biases and blind spots. Despite these limitations, Alison Light points to the fact that Woolf ‘was highly unusual in examining many of her reactions and feelings, probing her sore spots, especially in her diaries’ 13 about her interactions and experiences with Britain’s servant class. As Adrienne Rich has claimed, when Woolf was writing about women’s poverty and lack of funding and support in A Room of One’s Own , she was ‘aware of the women who are not with us here because they are washing the dishes and looking after the children’. 14 But nearly five decades after its publication, in the early 1970s when Rich was writing, she noted that very little had changed to help fund and support women’s creative and intellectual lives. Rich added to Woolf’s inquiry into women and fiction, ‘thinking also of women whom she left out [ … ] women who are washing other people’s dishes and caring for other people’s children, not to mention women who went on the streets last night in order to feed their children’. 15 Ultimately, Virginia Woolf’s personal and public relationship to class has been both reclaimed and challenged by feminist scholarship, which has noted the ways she exposed the vagaries and cruelties of the British class system, while also being complicit in its advantages and privileges as a result of her class status.

In A Room of One’s Own , Woolf promoted women’s contributions to cultural and literary production, theorizing a tradition of women writers who ‘think back through our mothers’, an idea that feminist thinkers such as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison found useful, but also, as women of colour scholars, and authors, exclusionary and in need of updating. It became important to many women of colour feminists to distance themselves from Woolf and push beyond her limitations, especially on issues of race. Indeed, Woolf’s omissions or audiences she refused to claim to speak for, sometimes justifiably, as she was often very clear about her own position as both an othered British subject and a white woman of privilege, but at other times, as a result of her own personal and historical racial and class biases, have created ellipses of their own, gaps in the text, to unpack and speak across. Alice Walker, for example, examined African American women’s experiences and contributions, invoking and extending Woolf’s argument that ‘Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman’, including women of colour creatives under the difficult aegis of anonymity ( ARO 38). Walker’s path-breaking work outlined her ‘womanist theory’ as ‘A black feminist or feminist of color. From the black folk expression of mother to female children and also a woman who loves other women, sexually and/or nonsexually. Appreciates and prefers women’s culture. Committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female.’ 16 She was writing in response to a white, liberal feminist movement, which marginalized women of colour in its own bid for equality and freedom of expression. In 2007, characterizing the history of feminist thought, Gill Plain and Susan Sellers pointed out that within the women’s movement there was ‘a pretense to a homogeneity of experience covered by the word sisterhood that does not in fact exist’, and that too often ‘white women focus upon their oppression as women and ignore differences of race, sexual preference, class, and age’. 17 This myopic view of the circumference of feminist thinking has been questioned, challenged, rethought, and expanded upon by decades of Black, Latinx, lesbian, trans, and multicultural scholarship, which insists on feminism’s plurality and continues to invigorate and extend feminist theoretical discourse. In addition to Alice Walker, African American critics and authors such as bell hooks, Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, and Tuzyline Allan have found Woolf’s work useful in disclosing her limitations regarding race and the racialized self.

This work delivered incisive critiques of both Woolf and the feminist movement in their own contemporary moments, while also demonstrating Woolf’s work as generative. By the late 1990s, African American women’s writing had begun to enjoy wider audiences, but, as Robyn Warhol-Down and Diane Price Herndl noted in 2009, African women’s writing was being eclipsed and ‘left out of histories and commentaries on African literature’. 18 Many African women writers, such as Beba Cameroonian author Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi, following Walker’s example, according to Warhol-Down and Price Herndl, ‘have hesitated to self-identify as “feminist” because of the Western roots of feminist theory and practice’. 19 Some prefer ‘womanist’ or other spellings of the word, as they use a feminist methodology to adapt to their own purposes. This rethinking of feminist identity resonates with Woolf’s own negotiation of the term ‘feminist’, when, in Three Guineas (1938), she ironically asks if we perhaps shouldn’t ‘write that word in large black letters on a sheet of foolscap; then solemnly apply a match to the paper’, because, with access to the professions achieved, there was no longer a need to fear that men and women wouldn’t work together for justice, equality, and freedom for all ( TG 179). The scene, however, is meant as a foil to her argument pointing to the ways in which other words such as ‘tyrant’ and ‘dictator’ remain current and alive, as well as the similarities between both the patriarchal state and the fascist state, a comparison that continues to make us uncomfortable today.

The questions and positions Virginia Woolf theorized about women’s privacy as well as the nature of feminist community and women’s relationship to the public sphere anticipate and sometimes reflect parallel development of similar questions feminist theorists face today in negotiating a relationship to social media. Indeed, any apprehension of her positions in relation to twenty-first-century feminist theory must inevitably involve a reckoning between feminist theory and social media, as conversations on feminist community are created, shaped, and reconsidered within its framework.

The fact that the discourse is both relentlessly replenished online and insatiably disseminated in a variety of social media platforms raises questions about both the content of the feminist conversation as well as the nature and efficacy of the methodology. As Urmila Seshagiri wrote in 2017, ‘Feminism is repetitive because patriarchy is undead.’ 20 She was pointing to a curious disjunction between a subject area that recognizes that women, feminists, and feminist women fundamentally shaped modernism and modernity and a body of scholarship responding to that subject, which continues to neglect women’s roles, experiences, and contributions. She was also writing within the political context of a rise in misogynistic rhetoric, an uptick in the commission of hate crimes, and policy initiatives aimed at rolling back women’s rights across the globe. Noting protest signs, such as ‘I can’t believe I still have to protest this shit’, displayed at the Women’s March in Washington, DC in January 2017, Seshagiri was also remarking upon a deep-seated frustration at having to repeat rationales to theoretical debates for women’s equity and equal treatment, many considered to have been won and translated into real policy decades earlier.

Since the political watershed of 2016 outlined a world leaning globally and with enthusiasm towards right-wing populist ideologies, resurgent nationalisms, and anti-feminist thought, feminist theory has increasingly been shaped and directed across a digital landscape of visual and verbal play in response. Indeed, the hashtag and the links and memes, GIFs, and images, which social media generate create their own kinds of feminist community, and, in my view, have become in and of themselves artefacts and indicators of a contemporary feminist zeitgeist. The spirit of the age, which Woolf satirized so incisively in Orlando as being much more varied and complex than the masculinist prescriptives of her father’s late Victorian age, in our own times finds us awash in an open-ended, infinite, and intersectional web of multiple interpretations and voices, similar to those ‘many thousand’ selves Woolf described in the final passages of the novel, as Orlando travels through centuries to her own contemporary time, and ‘now looked down into this pool or sea in which everything is reflected’ ( O 282, 295). The infinitude is both exhilarating and overwhelming, as Orlando, as a woman, must decide whether to submit to or resist its directives. Remarkably, Woolf’s embrace and interrogation of illegibility and ambivalence (sometimes in and of themselves as forms of resistance) throughout her work makes her somewhat of a twenty-first-century literary poster child for a digital generation, which very much sees itself as ‘a society for asking questions’ ( CSF 125) about which Woolf once fantasized for women in her 1921 short story ‘A Society’, which advocated for women’s reproductive freedom, access to education and the professions, and the inclusion of women’s voices and experiences in literary and cultural production.

Currently, as memes and hashtags are born and replicated, some, such as #MeToo, for example, dedicated to narratives of sexual assault and sexual harassment, gain traction and evolve to become phenomena, marking profound shifts in any given conversation. As in the case of #MeToo, a transition in theoretical discourse sparked several political movements and activism devoted to issues raised in the conversation. The phrase was first coined in 2006 by civil rights activist Tarana Burke on the social media platform Myspace, and later popularized on Twitter in October 2017 by American actress Alyssa Milano, in response to a widely publicized case of sexual assault and harassment by film producer Harvey Weinstein. Interestingly, even though it’s possible to discover the first mention of #MeToo on social media as a proliferating digital artefact, #MeToo is unencumbered by the boundaries of provenance, authorship, or origins.

While the feminist community generated by the MeToo hashtag far exceeds the reach of a twentieth century understanding of ‘the public’, social media’s democratization of the conversation speaks to Virginia Woolf’s challenges to and explorations of cultural gatekeeping, hierarchies, and pretentiousness. These she identified as male-driven and male-dominated, and as basic principles connected to egotism that she personally loathed. She rejected ‘the loudspeaker’ voice of the academy, was conflicted by both a desire for and a lack of formal education, (‘I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in’ ( ARO 19), and cautioned against using one’s influence, as women gained rights, the vote, and access to the professions, to re-enact the same power plays men in positions of authority often inflict upon women in the workplace. She wrote two collections of essays dedicated to everyday reading practices, entitled The Common Reader (1925) and The Second Common Reader (1932), as well as two major essays based on talks (not lectures), A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas , whose conversational and collaborative rhetorical styles are intimately bound up with their arguments, which investigate the architecture and hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion integral to a patriarchal society and its treatment of women.

The internet’s unbridled posturing, its freedom, and lack of curatorial concision are also marked by gender, race, and class, which paradoxically replicate and often reify many of the same biases women bristled at and resisted for years. While the online conversation in feminist theory has in many ways been invigorated by social media’s reach and efficacy, in other ways, it has led to an extraordinary loss of privacy and personal control and a documented increase in unfiltered and shameless hostility and hatred towards women. On the one hand, forewarned is forearmed, and certainly 2016 with the help of social media served as an unveiling and public airing of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and personal invective on a scale that made locating one’s enemies easy. On the other hand, the pool of widespread and unapologetic extremism is so vast that a sense of urgency, which begins around an issue of gross, disturbing, even unprecedented injustice and wrong-doing, too often quickly deteriorates into a lack of social engagement and a debilitating sense of being overwhelmed by information, misinformation, and disinformation.

Virginia Woolf’s involvement in as well as her ambivalence about public political discourses has been noted by critics such as David Bradshaw and Clara Jones, among others, especially in relation to Woolf’s responses to political changes during the 1930s. The decade of the 1930s, that earlier global turn towards fascism and nationalism, Anna Snaith notes, ‘saw Woolf battling with her “repulsion from societies” and yet her abhorrence of political developments at home and abroad’. 21 While part of Snaith’s aim in ‘ “Stray Guineas”: Virginia Woolf and the Fawcett Library’ is to outline Woolf’s anti-fascist positions and political support and involvement on behalf of women’s suffrage, refugees, and intellectual freedom, her investigation into the ways in which Woolf negotiated her responses to political causes also reveals a frustration on Woolf’s part—a frustration that resonates with today’s struggle to construct feminist community amidst relentless requests (whether via email or social media) to sign, donate, join, and protest. Snaith writes, ‘Her feeling of bombardment during the ’30s also involved awareness of the commodification of her signature. Desire for anonymity made her question public endorsement per se, regardless of the cause.’ 22 A desire for privacy, personal control, and a respite from the din of ceaseless public pressure concerned Woolf as she investigated its effects upon feminist thinking. She also recognized the ways in which capital, culture, and war combine to perpetuate patriarchy and its entrenched persecution of women, a system that Woolf sought to dismantle.

Three Guineas is relevant to anyone’s contemporary moment due to its subject matter, the need to prevent and end war. Yet it also remains current due to its inquiries into methodology. The essay outlining Woolf’s pacifism and patriarchy’s connection to women’s oppression in both the private and public spheres, is also, as Snaith points out, ‘a deliberation on the complexities and implications of various kinds of political and charitable support’. 23 In other words, in addition to its analysis of the complexities of pacifism and its usefulness and interconnectedness to feminist theory and activism, Three Guineas resonates with the challenges we face today as we grapple with the advantages and disadvantages of the political post-card versus the phone call to a representative, the online donation to Change.org, for example, versus a birthday fundraising appeal for a personal cause on Facebook. But within the panoply of these various media and the questions it raises about method, Three Guineas is, as Snaith claims, ‘an enactment of her preferred form of resistance: the text’. 24

Virginia Woolf used both her fiction and non-fiction work to question the nature of this vast public conversation, as she tried to identify and navigate her own role in relation to it. In the essay, she is very clear about her own positionality, as a white woman of a certain class, collectively ‘the daughters of educated men’, as she identifies herself in Three Guineas ( TG 180). In another characteristic interactive, collaborative stylistic signature, she begins as if in the middle of a conversation, theorizing a relationship between feminist interconnectedness in the public sphere and the need to maintain a specific, localized methodology in advancing a feminist agenda:

‘But,’ she may say, ‘ “the public”? How can that be reached without putting my own mind through the mincing machine and turning it into sausage?’ ‘ “The public,” Madam,’ we may assure her, ‘is very like ourselves; it lives in rooms; it walks in streets, and is said moreover to be tired of sausage. Fling leaflets down basements; expose them on stalls; trundle them along streets on barrows to be sold for a penny or given away. Find out new ways of approaching “the public”; single it into separate people instead of massing it into one monster, gross in body, feeble in mind.’ ( TG 176)

In an essay whose premise is framed around a response to a male correspondent asking her to sign a manifesto for peace, donate money, and join a society, her narrator investigates ‘some of the active ways in which you [ … ] can put your opinions into practice’ on behalf of a cause, while noting the challenges women face in particular in building coalitions in the public sphere ( TG 176). She points out how men and women are similarly appalled at the horrors of war. She returns again and again to the ‘photographs of dead bodies and ruined houses’ in the war-torn landscape of the Spanish Civil War, verbal images of destruction, the responsibility for which she lays at the feet of men in power ( TG 150). But our differences based on gender, she reminds us, are ‘profound and fundamental’, making a request of support and funds from a member of the patriarchy that oppresses, dismisses, and marginalizes women, difficult to satisfy ( TG 181).

In outlining and identifying the structure of patriarchy, she is also making suggestions, devising feminist strategies and theories about ways to subvert it. She writes that even ‘[t]he very word “society” sets tolling in memory the dismal bells of a harsh music: shall not, shall not, shall not. You shall not learn; you shall not earn; you shall not own; you shall not’, which complicates her relationship to the public request for funds ( TG 182). Her challenge to what seems a simple and obvious solicitation on behalf of peace becomes an intricate and deeply thought-out meditation on the consequences of systemic oppression, until ‘inevitably we ask ourselves, is there not something in the conglomeration of people into societies that releases what is most selfish and violent, least rational and humane in the individuals themselves? Inevitably we look upon society, so kind to you, so harsh to us, as an ill-fitting form that distorts the truth; deforms the mind; fetters the will’ ( TG 182).

We face similar challenges today as we struggle to engage with the internet as a tool both for constructing and maintaining a genealogy of feminist thought and for supporting feminist activism, only to realize that the echoes of the past continue to remind and sometimes to admonish us in the present. Not only do the size, scale, and scope of the internet work both for and against the advancement of feminist theory, but many of the issues and the movement’s aims, with few exceptions, have largely remained the same. Co-creating a feminist tradition of theory and activism with the past, while also pointing to the brutal, barbaric, and often life-threatening realities of the treatment of women under patriarchy, Woolf ultimately aligns the nineteenth-century fight for women’s rights by ‘those queer dead women in their poke bonnets and shawls’ with the twentieth-century fight against fascism.

Woolf’s narrator in Three Guineas , albeit conditionally, agrees to sign the manifesto and to send money for the peace effort, but she refuses to join his society, recording a separate tradition of feminist community and activism and instructing future generations of women by theorizing potential pathways for organizing resistance. She writes, ‘we believe that we can help you most effectively by refusing to join your society; by working for our common ends—justice and equality and liberty for all men and women—outside your society, not within’ ( TG 183). She famously creates the Society of Outsiders, which has no hierarchies, no oaths, no offices, no secretaries, no meetings, and no conferences, but values ‘elasticity’ and ‘secrecy’ instead and insists on achieving peace, intellectual liberty, and justice ‘by the means that a different sex, a different tradition, a different education, and the different values which result from those differences have placed within our reach’ ( TG 189). Instead, she calls on women to build their coalitions and advocacy efforts outside of the establishment, to maintain and practice indifference and disinterest, to offer her brothers ‘neither the white feather of cowardice nor the red feather of courage, but no feather at all’, to refuse to take part in patriotic displays and refuse to bear arms. In other words, she has been asked by her male correspondent to sign a peace manifesto, which she does, but only as she re-writes and posits, instead, one of her own. Woolf’s essays, but her entire body of work, in both the diaries and letters, her fiction, and journalism, as well, not only have created, but continue to create feminist communities of their own, as her arguments, investigations, images, and examples return to remind us of the need for sustained vigilance as well as new methods, new theories, and new ways of looking at the world.

As the methodologies of the internet work both for and against feminist aims, rage, too, is a multivalent sword. Feminist anger has acted both as an important tool for resistance and invigoration of a cause as well as a justification for committing acts of violence against women. In the wake of a widespread increase in right-wing ideologies, nationalism, fascism, racism, and anti-feminist thought, women’s rage has returned to the forefront of feminist theoretical discourse. As one leading feminist journal Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society states quite plainly in its most recent call for papers for a special issue devoted to the complexities of rage to be published in Summer 2021: ‘Feminists are raging’, and for good reason. In addition to running the online Feminist Public Intellectual Project, the journal will now be airing their site, Ask a Feminist, as a podcast with its first episode featuring recent titles fuelling the debate. Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger (2018), for example, argues that ‘a society that does not respect women’s anger is one that does not respect women; not as human beings, thinkers, knowers, active participants, or citizens’ 25 and Charlene A. Carruthers’s Unapologetic: A Black, Queer and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements (2018) provides a manifesto and manual for activism and effective organization from a Black, queer, and feminist perspective seeking to counter a ‘mainstream narrative propped up by patriarchy and misogyny (straight-up hatred of women)’. 26

Virginia Woolf’s work, biography, and example have figured prominently in the feminist uses of anger and its efficacy as political currency. Anger, and the ways in which she navigated her anger both on the page and in her personal life, became a key focus for women reading her work both in English and in translation throughout the 1960s and 1970s. In 1971, Adrienne Rich wrote about re-reading A Room of One’s Own and of recognizing, but also being struck by what she characterized as Woolf’s suppression of her anger in the text:

I was astonished at the sense of effort, of pains taken, of dogged tentativeness, in the tone of that essay. And I recognized that tone. I had heard it often enough, in myself and in other women. It is the tone of a woman almost in touch with her anger, who is determined not to appear angry, who is willing herself to be calm, detached, and even charming in a roomful of men where things have been said which are attacks on her very integrity. 27

While Woolf was addressing women in her ‘talk’, Rich claimed that she felt acutely the implied male presence in the room, because the political climate had not changed to the point ‘when women can stop being haunted, not only by “convention and propriety” but by internalized fears of being and saying themselves’. 28 This suppression of women’s anger is further investigated by Jane Marcus, who sought to encourage women to ‘spit out’ their ‘rage and savage indignation’, 29 as Marcus wrote in an essay, which she anthologized ten years later in her collection of essays Art and Anger: Reading Like a Woman (1988), noting the typical prolepsis that often occurs in the development of women writers, as feminist literary criticism strives to catch up to feminist politics as goals were achieved within the movement. Marcus admits that some of the earlier essays in the collection seem ‘too polite and well-mannered, now that Woolf is the subject of so much critical debate’ and hardly worth ‘the uproar it caused at the 1975 MLA’. 30 With one of the aims accomplished, to reshape the male-driven critical response to her work in the 1940s and 1950s as the ‘lyrical British novelist’ Mrs Woolf, feminists now were ‘paying attention to Woolf’s politics’. 31 Marcus noted an adjustment in the tenor of the debate, which focused very much on women’s personal anger and the need for women to express their emotions. She wrote that her interest in Woolf’s anger ‘clearly grew out of my own anger and the anger of my generation of feminist critics, who were trying to change the subject without yet having developed a sophisticated methodology’, 32 marking the importance of women’s anger as a resource and rationale for devising approach, strategy, and action in response to oppression. She characterized the trajectory of change indicated in the form of address: ‘Now that the subject has been changed, we can record the history of that process.’ 33 The earlier criticism on Woolf ‘address[es] the establishment with a clenched fist [ … ] cursing the literary hegemonic fathers. The later essays address a discursive community of feminist readers.’ ‘Now’, she writes ‘we look forward to the work of the “daughters of anger” ’ 34 in a bid to secure the future of feminism in a more forthright posture, implying confidence and a freedom of expression of anger.

Virginia Woolf was perhaps more ambivalent, or at least more realistic about the complexities and uses of rage and the size and scope of the burden of resistance upon the shoulders of future generations of feminists. In the 1921 ‘A Society’, after the women’s collective (representative of the feminist movement) has been truncated by the guns and battle cries of World War I, the women reconvene at the end of the story to assess the accomplishments of the group, but now, against the backdrop of the ‘proper explosion of the fireworks’ ( CSF 136), for peace. Woolf also identified these ‘proper’ celebrations as complicit in the cycles of war and remembrance, issues that she saw as intersecting with the experiences of women and children, and as consequential relationships she questioned and hoped to break. In the final scene of the satire, Woolf’s narrator, Cassandra, aptly named for the prophetess who spoke the truth, which no one believed or could understand, says, referring to one of the member’s daughters, whom they hope to carry on the legacy of the collective, ‘It’s no good [ … ] Once she knows how to read there’s only one thing you can teach her to believe in—and that is herself’ ( CSF 136). Castalia agrees, noting that, ‘that would be a change’. The women gather the papers and minutes of their society, and ‘though Ann was playing with her doll very happily, we solemnly made her a present of the lot and told her we had chosen her to be President of the Society of the future—upon which she burst into tears’ ( CSF 136).

Succeeding generations of feminist scholars have both questioned or built upon this earlier characterization of Woolf’s rage as being ‘suppressed’. Recently, conceptions of Woolf’s anger and how we understand it in relation to her feminist theoretical positions and strategies for future activism have been challenged by investigations into affect theory. In ‘After Anger: Negative Affect and Feminist Politics in Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas ’, Margot Kotler argues that Woolf’s Society of Outsiders and her juxtaposing of image and text outline her ‘impersonal method’, which ‘provides a model for collective feminist politics that complicates the teleological narrative of feminism in which emotion operates as a site of truth’. 35 Kotler’s aim is not to dismiss or ignore our emotions, but to rethink the ‘personal is political’ as ‘the personal is factual’. 36 In an instructive essay that insists we read Woolf’s feminist uses of anger more strategically, Kotler writes that Woolf:

[ … ] demonstrates the danger of a feminist politics that uncritically exploits the personal and the emotional as a source of truth and makes them the first step of a political project that will end in its own obsolescence. Instead, Woolf maintains that feminists would be better served by both transforming personal emotions into collective negative feelings, as shown in her use of impersonal anger as a feminist methodology, and harnessing this attributed anger and unhappiness to launch collective critique, via unsympathetic and indifferent response, of the emotionally exploitative rhetoric and imagery of the fascist and patriarchal state. 37

Understood in this way, rage becomes not personally exhausting as an emotion, but as a key tool and resource ‘that supports a more sustainable feminist politics’, 38 one that is more useful and effective moving forward, because, as Kotler claims in the essay, for Woolf, there really is no such thing as ‘after anger’. 39 Woolf, in an earlier era, strove to carve out a way forward for future generations of women readers, writers, and thinkers through a commitment to art and language, and through the transformation of her anger into an effective political tool of feminist thought.

In the historical documentation of her influence on feminist identity and community and in the replenishment of her work across new digital methodologies, Virginia Woolf continues to be a major vitalizing force in feminist theory, as states and individuals continue to attempt to police and regulate women’s lives. In seeking to dismantle patriarchy and theorize a world we have yet to create, Virginia Woolf exposed the cruelty of hierarchies, while also noting the repetitive nature of oppression that continues to sing the same old song as in the children’s nursery rhyme ‘Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush’, a refrain she used in Three Guineas to illustrate the same hypocrisies and injustices born on the backs of women’s unpaid labour. Challenges to feminist essentialism, female chauvinism, heterosexist assumptions overlooking lesbian and trans texts, and ableist bias have invigorated feminist theoretical discourse and activism on behalf of feminist causes. Both the embraces of and challenges to Virginia Woolf’s work, I would argue, have led to a more explicit acceptance of difference among women, and created a myriad of feminist approaches, which continue to enrich and diversify an ongoing feminist narrative and critical debate.

Selected Bibliography

Ahmed, Sara , Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017 ).

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Ahmed, Sara , The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010 ).

Carruthers, Charlene A. , Unapologetic: A Black, Queer and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements (New York: Beacon Press, 2018 ).

Caughie, Pamela , ‘The Temporality of Modernist Life Writing in the Era of Transsexualism: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Elnar Wegener’s Man into Woman ’, in Modern Fiction Studies 59, no. 3 ( 2013 ): 501–25.

Chemaly, Soraya , Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger (New York: Simon & Shuster, 2018 ).

De Beauvoir, Simone , The Second Sex [1949] (New York: Bantam Books, 1964 ).

Heilbrun, Carolyn , Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (New York: Knopf, 1964 .

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Nfah-Abbenyi, Juliana , Gender in African Women’s Writing: Identity, Sexuality and Difference (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997 ).

Plain, Gill , and Susan Sellers , eds, A History of Feminist Literary Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007 .

Rich, Adrienne , ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision (1971)’, in Sandra M. Gilbert , ed., Adrienne Rich: Culture, Politics, and the Art of Poetry, Essential Essays (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2018 ), 3–19.

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Beauvoir, The Second Sex , 344.

Beauvoir, The Second Sex , 585.

Beauvoir, The Second Sex , 584.

Carolyn Heilbrun , Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964) .

Sara Ahmed , Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 47 .

Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life , 235.

Sara Ahmed , The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 60 .

Pamela Caughie , ‘The Temporality of Modernist Life Writing in the Era of Transsexualism: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Elnar Wegener’s Man into Woman ’, Modern Fiction Studies 59, no. 3 (Autumn 2013), 501–25, at 502 .

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Adrienne Rich , ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision (1971)’, in Adrienne Rich: Culture, Politics, and the Art of Poetry, Essential Essays , ed. Sandra M. Gilbert (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2018), 3–19, at 7 .

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Warhol-Down and Herndl, Feminisms Redux , 7.

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Anna Snaith , ‘ “Stray Guineas”: Virginia Woolf and the Fawcett Library’, Literature and History 12, no. 2 (November 2003), 16–35, at 16 .

Snaith, ‘Stray Guineas’ , 18.

Snaith, ‘Stray Guineas’ , 18–19.

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Marcus, Art and Anger , xiv.

Marcus, Art and Anger , xxi.

Margot Kotler , ‘After Anger: Negative Affect and Feminist Politics in Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas ’, Woolf Studies Annual 24 (2018), 35–54, at 37 .

Kotler, ‘After Anger’ , 41.

Kotler, ‘After Anger’ , 53.

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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.

Adams, Carol J., 1990, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory , London: Bloomsbury.
Anderson, Elizabeth S., 1999, “What is the Point of Equality?”, Ethics , 109: 287–337
Andrew, Barbara S., 2003, “Beauvoir’s Place in Philosophical Thought,” in C. Card (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 22–44.
Annas, Julia, 1977, “Mill and the Subjection of Women,” Philosophy , 52 (200): pp. 179–194.
Astell, Mary, and P. Springborg (ed.), 1694, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies , Broadview Press, 2002.
Ayala, Saray, and Nadya Vasilyeva, 2015, “Extended Sex: An Account of Sex for a More Just Society,” Hypatia , 30 (4): 725–742.
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Whipps, Judy, and Danielle Lake, 2017, “Pragmatist Feminism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/femapproach-pragmatism/ >.
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Tong, Rosemarie and Williams, Nancy, “Feminist Ethics”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2019/entries/feminism-ethics/ >. [This was the previous entry on Feminist Ethics in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — see the version history .]
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Feminist Philosophy Quarterly , edited by Samantha Brennan, Carla Fehr, Alice MacLachlan, and Kathryn Norlock, ISSN 2371-2570.
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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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7 Feminism and Feminist Ethics

Kathryn MacKay

Introduction

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, early feminist writers, including Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), Sojourner Truth (1797-1883), and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902), began to address topics related to the political, economic, and educational status of women, and “women’s morality” (Tong and Williams 2018). This was partly motivated by a growing awareness of the real inequalities between men and women, including legal and social restrictions and prohibitions. These authors argued that disparities in educational opportunities, and the restrictions across race and gender of roles and responsibilities open to women, prevented women from fully developing as people and citizens (Wollstonecraft [1792] 2004). This was First Wave feminism, and it accomplished significant progress on emancipation and enfranchisement for women and visible minorities in the West.

In the twentieth century, Betty Friedan (1921-2006) would report similar phenomena among her white university-educated peers in the 1950s United States, who had returned to the home to be full-time housewives. Friedan wrote that this group of women appeared to suffer a sort of stunting, an erosion of their abilities, and a freezing of personal, intellectual, and moral development into a childlike and immature state (Friedan [1963] 1997). It should be noted, though, that this was not the experience of black women in the US, who often worked outside the home, frequently in the employ of white women, nor the experience of working-class women across races (Collins 1989). However, women found significant commonalities among themselves in the disparity of political and employment rights compared to men in their social groups (Thompson 2002). Around the same time in France, Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) published her seminal work examining the situation of women in French society, describing women’s second-class status as founded upon the social and political interpretations of biological differences between male and female (de Beauvoir [1949] 2014). The work of de Beauvoir, Friedan, and many others spurred Second Wave feminism among women in Europe and North America, as they began to examine anew the cultural, political, and moral positions that women occupied. Second Wave feminists focused their efforts on such issues as reproductive rights, domestic and sexual violence, paid maternity leave, and equal pay in the workplace.

While issues surrounding women’s political and moral development had long been a concern to feminists of the First and Second waves, it was around the end of the Second Wave and the beginning of the current Third Wave (roughly around the late 1980s and early 1990s), that writers began to think about the need for a specifically feminist ethics. Up to this point, moral theories (like deontology or consequentialism) had largely ignored or remained unaware of the specific perspective and experiences of women, privileging the experiences and perspectives of the “universal” or “neutral” position. Feminists, however, pointed out that this “universal” perspective was a specifically white male perspective. Alison Jaggar wrote that one problem with traditional ethics at the time was (and potentially still is) that it views as trivial the moral issues that arise in the so-called private world, the realm in which women do housework and take care of children, the ill or infirm, and the elderly. In its formulation of the “neutral” perspective, traditional ethics was charged with favoring “male” ways of moral reasoning that emphasized rules, rights, universality, and impartiality over “female” ways of moral reasoning that emphasize relationships, responsibilities, particularity, and partiality. Additionally, Jaggar points out that traditional ethics had under-rated culturally feminine traits like “interdependence, community, connection, sharing, emotion, body, trust, absence of hierarchy, nature, immanence, process, joy, peace, and life” (Jaggar 1992, 363-364).

Thus, an ethics that paid particular attention to these traditionally undervalued virtues, principles, values, perspectives, and ways of knowing was required to provide a full understanding of human experiences and moral life. In the Third Wave, feminists began to criticize and discuss the various shortcomings of the Second Wave, including its marginalisation of the voices and perspectives of women of oppressed races, ethnicities, sexual identities, and socio-economic positions (Combahee River Collective 1977; Mohanty, Torres, and Russo 1991). A feminist ethic, which paid attention to these different identities and perspectives, became centrally important to taking women’s lives and experiences seriously, and central to eliminating oppression of women, sexual minorities, and other oppressed groups. Thus, Jaggar framed feminist ethics as the creation of a gendered ethics that aims to eliminate or at least ameliorate the oppression of any group of people, but most particularly women.

The Ethics of Care

Care ethics, as it has become known, is an early feminist ethic that arose out of reactions to popular psychoanalytical accounts of male and female development in the mid-twentieth century, and the questioning of women’s roles in society. This ethic began from observational studies in psychology, and later became a positive normative account of moral behavior. The early formulations of care ethics were criticized by both feminist theorists and philosophers working in other moral traditions. The objections to these early formulations are important, and have led to useful and interesting developments. Care ethics has advanced as a normative theory, but has perhaps made its strongest contribution as a metaethic, a position from which to begin our moral reasoning, rather than as a tool to use in sorting out particular moral cases or dilemmas.

Early Formulation

In her psychological analysis of women’s moral decision-making in the 1980s, In a Different Voice, Carol Gilligan claimed that she found a difference in the way men and women perceived moral problems. While men focused on justice and rights, women were more likely to think about relationships in making moral decisions. In examining the question of abortion, Gilligan wrote,

[W]omen’s construction of the moral problem as a problem of care and responsibility in relationships rather than as one of rights and rules ties the development of their moral thinking to changes in their understanding of responsibility and relationships….Thus the logic underlying an ethic of care is a psychological logic of relationships, which contrasts with the formal logic of fairness that informs the justice approach. (Gilligan 1982, 73)

For Gilligan, this ethic of care particular to women develops in three stages. First, a woman exhibits a focus on caring for the self in order to ensure survival, which is accompanied by a transitional phase in which this mode of thinking about the self as primary is criticized as selfish. Following this critical phase, a new understanding of the connections between one’s self and others leads to the development of a concept of responsibility. Gilligan wrote that this concept of responsibility is fused with a “maternal morality,” which is focused on ensuring care for the dependent and unequal people in one’s circle. At this stage, the Good is defined in terms of caring for others. However, Gilligan continues, too much of a focus on others in this second stage of moral development leads to an imbalance of attention, which means that a woman must reconsider the balance between self-sacrifice and the kinds of care included in conventional ideas of feminine goodness. The third phase, then, is one which balances the self with others, and focuses on relationships and a new understanding of the connections between the self and others. The central insight in this ethic of care, Gilligan writes, is that the self and others are interdependent (Gilligan 1982).

A few years after Gilligan, Nel Noddings published Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education , which provided a deeper analysis into the people—the care provider and the care receiver—and the processes involved in caring. In this book, Noddings argued that morality requires a person to have two emotions. The first of these emotions is a sentiment of “natural care.” Noddings describes this care as pre-ethical; the caretaking that a mother engages in for her child, or a maternal animal for her offspring are equally examples of this natural care. As Gilligan also argued, Noddings says that concern for others, or recognition of others’ concern for us, gives rise to a conflict between responding to the needs of others and taking care of our own needs. This conflict gives rise, in turn, to the opportunity for “ethical caring,” or responding to the recognition that another has needs, and that we are in a position to meet these needs, and further acknowledging that this situation makes a moral claim on us. However, in many cases we can recognize and respond to another’s needs by way of natural care, a disposition to care for the other that arises spontaneously in us, rather than by way of ethical care, which one would only act from if natural care has failed. In this way, natural care is preferable to ethical care on Noddings’ account (Noddings 1984).

A number of objections have been raised to Gilligan’s and to Noddings’ formulations of an ethics of care within psychology, moral theory, and feminist thought. Of those raised by feminists, the most powerful objections focus on the potential for care ethics to “essentialize” the caring relationship. This objection says that care ethics may reduce the relationship of care to essential features which are then linked to “woman’s nature” in a way that calls upon and reinforces gender-based stereotypes (e.g. women are more sensitive and caring than men). These objections stress that even if women are (for social, cultural, biological, or interconnected reasons) better at providing or giving care than are men, it may still be “epistemically, ethically, and politically imprudent to associate women with the value of care” (Tong and Williams 2018). The worry is that intimately linking women with caring may “promote the view that women are in charge of caring or, worse, that because women can care, they should care no matter the cost to themselves” (Tong and Williams 2018; emphasis added).

From a Marxist-inspired feminist perspective, Sandra Lee Bartky (1935-2016) expands on this worry in her 1990 book, Femininity and Domination . Bartky argues that, rather than providing women with a valued and esteemed role in a man’s world, women’s activities in “building men’s egos and binding men’s wounds” ultimately disempower women (Tong and Williams 2018). She claims that the kind of affective labor (work that significantly involves one’s having or showing certain emotions) undertaken by women in providing care for a family, and in some service-oriented occupations, causes them to disconnect from their own basic emotions and feelings. In service occupations, such as being a flight attendant, Bartky says the employee must force their own feelings into the background, and be nice (for example) regardless of the behavior of the client in front of them. This kind of emotional labor risks blurring the distinction between “real” feelings of wanting to be friendly and nice and “inauthentic” feelings that are generated by the employment obligation to be friendly and nice.

In the home, something similar happens. Bartky writes that many wives and mothers say that the experience of caring for their husbands and children, even when difficult, provides their lives with fulfillment and meaning. The more they care, the more they view themselves as the glue of the family that holds everything together for everyone else (Tong and Williams 2018). But, and importantly for Bartky, such subjective feelings of empowerment are not the same as actually having power. A lack of power in the family means that a woman is obligated to take on these caring roles and, like the flight attendant, to force her own feelings down when they do not match with the expected behavior of a good wife or mother. So, like in employment situations, the required emotional work within the family risks blurring the distinction between a woman’s real feelings of care and satisfaction with feelings that are generated by her sense of obligation and of what it means to properly perform her role.

In employment and in the household, a woman’s emotional exploitation is linked closely to her economic and material oppression. Marxist-inspired feminists, such as Ann Ferguson, have argued that economic disadvantage within the household is analogous to capitalist exploitation of laborers. Ferguson analyses the “sexual division of labor” within a household, in which women are responsible for producing four main categories of goods. These are children, household maintenance, care (of children and of men), and sex (Ferguson 1991). Women and girls are taught to take pride and satisfaction in the production of these goods, while men learn that these are women’s work, and therefore not their responsibility. At the same time, the production of these goods is disvalued, and the desire to do this work is connected to the idea of “being a woman.” Thus, the labor that goes into the production of these things goes largely unrecognized. Bartky argues that in providing this care to her husband or children, a woman is exploited in such a way that her family benefits and has their interests advanced while she suffers damage to her own interests. In a similar vein, Sheila Mullet argues that when material conditions of oppression appear within a household, real relationships of care are prevented from forming. She argues that a woman is not in a position to truly care for someone if she is economically, socially, or psychologically forced to do so (Mullet 1988). Thus, real caring cannot occur under conditions characterized by domination and subordination. Only if women are fully equal to men can women take on the emotional work of care without fearing that men will take advantage of their labor.

Responses and Developments

Care ethics has continued to advance in recent years, in part by responding to the objections of various feminist and non-feminist thinkers. Care ethics made an important and valuable contribution in identifying that people are necessarily interconnected beings. The importance of care for morality and personal development gave rise to theories incorporating relational and intersectional conceptions of various ethical values, which will be discussed below.

A number of authors, such as Virginia Held and Eva Feder Kittay, have continued to develop care ethics into both a moral theory and a kind of metaethical framework, from which ethical obligations can be derived and in which certain moral principles and values may be grounded. There are three foundational theoretical commitments in the ethics of care that have been established amongst care theorists at this point (Sander-Staudt 2017). First, persons are understood to have varying degrees of dependence and interdependence. More about this will be said in the following section, Relational Theory. This perspective in care ethics contrasts with deontological and consequentialist moral theories that often view persons as having independent interests. Second, care ethics holds that anyone who is particularly vulnerable to one’s choices and their outcomes deserves extra consideration when making decisions. Third, the contextual details of situations must be part of the decision-making process, in order to safeguard and promote the actual interests of those concerned.

Further, in keeping with some of Noddings’ early views, Held and Kittay have argued that the principle of justice can be grounded in care. Held has said that while care can exist without justice, as it may do within unjust family relationships, justice cannot exist without care. In order for an inkling of justice to take shape in our minds, we must first express concern for the condition of another, and this is an expression of care. So, care is “deeply fundamental,” perhaps an ethical proto-value, motivating any further moral sentiment (Held 2005, 17; Tong and Williams 2018). In criticising Rawlsian formulations of justice as fairness, Kittay has argued that relationships of dependency characterized by care are such a fundamental part of human life that any theory of justice that leaves these out cannot achieve a just or fair society. Given that each person will experience dependency upon someone who takes on the responsibility to care for them in prolonged and significant episodes throughout one’s life, such relationships and the shift in power, labor, and interests that happen within them, must be attended to by any theory attempting to form a fair distribution of benefits and goods in society. An ethic of care, thus, must be central to formulations of justice (Kittay 1997).

Furthermore, Held sees care ethics as a normative moral theory, something that can provide robust tools for determining morally good outcomes in specific dilemmas or challenges. By denying the appeal to universal moral principles, by valuing emotional responses, and by looking at the specific relationships that we have with those “particular others for whom we take responsibility,” Held argues that care ethics can provide answers about what we ought to do in specific scenarios (Held 2005, 10).

However, even moral theorists who do not explicitly subscribe to an ethics of care may recognize the metaethical contribution it makes to our understanding of human interaction and moral life. The first of the three theoretical commitments of care ethics, that humans are essentially social and interconnected beings with varying degrees of independence, and not the sort of entities that pop into existence entirely able to support themselves or fully develop in the absence of social relationships characterized by interdependence and care, has had significant influence on the development of relational theories of identity and agency, as we shall see below. Thus, the metaethical notions grounding care ethics have become ingrained in feminist understandings of moral psychology, personal autonomy, rights, and responsibility.

Relational Theory

A metaethics of care provides the background for a group of ideas sometimes called “relational theory.” Here, relational autonomy and relational identity will specifically be discussed. Natalie Stoljar writes that the term “relational” makes a metaphysical claim, which denies a notion of “atomistic” personhood, “emphasizing instead that agents are socially and historically embedded, not metaphysically isolated, and are, moreover, shaped by factors such as race and class” (Stoljar 2015). Thus, the insights provided by early formulations of care ethics provide a portion of the metaphysical and metaethical starting point for seeing persons as always and unavoidably interconnected. In other words, insights from care ethics provide foundational building-block concepts for an interpretation of reality, and what our moral theories should take into account. Thus, interpersonal and social-group relations are an important feature of the world, and must accordingly form an important part of our moral theorising.

When referring to autonomy, Stoljar writes that the term “relational” may serve to deny that autonomy requires self-sufficiency, as it had traditionally been formulated. In most pre-feminist formulations of autonomy, especially following the development by various scholars of Immanuel Kant’s theory, a model of cool and detached reasoning, unconcerned with personal or familial commitments, became a requirement of independent decision-making. However, this way of thinking about autonomy is problematic because, under such requirements, one must either acknowledge that no person fully meets the criteria, or willfully ignore that any person’s ability to be independent is facilitated by the ongoing care provided to them by others. If we move away from this idea of what autonomy means, and acknowledge that relationships of care and interdependence are valuable and morally significant, then as Stoljar argues, any useful theory of autonomy must at least “be ‘relational’ in the sense that it must acknowledge that autonomy is compatible with the agent standing in and valuing significant family and other social relationships” (Stoljar 2015).

In response, many theorists working on questions of agency, decision theory, and ethics, among other areas, have adopted an account of autonomy that is relational (Christman 1991; Westlund 2009; Benson 1991). Relational theories of autonomy generally start with the minimal acknowledgment that we begin as non-autonomous beings, as infants, and develop into autonomous beings gradually as we learn various sets of skills and gain specific abilities central to making our own decisions, from the mundane to the momentous. Many relational theories of autonomy also take into account that our autonomy is impacted by the process of socialisation (Benson 1991; Meyers 1987), or may be suspended at various times in our lives. For example, we may become gravely ill, and become comparatively much more dependent upon others for the duration of the illness. We may also become less autonomous as we enter into the later decades of life. Autonomy, thus, may be something that is a matter of degrees or stages of life (Meyers 1987; Friedman 1997). Relational theories of autonomy can account for these facts of human existence, attending to the importance of our close relationships in facilitating decision-making and the achievement of a good and satisfying life.

Relational identity is another theoretical perspective on human development and experience that is metaethically informed by care and by recognition of intersectionality: the intersecting identities people hold. Intersectionality was conceptualized by Kimberlé Crenshaw, reflecting the reality of black women’s identities as being formed within the hierarchical power structures of both gender and race (as well as class, sexual orientation, ability, and so on) (Crenshaw 1989; 1991). In political or social movements that are oriented around “single-axis” issues, e.g. exclusively race or exclusively gender, Crenshaw argued that people with more than one of these identities were further marginalized. Crenshaw’s work is politically important, and important to a feminist ethic which seeks, as Jaggar said, to theorize for all oppressed people and especially women. The acceptance of intersectionality has led to a recognition that persons are complex, and may simultaneously experience realms of their identity that are privileged while other realms of their identity are oppressed. A feminist ethic must begin from the recognition of these intersecting dynamics of power within and among individual women and social groups.

As such, Françoise Baylis and Margaret Urban Walker have separately argued that the formation of the self and personal identity are ongoing social processes, happening with other people and the systems around us. Baylis writes that, since persons are interdependent beings, a person’s identity, “including her traits, desires, beliefs, values, emotions, intentions, memories, actions, and experiences,” is informed by her relationships, which have varying degrees and kinds of intimacy and interdependence (Baylis 2011, 109). A person’s public and private interactions help to structure her perception of herself and define her place in the world.

For relational identity theorists, a person is importantly constituted by the relationships and interactions they have. Baylis writes that one’s identity exists in the “negotiated spaces between my biology and psychology and that of others,” forming a “balance between self-ascription and ascription by others” (Baylis 2011, 110). Certain parts of myself may feel like they were created by me or perhaps were “always there,” in the sense that I might not be able to easily identify the source of influence that shaped them, but all parts of me are (in)formed by interactions with the social and political world. This way of conceptualizing identity pays attention to the fact that as infants we enter a world already full of meaning. The particular meanings attached to our bodies (about, for example, skin color, biological sex, or physical ability) and certain personal characteristics (such as gender expression or sexual identity) precede us in space and time. As Walker writes, women and men in situations of oppression or subordination may find themselves subject to socially normative narratives about their identities, which are coercive and disadvantaging (Walker 1997). These narratives exist in the world into which a person is born and grows up, impacting many aspects of their identity formation and expression. The recognition that we only ever exist within such narratives and interpersonal relationships of various kinds thus forms the backdrop for relational theories of identity formation and maintenance.

The development of feminist ethics stemmed from the recognition that the experiences and perspectives of some groups in society, including people of a minority race or ethnicity, people with disability status, people from lower socio-economic levels, and women, as well as people whose identities cut across these groupings in various ways, had been ignored or devalued by mainstream or traditional ethics, and has since been attempting to remedy this in conjunction with other anti-oppression movements. In a metaethics of care, the interdependence of human beings is taken as an enabling and necessary feature of life, rather than as something to be shaken off to achieve the greatest independence of thought or feeling. By acknowledging that “independence” is only a relative state, and that we are all, to various degrees at different stages of life, dependent on others for care and survival, feminist ethicists have achieved a revision in the way that important moral concepts, such as autonomy and personal identity, are conceived. That much caring labor is yet under- or de-valued, that its performance often still falls to women within households and disproportionately to minority-group women in the workforce, and that women still face economic disadvantages as compared to men within their social and cultural groups, remains a challenge for feminist ethicists and political philosophers.

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Article contents

Conflict resolution: feminist perspectives.

Simona Sharoni Simona Sharoni Department of Gender & Women’s Studies, SUNY Plattsburgh
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.130
Published in print: 01 March 2010
Published online: 30 November 2017

The academic study of conflict resolution was born as as a critique of mainstream International Relations (IR), which explains why feminist theory and conflict resolution share many things in common. For example, both feminists and conflict resolution scholars challenge traditional power politics grounded in realist or neorealists analyses of conflict. They also share the core belief that war is not inevitable and that human beings have the capacity to resolve conflicts through nonviolent means. In the past two decades, with the expansion of feminist scholarship in IR, feminist interventions in conflict resolution have gained more currency. This essay reviews feminist scholarship in conflict resolution, with particular emphasis on five elements: critiques of the absence and/or marginalization of women in the field and an effort to include women and to make women visible and heard; articulation of a unique feminist standpoint for approaching peacemaking and conflict resolution, which is essentially different to, and qualitatively better than, mainstream (or male-stream) perspectives; feminist theorization of difference in conflict resolution theory and practice (challenges to essentialism, intersections, power and privilege, culture); feminist redefinition of central concepts in the field, especially violence, power, peace, and security; and original feminist research and theorizing, including field research in conflict areas, designed to transform rather than just reform the field. This essay argues that in order to further expand and institutionalize conflict resolution studies, mainstream scholars must be willing to engage seriously the contributions and critiques of feminists.

conflict resolution
International Relations
feminist theory
marginalization of women
peacemaking

Introduction

Although the term “conflict resolution” has been in use for quite some time, only in the past two decades has it been institutionalized as a distinct field of study in the academy and as a body of knowledge and applied skills that can be utilized in many spheres of our personal, social, and political lives. Because the academic study of conflict resolution emerged as a critique of mainstream International Relations (IR), feminist theory and conflict resolution have much in common. First and foremost, they share a critique of traditional power politics grounded in realist or neorealists analyses of conflict. Further, feminists and conflict resolution scholars share the core belief that war is not inevitable and that human beings have the capacity to resolve conflicts nonviolently. Yet, despite the striking similarities between conflict resolution theory and feminist theory, feminist perspectives and feminist scholars and practitioners remain marginalized within the field of conflict resolution, much like their counterparts in other fields of inquiry.

Feminist interventions in conflict resolution have been similar in many ways to feminist critiques in other disciplines and fields of inquiry, but they have gained more currency in the past two decades, with the expansion of feminist scholarship in IR. Feminist perspectives on conflict resolution ranged in tone and political goals and, like other political interventions, they can be organized along a continuum, from liberal calls for inclusion and visibility within the emerging field of study and practice to more radical interventions which have called into question the underlying assumptions and mainstream theories in the field. The latter interventions did not call for reforms within the field but rather demanded its radical transformation. As part of the effort to transform conflict resolution, a new generation of feminist conflict resolution scholars has engaged in original theorizing and groundbreaking research, including in conflict-torn regions. The original scholarship published as a result of these studies, which will be discussed later in this essay, underscores the centrality of gender to conflict resolution theory, research and practice. The body of original feminist research in conflict resolution highlights issues and dimensions of conflicts that have remained unexamined in conventional, nonfeminist, conflict resolution scholarship.

Feminist scholarship in conflict resolution has included at least one element, though often some combination of several, from the following list:

Critiques of the absence and/or marginalization of women in the field and an effort to include women and to make women visible and heard.

Articulation of a unique feminist standpoint for approaching peacemaking and conflict resolution, which is essentially different to, and qualitatively better than, mainstream (or male-stream) perspectives.

Feminist theorization of difference in CR theory and practice (challenges to essentialism, intersections, power and privilege, culture).

Feminist redefinition of central concepts in the field, especially violence, power, peace, and security.

Original feminist research and theorizing, including field research in conflict areas, designed to transform, not merely reform, the field.

In this essay, I focus primarily on feminist perspectives pertaining to the analysis and resolution of conflicts, which have been traditionally described in IR literature as “international conflicts” and/or “ethnic conflicts.” Feminists, like other critical scholars, have called the terms themselves into question and suggested alternatives. In addition to critically examining various feminist critiques of conflict resolution theory, research, and practice, this essay highlights original and noteworthy contributions that feminist scholars and practitioners have made to conflict resolution study and practice. Finally, I discuss some new directions for feminist work in this area and examine the prospects and challenges for a fruitful collaboration between scholars of conflict resolution and feminist scholars.

Challenging Exclusion and Marginalization: Struggles for Inclusion, Voice, and Visibility

Early interventions centered around the question “where are the women?” in conflict resolution theories, research, and such practices as mediation and negotiation. Feminist scholars challenged the absence, exclusion, and marginalization of women’s experiences, voices, and perspectives both at the negotiation tables and in textbooks (Rifkin 1984 ; Kolb and Coolidge 1991 ; Stamato 1992 ; Sharoni, 1993 ; Taylor and Miller 1994 ; Kolb 2000 ; Anderlini 2007 ; English 2009 ). They questioned why, despite the fact that 51 percent of the world’s population is female and that women across the globe have been at the forefront of peace and justice struggles since at least the turn of the century, women continue to be marginalized, if not excluded, from official policy-making circles or at best are confined to the margins of political debates concerning peace and security. They further suggested that paying attention to women’s experiences would greatly contribute to both the analysis and the resolution of conflicts (Sharoni 1993 ; 1995 ; Cockburn 1998 ; 2007 ; Byrne 2009 ). Many feminists insisted that because women and girls constitute at least half of the world population, their experience should be counted and carefully considered alongside the experience of men (Taylor and Miller 1994 ; D’Amico and Beckman 1995 ; Turpin and Lorentzen 1996 ). Others, on the other hand, argued that because women are different to men, mostly due to a gendered socialization and experiences in conflict, they may be uniquely positioned to offer creative approaches to conflict resolution and peacemaking (Eisler 1989 ; Boulding 1992 , 1995 ; Reardon 1993 ; Fearon 1999 ; Fearon and McWilliams 2000 ).

In the academy, the struggle was led primarily by graduate students with feminist consciousness who drew attention to the exclusion of women’s voices and perspectives from course syllabi and major texts. They also pointed out the absence of women faculty, especially in programs that focused on international conflict resolution and offered graduate degrees in the field (Sharoni 1993 ; Stephens 1994 ; English 2009 ). These interventions called for the inclusion of work by women and on women in the emerging conflict resolution canon, and for the hiring of women faculty, whose teaching responsibility would include developing new courses that focused on gender and conflict. Around the same time, women and feminist practitioners in the growing field of mediation and alternative dispute resolution (ADR) began to call into question the assumption that mediation and negotiation were gender-neutral processes. They highlighted differences in women’s and men’s experiences of the conflict as well as in processes of mediation and negotiation and their outcomes (Hill 1990 ; Chataway and Kolb 1994 ; Dewhurst and Wall 1994 ; Watson 2004 ). The critiques were similar to feminist critiques in other fields. Feminists called into question the dominant discourses of mediation and negotiation for the masculinist assumptions and expectations. Grounded primarily in rational-choice theories, negotiators were expected to be rational, competitive, utility-maximizing individuals, while mediators were proffered to be neutral and objective. Feminists argued that these expectations valorize behaviors that are associated with men and therefore perpetuate their dominance in the field. Instead, they introduced alternative perspectives on conflict, mediation, and negotiation, focusing primarily on power dynamics and social aspects of relationships (Kolb and Coolidge 1991 ; Kolb 1992 ; Taylor and Miller 1994 ; Kolb and Putnam 1995 ; Ely and Meyerson 2000 ; Putnam and Kolb 2000 ).

In the area of policy making, feminist perspectives on conflict and conflict resolution challenged the absence of women at all decision-making levels and especially at the negotiation tables (Cravers 1990 ; Kolb and Coolidge 1991 ; Watson 1994 ; Mazur 2002 ). More recently, researchers using datasets examined the impact of gender inequalities on intrastate conflict. They concluded that states characterized by gender inequality are more likely to experience intrastate conflict (Caprioli 2000 , 2005 ; Caprioli and Boyer 2001 ). Along with the expansion of this body of literature, debates about gender inclusiveness and its implications for conflict and peacemaking have become commonplace in advocacy circles, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and International Nongovernmental Organizations (INGOs) around the world. Women within these organizations have worked tirelessly to transform policies and practices in the direction of gender-mainstreaming. UN Security Council Resolution 1325 is viewed as a serious milestone in the laborious process of infusing gender awareness and sensitivity into peacemaking and peacekeeping (Anderlini 2004 ; Anderlini and El-Bushra 2004 ; Cohn et al. 2004 ).

A Different Standpoint or Essentialist Theorizing?

While many feminists continue to focus on documenting women’s contributions to conflict resolution and peacemaking and advancing “gender mainstreaming” within international organizations that intervene in conflicts, others have warned against the tendency to “add women and stir,” which may not have a significant impact on the analysis or the resolution of conflicts (Zalewski 1995 ; Daly 2005 ; Squires 2005 ; Squires and Weldes 2007 ). At the same time, feminists inspired by women peace activists around the world have insisted that women have a different perspective on questions of war and peace and therefore can make unique contributions to peacemaking and to conflict resolution initiatives (Boulding 1992 ; Reardon 1993 ). Although feminists enthusiastically embraced the project of highlighting women’s activism around the world, the claim that women’s agency stems from their sex categorization was not unanimously endorsed by feminists.

Indeed, there has been an ongoing debate among feminists, as in scholarly and policy-making circles and the general population, on whether the mere call for equal participation of women in political affairs would guarantee a more peaceful agenda. The fact that throughout history more women than men have organized against war and in search of nonviolent ways to resolve conflicts has been used by some feminists as to establish the case for women’s special relationship to peace and for a unique feminist standpoint on peacemaking and conflict resolution (Cambridge Women’s Peace Collective 1984 ; Eisler 1989 ; Boulding 1992 ; Alonso 1993 ).

Those who wish to maintain the status quo of male-dominated politics have often used as examples of such hawkish, nationalist, and warmongering female leaders as Golda Meir , Indira Gandhi , Margaret Thatcher , Madeline Albright , and Condeleeza Rice (Fukuyama 1998 ). However, most feminists working on these issues nowadays insist that it is not one’s biological sex, but rather one’s overall political perspective and vision and the gendered systems that shape them, that affect one’s inclination for war or peace (Hunter and Flamenbaum 1993 ; Zalewski 1995 ; Tickner 1997 ; Caprioli 2000 ; Peterson and Runyan, forthcoming).

This debate has triggered many conversations among feminist scholars and activists, inspiring more complex theorizing that takes into account women’s experiences as both victims and perpetrators of conflict and makes clear that the call for the inclusion of women at the negotiation table is first and foremost a call for the inclusion of different perspectives. Toward this end, some feminists sought to demonstrate that women do have a special relationship to peace and to explain why and how it differs from conventional male perspectives.

During the latter part of the nineteenth century , primarily in Europe and North America, women activists and feminist scholars began to explore and articulate the connections between their struggles for emancipation as women and their pursuit of justice and peace. A prime example of this perspective was Virginia Woolf’s 1938 treatise Three Guineas , which was written in the form of a letter in response to a man’s question on how to prevent war. Woolf suggested that the issue of “how to prevent war” was linked to the broad complex of social relations and gender inequalities that prevailed in society at that time. She challenged the separation between the private and public domains which, she argued, has maintained women’s exclusion from public and political roles. Her prescription was to bring the private world of women into the public world of men to transform both (Woolf 1938 ).

Since the mid-1970s, much feminist work has sought to explain women’s predisposition to peacemaking and the non-violent resolution of conflicts. Some argued that because women experience sexism and violence they can empathize with other victims and support movements for justice and peace (Brownmiller 1975 ; Enloe 1987 ). Others insisted that it was women’s experiences as nurturers, and especially the practice of mothering, that provides the basis for a unique feminist standpoint on peacemaking and conflict resolution (Noddings 1984 ; Brock-Utne 1985 ; Reardon 1985 ; Ruddick 1989 ). Sara Ruddick ’s work on “maternal thinking” is exemplary of feminist theorists who claim that there is an “authentic” universal experience of mothering, which when released from patriarchal control can challenge militarization and nurture peaceful relationships (Ruddick 1989 ). The contention that women have unique peacemaking qualities and skills has later come under attack for reinforcing cultural practices and social expectations, which tend to equate men and masculinity with war and patriarchy.

A major work at this time was Betty Reardon’s influential book Sexism and the War System ( 1985 ), which challenged the dominant view at the time within the field of peace studies that “women’s issues” (usually narrowly defined by men) are secondary or collateral to the central concerns with questions of peace and war. Reardon equated war with patriarchy, militarism with sexism, and peace and world order with feminism (Reardon 1985 ). She appealed to peace movements and to peace researchers to place women’s experiences and feminist analyses at the center of their work and to utilize education as a means to produce the visions and capacities for social transformation. Along these lines, empirically supported research in the fields of negotiation and mediation suggested significant differences in conflict resolution styles between women and men (Rifkin 1984 ; Maxwell 1992 ). Drawing mostly on Carol Gilligan ’s work, the skills required for successful mediation and negotiation were initially viewed as more compatible with women’s values and dispositions (Gilligan 1982 ). Nevertheless, most feminist research and writing about mediation, especially family law mediation, have strongly criticized mediation as a process, insisting that it often puts women at a disadvantage (Woods 1985 ; Shaffer 1988 ; Girdner 1989 ; Ellis 1990 ; Hill 1990 ).

This period saw the emergence of scholars who referred to themselves as “feminist peace researchers.” Paying close attention to the peace movement and to women’s roles within it, they engaged in challenging conventional scholarship on questions of war and peace and searching for new theoretical frameworks and strategies to address these questions. This project grew out of the realization that the process of conducting corrective and compensatory research had shown that the scientific method – with its emphasis on objectivity, freedom from values, and abstract reasoning – reflected the experiences, mindset, and expectations of Western white males (Carroll 1972 ; Forcey 1991 ; Tickner 1992 ; Sylvester 2002 ). The result was new theorizing, research agendas, and methods that were qualitatively different from the research reflected in such flagship male-dominated journals as the Journal of Peace Research and the Journal of Conflict Resolution.

These feminist theories and critiques examined such topics as the linkages between the public and private domains, those between the violence of war and violence against women, and those between sexism and militarism. Although some feminists occasionally compared their experiences to those of other disenfranchised groups, for the most part the effort to articulate unique feminist perspectives on peace came at the expense of addressing differences among women, such as those based on race, class, and sexual orientation.

Feminists Theorize Difference in Conflict Resolution Theory and Practice

Feminist explorations of difference in relation to conflict and conflict resolution have centered around two central themes in contemporary feminist debates. The first is a critique of the treatment of women as a monolithic entity, which is essentially different to that of men. The second, related theme addresses differences among women.

Over the last two decades, feminist scholars have raised important theoretical and methodological questions that challenged the treatment of women and men as monolithic entities, diametrically opposed to one another. In the context of peace and conflict studies, these critiques called into question the common juxtaposition of men-warriors and women-peacemakers (Elshtain 1987 ; Sylvester 1987 ; 1989 ; Forcey 1991 ; Sharoni 1998 ; 2001 ; Skjelsbak 2001 ). These questions arose in the context of broader theoretical discussions, involving both a conceptual shift from a focus on “women” and “men” to a focus on “gender” as a socially constructed category and a methodological shift from empiricism and materialism to constructivism (Ackerly et al. 2006 ).

From a social constructivist perspective, gender is both an analytical category and a relational social process (Butler 1990 ; Scott 1990 ; Butler and Scott 1992 ; Ferguson 1993 ). Further, feminists have insisted that no categories, identities or practices associated with being women or men are natural or universal. Given this contention, any attempt to generalize differences between women and men, as collectivities, comes at the expense of differences among women and men as well as at the expense of historical specificity. Inspired by this new theoretical perspective, feminists writing about war, peace, and conflict have engaged in theorizing and original research that took into account the multiplicity of women’s voices and perspectives in different contexts (Elia 1996 ; Connolly 1999 ; Mason 2005 ). The attention to difference allowed feminists to examine critically contradictions and conflicts not only between women and men, but also among women, and more recently among men (Sharoni 1998 ; 2008 ; Whitworth 2004 ). As a result, there is now a rich body of literature that addresses constructions of masculinity in conflict, peacekeeping, and peacemaking (Zalewski and Parpart 1998 ; Masters 2008 ; Parpart and Zalewski 2008 ; Sharoni 2008 ).

For example, feminists insisted that women’s perspectives on war and peace, like gender identities, are socially constructed and therefore must be examined in relation to the particular historical and sociopolitical contexts that shaped them. Along these lines, feminists insisted that women’s struggles for peace and contributions to conflict resolution initiatives cannot be understood apart from women’s participation in and support of wars (Elshtain 1987 ; Sylvester 1987 ; Elshtain and Tobias 1990 ; Forcey 1991 ). In the context of our discussion on difference, feminists argued that attempts to separate women’s involvement in war from their struggles for peace reduce the complexity of women’s experiences and their diverse responses to conflict. This perspective led to extensive research on the role of women in militaries and in various support roles for militaries and militarization (Turshen and Twagiramariya 1998 ; D’Amico and Weinstein 1999 ; Enloe 2000 ; 2007 ; McKelvey 2006 ). Feminist research has also encompassed women in national liberation movements, including those who used armed struggle as one of their modes of resistance (Sylvester 1989 ; Abdulhadi 1998 ; Sjoberg and Gentry 2007 ).

Feminists insisted that paying attention to difference is important not only in order to recover silenced and marginalized voices and validate individual identities, but also as a way of exposing structured inequalities and power differentials. It was this realization of power imbalances at the mediation table that inspired feminist critiques of the mediation process, especially in the field of divorce mediation and family law (Woods 1985 ; Shaffer 1988 ; Girdner 1989 ; Ellis 1990 ; Hill 1990 ). Feminists insisted that understanding difference can be instrumental to examining power structures and relationships. To illustrate this point, Peterson and Runyan ( 2009 :86) use the phrase “global gendered, racialized, and sexualized divisions of power, violence, and labor and resources.” This theoretical contention was inspired by feminist theories of intersections, which emerged in the context of and in relation to social movements, especially those led by people of color, gays and lesbians, women, and working-class people.

By “intersections,” feminists referred to the interconnectedness of gendered identities, structures of domination, discrimination, oppression, exploitation, and violence (Crenshaw 1991 ; Mohanty 2003 ). These theories grew out of the experiences of women who felt that their histories and struggles were not reflected in the agenda of the feminist movement in Europe and North America. They included women of color, lesbians, working-class women and women in the global south, arguing that their experiences as women need to be examined in relation to other experiences shaped by their race, culture, ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation. Women of color in the US insisted that they can only be part of a feminist movement if it incorporates the notion of difference and does not force them to choose between their struggle against sexism and their commitment to end racism (Moraga and Anzaldua 1983 ; hooks 1984 ; 1990 ; Collins 1992 ; Anzaldua and Keating 2002 ). Along these lines, women in the global south who were engaged, alongside men, in struggles for national liberation, called into question the simplistic distinction of men-warriors and women-peacemakers. Furthermore, because these women were involved in a dual struggle, for national liberation and for women’s liberation, they began to explore and address the linkages between gender oppression and the broader political context within which it unfolds (Stephenson 1983 ; Jayawardena 1986 ; Mohanty 1991 ).

Feminists who theorize difference see that gender identities and gender relations are socially constituted through complex interrelated processes. As a result, the actual content of being a man or a woman and the rigidity of the categories themselves are highly variable across cultures, contexts, and time. Understanding the existing linkages between different, usually interlocking, systems of domination and oppression and between different cartographies of struggle is central to the analysis of conflicts and the exploration of prospects for their resolution. Taking difference into account and applying feminist theories of intersections to conflict resolution does not involve merely paying attention to race, gender, and class as variables in a particular case study. Rather, intersectional analysis should be used to uncover the distribution of power within systems and relationships and especially to reveal how unequal distribution of power and privilege can sow the seeds and lead to the escalation of conflict.

Feminists Redefine Central Concepts in Conflict Resolution Theory, Research, and Practice

Most, if not all, feminist literature dealing with conflict and conflict resolution begins with the premise that concepts such as violence, power, security, and peace are gendered (Cohn 1987 ; Tickner 1992 ; Enloe 1993 ; 2000 ; 2007 ; Sharoni 1995 ; Pettman 1996 ; Agathangelou 2004 ; Mazurana et al. 2005 ; Rai and Waylen 2008 ; Shepard 2008 ; Peterson and Runyan 2009 ). Feminist reformulations of violence, power, peace and security have broadened the range of political discourse by challenging the narrow definition of “women’s issues” and “politics.” This work has the potential to transform the theories, research, intervention methods, and public debates that frame our understanding of conflict in all sphere of social and political life.

Conflict resolution theory and practice rests heavily on such concepts as violence, power, peace, and security, and for the most part scholars and practitioners in the field have embraced the conventional conceptualizations of these central ideas. Accordingly, the definition of violence has been limited to physical violence and power has been understood mostly as “power over,” characterized by competition, domination and control. Similarly, mainstream conflict resolution has accepted conventional conceptualizations of peace and security. These conceptualizations have been for the most part grounded in an understanding of political life as a matter of government institutions and policies; competition between states and parties over interests, needs, and values; and clashes of powers and ideologies. Because the meaning of security has grown out of concerns about war and peace – understood as opposites – within the international state system, the meaning of peace has been limited to simply the absence of war and the understanding of security has been limited to “national security.”

Feminists continue to challenge conventional understandings of central concepts in the field for ignoring, obscuring, and marginalizing a broad range of issues, voices, and perspectives. Judging from the growing body of feminist literature on war, peace, security, and international politics more generally, feminists have been quite successful in disrupting dominant paradigms and conventional ways of theorizing conflicts and their resolution. Given the quantity and quality of the scholarship on war and peace produced by feminists in the past two decades, it is reasonable to expect that mainstream scholars will join their progressive counterparts and critically engage this literature.

Feminists who have engaged in projects of rethinking concepts such as violence, power, peace, and security searched for alternative formulations that would resonate with the daily lives and struggles of women in different conflict zones around the world. The search for alternative formulations focused on questions such as, what roles do women play in conflicts and in the processes designed to bring about their peaceful resolution? How do they define violence, power, peace, and security? What are the particular strategies, processes, and organizational frameworks that women employ in their conflict resolution efforts and in their struggles for peace and justice? And how do women’s and men’s lives change, during conflict and post-conflict? In many ways, feminist reconceptualizations of violence, power, security, and peace offer a conceptual framework that can address all these questions and more.

Most conceptualizations of violence within the field of conflict resolution are informed by Johan Galtung ’s theorizing about violence. According to Galtung, peace researchers, scholars, and practitioners must look beyond the manifestations of direct, physical violence, which often leave marks on the body. His theory encompasses two additional types of violence: structural violence and cultural violence (Galtung 1975 , 1990 ).

While feminists have generally found Galtung’s theorizing of structural and cultural violence compatible with feminist interpretations of violence, they have been greatly disappointed that neither he nor his male counterparts have paid much attention in their work to the gendered nature of violence (Confortini 2006 ). Early feminist theorizing on violence addressed mainly direct, physical violence, and associated violence with men and nonviolence with women (Eisler 1989 ; Kirk 1989 ; Boulding 1992 ). These conceptualizations became more complex as feminists began to articulate connections between violence against women and structural and cultural forms of violence including the war system (Sharoni 1994 ; Agathangelou 2004 ; Sachs et al. 2007 ; Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2009 ). The shift in feminist thought to theorizing differences and articulating intersections resulted in more nuanced conceptualizations of violence, which greatly enrich Galtung’s definitions of structural and cultural violence. The main difference, however, is that feminist conceptualizations of violence tend to be context-specific, grounded in particular struggles, and addressing systemic violations of people’s rights and dignity based on gender, race, ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation, among other things. Feminist redefinitions of violence offer conflict resolution scholars and practitioners conceptual tools to look beyond the symptoms of violence and examine its root causes. In most cases, there were structured inequalities and/or asymmetrical power relations, which tend to propel and fuel violence.

Feminist reconceptualizations of power are especially relevant to the resolution of international conflict since, like many conflict resolution frameworks, they offer a critique of the paradigm of power politics that has dominated the field of international politics and diplomacy for almost a century. Feminists have taken issue with conventional conceptualizations of power grounded in violence and dominance because they overlook other such dimensions and characteristics of power as energy, capacity, and potential. This critique is often referred to as the difference between “power over” and “power to” (Hartsock 1983 ; Eisler 1989 ; Margolis 1989 ; Boulding 1992 ).

The powerful feminist slogan “the personal is political” has inspired many feminist attempts to redefine power in relation to conflict. Accordingly, issues like division of labor within the household, self-esteem, depression, or violence against women, which women tended to view as their private issues, are reframed as political issues, originating from and reflecting unequal power relations. Along these lines, power can be defined as agency, manifesting itself in examples of women’s activism in conflict areas. As the conflict transforms their lives, these women feel empowered to shape its course and outcome (Sharoni 2001 ). More recently, feminist reconceptualizations of power have been influenced by Michel Foucault ’s theorizing on power. According to this formulation, power is everywhere, producing and shaping the meaning of everything we do (Shepard 2008 ). If everything we can see is shaped by and in turn shapes power relations, then everything we see is gendered, raced, and imbued with structured inequalities. This complex and multifaceted conceptualization of power has much to contribute to the analysis and resolution of conflicts.

Feminist scholars and activists have long called into question the pervasive understanding of security as “national security.” Thus they challenged the tendency to conflate security with national security, which takes for granted state power and the existing political status quo. They raised serious concerns with the overwhelming priority of states to invest funds and energies in the military and then rely upon the threat of using the army to “protect” the collective citizenry (Harris and King 1989 ; Ruddick 1989 ). Feminist case studies from around the world support the argument that states, far from being the providers of security, as is often assumed, have become a primary source of insecurity, especially for women and other underprivileged groups (Harris and King 1989 ; Sharoni 1993 ; Agathangelou 2004 ; Scuzarello 2008 ). Based on this evidence, feminists have concluded that the more preoccupied a government is with what it calls “national security,” the more insecure are its vulnerable constituents (Enloe 1987 ; 2007 ; Sharoni 1994 ; Abdo and Lentin 2002 ; Sachs et al. 2007 ). Feminist reexaminations of dominant security discourses point out that “security” has become more an instrument of mystifying rhetoric than a concept with any analytical precision.

Furthermore, appeals to the need for security have quite often been used (by states) to justify the most blatant military campaigns and territorial expansions. The post- September 11, 2001 era has not only provided ample evidence to support this proposition but also inspired some brilliant, highly original feminist scholarship (Falcon 2006 , Jiwani 2006 , Russo 2006 , Faludi 2007 , Riley et al. 2008 ). Feminist reconceptualizations of security suggest a shift from thinking about security in mutually exclusive, zero-sum ways (i.e., “national security”) to focusing instead on “human security” or “global security.”

Nevertheless, many feminist critiques go beyond the critique of “national security” to question the very idea of “security” as a totalizing patriarchal concept that cannot accept any disorder, incoherence, or lack of control. In contrast, feminists suggest that security is always partial, elusive, and mundane (Sylvester 1989 ; Tickner 1992 ). Feminist interpretations of security do not treat it as an absolute end or as a scarce resource which needs to be possessed, but rather as a very complex and elusive process that needs to be negotiated and renegotiated as change occurs in different historical and sociopolitical circumstances (Tickner 1992 ). More recently, feminists have challenged other feminists and peace activists who tend to define security as an outcome that can be achieved rather than as a discourse. In these flawed formulations, the term “security” is often used interchangeably with the term “peace,” and both assume the end of armed conflict (Jabri 1996 ; Mackay 2004 ; Shepard 2008 ). Feminist reconceptualizations of security can transcend what Laura Shepard ( 2008 :127) refers to as the “theoretical tautology of defining conflict as the absence of security and security as the absence of conflict.”

Feminists, regardless of the particular theories or struggles they are associated with, have generally accepted Galtung’s conceptualization of peace, which is grounded in the distinction between negative peace and positive peace (Galtung 1990 ; Confortini 2006 ). Indeed, early feminist theorizing on peace and conflict defined peace as more than the absence of physical violence, insisting that “real” peace must involve the absence of all forms of violence, including structural and cultural violence, and the presence of justice and equality for all (Boulding 1992 ; Reardon 1993 ). Peace is viewed as an outcome that seems rather impossible to achieve.

Drawing on examples from the ongoing conflicts and political processes in Israel, Palestine and Northern Ireland, Sharoni ( 2001 :174) argues that “the transition from conflict to post-conflict realities is more complex and multi-faceted than a simple departure from a negative situation (i.e conflict) to a positive one (i.e. peace).” Cynthia Enloe ( 1987 :538) suggested a more modest definition that emerges from “the conditions of women’s lives,” and involves “women’s achievement of control over their lives.” While this definition is both more subtle and more complex than conventional conceptualizations of peace, it still conceives of peace as a tangible outcome. Instead, some feminists suggest that peace does not have a fixed meaning, that it should rather be viewed as a political discourse. The definition of “peace,” like that of any other term, reflects the political position of the person or group who defines it as well as the particular sociopolitical context within which it is constructed. Different definitions of peace often reveal different degrees of commitment to social and political change or compliance with the prevailing status quo of power relations, including the gendered divisions of power and labor in a particular society. This formulation urges feminists and other conflict resolution scholars not to assume but to probe whether the mere signing of a peace agreement is likely to improve women’s lives and bring about gender equality.

In sum, feminists have long realized that the processes of refining and implementing feminist interpretations of central concepts in the field cannot be limited to the confines of the academy (Giles 2008 ). Today, there is consensus among feminists on the need to ground research on conflict and peacemaking in the diverse experiences of women in conflict zones. By rethinking peace and security from the daily lives and struggles of women around the world, feminists and other critical scholars can expand the understandings of peace and security to include questions of development; environmental degradation and ecological concerns; gender, race, and class inequalities; abuses of human rights; and attacks on cultural and ethnic identities (Agathangelou 2004 ; Agathangelou and Ling 2004 ; Philipose 2007 ; Lind forthcoming). Feminist reformulations of central concepts such as power, peace, and security represent an important step toward feminist theorizing in conflict resolution.

Toward Feminist Transformations of Conflict Resolution Theory, Research, and Practice

Challenging the centrality of men’s experiences and theories and paying attention to women’s lives, feminists insist, has the potential to shed light not only on the gendered aspects of social and political life, but also on other forms of structured inequality. That is, feminist perspectives are valuable not only because they call attention to gender differences, but also because they emerge from women’s experiences and women represent one particular example of a disenfranchised and marginalized social group (Harding 1991 ; Ackerly et al. 2006 ). Feminists generally agree that we must ask not only what are the voices and perspectives that have been marginalized, silenced, or excluded from conventional conflict resolution scholarship, but also what are the assumptions, processes, and practices that have enabled and perpetuated these exclusions.

Toward this end, many feminists engaged in tireless work to integrate gender and feminist perspective into conflict resolution, while others have called for a radical transformation of the field. Some chose to conduct original field research in particular conflict areas, while others have put their efforts into transforming policy debates related to conflict resolution.

The term “transformation” has become increasingly popular in peace and conflict resolution studies. While still a somewhat amorphous term, its growing popularity points to the limitations of other such terms as “management” and “resolution.” According to John Paul Lederach ( 1995 :17), “unlike resolution and management, the idea of transformation does not suggest we simply eliminate or control conflict, but rather points descriptively toward its inherent dialectic nature.” In other words, transformation, more than other concepts, takes into account the dynamic nature of social conflict and the potential changes it can trigger in individuals, groups, and structures. Moreover, Lederach and others prefer the term “transformation” over “resolution” or “management” because it is more dynamic and cannot be used to impose harmony or peace at the expanse of justice (Nader 1991 ). From a feminist perspective, the term “transformation” marks more than merely a linguistic departure from conventional approaches to the study and practice of conflict. It is also a concept that can be easily integrated into feminist perspectives on conflicts.

The move away from conventional toward new approaches to the analysis and resolution of conflicts, or from conflict resolution to conflict transformation, has theoretical, methodological, practical, and political implications. Figure 1 identifies four key dimensions that are interrelated and offer a framework for analyzing contemporary feminist scholarship:

a move from universal to context-specific theorizing;

a move from top-down/prescriptive to bottom-up/elicitive intervention models;

a move from scientific (positivist) to constructivist (postpositivist) research; and

a move from politics oriented toward the status quo to politics oriented toward social change.

As Figure 1 underscores, however, although conventional and new approaches rest on different sets of theoretical assumptions which inform different intervention models and political practices, they should not be treated as diametrically opposed to one another but rather as two poles of a continuum.

Feminists have insisted that their interventions are not designed to discredit or delegitimize conventional approaches and practices but rather to point out to their hegemony in the field and open up space for other perspectives. Along the same lines, the proposed framework is not designed to idealize new approaches and their related practices but rather to point out potential venues for future research.

As the literature on women and gender issues in conflict zones demonstrates, feminists have long sought to ground theoretical explorations in empirical research and case studies. Theoretically, this body of literature focused primarily on women’s involvement in conflict resolution efforts, peacemaking initiatives, and social justice campaigns at the grassroots level with an overemphasis on the potential of dialogue and alliances between women across political divides. Research also highlighted the impact of conflict on women’s lives, with a special emphasis on critiquing militarism, nationalism, and ethnic conflict (Yuval-Davis 1997 ; Cockburn 1998 ; 2007 ; Fearon 1999 ; Cohn and Ruddick 2003 ; Giles et al. 2003 ; 2004 ; Jacoby 2005 ). A few feminist scholars, whose lives were shaped by the conflicts they study, have expanded the analysis, and have documented the multiple identities and struggles of women in conflict zones, including the treatment of feminist identities and nationalist identities as mutually exclusive, which has been a source of tension in cross-community women’s alliances (Rooney 1995 ; Sharoni 1995 ; Hadjipavlou 2006 ; McEvoy 2009 ).

Figure 1 Conventional and New Approaches to Conflict Resolution

Feminist scholars have also worked to document women’s experiences not only as victims of violent conflict but also as perpetrators, and as agents of change. This body of work included accounts of the struggles of women within national liberation movements to link their struggles for national liberation and gender equality (Aretxaga 1997 ; Abdulhadi 1998 ; Moser and Clark 2001 ). Feminists have also begun to pay close attention to women’s roles in perpetuating violence, both within militaries and in other movements that have used armed struggle (Sjoberg 2006 ; Sjoberg and Gentry 2007 ).

The growing interest in violence against women in conflict zones, among mainstream scholars and policy makers, is noteworthy. Once a taboo in conventional analyses of conflict, the interplay between the violence of political conflict and violence against women has become part of the mainstream discourse on conflicts. Using the phrase “rape as a weapon of war,” mainstream media accounts have done more to sensationalize these crimes than to address their root cause or offer ways to resolve them. Critical feminists, however, rose to the challenge and sought to contextualize and historicize these accounts. The result is a rich body of literature, addressing the interplay between gender violence and other such structured inequalities as class, race, and ethnicity, as well as various constructions of militarized masculinity (Zarkov 2001 ; Green 2004 ; Sachs et al. 2007 ; Koukkanen 2008 ; Sharoni 2008 ; Whitworth 2008 ).

Critical feminist scholarship on conflict has proliferated in the aftermath of September 11, 2009 . Feminists were among the first to systematically deconstruct the dominant discourse deployed by US officials and policy makers to represent and respond to the attacks. They have called into question the pervasive manipulation of fears, threats, and insecurities as pretexts for military violence and for the expansion of US imperialism (Eisenstein 2004 ; 2007 ; Falcón 2006 ; Tetreault 2006 ; Faludi 2007 ; Philipose 2007 ; Richter-Montpetit 2007 ; Riley 2008 ; Sharoni 2008 ). Feminist scholars have also scrutinized myriad manifestations of heightened militarization and aggressive nationalisms in all spheres of life (Whitworth 2004 ; Enloe 2007 ; Sutton et al. 2008 ), the violent attacks on Muslims and people of Middle Eastern decent, as well as the changes in US immigration policies and practices (Oxford 2005 ; Hunt and Rygiel 2006 ). Above all, numerous feminists have been quick to challenge the cynical use of the narrative of rescue and the hijacking of feminism in order to legitimize, in the name of women’s liberation, the US-led attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq (Abu-Lughod 2002 ; Russo 2006 ; Sjoberg 2006 ). As a whole, this diverse body of feminist scholarship reflects careful attention to difference, brilliant analysis of intersections, and sound grounding in particular economic, social, cultural, and political contexts.

Other promising developments in feminist perspectives on conflict involve feminist perspectives on environmental degradation and environmental conflicts (Gorney 2007 ; Urban 2007 ; Sze 2007 ; Detraz 2009 ). This literature is very important because environmental conflicts and conflict originating from globalization have become central within the conflict resolution field, even if at present little or no attention has been devoted to their gendered dimensions. Another exciting trend in feminist scholarship on conflict resolution addresses post-conflict issues including reconstruction and transitional justice (Cockburn and Zarkov 2002 ; Handrahan 2004 ; Bell and Ni Aolain 2005 ; Bell and O’Rouke 2007 ). There has also been a dramatic increase in attempts to bridge the divides between feminist academics, activists, and policy makers (Cohn et al. 2004 ; Giles 2008 ). Although projects designed to facilitate exchange and collaboration among feminists in different arenas have not been without their challenges, they have transformative potential. Whether it is a network of women in conflict zones, a gathering of women at the World Social Forum or a campaign for a UN resolution like UNSCR 3125, these initiatives offer a space, a discourse, and strategies that conventional conflict resolution scholars and practitioners will increasingly find difficult to ignore.

Conflict resolution as a field has rapidly expanded in the past three decades. Yet a careful examination of current trends in the field reveals a fundamental failure to come to terms with the changing nature of conflicts across societal levels. By and large, scholars and practitioners in the field continue to embrace the key assumptions, while systematically overlooking the gaps, silences, and absences embedded in these assumptions and in the field as a whole. To seriously consider these gaps, scholars, practitioners, and activists who are committed to the peaceful resolution of conflicts have to engage in critical conversations both with people whose lives have been entangled in protracted conflicts and with scholars in other disciplinary fields of study, such as development, gender, and cultural studies, which have faced similar challenges. Because feminists have much to contribute to this endeavor, it is troubling that our interventions continue to be relegated to the margins of the field, especially in the arena of international conflict resolution.

While men’s recognition of the significance of feminist and women’s perspectives to conflict resolution is no doubt an important step toward establishing the legitimacy of feminist theorizing in the field, it is not enough. What is needed to advance the project of feminist theorizing in conflict resolution is a critical examination of the field that will go beyond calls for the inclusion of women’s voices and feminist perspectives. The field of conflict resolution is at a crucial and exciting crossroad. As people and social movements around the world engage in struggles to shape their futures, the global political context within which theories are constructed and applied is volatile and uncertain. Feminist perspectives on conflict can inspire new approaches to theory, research, practice, and activism. To engage feminism, conflict resolution scholars need to learn to embrace difference in conflict and conflict resolution. More specifically, in addition to coming to terms with the role of gender, such an approach will enable scholars and practitioners to explore questions of culture, history, disparities in power and privilege, and new understandings of identity and community which emerge in the context of struggles against different structures of inequality and oppression along the lines of, among other things, gender, ethnicity, race, class, sexuality, and nationality.

Conflict resolution as a field has yet to treat feminist theory as a central perspective that has much to offer to the analysis and resolution of conflicts. Nevertheless, feminists, publishing their work primarily in feminist magazines and working in collaboration with colleagues in other fields, have developed an impressive body of literature that should be incorporated into the conflict resolution canon. As this impressive body of original scholarship underscores, feminists have the theoretical grounding and practical experiences and skills to radically transform the existing field of conflict resolution. However, for this to happen, the male scholars who currently dominate the center of the field would have to share their positions of power with the brilliant feminists whose work has been relegated to the margins for too long! The further expansion and institutionalization of conflict resolution studies depends on the willingness of mainstream scholars to engage seriously the contributions and critiques of feminists.

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Links to Digital Materials

Peace and Justice Studies. At www.peacejusticestudies.org , accessed Oct. 2009. The Peace and Justice Studies Association is a non-profit organization dedicated to bringing together academics, K-12 teachers and grassroots activists to explore alternatives to violence and share visions and strategies for peacebuilding, social justice, and social change.

UN-INSTRAW. At www.un-instraw.org , accessed Oct. 2009. UN-INSTRAW is the leading United Nations Institute devoted to research, training and knowledge management in partnership with governments, the United Nations System, civil society and academia to achieve gender equality and women’s empowerment.

Boston Consortium on Gender, Security, and Human Rights. At www.genderandsecurity.org , accessed Oct. 2009. The Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights works to integrate the study of gender and of women into work on human rights, security, and armed conflict.

Women Waging Peace. www.womenwagingpeace.net , accessed Oct. 2009. The Women Waging Peace Network, brings together women peacemakers from conflict regions around the world. As part of The Institute for Inclusive Security, the project advocates for the full participation of all stakeholders, especially women, in peace processes.

WomenWarPeace. At www.womenwarpeace.org , accessed Oct. 2009. A UNIFEM portal designed to consolidate data on the impact of armed conflict on women and girls.

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Mapping 21st-Century Feminist Theory. Feminist theory is a vast, enormously diverse, interdisciplinary field that cuts across the humanities, sciences, and social sciences. As a result, this article cannot offer a historical overview or even an exhaustive account of 21st-century feminist theory. But it offers a genealogy and a toolkit for 21st ...
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Quick Reference. The extension of feminism (understood as a practical social movement concerned to address the inequality of the sexes) into theoretical discourse. Undoubtedly one of the most important and influential intellectual currents of the 20th century (every bit the equal of Marxism and psychoanalysis), Feminist theory encompasses most ...
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Although important for advancing equality between genders, there are two major lines of critique to second wave feminisms that have led to advances in feminist theory . The first advancement comes from the black feminist theorists' critique of second wave feminisms' lack of confronting experiences of race and racism.
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Feminist theory is not only about women; it is about the world, engaged through critical intersectional perspectives. Despite many significant differences, most feminist theory is reliably suspicious of dualistic thinking, generally oriented toward fluid processes of emergence rather than static entities in one-way relationships, and committed to being a political as well as an intellectual ...
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Feminist Philosophy
The importance of psychoanalytic approaches is also underscored in Shannon Sullivan's essay Intersections Between Pragmatist and Continental Feminism. Given the importance of psychoanalytic feminism for all three traditions, a separate essay on this approach to feminist theory is included in this section.
Feminist Theory: Sage Journals
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Feminist Theory: Definition and Discussion
Feminist theory is a major branch within sociology that shifts its assumptions, analytic lens, and topical focus away from the male viewpoint and experience toward that of women. In doing so, feminist theory shines a light on social problems, trends, and issues that are otherwise overlooked or misidentified by the historically dominant male ...
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Feminist critical theory in the era of second-wave feminism can be traced to Angela Davis's "Women and Capitalism," an essay written in the Palo Alto Jail in 1971 (1977). Another important early contribution was a lecture by Herbert Marcuse titled "Marxism and Feminism," published in the journal Women's Studies in 1974 (1974).
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Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender. First published Mon May 12, 2008; substantive revision Tue Jan 18, 2022. Feminism is said to be the movement to end women's oppression (hooks 2000, 26). One possible way to understand 'woman' in this claim is to take it as a sex term: 'woman' picks out human females and being a human female ...
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Feminist Theory in Sociology

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Gender Differences

Gender Inequality

Gender Oppression

Structural Oppression

Perspective

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31 Feminist Theory

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Feminist Ethics

1.1 Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Forerunners of Feminist Ethics

2. Themes in feminist ethics

2.4.1 Deontology, rights, and duties

2.4.2 Consequentialism and utilitarianism

2.4.3 Moral contractarianism

2.4.4 Virtue ethics

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7 Feminism and Feminist Ethics

Introduction

The Ethics of Care

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Responses and Developments

Relational Theory

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Introduction

Challenging Exclusion and Marginalization: Struggles for Inclusion, Voice, and Visibility

A Different Standpoint or Essentialist Theorizing?

Feminists Theorize Difference in Conflict Resolution Theory and Practice

Feminists Redefine Central Concepts in Conflict Resolution Theory, Research, and Practice

Toward Feminist Transformations of Conflict Resolution Theory, Research, and Practice

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