TMS - Feminism and The Future of Women (Guidebook) PDF

FEMINISM AND THE
FUTURE OF WOMEN
COURSE GUIDE
Professor Estelle Freedman

STANFORD UNIVERSITY
Feminism and
the Future of Women
Stanford University
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Feminism and the Future of Women

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Course Syllabus
Feminism and the Future of Women
About Your Professor ......................................................................................................4
Introduction ..................................................................................................................5
Lecture 1 What Is Feminism? ....................................................................................6
Lecture 2 Before Feminism: Explaining Gender and Power ....................................10
Lecture 3 The Idea of Equality ................................................................................14
Lecture 4 Feminism and Race in U.S. History ........................................................18
Lecture 5 Global Feminisms ....................................................................................24
Lecture 6 Domestic Labor ........................................................................................28
Lecture 7 Women, Wage Earning, and the Wage Gap ..........................................33
Lecture 8 Feminist Responses to Women’s Labor ..................................................39
Lecture 9 Body Politics ............................................................................................44
Lecture 10 Reproduction and Sexuality ....................................................................48
Lecture 11 Violence....................................................................................................54
Lecture 12 Spirituality and Creativity..........................................................................59
Lecture 13 Political Power..........................................................................................64
Lecture 14 Feminist History and the Future of Women ............................................68
Course Materials............................................................................................................72
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Photograph courtesy of Estelle Freedman
About Your Professor

Estelle Freedman
For the past twenty-five years, Estelle B. Freedman, a founder of
the Program in Feminist Studies at Stanford University, has written
about the history of women in the United States. Freedman is the
author of two award-winning studies: Their Sisters’ Keepers:
Women’s Prison Reform in America, 1830–1930 and Maternal
Justice: Miriam Van Waters and the Female Reform Tradition.
Freedman coauthored Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in
America, which was a New York Times Notable Book. Professor
Freedman lives in San Francisco.
You will get the most out of this course if you read
the following book:
Estelle Freedman’s No Turning Back: The History

of Feminism and the Future of Women (Ballantine
Books, 2003).
4
© PhotoDisc
Introduction
Since the time of the abolitionists, no movement has so politicized social life
in the United States as feminism. Responsible for wide-ranging legislation,
such as women’s right to vote and the right to an abortion, feminists have
fought their way to the center of the country’s political dialogue and made
themselves a major presence there. But the road to such influence has not
been easy.
From the battle over the Equal Rights Amendment to the continuing debates
about abortion, feminists have often found themselves in the middle of the
country’s most hotly contested disputes. They have won many allies, but also
many enemies. Yet even under the most intense political pressure, feminism
has continued to grow. It has evolved from a women’s movement concerned
with the rights of mostly white, middle- and upper-class women to an ideology
that embraces women from communities of color to, most recently, a move-
ment of international solidarity that pleads the cause of oppressed women
around the world, from those brutalized by the Taliban in Afghanistan to
teenagers sold into slavery in the East Asian sex trade.
Feminists have long called attention to historical injustice and unfair labor
practices. Now feminism has reached a position where it must decide not
only how to redress the discriminations of the past but how best to shape the
future of women.
5
Lecture 1:
What Is Feminism?
The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Estelle Freedman’s No Turning

Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women, chapter 1.
III. Why Study Feminism?

To introduce you to this course, we first ask you to suspend your precon-
ceptions about the term “feminism”; prepare to think historically about
what the term means and why we need to understand it.
In today’s world, the economic and political relations of men and women
are changing more rapidly than ever. Debates over abortion and welfare in
the United States, women’s political progress in Scandinavia, work place
glass ceilings in Japan, the rights of women in the Middle East, and
microenterprise in South Asia all attest to efforts to come to terms with
these changes. How do we explain the transformation of gender relations?
What is the role of feminism in this process? Why is feminism both so
influential and so controversial throughout the world?
After establishing some definitions of terms, we will discuss how this
course approaches the broad subject matter of feminism and the future
of women.
III. Defining Sex, Gender, and Gender Systems

A. In this course, we will be using the term “sex” to refer to the biological
(genetic, reproductive) categories of male and female; the term “gen-
der” usually refers to the socially constructed meanings of male and
female in a given culture.
Some scholars refer to a gender system or a sex/gender system,
meaning the rules and social practices that define proper gender
behavior in a given culture.
B. Historically, most societies have had gender systems that value
men more than women and grant men authority over women (gender
hierarchy, or patriarchy).
Some simple societies have a form of gender parallelism that
approaches a more egalitarian model, granting women authority over
some areas and men over others; but there is little evidence that there
has ever been widespread matriarchy, or women’s rule over, or without,
men (except in myths, such as those of the Amazons).
Evidence of gender hierarchy persists in the present: male child prefer-
LECTURE ONE
ence; the persistent wage gap in the United States; the over-represen-
tation of women among the world’s poor (70 percent female) and illiter-
ate (two-thirds female). We will explore these gender disparities and
movements that seek to change them.
6
C. The term “feminism” is quite recent historically, and it has multiple
meanings—historically specific ones and as an umbrella term for a
range of social movements. As we will learn during this course, femi-
nism is a historically specific political response to gender hierarchy.
1. For most of human history, few people questioned patriarchy;
they believed that it was proper, even natural, for men to rule
over women.
2. A major goal of this course is to explain why critiques of patriarchy
emerged when they did historically, and what forms they took.
III. Defining Feminism

A. Today the term “feminism” is quite loaded politically. We will put
aside contemporary stereotypes and caricatures of feminism to
understand its history.
B. Feminism as a term in modern Western culture has very recent histori-
cal origins, as well as diverse contemporary meanings.
1. The French world feminisme first appeared in the late nineteenth
century—from the word femme (woman) and isme (social movement
or ideology)—as part of broader campaigns for social justice, includ-
ing labor and socialist movements.
2. During the U.S. suffrage movement, after 1910, young women calling
themselves feminists demanded the right to vote on the grounds of
the human equality of women and men.
Most suffragists, however, did not adopt the term, which remained
highly unpopular in the United States, even among those who fought
for women’s equality, until the 1970s.
3. After the rebirth of the women’s movement in the 1960s, more
activists in Western societies began calling themselves feminists.
Feminism gradually became an umbrella term for a variety of social
movements that challenged gender inequality in law and culture.
C. For this course our working definition follows:
Feminism is a belief that although women and men are inherently
of equal worth, most societies privilege men as a group. As a
result, social movements are necessary to achieve political equali-
ty between women and men, with the understanding that gender
always intersects with other social hierarchies.
D. Another way of posing the concerns addressed in this course takes the
form of two central questions you should think about throughout:
What difference does gender make? (This involves analyzing when
and how men and women are treated differently, and whether those
differences are treated neutrally or in ways that are disadvantagious
to women.)
Which women are we talking about and how are they affected by
the subjects we study? (How do categories such as race, class,
religion, sexuality, nationality, and physical ability influence the
meaning of gender?)
7
E. Keep in mind as well what feminism is NOT:
1. It is not a theory of women’s victimization by men.
2. It is not for women only.
3. It is not a solely Western phenomenon.
4. It is never monolithic or static—varieties of feminist ideas keep
reshaping its politics over time.
Summary
Since the late 1800s, women and men have increasingly challenged the
view that one’s sex determines one’s legal, economic, and political status.
Despite strong resistance to change, most societies in the world today
acknowledge some form of women’s rights. Indeed, the transformation of
women’s work, political participation, and family life is one of the major histor-
ical trends of the past century and remains the subject of intense debate in
the present. This course asks why, and how, these changes have come
about; it provides both historical background to understand changing gender
relations and the analytic skills to interpret gender systems and the feminist
politics that seek to transform them.
LECTURE ONE
8

FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING
Questions
1. How has the definition of feminism evolved over the centuries? In light of
this lecture, what is you own definition?
2. What are the benefits of a matriarchal society? A patriarchy?
Suggested Reading
Freedman, Estelle. No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future
of Women. New York: Ballantine Books, 2003.
Other Books of Interest
Baumgardner, Jennifer and Amy Richards, eds. Manifesta: Young Women,

Feminism and the Future. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2000.
Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women.
New York: Crown, 1991.
Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle
Ages to 1870. New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 1993.
Rupp, Leila. Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s
Movement. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.
9
Lecture 2:
Before Feminism:
Explaining Gender and Power

Introduction
Until recent history, few people questioned patriarchy, or the formal rule of
men over women, in part because the very idea of equality was simply not
part of their world view. Supernatural or natural theories discouraged women
or men from questioning their inherited gender systems. Only at a particular
historical moment, when new ideas about equality and individual rights
replaced earlier beliefs in inherited status, did a theory of equal rights extend
to critiques of the sex/gender system. Before we can understand that histori-
cal transition, however, we need to look briefly at the ideas that justified male
authority over women; we then turn to how women in fact lived during the
long era before feminism.
III. Explaining Gender Asymmetry

A. In the centuries before the emergence of feminism, most societies
were characterized by what one anthropologist termed “universal
sexual asymmetry.”
1. In addition to a sexual division of labor, these sex/gender systems
place greater value on males (for example, son preferences and
male monopoly of religious and political leadership).
2. In other words, gender usually connotes not just difference, but a
hierarchy rooted in beliefs about male superiority.
B. These sex/gender systems explained gender hierarchy in a variety of
ways, from myths about human origins to scientific theories justifying
men’s greater social and political authority. We can map a range of
“origins stories” based on how static or malleable they imagine gender
to be.
1. At one end of the spectrum, essentialist theories leave little room for
change in the meaning of gender. The following theories are open to
criticism for “bioreductionism” (reading too much into biology) and for
overlooking “natural” examples of female power:
a. Supernatural theories (myths, religious cosmology).
b. Arguments from nature (from Greek medical theories to Darwin
and sociobiology).
LECTURE TWO
2. Psychological theories (such as Freudian theory) combine elements

of essentialist and social constructionist views.
a. They argue that gender difference (and men’s greater privilege) is
deeply learned at an early age.
10
b. These theories are open to criticism as scientifically hard to prove
and culturally limited.
3. At the other end of the spectrum, social constructionist theories ques-
tion the idea that gender is so deeply rooted in theology, nature, or psy-
chology that it cannot change.
a. These theories emphasize change in sex/gender systems, though
for different reasons.
b. Sociologists may stress the role of childhood and familial socializa-
tion in the maintenance of power, while historians offer divergent
versions of why and how sex/gender systems change over time.
C. Historical theories of the origins of patriarchy provide one kind of social
constructionist argument, but they offer conflicting accounts of the role
of technology and politics.
1. Modernization theory (“The Bad Old Days”) argues that primitive
societies oppressed women, but with technology and capitalism
women gained greater equality.
Counter examples, such as missionary and colonial contact with so-
called primitive societies, raise problems for modernization theory.
2. Socialist and some feminist historical theories (“The Good Old Days”)
argue that women often had greater authority in pre-modern cultures
and that private property and war exacerbated gender inequalities.
There are problems with socialist and feminist historical theories, as
well, because women are not universally oppressed.
a. Reciprocal relations among kin often protect women within patriar-
chal societies.
b. Because gender inequality never operates in isolation from other
forms of hierarchy, all women do not necessarily experience gen-
der as their primary source of status; elite women derive privilege
from class.
c. Even without kin protection or class status, women have always
found ways to subvert, resist, or undermine the constraints upon
them. We can find some forms of resistance to patriarchy in all
cultures and periods before the rise of modern feminism.
III. Exploring examples of women’s routes to authority within patriarchal
cultures illustrates gender and power in practice.
A. Where women control some economic production, they may exercise
political authority or achieve greater personal choices.
1. The case of Seneca women in North America, and some West
African women’s political roles are rooted in agricultural production
by women.
2. In China, the patriarchal family could treat young wives as if they
were servants in their husband’s homes, but in areas where silk and
other textile production created jobs for them, some women could
delay or entirely resist marriage.
11
B. Religion can provide choices for women. Whether in Buddhist areas of
China or Catholic regions of pre-industrial Europe, women’s religious
orders provided an alternative to marriage. For centuries, convents run
by women provided an arena of female authority.
C. Motherhood has been a key source of women’s authority, expressed in
religious symbolism or familial roles.
D. Exceptional women, whether warriors like Mulan and Joan of Arc or
poets like Sappho, defied gender constraints placed on most women of
their time.
Summary
While there is no single explanation for the greater authority men have exer-
cised over women historically, exploring various theories of gender asymme-
try allows us to complicate simple notions of universal oppression and reject
the stereotype of female victimization in the past. Ideas about gender may
posit greater privilege for men, but in practice, individual women have found
ways to resist patriarchy. Some practices have been institutionalized, such as
convent leadership, but many women acted individually to find loopholes in
patriarchy. To the extent these cases represented the exception, or a way
women circumvented male authority, they are pre-feminist forms of women’s
power. They do not challenge gender hierarchy but rather work within it.
LECTURE TWO
12

Questions
1. Which theories of gender hierarchy remain popular today? Think of both

essentialist and social constructionist ideas that explain, for example,
men’s dominance of formal political leadership or their higher pay.
2. Does technology always liberate women? In what contexts does the intro-
duction of new technology (like the plow) exacerbate or minimize gender
hierarchy?
3. Think of examples of women’s empowerment through work, religion, or
motherhood and ask what limitations each example places on women’s
empowerment (for exceptional women or all women? across classes and
races? within a gender hierarchy or challenging a gender hierarchy?).
Suggested Reading
Engels, Friedrich. The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State.
New York: International Publishers, Inc., 1990.
Fausto-Sterling, Ann. Myths of Gender: Biological Theories About Women
and Men. New York: Basic Books, 1985.
Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Patriarchy. New York: Oxford University
Press, USA, 1986.
13
Lecture 3:
The Idea of Equality

Introduction
The previous lecture looked at societies that accepted the legitimacy of gen-
der and other social hierarchies in which women nonetheless found ways to
assert authority, but without questioning patriarchy. This lecture turns to the
historical emergence of a critique of hierarchy itself. As new ideas about indi-
vidual rights and how best to achieve them appeared in western Europe after
1700, two concepts of justice would foment feminist critiques of patriarchy:
one was the concept of individual rights (liberalism), and the other was the
concept of cooperative, collective identity and class struggle (socialism).
Feminism emerged within these historical movements not as monolithic poli-
tics but rather through a variety of strains: equal rights or liberal feminism (the
most familiar form in many histories); socialist feminism; and a uniquely
female politics, later termed “maternalism,” that drew on women’s customary
authority as mothers to argue for public rights. After 1800, these and other
feminist politics overlapped wherever wage labor systems converged with
political revolutions that established representative governments.
III. Feminist politics emerged when and where they did because new
political and economic relations initially exacerbated the power
imbalance between men and women, privileging men as citizens and
making many women more economically dependent.
A. As political theorists rejected traditional hierarchical rule, such as the
divine right of kings, they substituted a social contract between the peo-
ple and their rulers, laying the groundwork for representative govern-
ments and guarantees of individual rights, as well as for a critique of
patriarchal authority in the family.
But theories of individual rights did not necessarily include women.
B. Similarly, where capitalist market revolutions encouraged wage labor
systems, they initially benefitted male workers; many women became
more economically dependent on men than in the past because chil-
drearing duties meant they could not enter the labor market as fully as
men could.
Wage labor would ultimately transform family life and draw women
into the labor market, where they encountered second-class status
LECTURE THREE
as workers.
III. In response to new political and economic systems, as well as the
constraints each placed on women, a variety of arguments to extend
women’s opportunities appeared in the 1700s and 1800s, laying the
groundwork for later feminist movements.
14
A. Liberal feminism, rooted in classical liberalism, emphasized the “rights
of woman” along with the “rights of man.”
1. Liberalism, first articulated by writers such as John Locke in the
1600s, emphasized rationality, individualism, and property rights;
enlightenment ideas of the 1700s helped inspire democratic revolu-
tions in the United States, France, and Europe.
They did not, however, include women as citizens.
2. Yet women were questioning the limitations on their sex, particularly
when they argued for greater access to education, as did writers
such as Sor Juana de la Cruz in Mexico, and both Mary Astell and
Mary Wollstonecraft in England.
3. After the mid-1800s, women and men who supported women’s edu-
cation began to extend their argument to additional rights, as did
Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the United States, and John Stuart Mill
and Harriet Taylor in England.
a. They rejected the legal principle of “coverture,” which gave a hus-
band rights over his wife, including her property and wages.
b. None of these ideas had mass popular support yet, but they
stirred debate.
c. In the United States, women and men gathered in 1848 at Seneca
Falls, New York, and endorsed Stanton’s Declaration of
Sentiments, including married women’s property rights, education-
al and professional opportunities for women, and woman suffrage.
B. A second inspiration for feminist critiques was Marxian socialism in the
1800s, which protested the exploitation of workers by capitalism.
1. Theoretically, both Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels compared the
exploitation of women in marriage to the exploitation of workers
under capitalism.
2. Some utopian socialists tried to achieve sexual equality when they
sought to replace the patriarchal family with more egalitarian, collec-
tive structures.
The dominant form of Marxian socialism, however, emphasized
organizing women wage earners within a revolutionary working class
movement.
3. Because Marxian socialism was more influential in Europe and Asia
than in North America, feminist applications of socialism have been
strongest outside of the United States.
III. Another strain of feminism, which historians have variously labeled
“maternalism” or “social feminism,” emphasized the unique experi-
ences of women, primarily the capacity for motherhood.
A. Motherhood has long been a source of authority for women throughout
the world, whether in Africa, China, Europe, or Latin America. But the
meaning of motherhood changed along with increasing industrialization
and urbanization.
15
1. The so-called domestic sphere of women and children became more
isolated when men left the home for wage labor and commerce.
2. Rather than a domestic cage, the home could provide a kind of pulpit
for middle-class women who claimed that their superior female moral
values should be brought to bear on the world.
B. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many reformers drew on this
ideology of gender difference, including the women’s temperance and
women’s peace movements.
Summary
By the nineteenth century, three basic forms of feminist political ideas had
been articulated in Western cultures: (1) Liberal feminism extended to women
the new rights enjoyed by some men—including education, private property,
and ultimately suffrage—and it appealed largely to middle-class women;
(2) socialist or Marxist feminism sought to mobilize working women into
revolutionary movements or unions, and appealed largely to working-class
women; (3) maternalism, which was applied largely but not exclusively by
middle-class women, argued for greater public authority based on women’s
unique interests, particularly as mothers.
LECTURE THREE
16

Questions
1. Why did feminist ideas originate in western Europe and North America
when they did?
2. How do liberal, socialist, and maternalist feminist approaches differ from
each other, and how do they overlap? What historical ideas inspired each?
3. Why was education critical to the origins of feminism?
Suggested Reading

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt, 1989.
———. Three Guineas. New York: Harcourt, 1972.
17
Lecture 4:
Feminism and Race in U.S. History

Introduction
Liberal political ideas about self-determination that helped inspire feminism
rested on a key paradox concerning race. How could racial slavery coexist
with a politics of “unfettered individualism”? Both antislavery and feminist poli-
tics rejected the contradictions of liberalism, but women’s movements them-
selves were not immune from the racial politics of their cultures. Integral to
the history of feminism is the historic relationship of movements for gender
and race equality, which includes relations of both cooperation and competi-
tion. Examining the history of feminism in the United States through two
major “waves,” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, illustrates the com-
plex impact that race and gender identity have had on women.
III. The “first wave” of U.S. feminism, from the 1830s through
the achievement of suffrage in 1920, had deep roots in an anti-
slavery movement.
A. The first major debate about women’s rights in the United States
occurred within the abolitionist movement.
1. In the 1830s, many Northern women joined Female
Antislavery Societies.
Racism could be found even within antislavery societies that admit-
ted only white women.
2. Sarah and Angelina Grimké, daughters of Southern slave owners
who moved north and joined the abolitionist movement, drew a
connection between the oppression of slaves and the situation of
women, especially when women were denied a voice in the move-
ment. In 1838, Angelina Grimké published Letters on the Equality
of the Sexes.
3. In 1840, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton met at the World
Antislavery Conference in London, setting in motion the later conven-
tion at Seneca Falls. Abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass
attended this historic conference.
B. During the convention movement of the 1850s and 1860s, many
women supported both antislavery and women’s rights.
LECTURE FOUR
A rare address in 1851 concerning both race and gender inequality, by

former slave and itinerant preacher Sojourner Truth, has gone down in
history as the “Ain’t I a Woman” speech.
18
III. Racial coalition in the first wave did not long survive the Civil War
and Reconstruction, and an era of separate organizing by black and
white women followed.
A. Most supporters of constitutional amendments to enfranchise freed
slaves feared that adding woman suffrage would undermine the cause.
1. The Fourteenth Amendment, which included the equal protection
clause, inserted the word “male” into the Constitution for the first
time, and the Fifteenth Amendment granted suffrage to black males
but neither black nor white females.
2. In 1869, the women’s movement split into two camps because of
strategic differences, including the failure to include woman suffrage
in the Fifteenth Amendment.
a. The split into the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA)
and the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) weak-
ened the cause.
b. Some suffragists would later exploit racial arguments by claiming
that educated white women deserved the vote more than African
American or Eastern and Southern European and Asian
immigrant men.
B. Most black male voters were disfranchised in the late nineteenth centu-
ry, when they faced an upsurge of racial terror (including Ku Klux Klan
violence and vigilante lynching), along with “Jim Crow” segregation.
1. In response, a black women’s movement, inspired by Ida B. Wells,
organized for race advancement and to oppose lynching.
2. The white women’s club movement did not respond to Wells’ call for
support in the fight against lynching.
C. Some branches of the broader “woman movement” did address class
and race issues after the 1890s. Some settlement house residents and
labor union organizers, influenced by socialism, supported immigrant
and working-class women.
III. The first wave peaked with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amend-
ment in 1920, after a gruelling campaign to win state and then
national suffrage.
During the height of the woman suffrage movement, in the early twentieth
century, both conflict and cooperation marked relations among women of
different racial and ethnic backgrounds.
A. In 1890 the split women’s movement merged to form NAWSA (the
National American Woman Suffrage League). Local and state suffrage
came very gradually, but after 1910 key victories and new public cam-
paigns revitalized the movement. Many suffragists used maternalist
arguments that women would clean up corrupt politics and bring
world peace.
African-American women, though relegated to the back of the suffrage
parades, sometimes found white allies to slip them into their ranks.
19
B. A younger generation of suffragists began to use the term “feminist,”
from the French feminisme. These radical women, such as Alice Paul,
rejected innate differences between men and women and claimed the
individual rights enjoyed by men.
After suffrage, most former activists rejected the equal rights approach
and continued to apply maternalist and socialist ideas to solving prob-
lems from protecting women workers to alleviating poverty to achieving
world peace.
C. Between the first and second waves of American feminism (1920s
through the 1960s), small scale interracial movements resurfaced
among church groups, in women’s organizations that endorsed anti-
lynching legislation, and in cross-class groups such as the Young
Women’s Christian Association.
IV. Second-wave feminism also had origins within a racial justice move-
ment, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
A. The civil rights movement gave women political organizing opportuni-
ties and new political ideas.
1. African-American women such as Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks,
and Ella Baker were critical to the Southern movement.
2. Northern white female college students who went to the South found
these women inspirational and, like their abolitionist predecessors,
noticed parallels between race and gender inequalities.
B. Civil rights legislation played a critical role in the rebirth of
liberal feminism.
1. By the 1960s, many white women, like black women before them,
were entering the wage labor force, where they faced gender barriers.
The popularity of Betty Friedan’s 1963 book The Feminine Mystique,
in which she urged dissatisfied homemakers to take jobs, signaled a
change in white, middle-class women’s priorities.
2. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which included “sex” as well as “race” in
its language, set up the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
(EEOC) to monitor workplace discrimination. Working women flooded
it with complaints, and when the EEOC failed to respond fully, a
group of women and men, including Friedan and black activists such
as Aileen Hernandez and Pauli Murray, founded the National Organi-
zation for Women (NOW).
a. Their goal was integrating women into the mainstream of American
society (moving women into men’s jobs with men’s pay, promotion,
and privileges, as well as getting women elected to office).
b. They endorsed the Equal Rights Amendment, signaling a shift
LECTURE FOUR
from the protective maternalism of the past.

3. Even though the Equal Rights Amendment, approved by Congress in
1972, was not ratified, many liberal feminist goals were achieved
during the 1970s and 1980s.
20
C. A more radical wing of second-wave feminism emerged among
younger civil rights workers, influenced by black nationalism and New
Left critiques of capitalism and American foreign policy.
1. Women in New Left organizations criticized male dominance in the
antiwar and student movements, particularly the sexual objectifica-
tion of women.
2. One influential branch of radical feminism emphasized a woman’s
body as the site of patriarchal control of women and turned attention
to issues of reproduction and sexuality.
a. A key phrase, “the personal is political,” sparked consciousness-
raising groups around the country, in which white, middle-class
women shared their stories of sexual as well as economic injustice.
b. Radical feminism targeted patriarchy as a key problem not only for
women’s exploitation but for all forms of injustice, including race. It
also emphasized organizing women as women, apart from men.
3. Another radical branch, more akin to socialist feminism, combined
the Marxian critique of capitalism with radical analyses of patriarchy,
targeting an amalgamation of “capitalist patriarchy” for the oppression
of women.
Socialist feminists helped direct attention to issues of child care for
women workers, nonconsensual sterilization of African, Native, and
Mexican American women, and the importance of women’s unwaged
labor in the family.
D. Women of color in the United States emphasized the “double jeopardy”
of race and gender; they criticized both men in their racial/ethnic com-
munities for sexism and continually named racism within women’s
movements, and they forced a revision of American feminism to make
race central to its politics.
1. African-American writers such as Alice Walker, Angela Davis, Audre
Lorde, and Bernice Johnson Reagon pointed out the centrality of
both race and gender to feminism.
2. Based on multiple “identity politics,” women of color organized
groups such as Asian American Women United, the Native American
Women’s Caucus, and the National Black Women’s Health Project.
3. Some white women gradually recognized their role in combating
racism and the importance of creating a “multiracial feminism.”
Summary
The history of feminism in the United States illustrates the ways this move-
ment has been integrally related to campaigns for racial justice. This history
also shows that feminists have been at times more, at times less, sensitive to
race, often reflecting dominant cultural beliefs. The U.S. case also reveals
that feminism is never monolithic or static. Multiple strains coexist within each
wave of the movement (liberal and radical, for example), and they continually
influence each other, shifting the political agenda and embracing new ideas
and identities. By the 1990s, it would be hard to delineate American feminists
21
along the old categories of liberal, radical, and maternalist. Feminism in the
United States and elsewhere continues to redefine itself. The importance of
including racial as well as gender justice in its politics has strong historical
grounding, but only continued vigilance about race will produce coalition,
rather than competition, among social movements.
LECTURE FOUR
22

Questions
1. How did both abolitionism in the nineteenth century and the civil rights
movement in the twentieth century inspire feminism?
2. Why did most women social reformers reject the individualist politics of the
Equal Rights Amendment until after the 1960s?
3. How does a multiracial feminism differ from a white supremacist or racist
feminism? What different agendas and priorities emerge when feminism
takes race, class, sexuality, and physical ability into account? How do
Barbara Smith’s words (at the beginning of chapter 4 of No Turning Back),
help to explain the changes in feminist politics?
Suggested Reading
Anzaldúa, Gloria and Cherríe Moraga, eds. This Bridge Called My Back:
Writings by Radical Women of Color. Watertown, MA: Persephone
Press, 1981.
hooks, bell. Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Boston: South
End Press, 1981.
———. Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics. Cambridge, MA:
South End Press, 2000.
Painter, Nell Irwin. Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol. New York: W.W.
Norton, 1996.
Rosen, Ruth. The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement
Changed America. New York: Viking, 2000.
23
Lecture 5:
Global Feminisms

Introduction
Although feminism had strong roots in the history of western Europe and
North America, wherever democratic ideals and wage labor spread, argu-
ments for women’s empowerment emerged, based variably on citizenship,
labor, or motherhood. In Japan, India, Russia, and elsewhere, liberal or
socialist politics inspired demands for women’s rights. In addition, both
women and men involved in nationalist or anticolonialist movements applied
the principles of self-determination to argue for women’s rights. While political
strategies vary enormously, depending on local contexts, feminism became
increasingly international over the course of the twentieth century.
III. Within specific historical contexts, reform and revolutionary move-
ments fostered feminist goals.
A. Soon after Japan admitted Western influences in 1868, debates over
individual rights raised the question of whether women who owned
property could vote.
B. Nineteenth-century Indian social reformers, such as Raja Rammoham
Roy and Pandita Ramabai, opposed sati (widow immolation), polygamy,
and violence against women by their husbands and supported women’s
educational and property rights.
C. During the effort to create an Egyptian state free of British rule, Huda
Sha’arawi and other educated women championed both independence
and women’s rights. Sha’arawi rejected the traditional veil; she also
helped found the Egyptian Women’s Union in 1924.
D. When socialists achieved power in Russia after 1917, Alexandra
Kollontai, who served as Commissar for Social Welfare in the early
1920s, attempted to apply Marxian theory to liberate women in the fam-
ily and in the workplace. Despite the mobilization of women as workers,
a conservative model of women in the home was revived by the 1930s.
E. Not all nationalist movements empowered women, as the case of the
Algerian revolution against French rule illustrates.
III. Since the late 1800s, international feminist organizations have
attempted to coordinate their work across regions.
LECTURE FIVE
In the early stages, European and U.S. feminists dominated these efforts.
The creation of the United Nations after World War II fostered feminist
goals of human rights and economic development, as well as a dialogue
across regions that has decentralized Western influence and expanded
the meanings of feminism.
24
A. From the 1840s through the 1880s, women’s rights activists from
Germany, England, France, Scandinavia, the United States, and parts
of Latin America and Asia corresponded and met periodically.
Like women of color in the United States, women from regions colo-
nized by Europeans named the conflicts they experienced in interna-
tional women’s organizations and rejected any “assumption of superiori-
ty” by westerners.
B. World War II represented a turning point for international
women’s organizing.
1. The political ideals of democracy extended farther beyond their
European origins.
2. The establishment of the United Nations provided a global forum for
discussing human rights, economic justice, and international security.
From its charter in 1945, the United Nations affirmed the equal rights
of women. in 1947, it established a Commission on the Status of
Women and in 1949 the Declaration of Human Rights reiterated
this principle.
C. As the preconditions for feminism—democratic ideals and wage labor—
spread globally, the United Nations increasingly turned attention to
women’s issues.
1. It declared 1975 as International Women’s Year, launching “The
Decade for Women.” Three international conferences (1975 in
Mexico City, 1980 in Copenhagen, 1985 in Nairobi) provided a criti-
cal intersection where Western feminists encountered the political
and material realities of women’s lives outside the West.
a. One outcome was the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms
of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), adopted by the UN
General Assembly in 1979.
b. During each UN conference, parallel meetings of non-govern-
mental organizations allowed women from the developed and
developing worlds to explore controversial issues and for Western
feminists to learn about the effects of poverty and racism on
women globally.
2. The UN conferences inspired other regional organizing, such as the
biennial Feminist Encuentros, which have been held since 1981 for
Latin American and Caribbean activists.
3. A follow-up UN conference in Beijing in 1995 revealed the extent of
feminist organizing around the world.
III. Global feminism today takes many forms, not neatly categorized as
liberal, socialist, or maternalist.
Not all who work to empower women identify themselves as feminists, yet
they partake in a larger movement to achieve full economic and political
citizenship for women.
25
A. In India, for example, poor women are often at the core of new organi-
zations and, in addition to opposition to violence against women, they
emphasize rural women’s need for income.
B. A good example of the importance of local contexts is the African
movement against female genital cutting, which works to change opin-
ion and practices at the local level.
Summary
Feminism flourishes globally—if we use the term ahistorically, that is, to refer
to all movements to empower women, and not specifically to Western politics.
Global feminisms differ enormously, given their unique cultural settings.
There is no one “Third World” feminism, or international feminism; just as
class, race, and ethnicity could divide women in U.S. history, other identities
intersect with gender to produce political consciousness around the world.
LECTURE FIVE
26

Questions
1. Why did revolutionary and anticolonial movements inspire women to orga-

nize for their rights?
2. What were some of the historical obstacles to achieving international
women’s movements?
3. Why has the United Nations been critical to transnational feminisms?
Suggested Reading
Alvarez, Sonia E. Engendering Democracy in Brazil: Women’s Movements in

Transition Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.
Baron, Beth and Nikki Keddie, eds. Women in Middle Eastern History. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.
Basu, Amrita, ed. The Challenge of Local Feminisms: Women’s Movements
in Global Perspective. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory,
Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.
27
Lecture 6:
Domestic Labor

Introduction
With a foundation in the history of feminist ideas and movements, we now
turn to specific problems addressed by feminists, starting with work and fami-
ly. The historical processes that produced feminism—wage labor and democ-
ratic political ideas—also transformed family life. In the first stages of wage
labor, men who entered labor markets came to be judged by a “breadwinner”
standard, while women came to be judged as homemakers. A Western ideol-
ogy of natural female domesticity masked not only the economic contributions
of women in the home but also the familial work performed by men and the
wage labor performed out of necessity by working-class women. Many of the
economic problems in the world today are rooted in a disparity between the
value placed on women’s and men’s labor, beginning with women’s “tradition-
al” domestic labor.
III. Division of Labor

Most societies have had some kind of a sexual division of labor, in which
women both care for children and produce other resources in or near the
home. Preindustrial societies counted on the labor of all family members
for economic survival. Women’s domestic labor has been, and remains,
critical to the world economy.
A. When factories began to lure workers with wages, women continued to
contribute to the “family economy” in a variety of ways, including barter
of farm produce, home maintenance, and child care.
B. Throughout the contemporary world, rural women continue to produce
over half the food in developing countries, as well as taking primary
responsibility for maintenance of family and household.
III. The Effects of Industrialization

Industrialization transformed the relationship between work and family by
drawing laborers out of the home. The historical shift from agriculture to
industry began in England and the United States around 1800, reached
most European nations by 1900, and affected the global economy by
2000. Wage labor had different effects on middle- and working-class
women, but most women were disadvantaged in the labor market by the
persistence of their unpaid domestic labor.
LECTURE SIX
A. Wage labor initially drew more men from home to factory or business-
es, and it created a middle-class ideal in which men supported women
in the home, where they were to create nurturing havens for husbands
and children.
28
B. Working-class women, however, often had to earn wages before, and
sometimes after, marriage. The ideal of female domesticity largely
determined which jobs female wage earners could get and the wages
they earned.
1. Early textile and other factories did employ some young women.
Other women marketed their traditional skills in the informal sector of
the economy, providing domestic service, or selling food, household
products, or sexual services.
2. None of these women workers could earn a living wage since they
were supposedly supported by fathers or husbands.
C. Unpaid domestic labor created the following disparities that feminism
would challenge:
1. There was a “double day” for women workers who earned wages
and cared for families.
2. Married women’s labor was legally owed to their husbands,
who controlled their wives’ wages and property (a practice known
as coverture).
III. Women’s Labor

Women’s labor in the home is worth understanding as a critical contribu-
tion to world economies and as a source of the disparity in the wage
labor system.
A. In the developing world, where three-quarters of all women live,
domestic work such as hauling water remains physically demanding
and women spend a majority of their time providing basic needs for
their families.
B. In most developed countries, women contribute over thirty hours of
housework per week, men only ten to fifteen hours.
1. Even with technological advances, the time spent in housework in
the West has not necessarily declined (standards of cleanliness rise
and time is spent shopping and running errands).
2. When both husbands and wives earn wages, women do far more
housework than men. In the United States, working wives do two to
four times as much housework as their husbands, although men’s
share of housework has increased over the past generation.
C. The value of women’s housework is rarely counted by economists, but
estimates of the value of services performed by a housewife, if pur-
chased in the U.S. labor market, range from around $14,000 in 1970,
to $40,000 in 1980, to $50,000 in 1993. Worldwide, women’s work was
worth $4 trillion a year in 1990, and $11 trillion in 1995.
D. Housework can also make women vulnerable to accidents, physical
abuse, or violence (especially if a woman is dependent on a husband’s
income and thus not likely to leave home) and to poverty after divorce,
abandonment, or death of a spouse.
29
IV. Paid Domestic Service
Paid domestic service has been the main entry point for women making
the transition from unpaid to wage labor. This transition occurs at different
historical moments across the world. Wherever an urban middle class
expands with industrialization, families have sought household help.
A. Paid domestic workers are often recent female migrants from the coun-
tryside to cities, whether to London, New York, or Mexico City.
B. Ethnicity and race strongly affected the composition of the domestic
labor force. Women rarely chose to remain in domestic service, but
racial barriers prevented some women from finding other jobs.
C. Immigrant women continue to enter labor markets through service jobs,
although by the late twentieth century they worked not only in private
homes but increasingly in the formal sector of the economy—cleaning
hotels, office buildings, or hospitals—or as private “nannies” to upper-
and middle-class families.
D. When sales and service jobs expand in consumer-based economies,
working women seek other options, and the proportion of the female
work force engaged in domestic labor declines.
IV. “Informal” Sector Employment

In addition to domestic service, many women work in the “informal” sector
of industrializing economies—taking in sewing or laundry, or marketing
goods or services on city streets.
A. This informal sector is characterized by part-time, seasonal activity and
meager income that evades government regulation. Economists rarely
recognize this labor force as part of national productivity, and thus they
underestimate the number of women who are in fact working for pay.
B. Both men and women participate in street peddling, but one occupation
within the informal economy is highly skewed by gender: prostitution.
1. Since the 1800s, prostitutes in European and American cities have
been considered the antithesis of the pure, middle-class mother in
the home; in the nineteenth century, prostitution was called a “neces-
sary evil” that supposedly protected the virtue of “pure” women.
2. Commercial prostitution expands rapidly in industrializing societies,
in which men unattached to families earn wages and seek sexual
services and women have few other wage-earning options.
3. Prostitution remains a multibillion dollar business in the United States
and a global traffic in women earns high profits for brothel owners in
other countries as well.
VI. Post 1970 Policies
Since the 1970s, feminists have addressed the issues of women’s
LECTURE SIX
domestic and informal sector labor by recommending a variety of policies

and services.
30
A. In response to homemakers’ vulnerability to divorce and desertion, they
achieved “Displaced homemaker” legislation (U.S., 1975); job training
and education for “re-entry” women after raising children; independent
social security for women; and court-enforced spouse and child support.
B. Socialist feminist proposals for “Wages for Housework” in the United
Kingdom and Canada, though less popular in United States, empha-
sized the value of caring work.
C. Decriminalization of prostitution has been recommended to make sex
workers less vulnerable to arrest, incarceration, and vulnerability to
pimps. Some socialist countries have created retraining programs
for prostitutes.
D. Monitoring of international migrant domestic labor has been initiated.
E. State support for caring work, such as the Family and Medical Leave
Act (U.S., 1993), child care subsidies for families, and state and busi-
ness-sponsored child care in Europe, acknowledge the double day of
working women.
Summary
The legacy of unpaid labor in the home has influenced women’s paid labor
dilemmas. The ideology of domesticity redefined work in the home as a nat-
ural and “priceless” quality of womanhood, first for the middle class but with
implications for all women. The deep association of women with domesticity
has shaped opportunities for paid work and wages, assuming that men are
supporting women and children; the association of women and caring work
also creates a “double day” for working women, who are expected to take
care of husbands and children. Feminists increasingly seek both more egali-
tarian parenting and community-based child care to ease this burden.
31

Questions
1. Why is housework a feminist issue?

2. What effects does women’s unpaid labor in the home have on women
wage earners?
3. Which policy solutions do you favor to resolve the double day? What are
the pitfalls of paying women to stay home and raise children?
Suggested Reading
Crittenden, Ann. The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the
World Is Still the Least Valued. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.
Ehrenreich, Barbara and Arlie Russell Hochschild, eds. Global Woman:
Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. New York:
Metropolitan Books, 2003.
LECTURE SIX
32
Lecture 7:
Women, Wage Earning, and the Wage Gap

Introduction
The expansion of women’s wage labor is one of the most important historical
trends of the twentieth century throughout the world. Two major themes char-
acterize the entry of women into wage labor. The first is the enormous growth
of the female labor force, which began with young, single women and eventu-
ally drew older and married women, as well as mothers, into the paid work
force. The second major theme is the sexually segregated labor force, in
which women and men hold different kinds of jobs, which has created a per-
sistent earnings differential. Social scientists have various explanations for
these gender gaps in the work force. Gender ideology, derived in part from
women’s work in the home, undergirds both sexual segregation in the labor
force and the wage gap. This lecture explores why women increasingly work
for wages, which women join the paid labor force, what jobs are available to
them, and why the wage gap persists. The next lecture turns to feminist
responses to these disparities.
III. Labor Demand and Supply

At every stage of their entry into the formal labor market, two factors have
combined to channel women into certain kinds of work: labor demand and
labor supply.
A. On the demand side, whenever a sector of the economy expands
and seeks low-paid workers, women find opportunities to earn
wages, whether in light manufacturing, clerical and sales jobs, or the
service sector.
B. The supply of women wage earners increases in commercial and urban
economies when reproductive labor declines.
For example, U.S. marital fertility fell from an average of over seven
children in 1800 to around two children in 2000.
C. Data on women’s work force participation reveals both the overall
growth of female employment and particular race and age patterns
in employment.
1. According to the U.S. census, in 1800 under 5 percent of all women
were gainfully employed; by 1900 that figure had risen to 21 percent.
In the 1990s, approximately 58 percent of the adult women in the
United States earned wages (see table).
2. An increase in women’s paid labor force participation has occurred
in all industrialized countries, though current (2000) rates differ from
33
34 percent in Italy, 48 percent in France, 53 percent in England, and
59 percent in Sweden.
3. Specific groups of women enter the labor force at different times.
In the United States, African American women entered wage
labor earlier, and in higher numbers, than all other groups (40 per-
cent in the paid work force by 1900).
By 1980, however, the race gap among women workers in the
United States disappeared, with about half of both black and white
women working for wages.
4. In 2000, approximately one half of the paid labor force in the world
was female. In Asia and Latin America, millions of young women
work in factories owned by multinational corporations.
III. Sexually Segregated Labor Force

Even as wage labor became the norm for women throughout the world,
the legacy of unpaid work in the home perpetuated economic inequality by
limiting the types of jobs women could hold and creating a sexually segre-
gated labor force.
PERCENTAGE OF ADULT WOMEN IN

U.S. PAID LABOR FORCE BY
ETHNICITY/RACE, 1900-2000
(Appendix from No Turning Back by Estelle Freedman)
All White Black Latina1 Asian2 Native

Women MX PR-US CH JP FL American
1900 20.6 16.0 40.7 n/a* n/a 10.4 30.1 n/a 13.8
1920 23.7 19.5 38.9 n/a n/a 12.5 25.9 11.6 11.5
1950 29.5 28.1 37.4 21.9 38.9 33.7 41.6 28.0 17.0
1960 37.7 38.0 42.2 28.8 36.3 44.2 44.1 36.2 25.5
1970 43.3 43.0 47.5 36.4 31.6 49.5 49.4 55.2 35.3
1980 51.1 52.0 53.3 49.0 40.1 58.3 58.5 68.1 47.7
1990 57.5 56.4 59.5 52.8 42.8 59.2 55.5 72.3 55.1
1996 59.3 59.1 60.4 53.4 47.43 58.6 n/a
2000 60.2 60.2 65.1 54.6 55.04 n/a n/a n/a n/a
*n/a = not available
NOTES:
LECTURE SEVEN
1. Not including Islander Puerto Rican. The first figure represents Mexican American women; the second figure represents U.S. Puerto Rican women. Available Islander
Puerto Rican women’s rates were 13.9% in 1900, 18.9% in 1920, 20.0% in 1960, 22.9% in 1970, 29.1% in 1980.
2. The first figure represents Chinese Americans; the second figure represents Japanese Americans; the third figure represents Filipina Americans. Single figure for 1996 is a
composite; ethnic-specific data is not available.
3. Because figures were not available for Puerto Rican women in 1996, data is from 1995.
4. Because figures were not yet available for 2000, data is from 1999. Available rates for Cuban-origin women were: 55.9% in 1990, 50.8% in 1995, and 50.2% in 1999.
Sources: Teresa Amott & Julie Matthaei, Race Gender and Work: A Multi-Cultural Economic History of Women in the United States (Boston: South End Press, 1996),
307; Bureau of Labor Statistics News (Washington D.C.: U.S. Department of Labor, 2000), Tables No. A1 and A2; Claudia Goldin, Understanding the Gender Gap: An
Economic History of American Women (NY: Oxford Press, 1990), Table 2.1, p.17; Joyce Jacobsen, The Economics of Gender, 2nd ed. Table 15.2 (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers, 1998), 459. See Amott & Matthaei for discussion of problems in data comparability.
34
A. Jobs created in the past century were viewed as an extension of
women’s traditional work (from professions such as teaching and
nursing to “pink collar” jobs such as health care aids, beauticians,
and waitresses).
In developed market economies today, almost 80 percent of women
workers can be found in service sector jobs.
B. Wages for these jobs have remained low in part because the work is
typed as female, and in part because women have been considered
secondary earners in families headed by male workers.
C. In the professions, sexual segregation has taken the form of “feminiza-
tion,” in which a profession once dominated by men expands and
requires more workers, creating openings for women; the profession
may “tip” to become female dominated, but it maintains a gender hier-
archy of male managers and female workers. Once feminized, a pro-
fession may lose prestige and pay rates may deteriorate.
1. In the nineteenth-century United States, teaching, librarianship, and
social work feminized.
2. In the United States, until the late twentieth century, medicine and
law resisted female entry by setting quotas on women’s admission to
professional schools.
a. In the Soviet Union, when women outnumbered men as doctors,
the profession carried low status and low pay.
b. After the 1960s, when antidiscrimination law opened up pro-
fessional schools in the United States, women flooded into
medicine and law. Yet the highest paying specialties continued
to be male dominated.
III. The Gender Gap

Both occupational segregation and feminization create a gender gap in
wages, which varies over time and across cultures.
A. In the United States, women’s share of male earnings grew from 46
percent in 1890 to 71 percent in 1995; but in nations like Norway and
Sweden, which support child care and foster equal opportunity, women
workers earn around 80 percent of male income.
B. The sexually segregated labor force accounts for much of the wage
gap because men hold higher-paying jobs. But even in the same jobs,
men earn more than women. (In the United States, saleswomen make
52 cents for every dollar earned by salesmen.)
C. The wage gap, like the segregated labor force, reflects both gender
and race hierarchies. In the 1990s, among U.S. workers with college
educations, white males earned four times the income of minority
women, three times the income of white women, and about one and a
half times the income of minority men.
35
IV. Labor Supply, Sex Discrimination, and Capitalism
Social scientists explain the wage gap as a product of labor supply, sex
discrimination, and structures of capitalism and/or patriarchy.
A. Supply side theory argues that employers don’t hire women in higher
paying jobs because family duties make women less committed to the
job, or that women workers don’t invest in training for higher paying
jobs because they plan to leave the work force to raise families.
These theories point to the conflict of family and work life for women,
but their assumptions about female choice and female productivity are
not always accurate, and they cannot explain all of the wage gap.
1. Holding constant for training and commitment (human capital such
as age, education, and experience), women still earn 75 to 89 per-
cent of men’s earnings.
2. Women who leave and re-enter the labor force to have children
prove to be more productive than newly trained workers.
B. Demand side theory emphasizes employer discrimination through barri-
ers on free choice operating.
1. When employers treat women as a group, making them compete
for limited numbers of women’s job and not openly for all jobs,
women will earn less. A 1981 U.S. National Academy of Sciences
report found that half the wage gap could be explained by
employer discrimination.
2. Both employers and coworkers can discriminate by isolating women
on the job, whether through exclusion from elite networks or harass-
ment on blue collar jobs.
C. Structural theories view discrimination not just as an individual act of
employers but rather as an integral part of capitalism, which keeps
wages low and profits high by maintaining a cheap female labor force.
In turn, women’s subsequent economic dependence enforces patri-
archy, or male power over women in the family and workplace.
IV. Gender Ideology

Underlying many of these theories is gender ideology, or the expectations
workers and employers bring to jobs. Even without intentional discrimina-
tion, viewing certain tasks as appropriate for each gender reinforces the
sexually segregated work force and the wage gap. Four U.S. Supreme
Court decisions illustrate how gender ideology has affected the workplace,
and how feminist ideas have changed legal use of gender ideology since
the 1970s.
A. In Bradwell v. Illinois (1878), the Supreme Court ruled against Myra
Bradwell’s suit to be admitted to the bar and practice law. “The consti-
LECTURE SEVEN
tution of the family organization,” the Court argued, “. . . indicates the

domestic sphere as that which properly belongs to the domain and
functions of womanhood . . . [and] is repugnant to the idea of a woman
adopting a distinct and independent career from that of her husband.”
36
B. In Muller v. Oregon (1908), the Court upheld protective legislation that
limited women’s work hours on the grounds that “woman’s physical
structure and the performance of maternal functions place her at a dis-
advantage in the struggle for subsistence. . . .” The Court justified fewer
work hours for women in part because the sexes differed in “the self-
reliance which enables one to assert full rights . . .”
C. The impact of women’s widespread wage earning and the feminist
call for equality can be seen in more recent rulings, such as Price
Waterhouse v. Hopkins (1989), in which a woman rejected for promo-
tion because of a lack of femininity won her sex discrimination case.
The Court ruled against discriminatory sex stereotyping in the evalua-
tion of her work.
D. In Hibbs v. Nevada (2003), Chief Justice Rehnquist, upholding an
application of the Family and Medical Leave Act, pointed out critically
that “stereotype-based beliefs about the allocation of family duties
remained firmly rooted, and employers’ reliance on them in establishing
discriminatory leave policies remained widespread.” Rehnquist wrote
that “differential leave policies were not attributable to any differential
physical needs of men and women, but rather to the pervasive sex-role
stereotype that caring for family members is women’s work.”
Summary
Gender ideology affects women globally, both because they are expected
to care for families as well as earn wages and because their low wages as
domestic or factory workers are often based on stereotypes that all women
are supported by men and do not need to earn a living wage. Historically,
women have been caught in a transition between a family economy and a
market economy; they still perform familial labors while they also enter the
paid labor force. Feminism has identified this dilemma and has offered a
variety of policy solutions, to which we turn next.
37

Questions
1. Why have so many women entered the wage labor force in the
past century?
2. What is the effect of the sexually segregated labor force on
women workers?
3. How does gender ideology influence the economics of women’s work?
Suggested Reading
Ehrenreich, Barbara. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.

New York: Henry Holt, 2001.
Goldin, Claudia. Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of
American Women. New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 1990.
LECTURE SEVEN
38
Lecture 8:
Femiist Responses to Women’s Labor

Introduction
The last two lectures emphasized the historical trends in women’s paid labor
force participation, as well as the legacy of women’s unpaid labor in the
home, which contributes to occupational segregation and the wage gap. At
the heart of problems of women workers is their dual identity as “woman” and
“worker”: as long as women alone bear most of the burden of family labor,
they are likely to face the double day and lower wages. During the past two
centuries of industrial growth, feminists, unions, employers, and governments
have promoted a range of policies that take women’s particular workplace
and family concerns into account. This lecture somewhat artificially divides
these policies into those that focus on women as workers and those that
focus on women as mothers.
Women as Workers
Since the origins of the wage labor system, reformers have exposed the
plight of women workers who earned low wages and worked long hours.
Their responses have differed, from organizing women into unions to protect-
ing women from overwork, but each has sought to minimize the exploitation
of women’s labor.
III. Nineteenth Century

In nineteenth-century Europe, Marxists and other socialists tried to union-
ize women along with men. Socialist feminists like Clara Zetkin wanted
women to earn enough money to be self-supporting and pressed the male
trade unions to admit and encourage women’s participation.
A. Much of the labor movement at the time, however, preferred to argue
for a “family wage,” earned by a male head of household, to support his
dependent wife and children.
B. In England and the United States, middle-class women helped to orga-
nize working women through the Women’s Trade Union Leagues,
which supported higher wages for striking garment workers.
C. Communist states in the twentieth century (China, Cuba, and East
Germany) mobilized women as workers; to do so they tried to free
women from certain domestic tasks by offering state-run child care and
maternity leave.
III. From the Nineteenth to the Twentieth Centuries

Historically, the labor movement organized industries dominated by male
workers, such as heavy manufacturing. But in the twentieth century,
39
where service economies grew and more women took service sector jobs,
female unionization expanded.
A. By the 1970s, clerical workers and nurses went on strike in the United
States, France, and elsewhere to achieve better pay.
B. In the United States, even though male union membership declined,
female membership has increased since the 1960s. The wage gap is
smaller for these unionized women.
C. In other parts of the world, women workers in the informal sector of the
economy have begun to organize, such as SEWA (Self-Employed
Women’s Association) in India.
III. Women Workers in the United States

In the United States, first-wave feminists relied on maternalist solutions to
women’s labor, but after the 1960s, second-wave feminists increasingly
favored equal rights laws.
A. At a time when American law could not interfere with contracts between
employers and workers, gender provided a loophole that allowed states
to protect working women as mothers.
The Women’s Trade Union League and other organizations supported
protective legislation that limited the hours women could work and tried
to set minimum wages for women (Muller v. Oregon [1908]).
B. Between 1908 and the 1960s, the women’s labor movement rejected
an equal rights strategy (the Equal Rights Amendment) because they
feared it would undermine protective legislation.
Only after the American labor movement gained hours and safety legis-
lation for all workers during the New Deal (1930s) could women drop
the gender argument.
C. Second-wave feminists, after the 1960s, increasingly turned to equal
rights laws to improve opportunities for women in the labor force.
1. Antidiscrimination law (such as Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act)
emphasized getting women into higher paying jobs that had been
monopolized by men.
2. Major court victories forced large companies such as American
Telephone and Telegraph and grocery chains to offer back pay for
women systematically denied promotions.
IV. New Strategies

New strategies for reversing historic patterns of inequality shifted from the
liberal, equal opportunity approach (to bring women into men’s jobs) and
began to value women’s unique economic contributions.
A. In the United States, affirmative action policies tried to redress past
LECTURE EIGHT
race or sex bias in hiring and promotion. They called for recruitment
and training of under represented groups, based on the principle that,
“all other things being equal,” women or minority candidates should
have an advantage in hiring.
40
1. Opponents of affirmative action fear it will undermine an ideal of indi-
vidual merit by treating people as members of groups, while propo-
nents argue that women and minorities are already being treated as
group members.
2. Affirmative action has been adopted in western Europe, Asia, and
Scandinavia to encourage employers to achieve gender equality in
the work place. The European Union encourages a range of “positive
action” to reverse past discrimination against women workers.
B. Another new strategy, pay equity, or comparable worth, calls for equal
pay not only for the same work performed by women and men, but for
reevaluating the wage value of tasks historically performed by women.
C. Most women in Europe and the Americas won property rights by the
end of the nineteenth century, but equal credit laws passed since the
1970s have expanded these rights.
1. Outside industrialized regions, however, credit remains a pressing
issue for women.
Most women in the world work either on the land or in the informal
sectors of the economy, based in their homes or on city streets. They
seek land reform, particularly women’s right to land ownership, and
access to credit.
2. Providing loans to poor women through “micro-credit,” originated by
the Grameen (Village) Bank in Bangladesh, is a priority of women’s
movements in the developing world.
Women as Mothers
Although not all women choose to become mothers, a large majority of wage
earning women will become pregnant at some point in their careers, and
internationally most mothers have to combine child care with labor in fields or
outside the home. How does feminism seek to reconcile motherhood with
wage labor?
IV. Disadvantages Experienced by Mothers in the Job Market

Childbearing has disadvantaged women in wage labor systems because
they have often lost their jobs when they become pregnant or lost seniori-
ty when they return to work.
A. As a result, women workers’ average earnings drop significantly when
they have children, which contributes to the gender wage gap and to
the growth of women’s reliance on welfare subsidies.
B. Equal rights laws have protected women from being fired when they
have children but they do not address the wage gap of lost income.
C. In the United States, Congress passed the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimina-
tion Act so that women workers get the same disability leave as men.
VI. European Models of Mothers’ Rights

Socialist and social democratic states in Europe, and most other industri-
alized nations, have led the way in protecting workers’ jobs when they
have children.
41
A. Paid maternity leave is available in countries ranging from Norway to
Mexico; some companies offer on-site child care.
B. In Sweden, where women helped to lay the groundwork for welfare
policies, a range of laws addresses not only women but also men as
parents and workers. Both parents can take paid parental leave or child
sick care leave.
In several Scandinavian countries, when only around 20 percent of
fathers took advantage of this option, the laws gave further incentives
that encouraged more fathers to take parental leave.
C. Paid parental leave is now the norm in western Europe, Australia, and
New Zealand.
VII. U.S. Policies for Working Mothers

The United States has the least generous parental leave policies of indus-
trialized nations.
A. U.S. policy shifted over the course of the twentieth century from state
payment to keep mothers out of the wage labor force to work require-
ments to encourage single mothers to earn wages.
B. With working parents increasingly the norm, feminists supported the
Family and Medical Leave Act, which became law in 1993; it provides
only unpaid leave for either parent for birth, adoption, or serious illness
of a child or parent, with a guaranteed job and health benefits.
C. A major goal of feminist policy is to find ways for men and women to
share domestic and parenting tasks, including state or company sup-
ported child care and paid parental leave.
Summary
Overcoming past discrimination against women in wage labor systems
requires multiple strategies. A major lesson of earlier policies is that only by
recognizing the integral relationship between women’s unpaid labor in the pri-
vate home and wage labor in the public sphere will social policy resolve the
dilemmas of working mothers. On the one hand, work in the family con-
tributes to the economy and deserves support. On the other hand, if support
for family labor applies only to women, it reinforces the very gender divide
that gives rise to the problem. In contrast to the emphasis on male wage
labor and the naturalization of women’s care taking work in the early periods
of industrialization, advanced or “post-industrial” societies are witnessing a
blurring of gender lines. Thus, in addition to recognizing the value of women’s
work in the family and rewarding women equally in the work place, social pol-
icy has begun to address the parental work of men as well as women.
LECTURE EIGHT
42

Questions
1. How have feminist solutions to women’s wage labor changed historically?

2. How do policy solutions to work/family dilemmas differ for developing and
industrialized economies, and why?
3. What is the significance of the shift from maternal to parental policies?
Suggested Reading
Williams, Joan. Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What
to Do About It. New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2000.
43
Lecture 9:
Body Politics

Introduction
The body may seem to be the one bona fide distinction that divides males
and females, and physiological distinctions have long provided a basis for
cultural elaborations of gender. Feminist analysis draws an important distinc-
tion between sex difference and gender dominance. Physiological differences
require attention—women’s reproductive health, medical testing of drugs for
each sex, and gender-specific disease research are all part of the feminist
health movement’s agenda. Difference, however, cannot be the basis for a
hierarchy of rights. Particularly in societies that value bodily freedom, when
remnants of bodily control continue to produce gender and race hierarchies,
feminists question their legitimacy. This lecture explores historical attitudes
toward female bodies and then surveys selected concerns of the feminist
health movement.
III. In pre-industrial societies, the female body can evoke both reverence
and fear.
A. On the one hand, from fertility goddesses to the Virgin Mary, religions
have invested women’s reproductive power with sacred meanings.
B. On the other hand, fear of unrestrained female sexuality has produced
forms of control over women’s mobility that reinforce patriarchal power
in the family.
1. Women have been socialized to accept, and pass on to their daugh-
ters, physical constraints such as tight-laced corsets in Victorian-era
England and America, foot binding in pre-modern China, and female
genital cutting in parts of Africa.
2. In Western thought since the Greeks, a dualism has associated men
with the rational mind and women with an irrational body.
III. Authority Over One’s Own Body

Since the 1600s, Western cultural ideas about the body changed politi-
cally and scientifically in ways that gave greater authority to men than
to women.
A. New political values of individual rights emphasized bodily freedom, but
they did not necessarily apply to women.
LECTURE NINE
B. Because scientific institutions and modern medicine were initially domi-

nated by men, they reinforced male authority over women’s bodies.
For example, male doctors displaced traditional female healers,
including midwives.
44
C. Commercialized cultures elaborated new forms of social control over
the female body, capitalizing on both a fascination with images of the
female body and women’s fears of having imperfect bodies.
In twentieth-century Western cultures, for example, advertising and
popular culture increasingly employed a “sexual sell” to market prod-
ucts. Mass representations homogenized the female ideal as a thin,
white, glamourous, or fit body, which supported the marketing of prod-
ucts to achieve that ideal.
III. The personal is political.

Since the 1800s, feminists have made the body a political, rather than
solely personal, issue.
A. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Mary Wollstonecraft,
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and others ques-
tioned societal emphasis on women’s physical, rather than mental,
attributes when they argued for female education.
B. In the 1960s, second-wave feminist attention to “the personal” has tar-
geted phenomena such as beauty pageants, or billboards and other
advertisements that exploit female sexuality or encourage violence
against women.
C. Critiques of male-dominated medicine inspired women’s self-help and
grass-roots health movements.
1. Consciousness-raising groups began to discuss taboo subjects, such
as abortion and female sexual pleasure; lay manuals, such as Our
Bodies, Ourselves (1973), inspired a national self-help movement.
2. Activists around the world worked for state-sponsored women’s health
services and lobbied for research on specific diseases (such as DES,
breast cancer, or chronic fatigue syndrome) that affected women.
IV. Social and Physiological Image

A good example of feminist analysis that includes social as well as physio-
logical concerns is body image.
A. Distorted body image affects a large number of young women in
Western cultures who suffer from anorexia (self-starvation) or bulimia
(binge and purge).
1. Up to a third of college-age women in the United States have symp-
toms of self-starvation. These conditions are not limited to the white,
middle classes.
2. Boys and men are also anorectic, but female rates are much higher.
B. In contrast to medical theories about organic causes, feminists
stress the societal conflicts girls and women experience concerning
their bodies:
1. The idealization of a thin body, along with the marketing of the diet
industry, contributes to the epidemic of female eating disorders.
2. The anorectic is an extreme case of symptoms concerning food
intake and self-image that most women experience during their lives.
45
Refusal to eat builds on socially sanctioned behavior for women—
dieting—but takes it to the extreme, not to please others but to
achieve some control over one’s body.
3. The disproportionate gender rates may also be related to women’s
economic opportunities, since historically attracting a man to support
oneself made physical appearance more important for women than
for men.
C. Eating disorders appear in societies of abundance (as opposed to
those prone to famine) but the exportation of Western culture can affect
body image in cultures that have historically valued female weight.
When television brings Western cultural images to developing societies,
or immigrants from Africa migrate to Europe, eating disorders increase
among them.
IV. International Concerns

Internationally, women’s health movements now address issues such as
AIDS, female genital cutting, and violence against women.
A. African feminists have successfully placed the campaign against female
genital cutting within the context of women’s health.
1. They criticized Western feminists at the 1980 UN Conference in
Copenhagen for sensationalizing the term “female genital mutilation”
and trying to take the lead in opposing the practice.
2. African women working to undermine the practice recognized that
only when women had educational and economic choices apart from
marriage could they resist the ritual. Thus, opposing poverty, illitera-
cy, and inadequate health care was critical to this health movement.
In Senegal, for example, grass roots health activists success-
fully changed village and then national attitudes about female
genital cutting.
B. International perspectives highlight bodily dilemmas in the West. For
example, while some Western feminists asked why women in the
Middle East choose the veil, Middle Eastern feminists, such as Nawal
El Saadawi, raise questions about Western women’s use of cosmetic
surgery and their reliance on makeup.
Summary
Feminism does not reject the importance of women’s physiological differ-
ence from men, but it does reject that difference as a basis for male authority
over women. Feminism seeks to empower women by providing information
about their bodies, adding women’s health to national and international policy
agendas, and questioning the cultural forces, including advertising and the
media, that promulgate an unattainable female body ideal and then profit
LECTURE NINE
from women’s efforts to achieve it. As international attention to genital cutting

reveals, body issues in every culture have underlying links to economic and
social systems that must be addressed in order to give women the same
rights over their bodies that men seek to enjoy.
46

Questions
1. Does feminism reject biological difference?

2. How do feminists explain women’s participation in their own body prac-
tices, such as dieting or genital cutting?
3. How would the medical profession and popular culture have to change to
achieve feminist goals of bodily self-determination?
Suggested Reading
Angier, Natalie. Woman: An Intimate Geography. New York: Random

House, 1999.
Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the
Body. Berkeley: University of California, 1993.
El Saadawi, Nawal. The Hidden Face of Eve. London: Zed Press, 1980.
Orbach, Susie. Fat Is a Feminist Issue. New York: Hutchinson, 1992.
47
Lecture 10:
Reproduction and Sexuality

Introduction
The meanings of reproduction and sexuality have changed dramatically in
the past two centuries, in large part because women bear fewer children than
in the past. In place of the high reproductive strategies of agricultural soci-
eties, industrializing regions have generally accepted family limitation, though
not without political controversy. The meaning of sexuality has changed as
well, as sex increasingly moves beyond the reproductive family. In the nine-
teenth century, feminists initially resisted this separation of sexuality and
reproduction, favoring a maternalist strategy to empower women. By the late
twentieth century, however, Western feminists had adopted reproductive and
sexual self-determination as a central goal. This lecture explores the chang-
ing meaning and politics of reproduction and sexuality.
III. Regulation of Reproduction
Almost all societies have regulated reproduction in some way, especially
when necessary for survival. But within family-based agriculture, having
more children was critical to a supply of farm laborers and ensured that
the next generation would care for elders.
A. The move from farms to cities, and from self-sufficient agriculture to
commerce and then industry, makes children less of an economic asset
and more of an economic cost for families.
1. In the United States, for example, the number of children born to
married women declined by half over the course of the nineteenth
century and by another half in the twentieth century.
2. The rate and pace of change differs demographically; thus in U.S.
history, those who remained in or migrated from rural areas had
more children, but their childbearing rates also declined over time.
B. The decline in childbearing raises several questions about
women’s lives.
1. How did families limit the possibility of conception?
a. They used a variety of strategies—abstinence, contraceptives, and
abortion among them.
b. In the United States, abortion was legal in the early nineteenth
century if performed with a woman’s consent before the time of
LECTURE TEN
“quickening”—when a woman felt the fetus move. It became more

common among married women with the shift to family limitation.
2. What happens to the cultural meaning of motherhood when woman’s
primary task is no longer to bear and raise children?
48
Despite the decline in reproductive labor, motherhood remained cul-
turally powerful and, for middle-class women, it took on new mean-
ings, such as investing more time in raising fewer children and
extending motherhood beyond the family and into society.
3. How did sexual meanings change in relation to the
reproductive decline?
a. Many cultures have tried to limit female sexuality to reproductive
settings, but sexuality has long been considered not only a duty
but also a pleasure within marriage; outside of courtship or mar-
riage, female sexuality often constitutes a threat to social order.
b. As families increasingly controlled conception, and as urban life
provided more opportunities for sex outside familial restraint, fears
about uncontrolled sexuality led to calls for internalized control,
especially by middle-class women.
In nineteenth century Victorian cultures, an ideal of female “pas-
sionlessness” contributed to maintaining sexual order, with women
expected to control male lust.
But double standards of morality meant not only that men could
“sow their wild oats” but also that lower-class women were fair
game for their advances.
C. By the end of the nineteenth century, declining reproductive rates
among white, middle-class women, along with fears of sexuality outside
the family, led to political movements to regulate sex and reproduction.
1. The “Comstock Act” of 1873 made it illegal to circulate contraceptive
information through the mail.
2. After 1870, most states criminalized abortion.
III. Nineteenth-Century Response to Changes in Legislation
Late nineteenth-century women’s rights movements responded to
changes in reproduction and sexuality through efforts to protect women
from exploitation.
A. Some women’s rights activists, such as Susan B. Anthony, argued that
prostitutes shouldn’t be blamed for their behavior because they were
being economically exploited by men.
B. African American reformers, such as Ida B. Wells, responded to the
stereotype of unchaste black women, which gave license to rape, by
mobilizing middle-class black women’s clubs to insist on the purity of
black women.
C. Feminists and free lovers championed a wife’s right to refuse marital
sex and favored this strategy of “voluntary motherhood” rather than arti-
ficial contraception and abortion.
They feared that contraception and abortion would provide men greater
sexual freedom outside of marriage.
Since most women were economically dependent on men, strengthen-
ing marriage was more important than exploring women’s sexuality out-
side of marriage.
49
III. Twentieth-Century Response to Changes in Legislation
In the twentieth century, feminist reproductive and sexual politics shifted
from an emphasis on protecting women from sex and toward an ideal of
women’s control over reproduction and enjoyment of sexual pleasure
apart from reproduction.
A. Margaret Sanger coined the term “birth control” when she opened the
first clinics to provide contraception for working-class women, just
before World War I, in defiance of the Comstock laws.
By the 1920s, doctors and liberal clergy supported her efforts to make
contraception available to married couples, and marital contraception
became widely available after the 1930s. By the 1960s, even the major-
ity of American Catholics practiced family planning.
B. In the century between the criminalization of abortion and its legaliza-
tion in Roe v. Wade (1973), class privilege allowed many women to pay
discrete physicians or travel abroad, but millions of poor or middle-class
women experienced the “back alley” abortions that could lead to death.
1. In response, some women organized self-help networks, such as the
Jane Collective in Chicago, which kept lists of safe abortionists for
women who sought illegal procedures.
2. In the 1970s, women in the United States and Europe began to
break silence about their experience of abortion, either in civil rights
groups or at legislative hearings.
a. Many Western nations decriminalized abortion after 1970, and by
2000 abortion was legal in 60 percent of the world’s nations.
b. Mortality rate from abortions in the United States declined by 40
percent in the decade after the Roe v. Wade decision.
3. Vocal opposition to legalized abortion has generated a massive political
campaign to limit its availability through restrictive laws, and, at the
extreme, to attack clinics and abortion providers.
Women stand on both sides of the abortion divide, but most feminists
insist that without access to safe, legal abortion, the mortality rates will
rise and women’s ability to be self-supporting will decline.
4. Over time, U.S. feminists have refined their rhetoric from “abortion on
demand” to emphasize the right to choose, with the recognition of
the difficulty of choosing abortion.
C. Since the 1960s, women of color in the United States have alerted
feminists to other reproductive rights concerns, such as coercive
sterilization—sterilization without informed consent—which has
higher rates among Native, African, and Mexican American and
Puerto Rican women.
IV. The Sexual Revolution
LECTURE TEN
In response to the movement of sexuality beyond reproduction, twentieth

century feminists increasingly sought sexual self-determination for women.
50
A. The “sexual revolution” within literature and among youth after World
War II provoked criticism from feminists such as Kate Millet—whose
book Sexual Politics (1970) exposed misogynistic strains among male
authors—and from women who experienced men’s greater sexual free-
dom as pressure on women to provide sex without commitment.
At the same time, feminist writers and artists began exploring women’s
sexual desires and forms of expression, questioning male definitions
and depictions of sexuality, and insisting on women’s right to refuse
unwanted sex.
B. Rejecting the earlier stigma of sin or illness, many lesbians who
embraced feminism argued for their rights to choose partners of their
own sex.
1. At first, some feminists feared their cause would be tarnished by
association with lesbianism, but most Western women’s movements
came to advocate lesbian rights.
2. Lesbians built a political culture that bridged feminism and gay libera-
tion; some called it “lesbian feminism.”
3. By the 1990s, lesbians were insisting on the reproductive rights to
raise their own children, increasingly conceived through new repro-
ductive technologies.
IV. International Issues

Internationally, the meanings of reproduction and sexuality differ widely
today, depending on regional economics, religions, and politics.
A. Family planning has become widespread and part of a strategy to
reduce world poverty.
1. By the 1990s, over 60 percent of women of childbearing age in
advanced industrialized countries used contraception.
2. Worldwide, contraceptive use ranges from 40 percent in the
Philippines to 50 percent in Mexico and Malaysia, as compared with
about 75 percent of U.S. women. Higher rates of female education
correlate with contraceptive use and lower birth rates.
B. Family planning remains controversial in many parts of the world, but
for varying reasons.
1. The Chinese government’s one child policy has been effective in
reducing population growth through incentives and contraceptive
availability, but the legacy of son preference has meant increased
female infanticide.
2. Some international agencies that offer incentives to control global
population growth have been accused of coercive methods (such as
non-reversible or unsafe contraceptive methods); other critics point
out that alleviating poverty requires a more equitable distribution of
resources rather than mere population control.
3. Abortion remains illegal in much of the world, and the World Health
Organization estimates that 20 million unsafe abortions annually
result in at least 70,000 deaths.
51
C. Transnational women’s groups have insisted that the reproductive, sex-
ual, and health rights of women should be considered as basic human
rights, and that all of them must be addressed to achieve world popula-
tion goals.
Summary
Wherever commerce and industry replace agricultural economies, the mean-
ings of reproduction and sexuality have undergone major historical transfor-
mation. Fear about unleashing female sexuality from the constraints of repro-
ductive families initially created political movements to limit access to contra-
ception and abortion, with which early feminists agreed. With the growing
separation of sexuality and reproduction, and when women’s entry into wage
labor required reliable family planning, feminists increasingly sought both sex-
ual and reproductive rights for women. These rights, however, mean different
things for different women—from poor women internationally who seek con-
traceptive access to escape poverty, to women of color in the United States
who resist sterilization abuse, to Chinese women who struggle with the one-
child policy of their government. The common theme in feminist reproductive
and sexual politics is choice, or self-determination.
LECTURE TEN
52

Questions
1. Why do reproductive rates decline in industrializing economies?

2. How did feminist politics of reproduction and sexuality change from the late
nineteenth century to the late twentieth century?
3. What difference do race, class, religion, and nation make in feminist repro-
ductive and sexual politics?
Suggested Reading
D’Emilio, John and Estelle B. Freedman. Intimate Matters: A History of

Sexuality in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Gordon, Linda. The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control
Politics in America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002.
Roberts, Dorothy E. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the
Meaning of Liberty. New York: Pantheon Books, 1997.
53
Lecture 11:
Violence

Introduction
At the start of the twenty-first century, the frequency of sexual violence
around the world remains high. In the United States, one out of three women
will experience some form of sexual violence in her lifetime. But sexual vio-
lence has a very long history, whether in the form of rape of women and chil-
dren, wife beating, or what we now call sexual harassment. What is new is
the social movement to oppose sexual violence.
In the centuries before feminism, sexually specific forms of violence, like other
uses of force, were often tolerated, even when criminalized. But the growing
adoption of ideals of self-determination undermined the legitimacy of interper-
sonal violence. Women’s movements have had particular complaints against
men’s assertion of physical and sexual power over women. For the past two
centuries, feminists have named sexual violence as one form of patriarchal con-
trol over women and children. In response, they have provided services for
those affected and pressed for legal reforms to eliminate the threat of violence.
These efforts have expanded from the private sphere, where wife beating and
marital rape occur, to the public sphere, where both rape and sexual harass-
ment undermine women’s equality. This lecture provides historical and political
contexts for understanding these antiviolence movements.
III. Violence Against Women

Historically, violence against women has been closely related to the con-
trol of women’s sexual and reproductive labor.
A. When husbands have legal control over the labor of their wives, they often
have the right to chastise their wives through corporal punishment.
B. Rape has been defined in highly patriarchal cultures as a crime
against property—either against a father whose daughter’s virginity
was stolen or a husband whose wife’s sexual, and potential repro-
ductive, labor was stolen.
Only virginal/chaste women could be raped, and women who were
property (slaves) or did not have property (the poor) were more likely to
be raped with impunity.
LECTURE ELEVEN
C. When rape is considered a crime of passion, attributed to men’s over-

whelming carnal lusts, women may be faulted for failing to contain
these desires.
To claim rape a woman had to prove that she resisted and often had to
provide corroborating witnesses.
54
III. Defining Sexual Violence
Feminists have rejected these historical constructions, which give men
rights to violence against women, in favor of a definition of sexual violence
as a crime of male power exerted over women.
A. Nineteenth century women’s rights activists argued that the crimes of
marital rape and domestic violence derived from women’s economic
dependence on men.
To reduce sexual and domestic violence, they favored divorce
reform, women’s right to say no to unwanted sex in marriage, and
woman suffrage.
B. Twentieth-century feminists have also emphasized the economic
dependency of women on men as a source of domestic violence,
rejecting the stereotype that domestic violence is a lower-class phe-
nomenon (since it occurs across class and race lines).
1. In 1975, Susan Brownmiller argued in Against Our Will: Men,
Women, and Rape that rape or the threat of rape allowed men to
keep all women in line because of the fear of sexual violence.
a. She pointed to the legitimation of rape, from the “spoils of war”
to slavery to mass rapes during episodes of ethnic cleansing.
b. Rape, Brownmiller and others argued, is not limited to these
extreme circumstances, but is endemic to Western cultures.
2. Rape has been exacerbated by class and race hierarchies.
Angela Davis points out that in the United States, race determines
the definition of both rape (once defined as an act of forced sex per-
petrated against a white woman) and rapist (disproportionate prose-
cution of black men and interracial, rather than intraracial, rape).
C. Feminists have also expanded the definition of sexual violence to include
marital rape, sexual harassment, and the sexual abuse of children.
III. A Changing Climate

Since the 1960s, feminist antiviolence movements have responded to
rape, domestic violence, harassment, and child sexual abuse by naming
these problems, providing services, involving men in the antiviolence
movement, and criticizing the “rape culture.”
A. Naming the problem refers to breaking silence about the experience of vio-
lence, so that it is viewed as a social, and not merely a personal, problem.
1. Silence about rape or domestic violence isolates women, encour-
ages internalization of blame, and masks the actual extent.
a. In the United States, 1.5 million women are raped annually; over
half of all women workers have experienced some form of unwant-
ed sexual advances on the job, and, according to the FBI, four
women die daily from domestic abuse.
b. United Nations data from 1995 for the percent of adult women
who had been physically assaulted by an intimate partner ranged
from about one-fourth in Northern Europe and some Latin
55
American countries, such as Chile, to three-fourths in lower
caste Indian villages.
2. Renaming and differentiating types of violence contributes to making
the problem more visible and less tolerated. In addition to stranger
rape, which is less common, feminists have named “acquaintance
rape” and sexual harassment as unacceptable practices.
3. Renaming women as “survivors” instead of “victims” rejects helpless-
ness and the emphasis on protection.
B. As early as the 1890s, American women created shelters for abused
wives, but since the 1970s, a feminist grass roots movement has pro-
vided a range of services.
1. Rape and domestic violence hot lines and crisis centers, as well as
shelters and survivor groups, help women heal from the experiences of
rape, domestic violence, or child sexual abuse throughout the world.
2. The self-defense movement is a proactive service that rejects passiv-
ity as a female virtue and encourages women and children to claim
the right to their own bodily safety.
C. A men’s antiviolence movement has encouraged men to educate them-
selves about violence and to undercut the culture of rape by respecting
women’s right to say no and refusing to participate in the objectification
or stereotyping of women.
Men have worked as allies for the antiviolence movement and some
former abusers have spoken out to help retrain other men.
D. Cultural change is required to end violence that is embedded in a male
sense of entitlement to women, the sexual objectification of women,
and the lack of opportunity for egalitarian sexual relations.
Popular culture often associates masculinity with violence and con-
quest, or portrays women as sexual objects.
IV. Enacting Change

A major focus of feminist antiviolence movements has been changing
laws, policing, and court procedures related to violence.
A. Critiques of the legal system fault male-dominated police and courts
for insensitivity that discourages women from reporting rape and
domestic violence.
Feminists have sought and achieved training for more sympathetic
treatment by medical, police, and court personnel.
B. A major legal redefinition occurred with the acceptance of the term
“sexual harassment” in a 1986 Supreme Court case (Vinson).
LECTURE ELEVEN
1. Most courts, however, dismissed harassment charges as mere office

flirtation, until women’s complaints soared after Anita Hill’s testimony
at the 1992 confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee
Clarence Thomas.
2. Since then, major lawsuits and settlements have held employers and
schools accountable for hostile work climates.
56
3. In the 1990s, countries such as Spain, South Korea, Venezuela, and
Israel all outlawed sexual harassment.
C. Feminists have demanded procedural reforms in cases of rape or
harassment, rejecting questions about a woman’s prior sexual history,
clothing, and whether or not she knew the accused rapist.
1. American laws have begun to redefine consent so that a woman
does not have to prove resistance or have a corroborating witness to
bring rape charges. (Violence Against Women Act, 1994).
2. These legal changes may account for increasing reports of rape,
which doubled in the United States from 1970 to the late 1980s
(although convictions have not increased at the same rate).
D. International law has begun to recognize wartime rape as a crime.
1. International women’s groups who came to the aid of the women in
Bosnia in the 1990s heard stories of systematic rape and sexual tor-
ture, recorded them, and made them public.
2. A coalition of women’s organizations lobbied to define wartime rape
as a “crime against humanity” under the World Court.
Summary
In hierarchical societies, few men or women questioned the legitimacy of physi-
cal force, but over the past two centuries, the line between legitimate force and
unacceptable violence has shifted, along with liberal ideas about individual rights
and free labor systems. Yet children, women, racial, and ethnic minorities, and
the poor, are more likely to be remain legitimate targets of force. Feminism has
challenged the gender and race hierarchies that legitimate violence; it has
achieved some success in naming and providing services for those who experi-
ence rape, domestic violence, and sexual harassment, as well as child sexual
abuse. But further cultural and legal change will be necessary to extend the prin-
ciple of self-determination to all, to reduce violence against women, and to dis-
entangle ideas about masculinity and aggression.
57

Questions
1. Why have feminists redefined forms of violence, such as rape and wife
battering, and identified new forms, such as marital rape and sexual
harassment? What, if any, problems do you see in these redefinitions?
2. What is the significance of “naming” violence and breaking silence?
3. What other strategies or policies do you think would reduce violence?
What would be necessary to create a world with minimal sexual violence
(allow yourself to think in utopian visions)?
Suggested Reading
Brownmiller, Susan. Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape. New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1975.
LECTURE ELEVEN
58
Lecture 12:
Spirituality and Creativity

Introduction:
The past two sections explored feminist analyses of women’s labor and the
female body, briefly surveying policy responses that seek greater self-deter-
mination for women. The final lectures turn from substantive issues to select-
ed strategies for empowering women: spirituality, creativity, and politics.
Historically, women in Europe and the United States were denied formal
authority in these realms, but they also found means to self-empowerment
through them. This lecture surveys the ways that feminism both criticizes the
limits placed on women’s formal authority in each arena and acknowledges
the value of alternate forms of female empowerment.
III. Religion and spirituality have both justified male dominance and pro-
vided women a source of personal and cultural meaning.
A. Although very early societies often worshiped female images, from at
least the Biblical era, the major monotheistic Western religions have
largely reflected and reproduced patriarchy.
1. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam imagined a male God and acknowl-
edged only male prophets and priests.
2. In Christian Europe, a gendered hierarchy placed women lower in
the order of spiritual capacity; only men were considered capable of
communicating directly with God.
a. Most Christian churches interpreted St. Paul to require that women
remain silent and subservient in religious matters.
b. Exceptions included early Christians and later sects, such as the
Society of Friends.
3. Even within Church hierarchies, however, women sometimes
claimed authority. Catholic nuns in Europe, like Buddhist nuns in
China, carved out their own religious domains, forming women’s
communities as alternatives to patriarchal marriage.
B. Outside formal religious institutions, women found multiple sources
of spiritual authority, whether through Christianity, Islam, Judaism,
or Buddhism.
1. Family-based religious observance often depended on women’s
knowledge of customs.
2. Women have selectively incorporated forms of worship: indigenous
women in Latin America incorporated traditional female deities into
Catholic images of the Virgin Mary; Muslim women practiced a per-
59
sonal spirituality in the home; Jewish women created special female
prayers.
3. Women have also found ways of self-authorization through religious
mysticism; both Joan of Arc and Sojourner Truth claimed to hear the
voice of God instructing them to act outside of female roles.
C. In contrast to these individual appropriations of authority within patriar-
chal religion, feminism has questioned the systematic gender bias in
institutional religions.
1. In the 1890s, Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote an alternative Woman’s
Bible that rejected the subordination of women.
2. Second-wave feminists have reinterpreted Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam to show the basis for more egalitarian practices in each religion.
a. Jewish feminists, such as Susanna Heschel, called for women to
be included in the quorum for prayer, for ordination of women
rabbis, and for reform of religious law to eliminate sexist prac-
tices. The more liberal branches of Judaism have implemented
these reforms.
b. Protestant denominations now ordain women; since the 1970s, the
proportion of women clergy has tripled in some churches.
Although the majority of North American Catholics favor ordination
of women, the Pope has reaffirmed opposition to women priests.
c. Buddhist nuns have been reintroducing women into legitimate
roles of spiritual authority, while Islamic feminists provide new
interpretations of the Koran that authorize female equality.
3. Feminist theologians also seek new spiritual visions to replace male-
dominated imagery, liturgy, and rituals using either gender-neutral or
distinctively feminine approaches.
D. In contrast to those who seek to integrate women fully into established
religions, other feminists reject these establishments and seek an alter-
native feminist spirituality.
The feminist spirituality movement has attracted both women and
men who revive pre-Christian worship of the concept of the goddess.
Others invent new forms of celebrating the female body and its rela-
tion to nature.
III. Women and Artistic Expression

Creativity, like spirituality, has long been considered a capacity of men
rather than women, with notable exceptions. While women reproduced the
species, men produced culture, including the arts. Yet women have also
been empowered through creativity, even if they have not always been
LECTURE TWELVE
acknowledged for it.

A. Pre-industrial societies may have been more culturally egalitarian sim-
ply because both men and women worked hard to survive and few
members of either sex enjoyed formal education and artistic training.
1. The spread of literacy after 1500 widened the cultural gender gap, as
60
more men than women learned to read and write.
Popular and religious beliefs about women’s intellectual and spiritual
inferiority could discourage even literate women, some of whom
chose to write under male pseudonyms.
2. Structural obstacles prevented talented women from achieving their
creative potential, as when art academies rejected female students.
Virginia Woolf’s argument about women’s historical exclusion from
the arts, in her 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own, cited women’s
economic dependence on men as another barrier.
3. Exceptional women—usually those who did not raise children—could
overcome these obstacles, and the list of accomplished women writ-
ers and artists grew in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
B. Feminist movements have always produced literature and art to voice
protests against gender hierarchy.
1. In the early twentieth century, the utopian tales of Charlotte Perkins
Gilman in the United States and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain in South
Asia imagined women in charge of peaceful and productive societies.
2. Second-wave feminism produced a flowering of women’s literature,
art, and theater.
a. From the consciousness-raising groups of the 1960s and 1970s
and journal writing, the stories of women’s personal dilemmas
began to surface in memoirs, art, film, and popular culture.
b. Adrienne Rich’s poetry, Alice Walker’s novels in the United States
and Monique Wittig’s in France, and Caryl Churchill’s plays in
England all reflect feminist critiques of gender and race hierarchies.
c. Feminist cultural production is by no means a Western phenomenon,
as writers such as Nawal El Saadawi of Egypt, Buchi Emecheta
of Nigeria, and filmmaker Deepa Mehta in India illustrate.
C. In addition to rejecting the exclusion of women from the fine arts and
inspiring art concerned with gender equality, feminism has also sought
to recover and value women’s vernacular creative visions.
1. Historically, women have produced art within their homes and com-
munities, from Mexican American corridas (ballads) to the domestic
needlework produced in rural China and the magnificent beadwork
and wall paintings among the Ndebele women of southern Africa to
the quilts of North American women of all classes and races.
2. Feminist artists have borrowed from the vernacular, such as artist
Judy Chicago’s “Woman House” and “Dinner Party” projects, or Faith
Ringgold’s use of quilts to portray African American experiences.
D. Feminists have also sought space and resources to encourage
women’s creativity.
1. Since the 1970s, women galleries and art shows have expanded,
and feminist publishers helped to introduce new women writers.
2. Feminist protests influenced major museums to exhibit women
61
artists, and groups such as the Guerrilla Girls continue to protest,
creatively, the gender and racial imbalances in the art world.
3. In popular culture, a women’s music movement begun in the 1970s
created record companies and concert venues that paved the way
for the next generation of feminist performers.
Summary
Feminist analysis criticizes religion and the arts when they operate as patri-
archal institutions. In response, feminists have tried both to integrate women
fully into established religions and creative worlds and to value alternative
forms of female spirituality and creativity. By the beginning of the twenty-first
century, women had achieved greater recognition within formal, public wor-
ship and the arts than at any time in history. In the process, feminism has
helped to transform religious liturgy and the subjects and genres of the arts.
Whether reinterpreting Biblical heroines, exhibiting in museums, or perform-
ing on village streets, women have incorporated their experiences of mother-
hood, sexuality, and violence in their spiritual and creative practices.
LECTURE TWELVE
62

Questions
1. Compare the strategies of integrating women into religion or mainstream

arts versus creating alternative spiritual and creative practices. What over-
laps and differences do you detect in these strategies?
2. How could spiritual and creative strategies address some of the feminist
agendas we have discussed concerning violence, the body, motherhood,
and labor?
3. What are the obstacles to women’s authority in religious and
creative realms?
Suggested Reading
Emecheta, Buchi. The Joys of Motherhood. New York: George Braziller, 2002.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Herland. New York: Pantheon Books, 1979.
Hossain, Rokeya Sakhawat. Sultana’s Dream. Trans. Roushan Jahan. New
York: Feminist Press, 1988.
63
Lecture 13:
Political Power

Introduction:
Feminism has deep historical roots in the era of political revolutions that
established the rights of citizens to elect representative governments.
Feminism flourishes in democratic societies with open political systems, and
it is less likely to find roots in non-democratic, weak democratic, or totalitarian
states. Not surprisingly, a key feminist strategy for social change has been to
elect to office both women and men who support women’s rights. But feminist
politics involves much more than elections, and feminist scholars point to a
variety of political strategies women have used to address inequality or
achieve their short- and long-term goals, as women and as citizens. This lec-
ture maps out a range of women’s politics, from maternalist to explicitly femi-
nist to antifeminist, with selected examples of each.
III. Maternalist Feminism
The maternalist strain in feminism derives from a long history of women
claiming authority as mothers. At times when formal political systems are
monopolized by men, maternalism can be particularly effective, but it is
used at other historical moments as well.
A. Scholars apply a variety of terms to describe this political strategy,
from “female consciousness” to “practical gender interest” and
“militant motherhood.”
B. Contemporary examples of maternalist movements include women who
protest war based on their roles in creating life, or groups such as Las
Madres del Plaza de Mayo, who protested the disappearance of chil-
dren during a totalitarian regime in Argentina in the 1980s.
C. Maternalist movements are vulnerable to the criticism that they essen-
tialize female gender, as if all women naturally sought peace and jus-
tice, and as if only motherhood entitled women to political authority.
III. Liberal Feminism

In contrast, liberal feminist politics usually demand rights for women as cit-
izens on universalist grounds (rights for all), rather than particular grounds
(special qualifications as women). These feminist politics seek structural
LECTURE THIRTEEN
change to extend to women the rights increasingly enjoyed by men.

A. The terms used for these politics include “gender consciousness” and
“strategic gender interests.”
B. The early women’s rights movement fits this model, with its demands
for suffrage, property rights, equal divorce laws, and equal access
64
to education and the professions; so does the second-wave agenda
of equal pay and equal credit, as well as sexual and
reproductive self-determination.
C. In many parts of the world today, achieving these basic rights remains
a high priority on the feminist agenda.
1. For example, the Islamic women’s rights movement seeks equal
divorce in Egypt and suffrage in Kuwait.
2. Groups such as Women Living Under Muslim Laws work for reform,
sometimes within Islam and sometimes critiquing its use as state law.
D. Internationally, the call for “Women’s Rights as Human Rights” seeks
not only formal access to voting, office holding, and educational and
economic opportunities, but also an end to practices that violate
women’s particular rights, such as honor killings of women who have
either been raped or have committed adultery, or the sale of girls.
III. Transforming Politics

In countries where women have achieved most democratic and human
rights, feminists additionally seek to increase women’s role in policy mak-
ing.
A. The number of women elected to office in democratic states has been
increasing significantly, but worldwide it remains as low as 5 to 10 per-
cent of office holders.
B. In response, feminists in democratic nations have been raising money
for female candidates and urging women to be “gender conscious”
when they vote.
1. In the United States, a gender voting gap emerged by the 1990s,
with a 12 to 15 percent difference in the 2000 election.
2. Some feminists have moved from grass roots activism to political
office, such as Taiwanese vice president Annette Lu.
C. Some countries are experimenting with forms of political affirmative
action, such as the French system of parité and India’s reservation of
village council seats for women and members of the lower castes.
IV. Grassroots Feminism

Even where women lack formal representation, local grass-roots
and transnational non-governmental organizations have become
increasingly influential.
For example, the women’s health movement ranges from village clinics to
international lobbying groups.
IV. Antifeminism
In the wake of feminist political success, extensive antifeminist politics
have mobilized both women and men who either support patriarchy per
se, reject elements of feminism (such as reproductive choice) on religious
grounds, or oppose liberal state intervention to achieve equality.
65
A. Many religious fundamentalists, whether southern Baptist or Islamic,
call for male authority in the home and oppose the separation of sexu-
ality and reproduction.
B. More secular organizations, such as the Independent Women’s Forum
in the United States, oppose discrimination against women but reject
state support for achieving feminist goals.
They oppose affirmative action, Title IX (equal spending for education,
including sports), comparable worth (pay equity), and U.S. approval of
the UN Convention to Eliminate Discrimination Against Women.
Summary
Historically, women have employed a range of strategies to achieve political
authority, from maternalism to liberal feminism to antifeminism. In the twenti-
eth century, feminists redefined politics to include not only formal state
authority but also personal relations. Yet much of the feminist agenda today
involves achieving greater authority in national and international governing
bodies, both by electing and appointing women to office and by voting for
men and women who champion women’s rights. In addition to integrating
women into politics, new strategies, such as parité, seek to transform tradi-
tional political practices. Despite significant opposition, feminist goals have
made strong headway in the past generation. In the United States in 2000,
for example, a large majority of those polled supported equal rights for
women. Most supporters, however, do not call themselves feminists, yet they
are living within and continually influencing the historical movement of chang-
ing gender relations that has resulted in feminist politics.
LECTURE THIRTEEN
66

Questions
1. Where, and why, do maternalist politics remain most salient today?

2. How can the concept of “women’s rights as human rights” be applied to
feminist issues concerning work and family? The body?
3. Imagine a debate between feminists and antifeminists over electoral
reforms to achieve greater representation for women. What arguments
might each group make?
Suggested Reading
Baumgardner, Jennifer and Amy Richards. Manifesta: Young Women,

Kaplan, Temma. Crazy for Democracy: Women in Grassroots Movements.
New York: Routledge, 1997.
Nelson, Barbara J. and Najma Chowdhury, eds. Women and Politics
Worldwide. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.
67
Lecture 14:
Feminist History and the Future of Women
Introduction
The lectures in this course have attempted to explain the importance of femi-
nism in our time by providing historical explanations for its growth. This lec-
ture reviews the main points of the course and suggests possible future direc-
tions of change.
III. Before Feminism

The historical trajectory of the course began “before feminism,” when few
questioned gender hierarchy, by looking at both the theories that support-
ed male authority over women and the ways women survived, resisted,
and found routes to authority, largely as individuals.
III. Early Feminism

We have seen how feminism—a politics that rejects gender hierarchy—
grew out of key historical transformations in the past few centuries, and
how its politics varied and changed over time.
A. Wherever two forces—democratic politics and wage labor—have con-
verged to transform societies, some form of feminism has rejected hier-
archical rule based on gender.
1. Ideas about the “rights of man” and self-determination initially exclud-
ed women, the poor, and non-Europeans, but they gradually expand-
ed by the late twentieth century as a theory of universal human rights.
2. The transition from rural, agricultural, family economies to commer-
cial and industrial market economies encouraged the shift from hier-
archy to individualism.
a. The transition to wage labor at first excluded women and made
them more dependent on men; expanding labor markets eventual-
ly drew women into paid work. Declining birth rates accompanied
this shift and encouraged women’s movement beyond the house-
hold economy.
b. As women bore fewer children and worked for wages, they did not
enjoy the full rights of workers (lower pay, fewer opportunities).
c. Women workers also shouldered the burden of the double day.
B. A variety of feminist politics responded to limitations on women’s eco-
nomic and political rights.
LECTURE FOURTEEN
1. Liberal, socialist, maternalist, and postcolonial feminisms never

operate in a vacuum but are influenced by racial, class, and
national histories.
2. The convergence of a political ideal of self-determination and wage
labor first occurred in western Europe and North America, and in
some of their former colonies, so explicit feminist politics first
demanded change in these regions.
68
a. By the end of the twentieth century, however, these processes
had spread throughout most of the world.
b. Contemporary communications networks have brought feminist
politics to regions that may not have full democracy or even fully
developed market economies.
c. Transnational encounters have forced Western feminists
to decentralize their history and priorities and recognize
multiple movements.
III. The Changing Face of Feminism

A major historical theme of this course has been that feminisms are never
static nor are they monolithic; they change over time and they take multi-
ple forms at any given time.
A. In every historical period, multiple feminist strategies coexist.
B. These multiple approaches may share common elements but apply
them depending on local contexts.
In reviewing work and family, we saw that the transition to a market
economy occurs at different times but with similar dilemmas for women
who enter wage labor and work a double shift at home.
1. Feminist strategies for empowering women economically differ: equal
pay in expanding labor forces; parental leave for men and women
once women have established workplace rights; and in developing
regions, micro-lending that supports home-based production.
2. Feminist strategies for addressing the body share common themes
of bodily integrity, health, and safety, but they differ depending on
cultural attitudes toward sexuality (emphasizing protection or plea-
sure, for example), or the way other social hierarchies affect women
(contraceptive access or the right to bear children denied by
sterilization abuse).
3. Workplace and body politics are not isolated but interact; for exam-
ple, sexual harassment discourages women at work by exercising a
gender hierarchy over the body.
C. Feminist politics change in response to internal and external critiques
and changing historical contexts.
1. In the United States, for example, social policy toward workers has
changed from maternalist protection of women workers, to liberal
goals of workplace opportunity, to the introduction of parental, not
merely maternal, support for all facing work/family dilemmas.
2. Feminism has become increasingly transnational via communications
networks of non-governmental organizations and through the United
Nations, and it is having an impact on world politics and attitudes.
IV. Tomorrow’s Feminism

While the historical momentum over the past two centuries has encour-
aged feminist politics, that movement is by no means complete, nor is it
inevitable in the future.
69
A. Nowhere have women approached full equality, whether viewed in
terms of the wage gap in the United States or the overrepresentation of
women among the world’s poor (70 percent female) and illiterate (two-
thirds female).
B. Antifeminist politics are a growing force and feminists must understand
their appeal for women and men.
C. If feminism rests upon expanding democratic rights and wage labor,
feminism will not flourish if these conditions do not prevail.
1. The Taliban in Afghanistan provides a good example of patriarchal
politics, combined with a largely pre-industrial economy, enforcing
gender hierarchy.
2. In democratic countries, too, politicians can support patriarchy, for
example, the resurgent fascist movement in France.
D. Throughout the world, including advanced industrial societies with
democratic elections, feminist agendas concerning sexuality, the body,
and violence have a long way to go to ensure bodily self-determination
for women.
For example, market economies have drawn women from rural areas
into sexual commerce around the world
E. To return to the first topic we covered, origins stories: What are the
implications of a revival of biological determinism among some scien-
tists and social scientists for feminist theories?
IV. Where We End This Course
Despite these complications, the historical momentum for full economic
and political citizenship for women will no doubt remain central to political
histories of the next century.
A. How feminism is defined in the next historical era is up to those actors
today who continue to reshape it.
B. I hope you have some new analytic tools for partaking in the debates
about how we shape gender systems: What difference does gender
make? Which women are affected by its politics?
LECTURE FOURTEEN
70

Questions
1. Where does the future of feminism lie?

2. onstruct a chart of women in political office within your state or local region
over the last 10 years. Can you draw any conclusions from this?
3. Select a nation other than the United States and create a cursory history of
local feminist movements.
4. Consider how women, specifically mothers, have been portrayed in the
media over the past ten years. Contrast this with how women in general
have been portrayed. What conclusions can you draw?
5. Is feminism a purely utopian concept?
6. Consider the state of Islamic women's rights movements. Select one
woman who has been influential in this movement and study her success-
es and failures. How would her experiences have been different or the
same in the early 18th century United States?
71
COURSE MATERIALS
Suggested Reading for this Course:
Other Books of Interest:
Alvarez, Sonia E. Engendering Democracy in Brazil: Women’s Movements in

Transition Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.
Angier, Natalie. Woman: An Intimate Geography. New York: Random
House, 1999.
Anzaldúa, Gloria and Cherríe Moraga, eds. This Bridge Called My Back:
Writings by Radical Women of Color. Watertown, MA: Persephone
Press, 1981.
Baron, Beth and Nikki Keddie, eds. Women in Middle Eastern History. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.
Basu, Amrita, ed. The Challenge of Local Feminisms: Women’s Movements
in Global Perspective. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995.
Baumgardner, Jennifer and Amy Richards, eds. Manifesta: Young Women,
Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the
Body. Berkeley: University of California, 1993.
Brownmiller, Susan. Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape. New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1975.
Crittenden, Ann. The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the
World Is Still the Least Valued. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.
D’Emilio, John and Estelle B. Freedman. Intimate Matters: A History of
Sexuality in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Ehrenreich, Barbara. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.
New York: Henry Holt, 2001.
Ehrenreich, Barbara and Arlie Russell Hochschild, eds. Global Woman:
Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. New York:
Metropolitan Books, 2003.
El Saadawi, Nawal. The Hidden Face of Eve. London: Zed Press, 1980.
Emecheta, Buchi. The Joys of Motherhood. New York: George Braziller, 2002.
COURSE MATERIALS
Engels, Friedrich. The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State.
New York: International Publishers, Inc., 1990.
Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women.
New York: Crown, 1991.
Fausto-Sterling, Ann. Myths of Gender: Biological Theories About Women
and Men. New York: Basic Books, 1985.
72
COURSE MATERIALS
Other Books of Interest (continued):
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Herland. New York: Pantheon Books, 1979.

Goldin, Claudia. Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of
American Women. New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 1990.
Gordon, Linda. The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control
Politics in America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002.
hooks, bell. Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Boston: South
End Press, 1981.
———. Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics. Cambridge, MA:
South End Press, 2000.
Hossain, Rokeya Sakhawat. Sultana’s Dream. Trans. Roushan Jahan. New
York: Feminist Press, 1988.
Kaplan, Temma. Crazy for Democracy: Women in Grassroots Movements.
New York: Routledge, 1997.
———. The Creation of Patriarchy. New York: Oxford University Press,
USA, 1986.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory,
Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.
Nelson, Barbara J. and Najma Chowdhury, eds. Women and Politics
Worldwide. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.
Orbach, Susie. Fat Is a Feminist Issue. New York: Hutchinson, 1992.
Painter, Nell Irwin. Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol. New York: W.W.
Norton, 1996.
Roberts, Dorothy E. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the
Meaning of Liberty. New York: Pantheon Books, 1997.
Rosen, Ruth. The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement
Changed America. New York: Viking, 2000.
Rupp, Leila. Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s
Movement. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Williams, Joan. Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What
to Do About It. New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2000.
———. Three Guineas. New York: Harcourt, 1972.
These books are available on-line through www.modernscholar.com

or by calling Recorded Books at 1-800-638-1304.
73

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FEMINISM AND THE

Professor Estelle Freedman

Recorded Books™ is a trademark of

Lecture content ©2004 by Estelle Freedman

72004 by Recorded Books, LLC

Feminism and the Future of Women

About Your Professor ......................................................................................................4

Lecture 1 What Is Feminism? ....................................................................................6

Lecture 2 Before Feminism: Explaining Gender and Power ....................................10

Lecture 3 The Idea of Equality ................................................................................14

Lecture 4 Feminism and Race in U.S. History ........................................................18

Lecture 5 Global Feminisms ....................................................................................24

Lecture 6 Domestic Labor ........................................................................................28

Lecture 7 Women, Wage Earning, and the Wage Gap ..........................................33

Lecture 8 Feminist Responses to Women’s Labor ..................................................39

Lecture 9 Body Politics ............................................................................................44

Lecture 10 Reproduction and Sexuality ....................................................................48

Lecture 12 Spirituality and Creativity..........................................................................59

Lecture 13 Political Power..........................................................................................64

Lecture 14 Feminist History and the Future of Women ............................................68

About Your Professor

Estelle Freedman’s No Turning Back: The History

The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Estelle Freedman’s No Turning

III. Why Study Feminism?

III. Defining Sex, Gender, and Gender Systems

III. Defining Feminism

Other Books of Interest

Baumgardner, Jennifer and Amy Richards, eds. Manifesta: Young Women,

The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Estelle Freedman’s No Turning

III. Explaining Gender Asymmetry

2. Psychological theories (such as Freudian theory) combine elements

1. Which theories of gender hierarchy remain popular today? Think of both

Other Books of Interest

The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Estelle Freedman’s No Turning

Other Books of Interest

Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle

The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Estelle Freedman’s No Turning

A rare address in 1851 concerning both race and gender inequality, by

from the protective maternalism of the past.

Other Books of Interest

The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Estelle Freedman’s No Turning

1. Why did revolutionary and anticolonial movements inspire women to orga-

Other Books of Interest

Alvarez, Sonia E. Engendering Democracy in Brazil: Women’s Movements in

The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Estelle Freedman’s No Turning

III. Division of Labor

III. The Effects of Industrialization

III. Women’s Labor

IV. “Informal” Sector Employment

domestic and informal sector labor by recommending a variety of policies

1. Why is housework a feminist issue?

Other Books of Interest

The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Estelle Freedman’s No Turning

III. Labor Demand and Supply

III. Sexually Segregated Labor Force

PERCENTAGE OF ADULT WOMEN IN

All White Black Latina1 Asian2 Native

III. The Gender Gap

IV. Gender Ideology

tution of the family organization,” the Court argued, “. . . indicates the

Other Books of Interest

Ehrenreich, Barbara. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.

The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Estelle Freedman’s No Turning