3 Feminist and Gender Theories

K. C. Leelavathy

INTRODUCTION

Evolution of human beings on the earth made a long term and continuous changes in the social, cultural, economic, political and educational systems. The first and prime most determination of human community in the beginning of evolution and growth was identification of sexual differences and in later point of time, the concept of gender evolved. There are some biological, physiological and psychological theories explains the differences between male and female.

CONCEPT OF SEX

Sex is a term used to denote the characteristics of a human being in terms of physical and biological factors, which can be generic and obvious characteristics. Sex can be determined as man and woman based on physical and biological characteristic. It is evident that there are some difficulties for woman than man in the area of reproduction and child rearing. For many years, due to the roles and responsibilities of woman in reproduction, women are treated as weaker section of the society. They stayed dependent to their family and male counter parts till the end of their life. Especially rural women groups are worse affected by wrong conceptualization of sex. The multitasking woman are restricted, discriminated, exploited, controlled and harassed by male counterparts by various means.

CONCEPT OF GENDER

A few historians had begun to use the term “gender” in their gender history studies in addition to “women’s history”. She directly repudiated the use of “gender” as a de-politicized, social-scientized synonym for women or sex, and she promised to reinvigorate feminist history by expanding its realm of influence. As per WHO gender is the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women.

SEX AND GENDER

Sexual roles and attributes are universally same across human societies and there are no major variations. But gender roles have multiple dimensions and varies based on customs and cultures prevailed in the community where they are living. In contrast to sex, which refersto biological differences between males and females, gender is a social or cultural construct of the differences between women and men.

WOMEN IN DEVELOPMENT & WOMEN AND DEVELOPMENT

Women in Development mean the integration of women into global process of economic, political and social growth and change. This was closely linked with modernization paradigm dominated thinking on International development from1950’s into 1970’s. The projects typically were the income generating activities. Women are thought to have a particular skill or craft and even sometimes in marketing. Women are the central to development.

 Women And Development also called as neo-marxist feminist approach-emerged in second half of 1970. It is in concern with explanatory limitation, of modernisaton theory.Its main focus is on the relationship between women and development.It points that women have been important economic actors inside and outside the household in central to that of societie

It offers a critical view of women’s potentialities and analysis of patriarchy, women’s subordination and suppression.

Difference Between WID &WAD

•  The WAD perspective focuses on the relationship between women and development processes rather than purely on strategies for the integration of women into development.
•  At a theoretical level, the WAD perspective recognizes and indeed focuses strongly on the impact of class, but in practical project design and implementation terms, it tends like WID, to group women together without taking strong analytical note of class, race, or ethnicity division, all of which may exercise a powerful influence on their actual social status.
• WAD offers a more critical view of women’s position than does WID, but it fails to undertake a full scale analysis of the relationship between patriarchy, differing modes of production and women’s subordination and oppression.
• A weakness common to the WID and WAD approaches is a singular preoccupation with the productive sector at the expense of the reproductive side of women’s work& lives.
• These intervention strategies therefore have tended to concentrate on the development of income-generating activities without taking into account the time burdens that such strategies place on women.

FEMINISM

Feminism is defined as the social,political and economic equality of the sexes.The feminist movement is organized around this belief and is an outgrowth of the general movement to empower women worldwide. Feminism can be defined as a recognition and critique of male supremacy combined with efforts to change it.

DEFINITION

N. Abercrombie:“Feminism is a doctrine suggesting that women are systematically disadvantaged in modern society and advocating equal opportunities for men and women.”

The New Encyclopaedia Britannica{Vol.12.Page:733} : “Women’s liberation movement also called feminist movement refers to a social movement that seeks equal rights for women, giving them equal status with men and freedom to decide their own careers and life-partners.”

COLLINS DICTIONARY OF SOCIOLOGY: Feminism refers to “a holistic theory concerned with the nature of women’s global oppression and subordination to men ”

CONCEPT OF FEMINISM

Men and women are born equal and they should always be treated so.There should be no sexual discrimination. Treating women as inferior especially to men and considering them individuals of the ‘second sex’, is not fair. When one speaks of women duties, one should show equal respect to women’s rights. Providing equal rights, opportunities and statuses to women on par with men is essential and morally mandatory. A powerful advocacy and justification of views such as these, is known as “feminism.” A social movement launched in support of these views under the leadership of women, can be regarded as ‘feminist movement ’or ‘women’s movement’, or ‘women’s liberation movement.’

GOALS OF FEMINISM

v  To demonstrate the importance of women.

v   To reveal that historically women have been subordinate to men.

v  To bring about gender equity. In simply,

Feminists fight for the equality of women and argue that women should share equally in societies opportunities and scare resources.

THE FEMINIST CAMPAIGN:

Five Basic Approaches Proposed by Barbara Bovee Polk In connection with the feminist campaign for social change, Barbara Boove Polk (1974) spoke of some basic approaches among which the following may be noted. Attempts by women to resocialize themselves and overcome traditional gender role conditioning. Efforts to change day to day personal interactions with men and other women to avoid conventional sexist patterns.

Use of the media and academic world to combat sexism and resocialize others to more egalitarian values ad greater respect for women.

Challenges to male dominance of social institutions through demonstrations, boycotts, lawsuits, and other tactics.

Creation of alternative institutions, such as women’s self help medical clinics, publishing houses and communes.^2

FEMINIST THEORIES

Feminist theories are useful tools in analyzing the “women” question and they change constantly as our knowledge grows. Theories incorporate both facts and feelings in order to reveal the totality of women experiences. Feminist theories can describe and explain women’s oppression and offer guidelines for combating it

Feminist theories are based on a series of assumptions. First, it assumes that men and women have different experiences and the task of feminist theory is to explain that difference. Secondly, it assumes that women’s oppression is unique constellation of social problems and has to be understood in itself and not as a subject of class or any other structure.

GENDER REFORM FEMINISM

The feminisms of the 1960s and 1970s were the beginning of thesecond wave of feminism. They are liberal feminism, Marxistand socialist feminisms, and development feminism. Their rootswere, respectively, 18th and 19th century liberal politicalphilosophy that developed the idea of individual rights, Marx’s19th century critique of capitalism and his concept of class consciousness, and 20th century anti-colonial politics and ideas of national development. Gender reform feminisms put women into these perspectives.

Liberal Feminism

Theoretically, liberal feminism claims that gender differences are not based in biology, and therefore that women and men are not all that different — their common humanity supersedes their procreative differentiation. If women and men are not different, then they should not be treated differently under the law. Women should have the same rights as men and the same educational and work opportunities. The goal of liberal feminism in the United States was embodies in the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which was never ratified. (It said, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex.”)

Politically, liberal feminists formed somewhat bureaucratic organizations, which invited men members. Their activist focus has been concerned with visible sources of gender discrimination, such as gendered job markets and inequitable wage scales, and with getting women into positions of authority in the professions, government, and cultural institutions.

Liberal feminist politics took important weapons of the civil rights movement – antidiscrimination legislation and affirmative action — and used them to fight gender inequality, especially in the job market. Affirmative action calls for aggressively seeking out qualified people to redress the gender and ethnic imbalance in work places. That means encouraging men to train for such jobs as nursing, teaching, and secretary, and women for fields like engineering, construction, and police work. With a diverse pool of qualified applicants, employers can be legally mandated to hire enough different workers to achieve a reasonable balance in their workforce, and to pay them the same and also give an equal chance to advance in their careers. The main contribution of liberal feminism is showing how much modern society discriminates against women.

In the United States, it was successful in breaking down many barriers to women’s entry into formerly male-dominated jobs and professions, helped to equalize wage scales, and got abortion and other reproductive rights legalized. But liberal feminism could not overcome the prevailing belief that women and men are intrinsically different. It was somewhat more successful improving that even if women are different from men, they are notinferior.

Marxist and Socialist Feminisms

Marx’s analysis of the social structure of capitalism was supposed to apply to people of any social characteristics. If you owned the means of production, you were a member of the capitalist class; if you sold your labour for a wage, you were a member of the proletariat. That would be true of women as well, except that until the end of the 19th century, married women in capitalist countries were not allowed to own property in their own name; their profits from any businesses they ran and their wages belonged to their husband.

Although Marx recognized that workers and capitalists had wives who worked in the home and took care of the children, he had no place for housewives in his analysis of capitalism. It was marxist feminism that put housewives into the structure of capitalism. Housewives are vital to capitalism, indeed to any industrial economy, because their unpaid work in the homemaintains bosses and workers and reproduces the next generation of bosses and workers (and their future wives).

Furthermore, if a bourgeois husband falls on hard times, his wife can do gentle work in the home, such as dressmaking, to earn extra money, or take a temporary or part-time job, usually whitecollar. And when a worker’s wages fall below the level needed to feed his family, as it often does, his wife can go out to work for wages in factories or shops or other people’s homes, or turn the home into a small factory and put everyone, sometimes including the children, to work. The housewife’s labour, paid and unpaid, is for her family. Marxist and socialist feminisms severely criticize the family as a source of women’s oppression and exploitation. If a woman works for her family in the home, she has to be supported, and so she is economically dependent on the “man of the house,” like her children. If she works outside the home, she is still expected to fulfill her domestic duties, and so she ends up working twice as hard as a man, and usually for a lot less pay. This source of gender inequality has been somewhat redressed in countries that give all mothers paid leave before and after the birth of a child and that provide affordable child care. But that solution puts the burden of children totally on the mother, and encourages men to opt out of family responsibilities altogether. To counteract that trend, feminists in the government of Norway allocated a certain portion of paid child care leave to fathers specifically.

Women in the former communist countries had what liberal feminism in capitalist economies always wanted for women-full-time jobs with state-supported maternity leave and childcare services. But marxist and socialist feminists claim that the welfare state can be paternalistic, substituting public patriarchy for private patriarchy. They argue that male-dominated government policies put the state’s interests before those of women: When the economy needs workers, the state pays for child-care leave; with a down-turn in the economy, the statereduces the benefits. Similarly, when the state needs women to have more children, it cuts back on abortions and contraceptive services. Women’s status as a reserve army of labour and as a child producer is thus no different under socialism than under capitalism. The solution of women’s economic dependence on men thus cannot simply be waged work, especially if jobs continue to be gender-segregated and women’s work is paid less than men’s. Socialist feminism had a different solution to the gendered workforce than liberal feminism’s program of affirmative action. It was comparable worth.

In examining the reasons why women and men workers’ salaries are so discrepant, proponents of comparable worth found that wage scales are not set by the market for labour, by what a worker is worth to an employer, or by the worker’s education or other credentials. Salaries are set by conventional “worth,” which is rooted in gender and ethnic and other forms of discrimination.

Comparable worth programs compare jobs in traditional women’s occupations, such as secretary, with traditional men’s jobs, such as automobile mechanic. They give a point values for qualifications needed, skills used, extent of responsibility and authority over other workers, and dangerousness. Salaries are then equalized for jobs with a similar number of points (which represent the “worth” of the job). Although comparable worth programs do not do away with gendered job segregation, feminist proponents argue that raising the salaries of women doing traditional women’s jobs could give the majority of women economic resources that would make them less dependent on marriage or state benefits as a means of survival.

Development Feminism

Addressing the economic exploitation of women in post-colonial countries on the way to industrialization, developmentfeminism has done extensive gender analyses of the global economy. Women workers in developing countries in Central and Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa are paid less than men workers, whether they work in factories or do piece work at home. To survive in rural communities, women grow food, keep house, and earn money any way they can to supplement what their migrating husbands send them. The gendered division of labour in developing countries is the outcome of a long history of colonialism. Under colonialism, women’s traditional contributions to food production were undermined in favour of exportable crops, such as coffee, and the extraction of raw materials, such as minerals. Men workers were favoured in this work, but they were paid barely enough for their own subsistence. Women family members had to providefood for themselves and their children, but with good land confiscated for plantations, they also lived at a bare survival level. Development feminism made an important theoretical contribution in equating women’s status with control of economic resources. In some societies, women control significant economicresources and so have a high status.

In contrast, in societieswith patriarchal family structures where anything women produce, including children, belongs to the husband, women and girls have a low value. Development feminism’s theory is that in any society, if the food women produce is the main way the group is fed, and women also control the distribution of any surplus they produce, women have power and prestige. If men provide most of the food and distribute the surplus, women’s status is low. Whether women or men produce most of the food depends on the kind of technology used. Thus, the mode of production and the kinship rules that control the distribution of any surplus are the significant determinants of the relative status of women and men in any society. In addition to gendered economic analyses, development feminism addresses the political issue of women’s rights versus national and cultural traditions. At the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women Forum held in Beijing in 1995, the popular slogan was “human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights.” The Platform for Action document that came out of the UN Conference condemned particular cultural practices that are oppressive to women – infanticide, dowry, child marriage, female genital mutilation. The 187 governments that signed onto the Platform agreed to abolish these practices.

However, since they are integral parts of cultural and tribal traditions, to give them up could be seen as kowtowing to Western ideas. The development feminist perspective, so critical of colonialism and yet so supportive of women’s rights, has found this issue difficult to resolve. Western ideas of individualism and economic independence are double-faced. On the one hand, these ideas support the rights of girls and women to an education that will allow them to be economically independent. They are also the source of a concept of universal human rights that can be used to fight subordinating and sometimes physically hurtful tribal practices, such as genital mutilation. On the other hand, Western ideas undercut communal enterprises and traditional reciprocal food production and shared child care. Indigenous women’s own solution to this dilemma is community organizing around their productive and reproductive roles as mothers — so that what benefits them economically and physically is in the service of their families, not themselves alone.

However, this same community organizing and family service can support the continuance of cultural practices like female genital mutilation, which Western development feminists want to see eradicated. The decision to not interfere with traditional cultural practices that are physically harmful to girls and at the same time work for their education and better healthcare is a particularly problematic dilemma for development feminism.

CONCLUSION

Gender reform feminisms laid the theoretical groundwork for second-wave feminism. Their politics are practical and perhaps the best way to redress gender inequality at the present time. The fight for equal legal status and political representation for women and men, and for autonomy for women in making procreative, sexual, and marital choices still has not been won in most countries of the world. Gender segregation in the workplace and lower pay for women’s work is pervasive in capitalist and socialist economies. The global economy,with its exploitation of poor women and men as cheap labour, and economic restructuring in industrializing and post-industrial economies, with its reduction in social-service benefits to mothers and children, has worsened the material conditions of life for many people throughout the world. Thus, economic problems are another arena for feminist gender politics.

While the politics of gender reform feminisms spills over into a politics for every disadvantaged person, the battles of gender resistant feminisms are for women alone. Fighting to protect women’s bodies against unwanted pregnancies and sterilizations, abortions of female foetuses, genital mutilation, rape, beatings, and murder has been an enormous and never-ending struggle. And the sexual integrity of women and girls needs protection from forced prostitution, exploitative sex work in pornographic productions and nightclubs, and loveless marriages.

Both lesbians and gay men need to be able to live free of discrimination and violent attacks, but many lesbian women also want their own physical space and their own cultural communities, where they where they live free of sexual harassment and men’s domination, nourish their loves and friendships, and produce books, music, art, and drama that reflect their different ways of thinking and feeling. Multi-ethnic feminism is part of a powerful political movement to redress past and present legal and social discrimination of disadvantaged groups in so many societies, and to preserve their cultures.

Men’s feminism follows in the footsteps of working class social research and politics, but expands their political arena to include gay men. Their condemnation of the price paid for the rewards of professional sports and the physical and sexual violence they foster are their particular political agenda. In conjunction with the radical feminist fight against rape and pornography, men’s feminism has gone directly to men in college workshops, seminars, and conferences to make them aware of how their behaviour can be so harmful to women. Social construction and postmodern feminisms have only begun to translate their theoretical and linguistic destabilization of thegender order into politics or praxis.

Degendering needs to be translated into everyday interaction, which could be revolutionary enough. But to fulfill their political potential, the gender revolution feminisms need to spell out what precisely has to be done in all the institutions and organizations of a society — family, workplace, government, the arts, religion, law, and so on — to ensure equal participation and opportunity for every person in every group. Gender revolution feminists have said that there are multiple voices in this world; now, they have to figure out how to ensure that every voice can be heard in the production of knowledge and culture and in the power systems of their societies.

REFERENCES

1. Joanne Meyerowitz (2008), “A History of “Gender” “, The American Historical Review, Oxford University Press, Vol. 113, No. 5 (Dec., 2008), pp. 1346-1356.