SOCI 337 Finial Flashcards
(26 cards)
Feminist theory is woman-centered—or women-centered—in two ways.
- The starting point of all its investigation is the situation (or the situations) and experiences of women in society.
- iI seeks to describe the social world from the distinctive vantage points of women.
Contemporary feminist theory begins in a deceptively simple question
“And what about the women?” In other words, where are the women in any situation being investigated? If they are not present, why? If they are present, what exactly are they doing? How do they experience the situation? What do they contribute to it? What does it mean to them?
“And what about the women?”
Women are present in most social situations. Where they are not, it is not because they lack ability or interest but because there have been deliberate efforts to exclude them.
- Male and female, have been blind to their presence.
- Women’s roles in most social situations, though essential, have been different from, less privileged than, and subordinate to the roles of men.
- Their invisibility is only one indicator of this inequality.
Feminism’s second basic question is:
“Why is all this as it is?”
“Why is all this as it is?”
One of feminist sociological theory’s major contributions to answering this question has been the development of the concept of gender.
Feminist theorists made it possible for people to see the distinctions between (a) biologically determined attributes associated with male and female and (b) the socially learned behaviors associated with masculinity and femininity.
- A starting point of agreement among nearly all varieties of feminist theory is an understanding of gender as a social construction, something not emanating from nature but created by people as part of the processes of group life.
Feminist theorists raised a third question:
“And what about the differences among women?”
“And what about the differences among women?”
The answers to this question lead to a general conclusion that the invisibility, inequality, and role differences in relation to men that generally characterize women’s lives are profoundly affected by a woman’s social location—that is, by her class, race, age, affectional preference, marital status, religion, ethnicity, and global location.
The fourth question for all feminists is:
“How can we change and improve the social world so as to make it a more just place for all people?”
feminist social theorists are confronting the question emerging from a record of victories and defeats:
“How—and why—does gender inequality persist in the modern world?”
Marx showed that the knowledge people had of society, what they assumed to be an absolute and universal statement about reality, in fact reflected the experience of those who economically and politically ruled the world
he effectively demonstrated that one also could view the world from the vantage point of the world’s workers. This insight relativized ruling-class knowledge and, in allowing us to juxtapose that knowledge with knowledge gained from the workers’ perspective, vastly expanded our ability to analyze social reality.
First Wave feminism
began in the 1830s as an offshoot of the antislavery movement and focused on women’s struggle for political rights, especially the vote. It is marked by two key dates—1848, when the first women’s rights convention was held at Seneca Falls, New York, and 1920, when the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote.
Second Wave feminism
(ca. 1960–1990) worked to translate these basic political rights into economic and social equality and to reconceptualize relations between men and women with the concept of gender.
Third Wave feminism
is used to describe the critical responses of various groups—women of color, lesbians, working-class women, women in the global South, as well as women who will live their adult lives in the 21st century—to the arguments of Second Wave feminism
Three waves of Feminism
Feminist history can be divided into three waves. The first wave, occurring in the 19th and early 20th century, was mainly concerned with women’s right to vote. The second wave, at its height in the 1960s and 1970s, refers to the women’s liberation movement for equal legal and social rights. The third wave, beginning in the 1990s, refers to a continuation of, and a reaction to, second-wave feminism.
Feminist ideas of the First Wave were abroad in the world in the 1830s
Auguste Comte coined the term sociology and feminist Harriet Martineau was asked to edit a proposed journal in sociology. Martineau is an important player in the history of sociology whose work has only been recovered under the impact of Second Wave feminism.
Gilman is particularly significant in the history of feminist contributions to sociology
providing the first conceptualization of what will become the idea of gender in her concept of excessive sex distinction, which she defines as socially maintained differences between men and women that go beyond the differences dictated by biological reproduction
Between 1920 and 1960, feminist thinking and activism ebbed, partly due to
a sense of anomie produced by its victory in getting the vote, partly in response to social crises—World War I and its aftermath, the Great Depression, World War II and its aftermath, and the Cold War of the 1950s. Women sociologists were left without a framework for critique of their professional marginalization. They worked as isolated individuals for a foothold in the male-dominated university.
Beginning in the 1960s, as a second wave of feminist activism energized feminist thinking
women in sociology drew strength to confront the organization of their profession and to (re-)establish a feminist perspective in the discipline. Key to their success was the leadership of individual women such as Alice Rossi, the establishment of the Women’s Caucus within the American Sociological Association, and then in 1971 of a separate feminist organization, Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS), which in 1987 undertook the financially daring launch of a new journal, Gender & Society, under the editorship of Judith Lorber. These moves brought women a feminist base from which to speak to the profession and a feminist publication from which to introduce ideas to the discipline.
The effects of Second Wave feminism continue to this day in sociology.
Women have moved into the profession in unprecedented numbers, as students, teachers, and scholars; the majority of undergraduate majors and about half of PhD recipients are now women
Central to this Second Wave triumph has been establishing
gender as a core concept in sociology
And what about the women? Essentially, there have been five answers to that question
- Gender Difference
- Gender Inequality
- Gender Oppsession
- Structual Oppsession
- Interrogating Gender
gender difference
women’s location in, and experience of, most situations is different from that of the men in those situations.
gender inequality
women’s location in most situations is not only different from but also less privileged than or unequal to that of men.
gender oppression
that is, a direct power relationship between men and women through which women are restrained, subordinated, molded, used, and abused by men
