Lecture outline:

Defining Feminisms

Last time:

Sex
Gender
Gender Socialization
“doing gender”

Theories of Gender:
   Essentialism
   Social Construction

Some historical views on women

 

St. Bernard of Clairvaux on women in his sermons, Middle Ages:

Eve was “the original cause of all evil, whose disgrace has come down to all other women.”

Christian theologian Tertullian (160CE) reminded women that they all share Eve's "ignominy...of original sin and the odium of being the cause of the fall of the human race"

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (1274 CE)

"A female is deficient and unintentionally caused. For the active power of the semen always seeks to produce a thing completely like itself, something male. So if a female is produced, this must be because the semen is weak or because the material [provided by the mother] is unsuitable, or because of the action of some external factor such as the winds from the south which make the atmosphere humid"

Aristotle, Misbegotten Man, 384 BCE

“Woman is an imperfect man  in no way different from a man except for the genitals which in the female, according to Galen, are kept and enclosed within the body for want of the natural heat that would force them to the exterior.”

Plato, Timaeus, 4th cen BCE

 “The animal within them is desirous of procreating children, and when remaining unfruitful long beyond its proper time, gets discontented and angry, and wandering in every direction through the body, closes up the passages of the breath, and, by obstructing respiration, drives them to extremity, causing all varieties of disease.”  --Plato, Timaeus, 91c

• Aretaeus, first century Greek physician
• Plato's primordial world

Ambrose Pare, 18th cen French physician - "what a uterus must look like"

And from religious traditions:

A definition of feminism:

Though men and women are inherently of equal worth, most societies privilege men as a group.  Thus, a range of social movements are necessary responding to interacting inequalities around ideas of gender, race, class, sexuality….

1.  EQUALITY / EQUAL WORTH

Working assumption: that men and women are inherently equal.

• Not exactly equal, but of equal worth, equal value
• Political Equality
• Equal Worth
• Cultural

2.  MALE PRIVILEGE

(Inequalities give certain groups unmerited PRIVILEGE)

Societal preference Economic - Property Political - Congress Sexual Media (pics) Health 1 2

3.  GENDER UNIQUELY INTERACTS
 with other inequalities to privilege/disadvantage women differently. 

• Race, class, sexuality (the big three)
• but also nationality, immigration status, generation, religion, citizenship
• Women are not homogenous
• Which women?  “liberated by work”

4.  SOCIAL MOVEMENTSSSSSSSSS

– Many, different. No agreement.

• Political protest 
• Institutional political
• Education
• Economic - SW
• Legal
• Artistic/creative     Vday  Lourdes
• Popular
• Cultural (family)

Note: Men are privileged as GROUP, not as individuals.  Individual personality has nothing to do with it.