Feminism
Feminism – from the Latin “femina” (“woman”) – a diverse body of theories, political ideas, social movements, and intellectual practices concerned with understanding and challenging gender-based inequality, sexism, and the social, political, economic, and cultural structures that subordinate or disadvantage women and other people on the basis of gender. Feminist traditions differ considerably in their theoretical foundations and political priorities, but they broadly share a commitment to expanding equality, freedom, autonomy, and social justice (Offen, 1988; hooks, 2000).
Feminism emerged historically from struggles against women’s legal, political, economic, educational, and social exclusion. It challenges the assumption that differences between women and men necessarily justify unequal rights, opportunities, authority, or social status. Feminist analysis also examines how gender inequality intersects with other forms of social differentiation and power, including race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, disability, and other social positions.
The modern terms feminist and feminism originated in nineteenth-century France. The widespread claim that Charles Fourier coined the term feminism is not supported by the principal historical scholarship on its emergence. The French word féministe began to circulate in the 1870s, while féminisme and féministe gained wider political currency during the 1880s, particularly through the work of women’s rights activist Hubertine Auclert (Offen, 1988, 2018).
Feminism may be understood in several interconnected senses:
- as a philosophical and intellectual tradition that critically examines dominant conceptions of society, culture, knowledge, the human subject, and social relations, drawing attention to the historical marginalization or exclusion of women’s experiences and to the gendered assumptions embedded in apparently universal categories;
- as a social and political theory that analyses gendered relations of power, the historical and contemporary subordination of women, and the institutions and practices through which gender inequality is produced and reproduced, while also developing approaches to overcoming such inequalities;
- as a social and political movement seeking to secure and expand women’s rights, freedoms, opportunities, autonomy, and political participation and to transform social structures in which people are treated unequally on the basis of gender;
- as a normative and ideological orientation opposing sexism, misogyny, discrimination, gender-based violence, and other practices that maintain or legitimize gender hierarchy;
- as a set of epistemological and methodological approaches to research that examine how gender and relations of power shape the production of knowledge, question androcentric assumptions in traditional scholarship, and seek to make previously marginalized experiences and perspectives visible. Feminist research does not constitute a single methodology; it includes diverse traditions such as feminist empiricism, standpoint theory, poststructuralist approaches, and other critical methodologies (Wigginton & Lafrance, 2019).
Feminism is therefore not a single homogeneous doctrine. Liberal, socialist and Marxist, radical, Black, postcolonial, intersectional, ecofeminist, queer, and other feminist traditions differ in their explanations of gender inequality and in the strategies they propose for social change. What connects them is a critical engagement with gendered relations of power and with the conditions under which equality, autonomy, and freedom can be realized.
See also: Gender, Sexism, Patriarchy, Misogyny, Intersectionality, Androcentrism.
References
hooks, b. (2000). Feminism is for everybody: Passionate politics. South End Press.
Offen, K. (1988). Defining feminism: A comparative historical approach. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 14(1), 119–157. https://doi.org/10.1086/494494
Offen, K. (2018). Debating the woman question in the French Third Republic, 1870–1920. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316946336
Wigginton, B., & Lafrance, M. N. (2019). Learning critical feminist research: A brief introduction to feminist epistemologies and methodologies. Feminism & Psychology, 30(4), 534–552. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959353519866058
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