Liberal Feminism
Liberal feminism – also referred to as equality feminism – originates in liberal ideas of individual freedom and freedom of choice.
The first statements of liberal feminists belong to the period of the French Revolution, when it became clear that only men were considered free and equal in rights, while women were not regarded as full citizens and therefore did not possess the full range of rights and freedoms. Naturally, this state of affairs did not satisfy everyone. In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in London. Decades later, Harriet Taylor Mill, together with her husband John Stuart Mill, published a number of essays justifying women’s emancipation. Both Wollstonecraft and the Mills emphasized that a woman is first of all a human being capable of rational thought and that she should have the same rights as those guaranteed to men. They argued that women’s so-called “natural” weakness, irrationality, and curiosity were in fact the result of a lack of education and freedom of choice, of women’s dependence on men, and of their defective socialization.
The main principle of liberal feminism is equality of rights and opportunities. Liberal feminists believe that women’s oppression is rooted in the refusal to grant them rights equal to those of men. They advocate social and legislative reforms and regard social policy as an important force in establishing women’s access to economic opportunities and civil rights.
The main demands of liberal feminists include: ending women’s legal, economic, and social dependence on men; ensuring freedoms and opportunities in obtaining and improving education; supporting the open and competitive functioning of the economic market and protecting it from interference and intervention; and introducing laws and public institutions that would guarantee equality of choice and opportunity, which could lead to the improvement of women’s status.
Liberal feminists emphasize socialization and education, since they view them as the main stages in the formation of the individual. In practice, their work to eliminate inequality includes, in particular, educational and social programmes aimed at eradicating discrimination.
Women’s rights movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries fought for women’s suffrage, the liberalization of divorce laws, the provision of economic autonomy for married women, and women’s access to higher education, paid labour, and professional activity (Husakovska et al., 2017).
Liberal feminism became the ideology of the reformist direction of the women’s movement of the 1960s in America and Europe. The second wave of feminism created new organizations for the protection of women’s rights, especially in the United States, France, and England. In some countries, such as the Scandinavian countries, liberal ideology was promoted by organizations that had existed since the nineteenth century; in others, new organizations were created.
Liberalism changed as the capitalist world developed, and the status of liberal feminism changed as well. Liberalism in the classical sense, which implied state protection of civil liberties and the creation of equal opportunities to act in the market, remained in the past. It was replaced by egalitarian liberalism, which implied state protection of economic justice, the provision of social and medical services, support for the family, and so on. Liberal feminism underwent a similar evolution, although it is not simply a copy of liberalism. Moreover, liberalism extended individualism and personal freedom only to men. The development of liberal feminism took it beyond formal equality and raised new questions concerning assistance in child-rearing and personal freedom in the reproductive sphere.
In the 1960s, the liberal women’s movement was inspired by the works of Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, and others. The American author Betty Friedan is recognized as a classic representative of this direction; she set out her views in The Feminine Mystique (1963). After the publication of the book, the National Organization for Women appeared in the United States. Within a short time, it united about 300,000 members and declared that its goal was the struggle for equal starting conditions for the self-realization of both sexes.
The image of the happy housewife was criticized as a non-existent myth. Social norms hindered women’s personal development: women were expected to conform to “infantile” patterns of behavior, and they were perceived only through men, only as passive beings having much in common with children.
In the postwar period, a notion of femininity was widespread that narrowed the possibilities of personal growth. At the very moment when new opportunities for career and education opened up, women began to leave educational institutions, preferring to perform only one traditional role. Stereotypes proved so strong that women lost even the idea of their own possibilities. This led to a crisis of identity and personal growth – a problem that arises for many people and that at the time was considered a male problem. Women’s fate was viewed as determined by biology, and therefore it was not assumed that women could have problems of identity and growth.
Unlike the classical liberal direction, feminists of egalitarian liberalism believed that women should have advantages, or positive discrimination. It was necessary to move from gender-neutral laws to gender-specific ones that would give widows, single mothers, and divorced women real chances.
This direction includes Betty Friedan’s second book, The Second Stage (1981), which appeared almost twenty years after the first, when new difficulties in combining women’s roles had become evident. If, in the 1960s, women were victims of “the feminine mystique,” they now became victims of “the feminist mystique.” If it had previously been discovered that housewives were dissatisfied with their lives, then a quarter of a century later disappointment appeared among women who were successfully building careers. From being a slave to a man, woman became a slave to work, and dependence moved from the private sphere into the public one. The “superwoman” became dependent both on her husband and on her employer. The way out of this situation was proposed in the reintegration of men into the family. These conclusions came to be known as pro-family feminism.
The problem of correlation with liberalism remains unresolved: if all people are equal by nature, are gender-oriented laws necessary? Does this imply that women must become equal and identical to men? Or the other way around? An approach sensitive to gender differences contradicts the orientation toward individuality in classical liberalism. Therefore, feminist criticism of liberalism is directed toward a revaluation of individual freedom; it advocates gender-neutral humanism, an orientation toward universal human values equal to male values, and the desire to act within the existing system without aiming at its radical transformation (Koroleva, 2013, pp. 46–47).
Neoliberal feminists, such as Alice Rossi, Janet Radcliffe Richards, and Susan Moller Okin, still appeal primarily to white middle-class women, orienting them toward the achievement of high professional goals, but without freeing them from the performance of traditional social roles, such as lover, wife, mother, domestic servant, and so on. Following Betty Friedan, neoliberals in Europe and the United States, as supporters of “equality feminism,” saw the problem not in the absence of rights, but in women’s inertia and their inability to use what had already been granted by law or could be achieved through legitimate means, especially in the legal and educational spheres.
For neoliberal feminists, the state is the expression of impersonalized reason. At the center of their tactics is the process of social learning in the use of legal methods for fulfilling the feminist demand for equality between the sexes. According to critics of neoliberal feminism, the neoliberal focus on making women equal to men in everything erases women’s natural particularities, leaves no place for women as women, and leads to a tendency to erase sex differences in the professional sphere, while at the same time overburdening women with family and domestic responsibilities that remain on their shoulders (Pushkareva, 2014).
The main representatives of liberal feminism include Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, Susan Anthony, Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Josephine Elizabeth Butler, Alice Rossi, Janet Radcliffe Richards, Susan Moller Okin, and others.
References:
Husakovska, N., Denishchik, A., & Kazakova, L. (Eds.). (2017, April 17). Liberalnyi feminizm [Liberal feminism]. Takaya: Nauchno-populiarnyi zhurnal, 6. Minsk: Center for Gender Studies, European Humanities University. Retrieved from http://takaya.eu/dictionary/rus_l/liber_fem [in Russian].
Koroleva, T. A. (2013). Zhenskoe dvizhenie: Genezis i evoliutsiia [The women’s movement: Genesis and evolution]. Vestnik Tomskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 368, 44–50. [in Russian].
Pushkareva, N. L. (2004). Feminizm [Feminism]. Multimediinaia entsiklopediia “Krugosvet”. Moscow: Novyi Disk. [in Russian].
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