Special-Rights Feminism
Special-rights feminism – a form of difference-oriented feminism based on the conviction that women possess a morality different from, and at the same time higher than, that of men, a morality explained by women’s nature. Supporters of special-rights feminism viewed women as unlike men, differing from them in their tendency toward cooperation and peacefulness, whereas men were associated with competitiveness and aggressiveness.
From the standpoint of difference between the sexes, women should not try to imitate men; on the contrary, they should preserve the virtues believed to be inherent in them. This higher morality was understood as deriving from the work that women perform “by their nature”: domestic labour and motherhood, or, outside the home, social work and education. Accordingly, if women gained access to public life, they would bring greater justice into it.
In America and in some European countries, in connection with the growing popularity of the “cult of true womanhood,” the idea began to prevail that women were “potential saviors of the nation,” since they were regarded as guardians of purity, tolerance, and traditional values. Consequently, it was argued that women should be granted political rights in order to improve the moral condition of the public sphere. Women’s pacifism was especially emphasized as an innate quality, in contrast to male militarism. The opposition between the image of woman as life-giver and man as destroyer remains relevant to this day.
One of the theorists of this approach, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, believed that “women’s values are connected with the progress of humanity” and that relations between the sexes are the main “motor” of development. Gilman was called a “leading thinker” of the women’s movement in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. The striking novelty of her judgments lay in the combination of socialism with an approach to history and society through the prism of women.
In her view, relations between the sexes are the main force, not merely a by-product of economic development. Woman, she argued, was originally the first producer, because while man “valiantly pursued the bison…, acting simply as an animal driven by hunger at the sight of nearby prey,” women thought about the future and sowed grain for themselves and their children. In addition, women were the first educators, and “woman as mother is the first coordinator, legislator, administrator, and executor.”
These essentially human traits of care, love, and protection were understood as originally inherent in women’s maternal role. Men, who did not possess such innate virtues, had to learn them, since “to act by force, to fight, to trample the earth, to cry out victoriously in wild joy – all these were primitive male instincts.” Only in the course of history did men become fully human and develop production and other originally maternal functions, such as legislation, to their highest form.
In the past, men’s strength allowed them to subordinate and exclude women, but increasing specialization and the division of labour made it possible for women to participate in industrial production. Economic development also stimulates the interdependence of members of society, so that egoism, competition, and individualism – the “spirit of the predatory male” – would soon become obsolete in a new era characterized by such “feminine” traits as collectivism and socialist cooperation in the common interest (Kharytonova, n.d.).
The main figure most directly associated with this line of thought is Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Thinkers such as Carol Gilligan, Sandra Harding, and Jean Grimshaw are more accurately described as authors connected with related debates on difference, care, feminist epistemology, women’s moral experience, and the critique of universalist models of equality.
Reference:
Kharytonova, O. (n.d.). Pervaia volna feminizma [The first wave of feminism]. Retrieved from http://womenation.org/first-wave-of-feminism [in Russian].
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