Jean Bethke Eishtain
FEMINISM AND POLITICS
Understood historically, feminism is a concern with the social role
and identity of women in relation to men in societies past and present, ani–
mated by a conviction that women suffer and have suffered injustices be–
cause of their sex. The political language and aims of modern feminism
emerged from the French Revolution and the Enlightenment. Associated
historically with forces combatting orthodoxy and autocracy, feminism de–
fined itself as a struggle for recognition of the rights of women, for equality
between the sexes, and for redefinitions of womanhood. Drawing upon lib–
eral and rationalist as well as utopian and romantic ideas in Western Europe
and America, feminism has long resisted easy definition, and its implications
for moral life are ongoingly contested and contestable.
Moral feminism is most often traced to the publication of Mary Woll–
stonecraft's
Vindication of the Rights of Women
in 1792. Wollstonecraft ad–
umbrated what were to become inescapable feminist preoccupations including,
but not limited to, the defense of political and natural rights. She challenged
received notions of the distinctive virtues of the two sexes; argued for a
transformed education for male and female; attacked martial images of citi–
zenship; and celebrated an androgynous notion of the rational self.
Reason became a weapon for women's emancipation, deployed against
the exclusive identification of women with 'nature' and their sexual function
and capacity. Faith in reason was then coupled with a strong belief in
progress. These convictions, refined in and through an already deeply rooted
tradition of liberal contractarianism and commitment to formal legalistic
equality, are most manifest in John Stuart Mill's classic nineteenth-century
tract,
The Subjection of Women
(1869). Counterposing 'Reason' and 'Instinct',
Mill looks forward to a society based on rational principles. Reason, he con–
tends, requires nullifying differences oftreatrnent based on considerations of
sex, among other 'accidents of birth'. Granting women equality of citizenship
and civil liberty in the public realm will help to bring about a deeper trans–
formation
in
the social relations of the sexes.
Liberalism has been attractive to feminist thinkers. The language of
rights is a potent weapon against traditional obligations, particularly those of
family duty or any social status declared 'natural' on the basis of ascriptive
characteristics. To be 'free' and 'equal' to men became a central aim offemi–
nist reform. The political strategy that follows from this dominant feminism is
one of inclusion: women, as well as men, are rational beings.
It
follows that
women as well as men are bearers of inalienable rights. Leading proponents
ofwomen's suffrage
in
Britain and the United States undermined arguments
which justified formal legalistic inequality on the basis of sex differences. Such
feminists claimed that denying a group of persons basic rights on the grounds
