Feminist essay
A feminist is someone who believes that women are oppressed in today’s society. Feminist can be male or female. There are many types of feminist theses all have different beliefs on the cause and solution to women’s issues. A few of these types are:
Marxist feminists: Marxist beliefs is that the cause of women’s oppression in society Is capitalism. This is due to the fact that the family reiterates the capital system whereby the proletariats do all the work for the bourgeois who profit from their work. The proletariat are not aware of this due to false class consciousness which is where they are unaware of what is happening. The bourgousi maintain this to avoid a revolution. Marxist feminist say the solution to this is a revolution to a communistic society. Mitchell a Marxist feminist said that women should be freed from their domestic responsibilities! He believed by doing this the women could pass on her roles to other agencies such as education and cleaners to allow her the freedom to do as she wishes in whatever domestic and relationships she chooses.
Criticisms of Marxist feminist are that they assume all families are stereotypical nuclear families (biological mum, dad and kids) by doing this they are ignoring family diversity since they don’t account for other family types such as bean pole (where a family have one child who goes on to have one child and this continues) .
Also radical feminist criticize Marxist feminist as they believe the cause and solution are different.
Radical feminist believe that the root of women’s oppression is patriarchal society (male dominant society where male are superior and women are inferior). Due to their belief of the cause radical feminist believe that the solution for women is to create their own separate society without men where each sex live their own life’s away from each other. This would challenge patriarchy and the polarisation of gender roles. A radical feminist Oakley said “women work long hours, doing dull, repetitive housework and receive no wage and little status, she argues that the family does not benefit the women, but harms her.
Criticisms of radical feminist are that the research carried out by two radical feminist (Delphy and Leonard ) was carried out on working class families Bott believes that research on middle class families shows more equality as they may share the roles more equally among themselves. This could be experimenter variables as the experimenter is more likely to find there prediction in the working class families.
Radical feminist have responded to these claims by now believing that the family is now changing for the better rather than wanting to replace it. They now claim that men should be given more responsibilities rather than none to free the women of some of her time and stress. This can be seen by changes in areas such as employment for example shorter working weeks, more job share and longer paternity leave for men .
Another group of feminist are the liberal feminist these feminist like radical feminist believe that patriarchy is the cause of women’s oppression. But they instead believe that the solution to the issues is changes in the law. A liberal feminist Gavron said that women are still over represented in certain occupations. Some of these are nursing, midwifery, teaching and cleaning. These are generally jobs where they are known for being nurturing roles often these are the less paid jobs like men are very rarely teachers but it is common for men to be headmasters with a reputation of being highly paid. The liberal feminist focus on changes that have benefited the women in society such as voting rights and equal pay act.
A criticism of this is that it is very naive to believe that changes in the law can fix gender inequalities. So the sex discrimination act 1975 has been seen by many as ineffective due to the fact that if an employer doesn’t want to give equal pay they just avoid it and ignore it. Evidence suggests that women are still paid less than men and also have a lower chance of getting promotion.