Feminism

Ideology · Late 18th century onward, with major waves in the 19th and 20th centuries · Politics, stage 2: Map the ideologies

Feminist political theory begins from the observation that the standard subject of political thought - the free, propertied, public citizen - was for most of that history a man, and that the arrangements built on him left women without legal personality, property, the vote, or standing inside the household. Its advocates argue that inequality of this kind is structural rather than incidental, that the boundary between public and private life is itself a political decision rather than a natural fact, and that a theory of justice which stops at the front door leaves most of women's lives unexamined. The tradition is internally plural: liberal feminism pursues equal rights and equal opportunity within existing institutions, socialist feminism ties women's position to the organisation of paid and unpaid work, and later writers have criticised earlier feminism for generalising from the circumstances of a narrow group of women. Critics argue that some strands overstate how far remaining differences in outcome reflect coercion rather than choice, and that the movement's internal disagreements about sex, gender and the family run deep enough to make any single position hard to state.

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