What I know about feminism (so far)

I’m back with another article about feminism (and misandry). It all started with this post I found earlier on Facebook.

So this is the premise. And I was thinking of making another post explaining why misandry is NOT feminism and urging people to stop mistaking the two, but I decided I’d do something more ‘technical’ in my own way.

I’m reading a lot of literature and theory related to feminism (if you have any recommendations, please let me know) and there’s one book that I kept going back to for each and every essay I wrote - Peter Barry, ‘Beginning Theory’.

The fight for equity (not really equality) starts around 1792 when Mary Wollstonecraft (the mother of Mary Shelley who wrote Frankenstein) wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women where she was basically saying that women could be great conversation companions to men if they could get a little education. Then things are a little quieter for a while with female writers starting to come out in public, some using male names, some using their own names. We have works by Olive Schreiner and Virginia Woolf in 1911 and 1929 and Simone de Beauvoir writes The Second Sex in 1949. In this period of time women get the right to vote and other basic rights, you have the suffragettes etc. (see Barry, p. 123).

All that built up into the WOMEN’S MOVEMENT of the 1960s where we went on to discuss the entire female experience - politics, culture, sexuality, identity, work, family etc. That’s actually the beginning of feminist literary criticism and there’s a focus on female liberation through art (although that was part of the movement from the very beginning). In the 1970s feminists start exposing the mechanisms of patriarchy and in the 1980s we start exploring the nature of the female world and outlook, reconstructing the lost or suppressed record of female experience. There’s also an ongoing discussion about the (literary) history and the roles that women played in it and adding women writers to the canon. (see Barry, pp. 123 - 124).

Now look at this piece of history and please tell me where can you see anti-male behaviours? Nowhere, really. Not on the surface. Of course, if you dig deeper into everything that actually happened, knowing that the movement was born out of anger and frustration, you will find ‘rotten apples’ all along the way. And then there are many literary critics or so-called experts who called feminist works misandric, and misandric works feminist. I wrote an entire essay about that (you can read it here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DTYhWZIbDpgoKB7dTguNybK7KX0nORg5/view?usp=sharing).

However, looking at the historical side of things you might ask what is the difference between feminism and other movements/ideologies that tried to do something good but the opposite came out (as an example I will refer to communism)? I kept asking myself while I was writing just now and then someone brought it up to me in the comments on the post I told you about. First of all, have a look at the definition of these two terms in the Merriam-Webster dictionary.

We will use their definitions as ‘theory’: one talks about equality and the other talks about private property. Feminism in any of its forms, including misandry, can still be fitted into that. Communism, on the other hand, had many more implications underneath their goal - a sole leader, the cult of personality etc. Because they strayed away from their goal a seemingly healthy ideology has become toxic. Moreover, it was never really just about common goods and sharing and it never brought positive results. Feminism, on the other hand, succeded and had a mostly positive impact on women’s lives and our society as a whole. And that success did not come with any hidden agenda and it never tried to rob anyone of their basic human rights. Still, the misandry (and misogyny) in the feminist movement are at a low level, promoted by a few extreme members of the movement and that’s not enough to turn its goal on its head.

I mentioned earlier that early feminism was more about equity, not equality and honestly, that is my favourite part of feminism. Women and Men are not really equal. Of course, we should have equal rights and obligations, equal pay, equal access to opportunities etc, but at the core, we are very unequal. There are biological inequalities such as pregnancy and so a woman will need an extra holiday just to bring another human into existence. Equality would mean adding an extra holiday to all men, equity means understanding why women get that extra holiday and why a man wouldn’t need it. Also, early feminism has a nice male-understanding component, even though some critics consider that patriarchal or sexist. Look at Jane Eyre, for example, where Rochester is opening-up emotionally to Jane and we can see how discussing his feelings helps him become less insecure. We can see Rochester’s vulnerability throughout the entire novel. Look at Frankenstein, another example, where most men are open about their feelings and struggles, instead of being stone-hard non-sentimental brutes - the ‘masculinity standard’.

Feminism is about empowering women and helping women make their way into the patriarchal society of the past. Women were angry at the leaders who decided they were incapable of being part of the public sphere. “Coincidentally”, all those leaders were white men so of course there was hate targeted at them. But the extremist wing of feminism generalised the hate towards all men and because of that, a very healthy movement has been turned into toxic ‘femininity’ for the public eye.

This is what the third wave of feminism will have to deal with. Feminism, just like Punk and unlike the Avantgarde, is not dead. I see women and men - young people, writers, influencers - openly addressing these issues. I am one of them. And hopefully, you, who are reading this, are also one of us.

Drawing by Jeanine