Feminism, Liberal

Category: Theoretical approaches

Liberal feminism started with the first wave of feminism in the 18th and 19th and the struggle for political equality and political liberties. Liberal feminists, after World War II, besides political equality, focused also on economic equality, but they did not want to end capitalism, just to reform it, advocating for equality in the job market and professional advancement, equal pay, the welfare state, and social security systems.

American sociologist and social reformer Jane Addams (1860-1935) founded, in 1889, Chicago's Hull House, a non-formal organization for informal education and continued learning. This institution also served for the sociological education of women. Addams advocated for women's suffrage, child protection, and the abolition of child labor, regulating factory labor, reducing poverty, and immigrant and African-American rights. Throughout her life, as a fiery pacifist, she fought for the ending of all the wars and her books dealing with these topics are New Ideals of Peace (1907) and Peace and Bread in Time of War (1922). Her pacifist efforts were crowned with the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.

American sociologist Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) was a member of several women's associations and published the magazine The Forerunner in the period from 1909 to 1916. In Women and Economics (1898), Gilman introduces a feminist sociological critique of the economic position of women in patriarchal societies and recognizes the importance of women's unpaid domestic work. In the book The Man-made World or Our Androcentric Culture (1911), she explores how men monopolize all human activities, and call them men's work. Family and marriage serve the needs of men and the subordination of women. She studied the political and cultural processes of "normalization" and "masculinization" which create social construction of women as a deviation or inferior version of what is valuable and desirable, i.e., men. Gilman also wrote about her own experience with postpartum depression and how doctors at the time refused to acknowledge that it was a real disease and were quick to classify it as a common female hysteria, that was, at that time, medically referred to as neurasthenia. She believed that feminist and labor movements were forces working on a common goal of making world progress.

American feminist theorist Betty Friedan is one of the founders of the second wave of feminism. In the book The Feminine Mystique (1966), she, based on her own experience, but also the experience of other women concludes that patriarchal society imposes the role of a housewife on women. The imposed role of housewife, which is fulfilled by the fact that the woman maintains the household and the family, made women prisoners. Friedan calls on women to reject the imposed role of a happy and tame housewife and to move from the family to the public sphere. Women should work actively to achieve career success, as well as to constantly fight for social and political gender equality. This book, which has sold over three million copies, made Friedan a spokesperson for the women's movement, so she co-founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) and become its first president, and later formed the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, as well as the National Women's Political Caucus.

American sociologist Cynthia Fuchs Epstein's first study Women's Place: Option and Limits on Professional Careers (1970), examines women's ability to pursue the most prestigious professions, with the greatest focus on the legal profession. The theoretical framework of this research was Merton's neo-functionalism. In the 1960s, the share of women in the labor force in the United States was significant, but they were pushed to occupations "appropriate" for women and were almost excluded from the most prestigious professions. Epstein concluded that men, who were leaders in prestigious professions, were very openly opposed to the inclusion of women in those professions. In addition, there were very limited quotas for women's enrollment in medical and law schools. Discrimination continued for women who managed to graduate from college, because the men who decided on employment, both in private companies and in state institutions, refused to hire women.

In a later study on African-American women in prestigious professions, Epstein found that female respondents who did not work in government institutions were able to find employment and advance in private companies because some employers wanted to fill officially required employment quotas for two minority groups (women and African-Americans). In a study of female lawyers who worked in large companies, which she conducted in the early 1990s, Epstein found that there were changes, but they still did not achieve equal status. Instead of actively opposing the employment of women and openly doubting the intellectual abilities of women, as was the case three decades earlier, women most often experienced a halt in their career advancement at the middle levels of the hierarchy. This kind of "glass ceiling", which is mostly reflected in the differences in salaries, was conditioned by the stereotype that states that female lawyers display different attitudes toward their clients.

Authors: Addams, Jane; Epstein, Fuchs Cynthia; Friedan, Betty; Gilman, Carol. Anthony, B. Susan; Beard, Ritter Mary; Mill, Stuart John; Murray, Sargent Judith; Nussbaum, Martha; Schreiner, Olive; Steinem, Gloria; Taylor, Harriet; Tubman, Harriet; Walker, Rebecca; Wolf, Naomi; Wollstonecraft, Mary; Wright, Frances.

Books:

Addams. Democracy and the Social Ethics (1902);

- Newer Ideals of Peace (1907);

- The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1909);

- A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil (1912);

- The Women at the Hague (1915);

- Peace and Bread in Time of War (1922);

Epstein. Women's Place: Option and Limits on Professional Careers (1970);

- The Other Half: Roads to Women's Equality (1971);

- Women in Law (1981);

- Deceptive Distinctions: Sex, Gender and the Social Order (1988);

- Part-time Paradox: Time Norms, Professional Life, Family and Gender (1999);