introduction to gender studies

HistoryBasic terms and issues

concept of the autonomous, sovereign individual

women: excluded

Bluestockings

Rebecca West (1892-1983): "People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that  differentiate me from a doormat "

“By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during marriage, or at least incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection and cover, she performs every thing; and is therefore called in our law-french fem-couvert.”

“A woman’s preaching is like a dog walking on its hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it at all.”

if a woman happened to have “any learning, [she should] keep it a profound secret, especially from the men.”

novels helped “render women more artificial and weak characters than they would otherwise have been.”

novels inspire in girls “false notions and hopes, teach them affectation, and shake their principles by presenting love as irresistible, love at first sight.”

“Soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness ... those beings who are only the objects of pity ... will soon become objects of contempt.”

“the cultivation of understanding is always subordinate to the acquirement of some corporeal accomplishment”; “sensibility is nurtured at the expense of understanding”

“Man does, woman is”

“Man for the field and woman for the hearth;

Man for the sword and for the needle she;

Man with the head and woman with the heart

Man to command and woman to obey

All else confusion.”

Middle-class, charity, extension of home duties to the public

Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)

Jeremy Bentham: Plan of Parliamentary Reform in the Form of Catechism (1817)

William Thompson/Anns Wheeler: An Appeal of One Half of the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men (1825)

Nightingale: The woman with the lamp; Crimean war Florence

Barbara Bodichon: Objections to the Enfranchisement of Women Considered (1866)

Josephine E. Butler: The Education and Employment of Women (1868)

Francis Power Cobbe: Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors (1869)

John Stuart Mill: The Subjection of Women (1869)

Barbara Bodichon: Reasons for and against the Enfranchisement of Women (1872)

mid-19th-c.: London College, Queen’s College

less prestigious universities admitted women and granted degrees

most resistant: Oxford and Cambridge

women’s colleges (Oxford: Somerville, St. Catherine’s; Cambridge: Newnham and Girton),

But: no degrees

excluded from the most prestigious (medical and legal) professions.

1891: right to inherit from their husbands (cf.: Austen)

1893: allowed to manage their own property completely free of the husband

1907: complete control of their wages

Divorce: 1857: Matrimonial Cause Bill: on different grounds, but even a woman could initiate a divorce

1884: awarded financial maintenance to the successful petitioner

1923: set the same grounds of divorce for both sexes

1918 : suffrage (right to vote); but: women householders or wives of male householders over 30 (men: 21)

1928: on the same grounds as men

“Nature’s darling woman is a stay-at-home woman, a woman who wants to be a good wife and a good mother, and cares very little for anything else.” (Henry A. Jones, The Case of Rebellious Susan, 1894)

by 1900 women had become “free both in their persons and their properties, their money and their consciences, their bodies and their souls.”

the suffragists: Henry and Millicent Fawcett’s National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS; 1897)

the suffragettes, Emmeline Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU;1903)

1870–1914: number of women clerks multiplied 20 times — male fear of job competition

1914: basic legal rights to join education fully, and to enter the professions—formal legal barriers removed — but not practice yet (cultural conditioning: semi-professions: nurses, librarians — and temporary work)

50% increase in working women; 700,000 women replaced men directly in the labour market

“war girls”

1918: Marie Stopes: Married Love, a book offering contraceptive advice

1921: birth-control clinic

agitation for communal childcare centres

Companionate marriage;

Dora Russell (Bertrand Russell’s wife): “sex, even without marriage and without children … is a thing of dignity, beauty and delight.”

sacking of women; marriage bar, unequal pay (47% of men’s pay)

1920: Oxford grants degrees to women

1923: women teachers banned from employment if married; general tendency: withdrawal of women from the labour market

“feminism’s awkward age,” a push towards domesticity in the 20s and 30s

“tranquillised 50s”

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European/Continental Related to the socialist movements

(internationals) Primary issue: class equality – women’s

rights: „side effect” (corollary effect) International women’s day

◦ Not about flowers◦ Clara Zetkin: 2nd International Women’s

Congress, Copenhagen◦ 8 March: from 1913 on◦ in memory of female textile workers’

demonstration in New York for equal pay in 1857

essentialism -- social constructionism

Simone de Beauvoir: “One is not born, but becomes a woman.”

One/the Other

Subject/the Inessential

The Absolute/ the relative being

Betty Friedan: The Feminine Mystique

The problem that has no name

The most comfortable concentration camp

Against latent discrimination Cultural-political Theoretical Institutionalisation Gender mainstreaming Rethinking of the private and the public Gender: concept valid in all walks of life Right to one’s bodies (against violence against

women) Feminisms: theoretically, thematically,

politically Target groups: multiplication, intersections

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State socialist countries: forced emancipation – the burden of the past in the ex-Eastern block

Woman’s double workload (full-time work + housework)

Lack of restructuring the private Discrimination in the public (often: token

women) Claim: feminism: no longer needed (problems

solved; „western” feminism: ridiculed, frowned upon); whereas: women: „used”

After the political changes: conservative turn//emergence of second-wave feminism in the post-socialist countries too

Problem: confluence of various tendencies, including backlash (argument: feminism is outdated)

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Thank you for your attention!