Hello hello! This is Zabeth bringing you another blog this week (named after my favorite movie), feminism has always been a sort of controversial opinion and especially so when it comes to branches of feminism such as pseudo feminism. Feminism, with its premise of wanting equality for both genders should be a positive thing right? Well today we’re taking a look at the history and different branches and definitions of feminism. Disclaimer, I write these posts with no ill intent. Just here to share an opinion and facts I’ve searched up about the topic itself. Without further ado, Enjoy Reading!~

A Detailed Analysis on Feminism

Feminism is somewhat of a controversial topic to discuss today, with many people both supporting and opposing the way that modern feminism works. But it seems that many modern feminists, who I believe are the cause for such a bad outlook on feminism as a whole, have seem to have forgotten what feminism aims to achieve.

To give a brief definition:

Feminism, the belief in social, economic, and political equality of the sexes. Although largely originating in the West, feminism is manifested worldwide and is represented by various institutions committed to activity on behalf of women’s rights and interests.

With that in mind, let’s try and see the history of feminism itself and seeing where it all began leading up to what it is now. 

History of Feminism

There is scant evidence of early organized protest against such circumscribed status. In the 3rd century BC , Roman women filled the Capitoline Hill and blocked every entrance to the Forum when consul Marcus Porcius Cato resisted attempts to repeal laws limiting women’s use of expensive goods. “If they are victorious now, what will they not attempt?” Cato cried. “As soon as they begin to be your equals, they will have become your superiors.”

That rebellion proved exceptional, however. For most of recorded history, only isolated voices spoke out against the inferior status of women, presaging the arguments to come. In late 14th- and early 15th-century France, the first feminist philosopher, Christine de Pisan, challenged prevailing attitudes toward women with a bold call for female education. Her mantle was taken up later in the century by Laura Cereta, a 15th-century Venetian woman who published Epistolae familiares (1488; “Personal Letters”; Eng. trans. Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist), a volume of letters dealing with a panoply of women’s complaints, from denial of education and marital oppression to the frivolity of women’s attire.

The defense of women had become a literary subgenre by the end of the 16th century, while the emerging feminists produced long lists of women of courage and accomplishment and proclaimed that women would be the intellectual equals of men if they were given equal access to education.

The so-called “debate about women” did not reach England until the late 16th century, when pamphleteers and polemicists joined battle over the true nature of womanhood.

Influence of the Enlightenment (Renaissance)

The feminist voices of the Renaissance never coalesced into a coherent philosophy or movement. This happened only with the Enlightenment, when women began to demand that the new reformist rhetoric about liberty, equality, and natural rights be applied to both sexes.

Initially, Enlightenment philosophers focused on the inequities of social class and caste to the exclusion of gender. Swiss-born French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example, portrayed women as silly and frivolous creatures, born to be subordinate to men. In addition, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which defined French citizenship after the revolution of 1789, pointedly failed to address the legal status of women.

Female intellectuals of the Enlightenment were quick to point out this lack of inclusivity and the limited scope of reformist rhetoric. Olympe de Gouges, a noted playwright, published Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne (1791; “Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the [Female] Citizen”), declaring women to be not only man’s equal but his partner. The following year Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the seminal English-language feminist work, was published in England. Challenging the notion that women exist only to please men, she proposed that women and men be given equal opportunities in education, work, and politics. Women, she wrote, are as naturally rational as men. If they are silly, it is only because society trains them to be irrelevant.

The Age of Enlightenment turned into an era of political ferment marked by revolutions in France, Germany, and Italy and the rise of abolitionism. In the United States, feminist activism took root when female abolitionists sought to apply the concepts of freedom and equality to their own social and political situations.

By the mid-19th century, issues surrounding feminism had added to the tumult of social change, with ideas being exchanged across Europe and North America.In the first feminist article she dared sign with her own name, Louise Otto, a German, built on the work of Charles Fourier, a French social theorist, quoting his dictum that “by the position which women hold in a land, you can see whether the air of a state is thick with dirty fog or free and clear.” And after Parisian feminists began publishing a daily newspaper entitled La Voix des femmes (“The Voice of Women”) in 1848, Luise Dittmar, a German writer, followed suit one year later with her journal, Soziale Reform.

First And Second Waves Of Feminism

First Wave

At the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, abolitionists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott boldly proclaimed in their now-famous Declaration of Sentiments that “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal.” Controversially, the feminists demanded “their sacred right to the elective franchise,” or the right to vote. Many attendees thought voting rights for women were beyond the pale, but were swayed when Frederick Douglass argued that he could not accept the right to vote as a black man if women could not also claim that right. When the resolution passed, the women’s suffrage movement began in earnest, and dominated much of feminism for several decades.

The 19th Amendment: Women’s Right to Vote

Slowly, suffragettes began to claim some successes: In 1893, New Zealand became the first sovereign state giving women the right to vote, followed by Australia in 1902 and Finland in 1906. In a limited victory, the United Kingdom granted suffrage to women over 30 in 1918.

Second Wave 

But cultural obstacles remained, and with the 1963 publication of The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan—who later co-founded the National Organization for Women—argued that women were still relegated to unfulfilling roles in homemaking and child care. By this time, many people had started referring to feminism as “women’s liberation.” In 1971, feminist Gloria Steinem joined Betty Friedan and Bella Abzug in founding the National Women’s Political Caucus. Steinem’s Ms. Magazine became the first magazine to feature feminism as a subject on its cover in 1976.

The Equal Rights Amendment, which sought legal equality for women and banned discrimination on the basis of sex, was passed by Congress in 1972 (but, following a conservative backlash, was never ratified by enough states to become law). One year later, feminists celebrated the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling that guaranteed a woman’s right to choose an abortion.

Third Wave 

Critics have argued that the benefits of the feminist movement, especially the second wave, are largely limited to white, college-educated women, and that feminism has failed to address the concerns of women of color, lesbians, immigrants and religious minorities. Even in the 19th century, Sojourner Truth lamented racial distinctions in women’s status by demanding “Ain’t I a Woman?” in her stirring speech before the 1851 Ohio Women's Rights Convention:

“And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have plowed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne 13 children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?”

Feminism Today (Or Pseudo Feminism)

I see many girls’ Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and Whatsapp stories claiming to be feminists and hardly any of them know what actually being a feminist is and they end up being a pseudofeminist.

A pseudo feminist desire is to fabricate a world regime by just women whereas a feminist only wants to get treated equally and wants respect like any other human being.

Feminism advocates EQUALITY. It basically demands an equally leveled ground in the society, where men and women realize their rights and have equal access to opportunities. Feminism is not misandry; it’s not about hating all men or saying that women are better than men. Feminists don’t want to control the world or put men down.

Women, historically, have faced many barriers, been discriminated against and in some parts, have also faced religious persecution based on their gender. Feminists across the world work to empower women, remove gender biases, ensure they get equal rights and strive for their social integration. So basically, anyone who believes in equality for all can be a Feminist.

However, as against the actual meaning of equality, lately, the word feminism has been misrepresented as misandry and female superiority. In fact, even most of the women do not know what feminism really means, the most problematic of them being the privileged ones who misinterpret it and are vocal about it.

Many self-proclaimed “feminists”, especially on social media go around unnecessarily disrespecting men, abusing them, claiming to be superior to men and doing things that are morally wrong for any human, expecting to get away with it under the pretext of Feminism.

This isn’t feminism. They are not demanding equality. They think of themselves as a superior race by undermining and insulting men. This is where you draw the line between FEMINISM and PSEUDO FEMINISM.

A pseudo feminist would bash a man for shaming her on her body type, for abusing or hitting a woman, and would call him sexist if he discriminates with them on any grounds. On the contrary, if a woman shames a man for his body, his color, hits him or abuses him, these same set of people would post those videos saying, “YOU GO GIRL!!!”, “More power to you!”, or just laugh over it and ignore it like it’s nothing. This is where Pseudo Feminism blends with Hypocrisy. Shaming, abusing, any kind of violence or discrimination are undoubtedly wrong. But two wrongs don’t make a right. If it is wrong for men to do it, it is wrong for women all the same. This selective morality is not feminism.

Creating an equal society, free of discrimination and prejudice, free of hatred between genders, where everyone shares a common goal and gets equal opportunities in education and employment is feminism.

Portraying ALL men as evil, playing the victim card when people don’t accept your superiority, unnecessarily tagging people, things, organizations, languages (!) as sexist without really understanding the term and context is Pseudo Feminism.

For example, a few days back I was reading somewhere that a girl in a bus calling herself a feminist didn't give a seat to a 70 year old man who was sick. If this is what they called feminism then I’m surely not a feminist but thankfully it's not the definition.

Another vicious quote on social media that I came across where the girl captioned her picture, “all men are trash, now they dont give us butterflies, they are giving headaches only”.

Okay! Maybe the men in her life who caused her trauma definitely deserve a punishment but why should we generalize and put all the men in one bracket. I saw many girls, most of them minor, captioning their pictures with words like, “surrender because you are men and I’m a feminist”, like seriously what’s that supposed to mean.

There are so many other incidents that we come across daily but the point here is pseudofeminism is all about female supremacy and hatred for men. It's not about equality but revenge for the atrocities and the dominance and the abuse faced by the women at the hands of some petty men, not all of them.

Due to these pseudo feminists and feminazis, the women who need help or support too don’t get the required support. And what we did without acknowledging the whole matter, we again shared the incident on our social media as shameful and disgrace and such thinking is only going to make our society hollow.

As much as traditional feminism is still present and being advocated for in today’s age, most of the world views feminism as what has been described up until now to simply be hate towards men and female supremacy. With the lack of a proper knowledge in what’s and why’s of what feminism is, many of the girls who do try to advocate for it end up just tipping the scales to favor their own sex which disengages the true meaning of what it is.

Of course Pseudo Feminism isn’t the only branch of feminism there is.

Liberal Feminism, Radical Feminism, Gender Critical Feminism

Despite the many branches here are some that most often get confused by:

Liberalism is concerned with the individual and personal liberties, liberal feminism is related concerns within feminism e.g. individual rights to vote, rights of bodily autonomy of the person including reproductive rights, rights to earn personal income and pursue ownership of property so the association with career women.

Radical feminism takes the meaning of radical that is to get to the ‘root’ of something. So radical feminism is concerned with more structural or systemic approaches to feminist change, that challenge the ‘root’ problem of a patriarchal order. Hence their concern with seeing women as a political group, united by patriarchal oppression, which they desire to change through often grassroots action. That is why radical feminists have played such a large role in the creation of women's networks on issues ranging from domestic violence shelters [to challenge patriarchy of wife battering] and the arts [to change the ‘male gaze’ in visual arts]

Gender Critical feminism isn’t a branch of feminism at all.

All feminism is gender critical, because they all address the existing gender norms of sexist expectations for women, at the absolute minimum. All usually acknowledge other aspects of conventional gender such as toxic masculinity. socializing children into rigid binary gender roles too.

Gender Critical has become used to mean those radical feminists who question or reject some transgender politics, but even this is a bit odd, as all radical feminism is strongly questioning traditional gender roles for all genders . Until very recently, radical feminism was the feminism MOST likely to put forward quite a lot of the same ideas that transgender politics does, such as rejecting all binary gender expectations.

The main difference is that that radical feminism proposes resolving rigid binary gender norms by rejecting the idea of gender entirely, while transgender politics has lately focussed on both the rights to transition gender and be recognized in the gender transitioned to, as well as widening the range of genders to include non-binary, genderfluid options.

Leading to radical feminists arguing for treating people of all genders as just people, making gender redundant, and continuing to acknowledge the sexes as political classes, but only as much as needed to address inequality in areas like sexual health or sexual equality where.

Gender Critical is sometimes used to mean those radical feminists who refuse to consider transgender identities as valid at all, but many radical feminists do accept transgender identities, they just think too much emphasis is placed on adding more genders, rather than challenging sexist gender norms and questioning how useful gender is as a form of identification at all.

With all that said and done, I have one question for myself throughout this:

What are your views about "feminism" today?

I am a feminist. Not ashamed to say it despite what many others might think. Speaking as a feminist however, I have noticed in a lot of the debates, talks, podcasts, and even news articles that come up about feminism don’t typically discuss the main point of it at all. Modern Feminism is about being able to have that equality with men, all genders having equal opportunities in all aspects of life (despite how we have barely reached a point where equal opportunities are yet a constant event) and with what I mentioned earlier, most of the views on feminism today have mostly been the views on the actions of Pseudo Feminists that have plagued the minds of not only grown women but also kids who (I believe) want to be able to advocate for that same equality but are presenting it in a way that only derogates the view of the world on feminism even further.

As much as there are bad things about feminism with the way we are all divided with our different views and perspectives (which is valid! Not all of us have lived the same lives to be able to be a feminist according to the exact definition and we are not required to be an active advocate for it) that doesn’t mean that feminism lacks good parts about it too. Despite how many of us we’re seen as inane and unreasonable, how to some it’s even childish to be an advocate for such a movement, to me it’s important regardless.

My only issue with feminism today is that many have the wrong idea about it, others may or may not be aware about it, but nonetheless it’s what I personally disagree with. 

Thank you so much for reading this far into the blog! This is my longest blog to date with the word count pinned in the comments below but this blog really gave me the opportunity to (hopefully) educate others with how feminism began and the different branches of it. Sometime in the future I might do a blog regarding specifically modern feminism and traditional feminism itself but that’s for another week. If you have your own answer to this question above or wish to add/correct me on some of the information given then I suggest leaving a comment below, I’m always open to new ideas and criticisms so don’t be shy. Once again thank you for reading and,

With matsalab,

Zabeth