feminist theory essay prompts

291 Feminism Topics

Much has been written about feminism, yet there always are good feminism essay topics and issues to debate about. Here, we invite you to delve into this movement advocating for gender equality, women’s rights, and the dismantling of patriarchal norms. With our feminist topics, you can encompass a wide range of perspectives and theories that challenge systemic discrimination and promote social change.

277 Feminism Topics & Women’s Rights Essay Topics

18 January 2024

last updated

Feminism topics encompass a comprehensive range of themes centered on advocating for gender equality. These themes critically address the social, political, and economic injustices primarily faced by females, aiming to dismantle patriarchal norms. Feminism topics may span from intersectional feminism, which underscores the diverse experiences of women across various intersections of race, class, and sexuality, to reproductive rights that advocate for women’s bodily autonomy and healthcare accessibility. They also involve the examination of workplace discrimination through concepts, such as the gender wage gap and the glass ceiling. Violence against women, including work and domestic abuse, sexual assault, and harassment, is a hot aspect, providing many discussions. In turn, one may explore the representation of women in media, politics, and STEM fields. Explorations of gender roles, gender identity, and the significance of male feminism are integral parts of these discussions. As society continues to evolve, feminism topics persistently adapt to confront and address emerging forms of gender inequality.

Best Feminism & Women’s Rights Topics

Achievements of Women in Politics: A Global Perspective
Emphasizing Gender Equality in the 21st-Century Workplace
Evolving Representation of Women in Media
Fight for Women’s Voting Rights: The Historical Analysis
Intersectionality: Examining its Role in Feminism
Unpacking Feminism in Third-World Countries
Dissecting Misogyny in Classical Literature
Influence of Religion on Women’s Rights Worldwide
Unveiling Bias in STEM Fields: Female Experiences
Gender Pay Gap: Global Comparisons and Solutions
Probing the Historical Evolution of Feminism
Reshaping Beauty Standards Through Feminist Discourse
Importance of Reproductive Rights in Women’s Health
Exploring Women’s Role in Environmental Activism
Glass Ceiling Phenomenon: Women in Corporate Leadership
Trans Women’s Struggles in Feminist Movements
Empowering Girls: The Role of Education
Intersection of Race, Class, and Feminism
Effects of Feminism on Modern Art
Impacts of Social Media on Women’s Rights Movements
Deconstructing Patriarchy in Traditional Societies
Single Mothers’ Challenges: A Feminist Perspective
Dynamics of Feminism in Post-Colonial Societies
Queer Women’s Struggles for Recognition and Rights
Women’s Contributions to Scientific Discovery: An Underrated History
Cybersecurity: Ensuring Women’s Safety in the Digital Age
Exploring the Misrepresentation of Feminism in Popular Culture
Repositioning Sexuality: The Role of Feminism in Health Discourse
Women’s Economic Empowerment: The Impact of Microfinance
Investigating Sexism in Video Gaming Industry
Female Leadership During Global Crises: Case Studies

Feminism Topics & Women’s Rights Essay Topics

Easy Feminism & Women’s Rights Topics

Power of Women’s Protest: A Historical Study
Feminist Movements’ Role in Shaping Public Policy
Body Autonomy: A Key Aspect of Feminist Ideology
Cyber Feminism: Women’s Rights in Digital Spaces
Violence Against Women: International Legal Measures
Feminist Pedagogy: Its Impact on Education
Depiction of Women in Graphic Novels: A Feminist Lens
Comparing Western and Eastern Feminist Movements
Men’s Roles in Supporting Feminist Movements
Impacts of Feminism on Marriage Institutions
Rural Women’s Rights: Challenges and Progress
Understanding Feminist Waves: From First to Fourth
Inclusion of Women in Peace Negotiation Processes
Influence of Feminism on Modern Advertising
Indigenous Women’s Movements and Rights
Reclaiming Public Spaces: Women’s Safety Concerns
Roles of Feminist Literature in Social Change
Women in Sports: Overcoming Stereotypes and Bias
Feminism in the Context of Refugee Rights
Media’s Roles in Shaping Feminist Narratives
Women’s Rights in Prisons: An Overlooked Issue
Motherhood Myths: A Feminist Examination
Subverting the Male Gaze in Film and Television
Feminist Critique of Traditional Masculinity Norms
Rise of Female Entrepreneurship: A Feminist View
Young Feminists: Shaping the Future of Women’s Rights

Interesting Feminism & Women’s Rights Topics

Roles of Feminism in Promoting Mental Health Awareness
Aging and Women’s Rights: An Overlooked Dimension
Feminist Perspectives on Climate Change Impacts
Women’s Rights in Military Service: Progress and Challenges
Achieving Gender Parity in Academic Publishing
Feminist Jurisprudence: Its Impact on Legal Structures
Masculinity in Crisis: Understanding the Feminist Perspective
Fashion Industry’s Evolution through Feminist Ideals
Unheard Stories: Women in the Global Space Race
Effects of Migration on Women’s Rights and Opportunities
Women’s Land Rights: A Global Issue
Intersection of Feminism and Disability Rights
Portrayal of Women in Science Fiction: A Feminist Review
Analyzing Post-Feminism: Its Origins and Implications
Cyberbullying and Its Impact on Women: Measures for Protection
Unveiling Gender Bias in Artificial Intelligence
Reimagining Domestic Work Through the Lens of Feminism
Black Women’s Hair Politics: A Feminist Perspective
Feminist Ethical Considerations in Biomedical Research
Promoting Gender Sensitivity in Children’s Literature
Understanding the Phenomenon of Toxic Femininity
Reconsidering Women’s Rights in the Context of Climate Migration
Advancing Women’s Participation in Political Activism

Feminism Argumentative Essay Topics

Intersectionality’s Impact on Modern Feminism
Evolution of Feminist Thought: From First-Wave to Fourth-Wave
Gender Wage Gap: Myths and Realities
Workplace Discrimination: Tackling Unconscious Bias
Feminist Theory’s Influence on Contemporary Art
Intersection of Feminism and Environmental Activism
Men’s Roles in the Feminist Movement
Objectification in Media: A Feminist Perspective
Misconceptions about Feminism: Addressing Stereotypes
Feminism in the Classroom: The Role of Education
Feminist Analysis of Reproductive Rights Policies
Transgender Rights: An Extension of Feminism
Intersection of Feminism and Racial Justice
Body Shaming Culture: A Feminist Viewpoint
Feminism’s Influence on Modern Advertising
Patriarchy and Religion: A Feminist Critique
Domestic Labor: Feminist Perspectives on Unpaid Work
Sexism in Sports: The Need for Feminist Intervention
The MeToo Movement’s Influence on Modern Feminism
Feminism and the Fight for Equal Representation in Politics
Women’s Rights in the Digital Age: A Feminist Examination
Feminist Critique of Traditional Beauty Standards
Globalization and Its Effects on Women’s Rights
The Role of Feminism in LGBTQ+ Rights Advocacy
Popular Culture and Its Reflection on Feminist Values

Controversial Feminist Research Paper Topics

Intersectionality in Modern Feminist Movements: An Analysis
Representation of Women in High-Powered Political Roles
Cultural Appropriation Within the Feminist Movement: An Inquiry
The Role of Feminism in Defining Beauty Standards
Women’s Reproductive Rights: A Debate of Autonomy
Feminism and Religion: The Question of Compatibility
Male Allies in the Feminist Movement: An Evaluation
Shift in Traditional Gender Roles: Feminist Perspective
Impacts of Media on Perceptions of Feminism
Dissecting the Wage Gap: A Feminist Examination
Menstrual Equity: A Battle for Feminist Activists
Feminism in Popular Music: Power or Appropriation?
Climate Change: The Unseen Feminist Issue
Education’s Role in Shaping Feminist Beliefs
Power Dynamics in the Workplace: A Feminist Scrutiny
Cyber-Feminism: Harnessing Digital Spaces for Activism
Healthcare Disparities Faced by Women: An Analysis
Transgender Women in Feminist Discourse: An Exploration
Feminist Perspectives on Monogamy and Polyamory
Feminist Analysis of Modern Advertising Campaigns
Exploring Sexism in the Film Industry through a Feminist Lens
Debunking Myths Surrounding the Feminist Movement
Childcare Responsibilities and Their Feminist Implications
Women’s Sports: Evaluating Equity and Feminist Advocacy

Feminist Research Paper Topics in Feminism Studies

Evaluating Feminist Theories: From Radical to Liberal
Women’s Health Care: Policies and Disparities
Maternal Mortality: A Global Women’s Rights Issue
Uncovering Sexism in the Tech Industry
Critique of Binary Gender Roles in Children’s Toys
Body Positivity Movement’s Influence on Feminism
Relevance of Feminism in the Fight Against Human Trafficking
Women in Coding: Breaking Stereotypes
The Role of Women in Sustainable Agriculture
Feminism in the Cosmetics Industry: A Dual-Edged Sword
The Influence of Feminism on Modern Architecture
Bridging the Gap: Women in Higher Education Leadership
The Role of Feminism in Advancing LGBTQ+ Rights
Menstrual Equity: A Key Women’s Rights Issue
Women in Classical Music: Breaking Barriers
Analyzing Gendered Language: A Feminist Approach
Women’s Rights and Humanitarian Aid: The Interconnection
Exploring the Role of Women in Graphic Design
Addressing the Lack of Women in Venture Capitalism
Impact of Feminism on Urban Planning and Design
Maternal Labor in the Informal Economy: A Feminist Analysis
Feminism’s Influence on Modern Dance Forms
Exploring the Role of Women in the Renewable Energy Sector
Women in Esports: An Emerging Frontier
Child Marriage: A Grave Violation of Women’s Rights

Feminist Topics for Discussion

Feminist Criticism of the Fashion Modelling Industry
Domestic Violence: Feminist Legal Responses
Analyzing the Success of Women-Only Workspaces
Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting: A Human Rights Issue
Women’s Role in the Evolution of Cryptocurrency
Women and the Right to Water: A Feminist Perspective
Gender Stereotypes in Comedy: A Feminist View
Intersection of Animal Rights and Feminist Theory
Roles of Feminism in the Fight Against Child Labor
Representation of Women in Folklore and Mythology
Women’s Rights in the Gig Economy: Issues and Solutions
Revisiting Feminism in Post-Soviet Countries
Women in the Space Industry: Present Status and Future Trends
The Influence of Feminism on Culinary Arts
Unraveling the Impact of Fast Fashion on Women Workers
Feminist Perspectives on Genetic Engineering and Reproduction
Assessing the Progress of Women’s Financial Literacy
Sex Work and Feminism: A Controversial Discourse
Women in Cybernetics: An Untapped Potential
Uncovering the Women Behind Major Historical Events
The Impact of the #MeToo Movement Globally
Women’s Rights in the Cannabis Industry: Challenges and Progress
Redefining Motherhood: The Intersection of Feminism and Adoption
Roles of Feminist Movements in Combatting Child Abuse

Women’s Rights Essay Topics for Feminism

Evolution of Women’s Rights in the 20th Century
Roles of Women in World War II: Catalyst for Change
Suffrage Movement: Driving Force Behind Women’s Empowerment
Cultural Differences in Women’s Rights: A Comparative Study
Feminist Movements and Their Global Impact
Women’s Rights in Islamic Societies: Perceptions and Realities
Glass Ceiling Phenomenon: Analysis and Impacts
Pioneering Women in Science: Trailblazers for Equality
Impacts of Media Portrayal on Women’s Rights
Economic Autonomy for Women: Pathway to Empowerment
Women’s Rights in Education: Global Perspective
Gender Equality in Politics: Global Progress
Intersectionality and Women’s Rights: Race, Class, and Gender
Legal Milestones in Women’s Rights History
Inequities in Healthcare: A Women’s Rights Issue
Modern-Day Slavery: Women and Human Trafficking
Climate Change: A Unique Threat to Women’s Rights
Body Autonomy and Reproductive Rights: A Feminist Analysis
Globalization’s Effect on Women’s Rights: Opportunities and Threats
Gender Violence: An Erosion of Women’s Rights
Indigenous Women’s Rights: Struggles and Triumphs
Women’s Rights Activists: Unsung Heroes of History
Empowerment Through Sports: Women’s Struggle and Success
Balancing Act: Motherhood and Career in the 21st Century
LGBTQ+ Women: Rights and Recognition in Different Societies

Women’s Rights Research Questions

Evolution of Feminism: How Has the Movement Shifted Over Time?
The Workplace and Gender Equality: How Effective Are Current Measures?
Intersectionality’s Influence: How Does It Shape Women’s Rights Advocacy?
Reproductive Rights: What Is the Global Impact on Women’s Health?
Media Representation: Does It Affect Women’s Rights Perception?
Gender Stereotypes: How Do They Impede Women’s Empowerment?
Global Disparities: Why Do Women’s Rights Vary So Widely?
Maternal Mortality: How Does It Reflect on Women’s Healthcare Rights?
Education for Girls: How Does It Contribute to Gender Equality?
Cultural Norms: How Do They Influence Women’s Rights?
Leadership Roles: Are Women Adequately Represented in Positions of Power?
Domestic Violence Laws: Are They Sufficient to Protect Women’s Rights?
Roles of Technology: How Does It Impact Women’s Rights?
Sexual Harassment Policies: How Effective Are They in Protecting Women?
Pay Equity: How Can It Be Ensured for Women Globally?
Politics and Gender: How Does Women’s Representation Shape Policy-Making?
Child Marriage: How Does It Violate Girls’ Rights?
Climate Change: How Does It Disproportionately Affect Women?
Trafficking Scourge: How Can Women’s Rights Combat This Issue?
Female Genital Mutilation: How Does It Contradict Women’s Rights?
Armed Conflicts: How Do They Impact Women’s Rights?
Body Autonomy: How Can It Be Safeguarded for Women?
Women’s Suffrage: How Did It Pave the Way for Modern Women’s Rights?
Men’s Role: How Can They Contribute to Women’s Rights Advocacy?
Legal Frameworks: How Do They Support or Hinder Women’s Rights?

History of Women’s Rights Topics

Emergence of Feminism in the 19th Century
Roles of Women in the Abolitionist Movement
Suffragette Movements: Triumphs and Challenges
Eleanor Roosevelt and Her Advocacy for Women’s Rights
Impacts of World War II on Women’s Liberation
Radical Feminism in the 1960s and 1970s
Pioneering Women in Politics: The First Female Senators
Inception of the Equal Rights Amendment
Revolutionary Women’s Health Activism
Struggle for Reproductive Freedom: Roe vs. Wade
Birth of the Women’s Liberation Movement
Challenges Women Faced in the Civil Rights Movement
Women’s Roles in the Trade Union Movement
Intersectionality and Feminism: Examining the Role of Women of Color
How Did the Women’s Rights Movement Impact Education?
Sexuality, Identity, and Feminism: Stonewall Riots’ Impact
Influence of Religion on Women’s Rights Activism
Women’s Empowerment: The UN Conferences
Impact of Globalization on Women’s Rights
Women’s Movements in Non-Western Countries
Women in Space: The Fight for Equality in NASA
Achievements of Feminist Literature and Arts
Evolution of the Women’s Sports Movement
Advancement of Women’s Rights in the Digital Age
Cultural Shifts: The Media’s Role in Promoting Women’s Rights

Feminism Essay Topics on Women’s Issues

Career Challenges: The Gender Wage Gap in Contemporary Society
Examining Microfinance: An Empowering Tool for Women in Developing Countries
Pioneers of Change: The Role of Women in the Space Industry
Exploring Beauty Standards: An Analysis of Global Perspectives
Impacts of Legislation: Progress in Women’s Health Policies
Maternity Leave Policies: A Comparative Study of Different Countries
Resilience Through Struggles: The Plight of Female Refugees
Technology’s Influence: Addressing the Digital Gender Divide
Dissecting Stereotypes: Gender Roles in Children’s Media
Influence of Female Leaders: A Look at Political Empowerment
Social Media and Women: Effects on Mental Health
Understanding Intersectionality: The Complexity of Women’s Rights
Single Mothers: Balancing Parenthood and Economic Challenges
Gaining Ground in Sports: A Look at Female Athletes’ Struggles
Maternal Mortality: The Hidden Health Crisis
Reproductive Rights: Women’s Control Over Their Bodies
Feminism in Literature: Portrayal of Women in Classic Novels
Deconstructing Patriarchy: The Impact of Gender Inequality
Body Autonomy: The Battle for Abortion Rights
Women in STEM: Barriers and Breakthroughs
Female Soldiers: Their Role in Military Conflicts
Human Trafficking: The Disproportionate Impact on Women
Silent Victims: Domestic Violence and Women’s Health

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489 Feminism Essay Topics

Women make up half of the world’s population. How did it happen they were oppressed?

We are living in the era of the third wave of feminism, when women fight for equal rights in their professional and personal life. Public figures say that objectification and sexualization of women are not ok. Moreover, governments adopt laws that protect equal rights and possibilities for people of all genders, races, and physical abilities. Yes, it is also about feminism.

In this article, you will find 400+ feminism essay topics for students. Some raise the problems of feminism; others approach its merits. In addition, we have added a brief nuts-and-bolts course on the history and principal aspects of this social movement.

❗ Top 15 Feminism Essay Topics

💻 Feminism Research Topics
📜 History of Feminism Topics
🙋‍♀️ Topics on Feminism Movements

🔥 Famous Feminists Essay Topics

👩‍🎓 Topics on Women’s Rights in the World
👸 Antifeminism Essay Topics

📚 Topics on Feminism in Literature

🔗 references.

Compare and contrast liberal and radical feminism.
The problem of political representation of feminism.
Is Hillary Clinton the most prominent feminist?
How can feministic ideas improve our world?
What is the glass ceiling, and how does it hinder women from reaching top positions?
What can we do to combat domestic violence?
Unpaid domestic work: Voluntary slavery?
Why do women traditionally do social work?
What are the achievements of feminism?
Why is there no unity among the currents of feminism?
Pornographic content should be banned in a civilized society.
Does feminism threaten men?
What is intersectional feminism, and why is it the most comprehensive feminist movement?
Those who are not feminists are sexists.
Why are women the “second gender?”

💻 Feminism Research Topics & Areas

Feminism is the belief in the equality of the sexes in social, economic, and political spheres. This movement originated in the West, but it has become represented worldwide. Throughout human history, women have been confined to domestic labor. Meanwhile, public life has been men’s prerogative. Women were their husband’s property, like a house or a cow. Today this situation has vastly improved, but many problems remain unresolved.

A feminism research paper aims to analyze the existing problems of feminism through the example of famous personalities, literary works, historical events, and so on. Women’s rights essay topics dwell on one of the following issues:

Healthcare & Reproductive Rights of Women

Women should be able to decide whether they want to have children or not or whether they need an abortion or not. External pressure or disapprobation is unacceptable. In many countries, abortions are still illegal. It is a severe problem because the female population attempts abortions without medical assistance in unhygienic conditions.

Economic Rights of Women

Women’s job applications are often rejected because they are expected to become mothers and require maternity leave. Their work is underpaid on a gender basis. They are less likely to be promoted to managerial positions because of the so-called “ glass ceiling .” All these problems limit women’s economic rights.

Women’s Political Rights

Yes, women have voting rights in the majority of the world’s countries. Why isn’t that enough? Because they are still underrepresented in almost all the world’s governments. Only four countries have 50% of female parliamentarians. Laws are approved by men and for men.

Family & Parenting

The British Office for National Statistics has calculated that women spend 78% more time on childcare than men. They also perform most of the unpaid domestic work. Meanwhile, increasingly more mothers are employed or self-employed. It isn’t fair, is it?

Virginity is a myth. Still, women are encouraged to preserve it until a man decides to marry her. Any expression of female sexuality is criticized (or “ slut-shamed “). We live in the 21st century, but old fossilized prejudices persist.

📜 History of Feminism Essay Topics

First wave of feminism & earlier.

Ancient and medieval promoters of feminist ideas.
“Debate about women” in medieval literature and philosophy.
The emergence of feminism as an organized movement.
Enlightenment philosophers’ attitudes towards women.
The legal status of women in Renaissance.
Women’s Liberation Movement Evolution in the US.
Mary Wollstonecraft’s views on women’s rights.
Sociopolitical background of the suffrage movement.
The most prominent suffrage activists.
The Liberation Theme Concerning Women.
“Declaration of sentiments”: key points and drawbacks.
What was special about Sojourner Truth and her famous speech?
The significance of the first feminist convention in Seneca Falls.
The National Woman Suffrage Association: goals and tactics.
The influence of abolitionism on feminism ideas.
Why did some women prefer trade unions to feminism?
Radical feminists’ criticism of the suffrage movement.
The UK suffragists’ approach to gaining voting rights for women.
Alice Paul and Emmeline Pankhurst’s role in the suffrage movement.
The Nineteenth Amendment: the essence and significance.
Infighting in the post-suffrage era.

Second Wave of Feminism Essay Titles

How did second-wave feminism differ from the suffrage movement?
The roots of the second wave of feminism.
John Kennedy’s policies concerning women’s rights.
Eleanor Roosevelt’s contribution to feminism.
Debates on gender equality in the late 1960s.
Feminism activists’ achievements in 1960-1970.
What was the focus of second-wave feminist research?
Why was there no comprehensive feminist ideology?
Anarcho-, individualist, “Amazon,” and separatist feminism: key ideas.
The nature of liberal feminism.
How did liberal and radical feminism differ?
Why was cultural feminism also called “difference” feminism?
Liberal and Postmodernist Theories of Feminism.
What is the difference between liberal and radical feminism?
Black feminists’ challenges and input to the fight for equity.
Sociocultural differences in views on female liberation.
The globalization of feminism: positive and negative aspects.
Taliban’s oppression of Afghani women.
Women in the US Military: World War II.
What were the main concerns of feminists from developing countries?
Why did Third World women criticize Western feminists?
Feminism achievements to the end of the 20th century.

Third Wave of Feminism Research Topics

What was peculiar about the third wave of feminism?
Why did third-wave feminists consider their predecessors’ work unfinished?
Social, political, economic, and cultural premises of third-wave feminism.
How did the information revolution impact feminism?
Third Wave Foundation’s major goals.
Women’s Rights and Changes Over the 20th Century.
Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards’ views on feminism.
The impact of second wavers success on third-wave feminism.
New approaches in fighting discrimination, utilized by third-wave feminists.
The influence of the postmodern movement on feminism.
The concept of a gender continuum.
How did sexist symbols turn into female empowerment tools?
What was specific about third-wave feminist art?
Third-wavers’ redefinition of women as powerful and assertive figures.
“Girl power” in pop culture.
How did the Internet impact third-wave feminism?
Sexualized behavior: sexual liberation or oppression in disguise?
Why was third-wave feminism criticized?
The multifaceted nature of third-wave feminism.
Is multivocality a strength or weakness of third-wave feminism?
How did third wavers counter the criticism?

Fourth Wave of Feminism Essay Topics

The premises of fourth-wave feminism.
Feminism’s major goals after 2012.
Peculiarities of fourth-wave feminism.
What behavior is sexual harassment?
Gender Equality at the Heart of Development.
Sexual harassment: different gender-based perspectives.
Social media: a feminist tool.
Can social media deepen discrimination?
Gender discrimination in video games.
Musical Preferences: Race and Gender Influences.
GamerGate’s alleged “men’s rights campaign.”
Sexism in Donald Trump’s speech.
Women’s March: reasons and significance.
Main steps in MeToo’s development.
Tarana Burke’s fight for justice.
Gender Stereotypes of Superheroes.
MeToo’s contribution to women’s rights.
The most impactful MeToo stories.
Harvey Weinstein’s case: outcome’s implications.
Gender Roles in the Context of Religion.
Sexual harassment awareness after MeToo.
MeToo’s influence on Hollywood’s ethics.
Reasons for criticism of MeToo.
Social Change and the Environment.
Are sexual violence discussions necessary?

🙋‍ Argumentative Essay Topics on Feminism Movements

Mainstream feminism topics.

What is the focus of mainstream feminism?
Mainstream feminism predispositions in the 19th century.
The place of politics within mainstream feminism.
What is males’ place in mainstream feminism?
The correlation of mainstream feminism and social liberalism.
The correlation between mainstream feminism and state feminism.
Gender equality in the doctrine of mainstream feminism.
Why sunflower is the symbol of mainstream feminism?
Anthony Gidden’s ideas regarding liberal feminism.
Liberal feminism, according to Catherine Rottenberg.
Mary Wollstonecraft and her vision of liberal feminism.
Liberal feminism through John Stuart Mill’s perspective.
Interdependence of mainstream feminism and political liberalism.
NOW’s activities and mainstream feminism.
LWV’s activities and mainstream liberalism.
LGBT’s place in mainstream liberalism’s doctrine.
Discourse Analysis of the Me Too Movement’s Media Coverage.
Frances Wright’s role in establishing mainstream feminism.
Mainstream feminism and the civil rights movement in the 1960s.
Constitutional Equity Amendment and mainstream feminism.
International Woman Suffrage Alliance’s activities and mainstream feminism.
Mainstream feminism and Gina Krog’s works.
Betty Friedan’s understanding of mainstream feminism.
Gloria Steinem’s theoretical contribution to mainstream feminism.
Simone de Beauvoir’s ideas and the framework of mainstream feminism.
Rebecca Walker and her vision within the scope of mainstream feminism.
NWPC’s activities and mainstream feminism.
WEAL’s activities and mainstream feminism.
Catherine Mackinnon and mainstream feminism’s critique.
“White woman’s burden” and mainstream feminism’s critique.
The roots of mainstream feminism in Europe.

Radical Feminism Essay Titles

Society’s order according to radical feminism.
Sexual objectification and radical feminism.
Gender roles according to radical feminism.
Shulamith Firestone’s ideas regarding the feminist revolution.
Ti-Grace Atkinson’s ideas in Radical feminism.
The vision of radical feminism on patriarchy.
Radical feminism’s impact on the women’s liberation movement.
Radical feminism’s roots in the early 1960s.
Kathie Sarachild’s role in radical feminism movements.
Carol Hanisch’s contribution to radical feminism.
Roxanne Dunbar and her radical feminism.
Naomi Weisstein and her vision of radical feminism.
Judith Brown’s activities in terms of radical feminism.
UCLA Women’s Liberation Front role in radical feminism.
Why have women come to be viewed as the “other?”
Ellen Willis’s ideas regarding radical feminism.
Redstockings’ role in radical feminism.
The feminist’s role in radical feminism.
Differences between The Feminists’ and Restokings’ positions.
The protest against Miss America in 1968.
11-hour sit-in at the Ladies Home Journal headquarters.
Forms of direct action in radical feminism.
Protest of biased coverage of lesbians in 1972.
Lisa Tuttle’s vision of radical feminism.
Catharine MacKinnon’s position regarding pornography.
Peculiarities of radical lesbian feminism.
Recognition of trans women in radical feminism.
Radical feminism in the New Left.
Mary Daly’s vision of radical feminism.
Robin Morgan’s vision of radical feminism.

🎯 Persuasive Women’s Rights Essay Topics

Healthcare and reproductive rights of women.

Is abortion morally acceptable?
Why is the fight for child care not over?
Should government participate in birth control?
Researching of Maternity Care in Haiti.
Government’s moral right to cancel abortions.
Should the government allow abortions?
What are birth control and its meaning?
Abortion rights recently disappeared in the US.
Gender Disparity in Colorectal Cancer Screening.
Why are women’s rights becoming less vital?
Western world’s degradation in women’s rights issue.
Canceling abortion endangers women’s human rights.
Female access to healthcare in developing countries.
Developed countries’ role in improving women’s healthcare.
Media’s contribution to legalizing abortions.
Middle-Aged Women’s Health and Lifestyle Choices.
Female genital mutilation’s moral side.
Feminism’s impact on LGBTQ healthcare rights.
The reproductive rights of women are everyone’s problem.
Abortion rights’ impact on country’s economy.
Protection From Infringement and Discrimination.
Women’s reproductive rights in developing countries.
Abortion rights crisis and the UN’s failure in achieving SDG#4.
UN’s contribution to achieving equal healthcare rights.
IGO’s impact on women’s reproductive rights issue.
Report on the Speech by Gianna Jessen.
Is birth control already at risk?
Why should abortions not be allowed?
Meaning of reproductive justice.
Reproductive rights movement’s role in the country’s development.
Single Mothers, Poverty, and Mental Health Issues.
The reproductive rights movement, as all social movements’ drivers.
Abortion’s relation to healthcare rights.
Healthcare rights’ impact on a country’s economic development.
Political agenda behind abortion cancellation.
Feminism’s role in national healthcare.

Economic Rights, Salaries, and Access to Education for Women

Definition of women’s economic rights.
Female economic rights’ impact on the economy.
Female economic rights and education.
Gender Prevalence in Medical Roles.
Can women do “male jobs”?
Gender inequality in the workplace.
Women’s economic rights movements.
How Wealth Inequality Affects Democracy in America.
Barriers to gender-equal economic rights.
Gender inequality by social classes.
Female economic rights and poverty.
Can equal economic rights solve SDG#1?
Gender-Based Discrimination in the Workplace.
Why is it important to have equal access to education?
How did the gender pay gap appear?
Why does the gender pay gap exist?
Women’s economic rights and industrialization.
Characteristics of Mayo Clinic.
Female economic rights worldwide.
Legal rights of women workers.
Laws that protect women’s economic rights.
Women as leaders in the workplace.
The Future of Women at Work in the Age of Automation.
Why are companies against women workers?
Fertility’s impact on female economic rights.
Quiet revolution’s impact female workforce.
Reasons to monitor occupational dissimilarity index.
Women’s Roles in Islam, Christianity, and Hinduism.
Female economic rights in developing countries.
Democracy and female economic rights.
Gender pay gap as a global problem.
ILO’s role in the fight for equal economic rights?
Politics’ impact on female economic rights.
Health Disparities: Solving the Problem.
Female economic rights movement and the fight against racism.
The best practices in achieving gender-equal economic rights.
Democracy and gender pay gap.
Equal Pay for Work of Equal Value.

Women’s Political Rights Essay Topics

Women’s suffrage movement definition.
Female suffrage movement’s significance.
Causes of gender inequality in politics.
Women’s suffrage movement’s role today.
Female suffrage’s impact on democracy.
Women’s suffrage and economy.
Suffrage movement’s effect on politics in the US.
Do women need the right to vote?
Effects of gender inequality on politics.
Suffrage movement and politics in Britain.
Laws for gender-equal political rights.
The correlation between gender inequality in politics and authoritarianism.
The possible solutions to gender inequality in politics.
The role of IGOs in solving gender inequality in politics.
How has the UN participated in the women’s suffrage movement?
What is women’s role in politics in developing countries?
How can women improve politics in their countries?
What can men do for women’s equal political rights?
Why equal rights to vote are everyone’s problem?
The impact of Antoinette Louisa Brown on women’s suffrage.
The effect of equal rights to education on equal political rights.
Are western policies for equal rights applicable in developing countries?
The importance of equal rights to vote.
How to eliminate the gender pay gap?
Why had women not had equal rights in politics?
Is politics a “male job”?
Benefits of appearance of female leaders in politics.
Who created the women’s suffrage movement?
How does women’s suffrage impact racism?
Women’s suffrage contribution to LGBTQ communities’ equal political rights.

Family and Parenting Research Titles

Female and male roles in a family.
Sexism in families.
Eliminating sexism in families is the best solution to gender inequality.
Why is feminism a pro-family movement?
The Childbirth Process in Women’s Experiences.
The benefits of feminist upbringing.
The causes of sexism in families.
How does feminism help LGBTQ parents?
Why should sexism be legally banned?
Healthcare Resources and Equity in Their Distribution.
The effects of sexism in families.
The influence of sexist customs on society.
Why should every family be feminist?
How can feminism help solve the domestic violence issue?
Government’s role in creating feminist families.
What is feminist family value?
The relation of authoritarian parent-paradigm on politics.
Can feminist families bring democracy?
Teaching feminism at home vs. at school.
Traditional vs. Feminist parenting.
Why should women have the right to be child-free?
The impact of bringing up feminist daughters.
Can feminist parents bring up mentally healthy children?
Does the government have a moral right to endorse feminist values?
The role of media for feminist families.
How does feminism transform parent-child relationships?
Can feminism help families overcome poverty?
The role of feminist families in the economy.
The influence of hierarchal husband-wife relationships on children.
Do IGOs have moral rights to intervene in feminist families?
The movements endorsing feminism in families.
The effect of different views on feminism in parents on children.

Sexuality Essay Ideas

The views of radical feminists on women’s sexuality.
Who are sex-positive feminists, and their values?
Feminism’s impact on sexual orientation.
The role of feminism in sexual identity matters.
Gender-Based Violence Against Women and Girls.
How does feminism help eliminate sexual violence?
What is harassment, and why are feminists fighting it?
The role of media in women’s sexuality.
Traditional views on women’s sexuality.
How is feminism transforming sexuality?
Domestic Violence and COVID-19 Relation.
What are feminist sex wars?
Why are some feminists against pornography?
What are pro-pornography feminist arguments?
How is feminism protecting the rights of sex workers?
Rights of sex workers in developed vs. developing countries.
Media Promotion of Cosmetic Surgery in Women.
Feminist critique of censorship.
What is behind the issue of sex trafficking?
Children’s rape problem and feminism.
The role of feminism in solving the sex trafficking problem.
The Influence of the Women Image in the Media.
R v. Butler case discussion.
How is pornography enhancing sexual objectification?
How is poverty causing prostitution?
Can feminism eliminate prostitution by solving poverty?
Child Marriage in Egypt and Ways to Stop It.
Pro-sex worker feminists and their beliefs.
What are the perspectives of pro-sex workers?
The consequences of violence against women.
The role of feminism to LGBTQ sex workers.
Why are feminists trying to decriminalize prostitution?
Beauty Standards: “The Body Myth” by Rebecca Johnson.
Prostitution in developed vs. developing countries.
The effect of class and race differences on prostitution.
Short- and long-term impacts on sex workers.

👩‍🎓 Essay Topics on Women’s Rights in the World

Essay topics on feminism in developing countries.

Social taboos and abortion in Nigeria.
Access to sexual healthcare in Asia.
Human Papillomavirus Awareness in Saudi Women.
Sexual health and access to contraception in developing countries.
Coronavirus pandemic’s impact on gender inequalities.
Health and education access for women in Afghanistan.
Female Empowerment in the Islamic States.
Does poverty result in increased sexual violence?
Regulations on gender equality in developing countries.
Unsafe abortion, contraceptive use, and women’s health.
Female genital mutilation in the 21st century.
Practicing female genital mutation in Africa.
Gender Discrimination After the Reemergence of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Which countries have the highest gender gap?
Forced and child marriages in humanitarian settings.
The Taliban’s view: Is woman a property?
Feminism in Latin America.
Honor killing in Pakistan: 1000 women are killed annually.
Women’s access to healthcare in Somalia.

Feminism Essay Topics in Developed Countries

“Broken Rung” and the gender pay gap.
What are the obstacles to reaching gender equality?
Do gender stereotypes result in workplace discrimination?
Increased educational attainment of young women.
Culture: Women With Hijab in Western Countries.
Ending sexual harassment and violence against women.
Is sexual harassment a form of discrimination?
Cracking the glass ceiling: What are the barriers and challenges?
Domestic drama: The impact of sexual violence on women’s health.
Socio-cultural Factors That Affected Sport in Australian Society.
Feminism and the problem of misogyny.
The challenges faced by women in developed counties.
Female participation in the labor market.
Discrimination Against Girls in Canada.
Unequal pay for women in the workplace.
How do developed countries improve women’s rights?
Nations with strong women’s rights.
Women’s employment: Obstacles and challenges.

👸 Antifeminist Essay Topics

Antifeminism: The right to abortion.
Gender differences in suicide.
Manliness in American culture.
Antifeminism view: Men are in crisis.
The threats of society’s feminization.
The meaning of antifeminism across time and cultures.
Antifeminism attracts both men and women.
Gender and Science: Origin, History, and Politics.
Antifeminism: The opposition to women’s equality?
How do religious and cultural norms formulate antifeminism?
Saving masculinity or promoting gender equality?
Traditional gender division of labor: Fair or not?
Are feminist theories of patriarchy exaggerated?
Oppression of men in the 21st century.
Psychological sex differences and biological tendencies.
Does feminism make it harder for men to succeed?
The change of women’s roles: Impact on the family.
How were traditional gender roles challenged in modern culture?
History of antifeminism: The pro-family movement.
Religion and contemporary antifeminism.
Antifeminist on the rights of minorities.
Heterosexual and patriarchal family: Facts behind antifeminism.
Women against feminism in Western countries.
Feminism versus humanism: What is the difference?
Does feminism portray women as victims?
Same-sex marriage: The dispute between feminists and antifeminists.
Male-oriented values of religions and antifeminism.
Does antifeminism threaten the independence of women?
Men’s rights movement: Manosphere.
Does antifeminism refer to extremism?
The fear of being labeled as a feminist.
A Vindication of the Right of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft.
Jane Austen: Criticism of inequitable social rules.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: Frankenstein and aborted creations.
Undercutting female stereotypes in Jane Eyre.
“Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body” by Marion.
Oppression of woman’s traditional roles in The Awakening.
Society’s inequitable treatment of women in The Age of Innocence.
Virginia Woolf and her feminism.
Orlando: A Biography. Evolving from man to woman.
Harriet Jacobs’s Experiences as an Enslaved Black Woman.
Feminist criticism: A Room of One’s Own.
Social oppression in Three Guineas by Woolf.
Rape, illegitimacy, and motherhood in The Judge by Rebecca West.
Feminist utopias of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
Women’s rights and societal reform views of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
Feminist critics in a culture dominated by men.
Black women’s aesthetic in Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Alice Walker’s ideas on Feminist women of color.
Female sexuality in Fear of Flying by Erica Jong.
How do feminist novels address race and ethnicity?
Society’s inequitable treatment of women in the Age of Innocence.
Social and emotional pressures in Love Medicine by Erdrich.
Feminist Parenting: The Fight for Equality at Home – Psychology Today
Feminist Parenting: An Introduction – Transformation Central Home
Women’s suffrage – Britannica
Only half of the women in the developing world are in charge of their own bodies – Reuters
Gender Equality for Development – The World Bank
How #MeToo revealed the central rift within feminism today – The Guardian
Feminist Novels and Novelists – Literary Theory and Criticism
Health Care & Reproductive Rights – National Women’s Law Center

Feminist Theory

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Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

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Essay Topics

In what ways does bell hooks disagree with the feminist movement at the time of writing Feminist Theory: From Margins to Center ? Choose three aspects of the feminist movement that hooks aims to reform and explain the changes she argues for.

hooks frequently quotes major feminist texts, post-colonial texts, and social criticism within her own writing. How does this reflect her understanding of community, education, and solidarity?

Explain hooks’s understanding of solidarity. How would it change the feminist movement? How does hooks propose bringing about this solidarity within the movement?

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380 Powerful Women’s Rights & Feminism Topics [2024]

Are you looking for perfect feminist topics? Then you’ve come to the right place. With our help, you can be sure to craft a great essay. Here, you can find feminist topics for discussion, feminism research topics and other ideas and questions for students.

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Some people think all feminists hate men. It couldn’t be further from the truth! Feminists are people of all genders who believe that they are socially and politically equal. Thanks to their achievements, women’s rights around the world are progressing.

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Creative feminism topics for your paper,
Tips to help you pick the perfect topic.

Let’s dive right in!

🔝 Top 10 Feminism Essay Topics

✅ How to Choose a Topic

⚖️ Top 10 Women’s Rights Essay Topics

🔬 top 10 feminism research topics.

📜 Women’s Rights History Topics
💪👩 Feminism Topics
📚 Feminist Theory
👩‍💻 Women Empowerment
👩‍🎓 Women’s Studies
🏥 Abortion Topics
🙅‍♀️ Domestic Violence

🔍 References

The 4 waves of feminism
Liberal vs. radical feminism
What is feminist psychology?
Feminist views on trans rights
Why ecofeminism is important
How has feminism changed culture?
Feminism interactions with socialism
The effects of liberal feminism on the society
Civil rights movement’s influence on feminism
The main proponents of feminist standpoint theory

✅ How to Choose a Feminism Topic

Picking the right topic is a crucial first step for any assignment. Check out these tips for a little starting help:

Formulate your topic as a question , such as “What makes Alice Schwarzer a controversial feminist figure?” This trick will help you clearly determine what your essay will be about.
Compile a keyword list . Once you have a general idea of what you want to work on, think of related words and phrases. For example, if our area of interest is “ Feminism in America , ” some of our keywords might be women’s suffrage movement , Fifteenth Amendment, birth control . You can use them to outline your research.
A concept map can be a helpful brainstorming tool to organize your ideas. Put your area of interest (for instance, women empowerment ) in a circle in the middle. Write all related concepts around it, and connect them with lines.
Stay clear from overused themes . Writing on popular subjects might be tempting. But can you offer a unique perspective on the issue? Choose such topics only if your answer is “yes.”
Make sure there is enough information available . Sure, an essay on the role of women in 17th century Tongan culture sounds exciting. Unfortunately, finding good sources on this topic might prove difficult. You can refer to subjects of this kind if you’re researching a thesis or a dissertation.

Now you’re ready to find your perfect topic. Keep reading and let one of our exciting suggestions inspire you.

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Gender bias in driving
Girls’ education in Afghanistan
Women’s political rights in Syria
Women’s land ownership rights
Overincarceration of women in the US
Resettlement of women refugees: risks
Abortion rights in conservative countries
Reproductive rights and HIV among women
Honor killings as women’s rights violation
Access to cervical cancer prevention for women of color
Gender equity vs. gender equality
Adverse effects of child marriage
#Metoo movement’s impact on society
Environmental crisis as a feminist issue
The importance of women’s education
Is gender equality a social justice issue?
Why is teen pregnancy dangerous?
How can gender biases be lessened?
Ethics of artificial reproductive technologies
Legacy of women’s suffrage movement

📜 History of Women’s Rights Topics

The history of women’s rights in America is long and full of struggles. The US is still far from having achieved complete equality. And in many developing countries, the situation is even worse. If you’re interested in the feminist movements and activists who paved the way thus far, this section is for you.

The role of women in the first American settlements.
Why weren’t women allowed to serve in combat positions in the US army until 2013?
What happened at the Seneca Falls Convention?
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Women’s Suffrage in America.
Discuss the impact of Sojourner Truth’s Ain’t I a Woman? speech.
Explore gender equality in 20th century Britain.
Trace the timeline of events that led to the 19th amendment.
Why was the invention of the pill a milestone in the fight for equal rights ?
The legacy of Amelia Earhart.
What was The Bitch Manifesto ?
Outline the history of women in American politics .
The role of women in the Civil Rights Movement.
How did the Comstock Laws affect the struggle for women’s rights?
How did Ruth Bader Ginsburg fight against gender discrimination in the US?
In what ways did the introduction of Islamic law improve women’s rights in Arabia?
Artemisia Gentileschi: forerunner of feminism.
In 2016, the first female president was nominated by a major US party. Why did it take so long?
Explore the origins of witch trials in Europe.
What did Molly Dewson achieve?
The history of women’s rights in Russia vs. England.
How did WWI influence the fight for equal rights ?
What were the goals of the Women’s Trade Union League?
The effects of the Equal Pay Act.

Study the connection between women’s health and rights throughout history.
When did women receive the right to own property in America? Why was it important?
Debate the role of women in history of theater.
In the past, Russia was one of the first European countries to introduce women’s suffrage . In 2016, it decriminalized domestic violence. What led to this change?
Women in the workforce: the long road towards workplace equality .
Minna Canth: the history of women’s rights activism in Finland.
Who were “The Famous Five”?
Why was Japan quicker to enact equality laws than its European counterparts?
The role and visibility of women writers in the 19th century.
What problems did the National Organization for Women face?
Discuss the foundation and impact of the Redstockings. Did they reflect the general attitude of women towards liberation at the time?
Who or what was responsible for the failure of the ERA ?
The role of women in Ancient Greek communities.
Alice Paul and the Silent Sentinels: how did they contribute to establishing the right to vote for women?
Why was Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique critical to the progress of feminism in the 20th century?
The presidential candidacy of Victoria Woodhull.
What was the purpose of the Hull House? How did it advance women’s rights?
Why did Elizabeth Cady Stanton oppose the Fifteenth Amendment?
Lucy Stone’s influence on the abolitionist and women’s rights movements .
Discuss the significance of literature for the success of the suffragist movement in America.
Slavery: compare women’s and men’s narratives.
How Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s speeches and poetry changed the world.
Emmeline Pankhurst as the central figure of the UK’s suffragette movement.
Why did it take so long for suffragette movements around the globe to gain traction?
From a historical perspective, why weren’t women’s rights the same as human rights?
Trace the development of women liberation in Morocco.
Investigate the founding of women’s day.

👩👍 Feminism Topics to Research

Feminism is a global phenomenon. That’s why it’s not surprising that the term has many definitions. What to consider sexism? What can we do about it? How important is the concept of gender? Those are central questions feminists around the world seek to answer. Feminism’s areas of study include politics, sociology, and economics.

Compare feminist issues on a global scale.
What distinguishes radical feminists from liberal ones?
Black feminism: is it a separate movement?
When does “being a gentleman” become sexist?
Is feminism always anti-racist?
What do we need gender concepts for?
Feminism oppression in Islamic countries.
How do gender stereotypes form in children?
Why are societies around the globe still struggling to achieve full equality?
The effects of gender-oriented politics.
Can men be feminists? (Consider Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists )
How did the patriarchy develop?
Would a matriarchal society be more peaceful than a patriarchal one? Draw your conclusions from real-life examples.
Compare and contrast Judith Butler and Alice Schwarzer.
Effectiveness of provocative methods in feminism.
What’s the problem with unisex bathrooms in restaurants and bars?
Discuss the prejudice transgender people face. What should we do about it?
Why are reproductive rights a crucial issue on the way to equality?
Describe various types of feminism.
How can hairstyle function as a political statement?
Which feminist movements are most prevalent in Asia?
Trace the history of feminist ethics.
What’s the “pink tax,” and why should it be abolished?
Discuss Audre Lorde’s feminism.
How does feminist research methodology influence education?
Sexism in advertising : why is it still a problem?
What are the goals of Girls Who Code?
The role of literacy politics in achieving gender equality .
Stay at home moms: are they a step back on the feminist agenda?
Explore the origins of color-coding pink and blue as girl and boy colors, respectively.
Are beauty pageants harmful to women’s positive body image?
The problem of ableism in intersectional feminist movements.
What is identity politics , and why is it important?
New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, recently introduced her new cabinet. Of the 20 people who serve in it, eight are women, five Maori, three belong to the minority Pasifika, and three are queer. Is it what all future cabinets should strive for?
What makes racism a feminist issue?
Describe how objectification works and why it is harmful.
A history of women inventors who didn’t get credit for their innovations.
Female circumcision as an example of women’s oppression disguised as a cultural tradition.
The infantilization of women: origins and effects.

Define how feminism influences science.
How does one avoid gender bias when raising a child?
What popular ideas about feminism are myths?
Gender inequality in politics of India and Iran .
What is the definition of ecofeminism? Describe its merits.
How do men benefit from feminism?
Why do we need gender equality in language?
Problems of reconciling religion and the LGBTQ community.
More and more fitness clubs introduce “women’s hours.” Some bars are only open for women. They claim to do this to create safe spaces. What’s your position on this development?
Anti-feminism: is it a movement for the far-right?
The impact of #metoo on work culture.

📚 Feminist Theory Topics to Look Into

Feminist theory criticizes how culture perpetuates misogyny. The best way to look at it is to divide feminism into three waves:

First-wave feminism (the late 1700s – early 1900s). It includes the women’s suffrage movement.
Second-wave feminism (the 1960s – ’70s.) Key points are equal working conditions and feminist political activism.
Third-wave feminism (1990s – today). It encompasses not only women but all marginalized groups.

Take a look at culture from a feminist perspective with our topics:

Discuss the concept of feminism in Barbie Doll by Marge Piercy.
Explain the success of Gillian Armstrong’s Little Women.
What inequalities between men and women does Mary Wollstonecraft mention in A Vindication of the Rights of Women ?
Masculinity and femininity in William Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage.
An existentialist view: how Simone de Beauvoir influenced the feminist discourse.
The role of women in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah.
Discuss the power dynamics between men and women in the Terminator series.
How does rap music perpetuate traditional concepts of masculinity ?
Daisy’s character in The Great Gatsby through a feminist lens.
Write about the depiction of women and the patriarchy in Mad Men.
What distinguishes the third wave of feminism from the other two?
Women’s history and media in Susan Douglas’ Where the Girls Are .
What is the goal of gynocriticism?
Possibilities of sisterhood in Hulu’s TV show A Handmaid’s Tale .
Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar : where does Esther Greenwood see her place in society?
Early feminist perspectives in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.
Compare and contrast how the characters in Mulan react to the protagonist as a woman vs. a man.
Life stages of women in Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma .
Why were feminists unhappy about Prado’s exhibition Uninvited Guests ?
Sexuality and society in Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire .
Gender expectations in The Little Mermaid .
Feminist concepts and issues in Netflix’s Thirteen Reasons Why .
Challenging traditional femininity: independence and rebellion in Thelma and Louise.
The target audience of Mad Max: Fury Road is stated as male. Yet, the central character of the film Furiosa is a strong rebel woman. Does this make it a feminist movie?
Persepolis : what it means to grow up as a liberal woman in Iran.
Blockbuster movies have an enormous reach. Does it obligate them to support feminist issues?
Marjorie Liu’s Monstress : what does it tell us about feminism?
The Berlin Film Festival announced that they would no longer crown the best actor and actress. Instead, they honor the best performance in either a leading or supporting role. What are the consequences of this?
What does it mean to criticize an art piece from a feminist point of view?
Compare and contrast the portrayal of female characters in horror genre throughout the years.
Analyze Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto . Why does the author use the cyborg metaphor? What arguments does it help bring across?
How do black women characters in Toni Morrison’s novels experience society?
What makes various awards an important instrument of feminism?
Analyze Katniss Everdeen archetype in Hunger Games.
Many classic children’s stories include outdated depictions of women and people of color. Because of this, some people are demanding to ban or censor them. Do you think this is the right way to tackle the problem?
What does the term “male gaze” mean, and why is it a problem?
The role of the body in feminist aesthetics.
Discuss the impact of women philosophers on renowned male scholars of their time.
What distinguishes feminist art from other art forms?
Debate the political dimension of using women in body art.
Does the message in Lemonade make Beyoncé a feminist icon?
Why are misogynist song lyrics still widely accepted?
How did Aretha Franklin’s music impact the Civil Rights Movement in America?
Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray from a queer theoretical perspective.
Objectification in film: analyzing Rachel’s character in The Dark Knight.
Investigate the Star Wars’ representation problem. How did the franchise develop into a battleground for diversity?
Misogynist vs. psycho: feminist aspects of David Fincher’s Gone Girl.
Was the diversity in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse a good thing?
The cultural significance of strong female characters.
Examine the concept of femininity in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

👩‍💻 Women Empowerment Topics to Write About

Women were excluded from crucial work areas such as the military and politics for a long time. This situation is changing now. Empowerment programs encourage women to seek professions in typically male-dominated areas. Do you want to research ways of increasing women’s control over their choices? Check out the following topics:

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Joan of Arc as a leadership idol.
The role of She Should Run in encouraging women to run for political positions.
What should we do about higher education barriers for African American women?
Examine current trends in female empowerment .
Importance of the women’s empowerment principles.

How can businesses use the Gender Gap Analysis Tool to promote equality in their companies?
Why is there such a big gap between committing to advancing equality and corporate efforts to implement women’s empowerment programs?
What business practices need to change so that men and women benefit from work programs equally?
Analyse the reasons behind poor body image among young women.
How does the transition from cash to digital payrolls help empower women in developing countries?
What challenges do large companies face when it comes to gender equality ?
How does making fashion a circular economy impact women?
Discuss what everyone can do to empower the women in their community.
Why is it important to demand fair pay?
The impact of Reese Witherspoon’s media company Hello Sunshine.
What does it mean to be empowered?
The influence of climate change on gender equality.
Women in leadership positions: the rhetoric and the reality.
Social stigma and family planning: the work of HER project in Kenya.
CARE: why providing women with access to clean water is crucial for empowerment.
How do you teach a girl that she can make a difference?
Achievements of the global Women Deliver Conferences.
How does Pro-Mujer help underprivileged women in Latin America?
Why is workplace health a particular concern for women empowerment?
What can businesses do to bridge the financial inclusion gender gap?
Debate how strengthening women’s social position helps fight discrimination against all kinds of marginalized groups.
Analyze the various benefits of women empowerment.
Fighting gender stereotypes in the 21st century.
The connection between a lack of women in politics and missing programs to support marginalized groups.
What are patriarchal taboos that keep women from seeking power?
How can a gender perspective on resilience activities assist businesses in finding ways to combat climate change?
What methods does the #WithHer movement use to raise awareness of violence against women?
The Spotlight Initiative: training sex workers to escape violence in Haiti.
Define the gender digital divide.
What’s the problem with the female gendering of AI assistants?
Criticize the Gender Empowerment Measure.
What role does the internet play in empowering girls?
Compare the Gender Parity Index in the US and South Africa.
How is Every Mother Counts working to decrease deaths related to pregnancies?
Debate the reliability of the Gender Development Index.
Child Marriage : the impact of Girls Not Brides.
What are the political and social constraints that hamper women’s empowerment in Nigeria?
How can you encourage women to give public speeches ?
How does e-learning help women worldwide gain independence?
Explore the influence of the women’s rights movement on anti-descrimination activities.
Challenges of women business in Mauritius.
Labibah Hashim as an inspirational figure for women empowerment in Lebanon.
How did Malaka Saad’s magazine al-Jens al-Latif inspire women to educate themselves in the Arab world?
The development of sexual harassment policies in East Africa.
How does microfinance in South America help women to start businesses?

👩‍🎓 Interesting Women’s Studies Topics for an Essay

Women’s or gender studies is an interdisciplinary science. It combines research from many fields, such as economics, psychology, and the natural sciences. Key aspects are women’s experiences and cultural as well as social constructs surrounding gender.

What is velvet rope discrimination?
The IT sphere is comparatively modern. Why does it still have such a gender gap problem?
Is paid maternity/ paternity leave a fundamental right for workers?
How do we break the glass ceiling in today’s society?
Discussing social taboos: postnatal depression.
Women in religion: why shouldn’t women be priestesses?
The queer of color critique: history and theory.
Should feminists be against supporting care policies?
Does foreign aid benefit women entrepreneurship in Sub-Saharan Africa?
Gender bias in criminal justice.
What does legalized prostitution mean for sex workers?
Does “stealthing” make otherwise consensual sex nonconsensual? Should this practice have legal consequences?
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks : a gendered analysis.
Rojava: give an overview of the egalitarian feminist society.
The role of women in modern nation-building processes.
How do we include transgender athletes into sex-segregated competitive sports?
Discuss the significance of gender in the euthanasia debate .
Chivalry and capital punishment : why are women who commit murders less likely to be sentenced to death?
Why do men have less confidence in women’s abilities than in men’s?
Are hijabs always a symbol of oppression?
Write about the role of feminism in international relations.
Universal basic income: changing perspectives for women.
Gamergate: what does it tell us about some men’s view on the video game industry?
Discuss the social construction of gender roles.
What is benevolent sexism, and why is it a problem?
The military seems to be especially notorious when it comes to discriminating against LGBT people. Where might this originate from?
Many army officers don’t hide that they don’t want women to serve. Why do women still do it? Why should they?
The Eurovision Song Contest gave drag queen Conchita Wurst an enormous audience. How did she use this opportunity?
Why are men who wear typically female clothing stigmatized?
How have The Guerilla Girls shaped the art world in the past 30 years?
Healthcare: what challenges do transgender patients face?
Femme invisibility: discrimination inside the LGBT community.
How did the idea develop that gay men and lesbians have to act and look a certain way to be considered queer?
The history of sodomy laws in the US.
“The Squad” as an example of the current success of left-wing women in politics.
Should women use their attractiveness to get what they want?
Are the careers of women scientists more affected by turmoil than those of their male counterparts?

Some of the most important female scientists.

Do children’s toys restrict gender criteria?
Many drugs are only tested on male subjects. How does this affect women?
Enumerate some qualities that are seen as positive in men and negative in women. Why do you think this happens?
Discuss the significance of the “Transgender Tipping Point.”
The meaning of “home” and home spaces for women over the centuries.
How do gender issues influence lawmaking?
Analyze queer narratives from post-soviet states. How do gender norms in these countries differ from those in your community?
Transgender representation in media: views of Viviane Namaste and Julia Serano.
Nuclear power between politics and culture: a feminist perspective.
Women guards in national socialist concentration camps.
What reasons do women have for sex tourism ?
The problem of eurocentrism in European education.
Explore the connection between citizenship and race.

🏥 Abortion Topics to Research

For some, abortion is a fundamental healthcare right. Others view it as a criminal act. Many conservative governments continue to restrict the access to this procedure. Because of this discrepancy, abortion remains a fiercely debated topic all around the globe. Consider one of these thought-provoking ideas:

Why was Roe v. Wade such a landmark decision?
Discuss why some CEOs step up against abortion bans .
Abortion in transgender and intersex people.
From a biological point of view, when does life begin?
What signs should indicate that it is too late to terminate the pregnancy?
Who influenced the abortion debate before Roe v. Wade?
Is abortion morally wrong? If so, does that mean it’s always impermissible?
Under what circumstances is terminating a life justified?
Who or what defines if a being has the right to life or not?
Analyse the access to abortion clinics as a policy issue.
Reproductive rights and medical access in Sub-Saharan Africa.
People terminate pregnancies, whether it’s illegal or not. Why would one still outlaw abortions?
Investigate the occurrence of forced abortions during China’s one-child policy .
Is the fetus’ right to life more important than the mother’s right to have control over her body?
What rights are more essential than the right to life?
Discuss women’s health as their integral right.
Should there be restrictions on abortions?
Can better access to contraceptives reduce the number of abortions?
At what point does a fetus become a human being?
Is selective abortion ethical?
Germany’s paragraph 219a prohibits the display of information on abortion services. In 2019, the government decided to revise it, and now patients can consult a list provided by the department for health education. Is this compromise enough?
What is the moral status of a human embryo?
Should pregnancy terminations be free for low-income women?
Is the criminalization of abortion discrimination?
The social and psychological impact of pregnancy terminations on families.
Should the man have a say in whether the woman has an abortion or not?
What non-religious persuasive arguments against abortion are there?
Are there good and bad reasons for ending a pregnancy?
Should it be required for teenagers to have their parents’ consent for the abortion procedure?
Examine the arguments of pro-life movement.
Analyze how the public’s attitude towards abortion has changed over the past 50 years.
Is withholding access to abortions a violation of human rights?
After week-long strikes, the Polish government has delayed its proposed abortion ban. Is this a victory for the local feminist movement?
Compare and contrast the various legal abortion methods.
Analyze A Defense of Abortion by Judith Jarvis Thomson.
How is abortion viewed in Eastern vs. Western countries?
Describe potential health issues surrounding late-term pregnancy terminations.
How can we prevent unsafe abortions ?
What complications can occur during the abortion process?
Debate the impact of the March for Life.
Discuss whether women should have an abortion if diagnostics show fetal abnirmalities.
What does Planned Parenthood do, and why is the organization important?
Should Helms Amendment be repealed?
How does the Hyde Amendment impact women of color in particular?
Is forcing a woman to carry out an undesired pregnancy morally permissible?
Mexican newspaper coverage on issues surrounding abortions.
What are the possible health consequences of an abortion?
Reproductive justice and women of color: the history of SisterSong.
Compare organizations that offer information on abortions.
How is the topic of abortion approached in Jason Reitman’s film Juno ?

🙅‍♀️ Domestic Violence Topics for a Paper

Domestic violence comes in many shapes, and it’s not always directed against women. It traumatizes not only the victim but the whole family. The long-term impacts on the victims are catastrophic, too. If you want to write a research paper on this topic, be sure to steel yourself before starting your reading.

How did the COVID-19 lockdowns influence domestic violence cases?
Domestic violence in closed religious communities.
Does the type of abuse differ if the perpetrator is a man or a woman?
Compare the problem of spousal abuse in the US, Asia, and Africa.
Why do many victims choose not to report their cases of domestic violence?
From a psychological perspective, why does domestic violence happen?
Domestic violence prevention : the role of parental communication.
Should a person with a history of abuse have custody over their child?
Why are men more likely to resort to violence than women?
Identify risk factors that can lead to elder abuse.
Trace how the frequency of reports on domestic violence has changed in your community over the past 30 years.

Domestic abuse is characterized by the following pattern.

Why do some victims choose to stay with their abusive partners?
What actions would you classify as domestic abuse?
Domestic violence and feminism in Bell Hooks’ theory.
Cultural perspectives on domestic violence : Saudi Arabia vs. Japan.
What do different religions say about IPV ?
If a victim kills its abuser to escape the violence, what legal consequences should they face?
Examine the legislature of different states concerning marital rape .
The social and legal concept of consent in marriage.
Domestic violence and integrity among women of color.
Abuse in teenage relationships.
Common psychological characteristics of a person who commits parricide.
Effects of emotional neglect on a child’s mental development .
Discuss the effectiveness of art therapy for victims of domestic violence.
The significance of Oregon v. Rideout.
Explore the link between spousal and animal abuse.
What is the Battered Woman Syndrome?
Analyze different forms of domestic violence using case studies.
Study the psychology behind victim blaming.
How do mental illnesses and domestic violence affect each other?
What are the signs of coercive control? How can one get out of it?
The problem of control in gay relationships.
How does one develop Stockholm Syndrome, and what does it entail?
Analyze the discourse surrounding domestic violence in Hong Kong.
The pseudo-family as a sociological concept.
Compare cases of domestic violence in military and religious families.
What is compassionate homicide, and how does the law deal with it?
If a juvenile delinquent was abused as a child, should that lessen their sentence?
Parental abduction: why do parents feel the need to kidnap their children?
Domestic violence: new solutions.
Is one sibling bullying the other a form of domestic abuse?
How do communities typically respond to domestic violence ?
Explore the link between women’s suicide and abuse.
What can healthcare specialists do to identify victims of violence more effectively?
What are the economic and social consequences of leaving an abusive relationship ?
How does Netflix’s show You portray the relationship between a stalker and his victim?
Treatment of perpetrators of domestic violence .
Why do some people repeatedly end up in relationships with IPV ?
What are the main motives for femicides ?
Discuss the psychological aggression men and women suffer during separation processes.

With all these great ideas in mind, you’re ready to ace your assignment. Good luck!

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Feminism Dissertation Topics – Choose The Best Topic For Your Dissertation

Published by Owen Ingram at January 2nd, 2023 , Revised On August 15, 2023

Feminist dissertation topics focus on the people who believe that women should have equal chances and rights as men. Feminism is a historical, social, and political movement founded by women to achieve gender equality and remove injustice. Feminism is an important topic that has been frequently debated in a male-dominated society since the nineteenth century. However, in recent years, the feminist voice has become louder, and feminist issues have grown in popularity.

An excellent feminist research topic is all you need to write a feminist dissertation. Feminism, in general, is a broad subject that examines the challenges women confront, such as sexual harassment, oppression, repression, stereotyping, sexual objectification, and other types of political and social oppression.

As the subject is vast, selecting a feminist topic for a dissertation or research paper is a difficult challenge. So, to assist you, we have compiled a list of relevant feminist research paper topics for your perusal.

You can also visit these links to get the best dissertation ideas for extensive research about sexual harassment dissertation topics and human rights dissertation ideas .

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Topics on Feminist Issues

Examine how the internet has transformed Feminism into a public source of mockery and praise.
Investigate the theoretical conflict between gender and sex.
Investigate the history of the #MeToo movement and the feminism victim challenge.
Examine the views of several feminists who are still devout Muslims on Female Genital Mutilation.
To make the feminist message, emphasize the feminist technique and means.
According to five works of literature or important feminists/anti-feminists of your choosing, how does Feminism establish, dismantle, and reconstruct gender roles?
Examine how feminists deal with societal injustice and violence.
Investigate the employability of feminist women in the United States.
What is the feminist critic’s stance on worldwide gender inequality?
How modern beauty standards continue to limit what and who is considered beautiful online and offline.
How the concept of beauty is also a radical social and political prejudice that denies women some basic rights.
Examine gender disparity and equality in American politics.
Investigate gender imbalance and equality in the UK government.
Consider if religion, Feminism, and liberal morality can be reconciled.
Examine the difficulties women confront in the face of violence in nations such as India and Pakistan.
Examine feminist psychology about Middle Eastern women.
Analyze the changing feminist thought in the academic and in the actual world.
How governments use Feminism as a tool for social mobilization, resulting in the demise of their culture.
Modern beauty standards continue to limit what and who is considered beautiful online and offline.
The concept of beauty is also a radical social and political prejudice that denies women some basic rights.

Feminist Project Topics

The contrast between the gender roles of women and the Feminist role in society
Examining the benefits and drawbacks of identifying as a feminist
Compare the benefits of being a feminist in rich and developing countries.
Examine the future of Feminism in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Examine the motivating elements of Feminism throughout history
Highlight and explain how Feminism has contributed to increased rape education.
Feminism and government assistance: How government assistance may put an end to all vices against women
The careful examination of equity and equality in Feminism
The modern world’s perspective on Feminism has shifted: debate
Investigate the lives, times, and biographies of any male feminist.
Justify the role of Middle Eastern women in the struggle for gender equality.
Examine any European government’s activities in promoting feminist principles.
Examine any Southern American government’s role in preserving women’s rights.
Investigate the relationship between Feminism and lesbianism.
Examine the link between Feminism and the increase of single women in America. Determine the relevance of the emergence of liberal ideals over conservative beliefs in promoting Feminism.
Discuss how women in the United States military are still subjected to discrimination, sexual assault, and brutality.
Discuss the methods for eliminating sexual assault and discrimination in the military of two nations of your choice.
Analyze the role of women in your preferred UK election.
Investigate the issue of gender equality in modern Britain.
Provide an outline of the British monarchy and the restoration of female kings.
Rebuild the Women’s Trade Union League’s fundamental ideals and principles.

Feminist Research Topics

Give some instances of modern feminist manifestos and what they have contained in feminist thought.
What is Feminism’s detrimental impact on teens, and how has it created hatred towards men?
What is the public’s take on women’s influence over celebrities in the face of the law in the aftermath of R Kelly’s imprisonment?
Speak with a self-identified feminist and discuss their views on Feminism.
Discuss the contentious topics surrounding Feminism and provide solutions to unsolved problems.
Examine Mona Eataly’s writings and compare her feminist beliefs to those of other black feminists.
Investigate what bold Feminism entails.
Should unisex restrooms be permitted in pubs, restaurants, and hotels in a world fraught with sexual violence?
Examine the prejudices experienced by transgender women and how the feminist movement might be a sort of stereotyped freedom.
Investigate the wide varieties of Feminism and how hairstyles can also be used to make political statements.

Feminist Topic Ideas for Discussion

Is Feminism only a historical residue of a modern need?
Is it possible for a female president to arise in America or the United Kingdom because Taiwan’s president is female?
What are your opinions on female authorities serving in various roles worldwide?
What do you think about the absence of female political representation?
How does a lack of political representation for women influence women’s political participation?
Could religion be claimed to be a contributing element to women’s current plight?
The internet has been a driving factor in the pursuit of equality.
The feminist movement is just a platform for women to gain more power.
How have environmental and feminist issues influenced national policies?
Have other movements swallowed Feminism?

Women Empowerment Topics

What role does the shift from cash to digital payrolls have in empowering women in poor countries?
Why is there such a disparity between corporate attempts to execute women’s empowerment?
Initiatives and corporate commitments to furthering equality?
Talk about what everyone can do to help women in their neighbourhood.
Why is workplace health such an important issue for women’s empowerment?
Examine the numerous advantages of women’s empowerment.
How has the UAE’s feminist movement empowered Arab women?
Women’s political representation, politics, and decision-making.
Discuss the role of feminists in promoting women’s empowerment.
Women’s empowerment in Asian countries has increased during the previous two decades.

Informative Feminism Dissertation Topics

Is it feasible to distinguish the three major waves of Feminism while defining a cohesive philosophy?
Why is the premise that ‘if you believe men and women are equal, you’re a feminist’ insufficient in the Feminist movement’s third wave?
Can Feminism forge a coherent movement amid the shattered environment of 21st-century Feminist thought?
An assessment of the third wave’s inadequacy as the final progression of Feminist thinking, as well as how the next wave will be characterized.
What are the difficulties that Intersectional Feminism has in disentangling oppressive systems from one another, and how can the movement negotiate this complication?
A feminist assessment of the relationship between police violence and patriarchal society.
Where is the boundary between defending an oppressed ecology and imposing oppressive ideals?
Investigating the relationship between authoritarian right anti-environmental and anti-feminist political thought.
Priority or Privilege? A critical examination of the Ecofeminist movement’s inability to address class problems and the consequences for its efficacy.
How does Feminist thought in emerging environments vary from Western Feminist philosophy?
A critical examination of how Western Feminism fails to meet the issues of global women.
Is it feasible for Western philosophy to accurately reflect women living in the aftermath of colonial domination in a postcolonial society?
Is promoting gender equality in emerging countries a moral obligation or an imperialist endeavour?
Investigate the gender difference in the pursuit of independence for any country.
A critical examination of the role of identity politics in social justice movements in the twenty-first century.

It is possible to contribute to an ever-growing and complicated field of study by writing a dissertation or capstone on feminist philosophy and critique. In view of the complexity of the underlying issue of ‘Feminism’, there are a number of feminist dissertation topics to consider. There has never been a more important time to research culturally relevant topics for your dissertation than in 2022.

Please contact us immediately if you need assistance writing your feminist dissertation. Our writers have years of experience researching, writing, proofreading, and editing dissertations on the greatest feminist research topics. Upon receiving your specifications, we will provide you with a high-quality, plagiarism-free research paper on time and within your budget.

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How to find feminism dissertation topics.

To find feminism dissertation topics:

Study feminist literature and theories.
Analyze gender-related gaps or issues.
Explore intersectionality with race, class, etc.
Investigate historical and contemporary perspectives.
Consider media, politics, arts for feminist angles.
Choose a topic resonating with your passion and research goals.

Essays About Feminism: Top 5 Examples Plus Prompts

When writing essays about feminism, there are a lot of aspects you can focus on. We have collected some of the best essay examples with prompts.

Feminism is a socio-political movement that is about fighting for equal rights and opportunities for all genders. While many point its beginnings to the women’s rights movements in the 19th century, when women were liberated and finally allowed to vote, feminist thinking can actually be traced back to as early as the late 14th century with the works of French writer Christine De Pizan , touted the first feminist philosopher.

Today, the definition of feminism has expanded to end discrimination, oppression and stereotyping of all genders from all walks of life. It aims to make radical reforms to eliminate cultural norms and push the legislation of equality-supporting laws.

Because feminism is a widely relevant topic, you may be asked to write an essay about feminism either as a student or a professional. However, it may be difficult to find a starting point given the broad spectrum of areas in which feminism is found relevant.

For help with your essays, check out our round-up of the best essays on feminism to provide inspiration:

1. Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit

2. bad feminist by roxane gay, 3. civic memory, feminist future by lidia yuknavitch, 4. trickle-down feminism by sarah jaffe, 5. emily ratajkowski explores what it means to be hyper feminine by emily ratajkowski , 1. definition of feminism, 2. does feminism still matter in the workplace, 3. would you consider yourself a feminist, 4. historical evolution of feminism, 5. criticisms against feminism, 6. how can we achieve gender equality , 7. who are the feminists in your community and what are they fighting for.

“The battle with Men Who Explain Things has trampled down many women — of my generation, of the up-and-coming generation we need so badly, here and in Pakistan and Bolivia and Java, not to speak of the countless women who came before me and were not allowed into the laboratory, or the library, or the conversation, or the revolution, or even the category called human.

Solnit starts with amusing narratives of real-life experiences with men who have critiqued her books wrongly. Solnit points out that men’s arrogance and tendency to explain things to women, thinking they know better, have forced women into silence and weakened their credibility even in places where their voices are crucial – such as in the court stand when women testify to being raped. Solnit, thus, emphasizes that the fight against mansplainers is important to the feminist movement. For more, check out these articles about feminism .

“I want to be independent, but I want to be taken care of and have someone to come home to. I have a job I’m pretty good at. I am in charge of things. I am on committees. People respect me and take my counsel. I want to be strong and professional, but I resent how hard I have to work to be taken seriously, to receive a fraction of the consideration I might otherwise receive. Sometimes I feel an overwhelming need to cry at work, so I close my office door and lose it.”

Gay reveals a series of secrets that make her believe she is a “bad feminst.” At first, she had tried to hide her fondness for men, fashion and thuggish rap, among many other things that gave her joy but went against the ideal feminist image etched in the mind of many. Eventually, Gay embraces the “mess of contradictions” that she is, proudly owning the label of a “bad feminist” while she speaks up on issues critical to the feminist movement and debunks myths on the unrealistic standards surrounding the sisterhood.

“There is no photo for what my father did to his daughters. It came into our bodies as a habit of being, a structure of consciousness, a way of life. Maybe it is akin to feeling discovered and conquered and colonized. Maybe the first colonizations are of the bodies of women and children, and from there they extend like the outstretched hand of a man grabbing land. Cultures.”

Yuknavitch highlights her rage against “fathers” both in her personal life and in each political administration that she survived. Yuknavitch described how these fathers and father images try to take control of others’ bodies and lives and crush others’ spirits. In her confrontation and memory of such men, however, Yuknavitch also learned to create art and find her feminist purpose.

“Women may be overrepresented in the growing sectors of the economy, but those sectors pay poverty wages. The public sector job cuts that have been largely responsible for unemployment remaining at or near 8 percent have fallen disproportionately on women (and women of color are hit the hardest). Those good union jobs disappear, and are replaced with a minimum-wage gig at Walmart—and even in retail, women make only 90 percent of what men make.”

Jaffe gives an in-depth view of the gains and impasse in the fight to improve women’s working opportunities. She stresses that women’s breakthroughs in the workplace may not always be a cause for celebration if these do not translate to long-term and more concrete changes for women to be treated better in the workplace. Jaffe encouraged feminists to continue organizing themselves to focus on solutions that can address the continued low wages of women, gender pay gaps and the minimal choice of professions offered to women.

“I often think about this. Why, as a culture, do we insist on separating smart and serious from sexy? Give women the opportunity to be whatever they want and as multifaceted as they can be.”

American model Ratajkowski writes a candid memoir on what it means to be hyper feminine in a society that represses and shames sexuality. She recounts how a misogynistic culture heavily influenced her early adventures on exploring her feminine side, how she took it to her advantage and turned being “sexy” into her strength. Ratajkowski also reveals how she feels about feminism today and women, in general, having their own decision and choices.

Writing Prompts on Essays about Feminism

For more help in picking your next essay topic, check out these seven essay prompts that can get you started:

Feminism is largely believed to be women’s fight against the patriarchy. Could it be a fight against all forms of oppression, discrimination, objectification and stereotyping? Could it be something more? You may even investigate some common myths about feminism. You might be interested in our list of adjectives for strong women .

Essays about Feminism: Does feminism still matter in the workplace?

Now that several women are climbing to the top of corporate ladders, have the right to vote and could get a doctorate, does feminism remain relevant?

Your article can explore the continued challenges of women in the workplace. You may also interview some working women who have faced obstacles toward certain goals due to discrimination and how they overcame the situation.

This would tie in closely to the topic on the definition of feminism. But this topic adds value and a personal touch as you share the reasons and narratives that made you realize you are or are not a feminist.

A common misconception is that only women can be feminists.

The First Wave of feminism started in the 19th century as protests on the streets and evolved into today’s Fourth Wave where technologial tools are leveraged to promote feminist advocacies. Look at each period of feminism and compare their objectives and challenges.

While feminism aims to benefit everybody, the movement has also earned the ire of many. Some people blame feminism for enabling hostility towards men, promiscuity and pornography, among others. You can also touch on the more controversial issue on abortion which feminists fight for with the popularizd slogan “My body, my choice.” You can discuss the law of abortion in your state or your country and what feminist groups have to say about these existing regulations.

Gender equality is pursued in various fields, especially where women have had little representation in the past. One example is the tech industry. Choose one sector you relate closely with and research on how gender equality has advanced in this area. It may be fun to also interview some industry leaders to know what policy frameworks they are implementing, and what will be their strategic direction moving forward.

Everyone surely knows a handful of feminists in their social media networks. Interview some friends and ask about feminist projects they have worked on or are working on. Of course, do not forget to ask about the outcomes or targets of the project and find out who has benefitted from the cause. Are these mothers or young women?

WRITING TIPS: Before you head on to write about feminism, check out our essay writing tips so you can have a struggle-free writing process.

If writing an essay still feels like a lot of work, simplify it. Write a simple 5 paragraph essay instead

Yna Lim is a communications specialist currently focused on policy advocacy. In her eight years of writing, she has been exposed to a variety of topics, including cryptocurrency, web hosting, agriculture, marketing, intellectual property, data privacy and international trade. A former journalist in one of the top business papers in the Philippines, Yna is currently pursuing her master's degree in economics and business.

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Feminist Philosophy

This entry provides an overview of all the entries in the feminist philosophy section of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP). After a brief account of the history of feminist philosophy and various issues regarding defining feminism, the entry discusses the three main sections on (1) approaches to feminist philosophy, (2) feminist interventions in philosophy, and (3) feminist philosophical topics.

Feminists working in all the main Western traditions of contemporary philosophy are using their respective traditions to approach their work, including the traditions of analytic, Continental, and pragmatist philosophy, along with other various orientations and intersections. As they do so, they are also intervening in how longstanding basic philosophical problems are understood. As feminist philosophers carry out work in traditional philosophical fields, from ethics to epistemology, they have introduced new concepts and perspectives that have transformed philosophy itself. They are also rendering philosophical previously un-problematized topics, such as the body, class and work, disability, the family, reproduction, the self, sex work, human trafficking, and sexuality. And they are bringing a particularly feminist lens to issues of science, globalization, human rights, popular culture, and race and racism.

1. Introduction

2.1 feminist beliefs and feminist movements, 2.2 normative and descriptive components, 2.3 feminism and the diversity of women, 2.4 feminism as anti-sexism, 3. approaches to feminism, 4. interventions in philosophy, 5. topics in feminism, other internet resources, related entries.

As this entry describes, feminism is both an intellectual commitment and a political movement that seeks justice for women and the end of sexism in all forms. Motivated by the quest for social justice, feminist inquiry provides a wide range of perspectives on social, cultural, economic, and political phenomena. Yet despite many overall shared commitments, there are numerous differences among feminist philosophers regarding philosophical orientation (whether, for example, Continental or analytic), ontological commitments (such as the category of woman), and what kind of political and moral remedies should be sought.

Contemporary feminist philosophical scholarship emerged in the 1970s as more women began careers in higher education, including philosophy. As they did so, they also began taking up matters from their own experience for philosophical scrutiny. These scholars were influenced both by feminist movements in their midst as well as by their philosophical training, which was anything but feminist. Until recently one could not go to graduate school to study “feminist philosophy”. While students and scholars could turn to the writings of Simone de Beauvoir or look back historically to the writings of “first wave” feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft, most of the philosophers writing in the first decades of the emergence of feminist philosophy brought their particular training and expertise to bear on analyzing issues raised by the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s, such as abortion, affirmative action, equal opportunity, the institutions of marriage, sexuality, and love. Additionally, feminist philosophical scholarship increasingly focused on the very same types of issues philosophers had been and were dealing with.

Feminist philosophical scholarship begins with attention to women, to their roles and locations. What are women doing? What social/political locations are they part of or excluded from? How do their activities compare to those of men? Are the activities or exclusions of some groups of women different from those of other groups and why? What do the various roles and locations of women allow or preclude? How have their roles been valued or devalued? How do the complexities of a woman’s situatedness, including her class, race, ability, and sexuality impact her locations? To this we add attention to the experiences and concerns of women. Have any of women’s experiences or problems been ignored or undervalued? How might attention to these transform our current methods or values? And from here we move to the realm of the symbolic. How is the feminine instantiated and constructed within the texts of philosophy? What role does the feminine play in forming, either through its absence or its presence, the central concepts of philosophy? And so on.

Feminist philosophers brought their philosophical tools to bear on these questions. And since these feminist philosophers employed the philosophical tools they knew best and found most promising, feminist philosophy began to emerge from all the traditions of Western philosophy prevalent at the end of the twentieth century including analytic, Continental, and classical American philosophy. It should come as no surprise then that the thematic focus of their work was often influenced by the topics and questions highlighted by these traditions. Hence, as a result, a given question can be taken up and addressed from an array of views, sometimes, as discussed below, with quite contradictory answers.

Hence feminist philosophical scholarship is not homogeneous either in methods or in conclusions. Indeed, there has been significant debate within feminist philosophical circles concerning the effectiveness of particular methods within philosophy for feminist goals. Some, for example, have found the methods of analytic philosophy to provide clarity of both form and argumentation not found in some schools of Continental philosophy, while others have argued that such alleged clarity comes at the expense of rhetorical styles and methodological approaches that provide insights into affective, psychic, or embodied components of human experience. Other feminists find approaches within American pragmatism to provide the clarity of form and argumentation sometimes missing in Continental approaches and the connection to real world concerns sometimes missing in analytic approaches.

Founded in 1982 as a venue for feminist philosophical scholarship, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy has embraced a diversity of methodological approaches in feminist philosophy, publishing work from all three traditions. Feminist scholarship in each of these traditions is also advanced and supported though scholarly exchange at various professional societies, including the Society for Women in Philosophy, founded in the United States in 1972. Additionally, the Society for Analytical Feminism, founded in 1991, promotes the study of issues in feminism by methods broadly construed as analytic, to examine the use of analytic methods as applied to feminist issues, and to provide a means by which those interested in analytical feminist can meet and exchange ideas. philoSOPHIA was established in 2005 to promote Continental feminist scholarly and pedagogical development. The Society for the Study of Women Philosophers was established in 1987 to promote the study of the contributions of women to the history of philosophy. Similar organizations and journals on many continents continue to advance scholarship in feminist philosophy.

Many of the ways in which feminist philosophy is not monolithic will be discussed below. Nevertheless, it is worth noting here at the start that although feminist philosophers have intended that their work—unlike the traditional philosophy they criticize—be applicable to all women and reflect the diverse experiences of women, in practice it has not always been the case. One important limitation that feminist philosophers are trying to overcome is their insufficient attention to the many interacting ways that human beings are oppressed, for example, along lines of race, sexuality, ability, class, religion, and nationality. Feminist philosophy strives for inclusivity and pluralism, even if it falls short.

2. What is Feminism?

The term “feminism” has many different uses and its meanings are often contested. For example, some writers use the term “feminism” to refer to a historically specific political movement in the United States and Europe; other writers use it to refer to the belief that there are injustices against women, though there is no consensus on the exact list of these injustices. Although the term “feminism” has a history in English linked with women’s activism from the late nineteenth century to the present, it is useful to distinguish feminist ideas or beliefs from feminist political movements, for even in periods where there has been no significant political activism around women’s subordination, individuals have been concerned with and theorized about justice for women. So, for example, it makes sense to ask whether Plato was a feminist, given his view that some women should be trained to rule ( Republic , Book V), even though he was an exception in his historical context (see, e.g., Tuana 1994).

Our goal here is not to survey the history of feminism—as a set of ideas or as a series of political movements—but rather to sketch some of the central uses of the term that are most relevant to those interested in contemporary feminist philosophy. The references we provide below are only a small sample of the work available on the topics in question; more complete bibliographies are available at the specific topical entries and also at the end of this entry.

In the mid-1800s the term “feminism” was used to refer to “the qualities of females”, and it was not until after the First International Women’s Conference in Paris in 1892 that the term, following the French term féministe , was used regularly in English for a belief in and advocacy of equal rights for women based on the idea of the equality of the sexes. Although the term “feminism” in English is rooted in the mobilization for woman suffrage in Europe and the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, of course efforts to obtain justice for women did not begin or end with this period of activism. So some have found it useful, if controversial, to think of the women’s movement in the United States as occurring in “waves”. On the wave model, the struggle to achieve basic political rights during the period from the mid-nineteenth century until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 counts as “First Wave” feminism. Feminism waned between the two world wars, to be “revived” in the late 1960s and early 1970s as “Second Wave” feminism. In this second wave, feminists pushed beyond the early quest for political rights to fight for greater equality across the board, e.g., in education, the workplace, and at home. More recent transformations of feminism have resulted in a “Third Wave”. Third Wave feminists often critique Second Wave feminism for its lack of attention to the differences among women due to race, ethnicity, class, nationality, religion (see Section 2.3 below; also Breines 2002; Spring 2002), and emphasize “identity” as a site of gender struggle. (For more information on the “wave” model and each of the “waves”, see Other Internet Resources .)

However, some feminist scholars object to identifying feminism with these particular moments of political activism, on the grounds that doing so eclipses the fact that there has been resistance to male domination that should be considered “feminist” throughout history and across cultures: i.e., feminism is not confined to a few (White) women in the West over the past century or so. Moreover, even considering only relatively recent efforts to resist male domination in Europe and the United States, the emphasis on “First” and “Second” Wave feminism ignores the ongoing resistance to male domination between the 1920s and 1960s and the resistance outside mainstream politics, particularly by women of color and working class women (Cott 1987).

One strategy for solving these problems would be to identify feminism in terms of a set of ideas or beliefs rather than participation in any particular political movement. As we saw above, this also has the advantage of allowing us to locate isolated feminists whose work was not understood or appreciated during their time. But how should we go about identifying a core set of feminist beliefs? Some would suggest that we should focus on the political ideas that the term was apparently coined to capture, viz., the commitment to women’s equal rights. This acknowledges that commitment to and advocacy for women’s rights has not been confined to the Women’s Liberation Movement in the West. But this too raises controversy, for it frames feminism within a broadly liberal approach to political and economic life. Although most feminists would probably agree that there is some sense of rights on which achieving equal rights for women is a necessary condition for feminism to succeed, most would also argue that this would not be sufficient. This is because women’s oppression under male domination rarely if ever consists solely in depriving women of political and legal rights, but also extends into the structure of our society and the content of our culture, the workings of languages and how they shape perceptions and permeate our consciousness (e.g., Bartky 1988, Postl 2017).

Is there any point, then, to asking what feminism is? Given the controversies over the term and the politics of circumscribing the boundaries of a social movement, it is sometimes tempting to think that the best we can do is to articulate a set of disjuncts that capture a range of feminist beliefs. However, at the same time it can be both intellectually and politically valuable to have a schematic framework that enables us to map at least some of our points of agreement and disagreement. We’ll begin here by considering some of the basic elements of feminism as a political position or set of beliefs.

In many of its forms, feminism seems to involve at least two groups of claims, one normative and the other descriptive. The normative claims concern how women ought (or ought not) to be viewed and treated and draw on a background conception of justice or broad moral position; the descriptive claims concern how women are, as a matter of fact, viewed and treated, alleging that they are not being treated in accordance with the standards of justice or morality invoked in the normative claims. Together the normative and descriptive claims provide reasons for working to change the way things are; hence, feminism is not just an intellectual but also a political movement.

So, for example, a liberal approach of the kind already mentioned might define feminism (rather simplistically here) in terms of two claims:

(Normative) Men and women are entitled to equal rights and respect.
(Descriptive) Women are currently disadvantaged with respect to rights and respect, compared with men […in such and such respects and due to such and such conditions…].

On this account, that women and men ought to have equal rights and respect is the normative claim; and that women are denied equal rights and respect functions here as the descriptive claim. Admittedly, the claim that women are disadvantaged with respect to rights and respect is not a “purely descriptive” claim since it plausibly involves an evaluative component. However, our point here is simply that claims of this sort concern what is the case not what ought to be the case. Moreover, as indicated by the ellipsis above, the descriptive component of a substantive feminist view will not be articulable in a single claim, but will involve an account of the specific social mechanisms that deprive women of, e.g., rights and respect. For example, is the primary source of women’s subordination her role in the family? (Engels 1845; Okin 1989). Or is it her role in the labor market? (Bergmann 2002). Is the problem males’ tendencies to sexual violence (and what is the source of these tendencies?)? (Brownmiller 1975; MacKinnon 1987). Or is it simply women’s biological role in reproduction? (Firestone 1970).

Disagreements within feminism can occur with respect to either the descriptive or normative claims, e.g., feminists differ on what would count as justice or injustice for women (what counts as “equality”, “oppression”, “disadvantage”, what rights should everyone be accorded?) , and what sorts of injustice women in fact suffer (what aspects of women’s current situation are harmful or unjust?). Disagreements may also lie in the explanations of the injustice: two feminists may agree that women are unjustly being denied proper rights and respect and yet substantively differ in their accounts of how or why the injustice occurs and what is required to end it (Jaggar 1994).

Disagreements between feminists and non-feminists can occur with respect to both the normative and descriptive claims as well, e.g., some non-feminists agree with feminists on the ways women ought to be viewed and treated, but don’t see any problem with the way things currently are. Others disagree about the background moral or political views.

In an effort to suggest a schematic account of feminism, Susan James characterizes feminism as follows:

Feminism is grounded on the belief that women are oppressed or disadvantaged by comparison with men, and that their oppression is in some way illegitimate or unjustified. Under the umbrella of this general characterization there are, however, many interpretations of women and their oppression, so that it is a mistake to think of feminism as a single philosophical doctrine, or as implying an agreed political program. (James 1998: 576)

James seems here to be using the notions of “oppression” and “disadvantage” as placeholders for more substantive accounts of injustice (both normative and descriptive) over which feminists disagree.

Some might prefer to define feminism in terms of a normative claim alone: feminists are those who believe that women are entitled to equal rights, or equal respect, or…(fill in the blank with one’s preferred account of injustice), and one is not required to believe that women are currently being treated unjustly. However, if we were to adopt this terminological convention, it would be harder to identify some of the interesting sources of disagreement both with and within feminism, and the term “feminism” would lose much of its potential to unite those whose concerns and commitments extend beyond their moral beliefs to their social interpretations and political affiliations. Feminists are not simply those who are committed in principle to justice for women; feminists take themselves to have reasons to bring about social change on women’s behalf.

Taking “feminism” to entail both normative and empirical commitments also helps make sense of some uses of the term “feminism” in recent popular discourse. In everyday conversation it is not uncommon to find both men and women prefixing a comment they might make about women with the caveat, “I’m not a feminist, but…”. Of course this qualification might be (and is) used for various purposes, but one persistent usage seems to follow the qualification with some claim that is hard to distinguish from claims that feminists are wont to make. For example, I’m not a feminist but I believe that women should earn equal pay for equal work; or I’m not a feminist but I’m delighted that first-rate women basketball players are finally getting some recognition in the WNBA. If we see the identification “feminist” as implicitly committing one to both a normative stance about how things should be and an interpretation of current conditions, it is easy to imagine someone being in the position of wanting to cancel his or her endorsement of either the normative or the descriptive claim. So, e.g., one might be willing to acknowledge that there are cases where women have been disadvantaged without wanting to buy any broad moral theory that takes a stance on such things (especially where it is unclear what that broad theory is). Or one might be willing to acknowledge in a very general way that equality for women is a good thing, without being committed to interpreting particular everyday situations as unjust (especially if is unclear how far these interpretations would have to extend). Feminists, however, at least according to popular discourse, are ready to both adopt a broad account of what justice for women would require and interpret everyday situations as unjust by the standards of that account. Those who explicitly cancel their commitment to feminism may then be happy to endorse some part of the view but are unwilling to endorse what they find to be a problematic package.

As mentioned above, there is considerable debate within feminism concerning the normative question: what would count as (full) justice for women? What is the nature of the wrong that feminism seeks to address? For example, is the wrong that women have been deprived equal rights? Is it that women have been denied equal respect for their differences? Is it that women’s experiences have been ignored and devalued? Is it all of the above and more? What framework should we employ to identify and address the issues? (see, e.g., Jaggar 1983; Young 1985; Tuana & Tong 1995). Feminist philosophers in particular have asked: Do the standard philosophical accounts of justice and morality provide us adequate resources to theorize male domination, or do we need distinctively feminist accounts? (e.g., Okin 1979; Hoagland 1989; Okin 1989; Ruddick 1989; Benhabib 1992; Hampton 1993; Held 1993; Tong 1993; Baier 1994; Moody-Adams 1997; M. Walker 1998; Kittay 1999; Robinson 1999; Young 2011; O’Connor 2008).

Note, however, that by phrasing the task as one of identifying the wrongs women suffer (and have suffered), there is an implicit suggestion that women as a group can be usefully compared against men as a group with respect to their standing or position in society; and this seems to suggest that women as a group are treated in the same way, or that they all suffer the same injustices, and men as a group all reap the same advantages. But of course this is not the case, or at least not straightforwardly so. As bell hooks so vividly pointed out, in 1963 when Betty Friedan urged women to reconsider the role of housewife and demanded greater opportunities for women to enter the workforce (Friedan 1963), Friedan was not speaking for working class women or most women of color (hooks 1984: 1–4). Neither was she speaking for lesbians. Women as a group experience many different forms of injustice, and the sexism they encounter interacts in complex ways with other systems of oppression. In contemporary terms, this is known as the problem of intersectionality (Crenshaw 1991, Botts 2017). This critique has led some theorists to resist the label “feminism” and to adopt a different name for their view. Earlier, during the 1860s–80s, the term “womanism” had sometimes been used for such intellectual and political commitments; in 1990, Alice Walker proposed that “womanism” provides a contemporary alternative to “feminism” that better addresses the needs of Black women and women of color more generally. But given more recent work on trans issues such a gender-specific term would today raise many more problems than it would solve.

To consider some of the different strategies for responding to the phenomenon of intersectionality, let’s return to the schematic claims that women are oppressed and this oppression is wrong or unjust. Very broadly, then, one might characterize the goal of feminism to be ending the oppression of women. But if we also acknowledge that women are oppressed not just by sexism, but in many ways, e.g., by classism, homophobia, racism, ageism, ableism, etc., then it might seem that the goal of feminism is to end all oppression that affects women. And some feminists have adopted this interpretation (e.g., Ware 1970, quoted in Crow 2000: 1).

Note, however, that not all agree with such an expansive definition of feminism. One might agree that feminists ought to work to end all forms of oppression—oppression is unjust and feminists, like everyone else, have a moral obligation to fight injustice—without maintaining that it is the mission of feminism to end all oppression. One might even believe that in order to accomplish feminism’s goals it is necessary to combat racism and economic exploitation, but also think that there is a narrower set of specifically feminist objectives. In other words, opposing oppression in its many forms may be instrumental to, even a necessary means to, feminism, but not intrinsic to it. For example, bell hooks argues:

Feminism, as liberation struggle, must exist apart from and as a part of the larger struggle to eradicate domination in all its forms. We must understand that patriarchal domination shares an ideological foundation with racism and other forms of group oppression, and that there is no hope that it can be eradicated while these systems remain intact. This knowledge should consistently inform the direction of feminist theory and practice. (hooks 1989: 22)

On hooks’ account, the defining characteristic that distinguishes feminism from other liberation struggles is its concern with sexism:

Unlike many feminist comrades, I believe women and men must share a common understanding—a basic knowledge of what feminism is—if it is ever to be a powerful mass-based political movement. In Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center , I suggest that defining feminism broadly as “a movement to end sexism and sexist oppression” would enable us to have a common political goal…Sharing a common goal does not imply that women and men will not have radically divergent perspectives on how that goal might be reached. (hooks 1989: 23)

hooks’ approach depends on the claim that sexism is a particular form of oppression that can be distinguished from other forms, e.g., racism and homophobia, even though it is currently (and virtually always) interlocked with other forms of oppression. Feminism’s objective is to end sexism, though because of its relation to other forms of oppression, this will require efforts to end other forms of oppression as well. For example, feminists who themselves remain racists will not be able to fully appreciate the broad impact of sexism on the lives of women of color—nor the interconnections between racism and sexism. Furthermore because sexist institutions are also, e.g., racist, classist, and homophobic, dismantling sexist institutions will require that we dismantle the other forms of domination intertwined with them (Heldke & O’Connor 2004). Following hooks’ lead, we might characterize feminism schematically (allowing the schema to be filled in differently by different accounts) as the view that women are subject to sexist oppression and that this is wrong. This move shifts the burden of our inquiry from a characterization of what feminism is to a characterization of what sexism, or sexist oppression, is.

As mentioned above, there are a variety of interpretations—feminist and otherwise—of what exactly oppression consists in, but the leading idea is that oppression consists in “an enclosing structure of forces and barriers which tends to the immobilization and reduction of a group or category of people” (Frye 1983: 10–11). Not just any “enclosing structure” is oppressive, however, for plausibly any process of socialization will create a structure that both limits and enables all individuals who live within it. In the case of oppression, however, the “enclosing structures” in question are part of a broader system that asymmetrically and unjustly disadvantages one group and benefits another. So, for example, although sexism restricts the opportunities available to—and so unquestionably harms—both men and women (and considering some pairwise comparisons may even have a greater negative impact on a man than a woman), overall, women as a group unjustly suffer the greater harm. It is a crucial feature of contemporary accounts, however, that one cannot assume that members of the privileged group have intentionally designed or maintained the system for their benefit. The oppressive structure may be the result of an historical process whose originators are long gone, or it may be the unintended result of complex cooperative strategies gone wrong.

Leaving aside (at least for the moment) further details in the account of oppression, the question remains: What makes a particular form of oppression sexist? If we just say that a form of oppression counts as sexist oppression if it harms women, or even primarily harms women, this is not enough to distinguish it from other forms of oppression. Virtually all forms of oppression harm women, and arguably some besides sexism harm women primarily (though not exclusively), e.g., body size oppression, age oppression. Besides, as we’ve noted before, sexism is not only harmful to women, but is harmful to all of us.

What makes a particular form of oppression sexist seems to be not just that it harms women, but that someone is subject to this form of oppression specifically because she is (or at least appears to be) a woman. Racial oppression harms women, but racial oppression (by itself) doesn’t harm them because they are women, it harms them because they are (or appear to be) members of a particular race. The suggestion that sexist oppression consists in oppression to which one is subject by virtue of being or appearing to be a woman provides us at least the beginnings of an analytical tool for distinguishing subordinating structures that happen to affect some or even all women from those that are more specifically sexist (Haslanger 2004). But problems and unclarities remain.

First, we need to explicate further what it means to be oppressed “because you are a woman”. For example, is the idea that there is a particular form of oppression that is specific to women? Is to be oppressed “as a woman” to be oppressed in a particular way? Or can we be pluralists about what sexist oppression consists in without fragmenting the notion beyond usefulness?

Two strategies for explicating sexist oppression have proven to be problematic. The first is to maintain that there is a form of oppression common to all women. For example, one might interpret Catharine MacKinnon’s work as claiming that to be oppressed as a woman is to be viewed and treated as sexually subordinate, where this claim is grounded in the (alleged) universal fact of the eroticization of male dominance and female submission (MacKinnon 1987, 1989). Although MacKinnon allows that sexual subordination can happen in a myriad of ways, her account is monistic in its attempt to unite the different forms of sexist oppression around a single core account that makes sexual objectification the focus. Although MacKinnon’s work provides a powerful resource for analyzing women’s subordination, many have argued that it is too narrow, e.g., in some contexts (especially in developing countries) sexist oppression seems to concern more the local division of labor and economic exploitation. Although certainly sexual subordination is a factor in sexist oppression, it requires us to fabricate implausible explanations of social life to suppose that all divisions of labor that exploit women (as women) stem from the “eroticization of dominance and submission”. Moreover, it isn’t obvious that in order to make sense of sexist oppression we need to seek a single form of oppression common to all women.

A second problematic strategy has been to consider as paradigms those who are oppressed only as women, with the thought that complex cases bringing in additional forms of oppression will obscure what is distinctive of sexist oppression. This strategy would have us focus in the United States on white, wealthy, young, beautiful, able-bodied, heterosexual women to determine what oppression, if any, they suffer, with the hope of finding sexism in its “purest” form, unmixed with racism or homophobia, etc. (see Spelman 1988: 52–54). This approach is not only flawed in its exclusion of all but the most elite women in its paradigm, but it assumes that privilege in other areas does not affect the phenomenon under consideration. As Elizabeth Spelman makes the point:

…no woman is subject to any form of oppression simply because she is a woman; which forms of oppression she is subject to depend on what “kind” of woman she is. In a world in which a woman might be subject to racism, classism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, if she is not so subject it is because of her race, class, religion, sexual orientation. So it can never be the case that the treatment of a woman has only to do with her gender and nothing to do with her class or race. (Spelman 1988: 52–3)

Other accounts of oppression are designed to allow that oppression takes many forms, and refuse to identify one form as more basic or fundamental than the rest. For example, Iris Young describes five “faces” of oppression: exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and systematic violence (Young 1980 [1990a: ch. 2]). Plausibly others should be added to the list. Sexist or racist oppression, for example, will manifest itself in different ways in different contexts, e.g., in some contexts through systematic violence, in other contexts through economic exploitation. Acknowledging this does not go quite far enough, however, for monistic theorists such as MacKinnon could grant this much. Pluralist accounts of sexist oppression must also allow that there isn’t an over-arching explanation of sexist oppression that applies to all its forms: in some cases it may be that women’s oppression as women is due to the eroticization of male dominance, but in other cases it may be better explained by women’s reproductive value in establishing kinship structures (Rubin 1975), or by the shifting demands of globalization within an ethnically stratified workplace. In other words, pluralists resist the temptation to “grand social theory”, “overarching metanarratives”, “monocausal explanations”, to allow that the explanation of sexism in a particular historical context will rely on economic, political, legal, and cultural factors that are specific to that context which would prevent the account from being generalized to all instances of sexism (Fraser & Nicholson 1990). It is still compatible with pluralist methods to seek out patterns in women’s social positions and structural explanations within and across social contexts, but in doing so we must be highly sensitive to historical and cultural variation.

However, if we pursue a pluralist strategy in understanding sexist oppression, what unifies all the instances as instances of sexism? After all, we cannot assume that the oppression in question takes the same form in different contexts, and we cannot assume that there is an underlying explanation of the different ways it manifests itself. So can we even speak of there being a unified set of cases—something we can call “sexist oppression”—at all?

Some feminists would urge us to recognize that there isn’t a systematic way to unify the different instances of sexism, and correspondingly, there is no systematic unity in what counts as feminism: instead we should see the basis for feminist unity in coalition building (Reagon 1983). Different groups work to combat different forms of oppression; some groups take oppression against women (as women) as a primary concern. If there is a basis for cooperation between some subset of these groups in a given context, then finding that basis is an accomplishment, but should not be taken for granted.

An alternative, however, would be to grant that in practice unity among feminists cannot be taken for granted, but to begin with a theoretical common ground among feminist views that does not assume that sexism appears in the same form or for the same reasons in all contexts. We saw above that one promising strategy for distinguishing sexism from racism, classism, and other forms of injustice is to focus on the idea that if an individual is suffering sexist oppression, then an important part of the explanation why she is subject to the injustice is that she is or appears to be a woman. This includes cases in which women as a group are explicitly targeted by a policy or a practice, but also includes cases where the policy or practice affects women due to a history of sexism, even if they are not explicitly targeted. For example, in a scenario in which women are children’s primary caregivers and cannot travel for work as easily as men, then employment practices that reward those who can travel can be deemed sexist because the differential is due to sexist practices. The commonality among the cases is to be found in the role of gender in the explanation of the injustice rather than the specific form the injustice takes. Building on this we could unify a broad range of feminist views by seeing them as committed to the (very abstract) claims that:

(Descriptive claim) Women, and those who appear to be women, are subjected to wrongs and/or injustice at least in part because they are or appear to be women.
(Normative claim) The wrongs/injustices in question in (i) ought not to occur and should be stopped when and where they do.

We have so far been using the term “oppression” loosely to cover whatever form of wrong or injustice is at issue. Continuing with this intentional openness in the exact nature of the wrong, the question still remains what it means to say that women are subjected to injustice because they are women. To address this question, it may help to consider a familiar ambiguity in the notion “because”: are we concerned here with causal explanations or justifications? On one hand, the claim that someone is oppressed because she is a woman suggests that the best (causal) explanation of the subordination in question will make reference to her sex: e.g., Paula is subject to sexist oppression on the job because the best explanation of why she makes $10.00 less an hour for doing comparable work as Paul makes reference to her sex (possibly coupled with her race or other social classifications). On the other hand, the claim that someone is oppressed because she is a woman suggests that the rationale or basis for the oppressive structures requires that one be sensitive to someone’s sex in determining how they should be viewed and treated, i.e., that the justification for someone’s being subject to the structures in question depends on a representation of them as sexed male or female. For example, Paula is subject to sexist oppression on the job because the pay scale for her job classification is justified within a framework that distinguishes and devalues women’s work compared with men’s.

Note, however, that in both sorts of cases the fact that one is or appears to be a woman need not be the only factor relevant in explaining the injustice. It might be, for example, that one stands out in a group because of one’s race, or one’s class, or one’s sexuality, and because one stands out one becomes a target for injustice. But if the injustice takes a form that, e.g., is regarded as especially apt for a woman, then the injustice should be understood intersectionally, i.e., as a response to an intersectional category. For example, the practice of raping Bosnian women was an intersectional injustice: it targeted them both because they were Bosnian and because they were women.

Of course, these two understandings of being oppressed because you are a woman are not incompatible; in fact they typically support one another. Because human actions are often best explained by the framework employed for justifying them, one’s sex may play a large role in determining how one is treated because the background understandings for what’s appropriate treatment draw invidious distinctions between the sexes. In other words, the causal mechanism for sexism often passes through problematic representations of women and gender roles.

In each of the cases of being oppressed as a woman mentioned above, Paula suffers injustice, but a crucial factor in explaining the injustice is that Paula is a member of a particular group, viz., women. This, we think, is crucial in understanding why sexism (and racism, and other -isms) are most often understood as kinds of oppression. Oppression is injustice that, first and foremost, concerns groups; individuals are oppressed just in case they are subjected to injustice because of their group membership. On this view, to claim that women as women suffer injustice is to claim that women are oppressed.

Where does this leave us? “Feminism” is an umbrella term for a range of views about injustices against women. There are disagreements among feminists about the nature of justice in general and the nature of sexism, in particular, the specific kinds of injustice or wrong women suffer; and the group who should be the primary focus of feminist efforts. Nonetheless, feminists are committed to bringing about social change to end injustice against women, in particular, injustice against women as women.

Feminism brings many things to philosophy including not only a variety of particular moral and political claims, but ways of asking and answering questions, constructive and critical dialogue with mainstream philosophical views and methods, and new topics of inquiry. Feminist philosophers work within all the major traditions of philosophical scholarship including analytic philosophy, American pragmatist philosophy, and Continental philosophy. Entries in this Encyclopedia appearing under the heading “feminism, approaches” discuss the impact of these traditions on feminist scholarship and examine the possibility and desirability of work that makes links between two traditions. Feminist contributions to and interventions in mainstream philosophical debates are covered in entries in this encyclopedia under “feminism, interventions”. Entries covered under the rubric “feminism, topics” concern philosophical issues that arise as feminists articulate accounts of sexism, critique sexist social and cultural practices, and develop alternative visions of a just world. In short, they are philosophical topics that arise within feminism.

Approaches to feminist philosophy are almost as varied as approaches to philosophy itself, reflecting a variety of beliefs about what kinds of philosophy are both fruitful and meaningful. To spell out such differences, this section of the SEP provides overviews of the following dominant (at least in more developed societies) approaches to feminist philosophy. The following are links to essays in this section:

Analytic Feminism
Continental Feminism
Pragmatist Feminism
Intersections Between Pragmatist and Continental Feminism
Intersections Between Analytic and Continental Feminism
Psychoanalytic Feminism

All these approaches share a set of feminist commitments and an overarching criticism of institutions, presuppositions, and practices that have historically favored men over women. They also share a general critique of claims to universality and objectivity that ignore male-dominated theories’ own particularity and specificity. Feminist philosophies of most any philosophical orientation will be much more perspectival, historical, contextual, and focused on lived experience than their non-feminist counterparts. Unlike mainstream philosophers who can seriously consider the philosophical conundrums of brains in a vat, feminist philosophers always start by seeing people as embodied. Feminists have also argued for the reconfiguration of accepted structures and problematics of philosophy. For example, feminists have not only rejected the privileging of epistemological concerns over moral and political concerns common to much of philosophy, they have argued that these two areas of concern are inextricably intertwined. Part 2 of the entry on analytic feminism lays out other areas of commonality across these various approaches. For one, feminist philosophers generally agree that philosophy is a powerful tool for understanding

ourselves and our relations to each other, to our communities, and to the state; to appreciate the extent to which we are counted as knowers and moral agents; [and] to uncover the assumptions and methods of various bodies of knowledge.

For another, feminist philosophers all generally are keenly attuned to male biases at work in the history of philosophy, such as those regarding “the nature of woman” and supposed value neutrality, which on inspection is hardly neutral at all. Claims to universality, feminist philosophers have found, are usually made from a very specific and particular point of view, contrary to their manifest claims. Another orientation that feminist philosophers generally share is a commitment to normativity and social change; they are never content to analyze things just as they are but are instead looking for ways to overcome sexist practices and institutions.

Such questioning of the problematic of mainstream approaches to philosophy has often led to feminists using methods and approaches from more than one philosophical tradition. As Ann Garry notes in part three of the entry on Analytic Feminism (2017), it is not uncommon to find analytic feminists drawing on non-analytic figures such as Beauvoir, Foucault, or Butler; and because of their motivation to communicate with other feminists, they are more motivated than other philosophers “to search for methodological cross-fertilization”.

Even with their common and overlapping orientations, the differences between the various philosophical approaches to feminism are significant, especially in terms of styles of writing, influences, and overall expectations about what philosophy can and should achieve. Analytic feminist philosophy tends to value analysis and argumentation, Continental feminist theory values interpretation and deconstruction, and pragmatist feminism values lived experience and exploration. Coming out of a post-Hegelian tradition, both Continental and pragmatist philosophers usually suspect that “truth”, whatever that is, emerges and develops historically. They tend to share with Nietzsche the view that truth claims often mask power plays. Yet where Continental and pragmatist are generally wary about notions of truth, analytic feminists tend to argue that the way to

counter sexism and androcentrism is through forming a clear conception of and pursuing truth, logical consistency, objectivity, rationality, justice, and the good. (Cudd 1996: 20).

These differences and intersections play out in the ways that various feminists engage topics of common concern. One key area of intersection noted by Georgia Warnke is the appropriation of psychoanalytic theory, with Anglo-American feminists generally adopting object-relations theories and Continental feminists drawing more on Lacan and contemporary French psychoanalytic theory, though this is already beginning to change (entry on intersections between analytic and continental feminism ). The importance of psychoanalytic approaches is also underscored in Shannon Sullivan’s essay Intersections Between Pragmatist and Continental Feminism . Given the importance of psychoanalytic feminism for all three traditions, a separate essay on this approach to feminist theory is included in this section.

No topic is more central to feminist philosophy than sex and gender, but even here many variations on the theme flourish. Where analytic feminism, with its critique of essentialism, holds the sex/gender distinction practically as an article of faith (see the entry on feminist perspectives on sex and gender and Chanter 2009), Continental feminists tend to suspect either (1) that even the supposedly purely biological category of sex is itself socially constituted (Butler 1990 and 1993 or (2) that sexual difference itself needs to be valued and theorized (see especially Cixous 1976 and Irigaray 1974.

Despite the variety of different approaches, styles, societies, and orientations, feminist philosophers’ commonalities are greater than their differences. Many will borrow freely from each other and find that other orientations contribute to their own work. Even the differences over sex and gender add to a larger conversation about the impact of culture and society on bodies, experience, and pathways for change.

Philosophers who are feminists have, in their work in traditional fields of study, begun to change those very fields. The Encyclopedia includes a range of entries on how feminist philosophies have intervened in conventional areas of philosophical research, areas in which philosophers often tend to argue that they are operating from a neutral, universal point of view (notable exceptions are pragmatism, poststructuralism, and some phenomenology). Historically, philosophy has claimed that the norm is universal and the feminine is abnormal, that universality is not gendered, but that all things feminine are not universal. Not surprisingly, feminists have pointed out how in fact these supposed neutral enterprises are in fact quite gendered, namely, male gendered. For example, feminists working on environmental philosophy have uncovered how practices disproportionately affect women, children, and people of color. Liberal feminism has shown how supposed universal truths of liberalism are in fact quite biased and particular. Feminist epistemologists have called out “epistemologies of ignorance” that traffic in not knowing. Across the board, in fact, feminist philosophers are uncovering male biases and also pointing to the value of particularity, in general rejecting universality as a norm or goal.

Entries under the heading of feminist interventions include the following:

feminist aesthetics
feminist bioethics
feminist environmental philosophy
feminist epistemology and philosophy of science
feminist ethics
feminist history of philosophy
liberal feminism
feminist metaphysics
feminist moral psychology
feminist philosophy of biology
feminist philosophy of language
feminist philosophy of law
feminist philosophy of religion
feminist political philosophy
feminist social epistemology

Feminist critical attention to philosophical practices has revealed the inadequacy of dominant philosophical tropes. For example, feminists working from the perspective of women’s lives have been influential in bringing philosophical attention to the phenomenon of care and care-giving (Ruddick 1989; Held 1995, 2007; Hamington 2006), dependency (Kittay 1999), disability (Wilkerson 2002; Carlson 2009) women’s labor (Waring 1999; Delphy 1984; Harley 2007), and scientific bias and objectivity (Longino 1990), and have revealed weaknesses in existing ethical, political, and epistemological theories. More generally, feminists have called for inquiry into what are typically considered “private” practices and personal concerns, such as the family, sexuality, and the body, in order to balance what has seemed to be a masculine pre-occupation with “public” and impersonal matters. Philosophy presupposes interpretive tools for understanding our everyday lives; feminist work in articulating additional dimensions of experience and aspects of our practices is invaluable in demonstrating the bias in existing tools, and in the search for better ones.

Feminist explanations of sexism and accounts of sexist practices also raise issues that are within the domain of traditional philosophical inquiry. For example, in thinking about care, feminists have asked questions about the nature of the self; in thinking about gender, feminists have asked what the relationship is between the natural and the social; in thinking about sexism in science, feminists have asked what should count as knowledge. In some such cases mainstream philosophical accounts provide useful tools; in other cases, alternative proposals have seemed more promising.

In the sub-entries included under “feminism (topics)” in the Table of Contents to this Encyclopedia , authors survey some of the recent feminist work on a topic, highlighting the issues that are of particular relevance to philosophy. These entries are:

feminist perspectives on autonomy
feminist perspectives on class and work
feminist perspectives on disability
feminist perspectives on globalization
feminist perspectives on objectification
feminist perspectives on power
feminist perspectives on rape
feminist perspectives on reproduction and the family
feminist perspectives on science
feminist perspectives on sex and gender
feminist perspectives on sex markets
feminist perspectives on the body
feminist perspectives on the self
feminist perspectives on trans issues

See also the entries in the Related Entries section below.

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Waring, Marilyn, 1999, Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth , second edition, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Weisberg, D. Kelly (ed.) 1993. Feminist Legal Theory: Foundations , Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Wendell, Susan, 1996, The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability , New York and London: Routledge.
Wilkerson, Abby L., 2002, “Disability, Sex Radicalism, and the Problem of Political Agency”. NWSA Journal , 14(3): 33–57. doi:10.1353/nwsa.2003.0018
Whisnant, Rebecca, 2010, Global Feminist Ethics , Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Winnubst, Shannon, 2006, Queering Freedom , Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
–––, 1985 [1990], “Humanism, Gynocentrism and Feminist Politics”, Women’s Studies International Forum , 8(3): 173–183. Reprinted in Young 1990a: 73–91. doi:10.1016/0277-5395(85)90040-8
–––, 1990a, Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory , Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
–––, 1990b, Justice and the Politics of Difference , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
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Zophy, Angela Howard, 1990, “Feminism”, in The Handbook of American Women’s History , Angela Howard Zophy and Frances M. Kavenik (eds), New York: Routledge (Garland Reference Library of the Humanities).

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up this entry topic at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

Resources listed below have been chosen to provide only a springboard into the huge amount of feminist material available on the web. The emphasis here is on general resources useful for doing research in feminist philosophy or interdisciplinary feminist theory, e.g., the links connect to bibliographies and meta-sites, and resources concerning inclusion, exclusion, and feminist diversity. The list is incomplete and will be regularly revised and expanded. Further resources on topics in feminism such as popular culture, reproductive rights, sex work, are available within each sub-entry on that topic.

Feminist Theory Website
Women and Social Movements in the US: 1600–2000
The Path of the Women’s Rights Movement: Detailed Timeline 1848–1997
Documents from the Women’s Liberation Movement (Duke Univ. Archives)
Documenting Difference: An Illustrated & Annotated Anthology of Documents on Race, Class, Gender & Ethnicity in the United States
Race, Gender, and Affirmative Action Resource Page

Associations

The Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP)
Association for Feminist Ethics and Social Theory (FEAST)
Association for Feminist Epistemologies, Methodologies, Metaphysics, and Science Studies (FEMMSS)
Feminist Theory Website (Introduction)
philoSOPHIA: A Feminist Society
Society for Analytical Feminism
The Society for the Study of Women Philosophers

“Waves” of Feminism

“Waves of Feminism” by Jo Freeman (1996).
Winning the Vote (Western NY Suffragists).
Amendments to the US Constitution: 13th, 14th, 15th, 18th, 19th, 21st
NOW’s 1966 Statement of Purpose
“The Women’s Liberation Movement: Its Origins, Structures, and Ideals” by Jo Freeman (1971).

Feminism and Class

Marxist, socialist, and materialist feminisms.

WMST-L discussion of how to define “Marxist feminism” Aug 1994)
Marxist/Materialist Feminism (Feminist Theory Website)
A Marxist Feminist Critique
Marxist Feminism

Feminist Economics

Feminist Economics (Feminist Theory Website)
International Association for Feminist Economics
International Center for Research on Women

Women and Labor

Rights for Working Women
United States Department of Labor
United States Department of Labor: Audience – Women , a shortcut to information and services the Department of Labor (DOL) offers for women.

Feminism and Disability

Center for Research on Women with Disabilities (CROWD)

Feminism, Human Rights, Global Feminism, and Human Trafficking

Global Feminism (Feminist Majority Foundation)
NOW and Global Feminism
Sisterhood is Global Institute (SIGI)
Polaris Project
Not For Sale Campaign
Human Trafficking Search Website

Feminism and Race/Ethnicity

General resources.

Office of the Gender and Women’s Studies Librarian (U. Wisconsin)
Women of Color Web Sites (WMST-L)

African-American/Black Feminisms and Womanism

Feminism and Black Womanist Identity Bibliography (Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library)
Black Feminist/Womanist Works: A Beginning List (WMST-L)

Asian-American and Asian Feminisms

American Women’s History: A Research Guide (Asian-American Women)
South Asian Women’s Studies Bibliography (UC Berkeley)
Journal of South Asia Women’s Studies

Chicana/Latina Feminisms

Chicano/a Latino/a Movimientos

American Indian, Native, Indigenous Feminisms

Native American Studies Program (Dartmouth College)

Feminism, Sex, Sexuality, Transgender, and Intersex

Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture (Duke Special Collections)

Acknowledgments

Over many revisions, thanks go to Elizabeth Harman, Elizabeth Hackett, Ishani Maitra, Ásta Sveinsdóttir, Leslee Mahoney, and Ann Garry.

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Article contents

Feminist theory and its use in qualitative research in education.

Emily Freeman Emily Freeman University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.1193
Published online: 28 August 2019

Feminist theory rose in prominence in educational research during the 1980s and experienced a resurgence in popularity during the late 1990s−2010s. Standpoint epistemologies, intersectionality, and feminist poststructuralism are the most prevalent theories, but feminist researchers often work across feminist theoretical thought. Feminist qualitative research in education encompasses a myriad of methods and methodologies, but projects share a commitment to feminist ethics and theories. Among the commitments are the understanding that knowledge is situated in the subjectivities and lived experiences of both researcher and participants and research is deeply reflexive. Feminist theory informs both research questions and the methodology of a project in addition to serving as a foundation for analysis. The goals of feminist educational research include dismantling systems of oppression, highlighting gender-based disparities, and seeking new ways of constructing knowledge.

feminist theories
qualitative research
educational research
positionality
methodology

Introduction

Feminist qualitative research begins with the understanding that all knowledge is situated in the bodies and subjectivities of people, particularly women and historically marginalized groups. Donna Haraway ( 1988 ) wrote,

I am arguing for politics and epistemologies of location, position, and situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims. These are claims on people’s lives I’m arguing for the view from a body, always a complex, contradictory, structuring, and structured body, versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity. Only the god trick is forbidden. . . . Feminism is about a critical vision consequent upon a critical positioning in unhomogeneous gendered social space. (p. 589)

By arguing that “politics and epistemologies” are always interpretive and partial, Haraway offered feminist qualitative researchers in education a way to understand all research as potentially political and always interpretive and partial. Because all humans bring their own histories, biases, and subjectivities with them to a research space or project, it is naïve to think that the written product of research could ever be considered neutral, but what does research with a strong commitment to feminism look like in the context of education?

Writing specifically about the ways researchers of both genders can use feminist ethnographic methods while conducting research on schools and schooling, Levinson ( 1998 ) stated, “I define feminist ethnography as intensive qualitative research, aimed toward the description and analysis of the gendered construction and representation of experience, which is informed by a political and intellectual commitment to the empowerment of women and the creation of more equitable arrangements between and among specific, culturally defined genders” (p. 339). The core of Levinson’s definition is helpful for understanding the ways that feminist educational anthropologists engage with schools as gendered and political constructs and the larger questions of feminist qualitative research in education. His message also extends to other forms of feminist qualitative research. By focusing on description, analysis, and representation of gendered constructs, educational researchers can move beyond simple binary analyses to more nuanced understandings of the myriad ways gender operates within educational contexts.

Feminist qualitative research spans the range of qualitative methodologies, but much early research emerged out of the feminist postmodern turn in anthropology (Behar & Gordon, 1995 ), which was a response to male anthropologists who ignored the gendered implications of ethnographic research (e.g., Clifford & Marcus, 1986 ). Historically, most of the work on feminist education was conducted in the 1980s and 1990s, with a resurgence in the late 2010s (Culley & Portuges, 1985 ; DuBois, Kelly, Kennedy, Korsmeyer, & Robinson, 1985 ; Gottesman, 2016 ; Maher & Tetreault, 1994 ; Thayer-Bacon, Stone, & Sprecher, 2013 ). Within this body of research, the majority focuses on higher education (Coffey & Delamont, 2000 ; Digiovanni & Liston, 2005 ; Diller, Houston, Morgan, & Ayim, 1996 ; Gabriel & Smithson, 1990 ; Mayberry & Rose, 1999 ). Even leading journals, such as Feminist Teacher ( 1984 −present), focus mostly on the challenges of teaching about and to women in higher education, although more scholarship on P–12 education has emerged in recent issues.

There is also a large collection of work on the links between gender, achievement, and self-esteem (American Association of University Women, 1992 , 1999 ; Digiovanni & Liston, 2005 ; Gilligan, 1982 ; Hancock, 1989 ; Jackson, Paechter, & Renold, 2010 ; National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education, 2002 ; Orenstein, 1994 ; Pipher, 1994 ; Sadker & Sadker, 1994 ). However, just because research examines gender does not mean that it is feminist. Simply using gender as a category of analysis does not mean the research project is informed by feminist theory, ethics, or methods, but it is often a starting point for researchers who are interested in the complex ways gender is constructed and the ways it operates in education.

This article examines the histories and theories of U.S.–based feminism, the tenets of feminist qualitative research and methodologies, examples of feminist qualitative studies, and the possibilities for feminist qualitative research in education to provide feminist educational researchers context and methods for engaging in transformative and subversive research. Each section provides a brief overview of the major concepts and conversations, along with examples from educational research to highlight the ways feminist theory has informed educational scholarship. Some examples are given limited attention and serve as entry points into a more detailed analysis of a few key examples. While there is a large body of non-Western feminist theory (e.g., the works of Lila Abu-Lughod, Sara Ahmed, Raewyn Connell, Saba Mahmood, Chandra Mohanty, and Gayatri Spivak), much of the educational research using feminist theory draws on Western feminist theory. This article focuses on U.S.–based research to show the ways that the utilization of feminist theory has changed since the 1980s.

Histories, Origins, and Theories of U.S.–Based Feminism

The normative historiography of feminist theory and activism in the United States is broken into three waves. First-wave feminism (1830s−1920s) primarily focused on women’s suffrage and women’s rights to legally exist in public spaces. During this time period, there were major schisms between feminist groups concerning abolition, rights for African American women, and the erasure of marginalized voices from larger feminist debates. The second wave (1960s and 1980s) worked to extend some of the rights won during the first wave. Activists of this time period focused on women’s rights to enter the workforce, sexual harassment, educational equality, and abortion rights. During this wave, colleges and universities started creating women’s studies departments and those scholars provided much of the theoretical work that informs feminist research and activism today. While there were major feminist victories during second-wave feminism, notably Title IX and Roe v. Wade , issues concerning the marginalization of race, sexual orientation, and gender identity led many feminists of color to separate from mainstream white feminist groups. The third wave (1990s to the present) is often characterized as the intersectional wave, as some feminist groups began utilizing Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality ( 1991 ) to understand that oppression operates via multiple categories (e.g., gender, race, class, age, ability) and that intersecting oppressions lead to different lived experiences.

Historians and scholars of feminism argue that dividing feminist activism into three waves flattens and erases the major contributions of women of color and gender-nonconforming people. Thompson ( 2002 ) called this history a history of hegemonic feminism and proposed that we look at the contributions of multiracial feminism when discussing history. Her work, along with that of Allen ( 1984 ) about the indigenous roots of U.S. feminism, raised many questions about the ways that feminism operates within the public and academic spheres. For those who wish to engage in feminist research, it is vital to spend time understanding the historical, theoretical, and political ways that feminism(s) can both liberate and oppress, depending on the scholar’s understandings of, and orientations to, feminist projects.

Standpoint Epistemology

Much of the theoretical work that informs feminist qualitative research today emerged out of second-wave feminist scholarship. Standpoint epistemology, according to Harding ( 1991 , 2004 ), posits that knowledge comes from one’s particular social location, that it is subjective, and the further one is from the hegemonic norm, the clearer one can see oppression. This was a major challenge to androcentric and Enlightenment theories of knowledge because standpoint theory acknowledges that there is no universal understanding of the world. This theory aligns with the second-wave feminist slogan, “The personal is political,” and advocates for a view of knowledge that is produced from the body.

Greene ( 1994 ) wrote from a feminist postmodernist epistemology and attacked Enlightenment thinking by using standpoint theory as her starting point. Her work serves as an example of one way that educational scholars can use standpoint theory in their work. She theorized encounters with “imaginative literature” to help educators conceptualize new ways of using reading and writing in the classroom and called for teachers to think of literature as “a harbinger of the possible.” (Greene, 1994 , p. 218). Greene wrote from an explicitly feminist perspective and moved beyond simple analyses of gender to a larger critique of the ways that knowledge is constructed in classrooms.

Intersectionality

Crenshaw ( 1991 ) and Collins ( 2000 ) challenged and expanded standpoint theory to move it beyond an individual understanding of knowledge to a group-based theory of oppression. Their work, and that of other black and womanist feminists, opened up multiple spaces of possibility for feminist scholars and researchers because it challenged hegemonic feminist thought. For those interested in conducting feminist research in educational settings, their work is especially pertinent because they advocate for feminists to attend to all aspects of oppression rather than flattening them to one of simple gender-based oppression.

Haddix, McArthur, Muhammad, Price-Dennis, and Sealey-Ruiz ( 2016 ), all women-of-color feminist educators, wrote a provocateur piece in a special issue of English Education on black girls’ literacy. The four authors drew on black feminist thought and conducted a virtual kitchen-table conversation. By symbolically representing their conversations as one from the kitchen, this article pays homage to women-of-color feminism and pushes educators who read English Education to reconsider elements of their own subjectivities. Third-wave feminism and black feminism emphasize intersectionality, in that different demographic details like race, class, and gender are inextricably linked in power structures. Intersectionality is an important frame for educational research because identifying the unique experiences, realities, and narratives of those involved in educational systems can highlight the ways that power and oppression operate in society.

Feminist Poststructural Theory

Feminist poststructural theory has greatly informed many feminist projects in educational research. Deconstruction is

a critical practice that aims to ‘dismantle [ déconstruire ] the metaphysical and rhetorical structures that are at work, not in order to reject or discard them, but to reinscribe them in another way,’ (Derrida, quoted in Spivak, 1974 , p. lxxv). Thus, deconstruction is not about tearing down, but about looking at how a structure has been constructed, what holds it together, and what it produces. (St. Pierre, 2000 , p. 482)

Reality, subjectivity, knowledge, and truth are constructed through language and discourse (cultural practices, power relations, etc.), so truth is local and diverse, rather than a universal experience (St. Pierre, 2000 ). Feminist poststructuralist theory may be used to question structural inequality that is maintained in education through dominant discourses.

In Go Be a Writer! Expanding the Curricular Boundaries of Literacy Learning with Children , Kuby and Rucker ( 2016 ) explored early elementary literacy practices using poststructural and posthumanist theories. Their book drew on hours of classroom observations, student interviews and work, and their own musings on ways to de-standardize literacy instruction and curriculum. Through the process of pedagogical documentation, Kuby and Rucker drew on the works of Barad, Deleuze and Guattari, and Derrida to explore the ways they saw children engaging in what they call “literacy desiring(s).” One aim of the book is to find practical and applicable ways to “Disrupt literacy in ways that rewrite the curriculum, the interactions, and the power dynamics of the classroom even begetting a new kind of energy that spirals and bounces and explodes” (Kuby & Rucker, 2016 , p. 5). The second goal of their book is not only to understand what happened in Rucker’s classroom using the theories, but also to unbound the links between “teaching↔learning” (p. 202) and to write with the theories, rather than separating theory from the methodology and classroom enactments (p. 45) because “knowing/being/doing were not separate” (p. 28). This work engages with key tenets of feminist poststructuralist theory and adds to both the theoretical and pedagogical conversations about what counts as a literacy practice.

While the discussion in this section provides an overview of the histories and major feminist theories, it is by no means exhaustive. Scholars who wish to engage in feminist educational research need to spend time doing the work of understanding the various theories and trajectories that constitute feminist work so they are able to ground their projects and theories in a particular tradition that will inform the ethics and methods of research.

Tenets of Feminist Qualitative Research

Why engage in feminist qualitative research.

Evans and Spivak ( 2016 ) stated, “The only real and effective way you can sabotage something this way is when you are working intimately within it.” Feminist researchers are in the classroom and the academy, working intimately within curricular, pedagogical, and methodological constraints that serve neoliberal ideologies, so it is vital to better understand the ways that we can engage in affirmative sabotage to build a more just and equitable world. Spivak’s ( 2014 ) notion of affirmative sabotage has become a cornerstone for understanding feminist qualitative research and teaching. She borrowed and built on Gramsci’s role of the organic intellectual and stated that they/we need to engage in affirmative sabotage to transform the humanities.

I used the term “affirmative sabotage” to gloss on the usual meaning of sabotage: the deliberate ruining of the master’s machine from the inside. Affirmative sabotage doesn’t just ruin; the idea is of entering the discourse that you are criticizing fully, so that you can turn it around from inside. The only real and effective way you can sabotage something this way is when you are working intimately within it. (Evans & Spivak, 2016 )

While Spivak has been mostly concerned with literary education, her writings provide teachers and researchers numerous lines of inquiry into projects that can explode androcentric universal notions of knowledge and resist reproductive heteronormativity.

Spivak’s pedagogical musings center on deconstruction, primarily Derridean notions of deconstruction (Derrida, 2016 ; Jackson & Mazzei, 2012 ; Spivak, 2006 , 2009 , 2012 ) that seek to destabilize existing categories and to call into question previously unquestioned beliefs about the goals of education. Her works provide an excellent starting point for examining the links between feminism and educational research. The desire to create new worlds within classrooms, worlds that are fluid, interpretive, and inclusive in order to interrogate power structures, lies at the core of what it means to be a feminist education researcher. As researchers, we must seriously engage with feminist theory and include it in our research so that feminism is not seen as a dirty word, but as a movement/pedagogy/methodology that seeks the liberation of all (Davis, 2016 ).

Feminist research and feminist teaching are intrinsically linked. As Kerkhoff ( 2015 ) wrote, “Feminist pedagogy requires students to challenge the norms and to question whether existing practices privilege certain groups and marginalize others” (p. 444), and this is exactly what feminist educational research should do. Bailey ( 2001 ) called on teachers, particularly those who identify as feminists, to be activists, “The values of one’s teaching should not be separated sharply from the values one expresses outside the classroom, because teaching is not inherently pure or laboratory practice” (p. 126); however, we have to be careful not to glorify teachers as activists because that leads to the risk of misinterpreting actions. Bailey argued that teaching critical thinking is not enough if it is not coupled with curriculums and pedagogies that are antiheteronormative, antisexist, and antiracist. As Bailey warned, just using feminist theory or identifying as a feminist is not enough. It is very easy to use the language and theories of feminism without being actively feminist in one’s research. There are ethical and methodological issues that feminist scholars must consider when conducting research.

Feminist research requires one to discuss ethics, not as a bureaucratic move, but as a reflexive move that shows the researchers understand that, no matter how much they wish it didn’t, power always plays a role in the process. According to Davies ( 2014 ), “Ethics, as Barad defines it, is a matter of questioning what is being made to matter and how that mattering affects what it is possible to do and to think” (p. 11). In other words, ethics is what is made to matter in a particular time and place.

Davies ( 2016 ) extended her definition of ethics to the interactions one has with others.

This is not ethics as a matter of separate individuals following a set of rules. Ethical practice, as both Barad and Deleuze define it, requires thinking beyond the already known, being open in the moment of the encounter, pausing at the threshold and crossing over. Ethical practice is emergent in encounters with others, in emergent listening with others. It is a matter of questioning what is being made to matter and how that mattering affects what it is possible to do and to think. Ethics is emergent in the intra-active encounters in which knowing, being, and doing (epistemology, ontology, and ethics) are inextricably linked. (Barad, 2007 , p. 83)

The ethics of any project must be negotiated and contested before, during, and after the process of conducting research in conjunction with the participants. Feminist research is highly reflexive and should be conducted in ways that challenge power dynamics between individuals and social institutions. Educational researchers must heed the warning to avoid the “god-trick” (Haraway, 1988 ) and to continually question and re-question the ways we seek to define and present subjugated knowledge (Hesse-Biber, 2012 ).

Positionalities and Reflexivity

According to feminist ethnographer Noelle Stout, “Positionality isn’t meant to be a few sentences at the beginning of a work” (personal communication, April 5, 2016 ). In order to move to new ways of experiencing and studying the world, it is vital that scholars examine the ways that reflexivity and positionality are constructed. In a glorious footnote, Margery Wolf ( 1992 ) related reflexivity in anthropological writing to a bureaucratic procedure (p. 136), and that resonates with how positionality often operates in the field of education.

The current trend in educational research is to include a positionality statement that fixes the identity of the author in a particular place and time and is derived from feminist standpoint theory. Researchers should make their biases and the identities of the authors clear in a text, but there are serious issues with the way that positionality functions as a boundary around the authors. Examining how the researchers exert authority within a text allows the reader the opportunity to determine the intent and philosophy behind the text. If positionality were used in an embedded and reflexive manner, then educational research would be much richer and allow more nuanced views of schools, in addition to being more feminist in nature. The rest of this section briefly discussrs articles that engage with feminist ethics regarding researcher subjectivities and positionality, and two articles are examined in greater depth.

When looking for examples of research that includes deeply reflexive and embedded positionality, one finds that they mostly deal with issues of race, equity, and diversity. The highlighted articles provide examples of positionality statements that are deeply reflexive and represent the ways that feminist researchers can attend to the ethics of being part of a research project. These examples all come from feminist ethnographic projects, but they are applicable to a wide variety of feminist qualitative projects.

Martinez ( 2016 ) examined how research methods are or are not appropriate for specific contexts. Calderon ( 2016 ) examined autoethnography and the reproduction of “settler colonial understandings of marginalized communities” (p. 5). Similarly, Wissman, Staples, Vasudevan, and Nichols ( 2015 ) discussed how to research with adolescents through engaged participation and collaborative inquiry, and Ceglowski and Makovsky ( 2012 ) discussed the ways researchers can engage in duoethnography with young children.

Abajian ( 2016 ) uncovered the ways military recruiters operate in high schools and paid particular attention to the politics of remaining neutral while also working to subvert school militarization. She wrote,

Because of the sensitive and also controversial nature of my research, it was not possible to have a collaborative process with students, teachers, and parents. Purposefully intervening would have made documentation impossible because that would have (rightfully) aligned me with anti-war and counter-recruitment activists who were usually not welcomed on school campuses (Abajian & Guzman, 2013 ). It was difficult enough to find an administrator who gave me consent to conduct my research within her school, as I had explicitly stated in my participant recruitment letters and consent forms that I was going to research the promotion of post-secondary paths including the military. Hence, any purposeful intervention on my part would have resulted in the termination of my research project. At the same time, my documentation was, in essence, an intervention. I hoped that my presence as an observer positively shaped the context of my observation and also contributed to the larger struggle against the militarization of schools. (p. 26)

Her positionality played a vital role in the creation, implementation, and analysis of military recruitment, but it also forced her into unexpected silences in order to carry out her research. Abajian’s positionality statement brings up many questions about the ways researchers have to use or silence their positionality to further their research, especially if they are working in ostensibly “neutral” and “politically free” zones, such as schools. Her work drew on engaged anthropology (Low & Merry, 2010 ) and critical reflexivity (Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008 ) to highlight how researchers’ subjectivities shape ethnographic projects. Questions of subjectivity and positionality in her work reflect the larger discourses around these topics in feminist theory and qualitative research.

Brown ( 2011 ) provided another example of embedded and reflexive positionality of the articles surveyed. Her entire study engaged with questions about how her positionality influenced the study during the field-work portion of her ethnography on how race and racism operate in ethnographic field-work. This excerpt from her study highlights how she conceived of positionality and how it informed her work and her process.

Next, I provide a brief overview of the research study from which this paper emerged and I follow this with a presentation of four, first-person narratives from key encounters I experienced while doing ethnographic field research. Each of these stories centres the role race played as I negotiated my multiple, complex positionality vis-á-vis different informants and participants in my study. These stories highlight the emotional pressures that race work has on the researcher and the research process, thus reaffirming why one needs to recognise the role race plays, and may play, in research prior to, during, and after conducting one’s study (Milner, 2007 ). I conclude by discussing the implications these insights have on preparing researchers of color to conduct cross-racial qualitative research. (Brown, 2011 , p. 98)

Brown centered the roles of race and subjectivity, both hers and her participants, by focusing her analysis on the four narratives. The researchers highlighted in this section thought deeply about the ethics of their projects and the ways that their positionality informed their choice of methods.

Methods and Challenges

Feminist qualitative research can take many forms, but the most common data collection methods include interviews, observations, and narrative or discourse analysis. For the purposes of this article, methods refer to the tools and techniques researchers use, while methodology refers to the larger philosophical and epistemological approaches to conducting research. It is also important to note that these are not fixed terms, and that there continues to be much debate about what constitutes feminist theory and feminist research methods among feminist qualitative researchers. This section discusses some of the tensions and constraints of using feminist theory in educational research.

Jackson and Mazzei ( 2012 ) called on researchers to think through their data with theory at all stages of the collection and analysis process. They also reminded us that all data collection is partial and informed by the researcher’s own beliefs (Koro-Ljungberg, Löytönen, & Tesar, 2017 ). Interviews are sites of power and critiques because they show the power of stories and serve as a method of worlding, the process of “making a world, turning insight into instrument, through and into a possible act of freedom” (Spivak, 2014 , p. xiii). Interviews allow researchers and participants ways to engage in new ways of understanding past experiences and connecting them to feminist theories. The narratives serve as data, but it is worth noting that the data collected from interviews are “partial, incomplete, and always being re-told and re-membered” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012 , p. 3), much like the lived experiences of both researcher and participant.

Research, data collection, and interpretation are not neutral endeavors, particularly with interviews (Jackson & Mazzei, 2009 ; Mazzei, 2007 , 2013 ). Since education research emerged out of educational psychology (Lather, 1991 ; St. Pierre, 2016 ), historically there has been an emphasis on generalizability and positivist data collection methods. Most feminist research makes no claims of generalizability or truth; indeed, to do so would negate the hyperpersonal and particular nature of this type of research (Love, 2017 ). St. Pierre ( 2016 ) viewed the lack of generalizability as an asset of feminist and poststructural research, rather than a limitation, because it creates a space of resistance against positivist research methodologies.

Denzin and Giardina ( 2016 ) urged researchers to “consider an alternative mode of thinking about the critical turn in qualitative inquiry and posit the following suggestion: perhaps it is time we turned away from ‘methodology’ altogether ” (p. 5, italics original). Despite the contention over the term critical among some feminist scholars (e.g. Ellsworth, 1989 ), their suggestion is valid and has been picked up by feminist and poststructural scholars who examine the tensions between following a strict research method/ology and the theoretical systems out of which they operate because precision in method obscures the messy and human nature of research (Koro-Ljungberg, 2016 ; Koro-Ljungberg et al., 2017 ; Love, 2017 ; St. Pierre & Pillow, 2000 ). Feminist qualitative researchers should seek to complicate the question of what method and methodology mean when conducting feminist research (Lather, 1991 ), due to the feminist emphasis on reflexive and situated research methods (Hesse-Biber, 2012 ).

Examples of Feminist Qualitative Research in Education

A complete overview of the literature is not possible here, due to considerations of length, but the articles and books selected represent the various debates within feminist educational research. They also show how research preoccupations have changed over the course of feminist work in education. The literature review is divided into three broad categories: Power, canons, and gender; feminist pedagogies, curriculums, and classrooms; and teacher education, identities, and knowledge. Each section provides a broad overview of the literature to demonstrate the breadth of work using feminist theory, with some examples more deeply explicated to describe how feminist theories inform the scholarship.

Power, Canons, and Gender

The literature in this category contests disciplinary practices that are androcentric in both content and form, while asserting the value of using feminist knowledge to construct knowledge. The majority of the work was written in the 1980s and supported the creation of feminist ways of knowing, particularly via the creation of women’s studies programs or courses in existing departments that centered female voices and experiences.

Questioning the canon has long been a focus of feminist scholarship, as has the attempt to subvert its power in the disciplines. Bezucha ( 1985 ) focused on the ways that departments of history resist the inclusion of both women and feminism in the historical canon. Similarly, Miller ( 1985 ) discussed feminism as subversion when seeking to expand the canon of French literature in higher education.

Lauter and Dieterich ( 1972 ) examined a report by ERIC, “Women’s Place in Academe,” a collection of articles about the discrepancies by gender in jobs and tenure-track positions and the lack of inclusion of women authors in literature classes. They also found that women were relegated to “softer” disciplines and that feminist knowledge was not acknowledged as valid work. Culley and Portuges ( 1985 ) expanded the focus beyond disciplines to the larger structures of higher education and noted the varies ways that professors subvert from within their disciplines. DuBois et al. ( 1985 ) chronicled the development of feminist scholarship in the disciplines of anthropology, education, history, literature, and philosophy. They explained that the institutions of higher education often prevent feminist scholars from working across disciplines in an attempt to keep them separate. Raymond ( 1985 ) also critiqued the academy for not encouraging relationships across disciplines and offered the development of women’s, gender, and feminist studies as one solution to greater interdisciplinary work.

Parson ( 2016 ) examined the ways that STEM syllabi reinforce gendered norms in higher education. She specifically looked at eight syllabi from math, chemistry, biology, physics, and geology classes to determine how modal verbs showing stance, pronouns, intertextuality, interdiscursivity, and gender showed power relations in higher education. She framed the study through poststructuralist feminist critical discourse analysis to uncover “the ways that gendered practices that favor men are represented and replicated in the syllabus” (p. 103). She found that all the syllabi positioned knowledge as something that is, rather than something that can be co-constructed. Additionally, the syllabi also favored individual and masculine notions of what it means to learn by stressing the competitive and difficult nature of the classroom and content.

When reading newer work on feminism in higher education and the construction of knowledge, it is easy to feel that, while the conversations might have shifted somewhat, the challenge of conducting interdisciplinary feminist work in institutions of higher education remains as present as it was during the creation of women’s and gender studies departments. The articles all point to the fact that simply including women’s and marginalized voices in the academy does not erase or mitigate the larger issues of gender discrimination and androcentricity within the silos of the academy.

Feminist Pedagogies, Curricula, and Classrooms

This category of literature has many similarities to the previous one, but all the works focus more specifically on questions of curriculum and pedagogy. A review of the literature shows that the earliest conversations were about the role of women in academia and knowledge construction, and this selection builds on that work to emphasize the ways that feminism can influence the events within classes and expands the focus to more levels of education.

Rich ( 1985 ) explained that curriculum in higher education courses needs to validate gender identities while resisting patriarchal canons. Maher ( 1985 ) narrowed the focus to a critique of the lecture as a pedagogical technique that reinforces androcentric ways of learning and knowing. She called for classes in higher education to be “collaborative, cooperative, and interactive” (p. 30), a cry that still echoes across many college campuses today, especially from students in large lecture-based courses. Maher and Tetreault ( 1994 ) provided a collection of essays that are rooted in feminist classroom practice and moved from the classroom into theoretical possibilities for feminist education. Warren ( 1998 ) recommended using Peggy McIntosh’s five phases of curriculum development ( 1990 ) and extending it to include feminist pedagogies that challenge patriarchal ways of teaching. Exploring the relational encounters that exist in feminist classrooms, Sánchez-Pardo ( 2017 ) discussed the ethics of pedagogy as a politics of visibility and investigated the ways that democratic classrooms relate to feminist classrooms.

While all of the previously cited literature is U.S.–based, the next two works focus on the ways that feminist pedagogies and curriculum operate in a European context. Weiner ( 1994 ) used autobiography and narrative methodologies to provide an introduction to how feminism has influenced educational research and pedagogy in Britain. Revelles-Benavente and Ramos ( 2017 ) collected a series of studies about how situated feminist knowledge challenges the problems of neoliberal education across Europe. These two, among many European feminist works, demonstrate the range of scholarship and show the trans-Atlantic links between how feminism has been received in educational settings. However, much more work needs to be done in looking at the broader global context, and particularly by feminist scholars who come from non-Western contexts.

The following literature moves us into P–12 classrooms. DiGiovanni and Liston ( 2005 ) called for a new research agenda in K–5 education that explores the hidden curriculums surrounding gender and gender identity. One source of the hidden curriculum is classroom literature, which both Davies ( 2003 ) and Vandergrift ( 1995 ) discussed in their works. Davies ( 2003 ) used feminist ethnography to understand how children who were exposed to feminist picture books talked about gender and gender roles. Vandergrift ( 1995 ) presented a theoretical piece that explored the ways picture books reinforce or resist canons. She laid out a future research agenda using reader response theory to better comprehend how young children question gender in literature. Willinsky ( 1987 ) explored the ways that dictionary definitions reinforced constructions of gender. He looked at the definitions of the words clitoris, penis , and vagina in six school dictionaries and then compared them with A Feminist Dictionary to see how the definitions varied across texts. He found a stark difference in the treatment of the words vagina and penis ; definitions of the word vagina were treated as medical or anatomical and devoid of sexuality, while definitions of the term penis were linked to sex (p. 151).

Weisner ( 2004 ) addressed middle school classrooms and highlighted the various ways her school discouraged unconventional and feminist ways of teaching. She also brought up issues of silence, on the part of both teachers and students, regarding sexuality. By including students in the curriculum planning process, Weisner provided more possibilities for challenging power in classrooms. Wallace ( 1999 ) returned to the realm of higher education and pushed literature professors to expand pedagogy to be about more than just the texts that are read. She challenged the metaphoric dichotomy of classrooms as places of love or battlefields; in doing so, she “advocate[d] active ignorance and attention to resistances” (p. 194) as a method of subverting transference from students to teachers.

The works discussed in this section cover topics ranging from the place of women in curriculum to the gendered encounters teachers and students have with curriculums and pedagogies. They offer current feminist scholars many directions for future research, particularly in the arena of P–12 education.

Teacher Education, Identities, and Knowledge

The third subset of literature examines the ways that teachers exist in classrooms and some possibilities for feminist teacher education. The majority of the literature in this section starts from the premise that the teachers are engaged in feminist projects. The selections concerning teacher education offer critiques of existing heteropatriarchal normative teacher education and include possibilities for weaving feminism and feminist pedagogies into the education of preservice teachers.

Holzman ( 1986 ) explored the role of multicultural teaching and how it can challenge systematic oppression; however, she complicated the process with her personal narrative of being a lesbian and working to find a place within the school for her sexual identity. She questioned how teachers can protect their identities while also engaging in the fight for justice and equity. Hoffman ( 1985 ) discussed the ways teacher power operates in the classroom and how to balance the personal and political while still engaging in disciplinary curriculums. She contended that teachers can work from personal knowledge and connect it to the larger curricular concerns of their discipline. Golden ( 1998 ) used teacher narratives to unpack how teachers can become radicalized in the higher education classroom when faced with unrelenting patriarchal and heteronormative messages.

Extending this work, Bailey ( 2001 ) discussed teachers as activists within the classroom. She focused on three aspects of teaching: integrity with regard to relationships, course content, and teaching strategies. She concluded that teachers cannot separate their values from their profession. Simon ( 2007 ) conducted a case study of a secondary teacher and communities of inquiry to see how they impacted her work in the classroom. The teacher, Laura, explicitly tied her inquiry activities to activist teacher education and critical pedagogy, “For this study, inquiry is fundamental to critical pedagogy, shaped by power and ideology, relationships within and outside of the classroom, as well as teachers’ and students’ autochthonous histories and epistemologies” (Simon, 2007 , p. 47). Laura’s experiences during her teacher education program continued during her years in the classroom, leading her to create a larger activism-oriented teacher organization.

Collecting educational autobiographies from 17 college-level feminist professors, Maher and Tetreault ( 1994 ) worried that educators often conflated “the experience and values of white middle-class women like ourselves for gendered universals” (p. 15). They complicated the idea of a democratic feminist teacher, raised issues regarding the problematic ways hegemonic feminism flattens experience to that of just white women, and pushed feminist professors to pay particular attention to the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality when teaching.

Cheira ( 2017 ) called for gender-conscious teaching and literature-based teaching to confront the gender stereotypes she encountered in Portuguese secondary schools. Papoulis and Smith ( 1992 ) conducted summer sessions where teachers experienced writing activities they could teach their students. Conceptualized as an experiential professional development course, the article revolved around an incident where the seminar was reading Emily Dickinson and the men in the course asked the two female instructors why they had to read feminist literature and the conversations that arose. The stories the women told tie into Papoulis and Smith’s call for teacher educators to interrogate their underlying beliefs and ideologies about gender, race, and class, so they are able to foster communities of study that can purposefully and consciously address feminist inquiry.

McWilliam ( 1994 ) collected stories of preservice teachers in Australia to understand how feminism can influence teacher education. She explored how textual practices affect how preservice teachers understand teaching and their role. Robertson ( 1994 ) tackled the issue of teacher education and challenged teachers to move beyond the two metaphors of banking and midwifery when discussing feminist ways of teaching. She called for teacher educators to use feminist pedagogies within schools of education so that preservice teachers experience a feminist education. Maher and Rathbone ( 1986 ) explored the scholarship on women’s and girls’ educational experiences and used their findings to call for changes in teacher education. They argued that schools reinforce the notion that female qualities are inferior due to androcentric curriculums and ways of showing knowledge. Justice-oriented teacher education is a more recent iteration of this debate, and Jones and Hughes ( 2016 ) called for community-based practices to expand the traditional definitions of schooling and education. They called for preservice teachers to be conversant with, and open to, feminist storylines that defy existing gendered, raced, and classed stereotypes.

Bieler ( 2010 ) drew on feminist and critical definitions of dialogue (e.g., those by Bakhtin, Freire, Ellsworth, hooks, and Burbules) to reframe mentoring discourse in university supervision and dialogic praxis. She concluded by calling on university supervisors to change their methods of working with preservice teachers to “Explicitly and transparently cultivat[e] dialogic praxis-oriented mentoring relationships so that the newest members of our field can ‘feel their own strength at last,’ as Homer’s Telemachus aspired to do” (Bieler, 2010 , p. 422).

Johnson ( 2004 ) also examined the role of teacher educators, but she focused on the bodies and sexualities of preservice teachers. She explored the dynamics of sexual tension in secondary classrooms, the role of the body in teaching, and concerns about clothing when teaching. She explicitly worked to resist and undermine Cartesian dualities and, instead, explored the erotic power of teaching and seducing students into a love of subject matter. “But empowered women threaten the patriarchal structure of this society. Therefore, women have been acculturated to distrust erotic power” (Johnson, 2004 , p. 7). Like Bieler ( 2010 ), Johnson ( 2004 ) concluded that, “Teacher educators could play a role in creating a space within the larger framework of teacher education discourse such that bodily knowledge is considered along with pedagogical and content knowledge as a necessary component of teacher training and professional development” (p. 24). The articles about teacher education all sought to provoke questions about how we engage in the preparation and continuing development of educators.

Teacher identity and teacher education constitute how teachers construct knowledge, as both students and teachers. The works in this section raise issues of what identities are “acceptable” in the classroom, ways teachers and teacher educators can disrupt oppressive storylines and practices, and the challenges of utilizing feminist pedagogies without falling into hegemonic feminist practices.

Possibilities for Feminist Qualitative Research

Spivak ( 2012 ) believed that “gender is our first instrument of abstraction” (p. 30) and is often overlooked in a desire to understand political, curricular, or cultural moments. More work needs to be done to center gender and intersecting identities in educational research. One way is by using feminist qualitative methods. Classrooms and educational systems need to be examined through their gendered components, and the ways students operate within and negotiate systems of power and oppression need to be explored. We need to see if and how teachers are actively challenging patriarchal and heteronormative curriculums and to learn new methods for engaging in affirmative sabotage (Spivak, 2014 ). Given the historical emphasis on higher education, more work is needed regarding P–12 education, because it is in P–12 classrooms that affirmative sabotage may be the most necessary to subvert systems of oppression.

In order to engage in affirmative sabotage, it is vital that qualitative researchers who wish to use feminist theory spend time grappling with the complexity and multiplicity of feminist theory. It is only by doing this thought work that researchers will be able to understand the ongoing debates within feminist theory and to use it in a way that leads to a more equitable and just world. Simply using feminist theory because it may be trendy ignores the very real political nature of feminist activism. Researchers need to consider which theories they draw on and why they use those theories in their projects. One way of doing this is to explicitly think with theory (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012 ) at all stages of the research project and to consider which voices are being heard and which are being silenced (Gilligan, 2011 ; Spivak, 1988 ) in educational research. More consideration also needs to be given to non-U.S. and non-Western feminist theories and research to expand our understanding of education and schooling.

Paying close attention to feminist debates about method and methodology provides another possibility for qualitative research. The very process of challenging positivist research methods opens up new spaces and places for feminist qualitative research in education. It also allows researchers room to explore subjectivities that are often marginalized. When researchers engage in the deeply reflexive work that feminist research requires, it leads to acts of affirmative sabotage within the academy. These discussions create the spaces that lead to new visions and new worlds. Spivak ( 2006 ) once declared, “I am helpless before the fact that all my essays these days seem to end with projects for future work” (p. 35), but this is precisely the beauty of feminist qualitative research. We are setting ourselves and other feminist researchers up for future work, future questions, and actively changing the nature of qualitative research.

Acknowledgements

Dr. George Noblit provided the author with the opportunity to think deeply about qualitative methods and to write this article, for which the author is extremely grateful. Dr. Lynda Stone and Dr. Tanya Shields are thanked for encouraging the author’s passion for feminist theory and for providing many hours of fruitful conversation and book lists. A final thank you is owed to the author’s partner, Ben Skelton, for hours of listening to her talk about feminist methods, for always being a first reader, and for taking care of their infant while the author finished writing this article.

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Gender, Justice, and Equity in Education
Education, Women, and the Politics of Curriculum
Risky Truth-Making in Qualitative Inquiry
Ecofeminism and Education
Qualitative Approaches to Studying Marginalized Communities
Poststructural Temporalities in School Ethnography
Gender and Technology in Education
Gender and the Superintendency
Activism and Social Movement Building in Curriculum
Gender Equitable Education and Technological Innovation

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Feminist Theory in Sociology

An Overview of Key Ideas and Issues

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Feminist theory is a major branch within sociology that shifts its assumptions, analytic lens, and topical focus away from the male viewpoint and experience toward that of women.

In doing so, feminist theory shines a light on social problems, trends, and issues that are otherwise overlooked or misidentified by the historically dominant male perspective within social theory .

Key Takeaways

Key areas of focus within feminist theory include:

discrimination and exclusion on the basis of sex and gender
objectification
structural and economic inequality
power and oppression
gender roles and stereotypes

Many people incorrectly believe that feminist theory focuses exclusively on girls and women and that it has an inherent goal of promoting the superiority of women over men.

In reality, feminist theory has always been about viewing the social world in a way that illuminates the forces that create and support inequality, oppression, and injustice, and in doing so, promotes the pursuit of equality and justice.

That said, since the experiences and perspectives of women and girls were historically excluded for years from social theory and social science, much feminist theory has focused on their interactions and experiences within society to ensure that half the world's population is not left out of how we see and understand social forces, relations, and problems.

While most feminist theorists throughout history have been women, people of all genders can be found working in the discipline today. By shifting the focus of social theory away from the perspectives and experiences of men, feminist theorists have created social theories that are more inclusive and creative than those that assume the social actor to always be a man.

Part of what makes feminist theory creative and inclusive is that it often considers how systems of power and oppression interact , which is to say it does not just focus on gendered power and oppression, but on how this might intersect with systemic racism, a hierarchical class system, sexuality, nationality, and (dis)ability, among other things.

Gender Differences

Some feminist theory provides an analytic framework for understanding how women's location in and experience of social situations differ from men's.

For example, cultural feminists look at the different values associated with womanhood and femininity as a reason for why men and women experience the social world differently. Other feminist theorists believe that the different roles assigned to women and men within institutions better explain gender differences, including the sexual division of labor in the household .

Existential and phenomenological feminists focus on how women have been marginalized and defined as “other” in patriarchal societies . Some feminist theorists focus specifically on how masculinity is developed through socialization, and how its development interacts with the process of developing femininity in girls.

Gender Inequality

Feminist theories that focus on gender inequality recognize that women's location in and experience of social situations are not only different but also unequal to men's.

Liberal feminists argue that women have the same capacity as men for moral reasoning and agency, but that patriarchy , particularly the sexist division of labor, has historically denied women the opportunity to express and practice this reasoning.

These dynamics serve to shove women into the private sphere of the household and to exclude them from full participation in public life. Liberal feminists point out that gender inequality exists for women in a heterosexual marriage and that women do not benefit from being married.

Indeed, these feminist theorists claim, married women have higher levels of stress than unmarried women and married men. Therefore, the sexual division of labor in both the public and private spheres needs to be altered for women to achieve equality in marriage.

Gender Oppression

Theories of gender oppression go further than theories of gender difference and gender inequality by arguing that not only are women different from or unequal to men, but that they are actively oppressed, subordinated, and even abused by men .

Power is the key variable in the two main theories of gender oppression: psychoanalytic feminism and radical feminism .

Psychoanalytic feminists attempt to explain power relations between men and women by reformulating Sigmund Freud's theories of human emotions, childhood development, and the workings of the subconscious and unconscious. They believe that conscious calculation cannot fully explain the production and reproduction of patriarchy.

Radical feminists argue that being a woman is a positive thing in and of itself, but that this is not acknowledged in patriarchal societies where women are oppressed. They identify physical violence as being at the base of patriarchy, but they think that patriarchy can be defeated if women recognize their own value and strength, establish a sisterhood of trust with other women, confront oppression critically, and form female-based separatist networks in the private and public spheres.

Structural Oppression

Structural oppression theories posit that women's oppression and inequality are a result of capitalism , patriarchy, and racism .

Socialist feminists agree with Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels that the working class is exploited as a consequence of capitalism, but they seek to extend this exploitation not just to class but also to gender.

Intersectionality theorists seek to explain oppression and inequality across a variety of variables, including class, gender, race, ethnicity, and age. They offer the important insight that not all women experience oppression in the same way, and that the same forces that work to oppress women and girls also oppress people of color and other marginalized groups.

One way structural oppression of women, specifically the economic kind, manifests in society is in the gender wage gap , which shows that men routinely earn more for the same work than women.

An intersectional view of this situation shows that women of color, and men of color, too, are even further penalized relative to the earnings of white men.

In the late 20th century, this strain of feminist theory was extended to account for the globalization of capitalism and how its methods of production and of accumulating wealth center on the exploitation of women workers around the world.

Kachel, Sven, et al. "Traditional Masculinity and Femininity: Validation of a New Scale Assessing Gender Roles." Frontiers in Psychology , vol. 7, 5 July 2016, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00956

Zosuls, Kristina M., et al. "Gender Development Research in Sex Roles : Historical Trends and Future Directions." Sex Roles , vol. 64, no. 11-12, June 2011, pp. 826-842., doi:10.1007/s11199-010-9902-3

Norlock, Kathryn. "Feminist Ethics." Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy . 27 May 2019.

Liu, Huijun, et al. "Gender in Marriage and Life Satisfaction Under Gender Imbalance in China: The Role of Intergenerational Support and SES." Social Indicators Research , vol. 114, no. 3, Dec. 2013, pp. 915-933., doi:10.1007/s11205-012-0180-z

"Gender and Stress." American Psychological Association .

Stamarski, Cailin S., and Leanne S. Son Hing. "Gender Inequalities in the Workplace: The Effects of Organizational Structures, Processes, Practices, and Decision Makers’ Sexism." Frontiers in Psychology , 16 Sep. 2015, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01400

Barone-Chapman, Maryann . " Gender Legacies of Jung and Freud as Epistemology in Emergent Feminist Research on Late Motherhood." Behavioral Sciences , vol. 4, no. 1, 8 Jan. 2014, pp. 14-30., doi:10.3390/bs4010014

Srivastava, Kalpana, et al. "Misogyny, Feminism, and Sexual Harassment." Industrial Psychiatry Journal , vol. 26, no. 2, July-Dec. 2017, pp. 111-113., doi:10.4103/ipj.ipj_32_18

Armstrong, Elisabeth. "Marxist and Socialist Feminism." Study of Women and Gender: Faculty Publications . Smith College, 2020.

Pittman, Chavella T. "Race and Gender Oppression in the Classroom: The Experiences of Women Faculty of Color with White Male Students." Teaching Sociology , vol. 38, no. 3, 20 July 2010, pp. 183-196., doi:10.1177/0092055X10370120

Blau, Francine D., and Lawrence M. Kahn. "The Gender Wage Gap: Extent, Trends, and Explanations." Journal of Economic Literature , vol. 55, no. 3, 2017, pp. 789-865., doi:10.1257/jel.20160995

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Essay on Feminism

500 words essay on feminism.

Feminism is a social and political movement that advocates for the rights of women on the grounds of equality of sexes. It does not deny the biological differences between the sexes but demands equality in opportunities. It covers everything from social and political to economic arenas. In fact, feminist campaigns have been a crucial part of history in women empowerment. The feminist campaigns of the twentieth century made the right to vote, public property, work and education possible. Thus, an essay on feminism will discuss its importance and impact.

Importance of Feminism

Feminism is not just important for women but for every sex, gender, caste, creed and more. It empowers the people and society as a whole. A very common misconception is that only women can be feminists.

It is absolutely wrong but feminism does not just benefit women. It strives for equality of the sexes, not the superiority of women. Feminism takes the gender roles which have been around for many years and tries to deconstruct them.

This allows people to live freely and empower lives without getting tied down by traditional restrictions. In other words, it benefits women as well as men. For instance, while it advocates that women must be free to earn it also advocates that why should men be the sole breadwinner of the family? It tries to give freedom to all.

Most importantly, it is essential for young people to get involved in the feminist movement. This way, we can achieve faster results. It is no less than a dream to live in a world full of equality.

Thus, we must all look at our own cultures and communities for making this dream a reality. We have not yet reached the result but we are on the journey, so we must continue on this mission to achieve successful results.

Impact of Feminism

Feminism has had a life-changing impact on everyone, especially women. If we look at history, we see that it is what gave women the right to vote. It was no small feat but was achieved successfully by women.

Further, if we look at modern feminism, we see how feminism involves in life-altering campaigns. For instance, campaigns that support the abortion of unwanted pregnancy and reproductive rights allow women to have freedom of choice.

Moreover, feminism constantly questions patriarchy and strives to renounce gender roles. It allows men to be whoever they wish to be without getting judged. It is not taboo for men to cry anymore because they must be allowed to express themselves freely.

Similarly, it also helps the LGBTQ community greatly as it advocates for their right too. Feminism gives a place for everyone and it is best to practice intersectional feminism to understand everyone’s struggle.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Conclusion of the Essay on Feminism

The key message of feminism must be to highlight the choice in bringing personal meaning to feminism. It is to recognize other’s right for doing the same thing. The sad part is that despite feminism being a strong movement, there are still parts of the world where inequality and exploitation of women take places. Thus, we must all try to practice intersectional feminism.

FAQ of Essay on Feminism

Question 1: What are feminist beliefs?

Answer 1: Feminist beliefs are the desire for equality between the sexes. It is the belief that men and women must have equal rights and opportunities. Thus, it covers everything from social and political to economic equality.

Question 2: What started feminism?

Answer 2: The first wave of feminism occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It emerged out of an environment of urban industrialism and liberal, socialist politics. This wave aimed to open up new doors for women with a focus on suffrage.

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Feminism in Frankenstein by Mary Shelley Essay

Introduction.

Mary Shelley is the second born daughter of a great feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft, who is perhaps the earliest proponent of the feminist wave. Mary Wollstonecraft expressly makes her stand known in advocating for the rights of the women in her novel, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, but her daughter is a bit reluctant to curve a niche about women in Frankenstein; The Modern Prometheus.

Did Mary Wollstonecraft have any influence on her daughter’s writing Frankenstein, The Modern Prometheus? Does Mary Shelley have the same zeal as her mother regarding the rights of women in the novel? “Men, in general, seem to employ their reason to justify prejudices, (Wollstonecraft pp. 7)” Her mother’s advocacy of feminism is outright.

Feminism is regarded as women having equal rights and equating to men in social status, economic, financially, just to mention a few and shining attention to the thesis that Frankenstein, The Modern Prometheus is not a feminist novel.

Female Characters in Frankenstein

Practical analysis of the theme of feminism in the novel requires the study of the female characters and the role they play or how they are portrayed in the novel. We meet Victor Frankenstein’s mother, who died, and her death affected Frankenstein to the extent that Frankenstein sought to come up with a creation that would defy nature’s laws, for instance, death.

Justine is accused of the murder of William, and she accepts the accusations placed on her for William’s death, and this leads to her death. She does not prove that she did not kill William, and this portrays her to the reader as very weak. Elizabeth, on the other hand, is murdered by the monster, and she does not defend herself as she was waiting on victor to protect her from the monster.

This is a pointer that, in the context of the novel, women did not have much of the rights, and they depended on men portraying a very patriarchal culture. Elizabeth’s act of waiting for Victor to save her from the monster shows the position of the woman in the society such that Elizabeth only sees Victor as her savior, and there was nothing she did to defend herself from the monster.

Another way in which the theme of feminism comes out is through the way Frankenstein destroys the female companion whom he had agreed to create for the monster. This further indicates the passiveness of women in the novel or rather in society as a whole, as if women have no rights in society.

To further support my point, Frankenstein easily destroys the female companion even before he brought life to her, yet he is unable to destroy the monster as easily as the female one even after the monster had killed everybody he loved (Shelley 42). “I pursued nature to her hiding place.” (Shelley 60) In the novel, nature has been likened to women, and the qualities that women possess are the same ones that nature possesses. The woman is portrayed as beautiful, and Frankenstein used to find consolation in the natural world.

Frankenstein runs away from the monster, and what is a better place than the heart of nature, the forest, to relax and reflect on what he has done? Mother Nature also provides the monster with food, water, and the basics that the monster required to survive. It is also in the forest that the monster self educates himself. This is a pointer that women are caring just like nature itself.

Though Victor Frankenstein created the monster (Shelley 56), he is unable to cater to the monster just the way a woman natures her infant from birth to the time the infant grows to be self-independent. Mary Shelley passed her point across that even if science is to take away that right and feeling that a woman has of giving birth, it is only the woman who has motherly instincts for science does not possess these motherly instincts.

The monster’s demands on his creator to have a female companion also indicate that women are compassionate and loving, for the monster wanted a female companion so that it would disappear from humankind.

Here one can see that women were taken as companions to men, and maybe the act of Frankenstein destroying the monster’s female companion was Shelley’s way of refuting societal commonly held norms that women can only become companions to men.

Victor expresses genuine pain when his friend Clerval is murdered by the monster, but when the monster also kills Elizabeth and Justine, Frankenstein’s emotions are not easily deciphered, and this shows the position of women in the society through his reaction (Shelley 45). Frankenstein; The Modern Prometheus is not really a feminist novel. My conclusion is drawn from the fact that Mary Shelley does not explicitly advocate for women’s equality to men.

For instance, her mother stands out as a great feminist even at an age when women were naturally taken to be inferior, so when we compare the work of Mary Shelley to the work of her mother, she does not stand out as advocating for women to be equal to men. One can justify that through the way, her female characters are passive in the novel and die even before the story ends.

There is no strong indication that she is for the rights of women to be of equal standing to the men and only uses her characters to show the position of women in the 18th-century society. If Frankenstein, the Modern Prometheus, was a feminist novel, we would expect Mary Shelley to make her stand through her female characters, which is not the case in the novel.

Even the story itself starts with the death of Victor’s mother (Shelley 3), giving us a hint that she does not dwell so much on the characters of women. In short, she does not have a clear and definite stand on the equality of men and women.

Mary Wollstonecraft’s advocacy for feminism is very outstanding in her work as compared to her daughter’s. For instance, one does not have to critically analyze her work to know that she was advocating for women to be accorded the same rights as men; the theme is evident even to a layman.

For Mary Shelley, to write in narrative form is symbolic of a society where women are passive, where no woman in the novel speaks directly or openly. Shelley wanted to show that women were to stroll behind the shadows of men and that they had no say in the 18th-century society.

Women in the novel do not speak openly through the narrative, and this further illustrates their submissiveness in society and a great contribution to feminism concerns in the book.

Women didn’t have the same rights as the male counterparts, and this is clear through the way Shelley clearly introduces her main characters in the narrative and leaves the women in the novel out of the narrative even Margaret to whom the letters are addressed to. In the novel, women are portrayed as if they would not exist if not for the men in their lives.

Even the way a monster female companion only comes into question when the monster demands to have her from his creator (Shelley 37) is a further illustration of feminism concerns in the novel, Frankenstein; The Modern Prometheus. Another reason why Mary Shelley is not seen as a great feminist in comparison to her mother is the use of narrative in the novel. It does not convey the writers’ point rather than it gives the reader the freedom to interpret the novel in their own views.

Feminism as Frankenstein’s Theme

The theme of feminism as portrayed in the novel leaves a lot in the minds of the reader; it leaves the reader with questions such as whether Mary Shelley really wanted women to be equated to men in her novel and which message she wanted to pass by partially ignoring the female characters in the novel.

Was she really trying to bring out the feminism theme? The use of narrative in conveying the feminism theme leaves a lot to be answered by the reader, and it is only through careful explication of the novel that one can bring out the theme of feminism in the novel.

Through narration, it is clear that the female characters do not have a say in society to the extent that men are the only ones who can narrate the story to the audience. The female characters have the privilege of being the main characters, a further indication that women were subordinate to men.

This is a pointer as to the obscurity of women in the society for why Mary Shelley would not discuss the female characters in the novel, and yet they formed a significant part of the story?

Why would an author omit some characters in the novel, specifically the female characters, if not to show their submissiveness/oppression in the society? The use of narration clearly shows the surrounding environment that Mary Shelley was brought up in.

An environment where women were oppressed is perhaps the reason why Shelley chooses to use Captain Walton and Frankenstein in narrating her story. Men were heard more than the women for were women of equal standing to men, Mary Shelley’s narrator would have also been a woman, for instance, Margate to whom the letters were addressed to. But women were taken to be unreliable and hence their implied characters in the novel. “I collected bones from charnel – houses and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame….” (Shelley 12). Frankenstein used science to create a monster and therefore defied the natural process through which a woman gives birth to a baby.

Through this act, Frankenstein is having no respect for women, for it is a woman’s pride when she gives birth to a baby. Frankenstein shows us that women have no value in the society in which he is living through his creation to the extent that he takes away the pleasure of women in giving birth through science. He believes that he can also possess the same powers that are possessed by women when they give birth to young ones. It further illustrates how women were degraded in the 18th century.

Feminism is among the many themes in the novel, Frankenstein; The Modern Prometheus though not that explicit as other themes like a quest for dangerous knowledge. Did Mary Wollstonecraft’s experiences have an impact on her daughter’s view of feminism?

Wollstonecraft’s background tells us something that relates to her being regarded as perhaps the earliest known feminism proponent. Shelley’s mother grew up in a society that was dominated by men, and women were very submissive. However, Wollstonecraft defied the societal norms and became an outright activist of women’s rights that women are not inferior to men and only need equal chances in education that are accorded to men in her book, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

“What acquirement exalts one being above another?” (Wollstonecraft pp. 3). We would expect that Mary Shelley being the daughter of a great feminist, would voice the same concerns as her mother, but this is not the case as all her female characters are passive.

On the contrary, through the use of science, Mary Shelley is advocating that women’s problems in reproduction can be eradicated. For instance, through science, women who are known not to give birth can get solutions to their problems. I think Mary Shelley advocates for science in solving women’s reproduction problems because of what her mother went through when she was giving birth to her.

Perhaps Shelley, through Frankenstein’s creation of a creature (the monster) that would defy natural laws, was seeking a solution to women’s problems during birth, for instance, the way her mother died few days after giving birth to her due to some complications with the placenta.

We can also draw the conclusion that through the destruction of the female companion for the monster, Shelley wanted to show that nature could not allow a creature that was brought forth through science to procreate and populate the world, this can be a strong indication that society cannot do without women, that women are important and that men do not have the right to take away the pride of women in giving birth.

The women suffer at the hands of the monster. But from literary analysis, Mary Shelley’s negative perception of female characters through their passiveness maybe was to emphasize that women ought to be strong and not to only rely on men, for when they rely on men, they end up suffering. She wanted to illustrate the way women in society are weak as compared to men and often rely on men to solve their problems.

Shelley wanted to put the point across that women ought to stop that habit of conforming to societal norms of viewing men as the only ones who can solve problems, for were it not for their view of men, the characters that are Justine and Elizabeth would have survived.

Elizabeth would have fought the monster, and Justine would have defended herself that she did not kill William, bringing us to the conclusion that Mary Shelley wanted to caution women on their over-reliance on men and that women too are at the forefront in perpetuating the patriarchal dominance in the society.

Works Cited

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; the Modern Prometheus. 1816. London. Oxford University Press. 1971.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

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IvyPanda. (2022, August 21). Feminism in Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-theme-of-feminism-in-mary-shelley-novel-frankenstein-the-modern-prometheus-essay/

"Feminism in Frankenstein by Mary Shelley." IvyPanda , 21 Aug. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/the-theme-of-feminism-in-mary-shelley-novel-frankenstein-the-modern-prometheus-essay/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'Feminism in Frankenstein by Mary Shelley'. 21 August.

IvyPanda . 2022. "Feminism in Frankenstein by Mary Shelley." August 21, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-theme-of-feminism-in-mary-shelley-novel-frankenstein-the-modern-prometheus-essay/.

1. IvyPanda . "Feminism in Frankenstein by Mary Shelley." August 21, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-theme-of-feminism-in-mary-shelley-novel-frankenstein-the-modern-prometheus-essay/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Feminism in Frankenstein by Mary Shelley." August 21, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-theme-of-feminism-in-mary-shelley-novel-frankenstein-the-modern-prometheus-essay/.

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Feminism is an umbrella term for many theories, but the central idea is that feminist theory emphasizes equality between the gender binary, and how the experiences of women are reflected in society. In the early days, feminism focused on defining sex and gender, and the differences between them. Many conventional ideas regarding societal gender norms […]

Sexism and Psychiatry

This article, Sexism And Psychiatry by Joan Busfield, is fundamentally related to the relationship between sexism and psychiatry, and how this matter has been impacted in the feminist literature. Accordingly, Busfield commenced with several concerns about this paper which primarily focuses on the dichotomy between psychiatry and sexism. Busfield presented Allen, who wrote the Psychiatry […]

Sexual Oppression in ‘The Handmaid’S Tale’

Oppression, by definition, refers to an authoritarian system that controls its citizens by denying certain individuals purposeful human rights. It’s a type of injustice that prevents people from being equal. Sexual oppression of women has continuously been one of the most crippling forms of oppression seen throughout humanity. In many societies around the world, women […]

Media Portrayal of Women

Another media platform that relentlessly manifests and perpetuates the sexual objectification of women is music. In today’s society, music, especially the hip-hop and rap genre, often have misogynistic and explicit lyrics which presents women in an exploitative manner. According to Adams and Fuller, women in this music genre are often portrayed as “mere objects that […]

The world today has changed in many aspects of gender related life style. Yet there is an area of improvement in the focus of gender: based on labour and the patriarchial working woman. The class society have a great impact on the behaviour women carry out. The different theories and definitions help to explain the relationship of the construction of the gender. Feminism has a great impact on the gender role in our society. Feminists have been fighting for a long time for power and control in this man’s world. Our family structure creates a great impact on women’s behaviour in society, family life and the labour force. All these titles focus on the relatonship of gender.

Gender is best described the construction of what is culturally assumed as [femininity as well as Imasculinity). Lesbian and gay male theory of a feminist is beyond the logic of masculine/femine. It is also referred to the social and cultural categories of the biological fact of human sex differentiation.

Teresa de Lauretis uses this table:

Gender is (a) representation-which is not to say that it does not have concrete or real implications, both social and subjective, for the material life of individuals. On the contrary,
The representation of gender is its construction – and in the simplest sense it can be said that all of Western Art and high culture is the engraving of the history of that construction.
The construction of gender goes on as busily today as it did in earlier times, say the Victorian era. And it goes on not only where one might expect it to – in the media, the private and public schools, the courts, the family, nuclear or extended or single-parented. The construction of gender also goes on, if less obviously, in the academy, in the intellectual community, in avantgarde artistic practices and radical theories, even, and indeed especially, in feminism.
Paradoxically, therefore, the construction of gender is also effected by its deconstruction; that is to say, by any discourse, feminist or otherwise, that would discard it as ideological misrepresentation, for gender like the real, is not only the effect of representation but also its excess, what remains outside discourse as a potential trauma which can rupture or destabilize, if not contained, any representation (Winders 15).

The Aristotelian view of the natural role of civilized woman as a wife and mother. A rational manis view for a woman is the daily chores and responsibilities of nurturing children and running a houshold; leisure time is not necessary for a wife and mother. The luncivilized woman is a slave or a serf or a labourer, or from a savage race, is even more handicapped by her social role and her natural abilities. On the same note, a laboured woman of these groups would completely shoutout the life of leisure.

The Descartes method can be acquired knowledge by breaking down complex beliefs and experiences. The simple natures are uncovered and examined closely to understand how they combine and to build up other objects. According to Princess Elizabeth of Behemia who corresponds to the method does not lead her enough time for her to acquire a habit of meditation or other inerests in her household. On the other hand, a poor woman would find it impossible. In class and race it becomes clear that Descartesis rational man is not only male but an upper-class, European male. A woman who wishes to follow Descartesis method must ignore her cultural roles and see the skills and thought that are combined and free from reason.

In a family setting equality is not practised for women. Rational and formal equality is taken for granted in a domestic admisphere based on tradition and natural inequalities.

Joan Ackerils of gender: the abstract worker is actually a man, and it is the man’s body, its sexuality, minimal responsibility in procreation, and conventional control of emotions that pervades work and organizational processes. Women’s bodies-female sexuality, their ability to procreate and their pregnancy, breast-feeding, and child care, menstruation, and mythic emotionality-are suspect, stigmatized, and used as grounds for control and exclusion (Williams 228).

The structural deflection is changing formal equality for a true equality or changing the goal of the organization or both. In the adoption of the fifty-fifty rule privileges males: first, to separate public and private life as a male model (the leader) which means to prove themselves as men in a male-defined space. To succeed the new leadership role is to adopt the same ability as men. Second, sex-paired leadership structure of the same sex is direct competition with an inferior group or sex.

Simone de Beauvoir argues the self-development as women are to relate to the subject and they should join the battle. Women should defind themselves as subjects against an object or other. Jessica Benjamin argues opposite a traditional feminist theory that must relate to the subject and needs to understand not only the self that relates to the object, but the relationship to the subject. Benjamin describes the normal development of the male subject as repression, domination, and denial of others.

Benjamin explains the repudiation of the mother which underlies male domination is adequately accounted for by the fact that boys must separate or disidentify from their mothers. This resolves to failure because of the separation from the mother is a replacement of mutual recognition with a subject-object relation (Weir 77).

The method of feminism concerning both objectivity and subjectivity are to have been objectified as sexual beings while characterizing a subjective desire. Women reject the distinction beween subjective and objective postures – as the means to comprehend social life. Not acting upon the objectivity towards the victim is excluded from its world through the desire to subjective being within. Women’s interest lies in overthrowing the distinction itself.

Beauvoir accepts subjectivity and objectivity categories but only otinclude women as subjects. This anticipates the argument of liberal feminism: women should be included in all aspects of public life, regardless of the injustices, inequalities, and economic and racial hierarchies upon which liberal capitalism rests. The superwoman syndome is the privileged class of women expecting to do everything. They are to succeed at a professional career, marriage, childbearing and child rearing, on a model of a male life pattern without public support in the form of federal of provincial maternity leaves, childcare, etc. The liberal feminist stands for equality. The difference between a radical and conservative spokeswomen is often not clear or probably to the amount of anger displayed in writing.

Carol Gilligan specifically uses the vocabulary subjectivity and objectivity as the difference between men and women to the effect of self or othr and inside or outside. She suggest women perceive the world closer to themselves then men. This has to do with two modes of describing the relationship between other and self. Women are more reluctant to make decisions based upon abstract moral standards. Gilligan argues the concept of adulthood is based on gender and mainly male.

The number of mothers entering the labour force is increasing every year and much more mothers with preschool children. This is effecting the maternal employment of which parents can make responsible and informed decisions about the timing and nature of their employment. In this research on chidren’s responses to maternal employment it includes: general mental health, social adjustment, cognitive ability, and achievement motivaton.

Lois Hoffman summarizes the research on school-age children using five hypotheses:

that working mothers provide different role models than nonworking mothers;
that employment affects the mother’s emotional state;
that different situational demands and emotional states of the working mother affect child rearing;
that working mothers give less supervision than nonworking mothers;
that the working mother’s absence leads to emotional and cognitive deprivation in the child.

Self-perception and self-esteem among women who work has been a focus of research. The high rate of depression among full-time homemakers perceive themselves powerless and isolated (OllBarr 27).

Heidi Hartmann refers to patriarchy and class society, this theory is called the dual systems. They two are relatively independent power systems that are integrated and mutually influence each other. Hartman summarizes her definition of patriarchy as: a set of social relations between men, which have a material base, and which, though hierarchical, establish or create interdependence and solidarity among men that enable them to dominate women. The material base upon which patriarchy rests lies most fundamentally in men’s control over women’s labour power (Jonasdottir 48).

Marxism’s identifies Dempty places to the feminist theory. Marxist theoretical concepts are and can only be sexblind-class, the reserve army of labour, and wage labourers. Capitalism is a necessity of capital structure to increase profits and the necessity of wage labour to earn its living: for instance sex, age, or ethicity. Also difference of capitalist societies and between periods of time and even within different regions in one country. The labour force refers only to value/cost and productivity.

Many women and children were mine workers in England in thenineteenth century. Today nearly all miners are men. The leaders of Swedish, industry recruited Swedish housewives and not immigrants in the 60s. Today women all over the world systematically occupy the worst paid, subordinate work positions, and have inconvenient working hours, more so then men.

Hartmann stresses labour unions are critical social institutions because men control the labour market and women’s work. Both historically and at present there is no doubt that one of the most central arenas of gender struggles outside the home. Women’s repeat failures and inferior position within unions must finally be seen as a consequence rather than a high rank positon to society.

Backlash is primarily a reactive position which means to have been lost, or to be under threat. The old fashioned thinking feel threatened with change of sex roles especially in power reations. Some backlash is regressive. It returns to golden age of traditional sex roles and sexual values. It is said that feminists are the blame to life getting worse. Another kind of backlash is reactive. It is agreed that there was a problem before women’s movement for women but their policies have made things worse.

As Kenneth Minogue said:

The first wave of feminism was rightly about equal opportunity. Women rightly demands to be admitted on their individual merits of the activities men had previously monopolised – politics, higher education, the professions and so on. There’s no doubt this created considerable problems about how to combine female aspirations, conventions, even dress, with what was necessary to be one of the boys. One unfortunate result of this development, however, was that it slanted aspirations away from those areas where women had previously excelled – style, grace, domesticity, the cultivation of intimacey – towards activities where male strength and competitiveness gave men an advantage (Haste 268). Unfortunately such reactive critics failed to ppreciate the difficulties of fighting those very past battles.

The Book of Eve of Constance Beresford-Howe was very descriptive. It was basted on women in the past-approximately the 1950s. Eva played the role of a slave,a care giver and a robot that just kept going in an monotonous way of life. She lived the life of what others expected of her. Like many other women, Eva was raised to come second to men. This lifestyle was normal to her and to her family. She finally came to realization; so she decided to put a stop to the kind of life that made her unhappy. She decide to leave this life behind; without knowing where she was going. She wanted to begin a new life of her own but didn’t know how.

Slowly, it all came together for her. She began to realized she was her own person and she could think and do what she pleases. This was a shock for her son and husband because they could no longer control or manipulate her and her thoughts. The symbol of the clock through out the house proved everything was timed and controlled. Evals life with her family was always perdictable. After she was on her own, she finally came to terms with herself and decided not to go back. Although life was difficult financially without the lean of her husband, she still felt her sanity and her life was much more important then the stability of her husband had to offer. Eva felt the price was to high to pay.

In Search of April Raintree by Beatrice Culleton was also a very moving and well described novel of how difficult it is to be a native woman in today’s society. The stereotype of the cultural back ground of an Indian family lifestyle is almost impossible to make progress. April paid a heavy price to be like one of the white girls as a young girl herself. She was put in different foster homes without her younger sister Cheryl. They were taken from their alcoholic parents at a young age. April’s first experience as a controlled slave was in a particular foster home that scared her for life. She would not be permitted to have any say when living in the foster homes.

As a young woman she had finally a chance at the brass ring. She earned to live on her own and then with time her sister Cheryl came to live with her. April felt it wasn’t enough for her to make it in a white man’s world. She then married a wealth white young man The cycle unfortunately did not break, she then become a slave to her husband’s world. April had to live to her husband and her mother-in-law’s expectations and lifestyles: she still was not free. She finally had proof of her insticts that her husband did not marry her for love. Instead he was unfaithful with April; she then divorced the family. Although she was financially set, she learned that her freedom was much more precious.

Fortunately, April didit have the same Metis problem as her sister; which was alcoholism. Her sister seaked for comfort through the bottle just like her parents. She wasn’t as strong as April and couldn’t over come the negativity of the world. The constant rejection and abuse of the whiteman’s world was forcing them to slip into the pattern life of what is expected of them. Some cycles are very difficult to break because they tend to always follow you.

The novels relate to the information of the aspects of gender and how it relates to a women world. It doesn’t matter the class of the woman, the employment strategies, or the home caring strategies: it still a very male domineering world. The theories focused on many different informative definitions of the different ways of thinking as women or man. It is still not considered a tangiable solution to the feminists because of the strong power and control men have in our society. For many decades feminists have made a difference. But yet, like April and Eva women are still haven’t grabbed the brass ring.

Elevate Your Work: 200 Unique Feminist Research Topics for 2023

The role of women in society is commonly highlighted these days. Hence, it’s not surprising that your professor has asked you to produce a research paper on Feminism. Yes, finding a good topic, to begin with, is more challenging than it sounds. But that’s where you can count on this interesting yet very informational write-up to help you out. As you should know, we have been offering Custom writing services for years now, so we have a list of the best topics for you to count on. That said, make sure you read this amazing blog post till the end to make the most of it.

Table of Contents

Feminist Research Topics: Unique, Interesting & Professor-Approved

We cannot deny how daunting feminist research paper writing can get, mostly because it is very difficult to extract the data for the same. That’s where the expert suggests you pick a suitable topic so you can get good help from the Internet with data collection and more. So, without further ado, let’s begin with the top feminist research topics to write on.

Best Feminist Research Topics

Want to make a mark with this research essay? Then, choose a topic from our list of best feminist research topics. Here you go:

Is there a possibility of Feminism becoming a new fashion?
Explain the 2022 trends of Feminism.
Are feminist actions justified?
How is Feminism influencing human psychology?
Can you consider Feminism a social trend?
What is triggering Feminism?
Explain how freedom of speech influences the proliferation of feminist ideas.
Has Feminism developed a new type of discrimination?
Drawbacks of Feminism for society.
Can you regard Feminism as a community’s new weapon?
How do feminist thoughts influence young minds?
Explain what countries are major flashpoints of Feminism and why?
Name the ethnic groups that are not supporting Feminism.

Fascinating feminist research topics

Want to sound impressive yet confident with your final piece? Then go for picking one of these fascinating research topics. Still, you must put some good time and effort into extracting relevant data for these. But those joyous moments of your professor appreciating your final piece is worth everything you could invest now. Here we go with the list of those fascinating topics:

How will you explain Feminism as a philosophy of life?
What encouraged Feminism, humans or society?
How are the sentiments of feminists relevant to the current generation?
Should you consider Feminism a want or need?
What are other ways for a woman to conquer freedom besides Feminism?
How does Feminism address violence?
How is Liberalism changing the way women think?
Where do the stereotypes lie in the 21st century?
How is the state playing a role in feminist movements?
Explain the feminism primary source.
Where are feminist groups illegal?
Discuss how women were treated in ancient times.
Explain the culture of Feminism.
Is it possible for women to change the world by taking part in feminist movements?
Why is Feminism no longer a taboo?
Explain how Feminism is developing.
In what circumstances do feminists’ occasionally resort to illegal means?
Explain how every human is a feminist.
Describe the outcomes of the feminist movement.
How is Feminism evolving in the social networks era?
Reasons to believe that women are no longer silent
Who condemned Feminism?
Understanding the feminist’s modern art.
Who is benefiting the feminist movements?
Does discrimination justify the existence of Feminism?
The role of women in international business.
How is feminism relevant in 2022?
Explain how feminism has harmed women’s reputations.
Effects of the evolution of feminism on society.
Elaborate on the future of feminism.
Explain why some religious groups regard feminism as a threat.
Discuss the impact of feminist views on the 2016 presidential election.

Most Discussed Feminist Research Topics

If you want to get over with your feminist research essay quickly, go with picking up a topic from this list of most discussed feminist research topics:

Is radical Feminism suppressing women’s freedom?
Feminism in the twentieth century.
Equality and Feminism – Things we should know about.
Discussing the second wave feminism.
Feminism and homosexuality – problems we should highlight
The misunderstanding of feminist moments.
How is liberal Feminism affecting equality?
The difference between first and second-wave feminists.
Explain the relationship between Feminism and post Feminism.
Feminism, symbolism, and more.
Shedding light on feminist social theory.
The hidden message of Feminism.
How is Feminism responding to the discrimination against women?
How is Feminism related to constructivism?
Feminism in the light of fairness doctrines.
Discussing the social system and Marxist feminist theory.
Feminism – The First Wave
The difference between Liberalism and political Feminism.
Social justice and Feminism – the connection.
Things you should know about black Feminism.
Explain why a gentleman might be insulting feminists.
Steps for adopting feminism.
How does anti-racism equate to feminists?
Explain the significance of Bitch Manifesto.
Elaborate on provocative feminism.
The study into women’s health and rights.
Is feminism influencing science?
Elaborate on women in leadership positions.
Overcoming gender stereotypes in the 21st century.
The female gendering of AI assistants – The real problem
How is child marriage impacting society?
Should gender roles be socially constructed?
How does feminism count in international relations?

Easiest feminism essay topics

Feeling writing on Feminism a tough ask? Don’t worry; we have the list of the easiest topics for you below. Picking up a simple topic will ensure that you begin writing your research paper immediately. Here’s your list of the easiest feminism research topics to write on and to impress your professor:

Radical Feminism vs. Liberalism
Promotion of Feminism in Beyonce’s music.
Feminism’s pride and power.
Post-feminism culture in teenage magazines.
Chicana Feminism and Mexican culture.
How is Feminism overcoming gender discrimination?
How is the media promoting Feminism?
Feminism vs Multiculturalism.
Dilemmas and Intersections of Feminism and Postcolonialism.
Gender differences in comparison to mainstream psychology.
Explain the differences between Liberal Feminism and Radical Feminism.
Collective representation and multicultural Feminism – an overview.
Feminism in China after Chinese Economic Reforms
Feminism in Haiti and female gender roles.
Julia Ward Howe’s struggle for Feminism.
The contentious issues for Feminism.
Compare and contrast 19th and 20th-century feminist cultures.
How are Masculinity and Feminism defining people today?
The Feminism real meaning.
The Feminism – What’s coming next?
Three types of Feminism.
The Feminism in Arab.
The rise of Feminism in Europe.
Eurocentric Feminism – Things you should know.
Is Feminism achieving its goals?
Western Feminism – How is it different?
How is Feminism benefiting American Society?
How has Feminism changed New Zealand?
The three waves of Feminism.
Elaborate on the Marxist Feminism Theory.
Explain how French Feminism is Manifesting itself.
The effects of Feminism on women, men, and families.
Male control and their dominance in society in the light of Feminism.
Discuss critical Feminism.
Things you should know about Patriarchy in Feminism.
The effects of South Korea Globalization on the role of Feminism.
Feminism and sayings of Stepford wives.
Important theories of Feminism.
Feminism, in simple words.
The objectives of Feminism.
Is Feminism equal to gender equality?
The rise of Feminism in the USA.

Powerful Feminist Research Topics

Surely you can add power to your feminist research essay. The right way of doing that is to pick a powerful research topic. Most importantly, you don’t have to wander about such a topic as we have a long list below.

Explain the Eco-feminism.
How are Fashion and Feminism related?
Modern education and Feminism.
Explain feminist movements in the USA.
Is Cyberfeminism a new concept?
The rise of Gender stereotypes – Are they still relevant?
Modern Feminism – The overview
Discuss how Feminism is influencing your life.
Feminism from a man’s perspective.
Anti-feminism movements.
Women inequality in modern society.
The modern manifestations of Feminism and their positive effects.
Feminism in literature.
Feminism’s negative influence on brand income.
How is feminism mainstream these days?
Teenagers and Feminism.
Famous feminist personalities.
The pros and cons of radical Feminism.
Feminism affects on heterosexual relationships.
A society without gender stereotypes.
How is Feminism harming men?
Feminists’ ways of reaching their goals.
The difference between Feminism and anti-feminism.
Common men’s perspective of Feminism.
Is calling oneself a feminist fashion these days?
Feminism – controversial issues.
Various perspectives of feminist movements.
How is the media influencing Feminism?
Explain how Feminism is negatively affecting women.

Events that have led to the birth of Feminism

The Blonde Beard was a practice where women would disguise themselves as men to get jobs in the workplace. This was done to avoid the glass ceiling and other forms of discrimination against women. The Blonde Beard was popular in the 19th century, but it has since fallen out of favor because of its association with sexism and racism.
Women in the pre-1800s were not allowed to work, go to school, or own property. This was because they were considered inferior to men, and the property was considered male-made.
You might think that the term “mommy blogger” is new, but it’s actually an old-fashioned insult. In fact, it dated back to the 1960s and was used to describe women who were too passive in their roles as mothers or housewives. This idea has stuck around for decades because it’s still very true. Men have historically been the ones who go to work outside the home (and get paid more than women), while women have historically stayed at home with children or other family members — even if they had jobs outside their homes.

Undoubtedly, coming up with a good feminist research topic feminist research paper topics is no less a daunting task. Not when you have found this article that lists great topics for you to get on with your research paper immediately. Furthermore, if we have missed including something here, please feel free to use the comment box below.

Moreover, if you want an expert hand to take care of your feminist research topics, count on one of our writers available.

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44 Student Essay Example: Feminist Criticism

The following student essay example of femnist criticism is taken from Beginnings and Endings: A Critical Edition . This is the publication created by students in English 211. This essay discusses Ray Bradbury’s short story ”There Will Come Soft Rains.”

Burning Stereotypes in Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains”

By Karley McCarthy

Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” takes place in the fallout of a nuclear war. The author chooses to tell the story though a technologically advanced house and its animatronic inhabitants instead of a traditional protagonist. The house goes about its day-to-day as if no war had struck. It functions as though its deceased family is still residing in its walls, taking care of the maintenance, happiness, and safety of itself and the long dead family. On the surface, Bradbury’s story seems like a clear-cut warning about technology and humanity’s permissiveness. Given that the short story was written in the 1940s, it’s easy to analyze the themes present and how they related to women of the time. Bradbury’s apt precautionary tale can be used as a metaphor for women’s expectations and role in society after World War II and how some women may have dealt with the fallout of their husbands coming back home with psychological trauma.

To experience “There Will Come Soft Rains” from a feminist perspective, readers must be aware of the societal norms that would have shaped Bradbury’s writing. “Soft Rains” takes place in the year 2026. Yet the house and norms found throughout were, “modeled after concept homes that showed society’s expectations of technological advancement” (Mambrol). This can be seen in the stereotypical nuclear family that once inhabited the house as well as their cliché white home and the hobbies present. According to writer Elaine Tyler May’s book Homeward Bound, America’s view of women’s role in society undertook a massive pendulum swing during the World War II era as the country transitioned through pre-war to post-war life. For example, in a matter of decades support for women joining the workforce shifted from 80% in opposition to only 13% (May 59). Despite this shift, the men coming back from the war still expected women to position themselves as the happy housewife they had left behind, not the newfound career woman architype. Prominent figures of the 40s, such as actress Joan Crawford, portrayed a caricature of womanhood that is subservient to patriarchal gender roles, attempting to abandon the modern idea of a self-sufficient working-class woman (May 62-63). Keeping this in mind, how can this image of the 1940s woman be seen in Bradbury’s work?

Throughout Bradbury’s life he worked towards dismantling clichés in his own writing. A biography titled simply “Ray Bradbury” mentions that even in his earlier work, he was always attempting to “escape the constrictions of stereotypes” found in early science fiction (Seed 13). An example of him breaking constrictions could be his use of a nonhuman protagonist. Instead, Bradbury relies on the personification of the house and its robotic counterparts. Bradbury describes the house as having “electric eyes” and emotions such as a, “preoccupation with self-protection which bordered on a mechanical paranoia,” something that would make the house quiver at the sounds of the outside world (2-3). While these descriptions are interesting, Bradbury’s use of personification here is a thought-provoking choice when one breaks down what exactly the house is meant to personify.

One analysis of this story notes that the house’s personification, “replaces the most human aspects of life,” for its inhabitants (Mambrol). Throughout the story, the house acts as a caretaker, records a schedule, cooks, cleans, and even attempts to extinguish an all-consuming fire. While firefighting is not a traditionally feminine career or expectation from the 1940s (more on that later), most of the house’s daily tasks are replacing jobs that were traditionally held by a household’s matriarch. Expanding further on this dichotomy of male/woman tasks, a chore mentioned in the story that is ‘traditionally’ accepted as a masculine household duty—mowing the law—is still assigned as a male task. This is feels intentional to the house’s design as Bradbury is, “a social critic, and his work is pertinent to real problems on earth” (Dominianni 49). Bradbury’s story is not meant to commentate on just an apocalypse, but society at large. Bradbury describes the west face of the house as, “black, save for five places” (Bradbury 1-2). These “five places” are the silhouettes of the family who had been incinerated by a nuclear bomb. The family’s two children are included playing with a ball, but the mother and father’s descriptions are most important. The mother is seen in a passive role, picking flowers, while the father mows the lawn. The subtext here is that the man is not replaceable in his mundane and tedious task. Only the woman is replaced. While this is a small flash into the owners’ lives, what “human aspect” or autonomy of the father’s life has been replaced by the house’s actions if the house is mainly personifying only the traditional 1940s female-held positions? The message here is that a man’s position in society is irreplaceable while a woman’s is one of mere support.

While this dynamic of husband vs subordinate is harmful, wives supporting their partners is nothing new. Homeward Bound explains that life after World War II for many women meant a return to their previous position as a housewife while many men came home irreparably damaged by years of warfare. PTSD, known then as shellshock, affected countless men returning from the war. Women were often expected to mend the psychological damage as part of their domestic responsibilities, even if they were unprepared for the realities of the severe trauma their husbands had faced (May 64-65). The psychological effects of the war came crashing into women’s lives the same way that the tree fell into the autonomous house in “Soft Rains”. As mentioned earlier, firefighting is not a task someone from the 40s would expect of women, but the house’s combustion and its scramble to save itself can be seen as a metaphor for women attempting to reverse the cold reality that the war had left them with. The picturesque family they had dreamed of would forever be scarred by the casualties that took place overseas. While Bradbury may not have meant for women to be invoked specifically from this precautionary tale, it’s obvious that him wanting his science fiction to act as, “a cumulative early warning system against unforeseen consequences,” would have impacted women of the time as much as men (Seed 22). The unforeseen consequences here is the trauma the war inflicted on families.

While men were fighting on the front lines, women back home and in noncombat positions would still feel the war’s ripples. In “Soft Rains” the nuclear tragedy had left, “a radioactive glow which could be seen for miles” (Bradbury 1). Despite the destruction, the house continues its routine as though nothing had happened. This can be seen as a metaphor for how women responded to the trauma their husbands brought back from the war. Women were urged to, “preserve for him the essence of the girl he fell in love with, the girl he longs to come back to. . .The least we can do as women is to try to live up to some of those expectations” (May 64). Following this, many could have put their desires and personal growth to the side to act as a secondary character in their husband’s lives.

The final line can be read as the culmination of similarities between post-war women and Bradbury’s house. The violence and destruction that fell upon the house in its final moments leaves little standing. What’s remarkable is how the house still attempts to continue despite its destruction. The final lines of the short story exemplify this: “Within the wall, a last voice said, over and over again and again, even as the sun rose to shine upon the heaped rubble and steam: ‘Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is…’” (Bradbury 5). The house is acting just like the women from the 40s, clinging to their past in an attempt to preserve something that had already been lost, society’s innocence. One analysis points out that, “The house is depicted in this way because it represents both humanity and humanity’s failure to save itself” (Mambrol). While it might be wrong to say that women were unable to save themselves in this situation, this quote does touch on an idea present in the feminist metaphor for “Soft Rains”. The preservation of “the essence of the girl he fell in love with, the girl he longs to come back to” was a failure (May 64). The same way that the house cannot preserve itself from destruction, women cannot preserve an image of themselves that had already dissolved. As mentioned earlier, women had already entered the workforce, a huge step towards removing sexist stereotypes around women’s worth. After garnering work-based independence, it seems impossible that the idea of women solely as men’s support would not immolate.

While Bradbury’s “Soft Rains” can be viewed as an apt precautionary tale with real modern world issues at hand, in many ways it is a period piece. As a writer in the 1940s, it’s hard to imagine that Bradbury’s story would not have been influenced by the framework of a nuclear family and the stereotypical expectations of this time. Bradbury’s use of personification opens dialogue about gender roles in the 1940s and how war had complicated patriarchal expectations. Despite his attempt to bypass science fiction stereotypes, his story is full of metaphor for gender stereotypes. Using a feminist lens to analyze the story allows it to be read as a metaphor for war and its effects on married women. The standard analysis appears to say that, “machine no longer served humanity in “There Will Come Soft Rains”; there humanity is subservient to machinery” (Dominianni 49). From a feminist perspective, instead of machine, the house represents patriarchy and gender norms. While men suffered greatly during World War II, women often put their wants and futures on hold to support their husbands. This is a selfless act that shows the resilience of women despite their society’s wish to downplay their potential and turn them into mere support.

Works Cited

Bradbury, Ray. “August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains.” Broome-Tioga BOCES, 1950, pp. 1-5. btboces.org/Downloads/7_There%20Will%20Come%20Soft%20Rains%20by%20Ray%20Bradbury.pdf.

Dominianni, Robert. “Ray Bradbury’s 2026: A Year with Current Value.” The English Journal , vol. 73, no. 7, 1984, pp. 49–51. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/817806

Mambrol, Nasrullah. “Analysis of Ray Bradbury’s There Will Come Soft Rains.” Literary Theory and Criticism , 17 Jan. 2022.

May, Elaine Tyler. “War and Peace: Fanning the Home Fires.” Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. 20th ed., Basic Books, 2008, pp. 58-88.

Seed, David. “Out of the Science Fiction Ghetto.” Ray Bradbury (Modern Masters of Science Fiction). University of Illinois, 2015, pp. 1-45.

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Feminist Film Theory: An Introductory Reading List

Evolving from the analysis of representations of women in film, feminist film theory asks questions about identity, sexuality, and the politics of spectatorship.

Director Julie Dash poses for the movie "Daughters of the Dust," circa 1991

Not unlike the emergence of feminist theory and criticism in the domains of art and literature, the women’s movement of the late 1960s and 1970s sparked a focused interrogation of images of women in film and of women’s participation in film production. The 1970s witnessed the authorship of massively influential texts by writers such as Claire Johnston, Molly Haskell, and Laura Mulvey in the United Kingdom and the United States, and psychoanalysis was a reigning method of inquiry, though Marxism and semiotics also informed the field.

Feminist film theory has provoked debates about the representations of female bodies, sexuality, and femininity on screen while posing questions concerning identity, desire, and the politics of spectatorship, among other topics. Crucially, an increasing amount of attention has been paid by theorists to intersectionality, as scholars investigate the presence and absence of marginalized and oppressed film subjects and producers. This reading list surveys a dozen articles, presented chronologically, as a starting point for readers interested in the lines of inquiry that have fueled the field over the last fifty years.

Laura Mulvey, “ Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema ,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18.

To put it most simply, Mulvey’s 1975 essay is nothing short of iconic. A cornerstone of psychoanalytic feminist film theory, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” describes the ways in which women are displayed on screen for the pleasure of the male spectator. Many of the essays listed below engage explicitly with Mulvey’s essay and the notion of the male gaze, illustrating what Corrin Columpar (2002, see below) describes as a “near compulsive return” to this pioneering work. But even Mulvey herself would later push back on some of her most provocative claims , including her positioning of the spectator as male, as well as her omission of female protagonists.

“ Feminism and Film: Critical Approaches ,” Camera Obscura 1, no. 1 (1976): 3–10.

Established in 1976, Camera Obscura was (and remains) a groundbreaking venue for feminist film studies. This introductory essay to the first issue contextualizes the necessity of such a journal in a scholarly and cultural environment in which there is a true “need” for the feminist study of film. Camera Obscura was, in part, an American response to the wave of British contributions to the field, often published in the journal Screen (the home of Mulvey’s essay). The editors spend much of this essay unpacking the camera obscura, an image projection device, as a metaphor for feminist film theory, as it functions as a symbol of contradiction that “emphasizes the points of convergence of ideology and representation, of ideology as representation.”

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Michelle Criton, Julia Lesage, Judith Mayne, B. Ruby Rich, and Anna Marie Taylor, “ Women and Film: A Discussion of Feminist Aesthetics ,” New German Critique no. 13 (1978): 83–107.

What makes film an enticing object of study for feminists in the first place? As Criton et al. attest, the answers lie in the social rather than individual or private dimensions of film as well as in its accessibility and synthesis of “art, life, politics, sex, etc.” The conversation featured here provides a glimpse into contemporary conversations about the work of Claire Johnston and Laura Mulvey and psychoanalysis as a shaping force of early feminist film theory. Additionally, they consider how a feminist filmmaking aesthetic can reveal and critique the ideologies that underpin the oppression of women.

Judith Mayne, “ Feminist Film Theory and Criticism ,” Signs 11, no. 1 (1985): 81–100.

Acknowledging the profound impact of “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Mayne surveys the development of feminist film theory, including both its historical contexts and its fixations upon psychoanalysis and the notions of spectacle and the gaze. Mayne outlines how contradiction—variously construed—is “ the central issue in feminist film theory and criticism” (emphasis added). Additionally, the author calls into question the historiography of women’s cinema, noting the “risk of romanticizing women’s exclusion from the actual production of films.” She urges scholars to, certainly, continue the necessary exploration of forgotten and understudied female filmmakers but to also open up the conception of women’s cinema to include not just the work of female directors but also their peripheral roles as critics and audience members.

Jane Gaines, “ White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory ,” Cultural Critique , no. 4 (1986): 59–79.

What, Gaines asks, are the limitations of feminist theory’s early fixation on gender at the expense of nuanced understandings of race, class, and sexuality? While feminist theory may, in its earliest years, have opened up possibilities for interrogating the gendered politics of spectatorship, it was largely exclusionary of diverse perspectives, including, as Gaines notes, lesbians and women of color. In doing so, “feminist theory has helped to reinforce white middle-class [normative] values, and to the extent that it works to keep women from seeing other structures of oppression, it functions ideologically.” Through an analysis of the 1975 film Mahogany and informed by black feminist theorists and writers such as bell hooks, Mayne argues that psychoanalysis ultimately results in erroneous readings of films about race.

Noël Carroll, “ The Image of Women in Film: A Defense of a Paradigm ,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48, no. 4 (1990): 349–60.

Carroll theorizes why psychoanalysis was so attractive to feminists in the 1970s and 1980s: by providing a theoretical framework, he argues, psychoanalysis was a means to “incorporate” and “organize” the “scattered insights of the image of women in film approach.” Taking issue with Mulvey’s perspective on voyeurism, Carroll positions the image approach, or the study of the image of women in film—in this case with an emphasis on theories of emotion— as a “rival research program” to psychoanalysis. He argues that paradigm scenarios, or cases in which emotions are learned behavioral responses, influence spectatorship and how audiences respond emotionally to women on screen.

Karen Hollinger, “ Theorizing Mainstream Female Spectatorship: The Case of the Popular Lesbian Film ,” Cinema Journal 37, no. 2 (1998): 3–17.

Hollinger surveys theoretical responses to lesbian subjectivity and the female spectatorship of popular lesbian film narratives. She articulates the subversive power of the lesbian look as a challenge to Mulvey’s notion of the male gaze, asserting its potential to empower female spectators as agents of desire.

Corinn Columpar, “ The Gaze As Theoretical Touchstone: The Intersection of Film Studies, Feminist Theory, and Postcolonial Theory ,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 30, no. 1/2 (2002): 25–44.

The male gaze is not, as Columpar articulates, the sole tool “in the contemporary feminist film critic’s box”: so are the ethnographic and colonial gazes, brought to film theory from postcolonial studies. Columpar reiterates that the early fixation upon gender and the male gaze “failed to account for other key determinants of social power and position.” Interdisciplinary perspectives, such as those informed by postcolonial theory, are better equipped to unpack “issues of racial and national difference and acknowledge the role that race and ethnicity play in looking relations.”

Janell Hobson, “ Viewing in the Dark: Toward a Black Feminist Approach to Film ,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 30, no. 1/2 (2002): 45–59.

Hobson illuminates the absence and/or disembodied presence of Black female bodies in Hollywood cinema. She argues that the invisibility of Black women’s bodies on screen was a defense mechanism against the disruption of “whites as beautiful, as the norm.” By turning away from the gaze and toward the sound of Black women’s disembodied voices in speech and song, viewers are better equipped to recognize how their voices are “used in mainstream cinema by way of supporting and defining the normalized (white) male body,” therefore “ensur[ing] the identity of white masculinity.”

E. Ann Kaplan, “ Global Feminisms and the State of Feminist Film Theory ,” Signs 30, no. 1 (2004): 1236–48.

Kaplan reflects on her trajectory as a pioneering feminist film theorist, illuminating her shift from cinema’s depictions of the “oppressions of white Western women” to the study of trauma in global and indigenous cinema. Importantly, she notes that in her earlier research, she failed to “confront the really tough questions of my own positionality.” In doing so, she invites readers to consider the ethics of witnessing and white, Western feminist participation in the development of multicultural approaches.

Jane M. Gaines, “ Film History and the Two Presents of Feminist Film Theory ,” Cinema Journal 44, no. 1 (2004): 113–19.

It may come as a surprise to many that, internationally speaking, women were indeed undertaking various forms of creative labor in the world of film production during the silent era, including screenwriting, producing, directing, etc. The question, then, is not just “why these women were forgotten” but also “why we forgot them.” Gaines considers the “historical turn” in feminist film studies, arguing that scholars must be mindful of how they narrativize and rewrite the rediscovered facts of women’s work in cinema.

Sangita Gopal, “ Feminism and the Big Picture: Conversations ,” Cinema Journal 57, no. 2 (2018): 131–36.

In this fascinating article, Gopal synthesizes responses to a series of questions posed to film scholars regarding feminist theory, praxis, and pedagogy, as well as feminism as “an unfinished project” and feminist media studies as a “boundless” field. Where theory is concerned, Gopal usefully highlights Lingzhen Wang’s and Priya Jaikumar’s suggestions for more explicitly linking and situating feminist media studies within “the big picture.” Notably, Jaikumar ponders the possibilities of feminism creating a framework such that “it is not possible to ask a question if it is absent of a politics.”

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