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Feminism is a hot topic, a user before mentioned his thoughts on it's origin, and that got me thinking. What is the social driver behind feminism?
Personally, I see it as a response to modern medicine and work safety standards, and the resulting rapidly booming population. Without historic mortality levels, it is no longer necessary for women to devote their lives to maintaining the population. With women free to do as they please, society suddenly finds itself with a lot of free hands that could be working, and so there is a push to remove the social systems that forbid women from traditional labor.
What puzzles me, is through what force does society implement change like this? It's not like we suffered the woes of overpopulation, and responded with feminist cultural change. This seems almost pre-emptive. But the arguments behind the feminist movement (I think) were based around freedom and equality. Was there a secret utilitarian agenda? Did things just coincidentally line up? Does society naturally drift towards freedom when the roadblocks are removed? Am I simply stupid and uneducated? I don't know enough to figure it out, but I feel like it's at least an interesting question. Thoughts?
This is a sentiment that is often expressed, including by both by feminists themselves who want to engage no-true-scotsmanning, and by some non-feminists who want to lay the blame squarely on 'third wave feminism' (and occasionally second wave as well). I strongly disagree with this sentiment.
There's really only two movements that can be described as distinct movements or schools of thought of feminism - liberal feminism and radical feminism. They are also mutually exclusive - belief in one necessarily precludes belief in the other.
Liberal feminism is essentially just liberalism or liberal thought applied to women. For this reason, I'm hesitant to even call it 'liberal feminism', as this implies a level of philosophical kinship with radical feminism that doesn't exist. 'Liberal feminism' doesn't have a distinct philosophical tradition or prominent philosophers either, instead relying heavily on liberal philosophers from Locke to Mills to Rawls generally, with lesser scholars basically just transposing their ideas onto women and gender, with the possible exception of Wollstonecraft. However, I must point out that even Mills assumed that women were subjugated by men Liberal feminism is what the average person is thinking of when they think positively about feminism, but this is actually just reflection of a positive view of liberalism generally.
Radical feminism is the other feminism and is arguably just 'feminism'. What makes radical feminism distinct is its core focus on patriarchy or patriarchy theory. This is a Marxian theory which defines men and women in terms of oppressive power dynamics, man as oppressor and women as oppressed, and that radical reform (revolution of some kind) is needed to end this 'patriarchy' and oppression. Virtually every prominent feminist scholar has been a radical feminist, from Millet and McKinnon to bell hooks. Even supposedly liberal feminists like Gloria Steinem were actually radical feminists, and I believe were more so labelled liberal feminists for their presentability. Ideologically they still subscribed to patriarchy theory and a radical deconstruction of society ('patriarchy'). Radical feminism is arguably just as old or even older than liberal feminism, with the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention's Declaration of Sentiments essentially laying out a form of proto-radical feminism/patriarchy theory (though there are some elements of liberal feminism there too).
Liberal feminism was a flash in the pan. Women gained legal equality extremely quickly, with the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964, before feminism had even really began in full swing. What are now regarded as seminal or foundational (radical) feminist texts, such as Kate Millet's Sexual Politics in 1970, were yet to be published. Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, often called the book that started the so called 'second wave' of feminism, was published in 1963, only a year before the Civil Rights Act. Of course, the underlying feminist sentiment existed before that, but my point is that liberal feminism or 'women's rights' were mainstreamed incredibly quickly and pretty painlessly too. With the primary goals of liberal feminism achieved so quickly, much of the liberal activist energy behind it dissipated, leaving behind mostly (though not exclusively) radical feminist activists, who still had a bone to pick. Many liberal feminists who stayed would eventually be excluded and pushed out, such as Warren Farrell and Karen DeCrow. It would be these radical feminist activists who would go on to fulfil the majority of feminist leadership roles, professorships in 'gender studies' and social sciences generally, and advocacy/lobby groups. Radical feminism has become orthodoxy, and the only active form of feminism.
The distinction between liberal feminism and radical feminism strongly mirrors the split in the black civil rights movement, between Martin Luther King Jr's liberal approach vs the black liberationist (i.e. Marxian) approach represented by Malcolm X or the Black Panthers and similar groups. However, while most people can distinguish between movements represented by MLK Jr and Malcolm X, the same does not seems to be true for liberal feminism and radical feminism, which are often conflated with each other or seen as part of the same tradition. I'm not completely sure why this is the case, it may just be because women's rights were relatively less of a contentious issue and people, including men as per a comment of mine above, were happy to go along and not question it much. It could have also been a deliberate tactic of obfuscation on the part of the radical feminists, deliberately linking themselves to and hiding behind the positive connotations of liberal feminism for gain. They have been pretty successful if this is the case, as radical feminism has completely supplanted any liberal notions of the relationship between the sexes. Patriarchy theory has become the default position in the public cultural continuousness, even those who would (mis)label themselves as liberal feminists. The idea that maybe women weren't essentially slaves to men in the past - and instead that liberalism towards women is a natural moral development due to changing social conditions/modernity - is verboten now.
There are some different groups within radical feminism, perhaps the most obvious being the contemporary conflict between intersectional feminism and the TERFs. But I wouldn't call these movements wholly different schools of thought, they are both radical feminist ideologies at their core. A comparison I would make is to Marxism. There are a whole range of different sub-movements within Marxism, Marxist-Leninism, Stalinism, Trotskyism, Maoism etc. that all do get into conflict with each other for one reason or another. But at the core they are still all Marxist and adopted the same core ideological thought and framing. The same is true for radical feminism. You can make legitimate blanket criticisms of (radical) feminism the same way you can of Marxism and its derivatives.
I think the idea not to criticise feminism too broadly is purely necessary for optics, or strategic reasons as you put it. As might be obvious, I've spent a not-insignificant amount of time reading both feminist history and theory. I'm not convinced the level of granularity you're suggesting is justified on the actual philosophical level. To repeat myself, it's perfectly reasonable to make broad criticisms of Marxism, which includes the granularity of all its derivatives, because it's the same core philosophy/ideology. But I must concede I may be just as vulnerable to outgroup homogeneity bias as anyone else, even though I don't think it refutes my arguments here.
I will say that I do very much agree with the general point of your original comment, my criticisms is more levelled at you describing this this is only a contemporary issue. What you were describing has always existed in feminism, at least as far back as 1848.
For the most part, yes. The suffragette movement (i.e. all pre-interwar feminism) was always an elite movement, made up exclusively of high class, wealthy women. The suffragettes weren't advocating for universal suffrage, but rather extending the right to vote from wealthy men to wealthy men and women.
It's hard to say say whether it involved signalling opportunities for elite men. The main issue with this idea is that the suffragette movement was (despite contemporary historical revisionism on the subject) largely unpopular for much of its existence, especially among women. Men were generally more in favour of women's suffrage than women were themselves. Here is a link if you want to know more about this topic. So as a purely political signal, elite men supporting women's suffrage wouldn't be that effective, at least until the early 20th century, but even then women's suffrage wasn't that popular when it actually passed either. You might argue that that the success women's suffrage was mere historical fluke caused by the mass killing of young men in the First World War which provided strong pressures for women to be involved in political affairs. The vast majority of states only passed women's suffrage after WW1, those that did it earlier were mostly limited to extremely sparsely populated basically colonial states or territories that probably had different reasons for doing so. And often when women's suffrage was passed, it was initially limited land-owning women, such as in the UK. It's also not like there was never any instance of women voting prior to the 19th/20th century either, there are numerous instances throughout history where women could and did vote.
In my opinion, what is more likely is that elite men were doing what men do best, and listening to the complaints of women and jumping to solve the issue and accommodate them. As I pointed out earlier, men are predisposed to such behaviour as protectors and providers.
This question is basically about rhetoric and how to win a debate/online argument. I'm not sure I have the best advice here. But some general things I've picked up:
First, remember you're arguing more to convince other readers (the audience) than you are necessarily are to convince your debate opponent. There's a good chance your debate opponent is a committed ideologue and you're not going to convince them no matter what you say. But if you make convincing arguments other readers may be convinced. Generally speaking, if you have provided credible sources and quotes from figures, and your opponent responds with some variation of 'well they're not MY preferred sources', it doesn't look good for them.
Second, most feminists you meet online (and even in person for that matter) are going to be woefully underinformed about their own topic. Part of the reason they are so dead set on their one specific source is because it's probably the only thing they have read, or was assigned reading on their gender studies subject. In particular is bell hooks. Seriously, probably three-quarters of the time the only source online feminists use is bell hooks, the prominent intersectional feminist. She's the one that always gets recommended for those who "don't understand feminism." You can pre-empt them by quoting (to refute) hooks yourself. Storming the motte before they even have a chance to occupy it.
Third, as much as this is a logical fallacy (we're talking about rhetoric here, your debate opponent is probably not acting in good faith), but just appeal to authority. Hopefully you do it in a clever and crafty way. To be slightly less fallacious, you can appeal to the relative prominence they have and therefore their outsized influence on the feminist movement as a whole, e.g. "it doesn't matter what you or some obscure minor feminist thinker no one cares about, I'm referring to the feminist who hold senior professorships at major colleges, or have written the foundational texts that are taught everywhere, or are senior members of prominent feminist organisations and advocacy groups." Essentially just name drop all the prominent, influential feminists, their importance and their positions. It's really hard for your opponent to not look silly when you're talking about Millet, Walby and hooks and they're talking about Feminist McNobody.
Funny you should say that, because she's not a feminist academic I would say!
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