writing, so as to make it clear that feminism represents as total a break as possible
with male-constructed society. Politics is not simply about the law and state, as
liberals think. It is about human activity in general and the celebrated slogan – ‘the
personal is political’ – captures the radical feminist argument that interpersonal
relations are as political as voting in elections. Radicals encourage women to meet
separately – to voice their problems without men – and to take personal experience
much more seriously than the liberal tradition allows.
Radicals see themselves as sexual revolutionaries, and thus very different from
liberal feminists who work within the system. We shall see later that radicals have
very different views from liberals on questions like prostitution and pornography.
Socialist feminist critique
The socialist critique of liberal feminism argues that liberal feminists ignore or
marginalise the position of working-class women and the problems they have with
exploitation and poor conditions in the workplace. The question of gender needs
to be linked to the question of class – and legal and political equality, though
important, does not address the differential in real power that exists in capitalist
society.
Marxist feminists in particular want to challenge the view of the state as a
benevolent reformer, and to argue that the state is an expression of class domination.
The freedom of women has to be linked to the emancipation of the working class
in general, with a much greater concentration on the social and economic dimensions
of gender discrimination. Why should the right to join the armed forces and the
police be a positive development if the police are used to oppress people at home
and the army to oppress peoples abroad? Liberal feminism neglects the question of
production and reproduction that lies at the heart of human activity.
Other critiques
The black feminist critique particularly takes issue with the tendency of liberal
feminists to treat women in an abstract fashion, and to assume that women are not
only middle class, but white as well. Many of the objections that liberal feminists
raise to the hypocritical politeness of men hardly apply to women who are subject
to racist abuse and treated in a derogatory fashion because they are black.
The feminisms looked at so far can be called ‘ideological’ feminisms, and they
overlap with what can be labelled ‘philosophical feminisms’: feminist empiricism,
standpoint feminism and postmodern feminism.
Feminist empiricists take the view that feminism should be treated as an objective
science which concentrates on the facts relating to discrimination. Feminist
empiricists feel that it is unnecessary and counterproductive to hitch feminism to
an ideological position, and that the norms of liberalism involve a value commitment
that narrows the appeal of feminist analysis.
Standpoint feminists take the view that the position of women gives rise to a
different outlook, so that liberal feminists are wrong to argue simply for equality
with men, and to concern themselves only with legal and political rights.
Chapter 14 Feminism 317