Cultural Feminist Ideas
Cultural feminism commends the positive aspects of what is seen as the female character or feminine personality. It is also a feminist theory of difference that praises the positive aspect of women. Early theorists like Jane Addams and Charlotte Perkins Gilman argued that in governing the state, cooperation, caring, and nonviolence in the settlement of conflicts society seem to be what was needed from women’s virtues.
Josephine Donovan argues that the nineteenth century journalist, critic and women's rights activist, Margaret Fuller, contributed to cultural feminism. She says that Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) initiated the cultural feminist tradition. It stresses the emotional, intuitive side of knowledge and expresses an organic world view that is quite different from the mechanistic view of Enlightenment rationalists.
Linda Alcoff argues that women are overdetermined by what she sees as patriarchal systems. She contends that:
"Man has said that woman can be defined, delineated, captured, understood, explained, and diagnosed to a level of determination never accorded to man himself, who is conceived as a rational animal with free will".
While cultural feminists argue that the traditional role of women provides a basis for the articulation of a more humane world view, other contemporary feminists do not believe that this transformation will happen automatically. They do not believe that the differences between women and men are principally biological. Alcoff makes the point that "the cultural feminist reappraisal construes woman's passivity as her peacefulness, her sentimentality as her proclivity to nurture, her subjectiveness as her advanced self-awareness".
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Famous quotes containing the words cultural, feminist and/or ideas:
“Unfortunately there is still a cultural stereotype that it’s all right for girls to be affectionate but that once boys reach six or seven, they no longer need so much hugging and kissing. What this does is dissuade boys from expressing their natural feelings of tenderness and affection. It is important that we act affectionately with our sons as well as our daughters.”
—Stephanie Martson (20th century)
“With a generous endowment of motherhood provided by legislation, with all laws against voluntary motherhood and education in its methods repealed, with the feminist ideal of education accepted in home and school, and with all special barriers removed in every field of human activity, there is no reason why woman should not become almost a human thing. It will be time enough then to consider whether she has a soul.”
—Crystal Eastman (1881–1928)
“I’m not afraid of facts, I welcome facts but a congeries of facts is not equivalent to an idea. This is the essential fallacy of the so-called “scientific” mind. People who mistake facts for ideas are incomplete thinkers; they are gossips.”
—Cynthia Ozick (b. 1928)