Gender Codes: Exploring Malaysia’s Gender Parity in Computer Science
The Voice of Technology: Understanding The Work Of Feminine Voice Assistants and the Feminization of the Interface
Whose Voices, Whose Values? Environmental Policy Effects Ofextra-Community Sovereignty Advocacy
Environmental Science and Public Policy
“Felons, Not Families”: The Construction of Immigrant Criminality in Obama-Era Policies and Discourses, 2011-2016
History and Literature
Seeing Beyond the Binary: The Photographic Construction of Queer Identity in Interwar Paris and Berlin
History and Literature
Iconic Market Women: The Unsung Heroines of Post-Colonial Ghana (1960s-1990s)
History and Literature: Ethnic Studies
From Stove Polish to the She-E-O: The Historical Relationship Between the American Feminist Movement and Consumer Culture
Social Studies
“Interstitial Existence,” De-Personification, and Black Women’s Resistance to Police Brutality
#Metoo Meets #Blm: Understanding Black Feminist Anti-Violence Activism in the United States
Social Studies
"Why Won’t Anyone Fight For Us?”: A Contemporary Class Analysis of the Positions and Politics of H-1b and H-4 Visa Holders
Social Studies
2019
Mirror, Mirror, On The Wall, Why Can’t I See Myself At All?: A Close Reading of Children’s Picture Books Featuring Gender Expansive Children of Color
African and African-American Studies
2019
Dilating Health, Healthcare, and Well-Being: Experiences of LGBTQ+ Thai People
2019
The Consociationalist Culprit: Explaining Women’s Lack of Political Representation in Northern Ireland
2019
Queering the Political Sphere: Play, Performance, and Civil Society with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in San Francisco, 1979-1999
2019
Playing With Power: Kink, Race, and Desire
History and Literature
2019
“Take Root:” Community Formation at the San Francisco Chinatown Branch Public Library, 1970s-1990s
Fetal Tomfoolery: Comedy, Activism, and Reproductive Justice in the Pro-Abortion Work of the Lady Parts Justice League
And They're Saying It's Because of the Internet: An Exploration of Sexuality Urban Legends Online
(In)visibly Queer: Assessing Disparities in the Adjudication of U.S. LGBTQ Asylum Cases
Enough for Today
Radical Appropriations: A Cultural History and Critical Theorization of Cultural Appropriation in Drag Performance
Surviving Safe Spaces: Exploring Survivor Narratives and Community-Based Responses to LGBTQ Intimate Partner Violence
“The Cruelest of All Pains”: Birth, Compassion, and the Female Body in
Virtually Normal? How “Initiation” Shapes the Pursuit of Modern Gay Relationships
How Stigma Impacts Mental Health: The Minority Stress Model and Unwed Mothers in South Korea
The Future is Taken Care of: Care Robots, Migrant Workers, and the Re-production of Japanese Identity
Bodies on the Line: Empowerment through Collective Subjectification in Women's Rugby Culture
"In the Middle of the Movement": Advocating for Sexuality and Reproductive Health Rights in the Nonprofit Industrial Complex
Breaking the Equator: Formation and Fragmentation of Gender and Race in Indigenous Ecuador
Social Studies
Deconstructing the American Dream: in Kodak Advertisements and Shirley Cards in Post World War II American Culture
Imposing Consent: Past Paradigms, Gender Norms, and the Continuing Conflation of Health and Genital Appearance in Medical Practice for Intersex Infants
And I am Telling You, You Can’t Stop the Beat: Locating Narratives of Racial Crossover in Musical Theater
Reality® Check: Shifting Discourses of “Female Empowerment” in the History of the Reality Female Condom, 1989-2000
Dialectics of a Feminist Future
Lesbian Against the Law: Indian Lesbian Activism and Film, 1987-2014
Talking Dirty: Using the Pornographic to Negotiate Sexual Discourse in Public and Private
Wars Are Fought, They Are Also Told: A Study of 9/11 and the War on Terrorism in U.S. History Textbooks
Yoko as a Narrator in Nobuyoshi Araki’s and
2014
Reading at an Angle: Theorizing Young Women Reading Science-Fictionally
English and American Literature
2014
“Are you Ready to be Strong?”: Images of Female Empowerment in 1990s Popular Culture
History and Literature
2014
Constructing the Harvard Man: Eugenics, the Science of Physical Education, and Masculinity at Harvard, 1879-1919
History and Science
2014
Sex, Science, and Politics in the Sociobiology Debate
History and Science
2014
"A Little Bit of Sodomy in Me”: Disgust, Loss, and the Politics of Redemption in the American Ex-Gay Movement
Religion
2014
Art of Disturbance: Trans-Actions on the Stage of the US-Mexico Border
Romance Languages and Literatures
2014
“Too Important for Politics”: The Implications of “Autonomy” in the Indian Women’s Movement
Social Studies
2014
Yes, No, Maybe: The Politics of Consent Under Compulsory Sex-Positivity
Social Studies
2013
Inside the Master's House: Gender, Sexuality, and the 'Impossible' History of Slavery in Jamaica, 1753-1786
2013
Illuminating the Darkness Beneath the Lamp: Im Yong-sin’s Disappearance from History and Rewriting the History of Women in Korea’s Colonial Period (1910-1945)
East Asian Languages and Civilizations
2013
"How to Survive a Plague": Navigating AIDS in Mark Doty's Poetry
English and American Literature
2013
Respectability's Girl: Images of Black Girlhood Innocence, 1920-2013
History and Literature
2013
Defining Our Own Lives: The Racial, Gendered, and Postcolonial Experience of Black Women in the Netherlands
Social Studies
2013
Beyond Victim-Blaming: Strategies of Rape Response through Narrative
Sociology
2012
From “Ultimate Females” to “Be(ing) Me”: Uncovering Australian Intersex Experiences and Perspectives
2012
Modernity on Trial: Sodomy and Nation in Malaysia
2012
: Woven Accounts of Gender, Work and Motherhood in South Korea
2012
Sexual Apartheid: Marginalized Identity(s) in South Africa's HIV/AIDS Interventions
2012
The Pornographer's Tools: A Critical and Artistic Response to the Pornography of Georges Bataille and Anaïs Nin
2012
Cerebral interhemispheric connectivity and autism: A laboratory investigation of Dkk3 function in the postmitotic development of callosal projection neuron subpopulations and a historical analysis of the reported male prevalence of autism and the “extreme male brain” theory
Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology
2011
"Let's Just Invite Them In" versus "We Just Don't Have the Resources to Support You": Selective and Non-Selective College Administrators as Creators of Alcohol Policies and Practices, Campus Cultures, and Students' Identities, and Implications for Opportunities in Higher Education
2011
Plaintiffs' Role in Reinventing Legal Arguments for Same-Sex Marriage
2011
Facing Tijuana's Maquilas: An Inquiry into Embodied Viewership of the US-Mexico Border
Romance Languages and Literatures
2011
"The Woman Who Shouts": Coming to Voice as a Young Urban Female Leader
Social Studies
2011
Closet Communities: A Study of Queer Life in Cairo
Social Studies
2011
Redefining Survival: Statistics and the Language of Uncertainty at the Height of the AIDS Epidemic
Statistics
2010
A Genealogy of Gay Male Representation from the Lavender Scare to Lavender Containment
2010
More Than "Thoughts by the Way": Young Women and the Overland Journey Finding Themselves Through Narrative Voice, 1940-1870
2010
Que(e)rying Harvard Men, 1941-1951: A Project on Oral Histories
2010
When Welfare Queens Speak: Survival Rhetoric in the Face of Domination
African and African American Studies
2010
ACT UP New York: Art, Activism and the AIDS Crisis, 1987-1993
Visual and Environmental Studies
"Gay, Straight, or Lying?": The Cultural Silencing of Male Bisexuality in America
"I had never seen a beautiful woman with just one breast": Beauty and Norms of Femininity in Popular Breast Cancer Narratives
2009
Diego Garcia: Islands of Empire, Archipelagos of Resistance
2009
Zion Sexing Palestine
2009
Are You Sisters?: Motherhood, Sisterhood, and the Impossible Black Lesbian Subject
African and African American Studies
2009
Girl Interpellated: Female Childhoods and the Trauma of Nationalist Subjectivity
History and Literature
Breaching the Subject of Birth: An Examination of Undergraduate Women's Perceptions of "Alternative" Birthing Methods
Sociology
2008
Biomedicalizing the Labor of Love: Narratives of Maternal Disability and Reproduction
Dis/locating the Margins: Gloria Anzaldúa and New Potential for Feminist Pedagogy
Mommy, Where Do Babies Come From? Egg Donation and Popular Constructions of Authentic Motherhood
Parallel Histories and Mutual Lessons: Advocates Negotiate Feminism and Domestic Violence Services in Immigrant Communities in Boston
SILENCE=DEATH: (Re)Presentations of "The AIDS Epidemic" 1981-1990
The "Sparrow in the Cage": Images of the Emaciated Body in Representations of Anorexia Nervosa
Theater of the Abject: The Powers of Horror in Sarah Kane's
Toward a Participatory Framework for Inclusive Citizenship: Haitian Immigrant Women's Claim to Civic Space in Boston
"Keepin' it Real," Queering the Real: Queer Hip Hop and the Performance of Authenticity
African and African American Studies
On the Surface: Conceptualizing Gender and Subjectivity in Chinese Lesbian Culture
East Asian Languages and Civilization
Viewing Post-War Black Politics Through a New Lens: Tracing Changes in Ann Perry's Conception of the Mother-Child Relationship, 1943-1965
History and Literature
Silent Families and Invisible Sex: Christian Nationalism and the 2004 Texas Sex Education Battle
Social Studies
White 2.0: Theorizing White Feminist Blogging
Social Studies
2007
Do Mothers Experience The Mommy Wars?: An Examination of the Media's Claims About the Mommy Wars and the Mothers Who Supposedly Fight In Them
2007
On The Offense: The Apologetic Defense and Women's Sports
2007
Stop Being Polite & Start Getting "Real": Examining Madonna & Black Culture Appropriation in the MTV Generation
2007
The Inviability of Balance: Performing Female Political Candidacy
2007
The Money Taboo
English
2007
Somewhere Over the Rainbow Nation: The Dynamics of the Gay and Lesbian Movement and the Countermovement After a Decade of Democracy in South Africa
Government
2007
Facing The Empress: Modern Representations of Women, Power and Ideology In Dynasty China
Religion
2007
Re-Evaluating Homosexuality: Extralegal Factors in Conservative Jewish Law
Social Studies
2007
Who's Producing Your Knowledge?: Filipina American Scholars
Social Studies
2006
"The Potential of Universality": Discovering Gender Fluidity Through Performance
Coming Out of the Candlelight: Erasure, Politics, and Practice at the 2005 Boston Transgender Day of Remembrance
May Our Daughters Return Home: Transnational Organizing to Halt Femicide in Ciudad Juarez
She Let It Happen: An Analysis of Rape Myth Acceptance among Women
Anthropology
"This is no time for the private point of view": Vexing the Confessional in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton
History and Literature
Relying on the Experts: The Hidden Motives of Tampon Manufacturers, Feminist Health Activists and the Medical Community During the American Toxic Shock Epidemic from 1978- 1982
History of Science
(In)visibility: Identity Rights and Subjective Experience in Gay Beirut
Social Studies
Social Studies
Social Studies
Social Studies
2005
"Takin' Back the Night!" Buffy the Vampire Slayer and "Girl Power" Feminism
Bread Winners or Bread Makers? The Professional Challenges for Working Women
Power to the People! Or Not: The Exceptional Decrease in Women’s Formal and Informal Political Participation in Slovenia During Democratization
To Whom Many Doors Are Still Locked: Gender, Space & Power in Harvard Final Clubs
Coca Politics: Women's Leadership in the Chapare
Anthropology
Redressing Prostitution: Trans Sex Work and the Fragmentation of Feminist Theories
Government
The Media Coverage of Women, Ten Years Later, in the 108th Congress, Has Anything Changed Since 'The Year of the Women' in 1992
Government
Divided Designs: Separatism, Intersectionality, and Feminist Science in the 1970s
History of Science
Completing the Circle: Singing Women's Universality and the Music of Libana
Music
Attitudes, Beliefs and Behavior Towards Gays and Lesbians
Psychology
Beauty and Brains: The Influence of Stereotypical Portraits of Women on Implicit Cognition
Psychology
"Rational Kitchens" How Scientific Kitchen Designs Reconfigured Domestic Space and Subjectivity from the White City to the New Frankfurt
Social Studies
2004
Begin By Imagining: Reflections of Women in the Holocaust
Feminism within the Frame: An Analysis of Representations of Women in the Art of Americas Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
History of Art and Architecture
The Fluid Body: Gender, Agency, and Embodiment in Chöd Ritual
Religion
Parodic Patriotism and Ambivalent Assimilation: A Rereading of Mary Antin's The Promised Land
Romance Languages and Literatures
Virgin, Mother, Warrior: The Virgin of Guadalupe as an Icon of the Anti- Abortion Movement
Romance Languages and Literatures
Feminist Evolutions: An exploration and response to the disconnect between young women and contemporary dominant feminism
Social Studies
Public Enemies: South Asian and Arab Americans Navigate Racialization and Cultural Citizenship After 9/11
Social Studies
The Blue Stockinged Gal of Yesterday is Gone: Life-course Decision-making and Identity Formation of 1950s Radcliffe College Graduates
Social Studies
At the Narrative Center of Gravity: Stories and Identities of Queer Women of Color
Embodying the Psyche, Envisioning the Self: Race, Gender, and Psychology in Postwar American Women’s Fiction
From Many Mouths to Her Mind: Pursuits of Selfhood, the American Woman, and the Self-Help Book
Out of Love: The Permissibility of Abuse in Love and Self Development
Promising Monsters, Perilous Motherhood: The Social Construction of 20th Century Multiple Births
Sexing the Gender Dysphoric Body: A Developmental Examination of Gender Identity Disorder of Childhood
The Specter of Homoeroticism: Recasting Castration in David Fincher's 'Fight Club'
Women's Occupational Health: A Study of Latina Immigrant Janitors at Harvard
Biology
Accidental Bodies
English
Transformations in the Polish Female Gender Model from Communism to Democracy
History of Science
Between Nation and World: Organizing Against Domestic Violence in China
Social Studies
The Process of Becoming: Cultural Identity-Formation Among Second-Generation South Asian Women in the Contexts of Marriage and Family
Social Studies
A Turn of the Page: Contemporary Women’s Reading Groups in America
Bordering Home
Canary in a Coal Mine: The Mixed Race Woman in American History and Literature
Reflections in Yellow
My Rights Don't Just Come to Me: Palestinian Women Negotiating Identity
Anthropology
“Progressive Conservatism”: The Intersection of Boston Women's Involvement in Anti-Suffrage and Progressive Reform, 1908 - 1920
History
“What Can a Woman Do?”: Gender, Youth, and Citizenship at Women's Colleges During World War I
History
Building Strong Community: A Study of Queer Groups at Northeastern, Brandeis, and Harvard
Sociology
Taking Care: Stereotypes, Medical Care, and HIV+ Women
Of Tongues Untied: Stories Told and Retold by Working-Class Women
On Display: Deconstructing Modes of Fashion Exhibition
The Un-Candidates: Gender and Outsider Signals in Women's Political Advertisements
Tugging at the Seams: Feminist Resistance in Pornography
Witnessing Memory': Narrating the Realities of Immigrant and Refugee Women
“La Revolution Tranquille”: Concubinage: The Renegotiation of Gender and the Deregulation of Conjugal Kinship in the Contemporary French Household
Anthropology
What is “natural” about the menstrual cycle?
Anthropology
Multi-Drug Resistance in Malaria: Identification and Characterization of a Putative ABC-Transporter in Plasmodium falciparum
Biology
“We Was Girls Together”: The Role of Female Friendship in Nella Larsen's and Toni Morrison's
English
Pom-Pom Power--The History of Cheerleading at Harvard
History
Conception of Gender in Artificial Intelligence
History of Science
“Hysterilization”: Hysterectomy as Sterilization in the 1970s United States
History of Science
What's Blood Got to Do with It? Menarche, Menstrual Attitudes, Experiences, and Behaviors
Psychology
Facing the Screen: Portrayals of Female Body Image on Websites for Teenagers
Sociology
They're Not Those Kinds of Girls: The Absence of Physical Pleasure in Teenage Girls' Sexual Narratives
Sociology
(Re)Writing Woman: Confronting Gender in the Czech Masculine Narrative
“Like a Nuprin: Little, Yellow, Queer”: The Case for Queer Asian American Autobiofictional Performance
Sex, Mothers, and Bodies: Chilean Sex Workers Voicing their Honor
Anthropology
Mapping his Manila: Feminine Geographies of the City in Nick Joaquin's
English
Precious Mettle: Margaret DeWitt, Susanna Townsend, and Mary Jane Megquier Negotiate Environment, Refinement & Femininity in Gold Rush California
History
From to : Analyzing the Aesthetics of Spoken Word Poetry
History and Literature
The Hymeneal Seal: Embodying Female Virginity in Early Modern England
History of Science
Suit Her Up, She's Ready to Play: How the Woman-in-a-Suit Tackles Social Binaries
Social Studies
"From the Bones of Memory": Women's Stories to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission
"When We Get Married, We'll Live Next Door to Each Other": Adolescence, Girl-Friends, and "Lesbian" Desires
Healthy Bodies, Healthy Lives: The Women's Health Initiative and the Politics of Science
Adah Isaacs Menken, The [Un]True Stories: History, Identity, Memory, Menken, and Me
Afro-American Studies
Situated Science: Margaret Cavendish and Natural Philosophical Discourse
English
From "Sympathizers" to Organizers: The Emergence of the Women's Liberation Movement from the New Left at Harvard-Radcliffe
History
Re-(e)valu[ate/ing] Madonna: Understanding the Success of Post-Modernity's Greatest Diva
Music
"Let's Not Change the Subject!": Deliberation on Abortion on the Web, in the House and in Abortion Dialogue Groups
Social Studies
A Socialist-Feminist Re-vision: An Integration of Socialist Feminist and Psychoanalytic Accounts of Women's Oppression
Social Studies
Common Visions, Differing Priorities, Challenging Dynamics: An Examination of a Low-Income Immigrant Women's Cooperative Project
Sociology
"I Don't Want to Grow Up - If It's Like That": Carson McCullers's Construction of Female Adolescence and Women's Coming of Age
Another Toxic Shock: Health Risks from Rayon and Dioxin in Chlorine Bleached Tampons Manufactured in the United States, a Public Policy Analysis
Damned Beauties of the Roaring Twenties: The Death of Young, White, Urban, American Women and
Just Saying No? A Closer Look at the Messages of Three Sexual Abstinence Programs
The Cost of Making Money: Exploring the Dissociative Tendencies of College Educated Strippers
Whose Sexuality? Masochistic Sexual Fantasies and Notions of Feminist Subjectivity
That Takes Balls…or Does it? A Historical and Endocrinologic Examination of the Relation of Androgens to Confidence in Males and Females
Anthropology
black tar/and honey: Anne Sexton in Performance
English
Redefining the Politics of Presence: The Case of Indian Women in Panchayati Raj Institutions
Government
The Psychic Connection: The historical evolution of the psychic hotline in terms of gender, spirituality, and talk therapy
History
Visions and Revisions of Love: and the Crisis of Heterosexual Romance
Visual and Environmental Studies
"I Feel it in My Bones That You are Making History": The Life and Leadership of Pauli Murray
"Reports from the Front: Welfare Mothers Up in Arms": A Case Study with Policy Implications
All the Weapons I Carry 'Round with Me: Five Adult Women Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse Speak about Their Experiences with Impact Model Mugging
: Manufacturing Multiplicity from American Fashion Magazines
Listening to Stories of Prison: The HIV Epidemic in MCI-Framingham
The Communicating Wire: Bell Telephone, Farm Wives, and the Struggle for Rural Telephone Service
When I Grow Up I Want to Be a Good Girl: Adolescent Fiction and Patriarchal Notions of Womanhood
Out of the Courtroom and onto the Ballot: The Politicization of the 1930s and '40s Massachusetts Birth Control Movement
History
"The Role For Which God Created Them": Women in the United States' Religious Right
Social Studies
Potent Vulnerability: American Jewry and the Romance with Diaspora
Social Studies
"I Certainly Try and Make the Most of it": An Exploratory Study of Teenage Mothers Who Have Remained in High School
In Their Own Words: Life and Love in the Literary Transactions of Adolescent Girls
Math/Theory: Constructing a Feminist Epistemology of Mathematics
Mirror, Mirror on the Wall…" Nella Larsen, Alice Walker, and the Self-Representation of Black Female Sexuality
Racial Iconography and Feminist Film: A Cultural Critique of Independent Women's Cinema
Real Plums in an Imaginary Cake: Mary McCarthy and the Writing of Autobiography
Single-Mother Poverty: A Critical Analysis of Current Welfare Theory and Policy from a Feminist, Cultural Perspective
Intra-household Resource Allocations in South Africa: Is There a Gender Bias?
Economics
Vision and Revision: The Naked Body and the Borders of Sex and Gender
English
Are Abusive Men Different? And Can We Predict Their Behavior?
Psychology
Racial Iconography and Feminist Film: A Cultural Critique of Independent Women's Cinema
Visual and Environmental Studies
"What Does a Girl Do?": Teenage Girls' Voices in the Girl Group Music of the 1950s and '60s
Continuing the Struggle: Gender Equality in an Egalitarian Community
Elements of Community: Re-entering the Landscape of Utah Mormonism
Loving and Living Surrealism: Reuniting Leonora Carrington and Max Ernst
Reading the Body: The Physiological Politics of Gender in Charlotte Bronte's , Margaret Oliphant's , and Mary Braddon's
Searching for a Place Apart: A Journey into and out of Bulimia Nervosa
The Flagstad Case
The Sound Factory
Visual Strategies of the Contemporary U.S. Abortion Conflict
Working Women, Legitimate Lives: The Gender Values Underlying 1994 Welfare Reform
The Hormone Replacement Therapy Decision: Women at the Crossroads of Women's Health
Anthropology
The Economic Consequences of Domestic Violence
Economics
"It's My Skin": Gender, Pathology, and the Jewish Body in Holocaust Narratives
English
Essentialist Tensions: Feminist Theories of the "Maleness" of Philosophy
Philosophy
Differences Among Friends: International feminists, USAID, and Nigerian women
Helke Sander and the Roots of Change: Gaining a Foothold for Women Filmmakers in Postwar Germany
On Dorothy Allison's and Literary Theory on Pain and Witnessing
Redefining : A Study of Chicana Identity and the Malinche Image
The Feminist Critique of the Birth Control Pill
The Re-visited: Women Villains in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema
The Framings of Ethel Rosenberg: Gender, Law, Politics, and Culture in Cold War America
Tradition and Transgression: Gender Roles in Ballroom Dancing
When Pregnancy is a Crime: Addiction, Pregnancy and the Law
Strategic Sentiments: Javanese Women and the Anthropology of Emotion
Anthropology
Engendering Bodies in Pain: Trauma and Silence in Dorothy Allison's
English
The Flowers of Middle Summer
English
Conceptions of Self, Relationships and Gender Roles in Japanese American Women in California and Hawaii
Psychology
Bad Mothers and Wicked (wo)Men: Facts and Fictions about Serial Killers
Child of Imagination: Literary Analysis of Woolf, Steedman, Rich & Gilligan
Gender Roles on Trial During the Reign of Terror
Grief and Rage: The Politics of Death and the Political Implications of Mourning
Jewels in the Net: Women Bringing Relation into the Light of American Buddhist Practice
Mamas Fighting for Freedom in Kenya
Rethinking "Feminine Wiles": Sexuality and Subversion in the Fiction of Jane Bowles
Sexing the Machine: Feminism, Technology, and Postmodernism
Sisterhood is Robin? The Politics of the Woman-Centered Feminist Discourse in the New Ms. Magazine
"Thank God for Technology!" Taking a Second Look at the Technocratic Birth Experience
Where She Slept These Many Years
Women's Narratives of Anger: Exploring the Relationship between Anger and Self
Edith Wharton's : Gendered Paradoxes and Resistance to Representation
English
Sociocognitive and Motivational Influences on Gender-Linked Conduct
Psychology
Conceptions of the Female Self: A Struggle Between Dominant and Resistant Forces
Objectified Subjects: Women in AIDS Clinical Drug Trials
Re-membering the American Dream: Woman in the Process of Placing a Beam in a Bag
: Voices of Resistance
Women and War
Women of the Cloister, Women of the World: American Benedictines in Transition
The Changing Lives of Palestinian Women in the Galilee: Reflections on Some Aspects of Modernization by Three Generations
Anthropology
Blending the Spectrum: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Women and HIV Disease
Biology
Maestra: Five Female Orchestral Conductors in the United States
Music
Negotiating Identity: Multiracial People Challenging the Discourse
Social Studies
Pain, Privacy, and Photography: Approaches to Picturing the Experiences of Battered Women
Visual and Environmental Studies
Incest and the Denial of Paternal Fallibility in Psychoanalysis and Feminist Theory
Sex and the Ivory Girl: Judy Blume Speaks to the Erotics of Disembodiment in Adolescent Girls' Discourses of Sexual Desire
Women's Secrets, Feminine Desires: Narrative Hiding and Revealing in Frances Burney's , Emily Bronte's , and Mary Braddon's
Workers, Mothers and Working Mothers: The Politics of Fetal Protection in the Workplace
Appalachian Identity: A Contested Discourse
Anthropology
Half-Baked in Botswana: Why Cookstoves Aren't Heating Up the Kitchen
Economics
"Management of Men": Political Wives in British Parliamentary Politics, 1846-1867
History
re:Visions of Feminism: An Analysis of Contemporary Film and Video Directed by Asian American Women
Social Studies
A Mini-Revolution: hemlines, gender identity, and the 1960s
Feeding Women and Children First: A Study of the Special Supplemental Food Program for Women, Infants and Children
On Refracting a Voice: Readings of Tatiana Tolstaia
Private Lives in Public Spaces: Marie Stopes, The Mothers' Clinics, and the Practice of Contraception
: Meaning and Community Re-orient/ed
With Child: Women's Experiences of Childbirth from Personal, Historical, and Cultural Perspectives
Representing "Miss Lizzie": Class and Gender in the Borden Case
History and Literature
Seductive Strategies: Towards an Interactive Model of Consumerism
History and Literature
Nancy Chodorow's Theory Examined: Contraceptive Use Among Sexually Active Adolescents
Psychology
Choosing Sides: Massachusetts Activists Formulate Opinions on the Abortion Issue
Social Studies
Influence of Early Hollywood Films on Women's Roles in America
Rethinking Sex and Gender in a World of Women without Men: Changing Consciousness and Incorporation of the Feminine in Three Utopias by Women
A Different Voice in Politics: Women As Elites
Government
The Lady Teaches Well: Middle-Class Women and the Sunday School Movement in England, 1780-1830
History
The Analytical Muse: Historiography, Gender and Science in the Life of Lady Ada Lovelace
History of Science
The Tragic Part of Happiness: The Construction of the Subject in
Literatures
The Ideology of Gender Roles in Contemporary Mormonism: Feminist Reform and Traditional Reaction
Religion
La fonction génératrice: French Feminism, Motherhood, and Legal Reform, 1880-1914.
Great gatsby through the lens of feminism.
November 5, 2018
ENGL 100. Prof Whitley
The Great Gatsby through the lens of Feminism
Feminist criticism examines the ways in which literature has been written according to issues of gender. It focuses its attention on how cultural productions such as literature address the economic, social, political, and psychological oppression of women as a result of patriarchy. Patriarchal ideology has a deeply rooted influence on the way we think, speak, and view ourselves in the world, and an understanding of the pervasive nature of this ideology is necessary for a feminist critique. Demonstrating how people are a product of their culture, feminist criticism of The Great Gatsby reveals how the novel both supports and challenges the assumptions of a patriarchal society. The Great Gatsby displays various aspects of feminist philosophy by reflecting opposing principles of society’s model through very different female characters. By using a range of characters who respond to the figure of the New Woman, the novel shows how difficult it was to defy the norms of the time.
The novel paints a picture of America in the 1920’s. Before the war, women had no freedom, and they had to remain on a pedestal prescribed by the limits of male ideals. But now, women could be seen smoking and drinking, often in the company of men. They could also be seen enjoying the sometimes raucous nightlife offered at nightclubs and private parties. Even the new dances of the era, which seemed wild and overtly sexual to many, bespoke an attitude of free self-expression and unrestrained enjoyment. In other words, a “New Woman” emerged in the 1920’s. The appearance of the New Woman on the scene evoked a great deal of negative reaction from conservative members of society who felt that women’s rejection of any aspect of their traditional role would inevitably result in the destruction of the family and the moral decline of society as a whole.
The main female characters in the novel – Daisy, Jordan, and Myrtle – despite their many differences in class, occupation, appearance and personality traits, are all versions of the New Woman. All three display a good deal of modern independence. Only two are married, but they don’t keep their marital unhappiness a secret, although secrecy on such matters is cardinal in a patriarchal marriage. The women also challenge their assigned roles as females by preferring the excitement of night life to the more traditional employments of hearth and home. There is only one child among them, Daisy’s daughter, and while the child is well looked after by a nurse and affectionately treated by her mother, Daisy’s life does not revolve exclusively around her maternal role. Finally, all three women openly challenge patriarchal sexual taboo. Jordan engages in premarital sex, and Tom is even prompted to comment that Jordan’s family “shouldn’t let her run around the country in this way” (14). Daisy and Myrtle are both engaged in extramarital affairs, although Myrtle is more explicit about it than Daisy.
One of Daisy’s most memorable quotes is “All right, I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool – that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little food” (16). Daisy speaks of her hopes for her infant child, which reveals a lot about her character. Her bitterness and cynicism are signaled as she expresses this devastating critique of women’s position in society with reference to her daughter. It is clear that Daisy is a product of a social environment that, to a great extent, does not appreciate or value intellect in women. While Daisy conforms to a shared, patriarchal idea of femininity that values subservient and docile females, she also understands these social standards for women and chooses to play right into them. In this way, Daisy is a more subversive feminist.
Jordan is prescribed as a more masculine female character and seems to resist social pressure to conform to feminine norms. Not only does she have her own successful career, something that most women in the 1920’s did not have, but her career is in the male-dominated field of professional golf. She seems androgynous in her appearance and is described as having a “mustache of perspiration” and being “slender, small-breasted, with an erect carriage which accentuated by throwing her body backward at her shoulders like a young cadet.” The numerous masculine references in her physical descriptions through words such as ‘mustache,’ ‘erect,’ and ‘cadet’ demonstrate how she was not the typical 1920’s woman. She is also very honest and direct, where the patriarchal norm would be to remain submissive and quiet.
Myrtle’s characterization is more focused on her physicality, and she is more quickly undermined as artificial and even grotesque. Her death is undignified and stresses the destruction of her feminine aspects, with her left breast “swinging loose” and her mouth “ripped.” It is possible to argue that Myrtle is severely punished for her expression of sexuality, while Daisy, less overt about her illicit relationship with Gatsby, and a less sensual character altogether, is able to resume her life with Tom once she has left Gatsby.
The novel also abounds with minor female characters whose dress and activities identify them as incarnations of the New Woman, and they are portrayed as clones of a single, negative character type: shallow, revolting, exhibitionist and deceitful. For example, at Gatsby’s parties, we see insincere, “enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other’s names” (44), as well as numerous narcissistic attention-seekers in various stages of drunken hysteria. We meet, for example, a young woman who “dumps” down a cocktail “for courage” and “dances out alone on the canvass to perform” (45) and a “rowdy little girl who gave way upon the slightest provocation to uncontrollable laughter” (51). The novel’s discomfort with the New Woman becomes evident through these characterizations.
In conclusion, the women in this text are shown to be victims of social and cultural norms that they could not change, demonstrating how influential culture can be in shaping the lives of individuals. There is an attempt to redefine society and culture in a new way by gender relations and the women in this novel actively try to change the social norms through their attitudes and actions. It becomes clear, however, that patriarchy is deeply internalized for these characters, demonstrating how powerful and often devastating this ideology can be.
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What is a thesis statement.
Your thesis statement is one of the most important parts of your paper. It expresses your main argument succinctly and explains why your argument is historically significant. Think of your thesis as a promise you make to your reader about what your paper will argue. Then, spend the rest of your paper–each body paragraph–fulfilling that promise.
Your thesis should be between one and three sentences long and is placed at the end of your introduction. Just because the thesis comes towards the beginning of your paper does not mean you can write it first and then forget about it. View your thesis as a work in progress while you write your paper. Once you are satisfied with the overall argument your paper makes, go back to your thesis and see if it captures what you have argued. If it does not, then revise it. Crafting a good thesis is one of the most challenging parts of the writing process, so do not expect to perfect it on the first few tries. Successful writers revise their thesis statements again and again.
A successful thesis statement:
How to write a thesis statement:
Suppose you are taking an early American history class and your professor has distributed the following essay prompt:
“Historians have debated the American Revolution’s effect on women. Some argue that the Revolution had a positive effect because it increased women’s authority in the family. Others argue that it had a negative effect because it excluded women from politics. Still others argue that the Revolution changed very little for women, as they remained ensconced in the home. Write a paper in which you pose your own answer to the question of whether the American Revolution had a positive, negative, or limited effect on women.”
Using this prompt, we will look at both weak and strong thesis statements to see how successful thesis statements work.
While this thesis does take a position, it is problematic because it simply restates the prompt. It needs to be more specific about how the Revolution had a limited effect on women and why it mattered that women remained in the home.
Revised Thesis: The Revolution wrought little political change in the lives of women because they did not gain the right to vote or run for office. Instead, women remained firmly in the home, just as they had before the war, making their day-to-day lives look much the same.
This revision is an improvement over the first attempt because it states what standards the writer is using to measure change (the right to vote and run for office) and it shows why women remaining in the home serves as evidence of limited change (because their day-to-day lives looked the same before and after the war). However, it still relies too heavily on the information given in the prompt, simply saying that women remained in the home. It needs to make an argument about some element of the war’s limited effect on women. This thesis requires further revision.
Strong Thesis: While the Revolution presented women unprecedented opportunities to participate in protest movements and manage their family’s farms and businesses, it ultimately did not offer lasting political change, excluding women from the right to vote and serve in office.
Few would argue with the idea that war brings upheaval. Your thesis needs to be debatable: it needs to make a claim against which someone could argue. Your job throughout the paper is to provide evidence in support of your own case. Here is a revised version:
Strong Thesis: The Revolution caused particular upheaval in the lives of women. With men away at war, women took on full responsibility for running households, farms, and businesses. As a result of their increased involvement during the war, many women were reluctant to give up their new-found responsibilities after the fighting ended.
Sexism is a vague word that can mean different things in different times and places. In order to answer the question and make a compelling argument, this thesis needs to explain exactly what attitudes toward women were in early America, and how those attitudes negatively affected women in the Revolutionary period.
Strong Thesis: The Revolution had a negative impact on women because of the belief that women lacked the rational faculties of men. In a nation that was to be guided by reasonable republican citizens, women were imagined to have no place in politics and were thus firmly relegated to the home.
This thesis addresses too large of a topic for an undergraduate paper. The terms “social,” “political,” and “economic” are too broad and vague for the writer to analyze them thoroughly in a limited number of pages. The thesis might focus on one of those concepts, or it might narrow the emphasis to some specific features of social, political, and economic change.
Strong Thesis: The Revolution paved the way for important political changes for women. As “Republican Mothers,” women contributed to the polity by raising future citizens and nurturing virtuous husbands. Consequently, women played a far more important role in the new nation’s politics than they had under British rule.
This thesis is off to a strong start, but it needs to go one step further by telling the reader why changes in these three areas mattered. How did the lives of women improve because of developments in education, law, and economics? What were women able to do with these advantages? Obviously the rest of the paper will answer these questions, but the thesis statement needs to give some indication of why these particular changes mattered.
Strong Thesis: The Revolution had a positive impact on women because it ushered in improvements in female education, legal standing, and economic opportunity. Progress in these three areas gave women the tools they needed to carve out lives beyond the home, laying the foundation for the cohesive feminist movement that would emerge in the mid-nineteenth century.
When revising your thesis, check it against the following guidelines:
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Feminist Ethics aims “to understand, criticize, and correct” how gender operates within our moral beliefs and practices (Lindemann 2005, 11) and our methodological approaches to ethical theory. More specifically, feminist ethicists aim to understand, criticize, and correct: (1) the binary view of gender, (2) the privilege historically available to men, and/or (3) the ways that views about gender maintain oppressive social orders or practices that harm others, especially girls and women who historically have been subordinated, along gendered dimensions including sexuality and gender-identity. Since oppression often involves ignoring the perspectives of the marginalized, different approaches to feminist ethics have in common a commitment to better understand the experiences of persons oppressed in gendered ways. That commitment results in a tendency, in feminist ethics, to take into account empirical information and material actualities.
Not all feminist ethicists correct all of (1) through (3). Some have assumed or upheld the gender binary (Wollstonecraft 1792; Firestone 1970). They criticize and aim to correct the privileging of men as the more morally worthy half of the binary, or argue against the maintenance of a social order that oppresses others in gendered ways. More recently, feminist ethicists have commonly criticized the gender binary itself, arguing that upholding a fixed conception of the world as constituted only by “biological” men and women contributes to the maintenance of oppressive and gendered social orders, especially when doing so marginalizes those who do not conform to gender binaries (Butler 1990; Bettcher 2014; Dea 2016a). Feminist ethicists who are attentive to the intersections of multiple aspects of identity including race, class, and disability, in addition to gender, criticize and correct assumptions that men simpliciter are historically privileged, as if privilege distributes equally among all men regardless of how they are socially situated. They instead focus more on criticizing and correcting oppressive practices that harm and marginalize others who live at these intersections in order to account for the distinctive experiences of women whose experiences are not those of members of culturally dominant groups (Crenshaw 1991; Khader 2013). Whatever the focus of feminist ethicists, a widely shared characteristic of their works is at least some overt attention to power, privilege, or limited access to social goods. In a broad sense, then, feminist ethics is fundamentally political (Tong 1993, 160). This is not necessarily a feature of feminist ethics that distinguishes it from “mainstream” ethics, however, since feminist analyses of ethical theory as arising from material and nonideal contexts suggest that all ethics is political whether its being so is recognized by the theorist or not.
Since feminist ethics is not merely a branch of ethics, but is instead “a way of doing ethics” (Lindemann 2005, 4), philosophers engaged in the above tasks can be concerned with any branch of ethics, including meta-ethics, normative theory, and practical or applied ethics. The point of feminist ethics is, ideally, to change ethics for the better by improving ethical theorizing and offering better approaches to issues including those involving gender. Feminist ethics is not limited to gendered issues because the insights of feminist ethics are often applicable to analyses of moral experiences that share features with gendered issues or that reflect the intersection of gender with other bases of oppression. Feminist philosophical endeavors include bringing investigations motivated by feminist ethics to bear on ethical issues, broadly conceived.
1.2 nineteenth-century influences and issues, 1.3 twentieth-century influences and issues, 2.1 gender binarism, essentialism, and separatism, 2.2 ethic of care as a feminine or gendered approach to morality, 2.3 intersectionality, 2.4 feminist criticisms and expansions of traditional moral theories, 2.5 rejections of absolutism: pragmatism, transnational feminism, and nonideal theory, other internet resources, related entries, 1. feminist ethics: historical background.
Feminist ethics as an academic area of study in the field of philosophy dates to the 1970s, when philosophical journals started more frequently publishing articles specifically concerned with feminism and sexism (Korsmeyer 1973; Rosenthal 1973; Jaggar 1974), and after curricular programs of Women’s Studies began to be established in some universities (Young 1977; Tuana 2011). Readers interested in themes evident in the fifty years of feminist ethics in philosophy will find this discussion in section (2) below, “Themes in Feminist Ethics.”
Prior to 1970, “there was no recognized body of feminist philosophy” (Card 2008, 90). Of course, throughout history, philosophers have attempted to understand the roles that gender may play in moral life. Yet such philosophers presumably were addressing male readers, and their accounts of women’s moral capacities did not usually aim to disrupt the subordination of women. Rarely in the history of philosophy will one find philosophical works that notice gender in order to criticize and correct men’s historical privileges or to disrupt the social orders and practices that subordinate groups on gendered dimensions. An understanding that sex matters to one’s ethical theorizing in some way is necessary to, but not sufficient for, feminist ethics.
Some philosophers and writers in almost every century, however, constitute forerunners to feminist ethics. Representative authors writing in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries discussed below explicitly address what they perceive to be moral wrongs resulting from either oppression on the basis of sex, or metaethical errors on the part of public intellectuals in believing ideal forms of moral reasoning to be within the capacities of men and not women. In the early-to-mid-twentieth century, at the same time that feminism became a more popularly used term in Europe and the Americas, more theorists argued influentially for ending unjust discrimination on the basis of sex. Some authors concertedly argued that philosophers and theorists erred in their understanding of what seemed to be gendered differences in ethical and moral reasoning.
In the seventeenth century, some public intellectuals published treatises arguing that women were as rational as men and should be afforded the education that would allow them to develop their moral character. They argued that since females are rational, their unequal access to learning was immoral and unjustifiable. They explored meta-ethical questions about the preconditions for morality, including what sorts of agents can be moral and whether morality is equally possible for different sexes. For example, in 1694, Mary Astell’s first edition of A Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest was published, advocating for access to education. It was controversial enough that Astell issued a sequel three years later, A Serious Proposal, Part II , that challenged “those deep background philosophical and theological assumptions which deny women the capacity for improvement of the mind” (Springborg, “Introduction,” in Astell 2002, 21). At the time, some apparently attributed the first Serious Proposal not to Astell, but to Damaris Cudworth Masham, a one-time companion of John Locke, since such criticisms of the injustice of women’s lot and the background assumptions maintaining their subordinate situation were familiar to Masham (Springborg, “Introduction,” in Astell 2002, 17). Although Masham sharply disagreed with aspects of Astell’s work, she too would later come to be credited with “explicitly feminist claims,” including objections to “the inferior education accorded women” (Frankel 1989, 84), especially when such obstacles were due to “the ignorance of men” (Masham 1705, 169, quoted in Frankel 1989, 85). Masham also deplored “the double standard of morality imposed on women and men, especially … the claim that women's ‘virtue’ consists primarily in chastity” (Frankel 1989, 85).
A century later, Mary Wollstonecraft, in her Vindication of the Rights of Women ([1792] 1988), renewed attention to girls’ lack of access to education. Criticizing the philosophical assumptions underpinning practices that denied girls adequate education, Wollstonecraft articulated an Enlightenment ideal of the social and moral rights of women as the equal of men. Wollstonecraft also broadened her critique of social structures to encompass ethical theory, especially in resistance to the arguments of influential men that women’s virtues are different from men’s and appropriate to perceived feminine duties. Wollstonecraft asserted: “I here throw down my gauntlet, and deny the existence of sexual virtues,” adding that “women, I allow, may have different duties to fulfil; but they are human duties, and the principles that should regulate the discharge of them … must be the same” (51). The revolutions of the Enlightenment age motivated some men as well as women to reconsider inequities in education at a time when notions of universal human rights were gaining prominence. As Joan Landes observes, Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet was an extraordinary advocate for the rights of women in France during the same period who argued in 1790 for “the admission of women to the rights of citizenship” and “woman's equal humanity on the grounds of reason and justice” (Landes 2016). Like many theorists of their time and places, including Catherine Macaulay (Tomaselli 2016), Olympe de Gouges, and Madame de Staël (Landes 2016), Wollstonecraft and Condorcet granted that there were material differences between the sexes, but advanced moral arguments against ethical double-standards on the basis of universal humanism. Yet the notion of universal humanism tended to prioritize virtues traditionally seen as masculine. Wollstonecraft, for example, argued against perceptions that women lacked men’s capacities for morality, but praised rationality and “masculinity” as preconditions for morality (Tong 1993, 44).
In Europe and North America, nineteenth-century moral arguments coalesced around material issues that would later be appreciated by feminist ethicists as importantly intersecting. A remarkably diverse array of activist women and public intellectuals advanced recognizably feminist arguments for women’s moral leadership and greater freedoms as moral imperatives. The resistance of enslaved women and the political activism of their descendants, the anti-slavery organizations of women in Europe and North America, the attention to inequity in women’s access to income, property, sexual freedom, full citizenship, and enfranchisement, and the rise of Marxist and Socialist theories contributed to women’s participation in arguments for the reductions of militarism, unfettered capitalism, domestic violence and the related abuse of drugs and alcohol, among other concerns.
Offering the first occurrence of the term feminisme (Offen 1988), the nineteenth century is characterized by a plurality of approaches to protofeminist ethics, that is, ethical theorizing that anticipated and created the groundwork for modern feminist concepts. These include some theories consistent with the universal humanism of Wollstonecraft and Condorcet and others emphasizing the differences between the sexes in order to argue for the superiority of feminine morality. The most well-known of the former in philosophy are John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women ([1869] 1987), which he credits Harriet Taylor Mill with co-authoring, and Harriet Taylor Mill’s essay, “The Enfranchisement of Women” (H. T. Mill [1851] 1998). Like their Enlightenment forerunners, Mill and Taylor argue that women ought to have equal rights and equal access to political and social opportunities. As a utilitarian philosopher, Mill further emphasizes the benefits to society and to the human species of improving women’s lives and social situations. Mill expresses skepticism about claims that women are morally superior to men, as well as claims that women have “greater liability to moral bias,” emotionality, and poor judgment in ethical decision-making ([1869] 1987, 518 and 519). Mill and Taylor tend to overemphasize the roles of women who are wives. They grant some differences between men and women that are controversial today; Mill’s works especially emphasize the benefits to family and domestic life as reasons to support the liberation of women from subjugation. Despite these views, both argue for the benefits of women’s liberation to scholarly and political spheres. For example, they describe differences in achievement and behavior to be the result mainly of women’s social situations and education, making their view consistent with the arguments of both the Enlightenment scholars noted above, and some, but not all, of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors discussed below.
Attitudes about the reasons for the moral goodness of such achievements differed. Some early utopian and Socialist movements in Europe that influenced women’s rights activists in America and would later influence British thinkers, including John Stuart Mill, lauded feminine virtues and women’s importance, but did so in ways that would reinforce views of women as “superior” because of innate qualities of gentleness, love, spirituality, and sentimentality (Moses 1982). In contrast, other Socialist movements expressed radical views of the equality of men and women not by attributing distinctive or greater moral virtues to women, but by challenging systems of privilege due to sex, race, and class (Taylor 1993). Although Mill and Taylor would later argue that “sexual inequality is an impediment to the cultivation of moral virtue,” some American activists such as Catherine Beecher forwarded a “separate-but-equal” vision of men and women as psychologically and essentially different, a view “according to which female virtue is ultimately better than male virtue” (Tong 1993, 36 and 37). In the pivotal year of 1848, Frederick Douglass insisted that “all that distinguishes man as an intelligent and accountable being, is equally true of woman” (quoted in Davis 2011, 51). In the same year, the Declaration of Sentiments was signed at a women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, and socialist and anarchist revolutions took place in Europe. The revolutionaries included public thinkers who advocated communal property and sexual equality, and who criticized the involvement of state and church in marriage. Their arguments about practical and feminist ethics influenced Emma Goldman and other turn-of-the-century thinkers.
Philosophical thinkers of different backgrounds gained greater access to education and printing presses in the nineteenth century, resulting in a plurality of approaches to the project of understanding, criticizing, and correcting how gender operates within our moral beliefs and practices. For example, the attachment of some protofeminist thinkers to the domestic virtues shaped their ethical recommendations. Some white and middle-class activists argued for the end of slavery and, later, against the subordination of emancipated women of color precisely on the grounds that they wished to extend the privileges that white and middle-class women enjoyed in the domestic and private sphere, maintaining the social order while valorizing domestic feminine goodness. As Clare Midgley says, “Women’s role was discussed in terms of family life. Emancipation would mark the end of the sexual exploitation of women and of the disruption of family life, and the creation of a society in which the black woman was able to occupy her proper station as a Daughter, a Wife, and a Mother” (Midgley 1993, 351).
In contrast, some former slaves including Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and descendants of slaves including Mary Church Terrell, grounded their work for women’s rights and arguments for women’s moral and sociopolitical equality in rather different priorities, asserting more interest in equal protection of the laws, economic liberation, political representation, and in Wells-Barnett’s case, self-defense and the exertion of the right to bear arms, as necessary to the very survival and liberation of Black Americans (Giddings 2007). Cooper, who rightly criticized white feminists for racist (and female-supremacist) statements when they were offered as reasons to work for white women’s voting rights rather than Black men’s, advanced a view of virtues and truth as having masculine and feminine sides. A century before care ethics would become a strain of academic feminist ethics, Cooper urged that both masculine reason and feminine sympathy “are needed to be worked into the training of children, in order that our boys may supplement their virility by tenderness and sensibility, and our girls may round out their gentleness by strength and self-reliance” (Cooper [1892] 2000, 60). Her timeless concern for the U.S. was that a nation or a people “will degenerate into mere emotionalism on the one hand, or bullyism on the other, if dominated by either exclusively” (61). Hers is a normative argument for appreciating the contributions that both traditionally feminine and masculine values could offer to a well-balanced ethics.
Explicitly arguing that standpoints matter to knowledge claims and moral theorizing, Cooper insisted that historical knowledge necessary to a nation’s self-understanding depends on the representation of Black Americans’ voices, and especially the “open-eyed but hitherto voiceless Black Woman of America” (Cooper [1892] 2000, 2; Gines 2015). Manifesting Cooper’s call for representations, Wells-Barnett determinedly included accounts of girls and women killed by lynching along with the narratives of murdered men and boys, and challenged the “racial-sexual apologies for lynching to trample the twin myths of white (female) sexual purity and black (male) sexual savagery” (James 1997, 80). Wells-Barnett’s investigative journalism led her to the blunt suggestion that some of the sexual relationships giving rise to cover stories of rape as justifications for lynching were consensual relationships between white women and Black men, while rapes of Black women and girls, “which began in slavery days, still continues without reproof from church, state or press” (quoted in Sterling 1979, 81).
Like Wells-Barnett, anarchist and socialist writers, some from working-class backgrounds, advanced frank arguments for differently understanding women’s capacities and desires as sexual beings with their own moral agency. Leaders included Emma Goldman, whose anarchism was developed as a response to Marx and Marxism (Fiala 2018). Goldman argued for broader understandings of love, sexuality, and family, because she believed that traditional social codes of morality resulted in the corruption of women’s sexual self-understanding (112). Like Wells-Barnett, Goldman coupled arguments against feminine sexual purity with attention to the sexual exploitation of, and trafficking in, women who did not enjoy the state’s protection (Goldman 2012). Some suffragists’ “emphasis on female morality repulsed Goldman. Yet, while she ridiculed the claim that women were morally superior to men … she also emphasized that women should be allowed and encouraged to express freely their ‘true’ femininity” (Marso 2010, 76).
Although early twentieth-century protofeminists differed in their beliefs as to whether men and women were morally different in character, they generally shared a belief in Progressive ideals of moral and social improvement if only humankind brought fair and rational thinking to bear on ethical issues. Progressive-era pragmatists, including Wells-Barnett, Charlotte Perkins-Gilman, Jane Addams, and Alice Paul, “saw the social environment as malleable, capable of improvement through human action and philosophic thought” (Whipps and Lake 2016). The beginning of the century was characterized by remarkably optimistic thinking even on the part of more radical theorists who appreciated the deep harms of oppressive social organizations. Most of the Progressive activists and suffragists of this era never described themselves with the new term, “feminist,” but as the immediate forerunners of feminism, they are described as feminists today.
Although belief in the possibilities for change seems widely shared, Progressive-era feminists did not always share common ground regarding women’s moral natures or how to achieve moral progress as a nation. For example, both Goldman and pro-suffrage Charlotte Perkins-Gilman argued for individual self-transformation and self-understanding as keys to women’s better moral characters (Goldman 2012), while maintaining that a person’s efforts were best supported by a less individualistic and more communitarian social and political framework (Gilman 1966). While Goldman included greater access to birth control and reproductive choice among the morally urgent routes to women’s individual self-discovery, Gilman and many feminists argued for women’s access to contraception in ways that reflected increasingly popular policies of eugenics in North and South America and Europe (Gilman 1932). Eugenics-friendly white women’s contributions of feminist ethical arguments to disrupt oppressive pronatalism or to avert the measurable costs of parenthood in sexist societies often took the form of deepening other forms of marginalization, including those based on race, disability, and class (Lamp and Cleigh 2011).
In the U.S., the centrality of sex and gender issues in public ethics reached a high-water mark during the Progressive Era, moving one magazine to write in 1914 that “The time has come to define feminism; it is no longer possible to ignore it” (Cott 1987, 13). Unfortunately, this sentiment would decline with the start of World War I and the consequent demise of optimistic beliefs in the powers of human rationality to bring about moral progress. Yet throughout the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, as economic difficulties, military conflicts, and wealth disparity fluctuated internationally, women’s groups and feminist activists in many countries would advance, with some success, feminist and moral arguments for workplace, professional, electoral, and educational access, for the liberalization of contraception, marriage, and divorce laws, and against militarism. Some of their gains in greater access to voting, education, and prosperity may have contributed to the wide audience that was receptive to Simone de Beauvoir’s publications in Europe and, after translations were available, in North America.
Beauvoir first self-identified as a feminist in 1972 (Schwarzer 1984, 32), and consistently refused the label of a philosopher despite having taught courses in philosophy (Card 2003, 9). Yet beginning in the 1950s, both her Ethics of Ambiguity ([1947] 1976) and The Second Sex ([1949] 2010) were widely read and quickly appreciated as important to feminist ethics (Card 2003, 1). As works of existentialist morality, they emphasized that we are not all simply subjects and individual choosers but also objects shaped by the forces of oppression (Andrew 2003, 37). Like the protofeminists described above, Beauvoir focused on the embodied experiences and social situations of women. In these pivotal works, she advanced the case that embodiment and social situatedness are not only relevant to human existence, but are the stuff of human existence, so crucial that philosophy ought not ignore them (Andrew 2003, 34). In The Second Sex , she argued that some men in philosophy managed the bad-faith project of both ignoring their own sex-situatedness and yet describing women as the Other and men as the Self. Because men in philosophy take themselves to be paradigmatically human and take it upon themselves to characterize the nature of womankind as different from men, Beauvoir said that men socially construct woman as the Other. Famously, Beauvoir said, “one is not born, but rather becomes, woman,” that is, one may be born a human female, but “the figure that the human female takes on in society,” that of a “woman,” results from “the mediation of another [that] can constitute an individual as an Other” (Beauvoir [1949] 2010, 329). The embodied human female may be a subject of her own experiences and perceptions, but “being a woman would mean being an object, the Other” (83), that is, the objectified recipient of the speculations and perceptions of men. Beauvoir described a woman who would transcend this situation “as hesitating between the role of object, of Other that is proposed to her, and her claim for freedom” (84), that is, her freedom to assert her own subjectivity, to make her own choices as to who she is, especially when she is not defined in relation to men. A woman’s position is therefore so deeply ambiguous—one of navigating “a human condition as defined in its relation with the Other” (196)—that if one is to philosophize about women, “it is indispensable to understand the economic and social structure” in which women aim to be authentic or ethical, necessitating “an existential point of view, taking into account her total situation” (84). In other words, philosophers speculating about women ought to take into account the obstacles to women’s opportunities for subjecthood and choice that are created by those who constructed an oppressive situation for women to navigate.
Beauvoir’s positions—that woman has been defined by men and in men’s terms, that ethical theory must attend to women’s social situation and their capacity to be moral decision-makers, and that women’s oppression impedes their knowing themselves and changing their situation—reflect the concerns of many forerunners of feminist ethics. Beauvoir’s work profoundly shaped the emergence of feminist ethics as a subfield of philosophy at a time when philosophers more generally had moved away from the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tendencies to describe women as lacking morally worthy rational capacities. Instead, by the middle of the twentieth century, some influential philosophers in Europe and the Americas had moved toward approaches that often led to describing both gender and ethics as irrelevant to philosophical discourse (Garry 2017).
In the fifty years that feminist ethics has been a subject of philosophical scholarship in (initially) Western and (increasingly) international discourse, theorists have considered metaethical, theoretical, and practical questions. Questions that occupied scholars in preceding centuries, especially those regarding moral agents’ natural (and gendered) capacities for moral deliberation, are critically reconsidered in debates that arose in the 1970s and 1980s. One main area of inquiry addresses whether and why there may be meaningful differences in feminine and masculine priorities of care and justice in normative theory. Concern about feminist methods of articulating ethical theories arise during this time and continue. These debates can be found in the scholarship of intersectionality, Black feminist thought and women of color feminism, transnational feminism, queer theory, disability studies, and twenty-first century criticisms of feminist ethics. They are of special concern whenever feminist ethicists seem to uphold a gender binary and simplistic conceptualizations of woman as a category. Questions about the shortcomings of traditional ethical theories, about which virtues constitute morally good character in contexts of oppression, and about which kinds of ethical theories will ameliorate gendered oppressions and evils generate critical scholarship in every decade.
Gender binarism, which is the view that there are only two genders—male and female—and that everyone is only one of them (Dea 2016a, 108), is assumed by most feminist ethicists in the 1970s and 1980s (Jaggar 1974; Daly 1979). Some of these feminists criticize male supremacy without thereby preferring female supremacy (Frye 1983; Card 1986; Hoagland 1988). They argue that although the categories of “men” and “women” are physiologically distinct, the potential of feminism to liberate both men and women from oppressive gendered social arrangements suggests that men and women do not have different moralities or separate realities, and that we do not need to articulate separate capacities for ethics (Jaggar 1974; Davion 1998).
Other feminist ethicists offer radically different views. Mary Daly, for example, argues in Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism that women were traditionally defined throughout intellectual history as being subversive of rationality, impartiality, and morality as traditionally conceived. Daly argues that women ought to embrace, as essential to women’s natures and good, some of the very qualities that she says men have ascribed to women as essential to women’s natures and bad. Daly suggests valuing both women’s capacities for childbearing and birth (as opposed to capacities to engage in war and killing) and women’s emotionality (versus rationality) (Daly 1979).
Radical feminists and lesbian feminists who disagree with Daly as to whether women’s moral natures are innately better than men’s agree with Daly in arguing either for essentialism (Griffin 1978; cf. Spelman 1988 and Witt 1995) or for women’s separation from men (Card 1988; Hoagland 1988). Some of them argue that separatism allows a setting in which to create alternative ethics, rather than merely responding to the male-dominated ethical theories traditionally discussed in the academy. They also argue that separatism better fosters women’s increased connection to each other and denies men the access to women that men might expect (Daly 1979; Frye 1983; Hoagland 1988).
In deep disagreement, philosophers such as Alison Jaggar argue against separatism as being in any way productive of a different and morally better world. Jaggar maintains that “what we must do instead is to create a new androgynous culture which incorporates the best elements of both …, which values both personal relationships and efficiency, both emotion and rationality. This result cannot be achieved through sexual separation” (Jaggar 1974, 288). Related arguments for androgynous approaches to ethics are influential in arguments supporting androgyny, gender bending, and gender-blending that are prevalent in the 1990s (Butler 1990; Butler 1993), and gender-eliminativist and humanist approaches to feminist ethics and social philosophy that are prevalent in the twenty-first century (LaBrada 2016; Mikkola 2016; Ayala and Vasilyeva 2015; Haslanger 2012).
One criticism of gender binarism is that its assumption marginalizes nonconforming individuals. In efforts described as promoting coalition between trans activists and non-trans feminists, some feminists argue that we ought to examine the gender privilege inherent in presuming a binary that reflects one’s own experience better than the experiences of others (Dea 2016a; Bettcher 2014). Yet such “beyond-the-binary” approaches, in turn, have been cautioned against as well-intentioned but, at times, invalidating trans identities, “by invalidating the self-identities of trans people who do not regard their genitals as wrong” or “by representing all trans people as problematically positioned with regard to the binary” (Bettcher 2013). Recognition of “reality enforcement” and its interconnection with racist and sexist oppression may better defray the harms of normalizing a gender binary (Bettcher 2013).
Jaggar argues against separatism or separate gendered realities, noting that there is no reason “to believe in a sexual polarity which transcends the physiological distinction” (Jaggar 1974, 283). The work of psychologist Carol Gilligan therefore has great influence on philosophers interested in just such evidence for substantial sex differences in moral reasoning, despite the fact that Gilligan herself does not describe these differences as polar. In her landmark work, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (1982), Gilligan disputes accounts of moral development that do not take into account girls’ moral experiences (18–19), or that describe women as stuck at an interpersonal stage short of full moral development as in the theories of Lawrence Kohlberg (30). Gilligan argues that Kohlberg wrongly prioritizes a “morality of rights” and independence from others as better than, rather than merely different from, a “morality of responsibility” and intimate relationships with others (19).
Gilligan’s research follows Nancy Chodorow’s in suggesting that for boys and men, “separation and individuation are critically tied to gender identity” (Gilligan 1982, 8). Further, the development of masculinity typically involves valuing autonomy, rights, disconnection from others, and independence, while seeing other persons and intimate relationships as dangers or obstacles to pursuing those values. This perspective is referred to as the “perspective of justice” (Held 1995; Blum 1988). Women, in Gilligan’s studies, were as likely to express the perspective of justice as they were to express a perspective that valued intimacy, responsibility, relationships, and caring for others, while seeing autonomy as “the illusory and dangerous quest” (Gilligan 1982, 48), in tension with the values of attachment. This perspective is known as the perspective of “care” (Friedman 1991; Driver 2005).
Philosophers who apply Gilligan’s empirical results to ethical theory differ about the role that a care perspective should play in normative recommendations. Nel Noddings’s influential work, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (1984), argues for the moral preferability of a care perspective as both feminine and, as she later says explicitly, feminist (Noddings 2013, xxiv), orienting moral agents to focus on the needs of those one cares for in relational contexts rather than on abstract, universal principles. Like her historical predecessors discussed above, Noddings emphasizes the feminine “to direct attention to centuries of experience more typical of women than men” (xxiv), in part to correct the extent to which “the mother’s voice has been silent” (1). Noddings’s normative theory endorses the moral value of partiality that justifies prioritizing interpersonal relationships over more distant connections. Virginia Held’s (1993; 2006) and Joan Tronto’s (1993) different applications of the perspective of care endorse care as social and political rather than limited to interpersonal relationships, and suggest that an ethic of care provides a route to realizing better societies as well as better treatment of distant others. Both Held and Sara Ruddick (1989) urge societal shifts to prioritize children’s vulnerabilities and the perspectives of mothers as necessary correctives to moral and political neglect of policies that would ensure the well-being of vulnerable people in relationships requiring care. This concern is further elaborated in Eva Feder Kittay’s attention to caregivers as “secondarily” or “derivatively dependent” (1999). In normative theory and applied ethics, care-work and caring in workplace relationships have come to receive more attention in twenty-first century philosophy than previously, as appreciation for the ethical demands of relational support-provision and client-centered or helping professions come to be influenced by variations on the ethic of care (Kittay 1999; Feder and Kittay 2002; Tronto 2005; Lanoix 2010; Reiheld 2015).
Robin Dillon observes that, “Care ethics was for some time the dominant approach in feminist ethics and so feminist discussions of virtue” (2017b, 574). Although the ethic of care continues to be strongly associated with feminist ethics, Gilligan’s work in psychology and Noddings’s work in philosophy were immediately contested (Superson 2012). Some feminist ethicists have argued that the ethic of care valorizes the burdened history of femininity associated with caring (Card 1996). The complex history of femininity and caregiving practices were shaped in contexts of oppression that may permit “moral damage” to women’s agency (Tessman 2005). If that burdened feminine history includes attention to particular relationships at the expense of attention to wider social institutions and systematic political injustice, then the ethic of care runs the risk of lacking a feminist vision for changing systematic and institutional forms of oppression (Hoagland 1990; Bell 1993). Further worries about the ethic of care include whether unidirectional caring enables the exploitation of caregivers (Houston 1990; Card 1990; Davion 1993), and whether such caring excludes moral responsibilities to strangers and individuals we may affect without meeting interpersonally (Card 1990), thereby risking an insular ethic that ignores political and material realities (Hoagland 1990). Another concern is whether we risk generalizing some women’s prioritizing caring to all women, which disregards the complex pluralism of many women’s voices (Moody-Adams 1991). Finally, preoccupation with women’s kinder and gentler feelings may prevent or distract from attention to women’s capacities for harm and injustice, especially the injustices borne of racial and class privilege (Spelman 1991).
The above criticisms tend to proceed from a view that it is problematic that an ethic of care is predicated on seeing femininity as valuable. They suggest that critical feminist perspectives require us to doubt the value of femininity. However, it remains controversial whether femininity is necessarily defined in relationship to masculinity and is thereby an inauthentic or insufficiently critical perspective for feminist ethics, or whether femininity is a distinctive contribution of moral and valuing agents to a feminist project that rejects or corrects some of the errors and excesses of legacies of masculinity (Irigaray 1985; Harding 1987; Tong 1993; Bartky 1990).
One way that some philosophers offer to resolve the possible tension between conceptions of femininity and feminism is to bring intersectional approaches to the question as to whose femininity is being discussed. Concerns that femininity is antithetical to a critical feminist perspective seem to presuppose a conception of femininity as passive, gentle, obedient, emotional, and dependent, in contrast with a conception of masculinity as its opposite. In a philosophical tradition dominated by white and masculine philosophers, describing femininity as necessarily the opposite of one’s conception of masculinity in a gender binary makes limited sense. Scholars of intersectionality point out, however, that identities are not binary: “the masculinity and femininity in play here are not racially unmarked (if only for the reason that gender is never racially unmarked)” (James 2013, 752). The insights of philosophers of Black Feminism, intersectionality, queer theory, critical race theory, disability studies, and transfeminism, among others, contribute to a view that there is no universal definition of femininity or of the category of woman that neatly applies to all women. Some of these philosophers suggest that the distinctive moral and valuing experiences of women and individuals of all genders may be unjustly ignored or denied by a conception of women or femininity that turns out to be white, ableist, and cisgender (Crenshaw 1991; Collins 1990; Wendell 1996; hooks 1992; Tremain 2000; Serano 2007; McKinnon 2014). Intersectional approaches reject binaries such as “masculinity/femininity” that tend to take the social positions of privileged people as generic. Minimally, intersectionality is “the predominant way of conceptualizing the relation between systems of oppression which construct our multiple identities and our social locations in hierarchies of power and privilege,” offering a remedy to histories of exclusions in feminist theory (Carastathis 2014, 304).
Although intersectional insights can be found in the works of writers even from the distant past, the predominance of intersectionality in feminist ethics today is largely owed to Black feminists and critical race theorists, who were the first to argue for the significance of intersectionality (Crenshaw 1989; Collins 1990; Gines 2014; Bailey 2009). Kimberlé Crenshaw describes intersectionality in different senses: as an experience, an approach, and a problem (Crenshaw 1989; Crenshaw 1991). Crenshaw’s description of intersectionality as an experience includes the phenomena of oppressive practices and harms that occur at, and because of, intersections of aspects of identity. For example, when Black men, but not any women, were permitted to work on a General Motors factory floor, and white women, but not any Black persons, were permitted to work in the General Motors secretarial pool, then Black women were discriminated against as Black women. That is, they were not permitted to have any job at General Motors due to living at an intersection of categories of identity that are treated separately in the law (Crenshaw 1989). Crenshaw’s description of intersectionality as an approach includes centering the lives and testimony of those whose experiences with living at intersections of oppressions have been ignored or denied in traditional philosophical and political theories (Crenshaw 1989; Crenshaw 1991; hooks 1984; Dotson 2014; Lorde 1990; Lugones 1987; Lugones 2014). Crenshaw’s description of intersectionality as a problem includes disrupting the traditional overlooking of Black women’s experiences, and offering the experiences and the approaches described above as challenges to the doctrine that discrimination occurs only along one axis of identity (Crenshaw 1989, 141). Intersectionality is pursued in the interests of expanding understandings of differences and accounting for the experiences of people previously spoken for, if addressed at all, rather than consulted.
Not all philosophers who embrace appreciation of the insights of intersectionality agree on whether it yields a distinct methodology, or a starting point for better inquiry, or a better conception of experiences of oppression (Khader 2013; Garry 2011). Serene Khader suggests that intersectional theories “are united by a critique of what Crenshaw (1991) calls ‘additive’ models of identity” that assume that individuals at intersections of traditionally oppressed identity categories are “necessarily worse off than the individual facing a single oppression,” as if each dimension on which one can be oppressed is easily separable in categories traditionally conceived in isolation (Khader 2013, 75). Instead, “intersectional theorists argue that the oppressions facing multiply oppressed women co-constitute one another and situate those women such that attempts to advance the interests of ‘all women’ may fail to advance theirs” (Khader 2013, 75).
Intersectionality is not without its critics in feminist ethics. For example, Naomi Zack (2005) argues that an intersectional approach to concepts such as that of woman successfully demonstrates problems with essentialism with respect to women’s natures, but degrades the category of woman, “multiplying axes of analysis and thus gender categories beyond necessity” (Bailey 2009, 21) to an extent that may thereby fragment attempts to advocate for women (Zack 2005; Ludvig 2006; Sengupta 2006). Some feminists who support intersectionality have responded to Zack’s concerns by arguing that everyday concepts such as woman include an array of identities, including distinct gender identities that bear a family resemblance and include a range of manifestations (Garry 2011). Other feminists have responded to Zack’s concerns for feminist movement or solidarity by arguing for the possibilities of working in coalitions that do not require widely shared commonality, working to learn from and about positions of difference, and cultivating more humility and less arrogance in theorizing (Lorde 1984; Lugones 1987; Reagon 2000; Bailey 2009; Carastathis 2014; Sheth 2014; Ruíz and Dotson 2017). Other feminist ethicists raise tensions in intersectional theory that are not intended to undermine the approach but to ask for elaboration of its details, including its very definition (Nash 2008). The appeal for these clarifications, however, may reflect traditions that intersectionality is dedicated to disrupting, since it is made in the context of the pursuit of justification, habits of opposition, and a narrow sense of definitional work that is typical in philosophy, a field that has a reputation for lacking appreciation for diverse practitioners (Dotson 2013).
If there is a commonality between all of the above feminist ethicists, it is their interest in provoking reconsideration of ethical theories that failed either to notice or to care when the perspective of the philosopher so criticized was taken for either a generic truth about moral theory or a gender-specific and false description of human nature. Elena Flores Ruíz observes that “professional philosophy sleepwalks ; its somnambulatory practices stroll silently, policing checkpoints without the burden of consciousness of its actions and practices” (2014, 199). In other words, philosophers have at times presumed that they speak for many without sufficient attention to their own presumptions. Ruíz’s claim is akin to Rosemarie Tong’s observation made decades earlier, that traditional ethical theory demonstrates “a sleepy inattentiveness to women’s concerns” (1993, 160). The provocation to alertness is evident in feminist critiques of traditional ethical theories such as deontology, consequentialism, social contract theory, and virtue ethics. Some feminist ethicists sympathetically extend canonical work to concerns that male theorists did not address, while other feminist ethicists resoundingly reject traditional ethical theories because the theories rely on a conception of moral agency or moral value with which they disagree.
Some feminist ethicists endorse deontological moral theories on the grounds that granting women—who have been subordinated in private and public spheres—the same rights routinely granted to men in positions of power would enable women’s freedom and flourishing, especially in contexts of political liberalism. Feminist ethicists have long argued that we should acknowledge women’s equal capacities for moral agency and extend human rights to them (Astell 1694; Wollstonecraft 1792; Stanton [1848] 1997; Mill [1869] 1987; Nussbaum 1999; Baehr 2004; Stone-Mediatore 2004; Hay 2013). While building on existing frameworks of liberalism, rights theory, and deontology, feminist ethicists have argued for granting rights where they have been previously neglected (Brennan 2010). They have argued for rights in the issues of enfranchisement (Truth [1867] 1995), reproduction (Steinbock 1994), abortion (Thomson 1971), bodily integrity (Varden 2012), women’s and non-heterosexual people’s sexuality (Goldman 2012; Cuomo 2007), sexual harassment (Superson 1993), pornography (Easton 1995), violence against women (Dauer and Gomez 2006), rape (MacKinnon 2006), and more. While recognizing limits to the universality of women’s experiences, feminist philosophers have argued for global human rights as a remedy for gendered oppression and dehumanization (Cudd 2005; Meyers 2016).
Feminist criticism of duty-centered frameworks, or, deontology, include those articulated by authors of the ethic of care, who argue against an ethic of duty, especially Kantian ethics, on several grounds. First, they claim that it proceeds from absolutist and universal principles which are unduly prioritized over consideration of the material contexts informing embodied experiences, particularities, and relationships. Second, they claim that it inaccurately separates capacities for rationality from capacities for emotion, and that it wrongly describes the latter as morally uninformative or worthless most likely because of their traditional association with women or femininity (Noddings 1984; Held 1993; Slote 2007). Moreover, an ethic of duty is likely to overly idealize moral agents’ capacities for rationality and choice (Tronto 1995; Tessman 2015). Some feminist ethicists embrace forms of obligation yet reject Kantian deontology when it denies the possibility of moral dilemmas (Tessman 2015). Feminists who argue that duties are socially constructed, rather than a priori, ground the nature of obligations in the normative practices of the nonideal world (Walker 1998; Walker 2003).
Transnational feminists, scholars of intersectionality, and postcolonial feminists argue that feminist advocates of global human rights routinely impose their own cultural expectations and regional practices upon the women who are purportedly the objects of their concern (Mohanty 1997; Narayan 1997; Narayan 2002; Silvey 2009; Narayan 2013; Khader 2018a; Khader 2018b). Critical analyses of some feminist deontologists’ concerns include arguments that universal morals, rights, and duties are not the best bulwark against relativist condonation of any and all possible treatments of women and subordinated people (Khader 2018b) and suggest that advocacy of human rights is perhaps well-intentioned but “entangled with imperialist precommitments in the contemporary West” (Khader 2018a, 19).
Since John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill argued both for utilitarianism and against the subjection of women, one could say that there have been feminists as long as there have been utilitarians. In The Subjection of Women ([1869] 1987), Mill argues that the desirable outcome of human moral progress generally is hindered by women’s legal and social subordination. He adds that not only each woman’s, but each man’s personal moral character is directly harmed by the injustice of unequal social arrangements (Okin 2005). Mill expresses special concern that “the object of being attractive to men had … become the polar star of feminine education and formation of character,” an immoral “influence over the minds of women” (Mill [1869] 1987, 28–29), as well as an immoral influence on the understandings of the boys and girls that such women raise. Consistent with the utilitarian principle that everyone counts equally and no single person’s preferences count more than another’s, Mill argues that men and women are fundamentally equal in their capacities for higher and lower pleasures and, arguably, in their responsibilities and interests (Mendus 1994). Harriet Taylor likewise argues in The Enfranchisement of Women for the moral improvement of humankind generally and “the elevation of character [and] intellect” that would permit each woman and man to be both morally better and happier, which are overlapping and important considerations to Taylor (1998, 65).
Contemporary feminist ethicists who address utilitarianism either critique Mill’s work in particular (Annas 1977; Mendus 1994; Morales 2005), or defend a feminist version of consequentialism (Driver 2005; Gardner 2012), or apply consequentialist aims to feminist issues (Tulloch 2005; Dea 2016b). Some consequentialist feminists provide reasons for thinking that utilitarianism can accommodate feminist aims because it is responsive to empirical information, can accommodate the value of relationships in good lives, and is appreciative of distinctive vulnerabilities (Driver 2005).
Critics of utilitarianism include those who specifically resist the expectation of utilitarian impartiality, insofar as impartiality in decision-making ignores emotional connections or personal relationships with particular beings. Feminists have advanced criticisms of impartiality from the points of view of care ethics (Noddings 1984; Held 2006; Ruddick 1989), ecofeminist or environmental ethics (Adams 1990; Donovan 1990; George 1994; Warren 2000), and analytical social ethics (Baier 1994; Friedman 1994). Impartiality may yield implausible requirements to value the well-being of all equally regardless of one’s commitments, material circumstances in a nonideal world, or obligations of caring (Walker 1998; Walker 2003). Impartiality as a desirable quality of moral agents may overly idealize moral agency (Tessman 2015) or tacitly presume a biased perspective in favor of adult, racially privileged, masculine agents in a formal or public sphere whose decisions are unencumbered by relationships of unequal power (Kittay 1999).
Some feminists criticize consequentialism for failing to capture the qualitatively problematic nature of oppressions that are not reducible to harms (Frye 1983; Card 1996; Young 2009). For example, Card argues that even if certain behavior does not produce more harm than good, its symbolism could violate one’s dignity. Her example is the case of women being barred from Harvard’s Lamont Law library even when helpful male classmates provided them photocopies of course readings (2002, 104–105). Card also objects on Rawlsian grounds that the wrongness of slavery was not the balance of benefits and harms, contra consequentialism, but the fact that trade-offs could never justify slavery (2002, 57).
Anti-imperialist and non-Western feminists argue that Mill’s views in particular purport to be universal but include “Western European biases and instrumental reasoning” that establish “problematic rhetorical models for women’s rights arguments” (Botting and Kronewitter 2012). For example, Eileen Botting and Sean Kronewitter argue that The Subjection of Women contains several examples of primitivist and Orientalist rhetorical moves, such as associating “the barbarism of patriarchal marriage with Eastern cultures and religions” (2012, 471). They also object that Mill offers instrumental arguments for women’s rights, such as favoring the reduction of men’s selfishness and the increase in men’s intellectual stimulation in marriage, as well as doubling mental resources for the higher service of humanity (2012, 470), suggesting that women’s liberation is secondary to greater purposes.
Some feminist ethicists argue for forms of contractarian ethics, that is, the view “that moral norms derive their normative force from the idea of contract or mutual agreement” (Cudd and Eftekhari 2018). Contractarian ethics permit moral agents to critically assess the value of any relationship, especially family relationships that may be oppressive on gendered dimensions (Okin 1989; Hampton 1993; Sample 2002; Radzik 2005). Other feminist contractarians appreciate Hobbes’s social contract theory for its applicability to women in positions of vulnerability. For example, Jean Hampton endorses Hobbes’s view that “you are under no obligation to make yourself prey to others” (Hampton 1998, 236). Hampton combines insights of both Kant and Hobbes in her version of feminist contractarianism, “building in the Kantian assumption that all persons have intrinsic value and thus must have their interests respected” (Superson 2012; see also Richardson 2007). Contractarianism arguably corrects gross injustices and inequities traceable to gendered oppressions and the most serious evils that are socially constructed (Anderson 1999; Hartley and Watson 2010).
Some feminists argue for the usefulness of contractarian ethics to evaluate one’s adaptive preferences, that is, “preferences formed in unconscious response to oppression” (Walsh 2015, 829). For example, Mary Barbara Walsh argues that social contract theory models “the conditions of autonomous choice, independence and dialogical reflection,” and therefore “exposes preferences that fail to meet” the conditions of autonomy. Feminist contractarianism may thereby generate new understandings of social contracts grounded in appreciation of material conditions, commitments, and consent (Stark 2007; Welch 2012). Feminist contractarians whose moral theories are influenced by John Rawls’s political philosophy suggest that his methodology, which involves reasoning from behind a veil of ignorance to decide which rules persons are rational to agree to, promotes critical appraisal of preferences that one would not hold in a better world (Richardson 2007, 414).
Feminist critics of contractarianism also raise concerns about adaptive preferences. In the actual, nonideal conditions in which individuals and groups develop, dominant perspectives and oppressive social arrangements can make persons come to prefer things that they would not otherwise prefer, such that the resultant preferences, when satisfied, are not for the agent’s own good, and may even contribute to her group’s oppression (Superson 2012). Feminists who are concerned that not all moral agents can meaningfully consent to contracts point to examples of women who are denied access to the public sphere, the market, education, and information (Held 1987; Pateman 1988). Others point out that traditionally, social contract theory has not attended to the inclusion of the needs of children, disabled community members, or their caregivers (Held 1987; Kittay 1999; Edenberg and Friedman 2013). Feminist critics of contractarianism tend to argue both for full consideration of needs born of differences between bodies and social locations, and against describing gender, embodiment, or dependency as a mere secondary characteristic irrelevant to what a body in need of care requires to flourish and thus what a “reasonable man” would choose behind a veil of ignorance (Nussbaum 2006; Pateman and Mills 2007).
Some feminist ethicists contend that virtue ethics, which focuses on living a good life or flourishing, offers the best approach to ensuring that ethical theory correctly represents the conditions permitting vulnerable bodies to flourish in oppressive contexts. Although virtue ethics is most notably associated with Aristotle, whose idealized and masculine agent is not generally considered paradigmatically feminist (Berges 2015, 3–4), feminists and their forerunners have engaged critically for several centuries with questions about which virtues and qualities of character would promote a good life in the context of what we now describe as women’s subordination. Philosophers who argue for feminist ethical virtues raise concerns that sexist oppression presents challenges to the exercise of virtues on the part of women and gender non-conforming people. Robin Dillon observes that feminist virtue ethics “identifies problems for character in contexts of domination and subordination and proposes ways of addressing those problems, and it identifies problems of unreflective theory and proposes power-conscious alternatives” (2017a, 381). Because the history of traditional virtue ethics is freighted with past characterizations of virtues as either gendered or as universal but less accessible to women, Dillon proposes what she calls “feminist critical character ethics” as an alternative to feminist virtue ethics (2017a, 380). Advocates of feminist virtue ethics and critical character ethics consider the relationships of gender to accounts of character, virtues, vices, and good lives (Baier 1994; Card 1996; Cuomo 1998; Calhoun 1999; Dillon 2017a; Snow 2002; Tessman 2005; Green and Mews 2011; Berges 2015; Broad 2015; Harvey 2018).
Like the ethic of care, virtue ethics is often described as offering a theory that is not beholden to abstract and universal principles (Groenhout 2014), but instead acknowledges “that moral reasoning might be an extraordinarily complex phenomenon …, a view on which what the ethical life requires of us cannot be codified or reduced to a single principle or set of principles” (Moody-Adams 1991, 209–210). A further commonality between care and virtue that is of interest to feminists is that “virtue theory, like care ethics, rejects a simplistic dichotomy between reason and emotion, and does not begin from the assumption that all human beings are essentially equal” (Groenhout 2014, 487). Ethical theories of virtue or character tend to appreciate the importance of emotions and interpersonal relationships to a person’s moral development. Some virtue ethics also focus on what opportunities for virtue are available to agents in particular social contexts, which is useful in feminist ethics when it comes to delineating our responsibilities as relational beings and as characters who may exhibit vices resulting from oppression (Bartky 1990; Potter 2001; Bell 2009; Tessman 2009a; Slote 2011; Boryczka 2012).
Indeed, the ethic of care bears so many important similarities to virtue ethics that some authors have argued that a feminist ethic of care just is a form or a subset of virtue ethics (Groenhout 1998; Slote 1998; McLaren 2001; Halwani 2003). Others believe that at a minimum, care and virtue ethics should inform each other and are compatible with each other (Benner 1997; Sander-Staudt 2006). Here, too, however, feminist ethicists disagree. Some contend that lumping together care and virtue might render the complexity of moral experiences and available moral responses less understandable rather than more articulate (Groenhout 2014). Others suggest that this consolidation might overlook important theoretical distinctions, including the capacity for virtue ethics to be gender-neutral while the ethic of care maintains a commitment to embodied, particular, and gendered experiences (Sander-Staudt 2006).
Virtue ethics provides wider opportunities for feminist ethics to attend to virtues such as integrity and courage in oppressive contexts that the ethic of care tends not to prioritize (Davion 1993; Sander-Staudt 2006). Resistance itself may be a “burdened virtue,” which is Lisa Tessman’s term for virtues that allow moral agents, even ones damaged by oppression, to endure and resist oppression, permitting a form of nobility that falls short of eudaimonia (Tessman 2005). Tessman argues that when agents live under conditions of systemic injustice, their opportunities to flourish are blocked and their pursuits may even be hopeless. She suggests that “the burdened virtues include all those traits that make a contribution to human flourishing—if they succeed in doing so at all—only because they enable survival of or resistance to oppression …, while in other ways they detract from their bearer's well-being, in some cases so deeply that their bearer may be said to lead a wretched life” (Tessman 2005, 95). Feminist ethicists have explored virtues that permit the sort of “conditioned flourishing” that Tessman describes (2009, 14), extending discussion of the virtues to specific applications in nonideal circumstances in which vulnerability is fundamental to the nature of a moral agent (Nussbaum 1986; Card 1996; Walker 2003). For example, feminists have argued for distinctive virtues in contexts such as whistleblowing and organizational resistance (DesAutels 2009), healthcare (Tong 1998), and ecological activism (Cuomo 1998).
Feminist criticisms of the limits of virtue ethics point to its emphasis on the personal as potentially problematic when it comes to “accounting for the possibility of social criticism and resistance on the part of the self who is constituted by the very social relationships and cultural traditions that would be the target of her resistance” (Friedman 1993). Virtue ethics may also include intrusive requirements to self-evaluate one’s every feeling or practice to an extent that an ethic of duty, for example, would not require (Conly 2001). Some care ethicists, most notably Nel Noddings (1984), argue that virtue ethics can be overly self-regarding rather than attentive to the point of view of another, and that it locates moral motivation in rational, abstract, and idealized conceptions of the good life rather than in the natural well-spring of moral motivation that is generated by encounters with particular persons.
As is evident from the foregoing, feminist ethics is not monolithic. Feminists have sometimes clashed over being essentialist or anti-essentialist. Some feminist work is authored by members of privileged groups, while other feminist work is written by and attends to concerns of those in marginalized groups. Some feminists have located solidarity in commonality, while others advocate coalition in the presence of intersectionality. The different approaches of feminists to ethics raise questions as to whether feminist ethics can be either universalist or absolutist. Feminists have observed that just as some men in the history of philosophy have falsely universalized from their own experience to describe the experiences of all humans, some feminists have presumed false universal categories of women or feminists that elide differences between women or presume to speak for all women (Grimshaw 1996; Herr 2014; Tremain 2015). Relatedly, some feminist philosophers have criticized absolutism in ethical theory, that is, the prioritization of rigorous applications of principles to ethical situations regardless of the particularities of context or the motivations of the individuals affected, in part because absolutism, like universalism, takes the absolutists’ priorities to be rational for all (Noddings 1984; Baier 1994). Feminist ethicists who have endorsed visions of universal human rights as liberating for all women have been criticized by other feminists as engaging in absolutism in ways that may prescribe solutions for women in different locations and social situations rather than attending to the perspectives of the women described as needing such rights (Khader 2018b; Herr 2014).
The predominant association of feminist ethics with an ethic of care, which is dichotomous with traditional ethical theories on many levels, together with decades of feminist critiques of the work of canonical absolutist theorists, might lead to a perception that feminist ethics is fundamentally opposed to universalism and absolutism in ethics. This perception, however, is not built into the nature of feminist ethics, which has been employed to understand, criticize, and correct the role of gender in our moral beliefs and practices by deontologists, utilitarians, contractarians, and virtue ethicists, who hold some universal principles or absolute requirements to be basic to their views. However, it is evident that the preponderance of scholarship in feminist ethics tends to prioritize all of the following: the moral contexts in which differently situated and differently gendered agents operate, the testimony and perspectives of the situated agent, the power relationships and political relationships manifest in moral encounters, the vulnerabilities of embodied actors that yield a plurality of approaches to ethical situations, and the degrees of agency or capacity that are shaped by experiences with oppression and misogyny. Such priorities tend not to result in relativism, though they certainly depart from rigid forms of absolutism. Feminist ethics is often expressed in morally plural ways, including pragmatism (Hamington and Bardwell-Jones 2012), transnationalism (Jaggar 2013; Herr 2014; McLaren 2017; Khader 2018b), nonideal theory (Mills 2005; Schwartzman 2006; Tessman 2009b; Norlock 2016), and disability theory (Wendell 1996; Garland-Thomson 2011; Tremain 2015).
The following sub-entries included under “feminism (topics)” in the Table of Contents to this Encyclopedia are relevant to the multiplicity of applications of feminist ethics:
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This entry exists thanks to the steady work of Research Assistant Collin Chepeka and the funds of the Kenneth Mark Drain Chair in Ethics at Trent University. Thanks to Noëlle McAfee for helpful comments on a first draft, and thanks to Anita Superson for extensive comments on every section of this entry.
Copyright © 2019 by Kathryn Norlock < kathrynnorlock @ trentu . ca >
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A thesis statement is needed in an essay or dissertation . There are multiple types of thesis statements – but generally we can divide them into expository and argumentative. An expository statement is a statement of fact (common in expository essays and process essays) while an argumentative statement is a statement of opinion (common in argumentative essays and dissertations). Below are examples of each.
“Mandatory school uniforms should be implemented in educational institutions as they promote a sense of equality, reduce distractions, and foster a focused and professional learning environment.”
Best For: Argumentative Essay or Debate
Read More: School Uniforms Pros and Cons
“This essay will explore how both genetic inheritance and environmental factors equally contribute to shaping human behavior and personality.”
Best For: Compare and Contrast Essay
Read More: Nature vs Nurture Debate
“The American Dream, a symbol of opportunity and success, is increasingly elusive in today’s socio-economic landscape, revealing deeper inequalities in society.”
Best For: Persuasive Essay
Read More: What is the American Dream?
“Social media has revolutionized communication and societal interactions, but it also presents significant challenges related to privacy, mental health, and misinformation.”
Best For: Expository Essay
Read More: The Pros and Cons of Social Media
“Globalization has created a world more interconnected than ever before, yet it also amplifies economic disparities and cultural homogenization.”
Read More: Globalization Pros and Cons
“Urbanization drives economic growth and social development, but it also poses unique challenges in sustainability and quality of life.”
Read More: Learn about Urbanization
“Immigration enriches receiving countries culturally and economically, outweighing any perceived social or economic burdens.”
Read More: Immigration Pros and Cons
“In a globalized world, maintaining distinct cultural identities is crucial for preserving cultural diversity and fostering global understanding, despite the challenges of assimilation and homogenization.”
Best For: Argumentative Essay
Read More: Learn about Cultural Identity
“Medical technologies in care institutions in Toronto has increased subjcetive outcomes for patients with chronic pain.”
Best For: Research Paper
“The debate between capitalism and socialism centers on balancing economic freedom and inequality, each presenting distinct approaches to resource distribution and social welfare.”
“The preservation of cultural heritage is essential, not only for cultural identity but also for educating future generations, outweighing the arguments for modernization and commercialization.”
“Pseudoscience, characterized by a lack of empirical support, continues to influence public perception and decision-making, often at the expense of scientific credibility.”
Read More: Examples of Pseudoscience
“The concept of free will is largely an illusion, with human behavior and decisions predominantly determined by biological and environmental factors.”
Read More: Do we have Free Will?
“Traditional gender roles are outdated and harmful, restricting individual freedoms and perpetuating gender inequalities in modern society.”
Read More: What are Traditional Gender Roles?
“The trend to online and distance work in the 2020s led to improved subjective feelings of work-life balance but simultaneously increased self-reported loneliness.”
Read More: Work-Life Balance Examples
“Universal healthcare is a fundamental human right and the most effective system for ensuring health equity and societal well-being, outweighing concerns about government involvement and costs.”
Read More: The Pros and Cons of Universal Healthcare
“The implementation of a fair minimum wage is vital for reducing economic inequality, yet it is often contentious due to its potential impact on businesses and employment rates.”
Read More: The Pros and Cons of Raising the Minimum Wage
“The homework provided throughout this semester has enabled me to achieve greater self-reflection, identify gaps in my knowledge, and reinforce those gaps through spaced repetition.”
Best For: Reflective Essay
Read More: Reasons Homework Should be Banned
“Charter schools offer alternatives to traditional public education, promising innovation and choice but also raising questions about accountability and educational equity.”
Read More: The Pros and Cons of Charter Schools
“The Internet has drastically reshaped human communication, access to information, and societal dynamics, generally with a net positive effect on society.”
Read More: The Pros and Cons of the Internet
“Affirmative action is essential for rectifying historical injustices and achieving true meritocracy in education and employment, contrary to claims of reverse discrimination.”
Best For: Essay
Read More: Affirmative Action Pros and Cons
“Soft skills, such as communication and empathy, are increasingly recognized as essential for success in the modern workforce, and therefore should be a strong focus at school and university level.”
Read More: Soft Skills Examples
“Moral panic, often fueled by media and cultural anxieties, can lead to exaggerated societal responses that sometimes overlook rational analysis and evidence.”
Read More: Moral Panic Examples
“Freedom of the press is critical for democracy and informed citizenship, yet it faces challenges from censorship, media bias, and the proliferation of misinformation.”
Read More: Freedom of the Press Examples
“Mass media shapes public opinion and cultural norms, but its concentration of ownership and commercial interests raise concerns about bias and the quality of information.”
Best For: Critical Analysis
Read More: Mass Media Examples
✅ Position: If your statement is for an argumentative or persuasive essay, or a dissertation, ensure it takes a clear stance on the topic. ✅ Specificity: It addresses a specific aspect of the topic, providing focus for the essay. ✅ Conciseness: Typically, a thesis statement is one to two sentences long. It should be concise, clear, and easily identifiable. ✅ Direction: The thesis statement guides the direction of the essay, providing a roadmap for the argument, narrative, or explanation. ✅ Evidence-based: While the thesis statement itself doesn’t include evidence, it sets up an argument that can be supported with evidence in the body of the essay. ✅ Placement: Generally, the thesis statement is placed at the end of the introduction of an essay.
One way to brainstorm thesis statements is to get AI to brainstorm some for you! Try this AI prompt:
💡 AI PROMPT FOR EXPOSITORY THESIS STATEMENT I am writing an essay on [TOPIC] and these are the instructions my teacher gave me: [INSTUCTIONS]. I want you to create an expository thesis statement that doesn’t argue a position, but demonstrates depth of knowledge about the topic.
💡 AI PROMPT FOR ARGUMENTATIVE THESIS STATEMENT I am writing an essay on [TOPIC] and these are the instructions my teacher gave me: [INSTRUCTIONS]. I want you to create an argumentative thesis statement that clearly takes a position on this issue.
💡 AI PROMPT FOR COMPARE AND CONTRAST THESIS STATEMENT I am writing a compare and contrast essay that compares [Concept 1] and [Concept2]. Give me 5 potential single-sentence thesis statements that remain objective.
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Expert Answers. Feminism has gotten to be a very broad subject in recent years. It used to be that "feminism" was understood to focus on women's right to vote and to own their own property. But ...
thesis, and you will reach the more important but elusive objective beyond it. The process of writing a thesis can be a glorious adventure. I hope that you will experience the exhilaration of ... students have relied on classic feminist theory in their projects; many have conducted literary or visual close readings; others have used statistical ...
However, in her writing, Brooks was able to redefine Marmee, consequently regenerating Little Women's feminist subtext. Indeed, by portraying Marmee as a strong liberal woman, sexually active - as she seduces Mr March - Marmee becomes an empowered feminine character. Yet, she will be oppressed through her marriage.
This Master's thesis is a case study of the gender equality and women's empowerment policies of L'Oréal analysed in the context of corporate social responsibility (CSR). It engages with business and feminist scholarly literature and critically analyzes select corporate documents of L'Oréal. 1
From the academy to the streets: Documenting the healing power of black feminist creative expression, Tunisia L. Riley. PDF. Developing Feminist Activist Pedagogy: A Case Study Approach in the Women's Studies Department at the University of South Florida, Stacy Tessier. PDF
Example of a feminist thesis statement: While William Blake's "London" and Mary Robinson's "January, 1795" share similar themes with similar levels of artistry, Robinson's work and critical reception demonstrates the effects of 18th-century patriarchal power structures that kept even the most brilliant women in their place.
intervention in broader debates on feminist and intersectional research practices. This thesis is mostly a theoretical thesis focussed on methodologies and methods.1 Chapter one deals with questions that concern how to conduct feminist research. The main concern here is: What is my role as a researcher within a research process?
Wonder Woman (2017) features several exhibitions of feminist resistance. to typically male-dominated film practices, like the utilization of the female gaze, displays of female agency, and juxtapositions of gender roles. The film uses a. female perspective to replace commonly used male gaze and by doing so, allows.
WE'VE ONLY JUST BEGUN: A BLACK FEMINIST ANALYSIS OF ELEANOR SMEAL'S NATIONAL PRESS CLUB ADDRESS Tara L. Tate, B.F.A. Thesis Prepared for the Degree of MASTER OF SCIENCE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS August 2000 APPROVED: Mark DeLoach, Major Professor John Gossett, Committee Member and Department Chair Michael Bruner, Committee Member
Master's Thesis in English 3 June 2019 Summary In this thesis, we analyse how women are portrayed in two novels penned over a century apart using mainly feminist theory and feminist literary criticism. By gathering a historical context regarding feminism and describing the ideas and theories by Hélène Cixous, Robin Lakoff, Simone
2013. Inside the Master's House: Gender, Sexuality, and the 'Impossible' History of Slavery in Jamaica, 1753-1786. 2013. Illuminating the Darkness Beneath the Lamp: Im Yong-sin's Disappearance from History and Rewriting the History of Women in Korea's Colonial Period (1910-1945) East Asian Languages and Civilizations.
Maija Laukka. LAUKKA, MAIJA: Women, War and Peace - A feminist content analysis. Throughout history war has commonly been associated with the actions of men and the victimhood of women. The objective of my thesis has been to identify alternative roles and experiences of civilian women's in the face of war and peace.
Brenton Wimmer, MEd PhD Graduate Student Educational Leadership & Policy Studies Jeannine Rainbolt College of Education University of Oklahoma. education and student affairs: Theory, research, narratives and practice from feminist perspectives. % ,-., Women of Color in Higher Education: Turbulent Past, Promising Future, 012.34.
Feminist and gender criticism are powerful literary methods that you can use to analyze literature. Be guided by the following process as you write your feminist or gender criticism paper. ... Revise the paper, which will include revising your original thesis statement and restructuring your paper to best support the thesis. Note: You probably ...
November 5, 2018. ENGL 100. Prof Whitley. The Great Gatsby through the lens of Feminism. Feminist criticism examines the ways in which literature has been written according to issues of gender. It focuses its attention on how cultural productions such as literature address the economic, social, political, and psychological oppression of women ...
Your thesis statement is one of the most important parts of your paper. It expresses your main argument succinctly and explains why your argument is historically significant. Think of your thesis as a promise you make to your reader about what your paper will argue. Then, spend the rest of your paper-each body paragraph-fulfilling that promise.
ploration of women's gendered experiencesPeace KiguwaIntroduction. eminist research approaches are diverse in their emphasis and method. However, all feminist-oriented research consists of core features that add. ess the ontology and epistemology of feminist theoretical frameworks. This includes the focus on and objective to critically engage ...
A Black Feminist Statement. The Combahee River Collective. We are a collective of black feminists who have been meeting together. since 1974.1 During that time we have been involved in the process of. defining and clarifying our politics, while at the same time doing political work within our own group and in coalition with other progressive ...
Feminist Ethics aims "to understand, criticize, and correct" how gender operates within our moral beliefs and practices (Lindemann 2005, 11) and our methodological approaches to ethical theory. More specifically, feminist ethicists aim to understand, criticize, and correct: (1) the binary view of gender, (2) the privilege historically available to men, and/or (3) the ways that views about ...
The thesis also reflects on feminist literary theory, especially current ideas on female writing, broadly defined as a search for female belonging. Recent criticism holds that the Victorian coquette operates either to show that eroticism was part of the Victorian woman's identity, or as a passive surface upon which certain aspects of the ...
I. Thesis Statement: The House on Mango Street is a novel that expresses many feminist ideals. II. Feminism. A. Definition of feminism. B. Feminism vs. machismo. III. Women denied equality and ...
Therefore, a good thesis statement for an essay that considers the interpretive question about why Kate Chopin's story is considered feminist literature will address the idea that Mrs. Mallard is ...
A thesis entitled "An Analysis of the Main Character through Feminism Approach in the Novel Lucia, Lucia by Adriana Trigiani" has been defended before the Letters and Humanities Faculty's Examination Committee on February, 9 2010 the thesis has already been accepted as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of strata 1.
Strong Thesis Statement Examples. 1. School Uniforms. "Mandatory school uniforms should be implemented in educational institutions as they promote a sense of equality, reduce distractions, and foster a focused and professional learning environment.". Best For: Argumentative Essay or Debate. Read More: School Uniforms Pros and Cons.