Feminism

While the OED defines feminism as “advocacy of equality of the sexes and the establishment of the political, social, and economic rights of the female sex; the movement associated with this,” here it is argued that a more encompassing definition of feminism, as a historical political tendency, is that it consists in opposition to masculinism. Masculinism is the doctrine that men legitimately govern women, while women do not legitimately exercise political authority over men. Aristotle is a classic source for the masculinist definition of the family as involving a natural relationship of ruler and subject; the subjects include women, children, and slaves. Masculinism comes into conflict with other accounts of political legitimacy such as aristocracy and meritocracy but is rationalized by masculinists by assertions that women are men’s moral and intellectual inferiors. Early feminists, intent on defending the right of queens and other aristocratic women to govern in limited circumstances, attacked these rationalizations of women’s exclusion from political power, claiming women’s moral equality with, and even superiority to, men. The rejection of theories of women’s inferiority undermined the legitimacy of the husband’s authority over his wife. Indeed, by the time of the French Revolution, women as men’s moral superiors led to Rousseau’s romantic, semi-egalitarian representation of marriage as combining men’s rule of his wife by reason with women’s virtuous rule of her husband’s passions. While seventeenth-century feminism concentrated on women’s subjection to men in the family, with the emergence of social contract as the accepted ground of political legitimacy, the focus of feminism changed, but continued to be opposition to masculinism, rejecting accounts of the social contract that imagined it to be a contract exclusively among men.