Many Feminisms

What is a Woman?

How do you constitute your identity?

 

Responses and Discussion

histories/herstories

Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) - ur-document of modern liberal feminism. Rational education, role of men, sensibility, desire. Codification of equality feminism. Enlightenment - Rousseau

Ladies of Langham Place (1850s): Focus on education, employment and marital law. Barbara Leigh Smith, Bessie Rayner Parkes and Anna Jameson. Queen's College and Bedford College began offering education to women from 1848.

Married Women's Property Act (1882)

Fight to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866, 1869

 

Early Origins: The First Wave

19th and Early 20th Century: Women's Suffrage

Custody of Infants Act 1839 - Women did not have rights over their children

Representation of the People Act (1918): Women who were 30 years old and had property. 1928 - women over 21, on an equal basis with men.

Inequality, Racism: Ain't I a Woman?

 

Videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=056FI2Pq9RY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NL5s9dk9U4w

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ry_i8w2rdQY

The First Wave

First World War: Women's entry into the labour market.

'Nationalisation of Women'

1929: Virginia Woolf 'A Room of One's Own'

Negative connotation of 'feminism' - women discouraged from self-identifying

Woolf:  "I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat."

Economic Recession: Women emerged as the most vulnerable part of workforce

Returning soldiers.

The First Wave

Attempt to bring equality in the public sphere.

Right to go out, to work, to vote

But critical inequalities remained in the private sphere

Need for more dialogue about the private sphere

Rise of the Second Wave

 

Rise of the Second Wave

Renewed domestication of women post WWII

1949: Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex - male centred ideology. Woman as Other.

1963: Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique - The problem that has no name. Images of perfect family. The woman in the American Dream.

Liberal feminism - Advocation for federal legislation, public sphere, professional lives and personal lives

Consciousness raising among middle class women in America

Viewing root cause of women's oppression in legal systems

Sex/Gender

Biological/Social

Countering biological determinism

Simone de Beauvoir - Becoming a woman. "Social discrimination produces in women moral and intellectual effects so profound that they appear to be caused by nature". (1972)

Cultural practices and social expectations constitute gender roles

 

Radical Feminism: Call for social re-ordering

Patriarchy (transhistorical) as oppressive and dominant - abolishment

Private sphere

Issues of objectification, violence against women

Need to challenge existing social norms

Reproductive rights

Changing organizational sexual culture

Emerging critiques of heteronormativity

Need for the Third Wave

Emphasis on diversity, individualism

Theories of intersectionality, ecofeminism, transfeminism etc.

Women experience layers of oppression - gender, race, class, geographies

Emphasis on personal narratives

Post-structuralist interpretation of gender and sexuality

Deconstructing binaries

Critiquing first two waves' focus on white, middle class cisgender women

Many Feminisms

Objections to Wave Constuct

Re-examining the category of the woman

From liberal feminism - terms 'gender studies', 'women's studies'

Critique of developmental feminism

Recognition of many feminisms

Social media and the construct of the woman - #metoo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtfsfsBNgiw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyBims8OkSY

Post feminist constructs

 

Ideas

Importance of structural changes

Postfeminism

Equality as sameness

Different but equal?

Leaning in, becoming: Contemporary ideas of women and leadership

Sandberg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18uDutylDa4&t=3s

Generation Equality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_UjYOfmkn8

Looking at it from the lens of history: how are constructs created and dismantled?

Femvertising

Media and Women: Airtel TVC, Titan TVC - What do you think of equality?

From pinkwashing to queerwashing

Ideas

Constructs of femininity and masculinity

 

Hegemonic masculinity

 

Alternatives and Fluidity discourse 

 

Sexuality Framing

 

Women's Leadership

Transactional leadership - accepts goals, cultures and structures of existing organisations based on motivation, reward, punishment, compliance. Change achieved incrementally, motivators extrinsic

​

Transformational leadership - Achieves social change—changes  modes of work and organisational cultures and structures as well  as of society

 

 

Women's Leadership

What is:

Women's Leadership

Feminist Leadership

Feminine Leadership

 

 

Feminine vs Feminist Leadership

Feminine leadership - Recognising women bring different qualities to leadership - nurturing, conflict resolving, non-aggressive, collective decision making and relationship building. Within accepted gendered roles of women.

 

Difference between feminine and feminist leadership - former does not seek to change gender power structures and women’s lack of access to positions of authority—tries to  “accommodate” women within existing structures.

 

Understanding Feminist Leadership

Mostly work emanating from North America

1970s-80s - Second Wave Feminism

Within discussions of power and alternative non patriarchal, non hierarchical structures of organisations.

Southern feminists less focussed on leadership per se but engaged in experiments with alternative structures and analysis of gendered power in social, economic and political realm - women’s exclusion from power in public realm and advocating women’s greater access to political power for more representation in leadership in government, business and civil society

 

Feminist Approaches to Leadership

Products of women’s struggles to examine their relationship to and practice of power

Advancing gender equality in power positions in public and private sector

Creating alternative feminist structures. Not replicating patriarchy - alternative ways of using power, leading, non hierarchical

Attending not only to gender but other systemic forms of oppression and privilege

Attending to intersectionalities - ethnicity, race, class, gender

Definitions of Feminist Leadership

“Society has tended to mystify leadership skills as belonging only to a few people who are then seen as better than everybody else. But if we view leadership skills as something that many people have in varying degrees - skills that can be supported and enhanced… not in order to make one person superior but because they are needed in the world. We are not interested in leadership for leadership’s sake. We are interested in bringing women’s talents to bear in addressing economic, social and political concerns.”

Mary S Hartmann

“The question is not whether we should have leaders but how we develop all women as leaders… Leadership as a function of growth is also the process of building confidence, not only so that others will follow but also so that others will attempt leadership themselves.”

Flora Carter

“The point is that wherever we are as women, wherever we are situated in our lives, we can advance a feminist agenda. If we stop thinking about how to be leaders and think rather about how to be doers, how to be agents if you move on or go away. To me that has always been the measure of leadership.”

Gerda Lerner

Definitions of Feminist Leadership

“Feminist leadership is a different arrangement of the human order: Redistribution of power and responsibilities, fighting inequalities, changing socio-economic structures, psychic structures, bridging personal freedom with collective freedom, aiming at cooperation instead of competition… Equality, mutuality and absence of sex role behaviour...Emotionality and the values of relationships.”

 

Admira Toolkit

 

“In modern leadership theory, the leader plays a start role, all others become bit players, supporting actors and extras...modern leadership is by definition a hierarchical, male and phallic spectacle. Feminist leadership is more circular and bottom up” 

David M. Boie

Goals of Feminist Leadership

Addresses the arrangement of power for greater equity

Attempts Inclusive, participatory, empowering, consensus building, valuing relationships

Experiments with alternative models of power and leadership to achieve more effective social change.

Self reflective: introspects on feminists’ own use and practice of power

 

Patriarchy, Power and Feminism

Feminists have been invested in analyses of power because they are committed to understand, critique and challenge unjust power relations affecting women including sexism, racism, heterosexism, class and community, state and nation’s oppression.

 

The kind of conception of power one develops will depend in large part on the interest that one has in studying power, on what one wants a theory of power to do, on what kind of phenomena one wants this concept to illuminate.

 

So feminist interests and objectives of social change through collective struggle and emancipator goals influence their analyses of power.

 

POWER AS RESOURCE AND POSSESSION: LIBERAL FEMINIST VIEWS

Power imagined as a resource, a positive social good that is currently unequally distributed amongst women and men.

 

Liberal feminists see power in the list of benefits, viewed as “critical social goods.” The goal of feminism would be to redistribute this resource in more equitable ways.

LIMITS OF THE APPROACH

Thinking of power as a possession leads us to conceive of power statically, and fixedly as a pattern of distribution which some have and some do not.

 

Assumes a dyadic, atomistic understanding of power- between the have and have nots- fails to illuminate the social, institutional and structural contexts that shape and inflect individual’s power in particular situations and relations.

 

Unhelpful in understanding the structural features of domination that power is a relation not a thing that can be distributed or redistributed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0NL02qPXl8

 

POWER AS DOMINATION: RADICAL FEMINISM

Understanding of power not only as power-over, but as a specific kind of power-over relation, namely, one that is unjust or illegitimate. 

 

Experience plays a crucial role in reinforcing and reproducing oppressive power relations, but radical reflection on our experience opens up a space for individual and collective resistance to and transformation of those power relations.

 

 

LIMITS OF THE APPROACH

Gender inequality is today being transformed by a shift from dyadic relations of mastery and subjection to more impersonal structural mechanisms that are lived through more fluid cultural forms (patriarchy)

In order to understand women’s subordination in contemporary societies, feminists will have to move beyond the master/subject model to analyze how women’s subordination is secured through cultural norms, social practices, and other impersonal structural mechanisms. (gendered division of labour, gender stereotypes, paternalism, protectionism)

EG: Femvertising - glorification of men 'sharing the load' while still maintaining that house work is women's work

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-6vm1hpPHo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QDlv8kfwIM

POWER AS EMPOWERMENT

An important strand of feminist theorizing of power starts with the contention that the conception of power as power-over, domination, or control is implicitly masculinist. To avoid such masculinist connotations, many feminists have argued for a reconceptualization of power as a capacity or ability (Power to), specifically, the capacity to empower or transform oneself and others.

This conception of power as transformative and empowering is a prominent theme in lesbian feminism and ecofeminism. They critique masculinist power focused on “state authority, police and armed forces, control of economic resources, control of technology, and hierarchy and chain of command” (Hoagland 1988, 114) and define power as “power-from-within” , “the power of ability, of choice and engagement.

French feminists urge us to question the definition of power in phallocratic cultures, for if feminists “aim simply for a change in the distribution of power, leaving intact the power structure itself, then they are resubjecting themselves, deliberately or not, to a phallocratic order” .To subvert the phallocratic order, we must reject masculinist definitions of power. Irigaray’s work on sexual difference suggests an alternative conception of power as transformative that is grounded in a specifically feminine economy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZO08C5vL2A​

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hg3umXU_qWc

WOMEN’S  EMPOWERMENT AND DEVELOPMENT DISCOURSE

While the idea of feminist ‘empowerment’ tries to reconceptualise power to achieve social change and move towards an alternative polity, the appropriation of the term in development discourse and government policies have managed to completely depoliticize it and dilute its radical potential. It has come to stand for a bland and convenient mode of including women in the development process without challenging any of the entrenched gender hierarchies in their lives and work or within the idea of development itself.

 

Feminism (a term disliked by the state), converted into ‘women’s empowerment’ becomes an ally of the capitalist and nationalist project of development. The discourse of women’s empowerment frames new discourses of the ‘good woman’- as benign and hardworking agents of the state who extend their patriarchally assigned roles as altruistic, self sacrificing apolitical members of the family to the arena of the state.

 

Power and Leadership

Leadership is about holding, exercising and changing distribution and relations of power.

Awareness of one’s own and others’ power

Feminist relationship to power is ambivalent

Not about mechanical management or resource mobilisation but about understanding dynamics of power to transform them and creating alternative models of power.

 

Sites of Power

Public (visible) - power of government, military, police, judiciary, corporations

 

Private - private institutions, family, marriage, tribe, friendships

 

Intimate - Power and powerlessness within self. Self confidence, self esteem, control over body

 

Women’s lives most affected by private and intimate sites.

 

Question of agency - power within us

Goals of Feminist Leadership

Leadership and Power

Intrinsic Power:

Personality traits of leader - charisma, talent, knowledge, experience etc

Both positive and negative qualities

 

Extrinsic Power:

Assigned authority - given by others. For example, people electing president

 

Positional Authority - Role confers power

 

Earned Authority - Gained by using assigned and positional authority, by sharing power with others, acting inclusively etc or through personal attributes

Expressions of Power

Power To:

Agency and capacity to act

To create change

 

Power Over:

Derives from positional or assigned authority to control human and other resources within processes

Often slips into domination

 

Power With:

Effective empowerment of all those engaged in the transformative process to create solidarity, mutual support systems, safety nets

 

Expressions of Power

Power Within:

Source is intrinsic power but also capacity to regenerate self and strategies in response to challenges

Includes knowledge, access to information, contacts, social network.

Power Under:

Why people who have experienced abuse and trauma become abusive when they gain power?

Power under emerges from powerless rage

Politics of powerlessness

Power politics in feminist organisations

 

Power in Organisations

Stated and unstated structures of power in organisation

Unstated deep structures:

Personal biases that override organisational norms - race, class, gender, ethnicity, caste, sexual and political orientation

What kinds of behaviour are valued? Yes-person vs troublemaker

Actual vs stated work norms - higher value for those who work late and on weekends

Informal decision making by cliques

 

Myths about Feminist Leadership

Women will lead differently

Women will share power more equally

Women’s organisations are more egalitarian

If there are feminists as head of organisations, organisations cannot be oppressive or undemocratic

Having formal leaders in leadership roles will reproduce patriarchy

Formalising decision making power and accountability systems is bureaucratic

 

Feminist Leadership

Feminist leadership must:

Understand workings of power—how it functions and how we use it

Challenge systems of power and seek change

Build alternative models of power—participatory, inclusive, ensuring work-life balance, transparent and shared decision making process

Facilitating and empowering every worker’s strength by giving responsibility and accountability

Rights based approach

Challenging all oppressions (intersectionalities) while prioritising gender justice

Leadership as a process, practice and means, not just goal oriented

Affirmative vision of change

Practices of Feminist Leadership

Vision:

Articulating a theory of change and fixing objectives accordingly

Politics:

Understanding and analysing power and intervening in power structures

Strategies:

Developing strategies according to vision and politics

Relationships:

Inducting, mentoring, training others. Inclusive attitude to stakeholders. Imparting vision and passion. Building alliances and goodwill. Resolving conflicts.

 

Sites of Feminist Leadership

Family, Caste, Clan, Tribe, Community

 

State

 

Market and Corporations

 

Civil society, women’s movements and social movements

 

Cultural and religious institutions