Responses and Discussion
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
Constructs of femininity and masculinity
Hegemonic masculinity
Alternatives and Fluidity discourse
Sexuality Framing
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
What is:
Women's Leadership
Feminist Leadership
Feminine 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.
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
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
“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
“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
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
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 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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
To challenge visible, hidden and invisible power and how such power reinforces women’s subordination and furthers sexism
To construct alternative models of power that amplifies visible power and eliminates hidden and invisible power
Feminist leadership seeks to make power visible, democratic, legible and accountable
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
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
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
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
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 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
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.
Family, Caste, Clan, Tribe, Community
State
Market and Corporations
Civil society, women’s movements and social movements
Cultural and religious institutions