Liberal Feminism: Equal Rights and Opportunities

• Liberal feminism is also known as egalitarian feminism.

Context of Emergence

• Liberal feminism began during the 17th and 18th centuries amid great social change and the transition from feudal to industrial societies.
• This era also saw the rise of labor, abolitionist, and feminist movements.

What is Liberalism?

• Liberalism emerged as a political philosophy in the 17th and 18th centuries, advocating for freedoms in political and economic spheres.
• Key tenets of liberalism are individual freedom, democracy, equal opportunities, and equal rights.
• Liberal feminism arose from educated women applying liberal ideas to gender equality.
• It addresses women's oppression by focusing on the lack of political and civil rights.
• It seeks reforms to establish equal opportunities, aiming to end discriminatory practices and ensure equal rights for women.

Feminism of Equal Rights

• Liberal feminism is a type of feminism focused on equal rights, demanding political equality, including the right to vote and stand for election, and access to the labor market.
• It seeks equal rights in marriage, education, and work, advocating for women to play an active role in society on par with men.
• It opposes prostitution, in contrast to pro-sex feminism, but similarly to radical feminism.
• It is reformist and believes the system can be changed, not a revolutionary feminism.
• It is individualistic, granting rights to individuals assumed to be equal, not group-based.
• Believing in feminism limited to equal rights for men and women is referring to liberal feminism.

The Movement's History

• Liberal feminism aligns with the spirit of the French Revolution and its calls for freedom and equality.
• Olympe de Gouges was one of the first liberal feminists with her 1791 Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Citizen.
• The document claimed equal civil and political rights, including freedom, property, security, divorce, and the abolition of slavery.
• Mary Wollstonecraft was a pioneer of liberal feminism in England, publishing A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792.
• John Stuart Mill defended civic and legal equality for women, along with the right to vote, in his 1869 essay On the Subjection of Women.
• 17th to 19th centuries saw feminist movements based on political liberalism, demanding the same rights for women as men.
• The first major advancements in gender equality occurred in the 20th century, particularly during the first wave of feminism in the West.
• Suffragettes demanded the right to vote for women, mainly led by liberal/egalitarian feminists, with contributions from more revolutionary feminists.
• New Zealand was the first country to grant women the right to vote in 1893.
• In France women did not obatin the right to vote and stand for election until 1944.
• The first wave was traditionally associated with liberal feminism, focused on the right to vote and political equality, while the second wave is linked to radical feminism.
• Second-wave feminism emerged in the early 1960s, concurrent with the civil rights movement and decolonization efforts.
• Despite gaining the right to vote and increased labor market participation, feminists continued to demand equal pay.
• Women could not open bank accounts or freely manage assets without their husband's permission.
• Liberal feminists popularized the concept of 'sexism' to denote ideas and practices that subordinate women, being the main cause of discrimination.
• Sexism is based on biological determinism (or essentialism), an ideology asserting inherent characteristics or abilities in women and men due to biology.
• This ideology regards differences between women and men as natural rather than social or cultural, suggesting women are suited to domestic work and men to politics.
• Sexism is also based on socialization into traditional roles.
• Betty Friedman, a liberal feminist, wrote The Feminine Mystique in 1963.
• The Feminine Mystique critiqued the American ideology of defining women solely as wives or mothers.
• Sexism stems from objectifying women as sexual objects, limiting their freedom in dress, action, and movement in public spaces.

Liberal Feminism Today

• Liberal feminism has traditionally focused on legal equality, which is largely achieved in some Western countries through constitutional rights.
• Gender equality in law does not guarantee real, effective equality, which is why liberal feminism remains relevant.

At Work

• Since the 1970s, there has been a significant increase in women's paid work with the rise of feminization of the labour market.
• Liberal feminists emphasize women's labor market participation and correcting market inequalities.
• This emphasis results in sexual segregation, where women and men are unequally distributed in jobs, affecting income.
• Sectors like sales, services, teaching, nursing, personal care, accommodation, and catering have an over-representation of women.
• Sectors like transport, construction, natural sciences, management, public services, or fishing and forestry are dominated by men.
• Women are more represented in sectors that were once considered male lawyers, accountants, notaries, veterinarians and doctors but are still confined to the least prestigious positions in the hierarchy.
• The confinement to the least prestigious positions in the hierarchy is often known as the "glass ceiling".
• The reverse movement (men entering traditionally female professions) has little evidence because these environments grant them less recognition, while positions usually pay less and are more precarious.
• The labour market is still very gendered, and this differentiation has significant consequences on wages.
• The wage gap is narrowing, yet this trend has levelled off since 1992.
• French women earned 28.5% less than men in 2017.
• French women earned 16.8% less for doing the same job in 2017.
• The wage gap can be due to years of experience, career decisions, or family choices ('baby penalty').
• There is an unexplained part of the wage gap due simply to discriminatory practices.

In Politics

• Women represent 52.3% of France's electorate.
• Women constitute 38.7% of the deputies of the National Assembly.
• Women constitute 31.6% of the senators.
• Women constitute 16.7% of the presidents of the departmental councils.
• Women represent 17.2% of mayors in municipalities with fewer than 1000 inhabitants.
• Women represent 12.9% in those with more than 1000 inhabitants.
• Only 7.7% of the presidents of EPCIs (Établissement Public de Coopération Intercommunale) and one vice-president in five are women.
• Having more women in positions of power would trigger positive changes to make women's voices heard.
• Women are generally more progressive than men.

On Television

• A 2018 study by the CSA (Conseil Supérieur de l'Audiovisuel) noted women's television airtime at 39% compared to men's 61%.
• Women are less likely to play the role of a heroine (38.4%) than men (61.6%).
• Hegemonic femininity young women are over-represented on television.
• Those over 65years make up 4% of television actresses compared to actual rate of 3x that amount.
• The Bechdel test aims to examine the presence of women in film and reveal the under-representation of women and the abundance of sexism in fiction.
• To pass the Bechdel test, the film must contain two named, speaking female characters whose conversation is not related to a man.
• Only a quarter of French films produced in 2019 were directed or co-directed by women, for a budget that was 40.2% lower than those directed by their male counterparts.
• Having more female directors at the helm would allow for more female actors and less stereotyping in cultural works.
• In advertisements, women are very often objectified and sexualized, portrayed naked to sell a car, a food, household or beauty item, or even insurance or banking services.

Liberal Feminist Solutions

• Liberal feminists have sought to educate the public on sexism in order to counter sexism at the root of the inequalities that women have to face.
• Sexism is a widely known, used, and negatively connoted concept.
• Liberal feminists lobbied for gender-neutral education, especially in textbooks in the 1960s and 1970s.
• Liberal feminists supported sending girls into non-traditional fields and professions.
• Liberal feminists advocated for parity measures (50% women everywhere) to achieve equality.
• Liberal feminists believe women's entry into the labour market is the solution to the economic emancipation of women in developing countries.
• It can be considered a relatively moderate feminist movement.
• Liberal feminists do not talk about systemic discrimination (women's oppression comes from a system, the patriarchy, which needs to be changed).
• Marxists and radicals have this the idea of women's oppression, not liberal feminists.
• Liberal feminists believe in changing individual mindsets, not overthrowing the system.

Strengths and Weaknesses of Liberal Feminism

• Liberal feminism is rooted in the dominant political and economic values of liberalism.
• Dominant political and economic values includes values like individual freedom, equal opportunities, democracy, etc.
• Liberal feminism is more easily won over by public opinion.
• Legal equality demands are difficult to challenge today and would be hard to justify in Western countries being against women's right to vote or their access to education.
• Major victories won by liberal feminism are no longer questioned.
• Liberal feminism has been carried by privileged women, especially in terms of class, fighting mainly for white women with a bourgeois background.
• Women have come to be seen and understood as a homogeneous group whose diversity has not been taken into account.
• Liberal feminists may have questioned the number of women in politics but not the number of women of color, or the number of working-class women.
• Other forms of oppression, especially class oppression, were not challenged.
• In the 19th century, the German Social Democratic Party and the Workers' International struggled in labelling themselves as feminists, seen as a bourgeois movement.
• The legal equality demanded by liberal feminism would only lead to real equality through socialism, a feminism described as socialist was derived.

A System Feminism

• Liberal feminism is based on the misconception that civic equality is sufficient to achieve gender equality.
• While obtaining voting rights, education or access to the labor market were major obstacles to achieving gender equality, inequalities cannot only be considered from a legal standpoint.
• Liberal or egalitarian feminism is system feminism.
• Liberal or egalitarian feminism is the institutionalized feminism promoted by certain States or international organisations such as the UN, sometimes in an opportunistic manner.
• Liberal feminism does not question even promotes, capitalism, which is at the root of the oppression of many women.
• Even if civic equality were achieved in all countries, the economic and ideological oppression of women would persist.
• The economic and ideological oppression of women would persist, with other forms of oppression specific towards women of colour, members of the LGBTQI+ community, women suffering from poverty or disabilities, etc.
• Liberal feminism is analytically deficient in terms of the causes of women's inequality and oppression.
• The 'enemy' is not identified as men, and the subject of power and hierarchical relationships between women and men is barely addressed.

A Focus on Work

• By insisting on finding a way out of oppression through work, contemporary liberal feminism appears to be ethnocentric and very white.
• Contemporary liberal feminism solutions are not always adapted to developing countries.
• Women always worked (free domestic labour), and access to the formal labour market does not necessarily signify liberation nor empowerment.
• Purely economic solutions tend to make the social or ideological aspects of gender equality invisible.
• Liberal feminism made a lot of progress possible, especially in first-wave feminism, but gradually lost its unexpected and innovative appeal by becoming part of the dominant values of society.
• By seeking to build consensus and rally the masses, its activism tended to become harmless and uncritical.
• Its anchorage in (neo-)liberal values prevents the theorising of women's oppression as collective, systemic and structural.