Crash Course: Political Theory

What does it actually mean to be a woman?

In 2013, Aimee Stephens was fired from her job as a funeral director two weeks after coming out as a trans woman.

Her boss testified in court, explicitly stating that he fired her because she was no longer going to represent [herself] as a man. Over the next seven years, this case of sex discrimination was debated and appealed, until the Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that firing someone for their LGBTQ identity is indeed against the law.

The fight for trans rights is unique to this moment in history, but in many ways, we're still asking exactly the same questions as early feminist political thinkers: what does it mean to be a woman?

What did it mean centuries ago, and what does it mean now?

Im Ellie Anderson, and this is Crash Course Political Theory.

[THEME MUSIC] Meet Lucy.

Thats what paleoanthropologists named the fossilized remains of one of the oldest known human ancestors.

Now, Lucy[record scratch] Sorry, producers in my ear.

We only have ten minutes?

I cant start with Lucy?

Ugh, fine.

Okay.

I guess well start in the 1790s, with Mary Wollstonecrafts bangin treatise.

In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she pushed back against what was then a pretty common idea: that women werent capable of abstract thought and reasoning, so it didnt make sense to educate them.

Cool cool.

Wollstonecraft arguedusing very sophisticated abstract thought and reasoning, I might add that women could and should receive formal education well, at least upper-class white women.

Her arguments inspired womens suffragists down the road, who won voting rights in the United States and Britain in the 1920s.

But the right to vote was just the beginning.

In the US, the feminist movement made several big strides during the civil rights era: the Equal Pay Act of 1963 made it illegal to pay men and women working the same job different salaries, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination based on a lot of identities, including gender.

In the 70s, Title IX increased womens access to sports, and the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision protected the right to abortion, which many people saw as essential to womens freedom.

Although, yeah, that last one was overturned in 2022, so needless to say, abortion is still a very contemporary feminist debate.

Anyway, this is all to say that feminists addressed a lot of inequalities by tackling particular laws and institutions.

But they also worked to expand our thinking about gender equality by pointing to problems in the very language we use.

Again with the abstract thought and reasoning Like, in 1949, the French writer Simone de Beauvoir argued in her book, The Second Sex, that for words like equality, to mean anything, we have to acknowledge that man and even human arent neutral terms.

Heres another way to think about it: why do we just say basketball when we mean mens basketball, but we always specify women when we talk about womens basketball?

These words conceal a distinctly male perspective, where women are imagined as the other, in contrast to men.

The book also includes such mic-drop lines as, and I quote, the most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women. Ive gotta put that on a T-shirt.

Two decades later, in the 1970s, another t-shirt-worthy slogan emerged: the personal is political. It objected to the boundaries of the private vs. public sphere that so much of our modern politics is based on.

German philosopher Jrgen Habermas described the public sphere as a place where individuals get together to exchange ideas, and its open to everyone.

The private sphere is a smaller space, like a persons home, and you need permission to enter it.

The slogan the personal is political was another way of saying that things that feel like personal problems for a lot of women, like doing an unequal share of the household labor, are actually problems we should all be thinking about.

Lets take a look at the numbers, shall we?

According to Oxfam, if women had been paid minimum wage for all the unpaid labor they did in 2019, they wouldve made ten point eight trillion dollars.

Look at all those zeroes!!!

OK, where were we?

If you saw the Barbie movie, you know that patriarchy isnt about horses.

But it wasnt until the 1980s that political thinkers like Carole Pateman were getting us to think about patriarchy in the context of politics.

Wollstonecraft had previously identified a sort of similar concept, a quote tyranny of man, which described how men held power over women and stood in the way of their freedom.

But patriarchy did something a bit broader.

It described a whole range of beliefs and values that oppress women, ones that are kind of hidden and baked right into our systems.

Like, in 248 years, we havent elected a woman president, despite having no law against it.

Clearly, were influenced not only by concrete legal structures, but also embedded values and biases.

And patriarchal attitudes can show up in our policies in all kinds of ways, from the failure of police departments to prosecute rape crimes to the fact that women get shamed for breastfeeding in public.

Never a good look, shamers.

Shifting the focus from the tyranny of man to patriarchy made clear that the root of womens oppression ran deeper than just individual men in power.

And it also made room for the fact that women can and do adopt patriarchal beliefs.

So yeah, not all women are feminists.

And, in not-so-breaking news, women dont all experience the world in the same way.

Feminist philosopher Kimberl Crenshaw spoke to this in 1989 when she described the ways that gender doesnt just operate in isolation.

She pointed out that societys perception of race, class, and gender work together to influence womens lives.

She called this intersectionality.

Which brings me back to the story I started with, of the trans woman Aimee Stephens.

As feminist political theory continues to evolve, questions of what feminism stands for and who it speaks forare still up for debate.

One of the biggest debates within feminism today has to do with the idea of essentialism.

A gender essentialist would argue that theres some set of properties maybe biological, maybe metaphysical that we can point to as the defining features of being a man or a woman, and those things cant be changed.

But it gets really messy here, because its not easy to identify or agree on what those features are.

Am I a woman because I have a uterus?

Because I grew up playing with Polly Pockets, and I wear yoga pants?

Philosopher and gender studies scholar Judith Butler offers another way of thinking about this.

They argue that gender isnt something we are, but something we do.

Certain behaviors like how a person walks or sits, or the way they dress or style their hair Butler says this is all a version of performativity.

Not performance like playing dress-up, or when I played the title role in the esteemed middle school production of Cinderella.

A stellar performance, by the way Rather, Butlers saying that we make our gender through our words and our embodied ways of being in the world.

In that sense, its not only trans people who perform gender.

Its all of us.

But a vocal minority of feminists called Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists, or TERFs, argue that this perspective threatens all of the progress we just walked through.

In the words of one such activist group, If, as a matter of law, anyone can be a woman, then no one is a woman, and sex-based protections in the law have no meaning whatsoever. These are some of the loudest voices behind laws that ban transgender people from using public bathrooms or playing on athletic teams that align with their gender identity.

And, in a big way, I found that questions like this who feminism is for, who it should protect, and at whose expense have always been part of the story.

Just as Simone de Beauvoir pointed out that male political thinkers werent exactly inclusive with their definitions of mankind, feminist definitions have always contained assumptions that include some and exclude others.

For example, Black feminist thinkers like bell hooks have argued that all too often, feminism has claimed to speak for all women but really only spoken for middle-and-upper class white women.

We can see evidence of this from the earliest days of the feminist movement like when Alice Paul, a suffragist leader, sent Black women to the back of marches.

During the civil rights movement, many Black feminists felt so unheard by white leadership that they left and started new movements, like womanism, a form of feminism focused on the experiences and concerns of Black women.

So, defining, redefining, and expanding the definition of woman, is both as old as feminism itself and as contemporary as this very moment.

Like a lot of women today, Im left with a burning question: Where does feminism go from here?

Reformists say theres more work to be done at the legal and institutional level.

Theyre focused on policy, legislation, and representation.

Whereas radical feminists are focused on dismantling patriarchy.

They argue true feminism cant be achieved unless we address the root of the problem through constant deconstruction and reconstruction of our cultures.

Though, exactly how to go about this isnt so straightforward.

Among radical feminists, there are those like Mara Lugones, who represent decolonial feminism.

She argued that our modern ideas of gender emerged during and as a result of European colonialism pointing to Indigenous communities that related to gender in more nuanced ways.

And so, in order to resist the patriarchy, we must also unpack the legacy of colonialism.

And then there are the democratic feminists, who argue that in order to keep the democratic dream alive, we must constantly re-invent what we mean by freedom, gender, and feminism.

By all of it.

In their view, this process of redefinition is part of the always-incomplete project of politics.

So whats my takeaway?

Feminist political theory is so much more than just one thing.

Its the very basic notion that women can think complex thoughts.

But its also the ongoing questions of how gender, race, and class show up and intersect in womens everyday lives.

And the future of feminism is being defined now as much as ever.

So, stay tuned.

Next time, well talk about another slogan: think local, act global. What does that really mean, and is it a good idea?