Talk:Feminism

/Old talk

(Moved old talk to the above page--the page was getting very long.)

I think it's time for me to try to write a long essay about what neutral point of view does and does not entail (in the Meta-Wikipedia, of course, and I'll invite people to edit it). I agree that the article at present obviously reflects an anti-feminist bias, but I also agree that this can and should be fixed without simply deleting useful content.

Look, we are all reasonably intelligent, articulate people here, or we wouldn't be working on this and caring so much about it. As I see it, we have to make it our goal to understand each others' perspectives and to work hard to make sure that those other perspectives are fairly represented. When any dispute arises as to what the article "should" say or what is "true," we must not adopt an adversarial stance; we must do our best to step back and ask ourselves, "How can this dispute be fairly characterized?" This has to be asked repeatedly as each new controversial point is stated. It is not our jobto edit Wikipedia so that it speaks for our own idiosyncratic views and then defend those edits against all comers; it is our job to work together, mainly adding new content, but also, when necessary, coming to a compromise about how a controversy should be described, so that it is fair to all sides.

I know many of you, and I have great confidence in your abilities. So I am very confident we can do this!

More later in that essay which I will now bang out. --LMS

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The idea that there is a good feminism, "equity feminism", and a bad feminism, "gender feminism", is recent (Sommers) and simply amounts to conter insurgency against the masculist insurgency. The earlier developments of things like "eco-feminism" and such, was also political and meant as a way to get more adherents by expanding it's advocacy, something that the women's movement has done with great success since it's beginnings. Remember the abolitionist movement? The "second wave" feminists were at core radical and had much resistence at first from the moderates, but the rad fems won and have called the shots since the mid seventies. Ignore that historical fact and we will be Wikigandists.

This feminist game is too old for a respectable encyclopedia to support it's political maneuverings, without pointing out those possible maneuvers. As for NPOV, I noticed some things in the reading, that while accurate, could have been said in a more NPOV way. When I get time, I'll check it out again. QIM

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I didn't know that "equity" feminism was good and gender feminism was bnad! Don't some people argue that it is the othe way around? In any event, I think the article should not get bogged down in trying to identify good or bad feminisms but rather different kinds of feminisms (and, where possible/appropriate, describe the contexts in which different feminisms developed) -- SR

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I worked some more on the first paragraph, in order to accomodate the view that "women" should be mentioned in the first sentence, while acknowledging that feminism includes far more than a struggle for gender equality. -- SR

As I understand it gender feminism is always bad because no feminist ever says they are one. It's a bogeyman used by feminists who want to justify retaining the label "feminist" by dismissing or minimising criticism of feminism as limited to bad feminists. Whoever wrote up the first page seems to be doing that for radical feminists too. It seems that in the fight over this page there are no radical feminists and therefore they may end up being the tacit scapegoat of the movement in an attempt to compromise. I wouldn't want that to happen. Radical feminists are usually the most honest of their kind (as in "Yes, we do hate men, so what?") David Byron

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The first pp is looking very good.

Some questions about the following text to which I don't know the answers:

Some feminists call for social, economic, and/or political equality between genders; historically, this struggle has centered on women's suffrage, salary equivalency, and control over reproductive issues. Other feminists, arguing that gender and sexuality are themselves socially constructed, have come to question prevalent assumptions about gender and sexual differences themselves.

Is there a terminology to distinguish these two branches of feminism? Is the first kind the predominant kind, at least historically (I thought so)? (It's the predominant dictionary definition.) Is there a better term of art for "salary equivalency"?

Almost no feminists really want equality today, but a lot claim they want equality as cover for their actual beliefs. As for 19th century feminists I'd guestimate that maybe one in three wanted equality. Feminism has always been about women not equality. About one sex not two. There's no secret about the bias towards women. Never has been. Instead feminists merely claimed that by advocating only for one sex they persued equality. Clearly that is a propaganda claim. David Byron

I'm not sure I'd call it a term of art, but the phrase most often used is simply "equal pay for equal work". --LDC

BTW, the neologism Wikigandists is pretty amusing.

--TheCunctator

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I've heard "equity" versus "gender" feminism used quite a bit. --LMS