7 Feminism and Feminist Ethics
Kathryn MacKay
Introduction
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, early feminist writers, including Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), Sojourner Truth (1797-1883), and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902), began to address topics related to the political, economic, and educational status of women, and “women’s morality” (Tong and Williams 2018). This was partly motivated by a growing awareness of the real inequalities between men and women, including legal and social restrictions and prohibitions. These authors argued that disparities in educational opportunities, and the restrictions across race and gender of roles and responsibilities open to women, prevented women from fully developing as people and citizens (Wollstonecraft [1792] 2004). This was First Wave feminism, and it accomplished significant progress on emancipation and enfranchisement for women and visible minorities in the West.
In the twentieth century, Betty Friedan (1921-2006) would report similar phenomena among her white university-educated peers in the 1950s United States, who had returned to the home to be full-time housewives. It should be noted, though, that this was not the experience of black women in the US, who often worked outside the home, frequently in the employ of white women, nor the experience of working-class women across races (Collins 1989). However, women found significant commonalities among themselves in the disparity of political and employment rights compared to men in their social groups (Thompson 2002). Around the same time in France, Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) published her seminal work examining the situation of women in French society, describing women’s second-class status as founded upon the social and political interpretations of biological differences between male and female (de Beauvoir [1949] 2014). The work of de Beauvoir, Friedan, and many others spurred Second Wave feminism among women in Europe and North America, as they began to examine anew the cultural, political, and moral positions that women occupied. Second Wave feminists focused their efforts on such issues as reproductive rights, domestic and sexual violence, paid maternity leave, and equal pay in the workplace.
While issues surrounding women’s political and moral development had long been a concern to feminists of the First and Second waves, it was around the end of the Second Wave and the beginning of the current Third Wave (roughly around the late 1980s and early 1990s), that writers began to think about the need for a specifically feminist ethics. Up to this point, moral theories (like deontology or consequentialism) had largely ignored or remained unaware of the specific perspective and experiences of women, privileging the experiences and perspectives of the “universal” or “neutral” position. Feminists, however, pointed out that this “universal” perspective was a specifically white male perspective. Alison Jagg