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EDITOR'S NOTE: Male Bashing or What's In a Name? Feminism in the United States Today
One of the enduring questions of women's history is who was a feminist? For example, how do you categorize Catharine Beecher? She played an important role in mid-nineteenth-century United States history by being instrumental both in the movement to make accessible to females an education beyond the fundamentals and in opening the teaching profession to women. Yet, she opposed woman suffrage and was an influential proponent of separate spheres ideology, a vision of gender roles which, although enhancing the social value of characteristics traditionally assigned to women and increasing their power within the home and over their children, celebrated and disseminated a sharply delimited arena of action for the lady of the house. The word "feminist" itself was not coined until near the end of the nineteenth century,(1) which raises the issue of whether it should be used to refer to persons living before that time? More to the point, however, is the question of how historians should refer to individuals today who have specifically rejected the label even while insisting on equal rights for women.
But what exactly does it mean to be a feminist? Virginia Sapiro's well-known introductory textbook in women's studies answerys the question by arguing that gender is one of the most important bases of society and serves as the rationale for women's lower status and lesser resources vis-a-vis men in most known societies. However, since gender is not a category of nature but a social construction, it can be changed. As a consequence, feminism includes not only analysis of the gender system but also the notion of working together to eradicate gender inequality.(2)
Of course, such a broad definition invites numerous perspectives on the problem, resulting in a variety of feminisms -- domestic feminism, socialist feminism, radical feminism, cultural feminism, and even power feminism, to name a few. But if "working together" means a social movement, the definitions of the various feminisms alluded to are more important to scholars and that cadre of committed feminists who are at the core of both theory and practice than to the nation at large. A movement requires numbers. Therefore, perhaps the most important definition of feminism at this...