Feminism

Liberal feminist groups aim to break down legal and social pressures that restrict women from pursuing careers and being politically active. Liberal feminists look at the public sphere as the key to liberate women’s oppression. By giving women more opportunities to succeed in social positions and reach a higher status in their employment would indicate a real change as to women’s rights changing. Women becoming CEO’s, bosses and managers would show and encourage other women to look up to them so they can achieve the same thing. However, liberal feminists do not want to politicize the private sphere. The private sphere is based on privacy and should be left to the individual’s choice which emphasis the idea of freedom. On the other hand, radical feminists would disagree with this. Kate Millet and Shulamith Firestone, radical feminists, have argued that patriarchy (male domination) begins in the household, hence their slogan ‘the personal is political’. Radical feminists argue that the private sphere confines women in the home and excludes them from the public sphere of work, economics and politics, therefore being the root of sexual inequality. Marxist feminists are closer to radicals than to liberals when concerning the public and private spheres. They state that inequality is rooted in the public sphere and change must occur in the wider economic system. Most socialist feminists would agree that women’s confinement within the home serves the economic interest of the economic system. Women act as a reserve army of labour and also through bearing children women produce the next generation of capitalism’s workers. They label this as the theory of ‘double oppression’.