essay on social feminism

Essay on Feminism

500 words essay on feminism.

Feminism is a social and political movement that advocates for the rights of women on the grounds of equality of sexes. It does not deny the biological differences between the sexes but demands equality in opportunities. It covers everything from social and political to economic arenas. In fact, feminist campaigns have been a crucial part of history in women empowerment. The feminist campaigns of the twentieth century made the right to vote, public property, work and education possible. Thus, an essay on feminism will discuss its importance and impact.

Importance of Feminism

Feminism is not just important for women but for every sex, gender, caste, creed and more. It empowers the people and society as a whole. A very common misconception is that only women can be feminists.

It is absolutely wrong but feminism does not just benefit women. It strives for equality of the sexes, not the superiority of women. Feminism takes the gender roles which have been around for many years and tries to deconstruct them.

This allows people to live freely and empower lives without getting tied down by traditional restrictions. In other words, it benefits women as well as men. For instance, while it advocates that women must be free to earn it also advocates that why should men be the sole breadwinner of the family? It tries to give freedom to all.

Most importantly, it is essential for young people to get involved in the feminist movement. This way, we can achieve faster results. It is no less than a dream to live in a world full of equality.

Thus, we must all look at our own cultures and communities for making this dream a reality. We have not yet reached the result but we are on the journey, so we must continue on this mission to achieve successful results.

Impact of Feminism

Feminism has had a life-changing impact on everyone, especially women. If we look at history, we see that it is what gave women the right to vote. It was no small feat but was achieved successfully by women.

Further, if we look at modern feminism, we see how feminism involves in life-altering campaigns. For instance, campaigns that support the abortion of unwanted pregnancy and reproductive rights allow women to have freedom of choice.

Moreover, feminism constantly questions patriarchy and strives to renounce gender roles. It allows men to be whoever they wish to be without getting judged. It is not taboo for men to cry anymore because they must be allowed to express themselves freely.

Similarly, it also helps the LGBTQ community greatly as it advocates for their right too. Feminism gives a place for everyone and it is best to practice intersectional feminism to understand everyone’s struggle.

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Conclusion of the Essay on Feminism

The key message of feminism must be to highlight the choice in bringing personal meaning to feminism. It is to recognize other’s right for doing the same thing. The sad part is that despite feminism being a strong movement, there are still parts of the world where inequality and exploitation of women take places. Thus, we must all try to practice intersectional feminism.

FAQ of Essay on Feminism

Question 1: What are feminist beliefs?

Answer 1: Feminist beliefs are the desire for equality between the sexes. It is the belief that men and women must have equal rights and opportunities. Thus, it covers everything from social and political to economic equality.

Question 2: What started feminism?

Answer 2: The first wave of feminism occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It emerged out of an environment of urban industrialism and liberal, socialist politics. This wave aimed to open up new doors for women with a focus on suffrage.

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What Is Socialist Feminism?

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“Town & Country,” our summer issue, is out now. Subscribe to our print edition today.

Barbara Ehrenreich on why we need socialist feminism to fight patriarchy.

New York Historical Society

The following essay is best read as a core sample drilled from the radical thought of over fifty years ago, when both feminism and socialism were still novel ideas to most Americans. Many young white, formerly middle-class, women like myself embraced both of these abstractions and struggled, if only out of some sense of theoretical tidiness, to see how they are connected. I would never undertake such a project today. It seems too quaint, too open to divergent answers, too “ahistoric,” for my present-day tastes.

The only thing about this essay that makes me wince when I read it now is the casual postponement of issues like race and homophobia to some later, more all-encompassing, stage of socialist feminist theory. My only excuse is that capitalism and male domination seemed at the time to possess the dignity of being “systems,” while racism and homophobia were easily mistaken for more transient “attitudes.” But this is a feeble excuse. A half century later I am no longer so entranced by abstract “systems” and far more tethered to the concrete, which includes sickening amounts of cruelty to LGBTQ people and people of color. Anyone who is into theorizing needs to theorize those facts too.

There is also, I will admit, a bit of historical sloppiness in this essay. I seem to date capitalism from the Industrial Revolution, which makes it a relative newcomer on the human scene, no more than a couple hundred years old. What I should have been interested in is not capitalism but class societies — or “stratified” societies — which arose roughly five thousand years ago in the Mesopotamian world, along with archeological indications of rising male dominance, warfare, and slavery. How these things “arose” is a story encoded in thousands of geographically specific myths, bas-reliefs, and other forms of narrative; the challenging question is how they managed to persist through so many millennia and changes in the “mode of production.”

Today the only thing I find at all refreshing about “What Is Socialist Feminist?” is its suggestion that both forms of oppression are rooted in, or maintained by, violence. That word did not feature prominently in our theoretical vocabulary in 1976, which was much more concerned with notions like “production” and “reproduction,” wages for housework, and wages in the local factories. What may have turned my attention to it was a near-violent incident with the gun-carrying ex-husband of my upstairs neighbor, a single mother and welfare recipient. On the theoretical front, though, violence was an exotic and marginal issue.

All that has changed, of course. Feminists began to focus on violence against women within the next few years, and succeeded in getting federal legislation against it in 1994. Similarly, “police brutality” was an issue in the 1970s, but it took the steady barrage of police violence in the 1990s and succeeding decades to provoke the formation of Black Lives Matter. By the twenty-first century there was no avoiding violence against LGBTQ people, Muslims, or immigrants. And today, random gun violence has become an issue the Left can no longer wave off with a reference to gun manufacturers’ profits.

But in our “theory” — such as it is — violence remains peripheral. We know that what keeps us in line is ultimately the fear of getting our teeth knocked out or our foreheads shot in, whether by state-sanctioned attackers or by deranged ex-husbands or neighbors. Maybe we need to find a fancy way of saying that.

At some level, perhaps not too well articulated, socialist feminism has been around for a long time. You are a woman in a capitalist society. You get pissed off: about the job, about the bills, about your husband (or ex), about the kids’ school, the housework, being pretty, not being pretty, being looked at, not being look at (and either way, not listened to), etc. If you think about all these things and how they fit together and what has to be changed, and then you look around for some words to hold all these thoughts together in abbreviated form, you’d almost have to come up with “socialist feminism.”

A lot of us came to socialist feminism in just that kind of way. We were searching for a word/term/phrase which would begin to express all of our concerns, all of our principles, in a way that neither “socialist” nor “feminist” seemed to. I have to admit that most socialist feminists I know are not too happy with the term “ socialist feminist ” either. On the one hand it is too long (I have no hopes for a hyphenated mass movement); on the other hand it is much too short for what is, after all, really socialist internationalist anti-racist, anti-heterosexist feminism.

The trouble with taking a new label of any kind is that it creates an instant aura of sectarianism. “Socialist feminism” becomes a challenge, a mystery, an issue in and of itself. We have speakers, conferences, articles on “socialist feminism” — though we know perfectly well that both “socialism” and “feminism” are too huge and too inclusive to be subjects for any sensible speech, conference, article, etc. People, including avowed socialist feminists, ask themselves anxiously, “What is socialist feminism?” There is a kind of expectation that it is (or is about to be at any moment, maybe in the next speech, conference, or article) a brilliant synthesis of world historical proportions — an evolutionary leap beyond Marx, Freud, and Wollstonecraft. Or that it will turn out to be a nothing, a fad seized on by a few disgruntled feminists and female socialists, a temporary distraction.

I want to try to cut through some of the mystery which has grown up around socialist feminism. A logical way to start is to look at socialism and feminism separately. How does a socialist, more precisely, a Marxist, look at the world? How does a feminist?

To begin with, Marxism and feminism have an important thing in common: they are critical ways of looking at the world. Both rip away popular mythology and “common sense” wisdom and force us to look at experience in a new way. Both seek to understand the world — not in terms of static balances, symmetries, etc. (as in conventional social science) — but in terms of antagonisms. They lead to conclusions which are jarring and disturbing at the same time that they are liberating. There is no way to have a Marxist or feminist outlook and remain a spectator. To understand the reality laid bare by these analyses is to move into action to change it .

Marxism addresses itself to the class dynamics of capitalist society. Every social scientist knows that capitalist societies are characterized by more or less severe, systemic inequality. Marxism understands this inequality to arise from processes which are intrinsic to capitalism as an economic system. A minority of people (the capitalist class) own all the factories/energy sources/resources, etc. which everyone else depends on in order to live. The great majority (the working class) must work out of sheer necessity, under conditions set by the capitalists, for the wages the capitalists pay.

Since the capitalists make their profits by paying less in wages than the value of what the workers actually produce, the relationship between the two classes is necessarily one of irreconcilable antagonism. The capitalist class owes its very existence to the continued exploitation of the working class. What maintains this system of class rule is, in the last analysis, force. The capitalist class controls (directly or indirectly) the means of organized violence represented by the state – police, jails, etc. Only by waging a revolutionary struggle aimed at the seizure of state power can the working class free itself, and, ultimately, all people.

Feminism addresses itself to another familiar inequality. All human societies are marked by some degree of inequality between the sexes. If we survey human societies at a glance, sweeping through history and across continents, we see that they have commonly been characterized by: the subjugation of women to male authority, both with the family and in the community in general; the objectification of women as a form of property; a sexual division of labor in which women are confined to such activities as child-raising, performing personal services for adult males, and specified (usually low-prestige) forms of productive labor.

Feminists, struck by the near universality of these things, have looked for explanations in the biological “givens” which underlie all human social existence. Men are physically stronger than women on average, especially compared to pregnant women or women who are nursing babies. Furthermore, men have the power to make women pregnant. Thus, the forms that sexual inequality take — however various they may be from culture to culture – rest, in the last analysis, on what is clearly a physical advantage males hold over females. That is to say, they result ultimately on violence, or the threat of violence.

The ancient, biological root of male supremacy — the fact of male violence — is commonly obscured by the laws and conventions which regulate the relations between the sexes in any particular culture. But it is there, according to a feminist analysis. The possibility of male assault stands as a constant warning to “bad” (rebellious, aggressive) women, and drives “good” women into complicity with male supremacy. The reward for being “good” (“pretty,” submissive) is protection from random male violence and, in some cases, economic security.

Marxism rips away the myths about “democracy” and its “pluralism” to reveal a system of class rule that rests on forcible exploitation. Feminism cuts through myths about “instinct” and romantic love to expose male rule as a rule of force. Both analyses compel us to look at a fundamental injustice. The choice is to reach for the comfort of the myths or, as Marx put it, to work for a social order that does not require myths to sustain it.

It is possible to add up Marxism and feminism and call the sum “socialist feminism.” In fact, this is probably how most socialist feminists see it most of the time — as a kind of hybrid, pushing our feminism in socialist circles, our socialism in feminist circles. One trouble with leaving things like that, though, is that it keeps people wondering “Well, what is she really?” or demanding of us “What is the principal contradiction?” These kinds of questions, which sound so compelling and authoritative, often stop us in our tracks: “Make a choice!” “Be one or another!” But we know that there is a political consistency to socialist feminism. We are not hybrids or fence-sitters.

To get to that political consistency we have to differentiate ourselves, as feminists, from other kinds of feminists, and, as Marxists, from other kinds of Marxists. We have to stake out a (pardon the terminology here) socialist feminist kind of feminism and a socialist feminist kind of socialism. Only then is there a possibility that things will “add up” to something more than an uneasy juxtaposition.

I think that most radical feminists and socialist feminists would agree with my capsule characterization of feminism as far as it goes. The trouble with radical feminism, from a socialist feminist point of view, is that it doesn’t go any farther. It remains transfixed with the universality of male supremacy — things have never really changed; all social systems are patriarchies; imperialism, militarism, and capitalism are all simply expressions of innate male aggressiveness. And so on.

The problem with this, from a socialist feminist point of view, is not only that it leaves out men (and the possibility of reconciliation with them on a truly human and egalitarian basis) but that it leaves out an awful lot about women. For example, to discount a socialist country such as China as a “patriarchy” — as I have heard radical feminists do — is to ignore the real struggles and achievements of millions of women. Socialist feminists, while agreeing that there is something timeless and universal about women’s oppression, have insisted that it takes different forms in different settings, and that the differences are of vital importance. There is a difference between a society in which sexism is expressed in the form of female infanticide and a society in which sexism takes the form of unequal representation on the Central Committee. And the difference is worth dying for.

One of the historical variations on the theme of sexism which ought to concern all feminists is the set of changes that came with the transition from an agrarian society to industrial capitalism. This is no academic issue. The social system which industrial capitalism replaced was in fact a patriarchal one, and I am using that term now in its original sense, to mean a system in which production is centered in the household and is presided over by the oldest male. The fact is that industrial capitalism came along and tore the rug out from under patriarchy. Production went into the factories, and individuals broke off from the family to become “free” wage earners. To say that capitalism disrupted the patriarchal organization of production and family life is not, of course, to say that capitalism abolished male supremacy! But it is to say that the particular forms of sex oppression we experience today are, to a significant degree, recent developments. A huge historical discontinuity lies between us and true patriarchy. If we are to understand our experience as women today, we must move to a consideration of capitalism as a system.

There are obviously other ways I could have gotten to the same point. I could have simply said that, as feminists, we are most interested in the most oppressed women — poor and working-class women, Third World women, etc., and for that reason we are led to a need to comprehend and confront capitalism. I could have said that we need to address ourselves to the class system simply because women are members of classes. But I am trying to bring out something else about our perspective as feminists: there is no way to understand sexism as it acts on our lives without putting it in the historical context of capitalism.

I think most socialist feminists would also agree with the capsule summary of Marxist theory as far as it goes. And the trouble again is that there are a lot of people (I’ll call them “mechanical Marxists”) who do not go any further. To these people, the only “real” and important things that go on in capitalist society are those things that relate to the productive process or the conventional political sphere. From such a point of view, every other part of experience and social existence — things having to do with education, sexuality, recreation, the family, art, music, housework (you name it) — is peripheral to the central dynamics of social change; it is part of the “superstructure” or “culture.”

Socialist feminists are in a very different camp from what I am calling “mechanical Marxists.” We (along with many, many Marxists who are not feminists) see capitalism as a social and cultural totality. We understand that, in its search for markets, capitalism is driven to penetrate every nook and cranny of social existence. Especially in the phase of monopoly capitalism , the realm of consumption is every bit as important, just from an economic point of view, as the realm of production. So we cannot understand class struggle as something confined to issues of wages and hours, or confined only to workplace issues. Class struggle occurs in every arena where the interests of classes conflict, and that includes education, health, art, music, etc. We aim to transform not only the ownership of the means of production, but the totality of social existence.

As Marxists, we come to feminism from a completely different place than the mechanical Marxists. Because we see monopoly capitalism as a political/ economic/cultural totality, we have room within our Marxist framework for feminist issues which have nothing ostensibly to do with production or “politics,” issues that have to do with the family, health care, “private” life.

Furthermore, in our brand of Marxism, there is no “woman question” because we never compartmentalized women off to the “superstructure” or somewhere in the first place. Marxists of a mechanical bent continually ponder the issue of the unwaged woman (the housewife): is she really a member of the working class? That is, does she really produce surplus value ? We say, of course housewives are members of the working class — not because we have some elaborate proof that they really do produce surplus value — but because we understand a class as being composed of people, and as having a social existence quite apart from the capitalist-dominated realm of production. When we think of class in this way, then we see that in fact the women who seemed most peripheral, the housewives, are at the very heart of their class — raising children, holding together families, maintaining the cultural and social networks of the community.

We are coming out of a kind of feminism and a kind of Marxism whose interests quite naturally flow together. I think we are in a position now to see why it is that socialist feminism has been so mystified: the idea of socialist feminism is a great mystery or paradox, so long as what you mean by socialism is really what I have called “mechanical Marxism” and what you mean by feminism is an ahistorical kind of radical feminism. These things just don’t add up; they have nothing in common.

But if you put together another kind of socialism and another kind of feminism, as I have tried to define them, you do get some common ground, and that is one of the most important things about socialist feminism today. It is a space free from the constrictions of a truncated kind of feminism and a truncated version of Marxism — in which we can develop the kind of politics that addresses the political/economic/cultural totality of monopoly capitalist society. We could only go so far with the available kinds of feminism, the conventional kind of Marxism, and then we had to break out to something that is not so restrictive and incomplete in its view of the world. We had to take a new name, “socialist feminism,” in order to assert our determination to comprehend the whole of our experience and to forge a politics that reflects the totality of that comprehension.

However, I don’t want to leave socialist feminist theory as a “space” or a common ground. Things are beginning to grow in that “ground.” We are closer to a synthesis in our understanding of sex and class, capitalism and male domination, than we were a few years ago. Here I will indicate only very sketchily one such line of thinking:

• The Marxist/feminist understanding that class and sex domination rest ultimately on force is correct, and this remains the most devastating critique of sexist/capitalist society. But there is a lot to that “ultimately.” In a day-to-day sense, most people acquiesce to sex and class domination without being held in line by the threat of violence, and often without even the threat of material deprivation.
• It is very important, then, to figure out what it is, if not the direct application of force, that keeps things going . In the case of class, a great deal has been written already about why the US working class lacks militant class consciousness. Certainly ethnic divisions, especially the black/white division, are a key part of the answer. But I would argue, in addition to being divided, the working class has been socially atomized. Working-class neighborhoods have been destroyed and are allowed to decay; life has become increasingly privatized and inward-looking; skills once possessed by the working class have been expropriated by the capitalist class; and capitalist-controlled “mass culture” has edged out almost all indigenous working-class culture and institutions . Instead of collectivity and self-reliance as a class, there is mutual isolation and collective dependency on the capitalist class.
• The subjugation of women, in the ways which are characteristic of late capitalist society, has been key to this process of class atomization. To put it another way, the forces which have atomized working-class life and promoted cultural/material dependence on the capitalist class are the same forces which have served to perpetuate the subjugation of women. It is women who are most isolated in what has become an increasingly privatized family existence (even when they work outside the home too). It is, in many key instances, women’s skills (productive skills, healing, midwifery, etc.) which have been discredited or banned to make way for commodities. It is, above all, women who are encouraged to be utterly passive/uncritical/dependent (i.e. “feminine”) in the face of the pervasive capitalist penetration of private life. Historically, late capitalist penetration of working-class life has singled out women as prime targets of pacification/”feminization” — because women are the culture-bearers of their class.
• It follows that there is a fundamental interconnection between women’s struggle and what is traditionally conceived as class struggle. Not all women’s struggles have an inherently anticapitalist thrust (particularly not those which seek only to advance the power and wealth of special groups of women), but all those which build collectivity and collective confidence among women are vitally important to the building of class consciousness. Conversely, not all class struggles have an inherently anti-sexist thrust (especially not those that cling to pre-industrial patriarchal values), but all those which seek to build the social and cultural autonomy of the working class are necessarily linked to the struggle for women’s liberation.

This, in very rough outline, is one direction which socialist feminist analysis is taking. No one is expecting a synthesis to emerge which will collapse socialist and feminist struggle into the same thing. The capsule summaries I gave earlier retain their “ultimate” truth: there are crucial aspects of capitalist domination (such as racial oppression ) which a purely feminist perspective simply cannot account for or deal with — without bizarre distortions, that is. There are crucial aspects of sex oppression (such as male violence within the family) which socialist thought has little insight into — again, not without a lot of stretching and distortion. Hence the need to continue to be socialists and feminists. But there is enough of a synthesis, both in what we think and what we do for us to begin to have a self-confident identity as socialist feminists.

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The ancient world

Influence of the enlightenment.

• The suffrage movement
• The post-suffrage era
• Dissension and debate
• The race factor
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• The fourth wave of feminism

Who were some early feminist thinkers and activists?

What is intersectional feminism, how have feminist politics changed the world.

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• Munich Personal RePEc Archive - An Overview on the Feminism and Its Categories
• Council of Europe - Feminism and Women’s Rights Movements
• Academia - History and Theory of Feminism
• Pressbooks @ Howard Community College - Feminism and Sexism
• National Army Museum - Women's Work?
• Social Science LibreTexts - Feminism
• EHNE Digital Encyclopedia - Feminisms and Feminist Movements in Europe
• Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University - Feminist Theory
• Pacific University, Oregon - Four Waves of Feminism
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Feminist Philosophy
• feminism - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)
• Table Of Contents

What is feminism?

At its core, feminism is the belief in full social, economic, and political equality for women. Feminism largely arose in response to Western traditions that restricted the rights of women, but feminist thought has global manifestations and variations.

In medieval France philosopher Christine de Pisan challenged the social restrictions on women and pushed for women’s education. In 18th-century England Mary Wollstonecraft ’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman became a seminal work of English-language feminist philosophy. Feminism in the United States had a number of prominent activists during the mid- to late-19th century. Notable mainstream activists included Lucretia Mott , Elizabeth Cady Stanton , and Susan B. Anthony . Less mainstream but similarly important views came from Sojourner Truth , a formerly enslaved Black woman, and Emma Goldman , the nation’s leading anarchist during the late 19th century.

Intersectionality is a term coined by professor Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 to describe how different social categories interact, sometimes resulting in compounding effects and tensions. Her paper on the subject argued that discrimination specifically against Black women is different from general anti-woman discrimination or anti-Black racism. Instead, it involves the unique compound experience of both sexism and racism. Initially used in the context of discrimination law, the concept saw a resurgence in the 21st century among left-wing activists who broadened intersectionality to include categories such as class and sexual orientation.

Feminism has provided Western women with increased educational opportunities, the right to vote, protections against workplace discrimination, and the right to make personal decisions about pregnancy. In some communities, feminism has also succeeded in challenging pervasive cultural norms about women. Outside of the Western world, activists such as Malala Yousafzai have highlighted issues such as unequal access to education for women.

feminism , the belief in social, economic, and political equality of the sexes. Although largely originating in the West, feminism is manifested worldwide and is represented by various institutions committed to activity on behalf of women’s rights and interests.

Throughout most of Western history, women were confined to the domestic sphere, while public life was reserved for men. In medieval Europe, women were denied the right to own property , to study, or to participate in public life. At the end of the 19th century in France, they were still compelled to cover their heads in public, and, in parts of Germany, a husband still had the right to sell his wife. Even as late as the early 20th century, women could neither vote nor hold elective office in Europe and in most of the United States (where several territories and states granted women’s suffrage long before the federal government did so). Women were prevented from conducting business without a male representative, be it father, brother, husband, legal agent, or even son. Married women could not exercise control over their own children without the permission of their husbands. Moreover, women had little or no access to education and were barred from most professions. In some parts of the world, such restrictions on women continue today. See also egalitarianism .

History of feminism

There is scant evidence of early organized protest against such circumscribed status. In the 3rd century bce , Roman women filled the Capitoline Hill and blocked every entrance to the Forum when consul Marcus Porcius Cato resisted attempts to repeal laws limiting women’s use of expensive goods. “If they are victorious now, what will they not attempt?” Cato cried. “As soon as they begin to be your equals, they will have become your superiors.”

That rebellion proved exceptional, however. For most of recorded history, only isolated voices spoke out against the inferior status of women, presaging the arguments to come. In late 14th- and early 15th-century France, the first feminist philosopher, Christine de Pisan , challenged prevailing attitudes toward women with a bold call for female education. Her mantle was taken up later in the century by Laura Cereta, a 15th-century Venetian woman who published Epistolae familiares (1488; “Personal Letters”; Eng. trans. Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist ), a volume of letters dealing with a panoply of women’s complaints, from denial of education and marital oppression to the frivolity of women’s attire.

The defense of women had become a literary subgenre by the end of the 16th century, when Il merito delle donne (1600; The Worth of Women ), a feminist broadside by another Venetian author, Moderata Fonte, was published posthumously. Defenders of the status quo painted women as superficial and inherently immoral, while the emerging feminists produced long lists of women of courage and accomplishment and proclaimed that women would be the intellectual equals of men if they were given equal access to education.

The so-called “debate about women” did not reach England until the late 16th century, when pamphleteers and polemicists joined battle over the true nature of womanhood. After a series of satiric pieces mocking women was published, the first feminist pamphleteer in England, writing as Jane Anger, responded with Jane Anger, Her Protection for Women (1589). This volley of opinion continued for more than a century, until another English author, Mary Astell, issued a more reasoned rejoinder in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694, 1697). The two-volume work suggested that women inclined neither toward marriage nor a religious vocation should set up secular convents where they might live, study, and teach.

The feminist voices of the Renaissance never coalesced into a coherent philosophy or movement. This happened only with the Enlightenment , when women began to demand that the new reformist rhetoric about liberty , equality, and natural rights be applied to both sexes.

Initially, Enlightenment philosophers focused on the inequities of social class and caste to the exclusion of gender . Swiss-born French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau , for example, portrayed women as silly and frivolous creatures, born to be subordinate to men. In addition, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen , which defined French citizenship after the revolution of 1789, pointedly failed to address the legal status of women.

Female intellectuals of the Enlightenment were quick to point out this lack of inclusivity and the limited scope of reformist rhetoric. Olympe de Gouges , a noted playwright, published Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne (1791; “Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the [Female] Citizen”), declaring women to be not only man’s equal but his partner. The following year Mary Wollstonecraft ’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the seminal English-language feminist work, was published in England. Challenging the notion that women exist only to please men, she proposed that women and men be given equal opportunities in education, work, and politics. Women, she wrote, are as naturally rational as men. If they are silly, it is only because society trains them to be irrelevant.

The Age of Enlightenment turned into an era of political ferment marked by revolutions in France, Germany, and Italy and the rise of abolitionism . In the United States, feminist activism took root when female abolitionists sought to apply the concepts of freedom and equality to their own social and political situations. Their work brought them in contact with female abolitionists in England who were reaching the same conclusions. By the mid-19th century, issues surrounding feminism had added to the tumult of social change , with ideas being exchanged across Europe and North America .

In the first feminist article she dared sign with her own name, Louise Otto, a German, built on the work of Charles Fourier , a French social theorist, quoting his dictum that “by the position which women hold in a land, you can see whether the air of a state is thick with dirty fog or free and clear.” And after Parisian feminists began publishing a daily newspaper entitled La Voix des femmes (“The Voice of Women”) in 1848, Luise Dittmar, a German writer, followed suit one year later with her journal, Soziale Reform .

5 Essays About Feminism

On the surface, the definition of feminism is simple. It’s the belief that women should be politically, socially, and economically equal to men. Over the years, the movement expanded from a focus on voting rights to worker rights, reproductive rights, gender roles, and beyond. Modern feminism is moving to a more inclusive and intersectional place. Here are five essays about feminism that tackle topics like trans activism, progress, and privilege:

“Trickle-Down Feminism” – Sarah Jaffe

Feminists celebrate successful women who have seemingly smashed through the glass ceiling, but the reality is that most women are still under it. Even in fast-growing fields where women dominate (retail sales, food service, etc), women make less money than men. In this essay from Dissent Magazine, author Sarah Jaffe argues that when the fastest-growing fields are low-wage, it isn’t a victory for women. At the same time, it does present an opportunity to change the way we value service work. It isn’t enough to focus only on “equal pay for equal work” as that argument mostly focuses on jobs where someone can negotiate their salary. This essay explores how feminism can’t succeed if only the concerns of the wealthiest, most privileged women are prioritized.

Sarah Jaffe writes about organizing, social movements, and the economy with publications like Dissent, the Nation, Jacobin, and others. She is the former labor editor at Alternet.

“What No One Else Will Tell You About Feminism” – Lindy West

Written in Lindy West’s distinct voice, this essay provides a clear, condensed history of feminism’s different “waves.” The first wave focused on the right to vote, which established women as equal citizens. In the second wave, after WWII, women began taking on issues that couldn’t be legally-challenged, like gender roles. As the third wave began, the scope of feminism began to encompass others besides middle-class white women. Women should be allowed to define their womanhood for themselves. West also points out that “waves” may not even exist since history is a continuum. She concludes the essay by declaring if you believe all people are equal, you are a feminist.

Jezebel reprinted this essay with permission from How To Be A Person, The Stranger’s Guide to College by Lindy West, Dan Savage, Christopher Frizelle, and Bethany Jean Clement. Lindy West is an activist, comedian, and writer who focuses on topics like feminism, pop culture, and fat acceptance.

“Toward a Trans* Feminism” – Jack Halberstam

The history of transactivsm and feminism is messy. This essay begins with the author’s personal experience with gender and terms like trans*, which Halberstam prefers. The asterisk serves to “open the meaning,” allowing people to choose their categorization as they see fit. The main body of the essay focuses on the less-known history of feminists and trans* folks. He references essays from the 1970s and other literature that help paint a more complete picture. In current times, the tension between radical feminism and trans* feminism remains, but changes that are good for trans* women are good for everyone.

This essay was adapted from Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability by Jack Halberstam. Halberstam is the Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Gender Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. He is also the author of several books.

“Rebecca Solnit: How Change Happens” – Rebecca Solnit

The world is changing. Rebecca Solnit describes this transformation as an assembly of ideas, visions, values, essays, books, protests, and more. It has many layers involving race, class, gender, power, climate, justice, etc, as well as many voices. This has led to more clarity about injustice. Solnit describes watching the transformation and how progress and “ wokeness ” are part of a historical process. Progress is hard work. Not exclusively about feminism, this essay takes a more intersectional look at how progress as a whole occurs.

“How Change Happens” was adapted from the introduction to Whose Story Is it? Rebecca Solnit is a writer, activist, and historian. She’s the author of over 20 books on art, politics, feminism, and more.

“Bad Feminist” extract – Roxane Gay

People are complicated and imperfect. In this excerpt from her book Bad Feminist: Essays , Roxane Gay explores her contradictions. The opening sentence is, “I am failing as a woman.” She goes on to describe how she wants to be independent, but also to be taken care of. She wants to be strong and in charge, but she also wants to surrender sometimes. For a long time, she denied that she was human and flawed. However, the work it took to deny her humanness is harder than accepting who she is. While Gay might be a “bad feminist,” she is also deeply committed to issues that are important to feminism. This is a must-read essay for any feminists who worry that they aren’t perfect.

Roxane Gay is a professor, speaker, editor, writer, and social commentator. She is the author of Bad Feminist , a New York Times bestseller, Hunger (a memoir), and works of fiction.

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✍️Essay on Feminism for Students: Samples 150, 250 Words

• Updated on  
• Nov 2, 2023

In a society, men and women should be considered equal in every aspect. This thought is advocated by a social and political movement i.e. feminism . The word feminism was coined by the French Philosopher Charles Fourier in 1837. He was known for his strong belief in equal rights for women as men in every sector, be it the right to vote, right to work, right to decide, right to participate in public life, right to own property, etc. Feminism advocates the rights of women with respect to the equality of gender . There are different types of feminism i.e. liberal, radical, Marxist, cultural, and eco-feminism. Stay tuned and have a look at the following sample essay on feminism!

Also Read: Popular Struggles and Movements

Essay on Feminism 150 Words

India is a land of diversity of which 52.2% are women as per an estimate for the year 2023. This doesn’t mean that every woman is getting basic fundamental rights in society. We should not neglect the rights of women and treat them as a weaker sex. Women are equally strong and capable as men. To advocate this thought a movement called Feminism came into existence in 1837. Feminism is a movement that advocates the equality of women in social, political, and economic areas. 

India is up eight notches in #WorldEconomicForum ’s annual gender ranking. And Iceland is #1 for women, again, for the 14th year in a row. @namitabhandare ’s newsletter, #HTMindtheGap looks at why. Plus the week’s other gender stories https://t.co/9Fen6TaEnb Subscribe here… pic.twitter.com/r6XfFMINO0 — Hindustan Times (@htTweets) June 25, 2023

Traditionally, women were believed to stay at home and there were severe restrictions imposed on them. They were not allowed to go out, study, work, vote, own property, etc. However, with the passage of time, people are becoming aware of the objective of feminism. Any person who supports feminism and is a proponent of equal human rights for women is considered a feminist. 

Feminism is a challenge to the patriarchal systems existing in society. Despite this strong movement burning in high flames to burn the orthodox and dominant culture, there are still some parts of the world that are facing gender inequality. So, it is our duty to make a world free of any discrimination. 

Essay on Feminism 250 Words

Talking about feminism in a broader sense, then, it is not restricted only to women. It refers to the equality of every sex or gender. Some people feel offended by the concept of feminism as they take it in the wrong way. There is a misconception that only women are feminists. But this is not the case. Feminists can be anyone who supports the noble cause of supporting the concept of providing equal rights to women.

Feminism is not restricted to single-sex i.e. women, but it advocates for every person irrespective of caste, creed, colour, sex, or gender. As an individual, it is our duty to help every person achieve equal status in society and eradicate any kind of gender discrimination . 

Equality helps people to live freely without any traditional restrictions. At present, the Government of India is also contributing to providing equal rights to the female sector through various Government schemes like Beti Bachao Beti Padhao, Pradhan Mantri Mahila Shakti Kendra, One Stop Center, and many more. 

Apart from these Government policies, campaigns like reproductive rights or abortion of unwanted pregnancy also give women the right to choose and lead their life without any external authority of a male. 

Feminism has also supported the LGBTIQA+ community so that people belonging to this community could come out and reveal their identity without any shame. The concept of feminism also helped them to ask for equal rights as men and women. Thus, it could be concluded that feminism is for all genders and a true feminist will support every person to achieve equal rights and hold a respectable position in society.

Check Out: Women Equality Day

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Feminism is a movement which has gained momentum to advocate against gender discrimination. It supports the thought that women should get equal rights as men in society.

The five main principles of feminism are gender equality, elimination of sex discrimination, speaking against sexual violence against women, increasing human choice and promoting sexual freedom.

The main point of feminism is that there should be collective efforts to end sexism and raise our voices against female sex exploitation. It is crucial to attain complete gender equality and remove any restrictions on the female sex.

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The Core Ideas and Beliefs of Feminism

The ongoing struggle to achieve gender equality

Karen Ducey / Getty Images

• History Of Feminism
• Important Figures
• Women's Suffrage
• Women & War
• Laws & Womens Rights
• Feminist Texts
• American History
• African American History
• African History
• Ancient History and Culture
• Asian History
• European History
• Latin American History
• Medieval & Renaissance History
• Military History
• The 20th Century
• B.A., Mundelein College
• M.Div., Meadville/Lombard Theological School

Feminism   is a complex set of ideologies and theories, that at its core seeks to achieve equal social, political, and economic rights for women. Although feminism benefits everyone, its aim is to achieve equality for women, because prioritizing those who are most oppressed means freeing everyone else. Since men's rights are already secured and institutionally protected, feminism does not aim to help men.

The Origin of the Word "Feminism"

While it is common to see the word "feminist" used for figures such as Mary Wollstonecraft  (1759–1797), the terms feminist and feminism were not used in the modern sense until a century after her 1792 book " A Vindication of the Rights of Women " was published.

The term first appeared during the 1870s in France as féminisme —although there has been some speculation that it may have been used before then. At the time, the word referred to women's freedom or emancipation.

In 1882, Hubertine Auclert, a leading French feminist and a campaigner for women's suffrage, used the term féministe to describe herself and others working for women's freedom. In 1892, a congress in Paris was described as "feminist." This launched a more widespread adoption of the term in the 1890s, with its use appearing in Great Britain and then America beginning about 1894.

Feminism and Society

Almost all modern societal structures are patriarchal and are constructed in such a way that men are the dominant force in making the majority of political, economic, and cultural decisions. In large part, this is the case due to colonization and imperialism by Europeans. Part of the cultural erasures perpetrated by imperialism involved eliminating the many existing matrilineal societies across the world and instituting Western patriarchy instead. Feminism focuses on the idea that since women comprise one-half of the world population, true social progress can never be achieved without the complete and spontaneous participation of women.

Feminist ideals focus on what culture is like for women as compared to what the world is like for men. Feminist scholars study the ways in which women are not treated equally to men.

Feminist ideology considers in which ways culture can and should be different across genders: Do different genders have different goals, ideals, and visions? There's a great deal of value placed on the importance of moving from point A (the status quo) to point B (female equality) through a statement of commitment to behavior and action to produce that change.

Feminism is not only about protecting the lives and rights of cisgender, heterosexual women, but also queer, transgender, and gender-expansive people. Feminism also considers the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, class, and other factors, particularly since, in many cases, those who live at those intersections (trans women or women of color, for instance) are the most vulnerable. Scholars and activists have considered these intersections and developed frameworks for what feminism means through this lens. One such foundational statement is the 1977 Combahee River Collective Statement . Developed by a collective of Black feminists, the statement delves into the complexities and challenges of feminism as it intersects with the politics and identities of race, sexuality, and class, and provides a fuller idea of what feminism means for those who are not cisgender, heterosexual, and White.

Feminism and Sexuality

One arena in which women have long been oppressed is with regard to sexuality, which includes behavior, sexual interactions, posture, and exposure of the body. In patriarchal societies, men are expected to be the commanders, standing tall and allowing their physical presence to represent their role in society, while women are expected to be quieter and more subservient. Under such societal conventions, women are not supposed to take up much space at the table, and most certainly, they should not be seen as a distraction to the men around them.

Feminism seeks to embrace female sexuality and celebrate it, as opposed to so many societal conventions that condemn women who are sexually aware and empowered. The practice of elevating sexually active men while denigrating sexually women creates a double standard across genders.

Women have long been subjected to sexual objectification by men. Many cultures still cling to the notion that women must dress so as to not arouse men, and in many societies, women are required to fully cover their bodies.

On the other hand, in some so-called enlightened societies, female sexuality is routinely exploited in the mass media. Scantily clad women in advertising and full nudity in movies and television are commonplace—and yet, many women are shamed for breastfeeding in public. Sex workers—the majority of whom are women and queer folks—are institutionally disadvantaged and among the most vulnerable, while also being excluded even from some so-called feminist circles. These conflicting views on female sexuality create a confusing landscape of expectations that women and men must navigate on a daily basis.

Feminism in the Workforce

There are many differences within the constellation of feminist ideals, groups, and movements related to workplace unfairness, discrimination, and oppression that result from the real disadvantages women experience. Feminism assumes that  sexism , which disadvantages and/or oppresses those identified as women, is not desirable and should be eliminated, however, it continues to be an issue in the workplace.

Unequal salaries are still pervasive in the workforce. Despite the Equal Pay Act of 1963, on average, a woman (on average) still earns only 80.5 cents for every dollar a man earns. This varies significantly when race is factored in, however. As of 2018, White women earned about 79 cents for each dollar a man earned, while Asian women earned 90 cents—but Black women earned only 62 cents, Latinx or Hispanic women earned only 54 cents, and Indigenous women earned only 57 cents. According to  data from the U.S. Census Bureau , women's median annual earnings in 2017 were $14,910 less than that of their male counterparts.

What Feminism Is and What it Isn't

There is a common misconception that feminists are reverse sexists, however, unlike male sexists who oppress women, feminists do not seek to oppress men. Rather, they seek equal compensation, opportunities, and treatment across genders.

Feminism seeks to achieve equal treatment and opportunity for women in order to achieve similar opportunities across different fields of work and culture and equal respect in a variety of roles. Feminists theorists often explore the concepts with regard to which of women's experiences are taken as normative, as well as the ways in which inequality is compounded by the intersection of multiple factors and identities.

The goal of feminism is to create equity, which is essential for leveling the playing field to ensure that no one's rights are violated due to factors such as race, gender, language, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, political or other beliefs, nationality, social origin, class, or wealth status.

Further Study

At the end of the day, "feminism" is an umbrella term that covers a number of different beliefs. The following list provides examples of a variety of feminist and ideologies and practices.

• Social Feminism
• Liberal Feminism
• Socialist Feminism
• Radical Feminism
• Cultural Feminism
• Third-Wave Feminism
• Intersectional Feminism
• The Women's Liberation Movement
• 10 Important Feminist Beliefs
• An Overview of Third-Wave Feminism
• What Is Radical Feminism?
• Socialist Feminism vs. Other Types of Feminism
• Feminist Philosophy
• The Feminist Movement in Art
• Top 20 Influential Modern Feminist Theorists
• Socialist Feminism Definition and Comparisons
• Womanist: Definition and Examples
• The Golden Notebook
• Feminist Poetry Movement of the 1960s
• Redstockings Radical Feminist Group
• Feminism in the United States

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Introduction to feminism, topics: what is feminism.

• Introduction
• What is Feminism?  
• Historical Context
• Normative and Descriptive Components
• Feminism and the Diversity of Women
• Feminism as Anti-Sexism
• Topics in Feminism: Overview of the Sub-Entries

Bibliography

Works cited.

• General Bibliography [under construction]
• Topical Bibliographies [under construction]

Other Internet Resources

Related entries, i.  introduction, ii.  what is feminism, a.  historical context, b.  normative and descriptive components.

i) (Normative) Men and women are entitled to equal rights and respect. ii) (Descriptive) Women are currently disadvantaged with respect to rights and respect, compared with men.

Feminism is grounded on the belief that women are oppressed or disadvantaged by comparison with men, and that their oppression is in some way illegitimate or unjustified. Under the umbrella of this general characterization there are, however, many interpretations of women and their oppression, so that it is a mistake to think of feminism as a single philosophical doctrine, or as implying an agreed political program. (James 2000, 576)

C.  Feminism and the Diversity of Women

Feminism, as liberation struggle, must exist apart from and as a part of the larger struggle to eradicate domination in all its forms. We must understand that patriarchal domination shares an ideological foundation with racism and other forms of group oppression, and that there is no hope that it can be eradicated while these systems remain intact. This knowledge should consistently inform the direction of feminist theory and practice. (hooks 1989, 22)

Unlike many feminist comrades, I believe women and men must share a common understanding--a basic knowledge of what feminism is--if it is ever to be a powerful mass-based political movement. In Feminist Theory: from margin to center, I suggest that defining feminism broadly as "a movement to end sexism and sexist oppression" would enable us to have a common political goal…Sharing a common goal does not imply that women and men will not have radically divergent perspectives on how that goal might be reached. (hooks 1989, 23)

…no woman is subject to any form of oppression simply because she is a woman; which forms of oppression she is subject to depend on what "kind" of woman she is. In a world in which a woman might be subject to racism, classism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, if she is not so subject it is because of her race, class, religion, sexual orientation. So it can never be the case that the treatment of a woman has only to do with her gender and nothing to do with her class or race. (Spelman 1988, 52-3)

D.  Feminism as Anti-Sexism

 i) (Descriptive claim) Women, and those who appear to be women, are subjected to wrongs and/or injustice at least in part because they are or appear to be women. ii) (Normative claim) The wrongs/injustices in question in (i) ought not to occur and should be stopped when and where they do.

III.  Topics in Feminism: Overview of the Sub-Entries

• Alexander, M. Jacqui and Lisa Albrecht, eds.  1998. The Third Wave: Feminist Perspectives on Racism.  New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press.
• Anderson, Elizabeth.  1999a.  “What is the Point of Equality?”  Ethics 109(2): 287-337.
• ______.  1999b.  "Reply” Brown Electronic Article Review Service, Jamie Dreier and David Estlund, editors, World Wide Web, (http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/bears/homepage.html), Posted 12/22/99.
• Anzaldúa, Gloria, ed. 1990. Making Face, Making Soul: Haciendo Caras.  San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.
• Baier, Annette C.  1994.  Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Barrett, Michèle.  1991. The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
• Bartky, Sandra. 1990.  “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power.” In her Femininity and Domination. New York: Routledge, 63-82.
• Basu, Amrita. 1995. The Challenge of Local Feminisms: Women's Movements in Global Perspective.  Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
• Baumgardner, Jennifer and Amy Richards. 2000.  Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
• Beauvoir, Simone de. 1974 (1952).  The Second Sex. Trans. and Ed. H. M. Parshley.  New York: Vintage Books.
• Benhabib, Seyla.  1992.  Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics.   New York: Routledge.
• Calhoun, Cheshire. 2000.  Feminism, the Family, and the Politics of the Closet: Lesbian and Gay Displacement.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• ______.  1989.  “Responsibility and Reproach.”  Ethics 99(2): 389-406.
• Collins, Patricia Hill.  1990.  Black Feminist Thought. Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman.
• Cott, Nancy.  1987.  The Grounding of Modern Feminism.  New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.“ Stanford Law Review , 43(6): 1241-1299.
• Crenshaw, Kimberlé, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller and Kendall Thomas. 1995.  “Introduction.” In Critical Race Theory, ed., Kimberle Crenshaw, et al. New York: The New Press, xiii-xxxii.Davis, Angela. 1983. Women, Race and Class.  New York: Random House.
• Crow, Barbara.  2000.  Radical Feminism: A Documentary Reader.  New York: New York University Press.
• Delmar, Rosalind.  2001. "What is Feminism?” In Theorizing Feminism, ed., Anne C. Hermann and Abigail J. Stewart.  Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 5-28.
• Duplessis, Rachel Blau, and Ann Snitow, eds. 1998. The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women's Liberation.  New York: Random House (Crown Publishing).
• Dutt, M.  1998.  "Reclaiming a Human Rights Culture: Feminism of Difference and Alliance." In Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age , ed., Ella Shohat. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 225-246.
• Echols, Alice. 1990.  Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-75.   Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Engels, Friedrich.  1972 (1845).  The Origin of The Family, Private Property, and the State.   New York: International Publishers.
• Findlen, Barbara. 2001. Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation, 2nd edition.  Seattle, WA: Seal Press.
• Fine, Michelle and Adrienne Asch, eds. 1988. Women with Disabilities: Essays in Psychology, Culture, and Politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
• Fraser, Nancy and Linda Nicholson.  1990.  "Social Criticism Without Philosophy: An Encounter Between Feminism and Postmodernism." In Feminism/Postmodernism, ed., Linda Nicholson. New York: Routledge.
• Friedan, Betty.  1963. The Feminine Mystique.   New York: Norton.
• Frye, Marilyn.  1983. The Politics of Reality.  Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press.
• Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. 1997.  Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press.
• Grewal, I. 1998.  "On the New Global Feminism and the Family of Nations: Dilemmas of Transnational Feminist Practice."  In Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age, ed., Ella Shohat.  Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 501-530.
• Hampton, Jean.  1993. “Feminist Contractarianism,” in Louise M. Antony and Charlotte Witt, eds. A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity,  Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
• Haslanger, Sally. Forthcoming. “Oppressions: Racial and Other.”  In Racism, Philosophy and Mind: Philosophical Explanations of Racism and Its Implications, ed., Michael Levine and Tamas Pataki.  Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
• Held, Virginia. 1993. Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Herrman, Anne C. and Abigail J. Stewart, eds. 1994.  Theorizing Feminism: Parallel Trends in the Humanities and Social Sciences.  Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
• Heywood, Leslie and Jennifer Drake, eds. 1997.  Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism. 
• Hillyer, Barbara. 1993.  Feminism and Disability. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.
• Hoagland, Sarah L.  1989. Lesbian Ethics: Toward New Values.   Palo Alto, CA: Institute for Lesbian Studies.
• Hooks, bell. 1989. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black.  Boston: South End Press.
• ______.  1984. Feminist Theory from Margin to Center.  Boston: South End Press.
• ______. 1981.  Ain't I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism.   Boston: South End Press.
• Hurtado, Aída.  1996.  The Color of Privilege: Three Blasphemies on Race and Feminism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
• Jagger, Alison M.  1983.  Feminist Politics and Human Nature.  Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
• James, Susan. 2000.  “Feminism in Philosophy of Mind: The Question of Personal Identity.” In The Cambridge Companion to Feminism in Philosophy, ed., Miranda Fricker and Jennifer Hornsby.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Kiss, Elizabeth. 1995.  "Feminism and Rights." Dissent 42(3): 342-347
• Kittay, Eva Feder.  1999.  Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency. New York: Routledge.
• Kymlicka, Will.  1989. Liberalism, Community and Culture. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Mackenzie, Catriona and Natalie Stoljar, eds.  2000.  Relational Autonomy: Feminist perspectives on Autonomy, Agency and the Social Self.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• MacKinnon, Catharine.  1989.  Towards a Feminist Theory of the State.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• ______.  1987. Feminism Unmodified.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Mohanty, Chandra, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, eds.  1991.  Third  World Women and the Politics of Feminism.    Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• Molyneux, Maxine and Nikki Craske, eds. 2001. Gender and the Politics of Rights and Democracy in Latin America. Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillan.
• Moody-Adams, Michele. 1997.  Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture and Philosophy.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Moraga, Cherrie.  2000. "From a Long Line of Vendidas: Chicanas and Feminism." In her Loving in the War Years, 2nd edition.  Boston: South End Press.
• Moraga, Cherrie and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds. 1981.  This Bridge Called My Back: Writings of Radical Women of Color. Watertown, MA: Persephone Press.
• Narayan, Uma.  1997.  Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third World Feminism.   New York: Routledge.
• Nussbaum, Martha. 1995.  "Human Capabilities, Female Human Beings." In Women, Culture and Development : A Study of Human Capabilities, ed., Martha Nussbaum and Jonathan Glover.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 61-104.
• _______.  1999.  Sex and Social Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• O’Brien, Mary.  1979.  “Reproducing Marxist Man.”  In The Sexism of Social and Political Theory: Women and Reproduction from Plato to Nietzsche, ed., Lorenne M. G. Clark and Lynda Lange.  Toronto: Toronto University Press, 99-116.  Reprinted in (Tuana and Tong 1995: 91-103).
• Ong, Aihwa.  1988. "Colonialism and Modernity: Feminist Re-presentation of Women in Non-Western Societies.” Inscriptions 3(4): 90. Also in (Herrman and Stewart 1994).
• Okin, Susan Moller. 1989.  Justice, Gender, and the Family.  New York: Basic Books.
• ______.  1979.  Women in Western Political Thought.   Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Pateman, Carole.  1988.  The Sexual Contract.    Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
• Reagon, Bernice Johnson. 1983. "Coalition Politics: Turning the Century." In: Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith. New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 356-368.
• Robinson, Fiona.  1999.  Globalizing Care: Ethics, Feminist Theory, and International Affairs. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
• Rubin, Gayle.  1975.  “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex.”  In Towards an Anthropology of Women , ed., Rayna Rapp Reiter.  New York: Monthly Review Press, 157-210.
• Ruddick, Sara. 1989.  Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace.  Boston: Beacon Press.
• Schneir, Miriam, ed. 1994. Feminism in Our Time: The Essential Writings, World War II to the Present.  New York: Vintage Books.
• ______.  1972.  Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings. New York: Vintage Books.
• Scott, Joan W. 1988.  “Deconstructing Equality-Versus-Difference: or The Uses of Poststructuralist Theory for Feminism.” Feminist Studies 14 (1):  33-50.
• Silvers, Anita, David Wasserman, Mary Mahowald. 1999.   Disability, Difference, Discrimination: Perspectives on Justice in Bioethics and Public Policy . Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield.
• Simpson, J. A. and E. S. C. Weiner, ed., 1989. Oxford English Dictionary.   2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press. OED Online. Oxford University Press.  “feminism, n1” (1851).
• Snitow, Ann.  1990.  “A Gender Diary.”  In Conflicts in Feminism, ed. M. Hirsch and E. Fox Keller.  New York: Routledge, 9-43.
• Spelman, Elizabeth.  1988. The Inessential Woman.   Boston: Beacon Press.
• Tanner, Leslie B.  1970  Voices From Women's Liberation.   New York:  New American Library (A Mentor Book).
• Taylor, Vesta and Leila J. Rupp.  1996. "Lesbian Existence and the Women's Movement: Researching the 'Lavender Herring'."  In Feminism and Social Change , ed. Heidi Gottfried.  Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.
• Tong, Rosemarie.  1993.  Feminine and Feminist Ethics.   Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
• Tuana, Nancy and Rosemarie Tong, eds. 1995.  Feminism and Philosophy. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
• Walker, Alice. 1990. “Definition of Womanist,” In Making Face, Making Soul: Haciendo Caras , ed., Gloria Anzaldúa.  San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 370.
• Walker, Margaret Urban.  1998. Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics. New York: Routledge.
• ______, ed. 1999.  Mother Time: Women, Aging, and Ethics. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
• Walker, Rebecca, ed. 1995. To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism.   New York: Random House (Anchor Books).
• Ware, Cellestine.  1970.  Woman Power: The Movement for Women’s Liberation .  New York: Tower Publications.
• Weisberg, D. Kelly, ed.  1993.  Feminist Legal Theory: Foundations.  Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
• Wendell, Susan. 1996. The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability. New York and London: Routledge.
• Young, Iris. 1990a. "Humanism, Gynocentrism and Feminist Politics."  In Throwing Like A Girl. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 73-91.
• Young, Iris. 1990b.  “Socialist Feminism and the Limits of Dual Systems Theory.”  In her Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory . Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
• ______.  1990c.  Justice and the Politics of Difference.   Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Zophy, Angela Howard. 1990.  "Feminism."  In The Handbook of American Women's History , ed., Angela Howard Zophy and Frances M. Kavenik.  New York: Routledge (Garland Reference Library of the Humanities).

General Bibliography

Topical bibliographies.

• Feminist Theory Website
• Race, Gender, and Affirmative Action Resource Page
• Documents from the Women's Liberation Movement (Duke Univ. Archives)
• Core Reading Lists in Women's Studies (Assn of College and Research Libraries, WS Section)
• Feminist and Women's Journals
• Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy
• Feminist Internet Search Utilities
• National Council for Research on Women (including links to centers for research on women and affiliate organizations, organized by research specialties)
• Feminism and Class
• Marxist, Socialist, and Materialist Feminisms
• M-Fem (information page, discussion group, links, etc.)
• WMST-L discussion of how to define “marxist feminism” Aug 1994)
• Marxist/Materialist Feminism (Feminist Theory Website)
• MatFem   (Information page, discussion group)
• Feminist Economics
• Feminist Economics (Feminist Theory Website)
• International Association for Feminist Economics
• Feminist Political Economy and the Law (2001 Conference Proceedings, York Univ.)
• Journal for the International Association for Feminist Economics
• Feminism and Disability
• World Wide Web Review: Women and Disabilities Websites
• Disability and Feminism Resource Page
• Center for Research on Women with Disabilities (CROWD)
• Interdisciplinary Bibliography on Disability in the Humanities (Part of the American Studies Crossroads Project)
• Feminism and Human Rights, Global Feminism
• World Wide Web Review: Websites on Women and Human Rights
• International Gender Studies Resources (U.C. Berkeley)
• Global Feminisms Research Resources (Vassar Library)
• Global Feminism (Feminist Majority Foundation)
• NOW and Global Feminism
• United Nations Development Fund for Women
• Global Issues Resources
• Sisterhood is Global Institute (SIGI)
• Feminism and Race/Ethnicity
• General Resources
• WMST-L discussion on “Women of Color and the Women’s Movement” (5 Parts) Sept/Oct 2000)
• Women of Color Resources (Princeton U. Library)
• Core Readings in Women's Studies: Women of Color (Assn. of College and Research Libraries, WS Section)
• Women of Color Resource Sites
• African-American/Black Feminisms and Womanism
• African-American/Black/Womanist Feminism on the Web
• Black Feminist and Womanist Identity Bibliography (Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library)
• The Womanist Studies Consortium (Univ. of Georgia)
• Black Feminist/Womanist Works: A Beginning List (WMST-L)
• African-American Women Online Archival Collection (Duke U.)
• Asian-American and Asian Feminisms
• Asian American Feminism (Feminist Theory Website)
• Asian-American Women Bibliography (Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe)
• American Women's History: A Research Guide (Asian-American Women)
• South Asian Women's Studies Bibliography (U.C. Berkeley)
• Journal of South Asia Women's Studies
• Chicana/Latina Feminisms
• Bibliography on Chicana Feminism (Cal State, Long Beach Library)
• Making Face, Making Soul: A Chicana Feminist Website
• Defining Chicana Feminisms, In Their Own Words
• CLNet's Chicana Studies Homepage (UCLA)
• Chicana Related Bibliographies (CLNet)
• American Indian, Native, Indigenous Feminisms
• Native American Feminism (Feminist Theory Website)
• Bibliography on American Indian Gender Roles and Relations
• Bibliography on American Indian Feminism
• Bibliography on American Indian Gay/Lesbian Topics
• Links on Aboriginal Women and Feminism
• Feminism, Sex, and Sexuality
• 1970's Lesbian Feminism (Ohio State Univ., Women's Studies)
• The Lesbian History Project
• History of Sexuality Resources (Duke Special Collections)
• Lesbian Studies Bibliography (Assn. of College and Research Libraries)
• Lesbian Feminism/Lesbian Philosophy
• Society for Lesbian and Gay Philosophy Internet Resources
• QueerTheory.com
• World Wide Web Review: Webs of Transgender

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Feminism: An Essay

Feminism: An Essay

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on April 27, 2016 • ( 6 )

Feminism as a movement gained potential in the twentieth century, marking the culmination of two centuries’ struggle for cultural roles and socio-political rights — a struggle which first found its expression in Mary Wollstonecraft ‘s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). The movement gained increasing prominence across three phases/waves — the first wave (political), the second wave (cultural) and the third wave (academic). Incidentally Toril Moi also classifies the feminist movement into three phases — the female (biological), the feminist (political) and the feminine (cultural).

The first wave of feminism, in the 19th and 20th centuries, began in the US and the UK as a struggle for equality and property rights for women, by suffrage groups and activist organisations. These feminists fought against chattel marriages and for polit ical and economic equality. An important text of the first wave is Virginia Woolf ‘s A Room of One’s Own (1929), which asserted the importance of woman’s independence, and through the character Judith (Shakespeare’s fictional sister), explicated how the patriarchal society prevented women from realising their creative potential. Woolf also inaugurated the debate of language being gendered — an issue which was later dealt by Dale Spender who wrote Man Made Language (1981), Helene Cixous , who introduced ecriture feminine (in The Laugh of the Medusa ) and Julia Kristeva , who distinguished between the symbolic and the semiotic language.

The second wave of feminism in the 1960s and ’70s, was characterized by a critique of patriarchy in constructing the cultural identity of woman. Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949) famously stated, “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman” – a statement that highlights the fact that women have always been defined as the “Other”, the lacking, the negative, on whom Freud attributed “ penis-envy .” A prominent motto of this phase, “The Personal is the political” was the result of the awareness .of the false distinction between women’s domestic and men’s public spheres. Transcending their domestic and personal spaces, women began to venture into the hitherto male dominated terrains of career and public life. Marking its entry into the academic realm, the presence of feminism was reflected in journals, publishing houses and academic disciplines.

Mary Ellmann ‘s Thinking about Women (1968), Kate Millett ‘s Sexual Politics (1969), Betty Friedan ‘s The Feminine Mystique (1963) and so on mark the major works of the phase. Millett’s work specifically depicts how western social institutions work as covert ways of manipulating power, and how this permeates into literature, philosophy etc. She undertakes a thorough critical understanding of the portrayal of women in the works of male authors like DH Lawrence, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller and Jean Genet.

In the third wave (post 1980), Feminism has been actively involved in academics with its interdisciplinary associations with Marxism , Psychoanalysis and Poststructuralism , dealing with issues such as language, writing, sexuality, representation etc. It also has associations with alternate sexualities, postcolonialism ( Linda Hutcheon and Spivak ) and Ecological Studies ( Vandana Shiva )

Elaine Showalter , in her “ Towards a Feminist Poetics ” introduces the concept of gynocriticism , a criticism of gynotexts, by women who are not passive consumers but active producers of meaning. The gynocritics construct a female framework for the analysis of women’s literature, and focus on female subjectivity, language and literary career. Patricia Spacks ‘ The Female Imagination , Showalter’s A Literature of their Own , Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar ‘s The Mad Woman in the Attic are major gynocritical texts.

The present day feminism in its diverse and various forms, such as liberal feminism, cultural/ radical feminism, black feminism/womanism, materialist/neo-marxist feminism, continues its struggle for a better world for women. Beyond literature and literary theory, Feminism also found radical expression in arts, painting ( Kiki Smith , Barbara Kruger ), architecture( Sophia Hayden the architect of Woman’s Building ) and sculpture (Kate Mllett’s Naked Lady).

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Tags: A Literature of their Own , A Room of One's Own , Barbara Kruger , Betty Friedan , Dale Spender , ecriture feminine , Elaine Showalter , Feminism , Gynocriticism , Helene Cixous , http://bookzz.org/s/?q=Kate+Millett&yearFrom=&yearTo=&language=&extension=&t=0 , Judith Shakespeare , Julia Kristeva , Kate Millett , Kiki Smith , Literary Criticism , Literary Theory , Man Made Language , Mary Ellmann , Mary Wollstonecraft , Patricia Spacks , Sandra Gilbert , Simone de Beauvoir , Sophia Hayden , Susan Gubar , The Female Imagination , The Feminine Mystique , The Laugh of the Medusa , The Mad Woman in the Attic , The Second Sex , Toril Moi , Towards a Feminist Poetics , Vandana Shiva , Vindication of the Rights of Woman

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ACADEMIC ESSAY: The Social Movement of Feminism

The fundamental nuts and bolts of Feminism is a concept or a belief that focuses on how women should be allowed to get the same rights as men. This social movement pursues equality for women. The Feminism, social and political movement rallied round and transformed the lives of many individual women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the Western world. In Britain, and this is where it started in 1866, women who were in full time occupation, because of the industrial revolution, had got the fortuitous chance to discuss in a highly organised groups about the their social issues within the British society as well as their political rights.

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Feminism is an ideology which seeks not only to understand the world but to change it to the advantages of women. It aims at defining, establishing and defending equal political, economic and social rights for women. Feminism focuses on the marginalisation of women and how they are being relegated to a secondary position. Most feminists believe that our culture is a patriarchal culture and it is organised in favour of the interests of men. Feminist literary critics try to explain how power imbalances due to gender in a given culture are reflected in or challenged by literary texts. Feminism is a movement for the empowerment of women. It is a social movement which redresses the gender imbalance in society. Aim of the Study The aim of the study is to find a connection between women empowerment and the movement of feminism. Being popularised in the early twentieth century, feminism struggles for securing women"s suffrage and the later socio-political movement for women"s eman...

Senanur Güvercinoğlu

Research Question: What special, economic and historical conditions led to feminism movement in the world? Give specific examples from specific societies and periods. Throughout the history of humanity, the physiological and biological differences between women and men have led to men and women gaining different roles in society, although they are not officially aware of society. For example, while women are expected to do household chores and take care of children, it is expected that men will work in various jobs and make money. But as time progresses and technology evolves, the impact of biological and physiological differences between women and men on the efficiency of jobs is reduced as societies become more prosperous. Men and women who are aware of this, women should be more prominent in social life, as well as women and men should have equal rights, otherwise, they argue that it is unfair for women. This way of thinking, which argued that women should have equal rights with men, began to form under the concept of feminism. Of course, the reasons that were effective in the formation of feminism were not only this idea but also many historical, economic and social reasons caused the concept of the feminism movement. The main reasons that led to the formation of the feminist movement are that women begin their search for identity as a result of the economic and social relief that occurs after the Second World War, especially in the United States and the United Kingdom. In order to find answers to the questions and problems of women in this quest and to change the image of women in society, some of the reasons that caused the feminism movement to start. Although the emergence of the movement of feminism differs in all countries, the problems of women in the emergence of this movement and the problems of inequality between women and men were common.

Gulce Ozkan

Academia.edu

Julius J U L I U S Ngu Samdong

Feminism as the name indicates is a feminine issue which has being on the day to day discussed in the international scene. This movement generated from a lot of bend down grudges coming from the female gender over time and space relating to the kind of treatment they face in the society from the opposite sex either in the social domain, political or economic domain they have posed their enormous grievances in all of the above mention domains. Note should however be taken that as a woman movement it has gone across international boundaries seeking to create influence in the world at large and to a greater extend it has built good foundations to fight for the rights of women. One of the first and most dedicated feminist was Mary Wollstonecraft from the United Kingdom who wrote her book the "vindication of the rights of women" in which she immensely argued for the right of a girl child or women to education in 1792. This study therefore seeks to investigate the different waves starting from the background feminism and moving forward to the feminist movement in the world with specificity on the United States of America and United Kingdom. Not forgetting to take a look at the impacts of this movement to the feminist society in the above mention nations both in Europe and in the US.

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277 Feminism Topics & Women’s Rights Essay Topics

• Icon Calendar 18 May 2024
• Icon Page 2272 words
• Icon Clock 11 min read

Feminism topics encompass a comprehensive range of themes centered on advocating for gender equality. These themes critically address the social, political, and economic injustices primarily faced by females, aiming to dismantle patriarchal norms. Feminism topics may span from intersectional feminism, which underscores the diverse experiences of women across various intersections of race, class, and sexuality, to reproductive rights that advocate for women’s bodily autonomy and healthcare accessibility. They also involve the examination of workplace discrimination through concepts, such as the gender wage gap and the glass ceiling. Violence against women, including work and domestic abuse, sexual assault, and harassment, is a hot aspect, providing many discussions. In turn, one may explore the representation of women in media, politics, and STEM fields. Explorations of gender roles, gender identity, and the significance of male feminism are integral parts of these discussions. As society continues to evolve, feminism topics persistently adapt to confront and address emerging forms of gender inequality.

Best Feminism & Women’s Rights Topics

• Achievements of Women in Politics: A Global Perspective
• Emphasizing Gender Equality in the 21st-Century Workplace
• Evolving Representation of Women in Media
• Fight for Women’s Voting Rights: The Historical Analysis
• Intersectionality: Examining its Role in Feminism
• Unpacking Feminism in Third-World Countries
• Dissecting Misogyny in Classical Literature
• Influence of Religion on Women’s Rights Worldwide
• Unveiling Bias in STEM Fields: Female Experiences
• Gender Pay Gap: Global Comparisons and Solutions
• Probing the Historical Evolution of Feminism
• Reshaping Beauty Standards Through Feminist Discourse
• Importance of Reproductive Rights in Women’s Health
• Exploring Women’s Role in Environmental Activism
• Glass Ceiling Phenomenon: Women in Corporate Leadership
• Trans Women’s Struggles in Feminist Movements
• Empowering Girls: The Role of Education
• Intersection of Race, Class, and Feminism
• Effects of Feminism on Modern Art
• Impacts of Social Media on Women’s Rights Movements
• Deconstructing Patriarchy in Traditional Societies
• Single Mothers’ Challenges: A Feminist Perspective
• Dynamics of Feminism in Post-Colonial Societies
• Queer Women’s Struggles for Recognition and Rights
• Women’s Contributions to Scientific Discovery: An Underrated History
• Cybersecurity: Ensuring Women’s Safety in the Digital Age
• Exploring the Misrepresentation of Feminism in Popular Culture
• Repositioning Sexuality: The Role of Feminism in Health Discourse
• Women’s Economic Empowerment: The Impact of Microfinance
• Investigating Sexism in Video Gaming Industry
• Female Leadership During Global Crises: Case Studies

Easy Feminism & Women’s Rights Topics

• Power of Women’s Protest: A Historical Study
• Feminist Movements’ Role in Shaping Public Policy
• Body Autonomy: A Key Aspect of Feminist Ideology
• Cyber Feminism: Women’s Rights in Digital Spaces
• Violence Against Women: International Legal Measures
• Feminist Pedagogy: Its Impact on Education
• Depiction of Women in Graphic Novels: A Feminist Lens
• Comparing Western and Eastern Feminist Movements
• Men’s Roles in Supporting Feminist Movements
• Impacts of Feminism on Marriage Institutions
• Rural Women’s Rights: Challenges and Progress
• Understanding Feminist Waves: From First to Fourth
• Inclusion of Women in Peace Negotiation Processes
• Influence of Feminism on Modern Advertising
• Indigenous Women’s Movements and Rights
• Reclaiming Public Spaces: Women’s Safety Concerns
• Roles of Feminist Literature in Social Change
• Women in Sports: Overcoming Stereotypes and Bias
• Feminism in the Context of Refugee Rights
• Media’s Roles in Shaping Feminist Narratives
• Women’s Rights in Prisons: An Overlooked Issue
• Motherhood Myths: A Feminist Examination
• Subverting the Male Gaze in Film and Television
• Feminist Critique of Traditional Masculinity Norms
• Rise of Female Entrepreneurship: A Feminist View
• Young Feminists: Shaping the Future of Women’s Rights

Interesting Feminism & Women’s Rights Topics

• Roles of Feminism in Promoting Mental Health Awareness
• Aging and Women’s Rights: An Overlooked Dimension
• Feminist Perspectives on Climate Change Impacts
• Women’s Rights in Military Service: Progress and Challenges
• Achieving Gender Parity in Academic Publishing
• Feminist Jurisprudence: Its Impact on Legal Structures
• Masculinity in Crisis: Understanding the Feminist Perspective
• Fashion Industry’s Evolution through Feminist Ideals
• Unheard Stories: Women in the Global Space Race
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• Women’s Land Rights: A Global Issue
• Intersection of Feminism and Disability Rights
• Portrayal of Women in Science Fiction: A Feminist Review
• Analyzing Post-Feminism: Its Origins and Implications
• Cyberbullying and Its Impact on Women: Measures for Protection
• Unveiling Gender Bias in Artificial Intelligence
• Reimagining Domestic Work Through the Lens of Feminism
• Black Women’s Hair Politics: A Feminist Perspective
• Feminist Ethical Considerations in Biomedical Research
• Promoting Gender Sensitivity in Children’s Literature
• Understanding the Phenomenon of Toxic Femininity
• Reconsidering Women’s Rights in the Context of Climate Migration
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Feminism Argumentative Essay Topics

• Intersectionality’s Impact on Modern Feminism
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• Gender Wage Gap: Myths and Realities
• Workplace Discrimination: Tackling Unconscious Bias
• Feminist Theory’s Influence on Contemporary Art
• Intersection of Feminism and Environmental Activism
• Men’s Roles in the Feminist Movement
• Objectification in Media: A Feminist Perspective
• Misconceptions about Feminism: Addressing Stereotypes
• Feminism in the Classroom: The Role of Education
• Feminist Analysis of Reproductive Rights Policies
• Transgender Rights: An Extension of Feminism
• Intersection of Feminism and Racial Justice
• Body Shaming Culture: A Feminist Viewpoint
• Feminism’s Influence on Modern Advertising
• Patriarchy and Religion: A Feminist Critique
• Domestic Labor: Feminist Perspectives on Unpaid Work
• Sexism in Sports: The Need for Feminist Intervention
• The MeToo Movement’s Influence on Modern Feminism
• Feminism and the Fight for Equal Representation in Politics
• Women’s Rights in the Digital Age: A Feminist Examination
• Feminist Critique of Traditional Beauty Standards
• Globalization and Its Effects on Women’s Rights
• The Role of Feminism in LGBTQ+ Rights Advocacy
• Popular Culture and Its Reflection on Feminist Values

Controversial Feminist Research Paper Topics

• Intersectionality in Modern Feminist Movements: An Analysis
• Representation of Women in High-Powered Political Roles
• Cultural Appropriation Within the Feminist Movement: An Inquiry
• The Role of Feminism in Defining Beauty Standards
• Women’s Reproductive Rights: A Debate of Autonomy
• Feminism and Religion: The Question of Compatibility
• Male Allies in the Feminist Movement: An Evaluation
• Shift in Traditional Gender Roles: Feminist Perspective
• Impacts of Media on Perceptions of Feminism
• Dissecting the Wage Gap: A Feminist Examination
• Menstrual Equity: A Battle for Feminist Activists
• Feminism in Popular Music: Power or Appropriation?
• Climate Change: The Unseen Feminist Issue
• Education’s Role in Shaping Feminist Beliefs
• Power Dynamics in the Workplace: A Feminist Scrutiny
• Cyber-Feminism: Harnessing Digital Spaces for Activism
• Healthcare Disparities Faced by Women: An Analysis
• Transgender Women in Feminist Discourse: An Exploration
• Feminist Perspectives on Monogamy and Polyamory
• Feminist Analysis of Modern Advertising Campaigns
• Exploring Sexism in the Film Industry through a Feminist Lens
• Debunking Myths Surrounding the Feminist Movement
• Childcare Responsibilities and Their Feminist Implications
• Women’s Sports: Evaluating Equity and Feminist Advocacy

Feminist Research Paper Topics in Feminism Studies

• Evaluating Feminist Theories: From Radical to Liberal
• Women’s Health Care: Policies and Disparities
• Maternal Mortality: A Global Women’s Rights Issue
• Uncovering Sexism in the Tech Industry
• Critique of Binary Gender Roles in Children’s Toys
• Body Positivity Movement’s Influence on Feminism
• Relevance of Feminism in the Fight Against Human Trafficking
• Women in Coding: Breaking Stereotypes
• The Role of Women in Sustainable Agriculture
• Feminism in the Cosmetics Industry: A Dual-Edged Sword
• The Influence of Feminism on Modern Architecture
• Bridging the Gap: Women in Higher Education Leadership
• The Role of Feminism in Advancing LGBTQ+ Rights
• Menstrual Equity: A Key Women’s Rights Issue
• Women in Classical Music: Breaking Barriers
• Analyzing Gendered Language: A Feminist Approach
• Women’s Rights and Humanitarian Aid: The Interconnection
• Exploring the Role of Women in Graphic Design
• Addressing the Lack of Women in Venture Capitalism
• Impact of Feminism on Urban Planning and Design
• Maternal Labor in the Informal Economy: A Feminist Analysis
• Feminism’s Influence on Modern Dance Forms
• Exploring the Role of Women in the Renewable Energy Sector
• Women in Esports: An Emerging Frontier
• Child Marriage: A Grave Violation of Women’s Rights

Feminist Topics for Discussion

• Feminist Criticism of the Fashion Modelling Industry
• Domestic Violence: Feminist Legal Responses
• Analyzing the Success of Women-Only Workspaces
• Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting: A Human Rights Issue
• Women’s Role in the Evolution of Cryptocurrency
• Women and the Right to Water: A Feminist Perspective
• Gender Stereotypes in Comedy: A Feminist View
• Intersection of Animal Rights and Feminist Theory
• Roles of Feminism in the Fight Against Child Labor
• Representation of Women in Folklore and Mythology
• Women’s Rights in the Gig Economy: Issues and Solutions
• Revisiting Feminism in Post-Soviet Countries
• Women in the Space Industry: Present Status and Future Trends
• The Influence of Feminism on Culinary Arts
• Unraveling the Impact of Fast Fashion on Women Workers
• Feminist Perspectives on Genetic Engineering and Reproduction
• Assessing the Progress of Women’s Financial Literacy
• Sex Work and Feminism: A Controversial Discourse
• Women in Cybernetics: An Untapped Potential
• Uncovering the Women Behind Major Historical Events
• The Impact of the #MeToo Movement Globally
• Women’s Rights in the Cannabis Industry: Challenges and Progress
• Redefining Motherhood: The Intersection of Feminism and Adoption
• Roles of Feminist Movements in Combatting Child Abuse

Women’s Rights Essay Topics for Feminism

• Evolution of Women’s Rights in the 20th Century
• Roles of Women in World War II: Catalyst for Change
• Suffrage Movement: Driving Force Behind Women’s Empowerment
• Cultural Differences in Women’s Rights: A Comparative Study
• Feminist Movements and Their Global Impact
• Women’s Rights in Islamic Societies: Perceptions and Realities
• Glass Ceiling Phenomenon: Analysis and Impacts
• Pioneering Women in Science: Trailblazers for Equality
• Impacts of Media Portrayal on Women’s Rights
• Economic Autonomy for Women: Pathway to Empowerment
• Women’s Rights in Education: Global Perspective
• Gender Equality in Politics: Global Progress
• Intersectionality and Women’s Rights: Race, Class, and Gender
• Legal Milestones in Women’s Rights History
• Inequities in Healthcare: A Women’s Rights Issue
• Modern-Day Slavery: Women and Human Trafficking
• Climate Change: A Unique Threat to Women’s Rights
• Body Autonomy and Reproductive Rights: A Feminist Analysis
• Globalization’s Effect on Women’s Rights: Opportunities and Threats
• Gender Violence: An Erosion of Women’s Rights
• Indigenous Women’s Rights: Struggles and Triumphs
• Women’s Rights Activists: Unsung Heroes of History
• Empowerment Through Sports: Women’s Struggle and Success
• Balancing Act: Motherhood and Career in the 21st Century
• LGBTQ+ Women: Rights and Recognition in Different Societies

Women’s Rights Research Questions

• Evolution of Feminism: How Has the Movement Shifted Over Time?
• The Workplace and Gender Equality: How Effective Are Current Measures?
• Intersectionality’s Influence: How Does It Shape Women’s Rights Advocacy?
• Reproductive Rights: What Is the Global Impact on Women’s Health?
• Media Representation: Does It Affect Women’s Rights Perception?
• Gender Stereotypes: How Do They Impede Women’s Empowerment?
• Global Disparities: Why Do Women’s Rights Vary So Widely?
• Maternal Mortality: How Does It Reflect on Women’s Healthcare Rights?
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• Leadership Roles: Are Women Adequately Represented in Positions of Power?
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• Roles of Technology: How Does It Impact Women’s Rights?
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• Politics and Gender: How Does Women’s Representation Shape Policy-Making?
• Child Marriage: How Does It Violate Girls’ Rights?
• Climate Change: How Does It Disproportionately Affect Women?
• Trafficking Scourge: How Can Women’s Rights Combat This Issue?
• Female Genital Mutilation: How Does It Contradict Women’s Rights?
• Armed Conflicts: How Do They Impact Women’s Rights?
• Body Autonomy: How Can It Be Safeguarded for Women?
• Women’s Suffrage: How Did It Pave the Way for Modern Women’s Rights?
• Men’s Role: How Can They Contribute to Women’s Rights Advocacy?
• Legal Frameworks: How Do They Support or Hinder Women’s Rights?

History of Women’s Rights Topics

• Emergence of Feminism in the 19th Century
• Roles of Women in the Abolitionist Movement
• Suffragette Movements: Triumphs and Challenges
• Eleanor Roosevelt and Her Advocacy for Women’s Rights
• Impacts of World War II on Women’s Liberation
• Radical Feminism in the 1960s and 1970s
• Pioneering Women in Politics: The First Female Senators
• Inception of the Equal Rights Amendment
• Revolutionary Women’s Health Activism
• Struggle for Reproductive Freedom: Roe vs. Wade
• Birth of the Women’s Liberation Movement
• Challenges Women Faced in the Civil Rights Movement
• Women’s Roles in the Trade Union Movement
• Intersectionality and Feminism: Examining the Role of Women of Color
• How Did the Women’s Rights Movement Impact Education?
• Sexuality, Identity, and Feminism: Stonewall Riots’ Impact
• Influence of Religion on Women’s Rights Activism
• Women’s Empowerment: The UN Conferences
• Impact of Globalization on Women’s Rights
• Women’s Movements in Non-Western Countries
• Women in Space: The Fight for Equality in NASA
• Achievements of Feminist Literature and Arts
• Evolution of the Women’s Sports Movement
• Advancement of Women’s Rights in the Digital Age
• Cultural Shifts: The Media’s Role in Promoting Women’s Rights

Feminism Essay Topics on Women’s Issues

• Career Challenges: The Gender Wage Gap in Contemporary Society
• Examining Microfinance: An Empowering Tool for Women in Developing Countries
• Pioneers of Change: The Role of Women in the Space Industry
• Exploring Beauty Standards: An Analysis of Global Perspectives
• Impacts of Legislation: Progress in Women’s Health Policies
• Maternity Leave Policies: A Comparative Study of Different Countries
• Resilience Through Struggles: The Plight of Female Refugees
• Technology’s Influence: Addressing the Digital Gender Divide
• Dissecting Stereotypes: Gender Roles in Children’s Media
• Influence of Female Leaders: A Look at Political Empowerment
• Social Media and Women: Effects on Mental Health
• Understanding Intersectionality: The Complexity of Women’s Rights
• Single Mothers: Balancing Parenthood and Economic Challenges
• Gaining Ground in Sports: A Look at Female Athletes’ Struggles
• Maternal Mortality: The Hidden Health Crisis
• Reproductive Rights: Women’s Control Over Their Bodies
• Feminism in Literature: Portrayal of Women in Classic Novels
• Deconstructing Patriarchy: The Impact of Gender Inequality
• Body Autonomy: The Battle for Abortion Rights
• Women in STEM: Barriers and Breakthroughs
• Female Soldiers: Their Role in Military Conflicts
• Human Trafficking: The Disproportionate Impact on Women
• Silent Victims: Domestic Violence and Women’s Health

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Social Justice Feminism

U of Cincinnati Public Law Research Paper No. 08-14

UCLA Women's Law Journal, Vol. 18, p. 131, 2010

61 Pages Posted: 24 Mar 2008 Last revised: 1 Aug 2014

Verna L. Williams

University of Cincinnati - College of Law

Kristin Kalsem

For the past three years, women leaders from national groups, grassroots organizations, academia and beyond have gathered to address dissonance in the women's movement, particularly dissatisfaction with the movement's emphasis on women privileged on account of their race, class, or sexuality. At these meetings of the New Women's Movement Initiative (NWMI), advocates who no longer want to do feminism have articulated a desire for social justice feminism. This article analyzes what such a shift might mean for feminist practice and legal theory. Drawing on history, specifically the work of the women behind the Brandeis brief in the Muller v. Oregon workers' hours' restriction case and the National Women's Conference of 1977, this article takes initial steps at broadly defining social justice feminism as that which is productive, constructive, and healing. Moving from practice to theory, it suggests a new way of articulating and understanding the feminist work that is being done in this current stage of feminist jurisprudence, after the path-breaking interventions of anti-essentialism and intersectionality. This article also sets forth certain methodological tools for doing social justice feminism and then uses them to examine the recent Supreme Court case, Long Island Care at Home v. Coke, a case upholding the lack of wage protections for certain domestic workers. With this article, we hope to advance the conversation that has already begun, both in the world of practice as evidenced by the work of the NWMI, as well as the world of feminist legal theory. Social justice brings to feminism a particular emphasis on fairness and transformation; it is a modification that signals change. At this critical time, with efforts to exacerbate the divides of race and gender, social justice feminism provides a new paradigm for talking about and examining these and other issues that threaten movements dedicated to dismantling oppression and bettering people's lives.

Keywords: Social justice feminism, oppression, Women's Legal History, Intersectionality, Race, Feminist Legal Theory, Women's Movement, Employment Discrimination, Race and Sex Discrimination, Feminist Jurisprudence, Civil Rights,

JEL Classification: J70, J71

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Verna L. Williams (Contact Author)

University of cincinnati - college of law ( email ).

P.O. Box 210040 Cincinnati, OH 45221-0040 United States 513-556-1220 (Phone) 513-556-1236 (Fax)

P.O. Box 210040 Clifton Avenue and Calhoun Street Cincinnati, OH 45221-0040 United States 513-556-0866 (Phone) 513-556-0163 (Fax)

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Article Contents

Introduction, the battle over intersectionality, constitutive controversies, methodology, constructing the feminist sector as intersectionality’s pathfinder, white feminism and trans rights, conclusions, acknowledgments.

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“Diversity Within”: The Problems with “Intersectional” White Feminism in Practice

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Ashlee Christoffersen, Akwugo Emejulu, “Diversity Within”: The Problems with “Intersectional” White Feminism in Practice, Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society , Volume 30, Issue 2, Summer 2023, Pages 630–653, https://doi.org/10.1093/sp/jxac044

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In intersectionality studies, debates about the additive versus constitutive nature of intersectionality are long-established. This article attempts to intervene in these conversations by examining how additive, “diversity within” intersectionality works in practice. Across feminist academia, advocacy, and policymaking, there is a widely held perception that among the nongovernmental organizations constituted around identity-based inequalities (feminist, racial justice, migrants, disability, and LGBTQI+ rights), it is the feminist sector that best advocates for and attempts to practice intersectionality. This is related to the appropriation of Black feminist theories of intersectionality which emerged from grassroots activism and Critical Race scholarship as “feminist” theory, wherein feminist is always-already constructed as white. Drawing on empirical research with equality organizations working with disabled women and trans women in England and Scotland, this article suggests that the opposite is true: the additive intersectionality practiced by the white-led feminist sector serves to uphold white supremacy and other structural inequalities.

Intersectionality is the term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw for Black women’s theorizing of the social world’s foundational organizing logics of white supremacy—a global, social, political, economic, and cultural system which privileges whiteness, gendered racism, and racialized sexism ( Collins 1990 ; Crenshaw 1989 , 1991 ). Although most often associated with Black American feminist theory, intersectionality has a long tradition in Black British feminism ( Amos et al. 1984 ; Bryan, Dadzie, and Scafe 2018 ; Mirza 1997 ) and Afropean feminism ( Emejulu and Sobande 2019 ; Florvil 2020 ; Optiz, Oguntoye, and Schultz 1991 ; Wekker 2016 ). Intersectionality is the understanding that social inequalities are interdependent and indivisible from one another: “race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, ability, and age operate not as unitary, mutually exclusive entities, but rather as reciprocally constructing phenomena” ( Collins 2015 , 2).

Crenshaw employs intersectionality to describe the ways that Black women’s experiences and identities are marginalized by practices that treat race and gender as mutually exclusive categories not only in anti-discrimination law but also in feminist and anti-racist movements. As the classic essay collection edited by Hull, Bell-Scott, and Smith (2015  [1980]) succinctly put it, “All the women are white, all the Blacks are men—but some of us are brave.” When race and gender are conceptualized as separate and independent from each other there is a tendency for the most powerful members of marginalized groups, in this case, white women and Black men—to universalize themselves and their particular experiences and position themselves as the only legitimate representatives of the group as a whole.

There is a long-running debate among intersectionality scholars on what precisely intersectionality is ( Hancock 2007 , 2013 ; Jordan-Zachery 2007 ; Lutz 2015 ; May 2015 ; Collins 2019 ), as well as what it means . If intersectionality is disputed by academics, then what does it mean to those seeking to practice intersectionality in nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)? How do definitions among practitioners relate to academic debates? How does what intersectionality is understood to mean relate to how it is applied? Our article examines how additive, what we call “diversity within,” intersectionality works in practice. Although rather unwieldy, we use “diversity within” to foreground how some practitioners in our study described the ways that they applied intersectionality. For these practitioners, addressing “diversity,” a term ubiquitously and often uncritically mobilized in the UK policy context (see Ahmed 2012 ), means acknowledging differences (e.g. of ethnicity, disability) within a predefined social group (i.e. women), and seeking to include those who have been excluded from their organization’s activities and services.

In feminist academia, advocacy, and policymaking, there is often an assumption that among the single-issue NGO sectors organized around identity-based inequalities (disability rights, feminist, LGBTQI+ rights, racial justice, migrants’ rights), it is the feminist sector that is the pathfinder that best advocates for and innovates in its practice of intersectionality (e.g. Evans 2015 , 2016 ; see also Bassel and Emejulu 2017a , 2017b ). Below we provide examples of this assumption being made by senior equality policymakers as well as women’s sector practitioners and directors in both England and Scotland. We argue that this erroneous assumption is the result of the appropriation of Black feminist theories of intersectionality emerging from Critical Race scholarship as “feminist” theory, wherein feminist is always-already constructed as white ( Alexander-Floyd 2012 ; Bilge 2013 ; Emejulu 2022 ; Lewis 2013 ; Tomlinson 2013 ). A majority of research on intersectionality and social movements which centers a particular identity-based sector focuses on white-dominated feminist organizations and movements (e.g. Boucher 2018 ; English 2019 , 2020 ; Evans 2015 , 2016 ; Laperriere and Lépinard 2016 ; Lépinard 2014 ; with exceptions including Tungohan 2015 ; Terriquez et al. 2018 ). This focus reflects intersectionality’s powerful academic appropriation as white “feminist” theory ( Davis 2008 ), particularly in Europe where race is disavowed and intersectionality is often mobilized to strategically erase race, racism, and white supremacy ( Emejulu and van der Scheer 2021 ; Lewis 2013 ). Feminist NGO advocates consider themselves to be the intersectionality experts—and thus legitimate “representatives” of women experiencing intersecting inequalities—a view echoed among gender equality policymakers, as will be evidenced through our empirical data below. Meanwhile among policymakers internationally, when it has been mobilized, intersectionality has been appropriated by “gender mainstreaming” technocrats (see e.g. Christoffersen 2022a on European policy; Hunting and Hankivsky 2020 for a critique; Lombardo and Agustín 2016 ), who engage exclusively with white-dominated feminist NGOs. Based on our research with equality organizations in England and Scotland, this article offers a counter-narrative. Instead, we argue that though the feminist NGO sector claims to be the only one really doing intersectionality, the particular way that intersectionality is being practiced by the single-issue white-led feminist sector serves, far from furthering intersectional justice, to uphold white supremacy and other structural inequalities. This is demonstrated through empirical examples concerning projects targeted toward disabled women, and perceptions and conflicts regarding trans rights. 1 We share these examples because issues of disability and trans rights formed the foci of discussions of intersectionality in the women’s sector—to the exclusion of discussion of racism.

We begin this article by first reviewing some of the key debates within intersectionality studies, particularly in relation to additive and constitutive approaches. We first discuss the additive ways that these practitioners understand how to apply intersectionality, an approach that reinforces white supremacy and other structural inequalities. We then provide examples of how additive approaches work in practice through discussion of organizing around disability and trans rights. Ultimately, diversity within intersectionality is “non-performative” ( Ahmed 2006 ; Nash 2019 ); in other words, it is an empty gesture that reaffirms white supremacy within these organizations. While much attention has been given to how single-issue women’s organizations can become more representative of marginalized women experiencing intersecting inequalities (e.g. Strolovitch 2007 ), we suggest alternative paths forward.

Intersectionality is a contested term ( Collins and Bilge 2016 ; Hancock 2016 ; May 2015 ), and authors have suggested conceiving it as a field of study rather than as simply a theory ( Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall 2013 ; Hancock 2016 ). Yet core to its meaning is that systems of inequality, including capitalism/class, sexism, racism and white supremacy, heterosexism, cisgenderism, ableism, and borders, constitute one another, meaning that they construct one another and interact to create institutions and differential social positions ( Bassel and Emejulu 2010 ; Collins 1990 ; Crenshaw 1989 , 1991 ; May 2015 ; Yuval-Davis 2006 ). Social institutions and positions are therefore shaped by multiple, mutually constituting, divisions operating simultaneously. Applying intersectionality, in both theory and practice, therefore means engagement with the interrelationship of these systems of inequality. This engagement is in turn predicated on acknowledgment of and reckoning with the ontology of each of these structures themselves.

As we and others argue, social divisions and identities cannot be separated from one another because they are mutually constituting, so that, for example, there is little analytical value in discussing “women” generically, but only particular categories of women, wherein gender is constituted by other elements, resulting in a specific inhabiting and experience of gender which is qualitatively different to others ( Collins 1990 ; Crenshaw 1989 , 1991 ). Yet intersectionality emerges from a feminist context where “woman” is always-already constructed as white ( Davis 1983 ; Lewis 2017 ), one where the figure of the Black woman has been discursively and materially degendered through slavery and its afterlife, and in its wake ( Hartman 2008 ; Sharpe 2016 ; Spillers 1987 ). Although not named as such, intersectionality has been a constitutive element of Black women’s politics since the colonial encounter. Understanding how race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, and legal status interact in ways that advantage some groups and disadvantage others has formed the basis of Black women’s politics for centuries ( Collins 1990 ; Emejulu 2022 ).

While we see a constitutive definition of intersectionality as integral to it, others advocate additive definitions: a strand of white feminist academic thought employs particular definitions of intersectionality suggesting that inequalities can be separated from one another. This is exemplified by Walby, Armstrong, and Strid (2012a, 2012b ), who seek to arbitrate a new legitimate meaning of intersectionality. As social scientists historically mainly concerned with gender and class, they argue for a conception of the relationship between inequalities as “mutually shaping” rather than mutually constitutive: “which suggests that while the effects of one inequality on other inequalities may be discerned, the separate systems of inequality remain” ( Walby, Armstrong, and Strid 2012a , 453), because “the recognition of the differences between the ontologies of inequalities is necessary in order to [analyze] … practices that have been important in developing appropriate measures to tackle inequalities” ( Walby, Armstrong, and Strid 2012a , 474). A “mutual shaping” approach would seem to justify a continued focus on gender alone, without meaningful engagement with the ontologies of other inequality structures, nor how gender both constructs and is always constructed by them. For Walby et al., mutual shaping “acknowledges the way that systems of social relations change each other at the point of intersection, but do not become something totally different” ( Walby, Armstrong, and Strid 2012b , 235). This contradicts what many Black feminists have argued are systems of social relations that together produce social institutions and positions that are qualitatively different from those produced by one system of social relations alone ( Crenshaw 1991 ). The “mutual shaping” model offered represents an additive approach to intersectionality, in that it suggests that inequalities can be separated from one another; the idea that they change one another only at the “point of intersection” ( Walby, Armstrong, and Strid 2012b , 235) suggests the existence of a point at which there is no intersection. While few authors are explicit in their employment of a “mutually shaping” rather than “mutually constitutive” approach, it is apparent in many white feminist treatments of intersectionality which discuss it as “gender plus” and only in relation to gender, women, women’s studies, and feminism ( Alexander-Floyd 2012 ; Bilge 2013 ; Lewis 2017 ).

Other scholars have not seen recognition of differing ontologies and a conceptualization of inequalities as mutually constitutive as being contradictory from one another: “although discourses of race, gender, class, etc. have their own ontological bases which cannot be reduced to each other, there is no separate concrete meaning of any facet of these social categories, as they are mutually constitutive in any concrete historical moment ” ( Yuval-Davis 2013 , 7; emphasis added). “Mutual shaping” forgoes what is considered a key tenet of intersectionality by many of its theorists, i.e. mutual constitution/construction (e.g. Crenshaw 1989 , 1991 ; Collins 1990 ).

As white feminist engagement with intersectionality increases, the body of literature that is critical of the way that white feminists apply intersectionality in both theory and practice is correspondingly growing (e.g. Alexander-Floyd 2012 ; Bilge 2013 ; Lewis 2013 ; May 2015 ; Tomlinson 2013 ). Within feminist studies, Bilge (2013) argues that “intersectionality … has been systematically depoliticized” (p. 405): “originally focused on transformative and counter-hegemonic knowledge production and radical politics of social justice, [it] has been commodified and colonized for neoliberal regimes” (p. 407). A tendency has been observed, and named, among some European thinkers “to find valuable a ‘purified’ intersectionality, quarantined from its exposure to race” ( Lewis 2013 ; Tomlinson 2013 , 266), a process Bilge calls “whitening” and observes within feminist studies and elsewhere ( Bilge 2013 ). Indeed, the focus on race within intersectionality studies has been found to be less prevalent in Europe than in the United States ( Mugge et al. 2018 ). It is important to carefully examine how intersectionality travels in a European context similarly characterized by anti-Blackness, and which disavows and displaces race ( Bassel and Emejulu 2017a ; Christoffersen 2022b ; Emejulu and van der Scheer 2021 ; Lewis 2013 ). Moreover, Black feminists theorize the ways in which Black women, “as both representation and embodied, sentient being[s]” ( Lewis 2017 , 117) are effaced, discursively and materially made absent. We therefore note the potential for invocations of intersectionality in practice—as well as in academia—to be a site of this epistemological and material erasure of Black women, as knowledge producers and actors in these social worlds ( Lewis 2017 ).

Additive approaches to intersectionality rely on essentialist ideas about what the social structure of gender is and does by ultimately refusing the idea that it exists only within always-interlocking structures of inequality. In so doing, both scholars and practitioners reconstruct gender, like the category “woman,” as always-already white, and as we will demonstrate, nondisabled and cis.

We now move onto contextualize the article within long-running grassroots contestations of white feminist conceptions of gender and womanhood from Black women and women experiencing intersecting inequalities.

We are in the middle of a tumultuous period in which key categories of identification and enactments of power relations through gender are being contested and reconfigured. The bitter debate about what womanhood is, how it is constituted and performed has upended Scottish and English feminisms. To be sure, these debates are in no way new, but debates about the status of trans women in ostensibly “female only” spaces, about race and white supremacy in light of resurgent anti-racist mobilizations, and about colonial memory and decolonization processes have brought to the fore long-standing tensions within feminist politics in the United Kingdom ( Bey 2017 ; Bhambra 2014 ; Emejulu 2022 ). Transness, race, and decoloniality, for instance, force us to historicize that which has been taken for granted—gender and the gender binary—and fundamentally challenge what the conceptual basis of being a “woman” and doing “womanhood” means. This is why Black feminist theorists are so careful in framing intersectionality as mutually constitutive because once you understand that embedded in the idea of “woman” are the normative values of white, bourgeois cisheteronormativity, then the entire fiction of “woman” is exposed ( Emejulu 2022 ; Hartman 2008 ; Sharpe 2016 ; Spillers 1987 ).

Black, Asian, lesbian, queer, and disabled women have long critiqued the excluding and exclusive category of “womanhood” as practiced by mainstream feminism, or what is now more recently termed “white feminism.” Under this framework, gender is the foundation of social inequality and the only category of inequality that can unite all women in a struggle against it. It is presumed that the subject in mainstream feminism is a straight, white, middle-class, and nondisabled woman, and that this particular subject and her experiences can be universalized as the standard bearer for all women across time and space. As such, feminist political strategies are pursued on this basis of “exclusive universalism” ( Bassel and Emejulu 2017a )—from abortion rights to anti-violence against women’s work to the gender pay gap. Because these struggles have, for the most part, excluded different kinds of women and their experiences of inequality at other intersections of race, class, sexuality, disability, and legal status, English and Scottish feminisms have been fractured over these constitutive politics.

For example, the struggle for abortion rights in the 1970s and 1980s had to be expanded by the Organization of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD), the Brixton Black Women’s Group, and other radical Black and Asian activists to include a wider conception of bodily autonomy, encompassing resistance against virginity tests and forced sterilization of women of color in Britain and across the former British colonies ( Brixton Black Women’s Group 1984 ; Bryan, Dadzie, and Scafe 2018 ). Women’s bodily autonomy was not only about the fate of individual women’s bodies in terms of accessing contraception and abortion services but about how collectives of racialized bodies are captured and controlled by the bordering practices of the British state. OWAAD and other radical women of color demonstrated how sexism could not be separated from racism and the colonial relations of the British state. Imbricated in this struggle to expand the boundaries of who is included in womanhood is the longstanding lesbian and queer critique of mainstream feminism and the heteronormative assumptions embedded in much of feminist politics—particularly in relation to the sexual division of labor ( Butler 1999 ; Federici 2004 ). Lesbian, queer, and trans women expanded feminist struggles beyond the gender binary and seeking rights beyond simple equality with (white) men. Lesbian, queer, and trans feminisms expand the terrain of feminist politics by insisting on survival, visibility, desire, and transgression as foundational feminist concerns which can only be addressed when the power relations mobilized through sexuality, gender, class, and race are taken seriously ( Cohen 1997 ; Phelan 1997 ). Indeed, perhaps what is most puzzling about the current trans debate is how it echoes similar bad faith concerns about the “lavender menace” and the fear of lesbian women infiltrating “straight” women’s feminist spaces in the 1960s and 1970s ( Brownmiller 2000 ).

Disabled women challenge ideas of womanhood by politicizing impairment and illness. Rather than framing disabled bodies as broken and in need of fixing, or worse, elimination, disability feminism makes visible our disabling physical and social environments and institutions which render disabled people deviant and abnormal. Through a social model of disability and crip theory, disabled feminists challenge the stigma and invisibility of impairments, by considering how particular bodies are framed as pathological and thus consigned to disposability. Thinking about how gender, race, sexuality, and disability intersect is a direct challenge to dominant feminist approaches to bodily autonomy and caring practices in public and private spaces. Disability feminism forces us to consider how different kinds of women’s bodies operate in space and generate different kinds of politics and strategies for liberation ( Inckle 2014 ; McRuer 2006 ).

Thus, the current uproar about the presence of trans women in feminist spaces, for instance, is part of a long tradition within English and Scottish feminisms of forcing open feminist politics and spaces to not only make them more inclusive but to implode dominant approaches to feminism and womanhood, and build a new kind of intersectional politics capable of understanding and taking action on complex inequalities derived from race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, and legal status. While what is a woman is always contested, contemporary debates about trans rights, sex work, decolonization, and anti-racism, and disability rights bring this particular and latent violence in the mainstream movement to the forefront.

We will now turn to discuss our methodology and methods.

The empirical data in this article draw on Christoffersen’s Ph.D. project exploring how equality NGO practitioners in England and Scotland conceptualize and operationalize intersectionality in their work. Mixed-method qualitative case studies of intersectionality’s conceptualization and use were conducted within three networks of equality organizations in three cities in England and Scotland, from 2016 to 2018. These networks bring together racial justice, feminist, disability rights, LGBTI rights, migrants’ rights organizations, and intersectional combinations of these. The case studies were participatory and ethnographic. For one year and six months, Christoffersen attended semi-regular meetings and events of equality networks and participated in their email lists. Networks were involved in the development of research questions and design, and some participants conducted data collection and recruitment.

Within the case studies, four methods were employed: interviews; participant observation; document analysis; and a focus group conducted with one network. Equality networks (rather than solely organizations) were selected because they represent a site of dialogue and joint working where there is not necessarily a significant tradition of or space for this within the equality NGO sector and movements. This is particularly important in a context where equality seeking has predominantly been conducted in “single strand” or “siloed” ways, and where solidarity and coalition are undermined by austerity politics ( Bassel and Emejulu 2017a ). Networks of equality organizations, representing a joining up of single-issue equality areas, create opportunities for dialogue and solidarity building that might engender or further intersectional meaning and practice. Networks were selected that include different types of equality organizations, explicitly take an intersectional approach, and have a policy intermediary, representative role. Christoffersen’s background as a practitioner in the sector was key to participant recruitment. The selected networks aim broadly at cooperation to address identity-based inequality, and advance equality, and work predominantly at local level. They tend, at decision-making levels, to be composed of relatively powerful organizations in their respective sub-sectors. These organizations are predominantly “single strand” and have been established for some time. Individuals, organizations, networks, and cities are anonymized; all names used are pseudonyms.

The data shared in this article draw primarily on research with feminist organizations: in-depth, semi-structured interviews with practitioners, senior managers, and directors, participant observation, and document analysis. Data concerning projects targeted toward disabled women were gathered through analysis of documents about and produced by the projects; participant observation at a meeting concerning one of the projects; and interviews. Documents are not quoted from directly since they are anonymized. Documents were analyzed with respect to how they define intersectionality, explicitly and implicitly, and what influenced work and knowledge in this area; how intersectionality was operationalized in the context of specific activities to which the documents pertain (identified by participants as “intersectional” work, such as the projects discussed below); assumptions and implicit meanings; omissions and exclusions; and framing.

Data concerning debates about trans rights draw on participant observation at network meetings, the focus group, document analysis, and interviews across equality sub-sectors. Participant observation and the focus group provided insight into the interaction of participants/network members representing different “strands,” having divergent histories and movements that have constructed them, and different interests: the possibilities for solidarity, and the challenges and conflict involved. Analysis of these data has centrally involved “asking the other question” ( Crenshaw 1991 ; Matsuda 1991 ): for example, in research with women’s organizations, asking how are race, disability, and gender identity constructed and/or omitted here?

The English and Scottish women’s organizations included are service providers ( n  = 2) and engaged in policy advocacy ( n  = 2); one service provider is large (thirty plus staff) while the remaining organizations are small (ten staff or fewer). Six single-issue feminist organizations participated in the research (alongside network staff and twenty-three other organizations from other equality sub-sectors (Deaf, disabled, faith, LGBTI, racial justice, migrants’ rights, trans) and intersectional combinations, the latter including one disabled women’s organization, one Black and minority ethnic (BME) women’s organization and two BME women of faith organizations. Two policymakers were also interviewed. For the purposes of the project, which was predominantly concerned with practice in organizations, in terms of individual positionality the equality subsector that the participant represents is the most important characteristic to contextualize them alongside their data. This is usually synonymous with an aspect or aspects of the identity of the participant (given that equality organizations are mainly led and staffed by their target communities). All other marginalized characteristics tend to be underrepresented in specific sector organizations, and all sectors but the racial justice and migrants’ rights sectors or intersectional organizations including work on race and/or ethnicity and/or migration status are white-led and predominantly white.

We will now move on to discuss our findings. We begin by establishing how feminist NGO sector practitioners and gender equality policymakers create a narrative that the feminist sector is the beacon of intersectional practice. We then turn to analyze empirical examples demonstrating that while feminist sector practitioners position themselves as the only true arbiters of intersectionality, they practice intersectionality in such a way as to reassert white supremacy and other structural inequalities in their organizations. These examples concern projects targeted toward disabled women and perceptions and conflicts regarding trans rights, selected because most “intersectionality” projects in the sector focus on disability, rather than race, which we find noteworthy and speaks to a broader European project of erasing race and putting disability in competition with race. Further, debates surrounding trans rights were rife during the period when the research was conducted and lack of agreement in this area, e.g. on the need to develop projects targeted toward trans women on par with those targeted toward disabled women, was identified by participants as a key challenge for intersectional solidarity. In other words, these examples emerged inductively from the data collected at this particular time and place concerning how practitioners conceptualize and operationalize intersectionality.

We will first offer examples of how practitioners represent themselves and their organizations as champions of intersectionality, and then turn to examine how such representations have a direct effect on how intersectionality is defined and practiced within these organizations.

Intersectionality’s appropriation by feminist studies ( Bilge 2013 ) is mirrored in perceptions held among some feminist academics, policymakers, and advocates that among equality-seeking NGOs, the feminist sector is the beacon of intersectional practice. This problematic unexamined assumption is reflected in methodological choices: a majority of research on intersectionality in practice has focused exclusively on feminist organizations (e.g. Evans 2016 ; Lépinard, 2014 ; for critiques of this approach, see Bassel and Emejulu 2017a , 2017b ). This perception was found among both prominent gender equality policymakers and feminist sector practitioners.

Women’s sector practitioners laid claim to intersectionality: for instance, Yvonne, director of a women’s organization in Scotland, stated: “we're not just focused on the gender issue, we're focused on the gender plus issues. Until very very recently, I think we were the only ones [among the equality organizations in the city] that had that overarching equality work.” Diane, a practitioner in a women’s organization in England, represented her work in a similar way: “successful services, sustainable services are built around that holistic approach, dealing with the whole woman, not just from a BME perspective or disabled perspective or an issue about class.”

As we can see from Diane’s claim, she constructs the women’s sector as the only sector which does “holistic” approaches, while the racial justice and disability rights sectors are constructed as limited and inherently inattentive to gender and women. Autonomous organizing by and for women of color and disabled women is effaced in both examples.

The perception that the single-issue, white-dominated feminist sector is the origin and pathfinder of intersectionality was echoed by policymakers. For instance, when asked about how she had encountered intersectionality, Margaret said: “It probably came from our [NGO] sector colleagues and … in particular the [single issue] women's organizations … they started to talk about wanting to work to examine intersectionality.” While Margaret went on to name particular white-led feminist organizations, Black women’s organizations were reflected upon only when later specifically asked about: “Black women's organizations had maybe a quicker grasp on it … than the more mainstream race organizations.” The implication was that while Black women’s organizations may have had a “quicker grasp on it” than racial justice organizations, really the white women’s sector was the leader.

While women’s sector practitioners claim that their sector is the only one really doing intersectionality, we argue that these kinds of (mis)representations of the feminist sector come at the expense of thoughtful and critical understandings and applications of intersectionality. We will now examine how ostensibly feminist organizations in England and Scotland practice intersectionality and the impact this has on both disability issues and trans rights in these organizational spaces.

Nothing About Us Without Us

First, we introduce the particular way that feminist sector practitioners understand intersectionality which is central to understanding both empirical examples to follow. “Diversity within” is an applied concept of intersectionality which means addressing “intersections” within an equality strand: for example, differences among women ( Christoffersen 2021 ). Gender remains the focus and is viewed implicitly or explicitly as more important than other inequalities. While this concept of intersectionality is related to single-issue organizing, it is not determined by it. Indeed, this additive “intersectionality” was found to be the most prevalent applied concept of intersectionality among those in the women’s sector, but importantly, this was not the case for any other single-strand sector (migrants’ rights, racial justice, disabled, Deaf, LGBTQI+), nor was it true of any of the intersectional sectors included in the sample. Organizations applied intersectionality in multiple ways and some employed a constitutive understanding of intersectionality ( Christoffersen 2021 ). In terms of individual positionality, “diversity within” was associated with dominant identities—cis, straight, middle-class white women (additive intersectionality serves to further the interests of singularly disadvantaged groups).

It is important to note that participants identified that additive intersectionality was conveyed to them and reproduced through on-the-job training and continuous professional development courses with other white-dominated feminist NGOs and white feminist academics advocating for this particular approach to intersectionality. This additive approach as represented in the training of NGO workers also served to reinforce the idea that white feminists “owned” intersectionality ( Bilge 2013 ).

Intersectionality is the new word … it has relevance … to the work that I do and that I'm focused on, so … obviously from my side it’s more about sort of women and those things that are happening around women and particular groups of women as well and how those things work, and I'm sort of quite interested in sort of gathering and articulating how a response to that or almost sort of the baseline of any work that we go forward doing, how that impacts on access to services, how organizations stay sustainable, there are lots of issues that are emerging now that, are, forgive me if I just keep going on about women specific things, but the generalisation of services, about funds being cut, and how that recognition of intersectionality impacts on women's lot. It’s quite, it’s insidious. The, the prioritising of the individual I think is seriously damaging to women as a group. And those intersectional points, I think is why we need to be clear and articulate, how and when that affects, and keep the case going strongly for keeping those visible. That's, that's my focus.

For Diane, intersectionality is constructed as something which is relevant sometimes, but not all the time; and something which is inherently individualistic. She argues that the recognition of intersectionality is “insidious” for women “as a group.” She sees it as her organizations’ task to narrow down when intersectionality is relevant, implying that oftentimes, it is irrelevant. In other words, she and her organization consider intersectionality reluctantly. It is important to note that few participants employing this understanding were openly reluctant about intersectionality. Indeed, most were enthusiastic about intersectionality as both a theory and a practice. It is only through the comparison of participants’ narratives that this reluctance becomes readily apparent. This understanding of intersectionality as additive (instead of being mutually constitutive with gender, other strands—race, class, sexuality, disability, and legal status—are perceived as being only nominally relevant and only some of the time) reflects an understanding of gender which is almost wholly blind to and arguably hostile to race, class, sexuality, disability, and legal status.

In practice, use of additive intersectionality often involves developing projects targeted at particular groups of women, driven by demographic analysis of service users by equality characteristics, frequently instituted as a funding requirement in light of the 2010 Equality Act. Feminist organizations have not always embraced intersectionality and developed projects out of new political understandings and goodwill. Rather, they have often been driven by equality monitoring requirements of funders revealing their exclusion of women experiencing intersectional disadvantage, even though they are funded to serve “all” in a given geographic community of identity.

Going back to examples like race, we've gone out, we've done engagement with race organizations. We'll always keep doing that, so we're not going to give up but we know that often [disabled BME] people will choose to stay belonging to those organizations … they're not going to get heavily involved in our community when they're involved in those communities.

As we can see, Susan offers problematic “cultural” narratives about “tight-knit communities” which she uses to rationalize why particular minority ethnic groups will not engage with her organization, thereby relieving her and the organization of responsibility to acknowledge and address white supremacy. As a result disabled people of color are particularly excluded from targeted, supposedly “intersectional” projects; there is a yawning gap between race and disability where little work exists at present. 3

In contrast, some organizations, cognizant of the origins of intersectionality, describe as their intersectional work either their own work with Black women (in the case of racial justice organizations), or seeking to widen their work with Black women and/or BME communities; for example, Anya, a practitioner in a racial justice organization, put it like this: “We would look at [intersectionality] more from a point of view of having Black women's organizations involved … we would be looking to make sure that their concerns were not drowned out by the majority and always came to the fore.”

Comparison of three projects addressing violence against disabled women illustrates the problems of diversity within intersectionality (AD 4 5–11, 42). These projects were all identified as “intersectional” by participants. Each project aimed broadly at increasing disabled women’s use of, and access to, anti-violence against women, and girls’ services, responding to the exclusion of disabled women from these services. These services emerged within single-issue women’s organizations and are subject to the exclusions of those organizations: they were not set up with disabled women in mind.

Two of the projects were initiated by nondisabled women’s organizations seeking to increase representation of disabled women among service users. Disabled women came to be identified as a priority because of equality monitoring: when looking at service user data, disabled women were found to be disproportionately underrepresented. For example, Helen, senior manager of a women’s organization in England, stated that her organization set up a targeted service because: “we were looking at some of our targets we were not meeting, we were thinking we weren’t meeting the needs of every [woman in the city] so we were looking at our performance against targets around deaf and disabled women.” Thus, even though Diane, the practitioner we introduced earlier, raised concerns about how intersectionality promoted individualism, we see that ostensible “intersectional service delivery” is driven not necessarily by a commitment to justice but by neoliberal performance management targets.

The projects’ focus was thus building the capacity of nondisabled women’s organizations to serve disabled women: a version of “acting for” or “doing to,” which fails to take into account disabled women’s agency and can be interpreted as paternalistic and part of a longer tradition of working on rather than with disabled women. In both of these projects, representation of disabled women among those running and directing the project was viewed as a bonus, not a necessity. Disabled women playing advisory roles were expected to give up their time for free. There was not necessarily any outreach to the disabled people’s sector in project development or implementation, nor was there attention paid to other inequalities within the projects (e.g. race, class, and/or sexuality). These projects, conceptualized singularly and under neoliberal compliance pressures, were nevertheless viewed as intersectional success stories by their proponents. In one of these two white-led women’s organizations, perceived as being “good on race” by some racial justice organizations since it also had a “race” project, its disability project was developed without race, or rather, whiteness was taken for granted: imagery depicted only white people, race was not highlighted in the documentation, monitoring information revealed that the project beneficiaries were c. 95 percent white while none were Black, and outreach reported did not include any racial justice or BME organizations (AD 42). This was possible because in additive applications of intersectionality, inequalities are conceptualized as being legitimately able to be added and subtracted at will, rather than being viewed as mutually constitutive. Some single-issue women’s organizations may therefore have targeted projects which may be deemed successful, but these are not necessarily “layered” and certainly not intersectional, and thus can be conceptualized and managed entirely separately within an (even quite small) organization. Nevertheless, the fact that such organizations have multiple projects targeted toward particular groups of women experiencing intersecting inequalities makes them heralded for their commitment to intersectionality, and bolsters the misperception held by some academics, policymakers, and practitioners alike that feminist organizations are more committed to intersectionality than other single-issue equality sectors.

In contrast, a third project led by a network of equality organizations focused on developing disabled-women-led peer support services, in other words it centered the agency of disabled women. This project aspired to be disabled-women-led and survivor-led as a core guiding principle. Building relationships with the disabled people’s sector in developing and implementing the project was viewed as essential from the outset. It was the only one of the three similar projects which centrally involved women of color in decision-making and integrated consideration of race, sexuality, and trans status along with gender and disability, consistent with a constitutive rather than an additive understanding of intersectionality. The representation of disabled women’s organizations and women of color in decision-making capacities was critical to the project developing in this way. Disabled women (conceptualized as diverse across other characteristics, rather than as a monolithic group) were viewed as agential, and their social position as mutually constituted rather than additively formed.

In spite of the notable differences in the projects driven by competing concepts of intersectionality, for practitioners employing diversity within intersectionality, intersectionality needs to stop there, or else they would have to admit that they are not really doing intersectionality. Diversity within “intersectionality” has all of the limitations of gender-first approaches to equality which efface women of color’s experiences that are widely critiqued elsewhere ( Crenshaw 1989 , 1991 ; Hankivsky 2005 ). The “diversity within” intersectionality practiced by the women’s sector fails to recognize relationality and the simultaneity of power and oppression insofar as it is additive. For this reason, it tends to view marginalized groups as solely oppressed, and those experiencing intersecting inequalities as having “additional barriers” in a deficit model. Within it, other aspects of identity may be able to be incorporated as “barriers,” but this tends to be limited to one.

Since intersectionally marginalized women are constructed as nonagential and unable to participate in decision-making about the projects, the more powerful, singularly disadvantaged, white, nondisabled women directing the projects are therefore implicitly constructed as ideal “representatives” of intersectionally marginalized women. In the context of the women’s sector, this concept of intersectionality thus serves to further the association of “women” with whiteness and the construction of “woman” as always-already white ( Lewis 2017 ).

We now turn to an empirical example concerning debates over trans rights, which further demonstrates the problems of additive intersectionality in practice. Additive intersectionality ultimately refuses meaningful engagement with structures of inequality other than a totalizing concept of gender which centers the interests of white and otherwise privileged women, thereby enacting violence on trans women and reinscribing white supremacy and ableism both within organizations and outside them.

A key challenge for intersectional practice that research participants identified was the opposition and resistance of some single-issue women’s organizations to the expansion of rights of trans people in general and trans women in particular, in the context of proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) 2004 by Westminster and Holyrood, respectively. This act makes provision for legal change of gender on birth certificates. Important proposed reforms that would simplify what is currently a difficult, bureaucratic, and heavily medicalized process were ultimately abandoned in England and at the time of writing are in discussion in the Scottish Parliament. 5 In contrast to “intersectional” projects focused on disabled women, there were no projects targeted toward trans women delivered by women’s organizations in the sample. The following section will explore why, and what this lack of provision for trans women indicates about the meanings given to “intersectionality” by women’s organizations.

In one equality network, a women’s organization circulated a policy document concerning the local equality strategy on the email list of the inner governing circle of the network. The document, which had been submitted to an influential local policymaker, asserted that trans rights were not “real” rights, and constructed these rights as being in opposition to, and detrimental to, “women’s” rights (AD 28). The existence of trans women was effaced in putting these groups into opposition, constructing them as being mutually exclusive, thereby denying categorical intersection ( Hancock 2013 ). Significantly, the same document later goes on to mention how important it is that equality policy consider intersectionality, here conceptualized as additive. The circulation of this document engendered a breakdown of solidarity in the network. To an extent, the network LGBTI organization representative felt supported by the dismayed responses of others to the circulation of the email in their next meeting. On the other hand, they felt unsupported by the fact that it was left to them to raise it, making it seem to them that they were the only one to view it as problematic.

Intersectionality is fundamentally about recognition of the interrelation of structures of inequality (particularly race, class, and gender). Yet recognition of, and engagement with, the interrelationship of inequality structures, requires a prior step of recognizing the ontology of the structures themselves. This refusal to do so is reflected not only among white feminist academics who appropriate the language of intersectionality but fail to name or recognize white supremacy, instead bending and stretching intersectionality in the interests of white women—but also among practitioners. Many feminist sector practitioners employing additive understandings of intersectionality do not recognize a structure of inequality affecting trans people, as illustrated by the quote below. Recognition of this structure of inequality is particularly problematic for the women’s sector, since it offers fundamental challenges to core beliefs and assumptions on which many organizations are premised (ideas of gender as a binary power relation between women and men, and of gender as a fixed, biological status). The structure of inequality affecting trans people has been variously theorized, but the emerging consensus in trans studies is that it is best theorized as cisgenderism, an ideology that “denies, denigrates, or pathologizes … [that] creates an inherent system of associated power and privilege” ( Lennon and Mistler 2014 , 63).

I [got really angry] at a meeting because somebody called me a cis woman. And I said, "You don’t get to define me." I don’t like the term cis because it’s never been said to me as a description, it's been said to me as an accusation. I am not-You do not have the right. You have not earned the right to call me a cis woman just because that’s your community as a trans community, as a trans woman because that’s what you use.

Here she is expressing discomfort with the idea of cisgender privilege. This was a fairly common position taken by women’s sector organizations and thus, in that city, relations between prominent women’s sector organizations and the LGBTI sector had broken down.

A women’s organization that others had said was “working on” trans inclusion had also signed the policy document seeking to exclude trans issues from equality debates described above (AD 28), yet this organization had also been heralded for its good practice on intersectionality. We suggest this may be indicative of the limits of additive intersectionality in practice, and its lack of attention to representation of intersectionally marginalized women in decision-making: inclusion of trans women in services provided within cisgendered spaces, or simple inclusion of those previously excluded from service provision, does not necessarily signify any change in issue agendas, nor does it signify a lack of discriminatory attitudes, or a commitment to intersectional transformation. It may be that some organizations feel compelled to work toward inclusion by their equality sector peers, while others are compelled by equality and diversity funding requirements, against what they actually desire to do. For these organizations, binary trans identity is incorporated merely as an additional barrier among women , but the relationship between sexism and cisgenderism is left uninterrogated.

I suppose the only thing for us is around … gender neutrality … it's important for us a woman-only organization to be able to emphasise the gendered nature of violence. So if there's a complete gender neutrality, which isn't really about trans women but just about the whole intersex [ sic ] or non-binary issues could impact on us being able to talk about women-only services and also perpetrators as being predominantly male. We want to be able to voice that.

Some can additively recognize inequality which marginalizes trans people and incorporate binary female trans identity as an “additional barrier” among women; but they cannot incorporate the always-interlocking nature of sexism and cisgenderism . Because of this, they are left with no framework in which to recognize nonbinary gender as a marginalized category. This identity presents a fundamental epistemological, ideological challenge to some of the bases on which these feminist organizations are constructed (namely understandings of gender as a binary power relation). This example demonstrates the ways in which additive intersectionality refuses the idea that structures of inequality are always-interlocking. This refusal inherent to additive intersectionality in relation to all inequality structures is especially apparent in this example, because the particular ontologies of the inequality structures involved (sexism and cisgenderism) explicitly generate conflict around shared key concepts and categories (namely gender/“woman”). Meaningful engagement with cisgenderism would explicitly call into question practitioner understandings of gender, as a monolithic, white social structure, itself. Meaningfully engaging with white supremacy would also call gender/“woman” into question, but perhaps less explicitly. Nevertheless, this refusal illustrated by way of the example of cisgenderism is instructive for analyzing enduring refusals of white-led feminist organizations across Europe to meaningfully engage with white supremacy and structural racism, in spite of decades of Black and women of color feminist critique and theorizing.

Ultimately, intersectionality challenges singe-issue white feminist organizations because they are reliant on essential ideas about their constituents, namely their wholly oppressed status. It is difficult to absorb an idea of the simultaneity of privilege/oppression when a whole organization is based on a static view of its constituents as oppressed. Absorbing this idea would also necessitate a redirection of agendas away from benefiting those with relative privilege, which is both predicated on and requires a reconceptualization of what the pertinent issues are facing an organization’s constituents. Perhaps intersectionality can be absorbed additively, until it requires a fundamental rethink of established political agendas invested in victimhood which is at odds with recognizing privilege; until it necessitates the transformation that intersectionality demands.

In this article, we have attempted to examine how an implicit commitment to white supremacy, ableism, and cisgenderism shape how many ostensibly feminist NGOs conceptualize and practice intersectionality. Seemingly committed only to understanding gender as de-raced, de-classed, nondisabled, and de-sexualized, many feminist organizations advance an exclusive and excluding category of womanhood which universalizes straight, cis, nondisabled, and middle-class women to the detriment of all others. This commitment to a limited understanding of gender and gender inequality in turn warps how intersectionality is understood and applied in these organizations. Rather than taking the Black feminist challenge seriously and understanding how race, class, gender, disability, sexuality, and legal status are mutually constitutive, many feminist organizations demur and instead treat intersectionality as a pick and mix—where gender is always picked and, more often than not, placed in competition with other intersecting inequalities. As a result, women seeking support from shrinking social welfare services are under-served, and worse still, poorly served, by being misrepresented as nonagentic victims of their own unfortunate “intersectional circumstances.”

The dynamics we have documented amongst some feminist organizations in England and Scotland should not come as a surprise. Indeed, feminist theory, feminist movements, and feminist organizations have always been wracked by these divisions—of marginalized groups theorizing their own experiences and wanting a feminist politics to not merely “include” them but rather to be fundamentally transformed as a worldview and a social relation so that care for many different kinds of people is at the heart of any kind of radical revisioning of the present and future. It remains unclear whether feminist organizations have the courage to rethink their practices. As additive intersectionality becomes routinized in the sector, we have grave doubts about its future as radical framework for justice and equality.

Work around disabled women is enacted in projects; around trans rights, in a lack of projects, due to lack of agreement on the need for this work.

This is not to at all imply that disability justice work is actually easy.

There are, however, BME disabled people’s organizations who work at this intersection, although these have been hit particularly badly by austerity. Also, some disabled people’s organizations do make substantial efforts to engage BME disabled people.

Each document analyzed has been listed in a database and been renamed as “Anonymous Document [number].”

https://www.scottishtrans.org/our-work/gender-recognition-act-reform-2022/

We wish to thank participants in the research as well as Leah Bassel, anonymous reviewers, and the editors for helpful comments on earlier drafts.

The empirical research used in this article was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council.

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Gun Violence—A Black Feminist Issue: An Excerpt From Roxane Gay’s New Essay, ‘Stand Your Ground’

“in some ways, feminism and gun ownership seem like a good fit. … but guns can be as disempowering as they are empowering.”.

Bold and personal, Roxane Gay unpacks gun culture and gun ownership in America from a Black feminist perspective in her latest work, “Stand Your Ground.” The essay is the capstone to  Roxane Gay &, a curated series of ebooks and audiobooks that lift up other voices , available exclusively on subscription hub Everand. 

In “Stand Your Ground,” Gay writes about power, agency and gun ownership: “I own a gun, but I have more questions than answers,” as she acknowledges the complexity of these issues through Audre Lorde’s famous quote: “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” 

The following is an excerpt from “Stand Your Ground: A Black Feminist Reckoning with America’s Gun Problem” copyright © 2024 by Roxane Gay, used by permission from Everand Originals and available exclusively through Everand .

Too many politicians made no efforts to codify [the right to abortion] federally. They assumed they were standing firmly on solid ground when such was not the case.

I’m a Black feminist, a bad feminist, a woman who believes a more equitable present and future are possible.

I’m not an optimist, but I have seen the change we are capable of when people work together and persist. I have also seen what we lose when we take the ground upon which we stand for granted or we don’t stand our ground firmly enough.

In 2022, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4, in Dobbs v. Jackson , that the Constitution does not endow people with a right to abortion. Many Americans were shocked because the right to abortion was the law of the land for nearly 50 years. An entire generation grew up understanding that they could make choices for their bodies without legislative intervention, though in more conservative states, that right was always contingent. And then, in an arbitrary legal decision, a judicial body took that right away from millions of people with uteruses. It happened because too many Americans assumed that the right to abortion was unimpeachable. Too many politicians made no efforts to codify that right federally. They assumed they were standing firmly on solid ground when such was not the case.

It is appalling that women and people with uteruses have lost such a fundamental right to bodily autonomy. And it is not lost on me that women in many states have more rights as gun owners than they do as women. The power to take a life is more constitutionally and culturally valuable than a woman’s right to live freely. I do not know how to reconcile this reality with my feminism.

I have no fondness for guns. They are, in most hands, incredibly destructive. Every year, the number of mass shootings increases. With each new atrocity, the details are more horrifying.

A concert in Vegas. An elementary school in Connecticut. An elementary school in Texas. Staggering numbers of young children, dead before they know what it means to live. A parade in a Chicago suburb. A synagogue. A grocery store. A gay nightclub. A church. Another church. So many high schools. Shopping malls. Movie theaters.

With each successive tragedy, the details become more lurid, haunting, devastating, grim. And with each passing year, it feels more dangerous to spend time in public places, wondering if you are on the precipice of becoming a statistic. 

It has not always been this way. It shouldn’t be this way. It does not need to be this way. 

The power to take a life is more constitutionally and culturally valuable than a woman’s right to live freely. I do not know how to reconcile this reality with my feminism.

There is no single reason for mass shootings, though there are a few common denominators. The vast majority of mass shooters are men. Nearly 60 percent of mass shooters have a history of domestic violence. It feels like we cannot understand or predict mass shootings, that we cannot unravel the tangled threads of violence on a massive scale, but that isn’t necessarily true. And even if these crimes were unpreventable (they aren’t), we could certainly make it far more difficult for mass shooters to have access to the weapons that make their paths of destruction possible.  

In some ways, feminism and gun ownership seem like a good fit.

A lot of feminist rhetoric centers on empowerment— creating opportunities and conditions that allow women to use their power, be treated with respect, have bodily autonomy, live on their own terms. A lot of gun rhetoric is also centered around empowerment—guns as a means of taking back power after trauma or claiming power in the name of self-defense or embracing the power of keeping our families safe.

But feminists must also grapple with the reality that however empowering guns may be, they are used against women at alarming rates—whether women are being threatened, injured or killed by a gun. The statistics are even more dire for Black, Latina and other women of color. Guns can be as disempowering as they are empowering. 

Throughout the trial, and the many months leading up to the trial, Megan Thee Stallion was defamed and discredited for standing her ground and demanding justice.

On a July evening in 2020, rapper Megan Thee Stallion was in Los Angeles, sitting in a car with rapper Tory Lanez outside a party. There was some kind of disagreement that ended with Lanez shooting at Megan Thee Stallion’s feet multiple times, and taunting her, after she got out of the vehicle. Her injuries required surgery and a lengthy recovery.

Hours after the shooting, Lanez left a meandering voicemail for Kelsey Harris, Stallion’s former friend. In the message, he said, “I was just so fucking drunk, nigga, I just didn’t even understand what the fuck was going on, bruh. […] Regardless, that’s not going to make anything right and that’s not going to make my actions right.” Though he didn’t explicitly admit he shot Stallion, the implication of and the regret for his actions were there. 

Two years later, Lanez was found guilty of assault with a firearm, illegal possession of a firearm, and negligent discharge—and sentenced to 10 years in prison. But the damage was done. Throughout the trial, and the many months leading up to the trial, Megan Thee Stallion was defamed and discredited for standing her ground and demanding justice. The severity of her injuries and the aftermath of the crime were doubted and dismissed. Hip-hop journalists, radio hosts and bloggers spread lies and misinformation and came up with all kinds of conspiracy theories to believe anything but the truth—that a Black woman was harmed and deserved justice. Rapper 50 Cent, in social media posts, doubted Stallion’s story, though later apologized. In “Circo Loco,” Canadian rapper Drake said, “This bitch lie ‘bout getting shots, but she still a stallion.” Eminem also had bars for Stallion when, in “Houdini,” he said, “If I was to ask for Megan Thee Stallion, if she would collab with me, would I really have a shot at a feat?”  

These incidents bring Malcolm X’s prophetic words into stark relief: “The most disrespected person in America is the black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the black woman. The most neglected person in America is the black woman.” Culturally sanctioned misogynoir clarifies why addressing gun violence is not just a criminal justice issue—it is very much a Black feminist issue.

Women Rap Back: ‘It’s My Dance and It’s My Body’

The Abolitionist Aesthetics of Patrisse Cullors, Co-Founder of Black Lives Matter

Kamala Harris and the Legacy of Black Women’s Leadership

U.S. democracy is at a dangerous inflection point—from the demise of abortion rights, to a lack of pay equity and parental leave, to skyrocketing maternal mortality, and attacks on trans health. Left unchecked, these crises will lead to wider gaps in political participation and representation. For 50 years, Ms . has been forging feminist journalism—reporting, rebelling and truth-telling from the front-lines, championing the Equal Rights Amendment, and centering the stories of those most impacted. With all that’s at stake for equality, we are redoubling our commitment for the next 50 years. In turn, we need your help, Support Ms . today with a donation—any amount that is meaningful to you . For as little as $5 each month , you’ll receive the print magazine along with our e-newsletters, action alerts, and invitations to Ms . Studios events and podcasts . We are grateful for your loyalty and ferocity .

About Roxane Gay

You may also like:, kentuckians sound the alarm: abortion bans are driving doctors out of state, abortions up over 20 percent since dobbs, driven by telehealth.

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Britain’s Violent Riots: What We Know

Officials had braced for more unrest on Wednesday, but the night’s anti-immigration protests were smaller, with counterprotesters dominating the streets instead.

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By Lynsey Chutel

After days of violent rioting set off by disinformation around a deadly stabbing rampage, the authorities in Britain had been bracing for more unrest on Wednesday. But by nightfall, large-scale anti-immigration demonstrations had not materialized, and only a few arrests had been made nationwide.

Instead, streets in cities across the country were filled with thousands of antiracism protesters, including in Liverpool, where by late evening, the counterdemonstration had taken on an almost celebratory tone.

Over the weekend, the anti-immigration protests, organized by far-right groups, had devolved into violence in more than a dozen towns and cities. And with messages on social media calling for wider protests and counterprotests on Wednesday, the British authorities were on high alert.

With tensions running high, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s cabinet held emergency meetings to discuss what has become the first crisis of his recently elected government. Some 6,000 specialist public-order police officers were mobilized nationwide to respond to any disorder, and the authorities in several cities and towns stepped up patrols.

Wednesday was not trouble-free, however.

In Bristol, the police said there was one arrest after a brick was thrown at a police vehicle and a bottle was thrown. In the southern city of Portsmouth, police officers dispersed a small group of anti-immigration protesters who had blocked a roadway. And in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where there have been at least four nights of unrest, disorder continued, and the police service said it would bring in additional officers.

But overall, many expressed relief that the fears of wide-scale violence had not been realized.

Here’s what we know about the turmoil in Britain.

Where arrests have been reported

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Teaching AI about social intelligence through Minecraft

ASU researchers generate largest publicly available human-AI team research dataset in history using the popular video game

Using Minecraft allowed researchers to design complex and highly dynamic tasks in a simulated urban search and rescue mission — such as a fire sweeping through a small town. Illustration by Andy Keena

Despite all the mind-blowing things artificial intelligence already can do — from writing essays and creating visual art to assisting doctors with diagnosing disease — it still lacks a basic understanding of what makes humans tick.

AI can make quick, lifesaving decisions — such as finding the fastest route to victims in a collapsed building — but it cannot understand why the rescue team diverts from that route or predict how the team might act in certain situations. 

Current AI is a good tool but a poor teammate, because of its lack of human understanding.

That is why the research and development arm of the U.S. Department of Defense, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), is exploring new ways to build social skills in AI systems that would allow humans and machines to work effectively together. 

And clues on how to create machines with social intelligence have been found in an unexpected place: the popular video game Minecraft.

Arizona State University researchers teamed up with Aptima — a company that develops solutions to optimize and improve human performance in mission-critical, technology-intensive settings — during a four-year program funded by DARPA called Artificial Social Intelligence for Successful Teams, or ASIST. The project aims to improve the social intelligence of artificial intelligence and make it better able to assist teams of humans working in complex environments, including national security missions.

Researchers from the  Center for Human, Artificial Intelligence, and Robot Teaming , or CHART —part of ASU’s  Global Security Initiative — generated data from 1,160 Minecraft games, which represents the largest publicly available human–AI team research dataset in history.

Building teams of the future

CHART is at the forefront of a new science of human, AI and robot teaming. It synthesizes research across computer science, robotics, law, art and social science to create human-machine systems that will revolutionize how we ensure national security.

“Typically, team research is statistically underpowered because it’s hard to schedule and convene participants at the same time,” says  Nancy Cooke , CHART senior scientific advisor and principal investigator on ASU’s portion of the project. “But we found special ways of recruiting participants by hosting Minecraft competitions and virtual hackathons and giving awards to high performers.”

More than 200 participants — including representatives from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Cornell; the University of Southern California; and Carnegie Mellon University — played a role in the ASIST research. ASIST is one component of a broader DARPA initiative called AI Forward, which is taking a deep look at how to reliably build trustworthy AI systems by examining AI theory, AI engineering and human-AI teaming. 

One aspect of this approach centers on developing AI machines that function more as colleagues than just tools to execute human-programmed rules.

To envision AI as a colleague versus a ChatGPT answer box, consider the "Star Trek" character Data, a self-aware and sentient android who serves as the second officer and chief operations officer aboard the starship Enterprise.

“Data can interact with human beings, kind of understand their feelings and anticipate what they’re asking for,” says  Jamie Gorman , CHART director and professor of human systems engineering in  The Polytechnic School . “Getting AI to where it’s almost thinking like a human in a certain way is a problem that really can’t be addressed using current science and requires key theoretical and technical innovations — a major leap forward.”

One of the things CHART does really well is taking an interdisciplinary approach. Not only human factors engineering, but also pulling in psychological perspectives and understanding the computational and AI side of things. They’re very willing to embrace innovative methods. The way we pivoted and ended up using a large-scale online game competition was something few academic labs could have accomplished. Adam Fouse Principal research engineer and senior director of the Performance Augmentation Systems Division at Aptima

Creating artificial social intelligence

Teaching machines social intelligence is no small feat. As humans, we have a skill called the theory of mind. It involves understanding that other people have intentions, desires, beliefs, perceptions and emotions that may be different than our own and can affect their actions and behaviors. People use theory of mind when analyzing, judging and inferring others’ behaviors — a crucial skill for success in everyday social interactions and effectively collaborating in a team.

“If you want AI to function as a teammate, it needs to have social intelligence,” Cooke says. “It needs to understand the intent of human teammates, what they’re doing and if they need help. But AI is a completely different type of intelligence. Humans have a lot of experience understanding their fellow humans, and they can empathize with what’s happened to them and what they need. AI doesn’t have that kind of social and emotional intelligence.”

To bridge the gap between man and machine, DARPA envisions computer-based agents that can observe the human team and their environment, infer teammates’ goals and plans, and advise the team in ways that fit the human perspective as conditions change.

It’s a tall order, so how could the popular video game Minecraft, with more than 166 million active players, provide answers?

Mining Minecraft

“At the time we started human subjects testing, it was 2020, right in the middle of COVID,” says  Myke Cohen , an ASU graduate research associate and PhD student who worked on the project. “We couldn’t do in-person data collection. We couldn’t develop our own systems. Part of the solution was to look at Minecraft because it’s not just a very popular game, it’s a very easily customizable game, and we were able to collect the data we wanted from it.”

“One of the things CHART does really well is taking an interdisciplinary approach. Not only human factors engineering, but also pulling in psychological perspectives and understanding the computational and AI side of things. They’re very willing to embrace innovative methods," says Adam Fouse, principal research engineer and senior director of the Performance Augmentation Systems Division at Aptima. "The way we pivoted and ended up using a large-scale online game competition was something few academic labs could have accomplished.”

Minecraft allowed researchers to design complex and highly dynamic tasks in a simulated urban search and rescue mission. In one scenario, a fire sweeps through a small town, putting people’s homes and lives at risk. The response team arrives and must operate as a unit to make quick, lifesaving decisions.

But what happens if one member of the team is not a person, but a virtual agent? ASU researchers transformed the experiment data into useful data stories that shed light on the state of artificial intelligence as a team member.

“Through ASIST, we saw the ability of AI to dynamically inject the right information at the right time was a bit limited,” Fouse says. “Having AI be a real-time dynamic team member is something that is still in the future of AI.”

The dataset that the ASIST project yielded will fuel future research for government, academia and industry alike.

“One of our successes was establishing a model for looking at human-AI teams,” Fouse says. “We combined researchers from many different areas: AI, computer science, social science and human factors, engineering and psychology. ASIST is a resource for future study because there’s a lot of richness to the datasets that haven’t been explored.”

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How to cite ChatGPT

Use discount code STYLEBLOG15 for 15% off APA Style print products with free shipping in the United States.

We, the APA Style team, are not robots. We can all pass a CAPTCHA test , and we know our roles in a Turing test . And, like so many nonrobot human beings this year, we’ve spent a fair amount of time reading, learning, and thinking about issues related to large language models, artificial intelligence (AI), AI-generated text, and specifically ChatGPT . We’ve also been gathering opinions and feedback about the use and citation of ChatGPT. Thank you to everyone who has contributed and shared ideas, opinions, research, and feedback.

In this post, I discuss situations where students and researchers use ChatGPT to create text and to facilitate their research, not to write the full text of their paper or manuscript. We know instructors have differing opinions about how or even whether students should use ChatGPT, and we’ll be continuing to collect feedback about instructor and student questions. As always, defer to instructor guidelines when writing student papers. For more about guidelines and policies about student and author use of ChatGPT, see the last section of this post.

Quoting or reproducing the text created by ChatGPT in your paper

If you’ve used ChatGPT or other AI tools in your research, describe how you used the tool in your Method section or in a comparable section of your paper. For literature reviews or other types of essays or response or reaction papers, you might describe how you used the tool in your introduction. In your text, provide the prompt you used and then any portion of the relevant text that was generated in response.

Unfortunately, the results of a ChatGPT “chat” are not retrievable by other readers, and although nonretrievable data or quotations in APA Style papers are usually cited as personal communications , with ChatGPT-generated text there is no person communicating. Quoting ChatGPT’s text from a chat session is therefore more like sharing an algorithm’s output; thus, credit the author of the algorithm with a reference list entry and the corresponding in-text citation.

When prompted with “Is the left brain right brain divide real or a metaphor?” the ChatGPT-generated text indicated that although the two brain hemispheres are somewhat specialized, “the notation that people can be characterized as ‘left-brained’ or ‘right-brained’ is considered to be an oversimplification and a popular myth” (OpenAI, 2023).

OpenAI. (2023). ChatGPT (Mar 14 version) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com/chat

You may also put the full text of long responses from ChatGPT in an appendix of your paper or in online supplemental materials, so readers have access to the exact text that was generated. It is particularly important to document the exact text created because ChatGPT will generate a unique response in each chat session, even if given the same prompt. If you create appendices or supplemental materials, remember that each should be called out at least once in the body of your APA Style paper.

When given a follow-up prompt of “What is a more accurate representation?” the ChatGPT-generated text indicated that “different brain regions work together to support various cognitive processes” and “the functional specialization of different regions can change in response to experience and environmental factors” (OpenAI, 2023; see Appendix A for the full transcript).

Creating a reference to ChatGPT or other AI models and software

The in-text citations and references above are adapted from the reference template for software in Section 10.10 of the Publication Manual (American Psychological Association, 2020, Chapter 10). Although here we focus on ChatGPT, because these guidelines are based on the software template, they can be adapted to note the use of other large language models (e.g., Bard), algorithms, and similar software.

The reference and in-text citations for ChatGPT are formatted as follows:

• Parenthetical citation: (OpenAI, 2023)
• Narrative citation: OpenAI (2023)

Let’s break that reference down and look at the four elements (author, date, title, and source):

Author: The author of the model is OpenAI.

Date: The date is the year of the version you used. Following the template in Section 10.10, you need to include only the year, not the exact date. The version number provides the specific date information a reader might need.

Title: The name of the model is “ChatGPT,” so that serves as the title and is italicized in your reference, as shown in the template. Although OpenAI labels unique iterations (i.e., ChatGPT-3, ChatGPT-4), they are using “ChatGPT” as the general name of the model, with updates identified with version numbers.

The version number is included after the title in parentheses. The format for the version number in ChatGPT references includes the date because that is how OpenAI is labeling the versions. Different large language models or software might use different version numbering; use the version number in the format the author or publisher provides, which may be a numbering system (e.g., Version 2.0) or other methods.

Bracketed text is used in references for additional descriptions when they are needed to help a reader understand what’s being cited. References for a number of common sources, such as journal articles and books, do not include bracketed descriptions, but things outside of the typical peer-reviewed system often do. In the case of a reference for ChatGPT, provide the descriptor “Large language model” in square brackets. OpenAI describes ChatGPT-4 as a “large multimodal model,” so that description may be provided instead if you are using ChatGPT-4. Later versions and software or models from other companies may need different descriptions, based on how the publishers describe the model. The goal of the bracketed text is to briefly describe the kind of model to your reader.

Source: When the publisher name and the author name are the same, do not repeat the publisher name in the source element of the reference, and move directly to the URL. This is the case for ChatGPT. The URL for ChatGPT is https://chat.openai.com/chat . For other models or products for which you may create a reference, use the URL that links as directly as possible to the source (i.e., the page where you can access the model, not the publisher’s homepage).

Other questions about citing ChatGPT

You may have noticed the confidence with which ChatGPT described the ideas of brain lateralization and how the brain operates, without citing any sources. I asked for a list of sources to support those claims and ChatGPT provided five references—four of which I was able to find online. The fifth does not seem to be a real article; the digital object identifier given for that reference belongs to a different article, and I was not able to find any article with the authors, date, title, and source details that ChatGPT provided. Authors using ChatGPT or similar AI tools for research should consider making this scrutiny of the primary sources a standard process. If the sources are real, accurate, and relevant, it may be better to read those original sources to learn from that research and paraphrase or quote from those articles, as applicable, than to use the model’s interpretation of them.

We’ve also received a number of other questions about ChatGPT. Should students be allowed to use it? What guidelines should instructors create for students using AI? Does using AI-generated text constitute plagiarism? Should authors who use ChatGPT credit ChatGPT or OpenAI in their byline? What are the copyright implications ?

On these questions, researchers, editors, instructors, and others are actively debating and creating parameters and guidelines. Many of you have sent us feedback, and we encourage you to continue to do so in the comments below. We will also study the policies and procedures being established by instructors, publishers, and academic institutions, with a goal of creating guidelines that reflect the many real-world applications of AI-generated text.

For questions about manuscript byline credit, plagiarism, and related ChatGPT and AI topics, the APA Style team is seeking the recommendations of APA Journals editors. APA Style guidelines based on those recommendations will be posted on this blog and on the APA Style site later this year.

Update: APA Journals has published policies on the use of generative AI in scholarly materials .

We, the APA Style team humans, appreciate your patience as we navigate these unique challenges and new ways of thinking about how authors, researchers, and students learn, write, and work with new technologies.

American Psychological Association. (2020). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.). https://doi.org/10.1037/0000165-000

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Journal of Materials Chemistry C

Long-wave infrared photothermoelectric detectors with resonant nanophotonics.

Photothermoelectric (PTE) detectors, renowned for their ultra-broadband photodetection capabilities at room temperature without requiring an external power supply, are pivotal for advancing infrared and terahertz detection technologies. Despite significant advancements with high-performance PTE detectors utilizing low-dimensional nanomaterials like graphene, persistent challenges such as low optical absorption efficiency and the complexities of scaling integration processes continue to restrict enhancements in device integration and wavelength scalability. Here, we introduce a high-performance long-wave infrared (LWIR) PTE photodetector, integrating a resonant nanophotonic structure with a photothermoelectric nanofilm. This detector capitalizes on the synergistic interactions between metasurfaces and photonic resonators, achieving an unprecedented peak absorption rate of 98.6% across a critical operational range of 8-20 μm. Our pioneering integration of the perfect absorber with photothermoelectric materials facilitates the fabrication of a self-powered detector, showcasing a responsivity of 0.388 mA/W, a rapid response time of 10 ms, and outstanding air stability. This research not only validates the feasibility of room-temperature, highly sensitive, and broadband photodetectors but also introduces a scalable approach that can be extended to other spectral regions through straightforward modifications to the resonant wavelength of the absorber.

• This article is part of the themed collection: Journal of Materials Chemistry C HOT Papers

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Y. zhang, J. Jiang, Z. Zhang, H. Yu, Y. Lian, C. Han, X. Liu, J. Han, H. Zhou, X. Dong, J. Gou, Z. Wu and J. Wang, J. Mater. Chem. C , 2024, Accepted Manuscript , DOI: 10.1039/D4TC02504K

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