Continental · 1792 – today
Feminist philosophy
The subordination of women is not natural but made by society and thought, and philosophy must examine how gender shapes knowledge, ethics and politics.
Is the difference between women and men natural, or made?
Enlightenment thinkers proclaimed universal reason and rights, yet most, Rousseau included, excluded women from both. Wollstonecraft answered in 1792; after women won the vote in many countries, Beauvoir asked in 1949 why woman was still defined as man’s “Other”, and later thinkers questioned the categories of sex and gender themselves.
If reason and rights belong to humans as such, denying them to women needs a justification; Wollstonecraft showed that women’s supposed inferiority was the product of their education. Beauvoir argued that “woman” is a social situation one is made into, not an essence. Butler went further: gender is a performance repeated until it seems natural.
- Women’s apparent inferiority is a product of education and circumstance.
- One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.
- Gender is performative, not a fixed essence.
It changed law, ethics, epistemology and political theory, and opened the way for care ethics, standpoint theory and gender studies.
Thinkers
1759–1797Mary WollstonecraftEnglish writer who argued that women are rational beings owed education1908–1986Simone de BeauvoirFrench existentialist whose The Second Sex reshaped feminismborn 1956Judith ButlerAmerican philosopher at Berkeley, theorist of gender performativityKey texts
Where it came from
Grew out ofThe EnlightenmentWollstonecraft claimed the Enlightenment’s universal reason and rights for women.Grew out of
ExistentialismBeauvoir applied existentialist freedom to women: one is not born but becomes a woman.Grew out of
Post-structuralismButler drew on Foucault and Derrida to argue that gender is produced by repeated norms.Borrowed from
Ordinary language philosophyButler’s “performativity” adapts Austin’s idea that some utterances do what they say.