Simone de Beauvoir, Mary Wollstonecraft or Judith Butler are often cited when talking about feminism. But they are not the only significant thinkers out there. Here are four feminists from different periods who you might want to get to know a bit better.
1. bell hooks (born Gloria Jean Watkins, in 1952)
No, that’s not a typo, bell hooks spells her pen name without capital letters. In doing so, she wants to draw attention away from herself and towards her thoughts and writings. And that’s not the only thing where she stands out from the crowd. In her work as a feminist thinker, she concentrates on the intersection of race, gender and class which she sees as interlinked concepts of oppression that cannot be understood separately. Her thoughts are firmly anchored in third-way feminism that emphasizes the diversity of the female experience and considers previous feminist traditions as too focused on the struggles of white middle-class women in Western countries. There is no one unique female experience, but rather there are diverse women enmeshed in various different circumstances and struggles that all affect them and place them in different situations.
A militant feminist, hooks remains attached to the values of the feminist movement but not without humor, which, according to her, is essential for the success of any revolution.
2. Kate Millett (born in 1934)
Author of the best-selling 1970 book Sexual Politics – which was actually her PhD thesis – Kate Millett is a thinker whose influence on second-wave feminism has been instrumental. Her analysis of patriarchy, sex and love was groundbreaking at a time when women’s role was systematically constrained by traditional gender roles. In Sexual Politics, she argues that sex and sexuality are political tools used by the patriarchal society to oppress and control women. The answer to this, she sees, is nothing short of a sexual revolution.
Sexual Politics catapulted Millett into fame – and even onto the cover of Time magazine – prompting many to dub her the leader of the women’s movement which had been resuscitated after decades of insomnia. Millett herself felt ambivalent about her fame and the position of a feminist leader she was being given by the press and academia. Many of her thoughts, such as ending the institutions of family and monogamy seem radical to this day and many disagree with Millett, but her influence on the feminist movement should nonetheless be remembered. In addition to feminist themes, Millett’s work focuses on issues such as mental health and human and civil rights.
3. Luce Irigaray (born in 1930)
Luce Irigaray’s feminist philosophy draws heavily on linguistics and psychoanalysis – she was a student of the famous French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan – and attempts to shed light on the inferior position of women in society by suggesting that women are excluded from the history of philosophy and from culture more generally. The result of this is that female subjectivity has a hard time existing in a culture where the projected imaginary is male-dominated and where women are seen as deviations from the norm, that is, the male. In addition to psychoanalysis, she uses structural linguistics to show how sexual difference, instead of being purely anatomical, also strongly manifests as, and constructed via language. According to Irigaray, we are as much mental beings as we are physical and that needs to be taken into account when discussing the positions of women and men.
Her writings offer new perspectives on how we usually define gender, body and self.
4. John Stuart Mill (born in 1806)
Yes, good ol’ Mill. You might know him as one of the most influential political thinkers of the 1800s, but he was also a feminist. Mill was way ahead of his time when it comes to women’s rights, going as far as advocating for perfect equality between the sexes. In The Subjection of Women, he was one of the first men to think out loud that the reason for women’s inferior position in society wasn’t their innate stupidity or lacking in mental capacities, but rather their not being able to access the same education that men did. Unfortunately, time wasn’t yet ripe for Mill’s thoughts in gaining wider acceptance and The Subjection of Women didn’t get the same attention his other works did. Nowadays, however, his thoughts are widely recognized as being an integral part of the history of feminism.
Furthermore, Mill argued that women’s inferior position in society wasn’t only harmful to them, but had a negative moral impact on the human race more generally, and that both men and women would be better off in an equal world.
Sources:
A New York Times interview with bell hooks
General information on bell hooks
Salon article on Kate Millett’s significance
Luce Irigaray in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy