User:Ilovethebeatles23: Difference between revisions – Wikipedia

Mary Astell’s 1694 “A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, for the Advancement of Their True and Greatest Interest,” argues that women who do not intend to marry should use their dowries to finance residential women’s colleges to provide the recommended education for upper- and middle-class women. Astell was one of the earliest critics of John Locke’s political philosophy. She argued that Locke’ did not apply his theory of consent to government or his guarantees of “life, liberty, and property” to women. Patricia Springborg notes, ” Her challenge to Locke to extend to women against domestic tyrants the liberty he claimed for subjects against the Crown was a subversive strataem” intended to expose “the tenets of contractarian liberalism” as hypocritical when restricted to men.^[1]

New section – Origins of Feminist Political Theory
Separate Section of Article

Early Feminist Political Theory (New Title)

The earliest origins of feminist political theory come from texts written by white women defending women’s abilities and moral capacity along with protesting about women’s exclusion and subordination. Since then, feminist theory has been expanded to include the intersection of racism and sexism. Scholars like Kimberlé Crenshaw note that “the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism”^[2] and that the early framework of feminist political theory ignored how Black women are marginalized. It wasn’t until late in the 20th century that black women became included in feminism political theory.^[3]

Some key primary texts include:

Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), that argued that women’s apparent inferiority to men was due to lack of educational resources, not nature. Her work is often considered the first major feminist text int he Western tradition.^[4]

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Declaration of Sentiments (1848), was a document that modeled itself on the U.S. Declaration of Independence, asserting that women and men were created equal. Her work was written for the Seneca Falls Convention and was foundational to first-wave feminism.^[5]

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929), argued that every woman needs a “room of her own”, a luxury that men are able to enjoy without question, in order have the time and the space to engage in uninterrupted writing time. Molly Hite stated, “A Room of One’s Own was a foundational document in the late twentieth-century rediscovery of a female literary tradition. It led generations of feminist scholars to repopulate the field of modernist literary studies with innovative, influential, and successful women writers of prose and poetry.”^[6]

Simone de Beauvoir’s, The Second Sex (1949), examined how women are socially constructed as “the Other” through cultural systems. She exposed the power dynamics surrounding womanhood, Judith Butler explained that Beauvoir’s insight “distinguishes sex from gender and suggests that gender is an aspect of identity gradually acquired.”^[7]