An Introduction to Feminism

Usually, we do not stop to ask what women and men are, as this is taken to be too obvious a matter to ask about. But it is an issue of some importance for feminists, who have consistently pointed out that the matter of what makes us women (or men) is not nearly as straightforward as we are encouraged, from our first moments, to believe. Is being a woman a matter of biology? If it is, does that mean that it is a matter of a person's physical shape, genitalia, chromosomes, hormones, or some complex calculus of all of these? Or is being a man or woman a matter of adopting certain characteristic styles of dress, sexual preference, bearing and demeanour? Or are women simply those who ‘self-identify’ as women – that is, who think of themselves as women and expect others to relate to them accordingly (e.g. by using the pronoun ‘she’ to refer to them and granting them access to women-only spaces such as women's public toilets)?

The line we take on these questions can have important implications for both theory and practice. It will determine the population we are talking about when we say things like ‘women are oppressed’ or ‘women must liberate themselves’, and it will have a bearing on questions such as the extent to which being a man or a woman is seen as pre-given and relatively fixed or as something subject to our (individual or collective) voluntary control, or whether we see men and women as fundamentally alike or as fundamentally different.

I will not aim to devise or promote one particular definition of ‘women’ (I don't think that this is a project which ultimately makes a lot of sense). Instead, I hope to clarify what it might mean for feminists to ask for or to offer an account of what women are, and in the process, I'll try to help locate more precisely some of the worse pitfalls into which feminists might be in danger of falling.

A distinction which has been extremely important to many feminists – but which (as we'll see) has also come in for strong criticism from among their own ranks – is the distinction between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’.