Enlightenment roots, and a first feminism

Feminism, the notes write, is a theory or a movement that looks for the causes and the condition of women’s oppression, and takes women’s liberation as its last aim. It also means a range of theories and political talk that seek to end every form of discrimination — of class, race, ethnicity, ability, sexual orientation, nationality, and the rest — together with discrimination that arises from biological sex and from social gender, and to realize equality. Among the main currents they list are liberal, Marxist, radical, socialist, postmodern, and eco-feminism. The variety, they say, can split feminists and blur the center of a movement, but it is also evidence that the movement has changed with the times. Here they want to look at the first feminism, liberal feminism, drawn from eighteenth-century Enlightenment thought and liberalism.

The birth of feminism, they write, is tied to the Enlightenment. Many Enlightenment writers still treated women as less than human, but some already argued, on Enlightenment grounds, for an improvement in women’s rights: women too have equal reason, and should be treated as human. Direct disciples of Descartes, they say, criticized social institutions that subordinated women to men as unjust, and Condorcet argued that excluding women from humankind was absurd, and worked for women’s rights. Those moves did not win a wide hearing at the time, but they helped form liberal feminism later.

Fourier, 1917, and a 1792 book

Other early bases, they write, include a religious moral orientation, the liberal ideas of the civic revolutions in Britain and France, and early Marxism. Utopian socialists such as Saint-Simon and Fourier, they add, already tied legal equality, economic independence, and a protest against sexual oppression to feminist thought. Fourier, they write, introduced the word féminisme in 1837, and had already argued in 1808 that the advance of women’s rights should be the basis of all social progress. An equal-rights movement, shaped by Enlightenment thought and by those revolutions, began, they say, from the awakening of early bourgeois women who protested their exclusion from declarations of rights and from the vote, and it later influenced suffrage campaigns in the United States and Britain between 1890 and 1920.

Saint-Simonians, they write, held that a complementary relation of women and men could bring a harmonious equality in public and private life; Fourierists saw love’s passion as a key mechanism of social change, and took the degree to which women’s nature was not suppressed, and women’s rights advanced, as a measure of progress. Marxists, they add, recast those questions: women’s oppression works through the family, and liberation requires that functions the family has carried be socialized. Engels located the origin of that oppression in the rise of the patriarchal family that props up private property; Bebel said that in a socialist society the consuming functions once done at home would be done in society. The Russian Revolution of 1917, they write, is judged to have contributed to women’s political rights: the revolutionary government of the time gave women political rights fully equal to men’s, and set up supports so that social activity beyond housework became possible. Women’s large share of industrial labor at home during the First World War, they add, also helped the advance of rights. Those dates stay in the years the notes name.

Equal education, the vote, and two liberal currents

Liberal feminists, the notes write, stress that women are as rational as men, but have not been given the training to use that capacity, and have been limited in the chance to use it in public life. Customary and legal limits, they say, are the cause of women’s subordination to men, so equal education and civil rights must be given if liberation is to come. Equal schooling, a chance to exercise ability in society, and legal reform — property rights and the vote among them — sit at the center of this current. More recently, they add, liberal feminism has taken up a notion of androgyny: each person has both masculine and feminine traits, and both women and men should be freed from a culture built as masculine or feminine. Gender roles fixed by socialization, they write, should fall away.

They distinguish two tendencies. Classical liberal feminists argue that discriminatory policy and law should be revised so that women and men can compete fairly; they do not deny the welfare state as such, but say state intervention should stay within a range that does not invade personal freedom. Welfare-liberal feminists, they write, want the state’s legal institutions concentrated on equal rights and chances, and argue that the state must remove legal and social-economic barriers already leaving women behind — for example through special admission, special hiring, or women’s quotas. Representative nineteenth-century names, in their list, are Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Taylor, and John Stuart Mill; in the twentieth century, Betty Friedan and Elizabeth Holtzman. Wollstonecraft’s 1792 book on the rights of women is called the first intellectual spur of nineteenth-century feminist thought, and the start of liberal-feminist discussion. She believed, they write, that women’s role had been confined to the home, in service to men, which was not a human life of real freedom, and that women’s own awakening and equal education could free them from obedience to that role. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes’ account of liberal feminism, including Wollstonecraft’s 1792 book and Fourier’s 1837 use of the word

Last updated: 14 November 2026