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Feminism

1. Definition and scope

Feminism refers to the set of social movements and bodies of theory that hold 1) that in society women’s position is subordinate to men’s, and 2) that this subordinate position is not a fact of nature but a relation of power — and that seek to change it. This is a minimal definition, deliberately so: beyond it, disagreements begin immediately.

Two misunderstandings need to be cleared up from the outset. First, feminism is not a unified doctrine but a family of currents often in open conflict — liberal, Marxist, radical, materialist, differentialist, intersectional, ecofeminist — which agree neither on the cause of domination, nor on the subject they defend, nor on the means. Second, the word itself is late: it only appears in French in the 1870s-1890s, and was first used as an insult, originally in a medical sense (a “feminized” man). Women writing in the 18th century did not call themselves feminists; the label was applied to them retrospectively, which is itself an act of historical construction.

The term “patriarchy” calls for the same caution. In anthropology, it designates a precise system of lineage and domestic authority. In militant usage, it designates the whole set of mechanisms of male domination. The two senses coexist, and confusing them fuels much talking-past-each-other: one can perfectly well hold that systemic male domination exists without subscribing to the idea of a coherent, intentional “patriarchal system.”

2. Origins (before the “waves”)

Feminist reasoning long precedes the word. Christine de Pizan wrote The Book of the City of Ladies in 1405 to refute, one by one, the misogynistic arguments of the clerics of her time. Poulain de la Barre published De l’égalité des deux sexes (On the Equality of the Two Sexes) in 1673, applying the Cartesian method to the question and coining a phrase that has endured: “the mind has no sex.” His argument is methodological before it is political: what we believe we know about women, we learned from men who had an interest in its being true — it is therefore a prejudice, in the exact sense Descartes gives that word.

The French Revolution is both a turning point and a disappointment. Olympe de Gouges published the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen in 1791, a literal mirror of the 1789 text, whose Article X contains a formula that has remained famous: “woman has the right to mount the scaffold; she must equally have the right to mount the rostrum.” She was guillotined in 1793. Condorcet, in 1790, had defended women’s admission to citizenship in purely logical terms: either rights derive from the quality of being a sentient and rational being, in which case women have them, or they do not, in which case no one has them. He was not heeded. Mary Wollstonecraft, for her part, published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792.

The key fact to remember is that the Revolution, which founds the universality of rights, explicitly excludes women from active citizenship. The 1804 Civil Code makes matters worse by placing the married woman under legal incapacity. Modern emancipation is thus born, in France, from a promise of universality that was made and withdrawn in the same movement — which explains the structure of all subsequent feminist arguments: they do not demand a new right, they demand the application of a principle already proclaimed.

3. The division into waves

The “waves” scheme is a tool of convenience, forged retrospectively (the phrase “second wave” was used by Martha Weinman Lear in 1968). It is useful and it is misleading; we will return to this in §7.

First wave (1840s–1945): rights

Object: legal and political equality. The right to vote, access to education and the professions, the right to control one’s own wages and property, the legal capacity of the married woman.

Landmarks. The Seneca Falls Convention (United States, 1848) produced a Declaration of Sentiments, likewise modeled on the Declaration of Independence. In Britain, the suffragists (constitutionalists, Millicent Fawcett) and the suffragettes (militants, Emmeline Pankhurst) differed in method: the latter practiced direct action — smashing shop windows, arson, hunger strikes in prison to which the state responded with force-feeding. Emily Davison died in 1913 under the King’s horse at the Epsom Derby. John Stuart Mill published The Subjection of Women in 1869.

Timeline of the right to vote: New Zealand 1893 (first country), Finland 1906, Russia 1917, United Kingdom 1918 (with age and property conditions; equal suffrage in 1928), United States 1920, France 1944 — ordinance of April 21, first effective vote in April 1945. France’s delay is notable and is partly explained by a reason that has nothing to do with feminism: part of the radical, anticlerical left feared that women, seen as closer to the Church, would vote for the right. This is a clear case of a short-term political interest blocking a principle.

In France, the law of July 13, 1965, ended the requirement for a married woman to obtain her husband’s authorization to work and open a bank account. This fact is often misdated: married women’s full legal capacity postdates the right to vote by twenty years.

Second wave (1960s–1980s): the body and the private sphere

Object: what the law did not touch. Contraception, abortion, sexuality, rape, domestic violence, the division of housework.

The slogan is “the personal is political” (a phrase popularized by Carol Hanisch, 1969). Its thesis is precise: what happens in the kitchen, in bed, and in the nursery is not a matter of individual temperament but a social organization — and therefore a legitimate political object.

The founding text is Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), whose sentence — “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” — separates biological sex from social destiny. She draws two consequences from it, which the book unfolds: woman is constituted as the “Other” relative to a masculine posited as neutral and universal; and her condition is not an essence but a situation, and therefore modifiable. Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique, 1963) triggered the American wave by naming “the problem that has no name” among educated housewives.

Achievements in France: the Neuwirth law on contraception (1967, implementing decrees only in 1972); the Manifesto of the 343 (1971); the Bobigny trial (1972, Gisèle Halimi); the Veil law legalizing abortion (January 17, 1975, initially passed on a provisional five-year basis, made permanent in 1979); the 1980 law defining rape and making it a crime; the abandonment of the notion of “head of the family” (1970); divorce by mutual consent (1975). Marital rape was recognized by the Court of Cassation only in 1990 and written into law in 1992.

This is also the wave of splits. In France, the MLF (Women’s Liberation Movement) quickly fractured into the “Psychanalyse et Politique” tendency (Antoinette Fouque), the class-struggle tendency, and the radical/materialist feminist tendency (Christine Delphy, Monique Wittig, the journal Questions féministes). The disagreement was not over the goal but over the cause: does domination come from capitalism, from culture, from language, or from an autonomous relation of exploitation?

Third wave (1990s): the plurality of women

Object: the very subject of feminism. Who is this “woman” in whose name people speak?

The observation, formulated first by Black American feminists, is that the feminism of the first two waves had taken a particular experience as universal: that of the white, Western, heterosexual, middle-class woman. The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977) states it, bell hooks and Angela Davis develop it in 1981, and Kimberlé Crenshaw coins the concept of intersectionality in 1989 from a legal case (DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, 1976: five Black women lost their case because the company employed women — white ones — and Black people — men; the discrimination was real and legally invisible). See Intersectionality — Feminism, Race, and Queer Theory for details.

At the same time, Judith Butler (Gender Trouble, 1990) shifts the question: gender is not an identity but a repeated practice under constraint (“performativity”), and sex itself is a category constructed by the very discourses that claim to describe it. This thesis opens a difficulty feminism has not resolved since: if “woman” is a construction, in whose name is the struggle waged?

The third wave is also that of “pro-sex feminism,” which breaks with the previous wave’s anti-pornography line (Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon) and refuses to treat sexuality solely through the lens of danger.

Fourth wave (2010s–): visibility and the digital

Object: sexual violence and harassment, with social media as its vehicle. #MeToo (the phrase is Tarana Burke’s, 2006; its global spread dates from October 2017, after the Weinstein affair; #BalanceTonPorc in France).

The mechanism is new, and it is what defines this wave: the public serialization of individual testimonies transforms a sum of private facts into a visible social fact. What the movement produces is not a law but a shift in the threshold of tolerance and in the social burden of proof — which is both its strength and the core of the objections raised against it.

4. The major currents and their theses (the disagreement concerns the cause)

Liberal / egalitarian feminism. Domination is a deficit of equal rights and opportunity. The remedy is legal and institutional: anti-discrimination laws, parity, equal pay, access to positions. Subject: the individual. Main objection made against it: it treats symptoms while leaving structures intact (the division of housework, the labor market), and its successes mainly benefit women who are already advantaged.

Marxist / socialist feminism. Women’s subordination is an effect of capitalism, which needs unpaid reproductive labor (Engels, The Origin of the Family, 1884). The remedy requires transforming the mode of production. The Wages for Housework campaign (Federici, Dalla Costa, 1970s) pushes the argument to its conclusion: housework is work, it produces labor power, and it must therefore be counted. Objection: history shows that socialist societies did not abolish male domination; the “capitalism” variable is therefore insufficient.

Radical feminism. Male domination is an autonomous system, prior to capitalism and irreducible to it. It operates first on bodies: sexuality, reproduction, violence (Kate Millett, Sexual Politics, 1970; Shulamith Firestone). Objection: the risk of an abstract universalism — “women” as a homogeneous class — precisely what the third wave contests.

Materialist feminism (French tradition). Delphy, Guillaumin, Wittig. “Women” are not a natural group but a social class, defined by the relation of exploitation that constitutes it (the appropriation of domestic labor; what Guillaumin calls “sexage”). Wittig draws the logical consequence: gender will disappear along with the relation that produces it; “lesbians are not women,” since the category “woman” only makes sense within the heterosexual contract. This is the most rigorously constructivist current — and the most in conflict with differentialism.

Differentialist feminism. There is a feminine specificity (bodily, symbolic) that formal equality erases; it should be valued rather than effaced (Luce Irigaray, Antoinette Fouque, Hélène Cixous’s “écriture féminine”). Objection: this is the return of essentialism through the back door of valorization; assigning a nature, even a flattering one, is still an assignment.

Intersectional feminism. See §3 and the dedicated note.

Ecofeminism. The exploitation of nature and that of women proceed from the same logic of treating things as available for use (Françoise d’Eaubonne, 1974; Vandana Shiva; Carolyn Merchant). See Ecofeminism.

5. Measurable facts

This section has a precise function: debates about feminism often spin in the void because the facts are never established. The following orders of magnitude are established and consistent across sources.

Gender pay gap (France, INSEE). The full-time-equivalent gross salary gap is about 14-15%; the total salary income gap (which includes part-time work) is about 22-24%. For comparable positions, sectors, and experience, the residual “unexplained” gap is about 4 to 5%. The correct reading is thus: direct pay discrimination is a minority factor in the total figure; most of the gap comes from occupational segregation (women are overrepresented in lower-paid sectors) and from part-time work. This shifts the question without dissolving it: it remains to be explained why these sectors are paid less, and who takes on part-time work.

The “motherhood penalty.” This is the most robust finding in the gender economics of the last twenty years (Kleven, Landais, Søgaard, on Danish data, 2019; replicated in about ten countries). Men’s and women’s salary trajectories run almost parallel until the birth of the first child, then diverge sharply and never converge again. The long-term penalty is on the order of 20% in Denmark, more in Germany or the United Kingdom, and it now accounts for the bulk of the total gap. The causal event identified is thus neither the diploma nor negotiation skill: it is the child — that is, a social distribution of parental labor, which is modifiable.

Domestic work. In France, women perform about 70% of domestic and parental tasks; the gap has narrowed slowly since 1985, and part of that narrowing is explained by a decrease in women’s time spent, not by an increase in men’s.

Violence (France). On the order of 100 to 120 intimate-partner femicides per year. About 94,000 adult women report each year having experienced rape or attempted rape (the Virage survey, INED). The rate of filing complaints is low, and the conviction rate, relative to the estimated number of incidents, is very low — this judicial “attrition,” more than the law itself, is today the subject of debate.

Representation. The parity law (2000) transformed list-based elections and much less so single-member elections — a lesson in method: a rule produces its effect where it is binding, and nowhere else. The Copé-Zimmermann law (2011) raised the share of women on CAC 40 boards of directors from about 10% to over 45%; but the share of women on executive committees, not covered by the quota, remained far lower. Same lesson.

6. Objections and internal debates

The naturalist objection. Some of the observed differences (career choices, aggressiveness, interest in people versus objects) are said to have a biological basis. Two claims must be distinguished. That average differences exist is partly documented; that they explain the observed social gaps is not. Two facts contradict the strong version of this thesis: on the one hand, within-sex variance is massively greater than between-sex variance, which makes any inference from the average to the individual invalid; on the other hand, the gaps vary considerably from one country to another and from one decade to another, which a constant biological cause cannot explain. The “gender-equality paradox” (Stoet & Geary, 2018: the most egalitarian countries have fewer women in science) is regularly invoked against feminism; it is real as a correlation, contested in its measurement, and its causal interpretation remains open — several competing explanations (including purely economic ones) account for the same data.

The universalist objection, in France. Naming groups (women, minorities) would amount to validating the very categories one claims to be fighting, and would replace the abstract citizen with a mosaic of identities. Standard reply: the abstract universal is not neutral, it has historically had a body — male, white, propertied — and refusing to name a category does not abolish discrimination, only its measurement. Serious counter-reply: constantly naming a group ends up solidifying it, and assignment is also a mechanism of domination. The debate is not settled, and is not settled because it pits two goods against each other (formal equality, substantive equality), not a good against an evil.

The class critique, formulated from within. Nancy Fraser argues that feminism has shifted from redistribution to recognition, and that neoliberalism has accommodated this without difficulty: capitalism has no problem with women executives, it has a problem with the minimum wage. “1% feminism” liberates an elite whose comfort rests on the underpaid domestic labor of other women, often migrants (the “global care chain,” Arlie Hochschild). The objection is solid; the symmetrical objection is too: invoking class alone has long served to indefinitely postpone women’s demands in the name of working-class unity.

Open internal conflicts. (a) Prostitution: abolitionism (the activity is itself a form of violence; penalizing the client — the 2016 French law) versus the so-called sex-work-positive position (penalization precarizes and renders invisible the people concerned). Empirical data are claimed by both camps and remain disputed. (b) The veil: the very same individual freedom is invoked both to ban it and to permit it. © Pornography, since the 1980s. (d) Trans issues: today’s sharpest conflict, between a so-called “gender-critical” current (if “woman” designates a class founded on sex and its exploitation, the category is defined by sex) and trans-inclusive feminism. Both camps claim the same heritage — Beauvoir, Wittig, Delphy — and read it in opposite ways; this is a disagreement over the definition of the political subject, not over goodwill.

The objection of co-optation. “Femonationalism” (Sara Farris, 2017) refers to the use of feminist vocabulary by political forces that have never been feminist, whenever the target is immigration. “Brand feminism” (marketing, corporate communication) produces an analogous effect: verbal endorsement at no cost.

Objections raised against #MeToo. The movement substitutes a media tribunal for judicial procedure; the presumption of innocence is effectively suspended; the sanction bears no proportionality or statute of limitations. Reply: judicial procedure was already failing on a massive scale (the attrition rate), and an extra-judicial mechanism appears wherever the institution fails to fulfill its function. Both propositions can be true simultaneously — which is precisely what makes the debate difficult.

7. The critique of the wave scheme

The division into waves is a pedagogical tool whose flaws must be recognized.

It is Anglo-American: it fits French history poorly (where the second wave is also a theoretical battle over materialism, and where the third wave arrives late), and other regions’ histories even less well. It suggests a linear progression, whereas issues recur (abortion is a reversible achievement, as shown by Dobbs v. Jackson in the United States in 2022, which overturned Roe v. Wade). It obscures fallow periods and underground continuities. It implies that each wave supersedes the previous one, whereas the waves coexist: liberal, radical, and materialist feminism are all alive today, and in disagreement.

Finally, it produces an optical effect on the past: Christine de Pizan, Poulain de la Barre, and Olympe de Gouges become “precursors” of a movement that did not exist, which makes them illegible in their own context.

8. What the debate has actually established

Three propositions today command broad agreement, including among authors hostile to militant feminism:

  1. The gendered division of domestic and parental labor is the main mechanism producing contemporary occupational inequality in developed countries. The causality is identified (the “first child” event), the mechanism is social, and it is therefore in principle modifiable — through mandatory, non-transferable parental leave, whose effectiveness is the best-established empirical finding in the literature.
  2. Formal legal equality is achieved in Western democracies and is not enough. This is a finding, not an opinion: the gaps persist within egalitarian legal frameworks.
  3. Gains are reversible. This is the lesson of the last decade, and it holds against any philosophy of history, including a feminist one.

And one proposition remains open, which is the real point of disagreement: should the sexes be made indifferent (abolished as relevant categories), or should the difference be made non-penalizing (maintained and equalized)? The entire structure of feminism’s internal conflicts can be derived from this alternative.

Symbolic dimension

The question of feminism is a textbook case of the more general problem of the universal. The movement was born from the observation that a universal declaration of rights could exclude half of humanity without its authors seeing any contradiction in that. It then made, about itself, the same discovery: its own universal — “women” — was in turn exclusionary. The gesture repeated itself a third time, when the category “woman” itself was contested.

What emerges from this series is not relativism, but a methodological principle: every universal statement has a point of enunciation, and that point is particular. The consequence is not that we must give up on the universal — the movement has never done anything but demand its application — but that no formulation of the universal can consider itself final. A movement that forgot this would become what it was formed against.

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