Feminist politics is an attempt to represent women’s interests in order to overcome the gender inequalities which disadvantage women. Although women’s struggles to improve their position have a long history, there have been two periods of particularly noticeable mass activity, which are referred to as the first wave and the second wave of feminism. The first wave in the nineteenth century is not discussed here. It was principally a liberal call for women’s inclusion within public life — a demand for the vote and for entry to university and the professions (Rendall, 1985).The second wave from the 1960s until the early 1980s arguably had a more revolutionary agenda and contained the more recent debates about representing gendered interests relevant to this chapter. There have been a lot of jokes about feminism, and it and feminists have been much misrepresented. For instance, feminists are usually stereotyped as short-haired, man-hating, dungaree-wearing lesbians. There are homophobic undertones to such stereotypes, so that it is assumed that being a lesbian is a bad thing. Overall it is a negative image. Lesbian women have been an extremely important part of feminist movement, but the image is not an accurate one and feminist politics is much more diverse than the misrepresentations suggest. There were a broad range of issues attended to and the content of feminist events was often eclectic. For example, a day-long feminist seminar, run in New Zealand in 1981 (Broadsheet Collective, 1981: 21), included a wealth of topics from fixing your car, to getting out of marriage, to complaining about advertisements, to non-violent political activism. The breadth was impressive. But explaining how it was that ‘masturbation’ could find itself next to ‘getting involved in your union’ as part of feminist politics requires some discussion that situates the feminist movement within traditional politics.
Western politics has, during the modern period, focused on the individual’s relationship with the state; distinguishing between their ‘public’ duties and a ‘private’ life supposedly free from political interference. This separation of public and private spheres has been crucial to the way
political life has been conducted and especially to the way it has been gendered (Young, 1991). Politics has been defined in terms of activities related to decision making within formalized ‘public’ institutions such as parliament, local councils, and — more recently — union meetings and other activities such as demonstrations. Issues have been designated ‘political’ if they are matters of ‘public’ interest. In the transition to modernity, family relationships, friendships, love and sex became considered areas of personal decision making and women were not regarded as citizens (Benhabib, 1987: 83). Women’s associations with ‘personal’ and ‘private’ matters, and most of all their feminine bodies, were said to make them incapable of the reason required for politics and therefore unfit to be citizens (Pateman, 1988). Into this arena came early liberal feminists (see Chapter 4), who sought reform within the traditional political system. They wished that system to be opened to women. However around half a century after the gaining of the vote by most Western women, it became clear that participation in the formal political sphere had not brought women full equality. Gradually, the small amounts of feminist activity that had continued from the Victorian period into the mid twentieth century swelled into what became known as second-wave feminism.
Understanding feminism, mainly as advanced within the second wave, is crucial to determining what the politics of gender are. The first five chapters have shed doubt on whether there are any ‘natural’ intrinsic things that make women different from men. We have also established that women and men are treated differently. Feminist politics has looked at that different treatment as disadvantaging women as a group, in relation to men as a group. Yet in the second wave they went beyond previous definitions of women’s disadvantage as mainly consisting in their exclusion from the public world of education, work and politics. They redefined what political activity was about. However the story of second-wave feminism has been told as a story of a unified sisterhood that fell apart into ineffective fragments. I examine whether there might be better ways to understand the diversity of the feminist movement and also include a discussion of varieties of masculinity politics that resulted from men’s reactions to feminism. I conclude by considering whether feminism still has any political relevance.