This extract is about different approaches to feminism and how they have been affected by modernism.

Authors Avatar

Culture and Society:  Portfolio of Assignments 100%

7. Feminist Critique of Modernism 50%

Lewis Stanley Cohen’s critique of Hebdige’s reading of the symbolism of the swastika

By: Elisha Morrison

This extract is about different approaches to feminism and how they have been affected by modernism.  Feminism is the belief in social, political and economic equality of the sexes  (2007).  Feminists emerged with the feeling that they were oppressed by men because they were women and were ready to speak out about it.  In 1790 the first piece of writing recognised as feminist was A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft.  

Capitalism was identified to be the catalyst of the inequalities towards women whereby women were seen as inadequate, weak and inept to contribute within the workforce and therefore incompetent to vote.  The only feasible role for them was a domestic one – looking after the house and children.  

The first group of feminists described are the Suffragettes.  They were middle-class and well-educated and were understandably frustrated by the inequalities they faced against men when they were intellectual and more than able to have a role within the workforce.   Texts by “Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters and George Eliot” (Lewis 2002) were of importance to the Suffragettes seeing that those texts also identified with the “concerns over the legal rights of women in marriage and property” (Lewis 2002) and enforced their opinions and encouraged them to speak out.  These novelists also, according to Lewis (2002), “sought a more dignified public role for women” other than the domestic role but only seemed to focus on “an educated, white, middle-class woman’s experience”.  It is clear however, from these novels that the Suffragettes were slightly bias, coming from the same background as the characters – wealth, class, and education and were not particularly concerned about people from lower classes, other races and ethnicities (Lewis 2002).  With this in mind, modernism as well as feminism which were “founded on values... which implicate… the (exclusion of) others” (Lewis 2002), proved to be “complex, contentious and inconsistent” as it applies to some but not others (Lewis 2002).

Join now!

Utilitarianism states that actions are only right if they are useful of benefiting the majority and that, “if individuals could enhance their own usefulness and the conditions of their own personal morality, then they would be general improvement to society at large” (Lewis 2002) and so was popular amongst the Suffragettes.  John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill (1970) were also utilitarian and rightly argued that women should be educated considering they were solely responsible for the education of the children.  The Suffragettes had became a political movement by 1912 and “carried out direct action… setting fire to the contents ...

This is a preview of the whole essay