FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY
The main principle is that if she (woman) be
Reported by: Ma. Clarissa S. Malig-on
I. WHAT IS FEMINISM?
At its core, feminism is about equality of men and
women.
The 20th century is referred to as the “century of
women.” In the Philippines, Rizal raised the seeds of
feminism in 1889 in his Letter to the Young Women of
Malolos, where he encouraged women to renounce
religious superstition for themselves and their children and
to be educated in the sciences.
Plato had this feminist work of Plato was titled “The
Three Waves,” where he argued that if we expect women to
take their full share in society, we must teach and train
them the same things as we do men.
There are different kinds of feminism that have been
divided into “waves” of feminist struggles.
II. HOW IT DEVELOPED
It is a misnomer to think of feminism as having only
one kind. It is, in fact, a splinter movement. In fact,
feminist struggle is divided into three waves.
A. First Wave Feminism (1848 – 1920) – B. Second Wave Feminism (1963 – 1980s) - PRO-
SUFFRAGETTES & MATERNALISM
By the 20th century, first-wave feminism or the
“suffragettes” gained ground for political, domestic, and
labor equality. They saw women as morally superior to
men and are this needed for cleaner politics. They also
fought for property and custody rights. “Maternalism” was
another term for early feminism, which exalts a woman’s
capacity to care and nurture, and to advocate for child and
maternal welfare, including maternal leave benefits.
It basically begins with the Seneca Falls Convention of
1848. There, almost 200 women met in a church in upstate
New York to discuss “the social, civil, and religious
condition and rights of women.” Attendees discussed their
grievances and passed a list of 12 resolutions calling for
specific equal rights — including, after much debate, the
right to vote.It was eventually established itself as a
movement specifically for white women, one that used
racial animus as fuel for its work.
The 15th Amendment’s passage in 1870, granting black
men the right to vote, became a spur that politicized white
women and turned them into suffragettes. Were they truly
not going to be granted the vote before former slaves were?
Despite its racism, the women’s movement developed
radical goals for its members. First-wavers fought not only
for white women’s suffrage but also for equal opportunities
to education and employment, and for the right to own
property.
In 1920, Congress passed the 19th Amendment
granting women the right to vote. (In theory, it granted the
right to women of all races, but in practice, it remained
difficult for black women to vote, especially in the South.)
In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman written in 1792
by Mary Wollstonecraft (considered to be the first feminist
manifesto).
not prepared by education to become the companion of
man, she will stop the progress of knowledge and virtue;
for truth must be common to all.. subordination, inferiority,
and inequality will ruin the formation of virtuous wives
and mothers who must grow more perfect when
emancipated.
From her childhood, Wollstoncraft experienced the
imbalance of power between man and woman as her
abusive alcoholic father, who was a bitter farmer, would
often beat her mother which she would shield by taking the
blows. When Wollstonecraft became a schoolteacher and
headmistress in London, she observed how women were
being trained to a subordinate mindset even if they were
equally gifted as men.
Wollstonecraft learned the value of women being
independent and self-sufficient. She lamented that while
men were entitled to various employments, women were
confined to be enslaved to the power and sensuality of
men. It is time to effect a revolution in female manners—
time to restore to them their lost dignity—and make them,
as a part o the human species, labor by reforming
themselves to reform the world.
CHOICE FEMINISM
Feminists collaborated with the Left and rehashed the
movement into a “class struggle” against men and
patriarchal laws. These feminists believe that while we are
born into a sex (biologically given), “gender,” “sexuality,”
and “sexual orientation” are cultural and can be
reconstructed. There are no essential difference between
women and men. They emphasized the right to “free love.”
These feminists..
Ø began to question the need for men, marriage,
and family
Ø rallied divorce and lesbian households
Ø resisted the reproductive role by encouraging
contraception, sterilization, and even abortion, so
women can choose to be completely free of
motherhood.
Ø parodied beauty pageants that reduce women into
objects of male fantasy
Ø objected to in vitro fertilization and surrogate
motherhood (these reduce women into egg and
womb donors)
Ø are against pornography where men are portrayed
as dominant and women become mere sperm
receptors.
The second wave of feminism begins with Betty
Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which came out in 1963.
There were prominent feminist thinkers before Friedan who
would come to be associated with the second wave — most
importantly Simone de Beauvoir, whose Second Sex came
out in France in 1949 and in the US in 1953 — but The
Feminine Mystique was a phenomenon.
Simone De Beauvoir, one of the left-wing pro-choice
feminists, was raised by a strict bourgeoisie Catholic
mother, and the social restrictions made her renounce her
faith. In the Second Sex, she wrote about her abortion,
stating that, “Men tend to take abortion lightly; they regard
it as one of the numerous hazards imposed on women by
malignant nature, but fail to realize fully the values
involved. She was suggesting then that in a class struggle, a
woman should leave all traces of that “feminine” and
should be ready to accept so-called “masculine” values by
thinking, acting, and working like men.
The Feminine Mystique rails against “the problem that
has no name”: the systemic sexism that taught women that
their place was in the home and that if they were unhappy
as housewives, it was only because they were broken and
perverse.
But, she argued, the fault didn’t truly lie with women,
but rather with the world that refused to allow them to
exercise their creative and intellectual faculties. Women
were right to be unhappy; they were being ripped off.
The Feminine Mystique was not revolutionary in its
thinking, as many of Friedan’s ideas were already being
discussed by academics and feminist intellectuals. Instead,
it was revolutionary in its reach. It made its way into the
hands of housewives, who gave it to their friends, who
passed it along through a whole chain of well-educated
middle-class white women with beautiful homes and
families. And it gave them permission to be angry.
“The personal is political,” said the second-wavers.
The movement won some major legislative and legal
victories: The Equal Pay Act of 1963 theoretically
outlawed the gender pay gap; a series of landmark Supreme
Court cases through the ’60s and ’70s gave married and
unmarried women the right to use birth control; Title IX
gave women the right to educational equality; and in
1973, Roe v. Wade guaranteed women reproductive
freedom.
Rights of Mother and Child
On Roe v Wade which legalized abortion in the US, Judge
Greer noted that what women gained was the “right” of
others to subject them to invasive procedures and abortive
pills to terminate unwanted pregnancies. Women end up
lacking genuine choices and alternatives. Women are really
not free.
In the 1980s, the comfortable conservatism of the
Reagan era managed to successfully position second-wave
feminists as humorless, hairy-legged shrews who cared
only about petty bullshit like bras instead of real problems,
probably to distract themselves from the loneliness of their
lives, since no man would ever want a (shudder) feminist.
That image of feminists as angry and man-hating and
lonely would become canonical as the second wave began
to lose its momentum, and it continues to haunt the way we
talk about feminism today. It would also become
foundational to the way the third wave would position itself
as it emerged.
C. Third
 Wave
 Feminism
 (1991
 -­‐
 …)
 – emphasized GIRL-
POWER FEMINISM and DROPPED THE MAN-HATE
RHETORIC.
This wave value differences and diversity among sexes
and among women themselves. Differences are turned into
sources of identity. Men and women have different needs.
Feminism must not turn its face from women by ignoring
that they have female-specific needs.
Generally, the beginning of the third wave is pegged to
two things: the Anita Hill case in 1991, and the emergence
of the riot grrrl groups in the music scene of the early
1990s.
In 1991, Anita Hill testified before the Senate Judiciary
Committee that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas
had sexually harassed her at work. Thomas made his way to
the Supreme Court anyway, but Hill’s testimony sparked an
avalanche of sexual harassment complaints, in much the
same way that last fall’s Harvey Weinstein accusations
were followed by a litany of sexual misconduct accusations
against other powerful men.
And Congress’s decision to send Thomas to the
Supreme Court despite Hill’s testimony led to a national
conversation about the overrepresentation of men in
national leadership roles. The following year, 1992, would
be dubbed “the Year of the Woman” after 24 women won
seats in the House of Representatives and three more won
seats in the Senate.
Aesthetically, the third wave is deeply influenced by
the rise of the riot grrrls, the girl groups who stomped their
Doc Martens onto the music scene in the 1990s.
The word girl here points to one of the major
differences between second- and third-wave feminism.
Second-wavers fought to be called women rather than girls:
They weren’t children, they were fully grown adults, and
they demanded to be treated with according dignity. There
should be no more college girls or coeds: only college
women, learning alongside college men.
But third-wavers liked being girls. They embraced the
word; they wanted to make it empowering, even
threatening — hence grrrl. And as it developed, that trend
would continue: The third wave would go on to embrace all
kinds of ideas and language and aesthetics that the second
wave had worked to reject: makeup and high heels and
high-femme girliness.
The third wave was a diffuse movement without a
central goal, and as such, there’s no single piece of
legislation or major social change that belongs to the third
wave the way the 19th Amendment belongs to the first
wave or Roe v. Wade belongs to the second.
D. The Present Wave: A Fourth Wave?
Feminism is now entering a new phase of securing the
rights of women in the womb against sex-selective abortion
and for pre-natal health care for both the mother and her
unborn child. In several decided cases, it was ruled that
abortion is to be made safe and legal in those circumstances
when pregnancy is fatal to both mother and child, that a
woman’s right to privacy is not absolute since when she is
pregnant her life becomes intimately connected with that of
the fetus, and that fertilization and its similar phase in
artificial cloning commences the conception of a human
being.
 Feminists have been anticipating the arrival of a fourth emotions. Because women are supposed to be flattered
wave since at least 1986. Over the past few years, as when we are catcalled. Harassing someone is not the way to
#MeToo and Time’s Up pick up momentum, the Women’s flatter her.
March floods Washington with pussy hats every year, and a To echo Emma Watson— the UN Women Goodwill
record number of women prepare to run for office, it’s Ambassador— tells us that, “Feminism is about having a
beginning to seem that the long-heralded fourth wave might choice. It’s not a stick with which to beat other women.
actually be here. While
  a
  lot
  of
  media
  coverage
  of
  It’s about freedom, it’s about liberation, it’s about
#MeToo
 describes
  it
 as
  a
  movement
  dominated
  by
  equality.” We have to scrap the impossible standards
third-­‐wave
 feminism,
 it
 actually
 seems
 to
 be
 centered
 in
  that modern feminists are often held to. Feminism is
a
 movement
 that
 lacks
 the
 characteristic
 diffusion
 of
 the
  about freeing women from societal standards, and about
third
 wave.
 It
 feels
 different.
  empowering women to abide by no one’s expectations
“Maybe
  the
  fourth
  wave
  is
  online,”
 said
  feminist
  but their own. Women are not one-dimentional figures.
Jessica
 Valenti
 in
 2009,
 and
 that’s
 come
 to
 be
 one
 of
 the
  Even though the feminist movement has already
major
  ideas
  of
  fourth-­‐wave
  feminism.
  Online
  is
  where
  yielded many positive results, we've still got a long way to
activists
  meet
  and
  plan
  their
  activism,
  and
  it’s
  where
  go. That’s why it’s crucial that we all assert ourselves as
feminist
  discourse
  and
  debate
  takes
  place.
  Sometimes
  feminists and fight for equality of the sexes. Let’s also not
fourth-­‐wave
  activism
  can
  even
  take
  place
  on
  the
  forget that men can be feminists.
internet
 (the
 “#MeToo”
 tweets),
 and
 sometimes
 it
 takes
 
place
  on
  the
  streets
  (the
  Women’s
  March),
  but
  it’s
 
conceived
 and
 propagated
 online.
  Sources:
Like
  all
  of
  feminism,
  the
  fourth
  wave
  is
  not
  a
 
monolith.
  It
  means
  different
  things
  to
  different
  people.
  Andrews, T. (2017, March 6). The Washington
Fourth-­‐wave
  feminism
  is
  queer,
  sex-­‐positive,
  trans-­‐ Post. ‘Feminism is not a stick with which to beat other
inclusive,
 body-­‐positive,
 and
 digitally
 driven.
 
  women’: Emma Watson tells off critics of revealing
photo. Retrieved May 5, 2018, from
Feminist methods of legal critique include.. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-
(1) “Woman in Question” – probes on the gender mix/wp/2017/03/06/feminism-is-not-a-stick-with-which-to-
implications of the law by taking into account the beat-other-women-emma-watson-tells-off-critics-of-
POV of women on sensitive issues trivialized by revealing-photo/?utm_term=.3a8e9fc08eec
men.
(2) “Consciousness Raising”– women are Grady, C. (2018, March 20). Vox. The waves of feminism,
encouraged to come out and share their and why people keep fighting over them,
experiences publicly to attract public attention explained. Retrieved May 5, 2018, from
and to challenge dominant versions of social https://www.vox.com/2018/3/20/16955588/feminism-
reality. waves-explained-first-second-third-fourth

Nicolo, B., & Bernardo, O. (2014). Chapter X Everyone

III. WHY IS IT (STILL) RELEVANT TODAY? "In": Postmodernism and The Future of
Law. Philawsophia: Philosophy and Theory of Law (pp.
There are thousands of people who feel we’ve already 204 - 21). Manila: Rex Book Store, Inc..
arrived at equality for men and women. Victim blaming is
still a massive problem—especially in cases of rape.
Educational and career sexism (glass ceiling) exists and are
still rampant. Because women feel unsafe walking home at
night. Because "taking care of the home" is still seen
primarily as a female responsibility. Because “stop acting
like a girl” is still an acceptable thing to say. Acting like a
girl should not be an insult. Because women, but not men,
are expected to change their last name upon getting
married. Because, in domestic abuse situations, we ask why
she stayed so long but not why he abused her. Because
women who don’t want kids are seen as strange. Because
we think men cannot be victims of domestic abuse as well.
Because girls are told that when a boy picks on you it
means he likes you. So, does that make it okay for someone
to be mean to you? Because women who are promiscuous
are called sluts. But men who are promiscuous are
(generally) deemed legends. Because women’s prefixes
(like Miss, Ms. and Mrs.) define women by their marital
status, yet men only use Mr. Because we still say a woman
"must be on her period" if she expresses passionate