...When studying feminist “philosophy” one can identify two particular strands (among others) that stand out. The earliest strand is so-called “first wave feminism” which centered upon increasing women’s opportunity for employment, the right to vote, and increased or equal pay for women. The second strand, beginning with “second wave feminism” and spawning a myriad of other waves, took a far different approach to the cause of women’s rights.
Simone de Beauvoir is among the early progenitors of second wave feminism. Her collection of short stories and monologues, The Woman Destroyed, were important for setting the stage of second wave feminist thought: marriage, love, courtship, etc., were all human constructs made by men to give men’s lives meaning in this cold, dark, and unforgiving universe. Women who submitted to these male-oriented and male-dominated social constructs subjected themselves to destruction.
Beauvoir’s influence was picked up by the real godmother of the radical feminist movement—Shulamith Firestone. Her influential and hauntingly terrifying magnum opus, The Dialectic of Sex, was even dedicated to Beauvoir and outlined positions that are commonplace to the feminist movement nowadays. First was her synthesis of the Marxist dialectical struggle between capitalist and proletariat over the means of economic production with the feminist struggle between men and women over the “means of sexual reproduction.” Until women gain control of their bodies, which entailed control over sexual reproduction, women could not be truly free. Second was her synthesis of Marx’s theory of labor with what she called the “sexual division of labor.” Women, like the proletariat who labor for the capitalists, work for men through sexual reproduction because women have to answer the beck and call of men’s sexual desires and then carry the child in their womb up through birth. In other words, the entire burden of sexual labor falls onto the shoulders of women. Third was her reevaluation of Beauvoir’s ideas of love, romance, marriage, and courtship as primarily to the benefit of men rather than women which created the mechanisms by which men “own” women moreover than such constructs meant to give meaning to the lives of men rather than women.
...Firestone wrote, “In the case of feminism the problem is a moral one: the biological family unit has always oppressed women and children, but now, for the first time in history, technology has created real preconditions for overthrowing these oppressive ‘natural’ conditions, along with their cultural reinforcements. In the case of the new ecology, we find that independent of any moral stance, for pragmatic—survival—reasons alone, it has become necessary to free humanity from the tyranny of its biology.” ....
...Human nature is the final frontier to overcome. And human nature is the ultimate constriction upon the idol of “freedom.” ....
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Originally Posted by Dangermouse
