Feminist frameworks [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION FEMINIST THEORY AND FEMINIST PRACTICE The first edition of Feminist Frameworks was conceived in the mid-1970s. The years immediately preceding its publication were full of excitement and contro-versy as millions of women in the industrialized nations of the world came to see themselves as oppressed and moved into action against that oppression. Every modern institution was exposed to critical scrutiny by the new feminists of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Like their predecessors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these feminists criticized male dominance in educa-tion, religion, government, and the economy. What especially distinguished them from earlier feminists, however, was their challenge to the organization of so-called personal life: marriage, family, sexuality, and even childhood as an institution. Those who were unsympathetic to the new feminism felt that the whole structure of society was under attack—as indeed it was. Conservatives responded with a variety of arguments designed to prove that traditional standards of appropriate behavior for men and women were grounded on biological predispositions that were different for each sex. On this basis, conservatives argued that women's subordination was in somé sense natural. According to their analysis, much of the dissatisfaction and misery that pervaded so many aspects of contemporary society was a consequence less of rigid and irrational gender norms than of the prevailing social disregard for biological imperatives. The first edition of Feminist Frameworks reflected the excitement and controversy of the time. It included women's reports of their own experience of oppression and various feminist attempts to analyse the nature and causes of that oppression. Somé of the feminist analyses were more than a century old; others constituted new theoretical beginnings, formulating new categories to under-stand areas of social life that had been ignored hitherto by social theory. The first edition of Feminist Frameworks alsó included somé of the new forms of biological determinism that purported to explain and thus justify women's oppression. The years since the originál publication of Feminist Frameworks have seen rapid changes, both social and theoretical. The situation of many women has been conspicuously altered, partly as a result of feminist struggles but more fundamentally in response to the changing economic situation. Moreover, the