List of conservative feminisms

For conservative feminists by name, see List of feminists.

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Some feminisms are considered more conservative than others.^[1][2][3][4]

Almost any feminism can have a conservative element. This list does not attempt to list feminisms simply with conservative elements. Instead, this list is of feminisms that are primarily conservative.

List

This list may include organizations or individuals where a conservative feminism is more readily identified that way, but is primarily a list of feminisms per se. Generally, organizations and people related to a feminism should not be in this list but should be found by following links to articles about various feminisms with which such organizations and people are associated.

• backlash feminism: see new conservative feminism in this list
• balanced feminism: see right-wing feminism in this list
• domestic feminism: see old conservative feminism in this list
• equity feminism
• Evangelical Protestant Christian profeminism ("Karen .... articulates the Evangelical [Protestant] profeminist position particularly well. Like profeminist Catholics and Jews, she feels that the women's liberation movement was a necessary response to the oppression of women. She praises the achievements of feminism in society as well as in Evangelical communities and insists that sexism persists and that further changes are necessary. Yet Karen, too, criticizes the movement for seeking to eliminate gender differences, devaluing motherhood and homemaking, and being led by extremists who do not represent ordinary American women, particularly with respect to the issues of homosexuality and abortion. Her comments on the latter two issues ... resemble ... closely the statements made by antifeminist Evangelicals.")^[5]
• individualist feminism, including concepts from Rene Denfeld and Naomi Wolf, essentially that "feminism should no longer be about communal solutions to communal problems but individual solutions to individual problems",^[6] and concepts from Wendy McElroy
• libertarian feminism: see individualist feminism in this list
• National Woman's Party, in the U.S., led by Alice Paul, described as "[articulating a] narrow and conservative version of feminism"^[7]
• new conservative feminism,^[8] or backlash feminism,^[9] arguably antifeminist,^[10] represented by Betty Friedan in The Second Stage and Jean Bethke Elshtain in Public Man, Private Woman and anticipated by Alice Rossi, A Biosocial Perspective on Parenting.^[11] These authors do not necessarily agree with each other on all major points.^[12] According to Judith Stacey,^[13] new conservative feminism rejects the politicization of sexuality, supports families, gender differentiation, femininity, and mothering, and deprioritizes opposition to male domination.
• old conservative feminism or domestic feminism, from the 19th century^[14]
• postfeminism
• right-wing feminism,^[15] or balanced feminism,^[16] including the work of Independent Women's Forum, Feminists for Life of America, and ifeminists.net headed by Wendy McElroy. It generally draws on principles of first-wave feminism^[17] and against both postfeminism and academic or radical feminism,^[18] the latter being defined to include left and progressive politics, not only feminism based on gender oppression.^[19] Right-wing feminism supports both motherhood and women having careers^[20] and both individuality and biological determinism;^[21] it accepts gender equality in careers while believing that numerical equality will naturally not occur in all occupations.^[22]
• state feminism
• Womansurge: see Women's Equity Action League in this list
• Women's Equity Action League (WEAL), formed originally by some of the more conservative members of the National Organization for Women (NOW), when NOW was viewed as radical.^[23][24] The members who founded WEAL focused on employment and education and shunned issues of contraception and abortion.^[23] Its founders called it a "'conservative NOW'".^[24] Its methods were "conventional", especially lobbying and lawsuits.^[24] The departures from NOW left NOW freer to pursue reproductive freedom and the Equal Rights Amendment.^[24] "[T]he fragmentation process, as organizations broke up and reformed, .... retained women within the movement who might otherwise have left it. This is what happened in the case of NOW, when it split up over internal divisions, and new feminism was nevertheless able to retain the most conservative elements through the formation of WEAL. At first, in fact, WEAL called itself the 'right wing of the women's movement.' Another NOW spinoff, Womansurge, tended to attract older women, who felt more comfortable in it than in NOW, which was becoming more politically radical under the influence of a new younger generation of militants."^[25]

Further reading

Not necessarily authored by conservative feminists, these illuminate conservative feminisms.

Books

• Dworkin, Andrea, Right-Wing Women: The Politics of Domesticated Females (N.Y.: Coward-McCann (also Wideview/Perigee Book), 1983)
• Young, Cathy, Ceasefire!: Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality (N.Y.: Free Press, 1999 (ISBN 0-684-83442-1)); she argues for a "philosophy" (id., p. 10 (Introduction: The Gender Wars)) and "do[es]n't know if this philosophy should be called feminism or something else" (id., p. 11 (Introduction))

Articles

• Grant, Jane, Confession of a Feminist, in The American Mercury, vol. LVII, no. 240, Dec., 1943, pp. 684–691.
• Kersten, Katherine, What Do Women Want?, in Policy Review, issue 56, Spring, 1991
• Lee, Martha F., Nesta Webster: The Voice of Conspiracy, in Journal of Women's History, vol. 17, no. 3 (Fall, 2005), p. 81 ff. (biography including on feminism)

External links

• ifeminists.com official website

References

1. ^ Kersten, Katherine, What Do Women Want?, in Policy Review.
2. ^ Young, Cathy, Right to be Feminist: A Left-Wing Litmus Test Risks Losing Valuable Allies For the Women's Movement (op-ed opinion), in The Boston Globe, Jun. 9, 2010, as accessed Feb. 20, 2011.
3. ^ Feldmann, Linda, Sarah Palin - Feminist First, Tea Partyer Second, in The Christian Science Monitor, May 14, 2010, sec. USA / Politics, as accessed Feb. 20, 2011 (author staff writer).
4. ^ Bradley, Allan, Conservative Feminism: Oxymoron?, Jun. 27, 2010, in HPRgument (blog), of Harvard Political Review (undergraduate publication of Harvard Univ.), as accessed Feb. 20, 2011.
5. ^ Manning, Christel J., God Gave Us the Right: Conservative Catholic, Evangelical Protestant, and Orthodox Jewish Women Grapple with Feminism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1999 (ISBN 0-8135-2599-3)), p. 190 (author asst. prof. religious studies, Sacred Heart Univ., Fairfield, Conn.).
6. ^ Siegel, Deborah, Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild (N.Y.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007 (ISBN 978-1-4039-8204-9)), pp. 122–124 & quoting p. 123 (author Ph.D. & fellow, Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership).
7. ^ Echols, Alice, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America: 1967–1975 (Minneapolis, Minn.: Univ. of Minn. Press (American Culture ser.), 1989 (ISBN 0-8166-1787-2)), p. 12 (author then visiting asst. prof. history, Univ. of Ariz. at Tucson).
8. ^ Stacey, Judith, The New Conservative Feminism, in Feminist Studies, vol. 9, no. 3 (Autumn, 1983), p. 559.
9. ^ This is apparently not entirely the backlash written about by feminist author Susan Faludi.
10. ^ Stacey, Judith, The New Conservative Feminism, op. cit., p. 574.
11. ^ Rossi, Alice, A Biosocial Perspective on Parenting, in Daedalus 106 (special issue on the family, Spring, 1977), as cited in Stacey, Judith, The New Conservative Feminism, op. cit., p. [559] n. 3.
12. ^ Stacey, Judith, The New Conservative Feminism, op. cit., pp. 562 & 567–568.
13. ^ Stacey, Judith, The New Conservative Feminism, op. cit., pp. 561–562.
14. ^ Stacey, Judith, The New Conservative Feminism, op. cit., p. 575 & n. 53, citing, e.g., Epstein, Barbara Leslie, The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism, and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century America (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1981), Sklar, Kathryn Kish, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1973), & DuBois, Ellen Carol]], Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1978).
15. ^ Bailey, Courtney, 'Taking Back the Campus': Right-Wing Feminism as the 'Middle Ground' , in Feminist Teacher, vol. 16, no. 3 (2006), p. 173.
16. ^ Bailey, Courtney, 'Taking Back the Campus' , op. cit., p. 175.
17. ^ Bailey, Courtney, 'Taking Back the Campus' , op. cit., p. 177.
18. ^ Bailey, Courtney, 'Taking Back the Campus' , op. cit., esp. p. 176.
19. ^ Bailey, Courtney, 'Taking Back the Campus' , op. cit., p. 174 n. 3.
20. ^ Bailey, Courtney, 'Taking Back the Campus' , op. cit., pp. 180–181.
21. ^ Bailey, Courtney, 'Taking Back the Campus' , op. cit., pp. 181–182.
22. ^ Bailey, Courtney, 'Taking Back the Campus' , op. cit., p. 182.
23. ^ ^{a b} Castro, Ginette, trans. Elizabeth Loverde-Bagwell, American Feminism: A Contemporary History (N.Y.: N.Y. Univ. Press, 1990 (ISBN 0-8147-1448-X)), p. 62 and see pp. 216–218 (trans. from Radioscopie du féminisme américain (Paris, France: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1984) (French)) (author prof. Eng. lang. & culture, Univ. of Bordeaux III, France).
24. ^ ^{a b c d} Siegel, Deborah, Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild, op. cit., p. 83.
25. ^ Castro, Ginette, trans. Elizabeth Loverde-Bagwell, American Feminism, op. cit., p. 176 ("new feminism" probably the author's term not referring to the new feminism related to Roman Catholicism but perhaps to second-wave feminism generally) (fragmentation prob. referring to late 1960s–early 1970s in U.S.).