Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link. Need an account? Click here to sign up. Download Free PDF. Feminist Political Theory. Valerie Bryson. A short summary of this paper. Download Download PDF. Translate PDF. Victoria University. Nell' Zealand: Miriam David. University of Essex: Janet Finch. University of New South Wales. Australia: Hilary Land. Duke Unil'ersity. North Carolina. A1acquaric Unil'crsity. Australia; Hilary Rose.
University of Bradford: Susan Sellers. France: Pat Thane. Goldsmiths' College. As far as possible books adopt an international perspective incor- porating comparative material from a range of countries where this is illuminating. Above all they are interdisciplinary. Women's Leisure, What Leisure'? No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced. His repressive attitude to sex also finds little sympathy from contemporary feminists.
In terms of both his insights and his limitations he would seem to be a typical Victorian feminist; despite the attention which his work has received he did not produce any new theoretical insights. Mainstream Feminism in the Mid-Nineteenth Century 55 Britain and the United States were not the only nations in which feminism developed in the nineteenth century. There was a clear international dimension to the growth of feminist ideas and, although the timing and nature of feminist ideas and movements varied, Evans has claimed that there was a common pattern of development throughout the industrialis- ing world, whereby initial claims for property, education and employment rights became fused with campaigns for moral reform, and led eventually to the demand for the vote Evans, The nineteenth century cannot, however, be seen simply as a time when the justice of mainstream feminist demands was gradually accepted.
As we shall see in the following chap- ters, the success of feminist movements varied widely. This does not mean that he was hostile to female liberation but simply that, unlike Mill or Thompson, he did not see issues of sexual oppression as interest- ing or important in their own right, and he never made them the subject of detailed empirical or theoretical investigation.
Nevertheless, although Marx himself had little to say directly about women, his theory claimed to provide a comprehensive analysis of human history and society, and later writers have attempted to apply it to femi- nist issues. Classic Marxist theory The ideas that Marx and Engels developed were extremely complex, and they have been interpreted in very many different ways.
The key to understand- ing the process of historical development lay, they argued, not in the ideas that people may hold, but in their physical productive activity: it was the first co-operative act of production that formed the basis of the earliest primitive society and the beginnings of human history, for life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself.
German Ideology As methods of production gradually became more complex, so too did the division of labour and the form of social organisation based upon it. Nineteenth-century capitalism was not how- ever the final form of human society, for the conditions were developing within it that would give birth to the final proletarian revolution. The extent to which all this implies a theory of technological or economic determinism is a matter of intense political and scholarly debate, but it seems clear that in seeking to understand social, political and legal systems and the beliefs that people have about them, Marx said that we must look first at the economic system on which they rest.
The implications of this whole approach for feminist theory are profound. In the first place, the family and sexual relationships are, like other forms of social organisation, placed in a historical context: neither eternally given nor consciously planned, they are the product of a partic- ular historical situation and therefore open to change in the future.
Here he drew heavily on the work of the nineteenth-century anthropologist Lewis Morgan to trace the supposed evolution of the family from the earliest savage society to the present day. This egalitarian situation was changed by the development of a new source of wealth in the male sphere of activity, through the domestication of animals and the breeding of herds. The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude; she became the slave of his lust and a mere instru- ment for the production of children.
However, his concern that working women were neglecting their home and children takes on a new dimension when we remember the condition and nature of early factory employment and the particular problems faced by women, who had to work throughout preg- nancy even on occasion giving birth amongst the factory machines , and who often had to return to work less than a week after giving birth; they also faced problems of sexual harassment and exploitation by the male fac- tory-owner.
Although of course he retained his opposition to capitalist exploitation, by Engels saw female paid employment as a progressive force. The second condition for liberation was the social revolution that Engels believed would soon occur, and which would replace the capitalist economic system with one based on common ownership. The care and education of the children becomes a public affair; society looks after all children alike, whether they are born of wedlock or not.
Engels claimed that present arrangements were characterised above all by hypocrisy; enforced monogamy for women was accompanied by sexual licence for men, while adultery and prostitution rather than fidelity and love were the basis of modern bourgeois marriage. This meant that although he said that in socialist society housework and childcare would be collectivised, he never thought it necessary to discuss which sex should perform these tasks; given his other remarks, the impli- cation is that they would be done by women, an interpretation that was certainly assumed by many later Marxists.
Similarly, his approach allowed little room for under- standing the sex-specific oppression of women as workers; in particular, he failed to show why women were paid so much less than men. Engels has been further criticised for his views on human sexuality see Evans, ; Jaggar, ; Millett, Like the mainstream femi- nists discussed earlier, he rejected the hypocrisy of the double standard of morality that praised chastity in women while condoning widespread prostitution, and his suggestion that morality may be dependent on eco- nomic needs offers an advance on earlier analyses.
At the same time, his stress on economic motivation often led to an oversimplification of sexual morality and behaviour. Similarly, while the family may serve an important economic function, to reduce it to this func- tion is highly dubious; at the very least, it ignores important psychologi- cal functions, and, as we have seen, it denies the possibility of oppression within the proletarian family.
In general he held a very romanticised view of proletarian marriage which he saw as the freely chosen result of love and sexual attraction; here male brutality could not last long as it no longer had an economic foundation, and the wife was free to leave.
However, there remains the problem of whether Marxism is really able to see or understand any non-economic sources of oppression, and this is related to its underlying theory of history. Engels expanded this position in his Preface to The Origin: According to the materialist conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of immediate life.
This, again, is of a twofold character. On the one side, the production of the means of subsistence, of food, clothing and shelter and the tools necessary for that production; on the other side, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species. The social institutions under which the people of a particular historical epoch and a particular country live are conditioned by both kinds of production: by the stage of development of labour on the one hand and of the family on the other.
The Origin:4 Despite these formulations, neither Marx nor Engels gave production and reproduction equal roles in the productive process. He further argued that such social forces did arise in Europe, with the introduction of private property, but that in America they did not, so that the indigenous American family remained in its early form.
This means that it was only in pre-class societies that the family and sexual relationships developed under their own momentum; for most of recorded history their form was dependent upon the development of production. Marx never said any- thing so specific, but it is quite clear that although he saw reproduction as a part of the material basis of society, it was in no way an independent source of change; in general, therefore, he found the oppression of women to be theoretically uninteresting, a product of class society rather than something worth understanding in its own right.
This theoretical perspective meant that Marx and Engels never explored in any detail the ways in which sexual relationships and family organisation have changed over time. For such Marxist feminists, reproduction is a key part of the material base which must be incorporated into a correct understand- ing of society; this opens up the possibility of a causal interaction between production and reproduction, which in turn implies the interaction of class and sex struggles — and in practical terms this means that the sexism of men in left-wing organisations or the working class can legitimately be challenged.
Others claim that the whole view of history as a process through which men increase their mastery over nature reflects an essentially male view that is responsible for our current ecological crisis; the drive to subdue or conquer nature is contrasted with the female method of working with and understanding it.
Defenders of Marxism, however, argue that despite their apparent limi- tations its concepts offer genuine insights. Thus Lise Vogel has claimed that, although Marx never developed their feminist implications, his economic categories point the way to an understanding of domestic labour and of the role of women in the capitalist economy.
As Barrett says, the implications of this for the ways in which men have maintained control over women through their control over ideas are very interesting; however she warns against a too easy transfer of the concept to the realm of sexual politics, which may not be based on economic relationships in the same way. This means that production has become an alien imposed activity, and the worker has lost all control over the products of his own labour; moreover, the more he produces the more his own poverty is increased.
This process has reached its final form under capitalist produc- tion, under which the extreme division of labour removes all vestiges of creativity or job satisfaction, and poverty becomes absolute while wealth is vastly increased. Some recent feminists have argued that the concept provides an impor- tant basis for feminist understanding see Jaggar, ; Foreman, ; Bryson, ; Barrett, The concept is also bound up with the division of labour in society: this has reached an extreme form under capitalism, but Marx believed that it would be ended or greatly reduced in future communist society, in which work could be freely chosen and fulfilling.
Although he was not concerned with the sex- ual division of labour, many feminists today see this as a central issue and argue that men and women can only realise their full humanity when domestic responsibilities as well as productive work are shared by all.
In general, although the concept of alienation seems relevant, no recent writer has applied it systematically. Some, moreover, are highly critical. Nevertheless, there seems no reason why this could not be included in principle.
This rejection of dualism also suggests that, from a Marxist perspective, sexuality could be recog- nised as a fully human activity, something which as we saw earlier John Stuart Mill and other liberal feminists had denied.
Unlike liberalism, Marxism therefore provides no theoretical basis for fear of sexuality or suspicion of sensual pleasure. In it, Marx made a clear distinction between political emancipation and human emancipa- tion: the former declared that all men are equal as citizens, but it left untouched the real inequalities existing in society.
Formal equality for all men as citizens therefore only disguises the real inequalities on which the state is based; real human emancipation requires a transforma- tion of society so that such differences are denied their material basis, and the artificial distinction between state and society, citizen and private indi- vidual, disappears. Although these rights are only likely to be achieved at partic- ular historical periods and they are not the final goal, they can therefore both represent significant stages in reaching that goal and valuable gains in their own right.
Nevertheless, it does claim to be a comprehensive theory, and a number of key points emerge which must form the basis of any coherent Marxist feminist position. In the first place, it is quite clear that for Marxists ques- tions of sex equality cannot be understood in terms of abstract principles, but only in a historical context.
Fourthly, the material conditions for such changes are already developing within existing society; successful change requires both these objective circumstances and self-conscious revolution- ary will and organisation. Fifthly, the struggle for sex equality is integrally connected to the economic class struggle; full freedom for women, as for men, requires the replacement of capitalism by communism. Finally, and more specifically, if women are to become equal to men they must achieve full economic independence; for this to be a source of liberation, house- work and childcare must be reorganised on a collective basis.
Contemporary feminists who wish to use Marxist theory in a less reductionist way are therefore left with the problem of how to understand the interrelationships of sex and class, patriarchy and capitalism; as we shall see in subsequent chapters, this is an area that has generated much debate. Similarly, new forms of employment did not necessarily mean female liberation, but frequently involved new forms of exploitation.
It is also important to remember that at this time the single largest occupation for women in both countries remained domestic serv- ice. In the United States, a majority of black southern women still worked in the fields and, although a significant minority of black women now entered college and the professions, most were still confined to the most menial and badly paid work of all Kleinberg, ; Cannon, ; Giddings, In the legal sphere too, many feminist demands had met with success.
By the end of the century, women in both Britain and the United States had won a significant degree of legal independence: a married woman could now own her own property and keep her own earnings, she had new rights concerning the custody and welfare of her children, and she had some degree of protection against physical abuse from her husband.
Similarly, although a husband still had sexual rights over his wife in the sense that rape within marriage was not a crime, he had lost the legal means of enforcing these rights. In general, therefore, although women by certainly did not enjoy full legal equality with men, the most glaring legal violations of their rights as individuals had been removed; as in the field of education, the principle had been con- ceded that women could be treated as rational and autonomous individuals, albeit as individuals who might need protection from men.
Such independence was also valued by black American women such as Julia Cooper, a prominent campaigner from the south, whose mother was a slave and whose father her owner. At the same time, women were entering public life on an unprece- dented scale.
Such activity was particularly important for those middle-class black American women who, like Maria Stewart in the s, argued that women had a key role to play in the elevation of their community, and helped establish schools and welfare support Gordon, and Gilmore, As legal segregation and racial violence against black people increased, particularly in the southern states, a number of black women also played a prominent role in anti-lynching campaigns Giddings, ; Taylor, ; Terborg-Penn, In England, women were from the s active on School Boards and in administering the Poor Law, and increased numbers participated in local government Caine, In the United States many were active in the growing temperance movement, which was particularly concerned with regulating the behaviour of new immigrants Beuchler, ; Staggenborg, ; Akkerman, Nevertheless, with the gradual growth of organised labour, some women were involved in strikes and trade union activity, and the needs of women workers were finding a place on the political agenda.
All this means that by the end of the century women were no longer totally excluded from public life and political debate, and many were not only demanding but also achieving a role outside the home.
Most of the clubs and organisations that had grown up were not self-consciously fem- inist, and women were frequently divided by class, generation, ethnicity and beliefs. Nevertheless, there now existed a significant number of women with experience in campaigning, organising, fund-raising and public speaking. The suffrage campaign The following discussion concentrates on Britain and the United States. Even in the west, the campaign was based on a number of apparently contradictory assumptions.
This means that although for some women the suffrage campaign was an end in itself, for others it was but a means, or part of a wider goal. It is to the disentangling of some of these that we now turn.
Equality or difference? As earlier chapters have shown, the demand for the vote could clearly be derived from liberal principles: thus it had been argued by such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and John Stuart Mill that women are, like men, rational and autonomous individuals, and that they are therefore entitled to full and equal political rights.
However, early writers had also allowed for the possibility of natural difference between the sexes, and the claim that men and women are morally and intellectually equal had coexisted with the idea that women were the custodians of sex- ual purity, temperance and traditional values.
The retreat from liberal arguments also involved a shift away from the idea that the vote was an individual entitlement, and towards utilitarian arguments about its beneficial social consequences. In the United States, the natural rights arguments that had been so prominent half a century before at Seneca Falls had by been largely dropped, to be replaced rather than combined with claims about the desirable consequences of enfranchising women. It also meant that utilitarian arguments could be used not only to claim political rights for women, but also to deny them to other groups in society.
The germ of this idea had already been present in earlier writers, for Mill expressed fear of tyranny by the ignorant majority, and shared with Stanton the view that the vote should be confined to those who could read and write; by the end of the century a much more overt elitism found powerful expression within the suffrage movement.
The WSPU, under the leadership of Emmeline Pankhurst — and her daughter Christabel — , began in as a democratic and pro-labour campaign based in the north-west of England; however, it rapidly jettisoned attempts to win the support of working-class women in favour of attracting wealthy and hopefully influ- ential patrons, and it became a highly autocratic and undemocratic organ- isation.
For some suffragettes, hostility towards men merged with a more general hostility towards the working class, so that the suspicion of many within the labour movement that the suffrage campaign was simply a movement of middle-class ladies indifferent to other social needs was not entirely without foundation.
By the end of the century, the economic situation of many former slaves had sharply deteriorated, legal segregation was firmly in place in the south and racist violence against them had reached new heights. Socialism, black feminism and the suffrage campaign Of course, not all middle-class suffrage campaigners accepted this kind of conservative and racist position, nor did they all see the vote as a goal in itself, a means of slotting women into a system which remained itself unchallenged.
Working-class women themselves were far more involved in the suffrage campaigns than conventional accounts, which have concentrated on the London leadership, suggest. Activity was particularly strong in the north-west of England, where women did not prioritise the vote for their own sex, but were more concerned with achieving full adult suffrage for all, seeing this as a means to social and economic reform Liddington and Norris, ; Mitchell, ; Hannan, ; Frances, Working-class women were also involved in semi-autonomous organisations in Scotland, Ireland and Wales Bolt, ; Hannan, ; Smith, In the United States, some sections of the main suffrage campaign did attempt to involve working-class, black and immigrant women, and Harriet Stanton Blatch friend of Sylvia Pankhurst and daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton argued that the experiences of working-class women meant that they were better informed than middle-class women on many issues, and in more need of the vote Dubois, Meanwhile, black women in the United States were increasingly organising separately to campaign for their right to vote, and some were developing distinctive arguments which anticipate elements of recent black feminist analysis.
Some were beginning to argue that black women needed the vote not simply as women and black people but as black women: that is, as people whose labour was most exploited, whose children were sent to inferior schools and who were particularly vulnerable to sexual abuse, but whose specific needs were not recognised either by white women or by black men.
However, she did not really extend her analysis to class issues, and, along with many women in the black club movement, she has been accused of speaking from a narrowly middle-class perspective, seeing working-class black women as benefici- aries of altruism rather than equal partners see Washington, ; Taylor, ; but see also Gordon, This position was diametrically opposed to the radical fem- inist analysis that was developing within some sections of the movement, and which was particularly explicit in the ideas of Christabel Pankhurst.
This analysis meant that the struggle for the vote was part of a struggle against all forms of male control, while the methods she chose could be seen as liberating in themselves, quite apart from their likelihood of success.
The courage of the suffragettes in facing the dan- gers of hunger-strikes and force-feeding experienced by over a thousand women; see Marcus, , and Morrell, meant that they could cer- tainly not be seen as frail and timid creatures in need of male protection.
Although such militant tactics were not widely used in other western countries, they attracted world wide publicity, and there were limited attempts to emulate the methods of the suffragettes in Germany, Hungary and France. Here again, as Christabel Pankhurst saw, the knowledge that women could act in such ways was significant not only for its direct effect on the franchise campaign, but for its impact on the prevailing ideology.
Housekeeping as it was currently organ- ised was, she argued, an intolerable burden on married women, and a waste of their time and economic energies; it was also unpaid and largely unrecognised. If, however, it were organised on a more efficient and co-operative basis, then productivity would be increased as women were freed from unnecessary labour. Here she argued that if a woman is unable to sell her labour to earn a living then she is forced to sell her body either temporarily as a prostitute or permanently as a wife , and that men denied women the vote primarily as a means of covering up sexual vice.
However the problem with which she was concerned was very real, and some recent radical feminists have hailed her pamphlet as an important step forward for feminist theory. However, unlike some later radical feminists, Pankhurst did not extend her hostility to male sexuality, politics and institutions to advocate extreme sep- aratism or lesbianism as a solution; commentators have speculated about her own sexual orientation, but it is probable that she accepted the wide- spread view that any form of sexual activity is an inferior form of human behaviour which, in the interests of both mental and physical health, should as far as possible be avoided by both men and women.
It is also an analysis that denies the liberal premise that reform can be achieved through reason and persuasion; for Christabel Pankhurst and the militant suffragettes, it was less the justice of their cause than the demonstrable strength of women that would ensure their victory. Rejecting any idea of a negotiated peace, she and her mother changed the name of their newspaper from The Suffragette to The Britannia, and suffragettes were the first to hand out white feathers the symbol of cowardice to men in civilian clothing.
Of course, such facts do not mean that either radical feminism or the broader suffrage campaign can be dismissed as essentially irrational or inherently fascistic; however, they illustrate well the very different directions in which feminist beliefs can lead, and the conclusions to which individual femi- nists may be drawn.
Subsequent commentary has on the whole failed to recognise the diversity of beliefs underlying the suffrage campaigns. In Britain, the suffrage campaigns finally met with limited success in , when the vote was given to women over 30 who were also local govern- ment ratepayers, wives of local ratepayers, or university graduates for details, see Smith, This had the effect of enfranchising slightly over 50 per cent of the adult female population in a year in which virtually all men were given the vote; it was not until that it was granted to women on the same terms as men.
In the United States, women had won the vote as early as and in the states of Wyoming and Utah; in the Nineteenth Amendment to the American Constitution, enfranchising all adult American women, was finally ratified. The reasons for this enfranchisement were extremely complex, and varied from country to country; they frequently owed more to political expediency than to any mass conversion of politicians to the feminist cause.
Increasingly too, ruling groups came to see women as a stabilising force that could be used against the threat of unrest and disruption; in this sense, therefore, their enfranchisement was a conservative rather than a radical step, designed to counteract the poten- tial power of new immigrant groups in Australasia, immigrants and blacks in the United States, and the working class in Europe see Evans, Whatever the mix of reasons, in many nations a seemingly critical feminist battle had now been won.
Certainly, those who had hoped that politics would be morally transformed by the enfranchisement of women was soon to be disap- pointed. However, most suffrage leaders, like most women, had supported the war effort, and although some continued to be active in pacifist organisations after the war, they remained a minority with little significant effect on government policies. More generally, any hopes or fears that women would vote as a united group proved unfounded; like men, women voted according to their class, religion and family traditions rather than on feminist issues, whilst in the United States white women were not prepared to support black women who were rapidly disenfranchised by racist voting regulations in the southern states.
There was, moreover, no great rush of women waiting to stand for public office. Although a few women were elected to both local and national governments, party differences and the hostility of party leaders made it difficult for them to act as a united group, even if they had wanted to; their small numbers also meant that they were dependent on male support for any action on feminist issues.
It was, however, a period of intense ideological disagreements amongst feminists, as the contradictory nature of the assumptions behind the suffrage campaign became apparent. Equal rights v. A central issue at the time was the question of protective legislation, which was aimed at protecting women from the worst effects of danger- ous and unhealthy occupations and long working hours see Crystal Eastman in Cook ed.
Mill and most nineteenth-century American feminists had avoided. However, in seeing a career as a source of fulfilment it ignored the fact that for the vast majority of women paid employment was an added burden rather than a source of liberation. It is therefore unsurprising that former black suffragists chose to organise separately and developed international links, such as the International Council of Women of the Darker Races Terborg-Penn, Not only do the proposed legal solutions seem inadequate, given the immensity of the problem that has been identified, but, as Eisenstein has pointed out, the perception of women as a sex-class, united in their struggle against men, runs counter to the liberal insistence that, once they are given equal political and legal rights, it is up to individuals to change their situation Eisenstein, ; see also Scott, Cott has therefore argued that those few women who in inter-war America achieved success in the male world were unable to work for the wider interests of their sex, for to succeed they had to accept the existing rules of the game, and if they were to draw attention to the disadvantages faced by other women they would in effect be drawing attention to their own inferiority Cott, ; see also Scott, In general, the feminist label in the United States in the inter-war years tended to become restricted to these equal rights campaigners, whose position was increasingly seen as both old-fashioned and narrowly elitist.
Nevertheless, many other groups continued to work for the needs and interests of women as they saw them. This involved both charitable work by and for women, and political cam- paigns to improve their living conditions.
The main suffrage organisation became the League of Women Voters, and although, as we saw, women did not tend to vote on sex lines, this acted as a pressure group, particularly concerned with the welfare of children and their mothers.
During the Depression, this attitude led many women to agree that the preservation of jobs for male breadwinners should be a priority, and demands for equal pay and oppor- tunity were replaced by campaigns to allow women to perform their traditional roles under the best possible conditions. Nevertheless, it was such middle-class groups that were largely responsible for keeping the whole idea of state responsi- bility for the welfare of its citizens on the political agenda at a time when this was rejected not only by business interests and the main political parties, but also by organised labour.
As we shall see in Chapter 8, the resulting welfare provision was both gendered and racialised in its assumptions and effects. The situation in Britain was also very different because welfare feminists were not politically isolated as in the United States, but could frequently make common cause with the new Labour Party.
Some women had long been involved in charitable work, and a number of studies carried out in the first decades of the century increased public awareness of the particular problems faced by women, revealing an appalling catalogue of chronic poor health, bad housing and malnutrition Davies, ; Reeves, The inter-war years were therefore characterised by campaigns for improved maternal and infant health provision, for the inclusion of women in the developing system of national insurance, and for economic assistance to women through maternity benefits or child allowances Dale and Foster, As in the United States, welfare feminism had the advantage of addressing the real needs of large numbers of women, and in this it contrasted favourably with the equal rights feminists who seemed largely concerned with the needs of middle-class women.
It was also seen by some as a step towards improved conditions for all. With the ending of the war, the large numbers of women who had been substituting for men in all kinds of occupations were replaced by returning soldiers; for welfare feminists this was a welcome return to the natural order of things, rather than a blow to their cause, but for many individual women it meant extreme hardship. Eleanor Rathbone and the family allowance campaign Perhaps paradoxically, the one campaign that might have served the needs of both single and married women was the demand for family allowances, led by Eleanor Rathbone, a long-time suffrage campaigner and social reformer who succeeded Fawcett as President of the NUWSS in and was elected as an Independent member of parliament in Rather, she sought to give all women a choice: women would no longer be forced into the labour market through financial necessity, but if they wished to pursue a career they could use their family endowment to purchase domestic help.
She also believed that her proposals could lead to equal pay for men and women. In practice, when family allowances were introduced after the Second World War for second and subsequent children , they were at a level far below that which would give women financial independence or under- mine the idea of the male breadwinner. Nevertheless, it was feminists such as Rathbone who ensured that the allowance was paid directly to mothers.
Birth control An area which spanned the concerns of both equal rights and welfare feminists was the issue of birth control. This had formerly been largely regarded as a source of sexual enslavement rather than liberation, and nineteenth-century proponents such as Annie Besant had received little support from the suffrage leaders. For some working-class men and women, therefore, the birth control movement was seen as a sinister move towards controlling the working class rather than a means of liberating women; it was also seen as a way of blaming poverty on feckless over-breeding rather than on capitalist exploitation.
Similar well-founded suspicions were shared by many black people in the United States. During this inter-war period, feminists concentrated largely on contraception Banks, —4; but see also Rowbotham on the pro-abortionist Stella Browne [Rowbotham, ] ; their arguments recur, however, in contemporary debates about abortion and reproductive technology, which many feminists now see as a key issue see Chapter 11 below.
In general, feminism at this time moved away from liberal individualism, equal rights and laissez-faire, and towards more collectivist and interven- tionist solutions. Donate this book to the Internet Archive library. If you own this book, you can mail it to our address below. Borrow Listen. Want to Read. Download for print-disabled.
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