Feminism

In analyzing the roots of women's oppression, feminist theorists were attracted to two of the central ideologies of the twentieth century—Marxism and psychoanalysis. Marxist analyses provided a framework for understanding women's economic oppression and issues of class within feminism. Psychoanalysis, with its preoccupation with sexual differences, offered a means for analyzing personality structures and object relations in the hope that individuals (i.e., women) would be freed from their unconscious conflicts. Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) became an important influence—although, while some scholars found in his theorizing important tools for their own, others attacked him for being a misogynist.

Given that by the 1980s many feminists believed that women's experience of patriarchy and male domination differed by race, class, and culture, feminist theorizing needed other theoretical tools. Those who realized the limitations of constructing theories based on generalizations about the experience of Western white middle-class women found a natural ally in post-modernism. Postmodernist critiques offered a resistance to modernist conceptions of reason and claims of scientific "neutrality." There emerged clear overlaps between the postmodernist stance and feminist positions, which had long criticized Enlightenment ideals that legitimized an autonomous self as being reflective of masculinist agendas. Constructivism and deconstruction, which challenged the positivist tradition in science and essentialist theories of a single "truth" or "reality," appealed to feminist theorists. These approaches opened up possibilities for understanding how power operates through constructions of knowledge (i.e., about women) that are perpetuated through the medium of language by those who have the power over language/knowledge (i.e., men). Feminist psychologists used constructivism to argue that theories of women's sexuality were in fact organized within particular assumptive frameworks that strengthened patriarchal controls over women's bodies and desires. Thus constructivism, with its focus on representations of gender (rather than sex difference) provided for feminist thought a germinal insight: that woman, beyond the sexual differences, is a social category.

Gradually a whole range of disparate concepts were inserted in feminist thought that drew not only from Freud but also Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) and Michel Foucault (1926–1984). In theorizing about difference, feminist theorists were influenced by the writings of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (b. 1930). Foucauldian conceptualizations of power and hegemony proved useful for understanding institutionalized patriarchal power structures that subordinated women. The "postmodern turn" thus became a pressing issue for feminist scholars, although there are many diverse positions within this framework.

Anglo-American feminist theory from the 1960s into the 1980s reflected the viewpoints of white middle-class North American and western European feminist scholars who did not interrogate their own methodological legacies and failed to recognize the embeddedness of their own assumptions within a specific historical context. An example of this approach was represented by Robin Morgan's book Sisterhood Is Global (1984), which asserted that women in their experience of oppression "shared a common world view." These assumptions of sameness were fiercely contested for their ethnocentric bias in the 1980s.