FEMINISM

Feminism

Feminism

Women have made art that deals with their status in society, and with the range of economic, social, and psychological forms of oppression this may entail: such art, having political aspects, may be called feminist. It has developed over the later 20th century from the early, and important, notion that 'the personal is political' towards a view which sees art as a means of exposing the myths of a patriarchal society, in particular the social construction of femininity.

The Women's Movement (initially called Women's Liberation), which began in America in the late 1960s, encouraged women to protest against discrimination within the art world, particularly the ludicrously small percentage of women included in major museum shows. The most important single event, however, was the setting up in 1971 of the first Feminist Art Program by Judy Chicago ( 1939 - ) and Miriam Schapiro ( 1923 - ) at the California Institute of the Arts. Their exhibition Womanhouse involved the transformation of seventeen rooms of an old house 'to concretise the fantasies and oppressions of women's experience' (Lippard), and included a bridal staircase and a menstruation bathroom. It was important not only because the project was essentially collective but also because it challenged the stereotype that domesticity was inimical to art. Much of early feminist art practice was thus to do with celebrating femaleness as something positive and creative and by implication different from the careerist ambitions of mainstream male artists. The result was that separatism—a conscious decision to isolate themselves from male-dominated culture and only mount exhibitions for their own audiences—became a chosen policy for many feminists. (Zinn and Thornton , 1996, pp.321-331)

For feminism, these issues presently constitute a crisis of definition, as well as a choice about how to proceed. In Fire With Fire, Naomi Wolf offers a number of different definitions of feminism. Two however seem particularly instructive in the present context. In one portion of the book she advocates a definition of feminism that focuses on difference, on "more for women," including anything as feminist that "makes women stronger in ways that each woman is entitled to define for herself" and allowing that a woman is a feminist if she "respects herself" and is "operating at her full speed." This identity and difference-oriented definition is one direction in which feminism may continue to go. Feminists in this view would include Phyllis Schlafly and Margaret Thatcher for surely they respect themselves and believe they have defined ways to make women stronger. This brand of feminism would focus on getting more for women regardless of the implication for others and would advocate the use of their newly attained power for good or evil, as they individually decide.

One of the best known and most important political slogans of the early Women's Liberation Movement in which I was involved in the middle 1960s claimed that "the personal is political." That phrase was honed in reaction to struggles within the 1960s social movements out of which the Women's Liberation Movement first ...