Feminist Community Practice

Defining Feminism

There is considerable debate in feminist scholarship as to what constitutes feminism. Yet the common thread is the recognition that collectively women have been and continue to be denied power and privilege because of gender.

Feminism is (minimally) the recognition that women, compared to men, are an oppressed group and that women's problems are a result of discrimination. Women's status is shaped by processes of structural inequality, not individual actors or circumstances. Feminism is transformational because it involves a vision of a society that does not exist and sees social, political, and economic change as necessary for that vision to be realized (Martin, 1990, p. 184). Feminist activism, then, is concerned with “challenging women's subordinate (or disadvantaged) status in the society at large and in their own community” (Gluck, 1998, p. 34).

Feminism is not, however, a singular ideology, perspective, or movement. Following feminism's reemergence in the 1960s, several dominant ideological streams developed, including liberal, radical, socialist, and cultural perspectives. Within each of these frameworks, different visions, strategies, tactics, organizational types, and outcomes were articulated (Ferree & Martin, 1995; Hyde, 2001; Martin, 1990). Stemming from critiques that feminism was insufficiently attentive to racial oppression, a woman of color (also termed womanisf) perspective evolved (Walker, 1983; Weil, 1996). More recently, feminist scholars and activists have advocated a multiracial or multicultural feminism in order to weave together gender, race, class, and sexual orientation (Gluck, 1998; Gutiérrez & Lewis, 1997,1999; Naples, 1991,1992,1998b; Wolfe & Tucker, 1995; Zinn & Dill, 1996). Regardless of perspective, gender is a lens through which one's identity and experiences are understood, either exclusively or in combination with other dimensions of one's cultural identity (Lather, 1988).

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