Feminism
Feminism was a study and movement which had to consistently fight for its mere existence, and still managed to reach most of the projected goals. In the history of the society it is a pillar equally if not more important to the paradigm of Marxism, for instance, one of them being about sex apportion, other – apportion in terms of class. The three hypostases of the feminist phenomenon are liberal, cultural and radical feminism.
Radical feminism claims that concept of gender as such is so much faulted in the society, that optimal solution would be to eliminate it entirely. It goes as far as advertising technologies which enable bearing children outside of the human body. Liberal feminism looks on the issue from the side of deeper integrating women in the society, its areas like business, political and social activities (Echols 1989). Cultural feminism states that primarily masculine behavioral patterns are encouraged by public (that is aggressiveness, competitiveness and alike), while communities could benefit much from reversing this pattern into stimulating feminine ways as well. In recent years feminism has lived through an emergence of fresh and novel views, one of the important trendsetters for which was Katharine Bartlett, a scholar who gave feminism a significant amount of her attention. Professor Bartlett primarily concentrated on three vital points.
First, is “asking the women question” (Bartlett and Stack 1986). That is, importance of understanding, how men and women may be treated differently by various areas of law, and how women are eventually affected by this influence. For instance, she brings up the case of self-defense in the criminal proceeding for a murder: a legislation element which implicitly favors male defendants. Argument for self-defense is accepted by judges primarily when a sudden, spontaneous and straightforward loss of self-control takes place. According to biological research, however, women are more likely to lose self-control in a relatively slower, building up manner, which suggests that there is definitely room for improvement in this particular “provocation” law in terms of treating both genders’ equally. This latter means, that a set of rights for men and women should be modified due to their psychological and physiological distinctions.
Second, Katherine tackles feminist practical reasoning – a claim that women approach reasoning differently than men do. In her opinion, the women’s way of thinking combines the classic practical reasoning with conceptualism and several other specific feminists’ methods (Bartlett 1990). Third point of interest is consciousness raising – fostering more collaborative decision making in the circles of judges, and also toppling the existing versions of social realities in favor of more women-fair and women-friendly (Bartlett 1994).Luce Irigaray focused on defining the agenda for “co-existence” between the two dialectically related and yet opposed poles of the society – the two genders. “Democracy begins between two”, she suggests (Irigaray 2000) and also makes and argument for introduction of the “sexed” rights, which would account for the evident distinctions between men and women. Irigaray is also particularly …
