Some variants of
feminism
Feminism is a range of socio-political movements and ideology, ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social gender equality, equality of the sexes. Feminism holds the position that modern soci ...
are considered more
conservative
Conservatism is a cultural, social, and political philosophy and ideology that seeks to promote and preserve traditional institutions, customs, and values. The central tenets of conservatism may vary in relation to the culture and civiliza ...
than others.
Historically feminist scholars tend to not have much interest in conservative women but in recent years there have been efforts at greater scholarly analysis of these women and their views.
Because almost any variant of feminism can have a conservative element, this list does not attempt to list variants of feminism simply with conservative elements. Instead, this list is of feminism variants that are primarily conservative.
List
This list may include organizations or individuals where conservative variants of feminism are more readily identified that way, but is primarily a list of variants ''per se''. Generally, organizations and people related to a particular variant of feminism should not be included in this list but should be found by following links to articles about the variants of feminism with which such organizations and people are associated.
* Conservative feminism (in addition to various variants of feminism in this list that are conservative):
**
Katherine Kersten objects "that in many of their endeavors women continue to face greater obstacles to their success than men do", thus acknowledging that
sexism
Sexism is prejudice or discrimination based on one's sex or gender. Sexism can affect anyone, but primarily affects women and girls. It has been linked to gender roles and stereotypes, and may include the belief that one sex or gender is int ...
exists, and does not reject feminism entirely but draws on a classical feminist tradition, for example
Margaret Fuller
Sarah Margaret Fuller (May 23, 1810 – July 19, 1850), sometimes referred to as Margaret Fuller Ossoli, was an American journalist, editor, critic, translator, and women's rights advocate associated with the American transcendentalism movemen ...
. Kersten advocates for conservative feminism based on equality and justice defined alike for women and men and acknowledgment of historical and present injustice suffered by women. She also advocates building on Western ideals and institutions, with reform pursued slowly and cautiously and accepting that human failings mean that perfection is unattainable. Her concerns include crime and violence against women, cultural popular media's degradation of women, noncommittal sex, and poverty's feminization, but opposing affirmative action and class action litigation.
**
Sarah Palin
Sarah Louise Palin (; Heath; born February 11, 1964) is an American politician, commentator, and author who served as the ninth governor of Alaska from 2006 until her resignation in 2009. She was the 2008 Republican vice presidential nomi ...
"made her case for conservative feminism" in 2010, at a meeting of the
Susan B. Anthony List
Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America (formerly Susan B. Anthony List) is an American 501(c)(4) non-profit organization that seeks to reduce and ultimately end abortion in the US, by supporting United States anti-abortion movement, anti-abortion poli ...
.
**
Richard A. Posner
Richard Allen Posner (; born January 11, 1939) is an American legal scholar and retired United States circuit judge who served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit from 1981 to 2017. A senior lecturer at the University of Chicag ...
"suggest
"'conservative feminism' .... is ... the idea that women are entitled to political, legal, social, and economic equality to men, in the framework of a lightly regulated market economy." Posner tentatively argues for taxing housewives' at-home
unpaid work
Unpaid labor or unpaid work is defined as labor or work that does not receive any direct remuneration. This is a form of non-market work which can fall into one of two categories: (1) unpaid work that is placed within the production boundary of ...
to reduce a barrier to paid outside work (argued by D. Kelly Weisberg to be rooted in a
Marxist feminist
Marxist feminism is a philosophical variant of feminism that incorporates and extends Marxist theory. Marxist feminism analyzes the ways in which women are exploited through capitalism and the individual ownership of private property. According ...
argument for
waged housework) and argues for sex being a factor in setting wages and benefits in accordance with productivity, health costs with pregnancy, on-the-job safety, and longevity for pensions. Posner is against
comparable worth
Equal pay for equal work is the concept of labour rights that individuals in the same workplace be given equal pay. It is most commonly used in the context of sexual discrimination, in relation to the gender pay gap. Equal pay relates to the full ...
among private employers, against
no-fault divorce
No-fault divorce is the dissolution of a marriage that does not require a showing of wrongdoing by either party. Laws providing for no-fault divorce allow a family court to grant a divorce in response to a petition by either party of the marria ...
, in favour of surrogate motherhood by binding contract, against rape even in the form of nonviolent sex, and for a possibility that pornography may either incite rape or substitute for it. Posner does not argue for or against an abortion right, arguing instead for a possibility but not a certainty that the fetus is "a member of society" because libertarianism and economics do not say one way or the other. Posner argues that the differences between the genders on average include women's lesser aggressiveness and greater child-centeredness and has "no quarrel" with law being empathetic to "all marginal groups."
*
Maternal feminism
Maternal feminism is the belief of many early feminists that women as mothers and caregivers had an important but distinctive role to play in society and in politics.
It incorporates reform ideas from social feminism, and combines the concepts ...
*
Equity feminism
Equity feminism is a form of liberal feminism that advocates the state's equal treatment of women and men without challenging inequalities perpetuated by employers, educational and religious institutions, and other elements of society. (revised ...
*
Individualist feminism
Individualist feminism, also known as ifeminism, is a libertarian feminist movement that emphasizes individualism, personal autonomy, freedom from state-sanctioned discrimination against women, and gender equality.
Overview
Individualist f ...
was cast to appeal to "younger women ... of a more conservative generation" and includes concepts from
Rene Denfeld
Rene Denfeld is an American author.
Her first novel, ''The Enchanted'' (Harper 2014), was awarded the French Prix du Premier Roman Etranger award, an ALA Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and a Carnegie Listing. The book was a finalist for the C ...
and
Naomi Wolf
Naomi Rebekah Wolf (born 1962) is an American feminist author, journalist, and conspiracy theorist.
After the 1991 publication of her first book, '' The Beauty Myth'', Wolf became a prominent figure in the third wave of the feminist movemen ...
, essentially that "feminism should no longer be about communal solutions to communal problems but individual solutions to individual problems," and concepts from
Wendy McElroy
Wendy McElroy (born 1951) is a Canadian individualist feminist and voluntaryist writer. McElroy is the editor of the website ifeminists.net.
McElroy is the author of the book ''Rape Culture Hysteria'', in which she contends that rape cul ...
*
Evangelical Protestant Christian Profeminism:
* The
National Woman's Party
The National Woman's Party (NWP) was an American women's political organization formed in 1916 to fight for women's suffrage. After achieving this goal with the 1920 adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, the NWP ...
in the U.S. was led by
Alice Paul
Alice Stokes Paul (January 11, 1885 – July 9, 1977) was an American Quaker, suffragette, suffragist, feminist, and women's rights activist, and one of the foremost leaders and strategists of the campaign for the Nineteenth Amendment to the Unit ...
, described as "
rticulating anarrow and conservative version of feminism."
*
New Catholic feminism, embraced by conservative Catholic women as a form of reconciling their struggle for equality with the Church's official teachings on women. Influenced by
Personalism
Personalism is an intellectual stance that emphasizes the importance of human persons. Personalism exists in many different versions, and this makes it somewhat difficult to define as a philosophical and theological movement. Friedrich Schleie ...
and
Phenomenology
Phenomenology may refer to:
Art
* Phenomenology (architecture), based on the experience of building materials and their sensory properties
Philosophy
* Phenomenology (Peirce), a branch of philosophy according to Charles Sanders Peirce (1839� ...
, as well as Pope John Paul II's ''
Mulieris dignitatem'', this school is represented by historian
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
Elizabeth Ann Fox-Genovese ( Fox; May 28, 1941 – January 2, 2007) was an American historian best known for her works on women and society in the Antebellum South. A Marxist early on in her career, she later converted to Roman Catholicism and ...
, theologians
Alice Von Hildebrand
Alice Marie von Hildebrand, Order of Saint Gregory the Great, GCSG (née Jourdain; 11 March 1923 – 14 January 2022) was a Belgian-born American Catholic philosopher, theologian, author, and professor. She taught philosophy at Hunter College fo ...
,
Prudence Allen
Sister Mary Prudence Allen (born 21 July 1940) is an American philosopher who converted to Catholicism and joined the Religious Sisters of Mercy. In 2014 she was appointed to the International Theological Commission for a five-year term by Pope ...
and Robert Stackpole, journalist
Colleen Carroll Campbell
Colleen is an English-language name of Irish origin. It derives from the Irish word "girl/woman", the diminutive of "woman, countrywoman".
Although it derives from the Irish language, Colleen as a given name is rare in Ireland, but far more ...
, among others.
* New conservative feminism, or backlash feminism, is arguably antifeminist and is represented by
Betty Friedan
Betty Friedan (; February 4, 1921 – February 4, 2006) was an American feminist writer and activist. A leading figure in the women's movement in the United States, her 1963 book '' The Feminine Mystique'' is often credited with sparking the s ...
in ''
The Second Stage'' and
Jean Bethke Elshtain
Jean Paulette Bethke Elshtain (January 6, 1941 – August 11, 2013) was an American ethicist, political philosopher, and public intellectual. She was the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics in the University of C ...
in ''Public Man, Private Woman'' and anticipated by Alice Rossi, ''A Biosocial Perspective on Parenting''. These authors do not necessarily agree with each other on all major points. According to Judith Stacey, new conservative feminism rejects the politicization of sexuality, supports families, gender differentiation, femininity, and mothering, and deprioritizes opposition to male domination.
* Old conservative feminism or domestic feminism, from the 19th century
*
Postfeminism
Postfeminism (alternatively rendered as post-feminism) is an alleged decrease in popular support for feminism from the 1990s onwards. It can be considered a critical way of understanding the changed relations between feminism, femininity and po ...
*
Reactionary feminism
Reactionary feminism is a conservative variant of feminism that emphasizes traditional gender roles, heteronormativity, and the family as solutions to women's socio-economic challenges. The term originated in a 2021 article by the author Mary Ha ...
, emphasizes traditional
gender roles
A gender role, or sex role, is a social norm deemed appropriate or desirable for individuals based on their gender or sex.
Gender roles are usually centered on conceptions of masculinity and femininity. The specifics regarding these gende ...
,
heteronormativity
Heteronormativity is the definition of heterosexuality as the normative human sexuality. It assumes the gender binary (i.e., that there are only two distinct, opposite genders) and that sexual and marital relations are most fitting between peo ...
, and the
family
Family (from ) is a Social group, group of people related either by consanguinity (by recognized birth) or Affinity (law), affinity (by marriage or other relationship). It forms the basis for social order. Ideally, families offer predictabili ...
as solutions to women's socio-economic challenges.
Reactionary feminists argue that
progressive politics deny biologically based, evolutionarily determined differences between men and women.
Many reactionary feminists are
anti-abortion
Anti-abortion movements, also self-styled as pro-life movements, are involved in the abortion debate advocating against the practice of abortion and its Abortion by country, legality. Many anti-abortion movements began as countermovements in r ...
. They align with aspects of
maternal feminism
Maternal feminism is the belief of many early feminists that women as mothers and caregivers had an important but distinctive role to play in society and in politics.
It incorporates reform ideas from social feminism, and combines the concepts ...
and reject the
sexual revolution
The sexual revolution, also known as the sexual liberation, was a social movement that challenged traditional codes of behavior related to sexuality and interpersonal relationships throughout the Western world from the late 1950s to the early 1 ...
.
* Right-wing feminism, or balanced feminism, includes the work of
Independent Women's Forum
The Independent Women's Forum (IWF) is an American conservative, non-profit organization focused on economic policy issues of concern to women.[Feminists for Life of America
Feminists for Life of America (FFL) is a non-profit, anti-abortion feminist, non-governmental organization (NGO). Established in 1972, and now based in Alexandria, Virginia, the organization publishes a biannual magazine, ''The American Feminist'' ...]
, and ifeminists.net headed by
Wendy McElroy
Wendy McElroy (born 1951) is a Canadian individualist feminist and voluntaryist writer. McElroy is the editor of the website ifeminists.net.
McElroy is the author of the book ''Rape Culture Hysteria'', in which she contends that rape cul ...
. It generally draws on principles of
first-wave feminism
First-wave feminism was a period of feminist activity and thought that occurred during the 19th and early 20th century throughout the Western world. It focused on De jure, legal issues, primarily on securing women's right to vote. The term is oft ...
and against both
postfeminism
Postfeminism (alternatively rendered as post-feminism) is an alleged decrease in popular support for feminism from the 1990s onwards. It can be considered a critical way of understanding the changed relations between feminism, femininity and po ...
and academic or
radical feminism
Radical feminism is a perspective within feminism that calls for a radical re-ordering of society in which male supremacy is eliminated in all social and economic contexts, while recognizing that women's experiences are also affected by other ...
, the latter being defined to include left and progressive politics, not only feminism based on gender oppression. Right-wing feminism supports both motherhood and women having careers and both individuality and
biological determinism
Biological determinism, also known as genetic determinism, is the belief that human behaviour is directly controlled by an individual's genes or some component of their physiology, generally at the expense of the role of the environment, wheth ...
; it accepts gender equality in careers while believing that numerical equality will naturally not occur in all occupations.
*
State feminism
State feminism is feminism created or approved by the government of a state or nation. It usually specifies a particular program. The term was coined by Helga Hernes with particular reference to the situation in Norway, which had a tradition of g ...
**
Imperial feminism
* The
Women's Equity Action League The Women's Equity Action League, or WEAL, was a United States women's rights organization founded in 1968 with the purpose of addressing discrimination against women in employment and education opportunities. Made up of conservative women, they use ...
(WEAL) was formed originally by some of the more conservative members of the
National Organization for Women
The National Organization for Women (NOW) is an American feminist organization. Founded in 1966, it is legally a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization. The organization consists of 550 chapters in all 50 U.S. states and in Washington, D.C. It ...
(NOW) when NOW was viewed as radical. The members who founded WEAL focused on employment and education, and shunned issues of contraception and abortion. Its founders called it a "'conservative NOW'". Its methods were "conventional", especially lobbying and lawsuits. The departures from NOW left NOW freer to pursue
reproductive freedom and the
Equal Rights Amendment
The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was a proposed amendment to the Constitution of the United States, United States Constitution that would explicitly prohibit sex discrimination. It is not currently a part of the Constitution, though its Ratifi ...
. "
e fragmentation process, as organizations broke up and reformed, .... retained women within the movement who might otherwise have left it. This is what happened in the case of NOW, when it split up over internal divisions, and new feminism was nevertheless able to retain the most conservative elements through the formation of WEAL. At first, in fact, WEAL called itself the 'right wing of the women's movement.' Another NOW spinoff, Womansurge, tended to attract older women, who felt more comfortable in it than in NOW, which was becoming more politically radical under the influence of a new younger generation of militants."
* In the
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Northwestern Europe, off the coast of European mainland, the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...
, it is now common for prominent women in the
Conservative Party to declare that they are feminists; this trend began with
Theresa May
Theresa Mary May, Baroness May of Maidenhead (; ; born 1 October 1956), is a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Conservative Party from 2016 to 2019. She previously served as Home Secretar ...
wearing a t-shirt by the
Fawcett Society
The Fawcett Society is a membership charity in the United Kingdom which campaigns for women's rights. The organisation dates back to 1866, when Millicent Garrett Fawcett dedicated her life to the peaceful campaign for women's suffrage. From 190 ...
emblazoned with the words 'This is What a Feminist Looks Like.' Today, British female Conservative Parliamentarians claim that they are feminists, and claim feminist justification, while advocating a range of policies, from equal career opportunities for women to, in the case of
Anna Soubry
Anna Mary Soubry (; born 7 December 1956) is a British barrister, journalist and former politician who was Member of Parliament (United Kingdom), Member of Parliament (MP) for Broxtowe (UK Parliament constituency), Broxtowe from 2010 United Ki ...
and others, opposing pornography. The Conservative MP
Nadine Dorries
Nadine Vanessa Dorries (' Bargery; born 21 May 1957) is a British author and a former politician who served as Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport from 2021 to 2022. She was Member of Parliament (MP) for Mid Bedfordshire ...
has even put forward a feminist argument for restricting abortion.
See also
*
*
*
List of feminists
*
Femonationalism
Femonationalism, sometimes known as feminationalism, is the association between a nationalist ideology and some feminist ideas, especially when driven by xenophobic motivations.
The term was originally proposed by the researcher Sara R. Farris t ...
Notes
References
Bibliography
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
Table of contents.*
*
*
*
Further reading
Books
*
Dworkin, Andrea, ''Right-Wing Women: The Politics of Domesticated Females'' (N.Y.: Coward-McCann (also Wideview/Perigee Book), 1983)
*
Young, Cathy, ''Ceasefire!: Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality'' (N.Y.: Free Press, 1999 ()); she argues for a "philosophy" (''id.'', p. 10 (''Introduction: The Gender Wars'')) and "do
s't know if this philosophy should be called feminism or something else" (''id.'', p. 11 (''Introduction''))
Articles
*
Grant, Jane, ''Confession of a Feminist'', in ''
The American Mercury
''The American Mercury'' was an American magazine published from 1924Staff (Dec. 31, 1923)"Bichloride of Mercury."''Time''. to 1981. It was founded as the brainchild of H. L. Mencken and drama critic George Jean Nathan. The magazine featured w ...
'', vol. LVII, no. 240, Dec., 1943, pp. 684–691.
*
Kersten, Katherine, ''What Do Women Want?'', in ''Policy Review'', issue 56, Spring, 1991
* Klatch, Rebecca, ''Women of the New Right''
* Lee, Martha F., ''
Nesta Webster
Nesta Helen Webster (née Bevan, 24 August 1876 – 16 May 1960) was an English author who revived conspiracy theories about the Illuminati.Who are the Illuminati? ''Independent on Sunday'' (London) 6 November 2005. She claimed that the sec ...
: The Voice of Conspiracy'', in ''
Journal of Women's History
The ''Journal of Women's History'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal established in 1989 covering women's history. It explores multiple perspectives of feminism rather than promoting a single unifying form. Articles published in this ...
'', vol. 17, no. 3 (Fall, 2005), p. 81 ''ff.'' (biography including on feminism)
*
Burfitt-Dons, Louise, ''The successes and failures of feminism'', on
Conservative Home
ConservativeHome is a politically conservative news website and events company. It was first established by Tim Montgomerie in 2005 with the aim of arguing for a broad conservative spectrum, which is serious about both social justice and a fair ...
Jan 4, 2014
* Swift, David, ''From "I'm not a feminist but..." to "Call me an old-fashioned feminist..."'', in ''
Women's History Review
''Women's History Review'' is a bimonthly peer-reviewed academic journal of women's history published by Routledge. The editor-in-chief is June Purvis ( University of Portsmouth) and Sharon Crozier-De Rosa is deputy editor.
Abstracting and inde ...
'', (Summer, 2018).
Blogs
*
Louise Burfitt-Dons,
The Common Sense Feminist'
{{DEFAULTSORT:Conservative Feminisms, List Of
Conservatism-related lists
Feminism-related lists
Feminist movements and ideologies
Anti-pornography feminism
Conservatism in the United States
Social justice