What kind of feminist are you?

My mom, who is studying for her Phd in Education, has been studying “feminism” in the classroom. It’s so funny, I think of myself as a feminist, because, you know, I’m for things like equal pay for equal work and radical ideas of that nature. But apparently there are specific categories. Here is the e-mail she sent me. So tell me, what kind of feminist are you?

“Kinds of feminism, according to Rosemarie Tong and Michael Crotty, are:

1) Liberal feminism – humanist (truth and vales are uniquely human, and only humans give them meaning) and politically liberal (any law or policies needs to be justified because it limits the rights of the individual to “perfect freedom”). This view strives for a society that safeguards individual rights and permits self-fulfillment, and believes the purpose of government is to protect those rights while staying out of people’s personal lives and choices as much as possible. The goal is to achieve government reforms that accord women the same political and social rights as men.

2) Marxist – revolutionary; this view believes that because the current political and social structure is based on male dominance and control, women cannot achieve equal rights through reform alone. They believe that the ends of capitalism are achieved at least partially on the oppression of women as unpaid domestic labor and low paid staff. They want the government to pay domestic workers a salary in recognition of their importance to society. They do not value the differences between men and women.

3) Radical – separatist; this view of feminism derives from the belief that oppression of women is the oldest and most grievous of all forms of deprivation of human rights. They view rape, pornography, prostitution, emotional and physical battering, sterilization, and abortion as abuse of women by men. They do not want to be like men. They believe that patriarchal societies cannot be just, and want to create matriarchal societies or entirely separate, female-only organizations to safeguard their rights.

4) Psychoanalytic – anti-Freudian, these feminists believe that the oppression of women derives from psychological notions that males are superior biologically, psychologically, sexually, and socially, and that we must discard these notions and refuse to pass them on to the next generation before females can enjoy equal rights.

5) Socialist – believe that feminists (both men and women) must unify and speak with one voice about the causes of female oppression in order to achieve freedom. They draw on all forms of feminism as variations of a single theme.

6) Existentialist – this view derives from the view that there is no orderly, stable, or sensible set of laws governing the world; therefore, everything we accept as truth is something we have construed in order to control or dominate our environment. Males oppress women by constructing myths and stories about women that ensure that “good” women will not threaten their domination. This view calls upon women to deny these images and create their own social roles that are not defined by men, but by women.

7) Postmodern – this view is that society must “deconstruct” or dismantle the elaborate social, psychological, and other structures that support the oppression of women to discover its roots, drive out its influence in science, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, and recognize the subtle ways in which women are prevented from empowerment. Women must stop defining themselves in terms of men altogether, and define themselves in uniquely female ways.

Mainstream thought among both sexes in the USA today is that women should have the same rights as men, that men and women should be paid the same wage for the same work, that they should be provided with the same social, political, educational, and career opportunities, and that women should be more proportionately represented in the government and other law and policy making organizations. This is not feminism, but a line of thought based on the concept of “no taxation without representation.””

I feel like I don’t fit into any of these categories exactly. My favorite “feminists” are usually writers like Margerat Atwood and A.S. Byatt who have been criticized by various “feminist” groups for their negative/”disempowering” visions of women. But we are nothing if not complicated, right? I guess maybe “existentialist feminist” might be the closest…since I love to re-work old mythologies about women…