The Feminist Thought Is Old Enough - 1412 Words

The Feminist thought is old enough to have a history complete with a set of labels: liberals,radical,marxist/socialist, and psychoanalytic ( with the exception of several more). Each school of feminism that’s been considered has offered explanations and solutions for women’s oppression that are rooted either in society’s political and economic structures or in humanbeings’ sexual and reproductive relationships, roles, and practices. Liberal feminists claimed that equipping women with the same rights and opportunities men enjoy may be enough to eliminate gender discrimination. Radical feminists thought otherwise. They insisted that if gender equality is the goal, we must first examine men’s and women’s sexual and reproductive rights and†¦show more content†¦Finally, Marxist and socialist feminists considered that unless capitalist economic structures are terminated, people will continue to be divided into two oppositional classes, the haves and the have-nots, and because of the ways in which capitalism and patriarchy boost each other, women, more than men, will find themselves in the groups of the have-nots. In contrast to liberal, radical, and Marxist/socialist feminists, psychoanalytic feminists sustain that the fundamental explanation for a women’s way of acting is rooted deep in women’s persona, specifically, in a women’s way of thinking about themselves as a women. By no means was Sigmund Freud a feminist, however psychoanalytic feminists have found in his writings pointers about how to better understand the causes and consequences of women’s oppression. Freud’s theories about psychosexual development interrupted his late-nineteenth-century Viennese contemporaries not so much because he addressed traditionally taboo topics, but because he theorized that all sexual â€Å"aberrations,† â€Å"variations,† and â€Å"perversions† are simply stages in the de velopment of normal human sexuality. According to Freud, children go through distinct psychosexual developmental stages, and their gender identity as adults is the result of how well or badly they have weathered this process. Masculinity and femininity are, in other words, the product of sexual