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Feminism is a broad structural and conflict perspective that focuses on gender inequality as a central feature of society. Feminist sociologists argue that sociology has historically been "malestream" — dominated by male perspectives, concerns, and assumptions — and that a specifically feminist analysis is needed to understand the experiences and disadvantages of women. For AQA A-Level Sociology, you must understand the different strands of feminist thought and their distinctive contributions to sociological theory. Feminism is not a single doctrine but a family of perspectives that disagree sharply with one another, and being able to distinguish and compare them is exactly what earns marks.
Key Definition: Feminism is a sociological and political perspective that analyses society in terms of gender inequality. It seeks to understand the sources, nature, and consequences of women's subordination and to advocate for gender equality.
Feminism is assessed in the Theory and Methods sections of Paper 1 and Paper 3 and is a key perspective across the substantive topics. In the family it supplies Oakley on the domestic division of labour and the "conventional family", and Marxist-feminist accounts of unpaid labour; in education it informs analyses of the gender gap and the policing of girls' identities (Lees); in beliefs it asks whether religion is patriarchal; and in crime and deviance it underpins Heidensohn on female conformity and Carlen on women and crime, as well as critiques of "malestream" criminology. Feminism also bears directly on the research methods debate through the idea of a distinctively feminist methodology.
Track the disagreements as you read. Feminism shares Marxism's conflict model but insists the primary division is gender (patriarchy), not class — a quarrel played out within Marxist and dual-systems feminism. It opposes functionalism directly: where Parsons sees the family's gendered "expressive" and "instrumental" roles as functional, Oakley sees patriarchal exploitation. It overlaps with interactionism when it studies how gender identities are constructed in interaction (a link to symbolic interactionism and to West and Zimmerman's "doing gender"). Methodologically, many feminists (e.g. Ann Oakley) argue for qualitative, non-hierarchical methods that give women a voice and reject the "detached", masculine model of positivist research — a major synoptic link to the methods and the value-freedom debates.
Liberal feminism focuses on achieving equal rights and opportunities for women within the existing social and political system. Liberal feminists do not seek to overthrow capitalism or radically restructure society; instead, they argue that gender inequality can be eliminated through legal reform, education, and changes in attitudes.
Oakley is one of the most important feminist sociologists. Her key contributions include:
Liberal feminists also point to evidence that gendered attitudes are changing. Sue Sharpe's restudy of working-class girls in London found that their priorities shifted markedly between the early 1970s and the 1990s — from "love, marriage, husbands and children" towards educational and career success and self-reliance — which liberal feminists read as evidence that socialisation and aspirations can be transformed through reform and changing opportunities. Studies of girls' improving educational performance are similarly cited as a liberal-feminist success story.
Evaluation (AO3):
Radical feminism argues that patriarchy — systematic male domination of women — is the most fundamental and pervasive form of social inequality. Unlike liberal feminists, radical feminists deny that reform alone can end gender inequality; patriarchy is embedded in every institution and intimate relationship and requires a radical transformation of society.
Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex (1970) argued that patriarchy is rooted in the biological facts of reproduction: women's role in childbearing and childrearing makes them physically dependent on men. She argued that genuine liberation would require new reproductive technologies to free women from the biological burden of pregnancy.
In Sexual Politics (1970), Millett argued that patriarchy is the most basic form of human power, sustained through the socialisation of both sexes into the "patriarchal ideology" of male dominance and female subordination, and reinforced through the family.
A further radical-feminist contribution is the analysis of patriarchy as a system reproduced in everyday life rather than merely in law or the economy. Radical feminists draw attention to the sexual division of labour, the cultural objectification of women's bodies, the policing of female sexuality through the "double standard", and the use (and threat) of male violence as mechanisms that sustain male dominance across all institutions. Because patriarchy is held to operate in intimate relationships as much as in public structures, radical feminists argue that personal life — who does the housework, who controls reproduction, how heterosexuality is organised — is a legitimate and urgent object of political and sociological analysis, not a private matter beyond scrutiny. This insistence that "the personal is political" reframed what counts as a social problem and opened up areas of life that earlier, malestream sociology had simply ignored.
Evaluation (AO3):
Marxist feminism combines Marxism and feminism, arguing that women's oppression is rooted in capitalism. Where radical feminists see patriarchy as primary, Marxist feminists argue that capitalism is the fundamental cause of gender inequality and that women's oppression serves the interests of capital.
Benston argued that women's unpaid domestic labour is essential to capitalism: by performing housework and childcare for free, women subsidise the system by lowering the cost of reproducing labour-power.
Evaluation (AO3):
Dual systems feminism seeks to overcome the limitations of radical and Marxist feminism by arguing that patriarchy and capitalism are two separate but interacting systems of oppression. Women are disadvantaged both by gender (patriarchy) and by class (capitalism), and a full account requires attention to both — a "marriage" of Marxism and radical feminism.
Walby's Theorizing Patriarchy (1990) is the most influential dual-systems account. She identified six structures of patriarchy:
Walby also distinguished private patriarchy (women controlled within the household by individual men) from public patriarchy (women controlled by structures in the public sphere — the labour market and the state). She argued there has been a historical shift from private to public patriarchy: women are no longer largely excluded from public life, but are subordinated within it.
Evaluation (AO3): Dual-systems theory is praised for capturing the way class and gender interact rather than forcing a choice between them, and Walby's six structures provide a usable framework for analysing inequality across institutions. Critics (especially intersectional feminists) argue it still treats "women" too uniformly and neglects how ethnicity transforms the experience of both patriarchy and capitalism.
Intersectional feminism argues that gender cannot be understood in isolation from other axes of inequality — class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability and age. Women's experiences of oppression are shaped by the intersection of multiple, overlapping systems of disadvantage, so there is no single, universal "women's experience".
hooks (who deliberately used lower-case letters for her name) argued that mainstream feminism had been dominated by white, middle-class women and ignored the experiences of Black women. In Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), she called for a feminism that centres those most disadvantaged by multiple, intersecting oppressions.
Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality (1989) to describe how race and gender combine to shape Black women's experiences in ways that cannot be grasped by analysing race or gender separately — Black women face discrimination distinct from that of white women or Black men.
Drawing on postmodernism, some feminists argue there is no fixed, essential category "woman". Identities are fluid and discursively constructed, and feminism should attend to difference and the diversity of femininities rather than assume a shared female condition. Influenced by Foucault, poststructuralist feminists analyse how power operates through discourses — the historically specific ways of defining and talking about women, sexuality and the body — rather than through a single, monolithic "patriarchy". A practical illustration is the way Black feminists have insisted that the experience of family life cannot be generalised: where some white feminists portrayed the family chiefly as a site of patriarchal oppression, Black feminist writers argued that, for many minority-ethnic women facing racism in the wider society, the family can also be a vital source of solidarity, identity and resistance. This warns against assuming a single, universal "women's experience" and exemplifies the difference-feminist correction to second-wave universalism.
Evaluation (AO3):
The single most useful thing you can do with feminism is map its strands by where they locate the cause of inequality, because that disagreement is the engine of evaluation. The diagram below organises the strands around that question.
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