womanhood essay

What Does It Mean to Be a Woman? It’s Complicated

A n “adult human female,” according to a seemingly common-sense slogan seen on the T-shirts and laptop stickers of those who oppose the idea that transgender women are women. They argue that gender itself is a false ideology masking the truth of biological sex difference. But “woman” is complicated in ways that have little to do with transgender issues. Only the delusional would deny biological differences between people, but only the uninformed can maintain that what the body means, and how it relates to social category, doesn’t vary between cultures and over time.

The Caribbean novelist and intellectual Sylvia Wynter opposes the “biocentric” ordering of the world that emerged from European colonialism; the transatlantic slave trade depended, after all, on the idea that certain biological differences meant a person could be treated like property. The black 19th century freedom fighter Sojourner Truth’s famous, perhaps apocryphal, question “Ain’t I a woman?” challenged her white sisters in the struggle for the abolition of slavery to recognize that what counted as “woman” counted, in part, on race. A century later in the Jim Crow South, segregated public-toilet doors marked Men, Women and Colored underscored how the legal recognition of a gender binary has been a privilege of whiteness. In 1949, the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir asserted that “one is not born, but rather becomes a woman”; in doing so, she grasped how the raw facts of our bodies at birth are operated on by social processes to transform each of us into the people we become.

Who gets “womaned” by society and subjected to misogynistic discrimination as a result, and who answers yes to the question, posed publicly or in the innermost realms of thought, as to whether they’re a woman or not? The intersection of those two conditions arguably marks the status of belonging to womanhood in ways that do not depend on reproductive biology.

The “What is a woman?” question can stretch the bounds and bonds of womanhood in messy yet vital directions—as in the case of Marsha P. Johnson , a feminine gender-nonconforming person who graced the streets of New York City as a self-proclaimed “street transvestite action revolutionary” for decades. She’s now hailed as a transgender icon, but Johnson fits awkwardly with contemporary ideas of trans womanhood, let alone womanhood more generally. She called herself “gay” at a time when the word transgender was not common, and lived as a man from time to time. She used she/her pronouns but thought of herself as a “queen,” not as a “woman,” or even a “transsexual.”

While some people now embrace a rainbow of possibilities between the familiar pink and blue, others hew even tighter to a biological fundamentalism. Those willing to recognize new forms of gender feel anxious about misgendering others, while those who claim superior access to the truth are prepared to impose that truth upon those who disagree. What’s right—even what’s real—in such circumstances is not always self-evident. Labeling others contrary to how they have labeled themselves is an ethically loaded act, but “woman” remains a useful shorthand for the entanglement of femininity and social status regardless of biology—not as an identity, but as the name for an imagined community that honors the female, enacts the feminine and exceeds the limitations of a sexist society.

Why can’t womanhood jettison its biocentrism to expand its political horizons and include people like Marsha P. Johnson? After all, it’s we the living who say collectively what “woman” means, hopefully in ways that center the voices and experiences of all those who live as women, across all our other differences.

Stryker is a presidential fellow and visiting professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Yale University

This article is part of 100 Women of the Year , TIME’s list of the most influential women of the past century. Read more about the project , explore the 100 covers and sign up for our Inside TIME newsletter for more.

What Does It Mean to Be a Woman: Understanding the Essence and Experience

Being a woman encompasses a multitude of experiences, perspectives, and identities. When we consider what it means to be a woman, it goes beyond biological definitions. It is about embracing the unique challenges and strengths that come with identifying as female.

To me, being a woman means navigating societal expectations while staying true to oneself. It means finding empowerment in our choices and supporting other women along the way. As women, we often face obstacles and biases that can hinder our progress, but it is through resilience and determination that we continue to break barriers and make strides towards equality.

In today’s ever-evolving world, the definition of womanhood continues to expand. It is inclusive of transgender women who bravely embrace their true selves and contribute to the rich tapestry of femininity. Being a woman means recognizing that gender is not binary but exists on a spectrum.

As we explore what it truly means to be a woman, let us celebrate the diversity within our community and champion each other’s successes. Together, we can redefine societal norms and create a future where every individual feels seen, heard, and valued for who they are.

The Historical Significance of Womanhood

The historical significance of womanhood is a complex and multifaceted topic that has evolved over time. It encompasses the roles, rights, and experiences of women in different societies throughout history. Exploring this subject sheds light on the struggles, achievements, and contributions of women that have shaped our world. Let’s delve into some examples and key moments that highlight the historical significance of womanhood:

• Suffragette Movement: One of the pivotal moments in women’s history is the suffragette movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Women fought tirelessly for their right to vote, challenging societal norms and demanding political equality. The suffragettes’ determination paved the way for significant progress towards gender equality.
• Women in World War II: During World War II, women took on vital roles previously reserved for men on the home front while men were at war. They worked in factories, served as nurses, operated machinery, and contributed significantly to war efforts globally. This period marked a turning point in challenging traditional gender roles.
• Feminist Movements: Throughout history, various feminist movements have emerged worldwide advocating for equal rights for women. From first-wave feminism focusing on suffrage to second-wave feminism addressing reproductive rights and workplace discrimination, these movements have had a profound impact on shaping policies and societal attitudes toward women .
• Trailblazers in Science: Despite facing significant barriers due to gender biases, many pioneering female scientists have made groundbreaking discoveries throughout history. Notable figures like Marie Curie (who discovered radioactivity) and Rosalind Franklin (who contributed to understanding DNA structure) defied societal expectations and advanced scientific knowledge.
• Women’s Rights Activism: From influential figures like Malala Yousafzai fighting for girls’ education to activists like Gloria Steinem advocating for reproductive rights, countless individuals continue to fight against gender-based discrimination today, both locally and globally.

These examples merely scratch the surface of the historical significance of womanhood. They demonstrate how women have challenged societal norms, fought for their rights, and contributed to various fields despite facing significant obstacles. Understanding this history helps us appreciate the progress made while recognizing the ongoing struggle for gender equality.

Exploring the Biological Aspects of Being a Woman

When it comes to understanding what it means to be a woman, exploring the biological aspects is essential. These aspects shed light on the unique characteristics and experiences that shape the female identity. Let’s dive into some key points:

• Chromosomal Makeup: One of the fundamental biological distinctions between males and females lies in their chromosomal makeup. Women typically have two X chromosomes (XX), while men have one X and one Y chromosome (XY). This genetic difference contributes to various physical and physiological differences observed between males and females.
• Reproductive System: The female reproductive system plays a central role in defining womanhood. From puberty through menopause, women undergo significant hormonal fluctuations that regulate their menstrual cycles, fertility, and pregnancy-related processes. It is through this intricate system that women can conceive, nurture, and give birth to new life.
• Secondary Sexual Characteristics: Women possess distinctive secondary sexual characteristics that develop during puberty under the influence of hormones like estrogen. These include breast development, widening of hips, redistribution of body fat, and growth of pubic hair. These changes contribute to both physical appearance and functionality specific to the female body.
• Hormonal Influences: Hormones significantly impact various aspects of a woman’s life beyond reproduction alone. Estrogen levels affect bone density, cardiovascular health, emotional well-being, cognition, and more. Progesterone also plays a crucial role in regulating the menstrual cycle and preparing the body for potential pregnancy.
• Aging Process: The aging process brings about unique challenges for women as their bodies undergo hormonal changes associated with menopause. This transition marks the end of reproductive years but also has implications for overall health and well-being due to shifts in hormone production.

Understanding these biological aspects helps us appreciate the diverse experiences encountered by women throughout their lives—physically, emotionally, and socially.

As we explore further into other sections of this article, we’ll delve into the societal, cultural, and personal dimensions that contribute to the multifaceted nature of womanhood. Stay tuned for more insights on what it truly means to be a woman in today’s world.

Societal Expectations and Gender Roles

When exploring the concept of what it means to be a woman, one cannot ignore the influence of societal expectations and gender roles. These factors play a significant role in shaping women’s experiences, behaviors, and opportunities. Let’s dive into this complex topic by examining some examples:

• Traditional Gender Roles: Throughout history, society has placed certain expectations on individuals based on their gender. Women have often been assigned domestic responsibilities like caregiving, housekeeping, and child-rearing. These traditional gender roles can limit women’s choices and reinforce stereotypes about femininity.
• Workplace Inequality: Despite progress in recent years, gender inequality persists in many workplaces. Women continue to face challenges such as lower pay compared to male counterparts for doing the same job and limited representation in leadership positions. These disparities stem from deeply ingrained biases and societal norms that undervalue women’s contributions.
• Beauty Standards: Society often imposes narrow beauty standards on women, which can lead to body image issues and low self-esteem. The media frequently portrays an idealized version of femininity that is unattainable for most women. This pressure to conform to unrealistic beauty ideals can have detrimental effects on mental health.
• Double Standards: Women are often held to different standards than men when it comes to behavior and choices they make. For example, assertive behavior may be seen positively in men but negatively labeled as aggressive or bossy in women. This double standard reinforces stereotypes about how women should behave and limits their autonomy.
• Reproductive Expectations: Society places significant emphasis on motherhood as an essential aspect of womanhood, creating expectations around marriage and starting a family at a certain age or stage of life. This pressure can create feelings of inadequacy or exclusion for those who do not wish to follow traditional paths or face difficulties conceiving.

It is important to recognize that these societal expectations are not universal and vary across cultures, communities, and time periods. However, they continue to influence women’s experiences in significant ways. By acknowledging and challenging these expectations, we can work towards creating a more inclusive and equitable society for all genders.

As we continue our exploration of what it means to be a woman, it is crucial to consider the impact of societal expectations and gender roles on women’s lives. By understanding these dynamics, we can strive for a future where everyone can embrace their authentic selves, free from restrictive norms and stereotypes.

Challenging Stereotypes and Breaking Barriers

When it comes to the concept of being a woman, challenging stereotypes and breaking barriers becomes an integral part of the journey. Society has often placed women in predefined boxes, limiting their potential and imposing expectations on them. However, many incredible individuals have risen above these constraints, proving that being a woman is not about conforming to societal norms but rather defying them.

• Shattering Gender Roles: One inspiring example of challenging stereotypes is the increasing number of women who are entering traditionally male-dominated fields such as STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). From pioneering scientists to groundbreaking engineers, these women are redefining what it means to be successful in careers that were once considered off-limits for females. Their accomplishments not only challenge gender biases but also inspire future generations to pursue their passions without limitations.
• Advocating for Equal Rights: Another way women challenge stereotypes is through their tireless advocacy for equal rights. Throughout history, women have fought relentlessly for gender equality, pushing boundaries and demanding recognition for their contributions. From suffragettes fighting for the right to vote to activists championing reproductive rights and workplace equality today, these courageous individuals refuse to accept societal norms that limit opportunities based on gender.
• Empowering Voices: In recent years, social media platforms have provided a powerful tool for women to amplify their voices and share experiences that challenge stereotypes head-on. The rise of online communities dedicated to feminism has created spaces where women can connect with one another, share stories of triumphs over adversity, and provide support in the face of discrimination or prejudice. These digital platforms have become catalysts for change by enabling conversations about body positivity, mental health awareness, intersectionality, and other important topics.
• Redefining Beauty Standards: Women are also breaking barriers by redefining traditional beauty standards imposed by society’s narrow definitions. The body positivity movement has gained momentum, promoting self-acceptance and celebrating diverse body shapes, sizes, and colors. Influential figures in the fashion industry are challenging the long-standing notion that beauty only comes in one form by featuring models of different ethnicities, ages, and body types on runways and in advertising campaigns.
• Nurturing Leadership: Women are not just breaking barriers individually; they are also collectively empowering one another to take on leadership roles. Initiatives like mentorship programs and networking groups provide support systems for women to grow professionally and ascend into positions of power. As more women occupy leadership roles across various sectors, they inspire others to believe in their own capabilities and challenge the notion that leadership is solely a male domain.

By challenging stereotypes and breaking barriers, women continue to redefine societal perceptions of what it means to be a woman. Through their resilience, determination, and unwavering spirit, they pave the way for future generations to thrive without limitations or preconceived notions.

Empowerment and Feminism

When it comes to the topic of empowerment and feminism, there are numerous aspects to consider. In today’s society, the concept of empowering women has gained significant traction as it seeks to challenge traditional gender roles and promote gender equality. Let’s delve into a few examples that highlight the importance and impact of empowerment and feminism:

• Economic Empowerment: Economic empowerment plays a crucial role in advancing women’s rights and achieving gender equality. It involves providing women with equal access to opportunities, resources, education, and job prospects. When women are economically empowered, they can break free from financial dependence, contribute to household income, make independent decisions about their lives, and invest in their own futures.
• Political Empowerment: Political empowerment focuses on increasing women’s participation in decision-making processes at all levels of governance. This includes encouraging their involvement in politics, leadership positions, policy-making bodies, and other influential roles. By having more diverse perspectives represented in political arenas, societies can benefit from inclusive policies that address the needs of all citizens.
• Social Empowerment: Social empowerment aims to challenge societal norms and stereotypes that limit women’s potential. It involves fostering an environment where women feel safe and supported to pursue their aspirations without facing discrimination or prejudice. Through initiatives such as education campaigns against gender-based violence or promoting equal opportunities for girls in sports or STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, mathematics), social empowerment helps dismantle barriers that hinder progress.
• Intersectionality in Feminism: It is essential to recognize the intersectionality within feminism – acknowledging that different individuals face unique challenges based on race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, and disability status, among other factors – when discussing empowerment efforts fully. By embracing an intersectional approach within feminism, movements focus not only on gender but also on addressing overlapping systems of oppression for more inclusive progress.
• The Power of Solidarity: Feminism thrives on solidarity and collective action. Empowering women involves creating a supportive network where individuals can come together to advocate for gender equality, amplify each other’s voices, and challenge discriminatory practices. Whether it’s through grassroots movements, online activism, or community organizations, the power of solidarity has the potential to create lasting change.

Remember that these examples are just a starting point in understanding empowerment and feminism; there is much more to explore within this vast topic. By continuing to educate ourselves and engage in meaningful conversations about gender equality, we can contribute to a more inclusive and empowered world for all.

Navigating Gender Identity and Expression

Understanding and navigating gender identity and expression is a complex journey that individuals embark on to discover their authentic selves. It encompasses the exploration of one’s internal sense of being male, female, or non-binary, as well as how they choose to express themselves outwardly. Let’s delve into this topic further by examining a few examples:

• Personal Exploration: For many individuals, understanding their gender identity involves introspection and self-reflection. They may question societal expectations and norms surrounding gender roles, leading them to explore the possibility of identifying with a different gender than assigned at birth. This process often involves seeking support from friends, family, or professionals who can provide guidance and resources.
• Non-Binary Identities: Non-binary individuals challenge the traditional binary concept of gender by identifying outside of the categories of male or female. They may embrace fluidity in their gender expression and feel comfortable embracing characteristics typically associated with both genders or neither. This inclusive approach allows for greater freedom of self-expression.
• Gender Expression: How one chooses to express their gender externally is an important aspect of personal identity and can vary greatly from person to person. Some individuals may align their appearance with societal expectations for their identified gender, while others might intentionally subvert these expectations through clothing choices, hairstyles, or other forms of self-expression.
• Intersectionality: It’s crucial to recognize that navigating gender identity intersects with various aspects of an individual’s life, such as race, culture, religion, disability status, socioeconomic background, etc. These intersecting identities shape unique experiences within society and influence how someone navigates their own path towards self-discovery.
• Supportive Communities: Building supportive communities plays a vital role in helping individuals navigate their journey of understanding gender identity and expression successfully. LGBTQ+ organizations provide safe spaces where people can connect with others who share similar experiences while accessing valuable resources such as counseling services or educational materials.

As we continue to explore the multifaceted nature of gender identity and expression, it’s essential to approach this topic with empathy and respect for individuals’ lived experiences. By fostering a society that values diversity and inclusivity, we can create a more accepting world where everyone feels empowered to express their true selves.

Embracing Diversity within Womanhood

When it comes to understanding what it means to be a woman, embracing diversity is crucial. The concept of womanhood encompasses a wide range of experiences, identities, and perspectives. In this section, we’ll explore how embracing diversity within womanhood can lead to empowerment and inclusivity for all.

• Celebrating Different Backgrounds: One of the most beautiful aspects of womanhood is that it transcends cultural boundaries. Women come from various ethnicities, religions, socioeconomic backgrounds, and nationalities. Embracing this diversity means acknowledging and celebrating the unique experiences that shape each woman’s identity. By recognizing the richness that different backgrounds bring to the table, we create a space where all women feel seen and valued.
• Embracing Intersectionality: Womanhood intersects with other dimensions of identity such as race, class, sexual orientation, disability status, and more. Recognizing this intersectionality allows us to understand that every woman’s experience is shaped by multiple factors simultaneously. It helps us avoid making sweeping generalizations about what it means to be a woman based on one aspect alone. Embracing intersectionality fosters empathy and encourages allyship among women from various walks of life.
• Challenging Stereotypes: Society often imposes narrow definitions of femininity onto women, perpetuating harmful stereotypes that limit individuality and self-expression. Embracing diversity within womanhood involves challenging these stereotypes by creating spaces where all women can confidently embrace their authentic selves without judgment or pressure to conform.
• Amplifying Voices: Within any group or community, there are voices that tend to dominate while others remain marginalized or unheard altogether. Embracing diversity within womanhood requires actively seeking out those voices that have been historically silenced or overlooked due to systemic biases or discrimination. By amplifying diverse voices through platforms like social media or public discourse, we can foster an environment in which every woman’s story is valued and respected.
• Building Solidarity: Embracing diversity within womanhood means recognizing that all women face unique challenges but also acknowledging that some women experience additional barriers due to intersecting forms of oppression. By standing in solidarity with one another, we can work together to dismantle these barriers and create a more equitable society for all women.

In conclusion, embracing diversity within womanhood is not only essential but also empowering. It allows us to appreciate the multifaceted nature of being a woman and creates space for inclusivity, understanding, and growth. By celebrating different backgrounds, embracing intersectionality, challenging stereotypes, amplifying voices, and building solidarity, we can foster an environment where every woman feels seen, heard, and valued.

Finding Strength in Unity: Sisterhood in the Modern World

In today’s fast-paced and interconnected world, the power of unity and sisterhood has become even more significant. Women from all walks of life are coming together to support and empower each other, creating a strong network that fosters personal growth and societal change. In this section, we’ll explore how women find strength in unity through sisterhood.

• Building a Supportive Community:
• One of the key aspects of sisterhood is building a supportive community where women can lean on each other during challenging times. Whether it’s dealing with work-related issues, relationship struggles, or personal setbacks, having a network of understanding women provides comfort and guidance.
• Through open conversations, shared experiences, and empathetic listening, sisters offer not only emotional support but also practical advice to help navigate various situations.
• Empowering Each Other:
• Sisterhood goes beyond offering support; it involves empowering one another to reach their full potential. Women uplift each other by celebrating achievements, promoting self-confidence, and encouraging risk-taking.
• By sharing knowledge and skills, sisters inspire each other to excel in both personal and professional spheres. They recognize that when one woman succeeds, it paves the way for others to follow suit.
• Advocating for Gender Equality:
• Sisterhood plays a crucial role in advocating for gender equality on both local and global scales. United voices amplify the call for equal opportunities, fair treatment, and an end to discrimination.
• Women come together to challenge societal norms that limit their potential or perpetuate inequality. By standing up against gender-based violence, unequal pay practices, or lack of representation in leadership roles, they strive to create a more equitable world for all.
• Fostering Collaboration:
• The power of collaboration within sisterhood cannot be underestimated. When women join forces with shared goals and passions, they become catalysts for positive change.
• Sisters collaborate on projects, initiatives, and advocacy campaigns to address issues that affect women collectively. Their diverse perspectives, skills, and experiences create a rich tapestry of ideas and strategies for creating lasting impact.
• Inspiring Future Generations:
• Sisterhood in the modern world is not just about women supporting each other; it’s also about inspiring future generations of girls to embrace their own power and potential.
• By serving as role models, mentors, and advocates for young girls, sisters sow the seeds of empowerment and resilience. They instill values of self-worth, ambition, and compassion in the next generation, ensuring a legacy of strong women who continue to uplift one another.

Sisterhood in the modern world represents a collective force that empowers women to break barriers, overcome challenges, and thrive personally and professionally. Through building supportive communities, empowering each other, advocating for gender equality, fostering collaboration, and inspiring future generations – unity becomes strength. Together as sisters, we can create a more inclusive society where every woman thrives.

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5 Women Empowerment Essays Everybody Should Read

What does “women’s empowerment” mean? It refers to the process of giving women control over their choices and access to the opportunities and resources that allow them to thrive. While there’s been progress, gender inequality remains a persistent issue in the world. Empowering women politically, socially, economically, educationally, and psychologically helps narrow the gap. Here are five essays about women’s empowerment that everyone should read:

Women’s Movements and Feminist Activism (2019)

Amanda Gouws & Azille Coetzee

This editorial from the “Empowering women for gender equity” issue of the journal Agenda explores the issue’s themes. It gives a big picture view of the topics within. The issue is dedicated to women’s movements and activism primarily in South Africa, but also other African countries. New women’s movements focus on engaging with institutional policies and running campaigns for more female representation in government. Some barriers make activism work harder, such as resistance from men and funding, If you’re interested in the whole issue, this editorial provides a great summary of the main points, so you can decide if you want to read further.

Agenda is an African peer-viewed academic journal focusing on feminism. It was established in 1987. It publishes articles and other entries, and tutors young writers.

5 Powerful Ways Women Can Empower Other Women (2020)

Pavitra Raja

Originally published during Women’s History Month, this piece explores five initiatives spearheaded by women in the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship community. Created by women for women, these innovations demonstrate what’s possible when women harness their skills and empower each other. The initiatives featured in this article embrace technology, education, training programs, and more.

Pavitra Raja is the Community Manager for social entrepreneurs in Europe, North America, and Latin America. She’s consulted with the UN Economic Commission for Europe and also has experience in legal affairs and policy in the private and public sectors.

The Key to Improving Women’s Health in Developing Countries (2019)

Because of gender inequality, women’s health is affected around the world. Factors like a lower income than men, more responsibilities at home, and less education impact health. This is most clear in developing countries. How can this be addressed? This essay states that empowerment is the key. When giving authority and control over their own lives, women thrive and contribute more to the world. It’s important that programs seeking to end gender inequality focus on empowerment, and not “rescue.” Treating women like victims is not the answer.

Axa is a leading global insurer, covering more than 100 million customers in 57 countries. On their website, they say they strive for the collective good by working on prevention issues, fighting climate change, and prioritizing protection. The company has existed for over 200 years.

Empowering Women Is Smart Economics (2012)

Ana Revenga and Sudhir Shetty

What are the benefits of women’s empowerment? This article presents the argument that closing gender gaps doesn’t only serve women, it’s good for countries as a whole. Gender equality boosts economic productivity, makes institutions more representative, and makes life better for future generations. This piece gives a good overview of the state of the world (the data is a bit old, but things have not changed significantly) and explores policy implications. It’s based on the World Bank’s World Development Report in 2012 on gender equality and development.

Ana Revenga and Sudhir Shetty both worked at the World Bank at the time this article was originally published. Revenga was the Sector Director of Human Development, Europe and Central Asia. Shetty (who still works at the World Bank in a different role) was the Sector Director, Poverty Reduction and Economic Management, East Asia and Pacific.

The Side Of Female Empowerment We Aren’t Talking About Enough (2017)

Tamara Schwarting

In this era of female empowerment, women are being told they can do anything, but can they? It isn’t because women aren’t capable. There just aren’t enough hours in the day. As this article says, women have “more to do but no more time to do it.” The pressure is overwhelming. Is the image of a woman who can “do it all” unrealistic? What can a modern woman do to manage a high-stakes life? This essay digs into some solutions, which include examining expectations and doing self-checks.

Tamara Schwarting is the CEO of 1628 LTD, a co-working community space of independent professionals in Ohio. She’s also an executive-level consultant in supply chain purchasing and business processes. She describes herself as an “urbanist” and has a passion for creative, empowering work environments.

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Essay on Proud to Be a Woman

Students are often asked to write an essay on Proud to Be a Woman in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Proud to Be a Woman

The essence of being a woman.

Being a woman is a matter of pride. Women are unique, possessing strength and grace. They excel in various roles, from being nurturing mothers to successful professionals.

Women’s Achievements

Empowerment and equality.

Women’s empowerment is crucial for a balanced society. It’s important to respect women’s rights and promote gender equality. Women should be proud of their identity and achievements.

Being a woman is a privilege and a source of immense pride. Women are the backbone of society, and their contributions should be celebrated.

250 Words Essay on Proud to Be a Woman

The essence of womanhood, overcoming challenges.

Historically, women have faced numerous challenges and societal prejudices. Yet, they have constantly fought to overcome these obstacles, proving their tenacity and resilience. Their struggles for equality and rights, from the suffragette movement to the #MeToo campaign, demonstrate their courage and determination.

Contributions to Society

Women have made significant contributions to society, often without recognition. From Marie Curie’s groundbreaking work in physics and chemistry to Malala Yousafzai’s advocacy for girls’ education, women have left indelible marks on our world. They have broken barriers and shattered glass ceilings, proving that gender does not limit one’s capabilities or potential.

The Power of Femininity

Femininity is not a weakness but a strength. Women’s emotional intelligence, empathy, and nurturing capabilities are qualities that should be celebrated. These attributes contribute to balanced decision-making, compassionate leadership, and a more inclusive society.

Being a woman is a privilege and a responsibility. It is about embodying strength, resilience, compassion, and intelligence. It is about breaking barriers and making a difference. It is about celebrating the essence of being a woman and the unique contributions women make to society. As a woman, I am proud of my identity and the legacy of strong, influential women I am part of.

500 Words Essay on Proud to Be a Woman

Women have been the pillars of society since time immemorial, their roles evolving from mere nurturers to leaders and innovators in the modern world. Today, we celebrate the strength, resilience, and versatility that characterize womanhood. Being a woman is a matter of pride, not just because of the biological uniqueness we possess, but also due to the diverse roles we play and the immense potential we hold within ourselves.

The Power of Creation

Women in leadership.

Women have proven themselves to be effective leaders, demonstrating qualities like empathy, communication, and resilience. From Angela Merkel’s steady hand in guiding Germany, to Jacinda Ardern’s empathetic leadership in New Zealand, women leaders have shown the world that power can be wielded with grace, compassion, and fairness. This shift in leadership dynamics has brought a sense of pride as it shatters stereotypes and paves the way for future female leaders.

Champions of Social Change

Women have often been at the forefront of social change, advocating for rights and equality. Figures like Malala Yousafzai, who stood up for girls’ education, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who fought for gender equality, are shining examples of this. These women have not only changed the course of history but also serve as inspirations for future generations. Their courage and determination underscore why it is an honor to be a woman.

The Versatility of Womanhood

One of the most compelling aspects of being a woman is the versatility we embody. Women are not confined to a single role but wear many hats – from being caregivers and homemakers to being professionals and entrepreneurs. This ability to adapt and excel in diverse roles is a testament to the flexibility and determination inherent in womanhood.

Conclusion: Embracing Womanhood

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

Happy studying!

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Lady Gaga essay on womanhood: Being a lady today means being a fighter

Lady Gaga has embraced her place in a long line of rebels and strong women.

In a powerful new essay in Harper’s Bazaar , the pop star weighs in on what it means to be a woman in the modern world, and how her female forbears influenced her.

“Being a lady today means being a fighter,” writes Gaga, whose real name is Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta. “It means being a survivor. It means letting yourself be vulnerable and acknowledging your shame or that you’re sad or you’re angry. It takes great strength to do that.”

One woman whose legacy Gaga has long carried is the paternal aunt she is named after, Joanne Stefani Germanotta. A survivor of sexual assault, Germanotta died of lupus in 1974, 12 years before Gaga was born.

“The best way to describe my relationship with her is that it’s like the relationship someone might have with an angel or a spirit guide or whatever you think of as a higher power,” Gaga writes. “I learned about her mostly through stories and pictures. But I also learned about her through the rage of my father and watching him pour a drink every night and through seeing my grandparents cry at the Christmas dinner table when it was clear that there was an empty seat they wanted to fill.”

Gaga thought of her aunt when the scandal erupted over Donald Trump’s lewd comments about women on a leaked Access Hollywood tape.

“Here we were, in 2016, and the fact that the sort of language that was being used to talk about women was everywhere — on TV, in politics — was eye-opening,” she writes. “I felt depressed and hurt by it because that’s what that kind of language does. Then I watched our incredible first lady, Michelle Obama, talk in New Hampshire about how hurt she felt seeing it too. She talked about how women are often afraid to say anything because we’re worried that we will appear weak — that we’ll be told we’re being over-the-top, dramatic, emotional. But we’re not. We’re fighting for our lives.”

Gaga’s essay echoes themes explored on her new album, which is titled Joanne in honor of her late aunt.

“The truth is, the album is about being tough,” Gaga recently told EW . “The album is about having endurance and heart no matter how hard things get, and about being unafraid to really look into your heart and how you feel.”

Read Gaga’s full essay at Harper’s Bazaar .

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Faithfully, Yours: Womanhood, Faith, and “A Woman’s Portion” in Persuasion

By Katherine A. Avery

The College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA Mentor: Kim Wheatley

Division: College/University

Place: 1st Place

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2018 Essay Contest — Winning Entries

Gender Roles ›   Morality, Virtues, Ethics ›  

“. . .strength of body and mind are sacrificed to libertine notions of beauty, to the desire of establishing themselves, —the only way women can rise in the world, —by marriage.”           (Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women 74)

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single woman in possession of sound mind, able body, and stout heart, must be in want of a husband. This is, at least, the perception of such commentators as William Hayley, who in a 1793 essay situates Widows and Old Maids as rival claimants to the “nuptial coronet,” expounds upon their respective “right” to marriage, and never questions the assumption on which his argument is predicated: that the desire for marriage is an automatic given (Hayley 191). Even conspicuously radical writers, such as Mary Wollstonecraft—today considered to be the grandmother of the modern feminist movement—seem unable to extricate ideal womanhood from the trappings of wedlock. In the Introduction to her Vindication of the Rights of Women , she describes the divide between the “alluring mistresses” that men seek to make women into, and the “affectionate wives and rational mothers” that women ought to make of themselves (Wollstonecraft 71). Marriage, in either case, functions as a finish line, a prize to be sought after by and awarded to “good” women. These understandings, moreover, seem ultimately to be grounded in an association between fidelity and feminine virtue: “good” womanhood entails a certain permanence of both disposition and personal ambition. The interplay of faith, constancy, and womanhood is explored with particular complexity in Jane Austen’s Persuasion . An author whose works largely revolve around the lives, communities, and social situation of women, Austen—herself a woman who did not marry—offers complex, multifaceted illustrations of the permutations that nineteenth-century womanhood could take. In Persuasion , faith—understood in terms of both emotional constancy and personal loyalty—is a defining factor in the concept of “good womanhood” as embodied by the novel’s protagonist, Anne Elliot. Though Anne is Persuasion ’s most virtuous character, and an exemplary model of feminine deportment, she is also the one most representative of the possibility of spinsterhood, and the danger that it poses to womanhood. Austen, however, constructs Anne’s situation as one shown to be rooted in the very virtue of “faith” that was so highly prized in that very conventional womanhood. In doing so, Austen both redefines spinsterhood along positive lines, and re-emphasizes the centrality of faith and virtue to feminine “worth.” As such, Persuasion broadens the culturally-acceptable range of womanhood even as it seems to reinforce the limited number of attributes that are allowed to define it.

Gendered discourse runs rampant throughout Persuasion . Characters of both genders and varying levels of ridiculousness—from Mary Musgrove to Captain Harville—assume gender as their discursive province, and on multiple occasions speak at length on the qualities of one sex or the other. Much of the narrative’s conflict, in fact, is centered on the gendered disconnect between Anne and Captain Wentworth’s respective perceptions of the performance of ideal, faithful femininity. When speaking to Louisa Musgrove, Wentworth somewhat bitterly exclaims that “It is the worst evil of too yielding and indecisive a character, that no influence over it can be depended on. —You are never sure of an impression being durable” (Austen 63). Though Anne is not explicitly mentioned here, an earlier passage makes the target of his criticism clear: “[Wentworth] had not forgiven Anne Elliot . . . She had given him up to oblige others” (Austen 44-45). Here, Anne’s “sin” is understood as her lack of faith: her decision to place her loyalties in people other than Wentworth and, tacitly, the more general lack of faith in him in the “anxiety attending his profession” and fortune that was central to her family’s and Lady Russell’s objections (Austen 22). To be influenced, however, is expected of Anne— it is simply her refusal to prioritize Wentworth’s particular influence that is the “evil” in question. Interestingly, Anne herself takes issue with Wentworth’s “high and unjust resentment of her actions,” clearly identifying, in this description, the unfairness of his accusations (Austen 65). Indeed, Anne refuses to apologize for her decision even after the two have been reunited. “I must believe that I was right,” she tells Wentworth, “ . . . that I was perfectly right . . . I have now . . . nothing to reproach my self with” (Austen 174). Though this speech comes decidedly after Anne’s happily-ever-after (and access to conventional womanhood) has already been secured, it is a mistake to ignore “the agency [Anne] has exercised by rejecting Wentworth, even under persuasion” (Horn 237). Anne’s choice is one that she, herself has made. More importantly, it is one that she accepts responsibility for. In whatever light her decision is cast, even taking the influence of her family into account, Anne’s choice remains her own—and, though she may have been remorseful for the loss incurred, it is a decision that she stands by, even after years of heartache. Her actions, despite offending both Wentworth’s personal desires and the normative expectations he has of femininity, are nonetheless a point of personal agency and, later, an site of self-affirmation for Anne herself.

At the same time, Austen constructs her narrative—and the character of Anne Elliot—in such a way as to communicate the fact that Anne is not only quite faithful, but also that her present reality (the state of near-spinsterhood that she occupies) is founded upon that faith. Anne, as only the audience is aware, has remained faithful to Wentworth in a way that his criticism fails to account for. For, although Anne may have rejected his proposal, her feelings for him have remained steadfast. Wentworth may not have forgiven Anne Elliot, but Anne Elliot has certainly not forgotten Frederick Wentworth. In the celebrated debate between Anne and Captain Harville, she remarks that “the privilege I claim for my own sex . . . is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone” (Austen 166). With this statement, Anne underscores her faithfulness to Wentworth and links it to her performance of femininity, claiming this faith both for herself and her “own sex” in general. With this in mind, Anne’s conversation with Harville can in part be understood as an effort on her (and Austen’s) part to re-emphasize the validity of her own womanhood—an identity threatened not only by Wentworth’s criticism of her youthful choice, but also by the threat of spinsterhood that comes with the approach of “the years of danger” (Austen 6). Even Anne’s refusal to condemn her past decision can be understood as having been derived from her faith. Acknowledging Lady Russell to have occupied “the place of a parent,” she is adamant that “If I had done otherwise, I should have suffered more . . . I should have suffered in my conscience . . . a strong sense of duty is no bad part of a woman’s portion” (Austen 174). With this statement, Anne creates a definition of faith that extends not merely to the man she loves, but to her family. It becomes a “duty” she understands as intrinsic to her performance of virtue and gender. The “woman’s portion” she speaks of reaffirms the centrality of faith—this time, familial—to the construction of womanhood she has made and fought to maintain for herself. Realigning Anne’s “deviant” brand of femininity with more conventional understandings of feminine virtue, Austen validates unmarried womanhood as an acceptable identity—and choice—for women to take.

By linking faith to positive femininity, and having its truest proponent considered a spinster-in-the-making, Persuasion attempts to erode the stigma surrounding the Spinster identity. Breanna Neubauer describes the precarious position of the Old Maid within society in terms of a perceived failure—on their part—to properly perform femininity. “Spinsters defied [the] understanding of what nature had intended women to do,” she writes, “and thus they were often regarded as not fulfilling their natural role” (Neubauer 126). With Anne, however, Austen throws the aspects of this performance into question. Though Anne, by the end of Persuasion , has been “saved” from spinsterhood by her marriage to Captain Wentworth, she has spent much of the novel in roles that characterize the portion of the Old Maid, and in doing so, lends them a kind of honor not often found in them. Anne is not Pride and Prejudice ’s Charlotte Lucas or Emma ’s Miss Bates, though she exists, necessarily, in close relation to them. Instead, she is a character who fully retains both her dignity and her identity, and she seeks within her duties the sense of self-worth that broader society (and her own family) seldom provides her. Persuasion , writes Dashielle Horn, “shows spinsterhood to be a construct imposed on unmarried women and, more radically, that spinsterhood can be a position adopted by choice” (Horn 236). Once again, Anne’s agency concerning the position she occupies is important to consider: not only has she rejected Captain Wentworth and Charles Musgrove, but later—when the threat of single old age has become far more apparent—Anne continues to avoid what might be construed as possible “solutions” to her situation. Where Charlotte Lucas settles for the absurd Mr. Collins, Anne’s own “alternative,” Mr. Elliot, is only momentarily considered a possibility—and even then, quickly dismissed. This is due to her attachment to Captain Wentworth, yes, but it is also a show of faith towards herself—an adherence to her own principles and desires. “How she might have felt, had there been no Captain Wentworth in the case, was not worth enquiry,” Anne muses, “for there was a Captain Wentworth; and be the conclusion of the present suspense good or bad, her affection would be his for ever” (Austen 135). The possibility of Anne’s spinsterhood thus becomes a function not of anything Anne lacks—bloom, youth, charm—but rather of something she has in abundance: a faithful devotion toward both “her first and only love” and toward her own mind (Hayley 192). The Spinster, understood in terms of the appropriately feminine (the result of an enduring faithfulness to one man) becomes not a failure, but an alternate type of womanhood, one that can be understood as somewhat radical, even as its characteristics—faith, duty, selflessness—fall in line with (and are made respectable by) conventional femininity.

Austen further underscores the validity of unmarried womanhood with the fact that Anne’s pseudo-Spinster identity—and the obligations that accompany it—render her among the most capable characters (and certainly the most demonstrably capable woman) in the narrative. Anne “has performed spinster duties for the last eight years . . . but these duties have graced her with a maturity, insight, and proficiency that she might not have otherwise” (Neubauer 131). Though not yet a spinster, Anne willingly assumes the office and duties typically reserved for one: she plays the piano so that others might dance, cares for children so that others might socialize, and is generally “glad to be thought of some use, glad to have any thing marked out as a duty” (Austen 25). Though subjected, in the course of these duties, to a number of degradations—such as assaults from incorrigible nephews—they nonetheless give Anne a stable sense of purpose and worth. Even more than this, her powers of efficiency and her desire to be useful prove to transcend the purely domestic sphere in the aftermath of Louisa Musgrove’s momentous fall. As Neubauer observes, “While the hardened navy men are paralyzed into inaction, only Anne” is able to maintain her self-possession; keeping her cool, and directing the actions of those around her, Anne’s experiences in the realm of the Spinster “enable her, in that moment, to be superior to England’s finest” (Neubauer 132). Where she is typically resigned only to keep the faith, she becomes, now, an object of faith for those around her. It is to her that they look, and in her that they place their faith when the crisis occurs. It is Anne whom Charles addresses in his panic: “’Anne, Anne . . . what is to be done next? What, in heaven’s name, is to be done next?’” (Austen 80). She takes on, in these moments, a mantle of power that is seldom allotted to women in general, much less in the realm of real-world crisis. It is perhaps because her sphere is not limited to the conjugal that Anne is able to so efficiently assess and address the needs of the people around her. Used to caring for others above herself, she is able to take charge in a way that is natural for her character. The faith that others place in her highlights not only the authority she is given, but also the degree to which her particular brand of womanhood is genuinely valuable and important to the community she exists within. Anne—and through her, the Unmarried Woman—is transformed not only into a worthy form of womanhood, but a superior one, essential to the society into which she supposedly cannot fit.

“Men,” says Anne, in Persuasion ’s most climactic—and heavily gendered—scene, “have had every advantage of us in telling their own story” (Austen 165). This statement illustrates the main problem in the rupture between Anne and Wentworth: it is his discontent that is allowed to characterize the situation. As Anne’s speech continues, she touches on aspects of masculine advantage that almost ring of Wollstonecraftian revolution. Advantage rests not only in the telling of the story, but in the pen that writes it and in the education that enables it—all of which have also long belonged to men. She will not, she says finally, “allow books to prove any thing” (Austen 165). It is difficult, in this moment, not to be conscious of Persuasion ’s origins. What does Anne Elliot mean—both in her words and as a character—as the product of an author who is telling not only her own story, but, in a way, that of an entire category of women? It would be simplistic to reduce Anne—and, indeed, Austen—to a reflection of her creat(or)(ion). Drawing biographical parallels is almost too easy, too monolithic to fully capture the complexity of either woman. It cannot be denied, however, that Anne Elliot is a character uniquely equipped to tell and defend her own story—and that Austen, an unmarried woman like her heroine, is the one holding the pen. Two inches wide or not, Austen’s story is one whose implications resonate on a grand scale. Within the diegesis, Anne forges a femininity that simultaneously defies and conforms to conventions of “proper” womanhood. Unmarried and capable, older and unequalled in mind or temperament, Anne proves her worthiness to other characters and readers alike. This is, in part, because she does so in a recognizable way. Her worth lies in her ability to enact superbly the feminine virtues that society demands: faith, in particular, becomes a defining aspect of her character. At the same time, however, she becomes representative of a womanhood that does not require marital felicity to have worth or validity—a position that, in its own right, is fairly radical. It is difficult, by the end of the story, to begrudge Anne the happy ending (and rescue from Spinsterhood) that she receives. Anne returns to—or rather, is allowed entry into—conventional womanhood. Yet, this entry does not erase the strength she has shown while she lived outside of it, as she has throughout the bulk of the novel. And while, as Mary Wollstonecraft writes, it is only through marriage that “women can rise in the world,” Anne’s character shows the complications intrinsic to so broad a statement (Wollstonecraft 287). Her position in the world, and the worth she earns towards it, are things that she achieves before the “nuptial coronet” is quite within her grasp. To say that her marriage precludes her character’s radicality is a summation that does not quite fit the woman that Persuasion has brought to life. Though Anne Elliot is Spinster no more, it is from the experience given her by that role that she is the complex, fully realized character—one almost too good for us all —we are privileged to meet. Her situation may have changed, but her character cannot, by this change, have “altered beyond [our] knowledge,” as Mary Musgrove so ineptly puts it (Austen 44). Having kept the faith for most of the novel, then, it is only fair that Anne receives her share of it from her readers, rational creature we know she is—and as we all, in the end, hope to be.

Works Cited

• Austen, Jane. Persuasion : Authoritative Texts, Background and Contexts, Criticism . Edited by Patricia Meyer Spacks, 2nd ed., W.W. Norton & Co., 2013.
• Hayley, William. “On Old Maids.” Persuasion : Authoritative Texts, Background and Contexts, Criticism Edited by Patricia Meyer Spacks, 2nd ed., W.W. Norton & Co., 2013.
• Horn, Dashielle. “Choosing Spinsterhood: Enacting Singleness in Persuasion .”  Persuasions 38 (2016): 236-44
• Neubauer, Breanna. “This Old Maid: Jane Austen and Her S(p)i(n)Sters.” Midwest Quarterly , vol. 56, no. 2, 2015, pp. 124-138.
• Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Men; A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution . Edited by Janet Todd, Oxford University Press, 1993.

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American Women: Topical Essays

“with peace and freedom blest”: woman as symbol in america, 1590-1800.

• Introduction
• American Women: An Overview
• Marching for the Vote: Remembering the Woman Suffrage Parade of 1913
• Sentiments of an American Woman
• The House That Marian Built: The MacDowell Colony of Peterborough, New Hampshire
• Women On The Move: Overland Journeys to California
• The Long Road to Equality: What Women Won from the ERA Ratification Effort

Prints & Photographs : Ask a Librarian

Have a question? Need assistance? Use our online form to ask a librarian for help.

Author: Sara Day, Publishing Office (retired)

Editor: Melissa Lindberg, Reference Librarian, Prints & Photographs Division

Note: This guide is adapted from the original essay in "American Women: A Library of Congress Guide for the Study of Women's History and Culture in the United States," 2001.

Created: December 2001

Last Updated: March 2019

Abstract:  Sara Day, one of the editors of "American Women," searched the Library's pictorial and textual collections for images of women in pre-1800 America, analyzed the content of these pictorial depictions, and concluded that stereotypical and allegorical representations of women belied the reality of most women's lives and helped to limit women's roles in early America.

Behold Columbia's empire rise, On Freedom's solid base to stand; Supported by propitious skies, And seal'd by her deliverer's hand. “A Federal Song,” Albany (New York) Journal, August 4, 1788

I would give my daughters every accomplishment which I thought proper, and to crown all, I would early accustom them to habits of industry, and order; . . . they should be enabled to procure for themselves the necessaries of life, independence should be placed within their grasp, and I would teach them to “reverence themselves.” [Judith Sargent Murray,] “The Gleaner No. XV,” Massachusetts Magazine 5 (August 1793): 461 1

American women's ongoing struggle to capture and define their own varying realities has been shaped by western societies' changing attitudes and ideas about gender roles, race, religion, and politics. Reflecting these changing ideologies are the female allegorical representations and visual stereotypes that have in fact helped to limit women's roles in America. From the first illustrations made by Europeans of the American continent's native women to the patriotic model devised for white, middle class women in the late eighteenth century, visual and textual collections of the Library of Congress may be uniquely suited to throw light on the sometimes crude, sometimes subtle shadings of motive behind the early imaging of American women. A trio of engravings—two made in Europe and one in the brand new United States of America—showing the allegorical image of American women, respectively, as sinful Eve, as Indian queen and princess, and as neoclassical Liberty figure, reflects this evolution.

In 1590, Flemish engraver and publisher Theodor de Bry opened part one of America, his illustrated compilation of early travel accounts describing European encounters with the strange peoples in the mysterious “new found lands” across the Atlantic, with his engraving of Adam and Eve and the serpent. 2 Thus the old stereotype of the formerly blessed couple cast out into the wilderness through the perfidy of original woman was transposed to an imagined America, the New Eden. De Bry, an ardent Protestant who never traveled to America, was influenced by European iconographical, cultural, and religious tradition, particularly in his depictions of women. The remainder of de Bry's plates in this volume, despite his tendency to Europeanize drawings made from life, illustrate the lifestyle of the native peoples living on Roanoke Island when the first British settlers arrived in what they called Virginia. Eyewitness and chronicler Thomas Hariot tells us at one point in the text that these peoples believed that “woman was made first,” 3 and subsequent plates show women participating as apparent equals in the impressive economy and ceremony of tribal life.

Nearly 150 years later, Indian women—mother and daughter or, alternatively, queen and princess—had become established as symbols of America, the first for the Western Hemisphere (North and South America), the second for the British colonies in North America. Both dominate the cartouche (the ornamental frame to a map title) of Henry Popple's Map of the British Empire in America (1733). European artists—all male—had turned real and capable Indian women into prurient icons of a new civilization; the “queen” rests a foot on a human head, suggesting highly disturbing behavior.

The third engraving, a handsome rendering of the neoclassical Liberty figure, by American artist Edward Savage, made a few years after the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, represents the young nation struggling to reemphasize the ideals on which it was founded. With the concept of freedom permeating American political and social philosophy and propaganda, who or what did the new country's leaders choose to represent the concepts of nationhood and civic virtue? Abandoned for now was the iconic Indian woman. Instead, a beautiful, young, white, classicized female was invented as an emblem of national values and republican motherhood.

De Bry's work can be seen in original editions found in the extraordinary Rosenwald Collection held in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress and in numerous later editions in the Library's General Collections. 4 Woman as symbol or allegory of nationhood, patriotism, and civic and moral virtue—and of sexual temptation, immorality, and willful or unruly conduct—can also be seen in countless examples of images made before 1800—and in a deluge thereafter—in the Library's vast collections. These engravings, etchings, and woodcuts are ubiquitous, whether presented as fine prints, map cartouches, political cartoons, and newspaper mastheads or as illustrations in journals and magazines, on broadsides, paper currency, or stock and benevolent society membership certificates. With the advent of the new national government, designs for the decoration of the U.S. Capitol and other public buildings and monuments came forth, rife with neoclassical females. 5 These visual images are buttressed by standards for women expounded, often allegorically, in sermons and advice literature, and, later, in articles and novels (see Etiquette Books and Prescriptive Literature in the General Collections section and Advice Books in the Rare Book and Special Collections section). Following the generalized female chronologically through North America's history shows how she has been recruited for every manifestation of propaganda and satire, particularly at times of political uncertainty and challenges to the status quo. 6

It was de Bry's engravings, not the watercolors made from real life, that influenced European artists for at least two hundred years. Perhaps most influential as models for iconic images and stereotypes of Indian women were his engravings for Hans Staden's account of his year-long trials as a captive and threatened meal of Brazil's Tupinamba tribe. For this new edition, part 3 of America, de Bry made forty-five engravings based on woodcuts in Staden's original 1557 account, many of which sensationalized the central role of women in the cannibalism of their enemies, particularly the Portuguese, and the preparation of stomach-emptying alcoholic brews. 7 Influenced by Staden's account, and that of Amerigo Vespucci—whose baptismal name, feminized, was placed on the first map of the Western Hemisphere—other artists had begun to represent the unfamiliar continent as a naked Indian maiden in an exotic landscape. 8 They pictured her with severed heads and other gruesome detritus of the alleged cannibalism of the Tupinamba. America, wild and scantily clad, now joined the symbols for her sophisticated sister continents of Europe, Africa, and Asia. 9 For those who were contemplating founding religious settlements in America, these images were evidence—along with many accounts of native females' sexual licentiousness—that Eve, the embodiment of original sin, was already running amok in the new lands. 10

The imaging of America's natives had begun with the purely imaginary woodcuts illustrating a 1494 edition of Columbus's famous printed letter reporting his “discovery.” 11 A few woodcuts illustrating sixteenth-century travel accounts and histories depicted Indians of Brazil and the Caribbean engaged in daily activities, but the reality of native lives in North America remained a matter of speculation until de Bry included his own engravings with travel accounts that he published in the order in which he acquired them. He based his engravings of the Timucua Indians—first published in 1591 as part 2 of America —on artist Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues's watercolors made in 1564 in northeast Florida. 12 Le Moyne, the first professional artist to work in the territory that would become the United States, had accompanied French Huguenot leader René de Laudonnière on an expedition to found a settlement. All but one of his watercolors have been lost but, judging by the remaining example, de Bry made remarkably few changes in designs that depicted native life through a European lens. Timucua women, however, are shown actively involved with men in work and ceremony—planting the fields, loading and transporting baskets with corn and fruits, and worshiping a column left by a previous French expedition. 13

John White's apparently more ethnographically accurate watercolors of southeastern Algonquian peoples, made twenty years later than the Florida designs, were actually the first to be engraved and published by de Bry. 14 Women are shown participating in ceremonial occasions, posing proudly and individually for their portraits as wives and leading citizens of the Algonquian towns of Secotan or Pomeiock, and involved in daily activities, such as a self-confident young woman “sitting at meate” with her husband [ view picture ].

Looking for the women in these images reminds us that, although we may learn much from them about the reality of Indian women's lives during the encounter period, the images reflect the artist's—and particularly the engraver's—own prejudices, preconceptions, and misconceptions. The creator's point of view is central to the interpretation of any historical document, including visual images. Comparison of the Virginia engravings with the original watercolors, most of which have survived, shows that de Bry altered the faces, particularly the women's, making them conform to European ideas of beauty and attractiveness; sometimes removed the tattoos shown in the White watercolors; adjusted poses and physiques—Botticelli's “Three Graces” appear in one of de Bry's versions of ceremonial scenes (plate 18, White: LC-USZ62-572 [ view picture ]; de Bry: LC-USZ62-40055 [ view picture ]); added pastoral landscapes, plants, and animals; and “corrected” the Indian artifacts. 15

During the period of European colonial settlement of America, the colonists' image of their new country derived from their home countries. Travel and missionary accounts continued to depict Indian customs, lifestyles, and, increasingly, territorial conflicts with white settlers. 16 It was not until well toward the end of the eighteenth century, however, several generations after the arrival of the first European settlers in New England and along the mid-Atlantic coast, that American artists and engravers, conscious of their newly separate nationality, began to build a substantial visual record of American life and cultural and political attitudes. Although printing presses had been established in the British colonies by the mid-seventeenth century—and even earlier in the Spanish colonies, the economy and the ideological climate were not yet ripe for the making or printing of images in colonial America. The earliest printed portraits made in America in the early eighteenth century were of men, including a mezzotint of the Congregational minister Cotton Mather, an authoritarian with strong views on women's roles. 17

Despite the fact that women had shared with men the religious persecutions and economic depressions that had driven them to settle British North America, European immigrants—with the notable exception of Quakers—believed explicitly in women's inferiority, intellectually, spiritually, and legally. Students of American women's history, including nineteenth-century suffrage leaders, have remarked on the difference in attitudes toward European women, who, through the feme covert tradition of English common law governing married women, could neither own property in their own right nor make decisions about their children independently of their husbands (see Property Law in the Law Library section), and the apparent sharing of power and division of labor between women and men in many Indian tribes. 18 In the matrilineal Iroquois Five Nations, for example, the household and land up to the forest's edge were the women's domain, giving them economic heft and authority in their tribe, and older women had the right to nominate the council of elders and depose chiefs. 19 Men's work—war, trading, hunting, and international relations—was generally carried out in the forest.

Another factor in the retardation of American-made imagery was that the Protestant sects that came to America tended to shun graven images. As people of the Word, they relied on the sermons of ministers or church elders for definitions and allegories of ideal or dangerous womanhood. Dissidents such as Anne Hutchinson, Mary Dyer, and other “disorderly women,” like Eve, were often demonized, and put to trial, executed, or banished. 20 Women who fulfilled traditional roles as good wives were idealized by the Puritan community. 21 Although women's essential contributions as managers of the domestic economy were more valued in the struggling colonies than they might have been in England, men were imbued with a fear of assertive women that had its roots in Judeo-Christian doctrine. 22 By contrast, religious icons were central to the Spanish conversión of Indians to Christianity—specifically Catholicism—in the Southwest between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. Symbols of the Madonna, the metaphysical image of the Mother Church—especially the ubiquitous Virgin of Guadalupe—and female saints were there revered and held up as exemplars of ideal womanhood. Catholic women generally remained in their submissive place, however, and outspoken, immoral, or otherwise unconventional women risked being singled out for punishment by the Spanish Inquisition. 23

During the seventeenth century, New England colonists intermittently suffered devastating losses from territorial wars with Northeastern Indian tribes and frontier attacks, while the Indians themselves were decimated by war and disease. Ironically, it was often white women—or men writing in their name—who published accounts of their captivity and the murder of their children by vicious savages who mocked white settlers. 24 These descriptions became an influential force in the creation of the American antithesis of the noble savage image promulgated by Europeans. In the meantime, European mapmakers were depicting America in cartouches as an increasingly noble Indian queen, with the trappings of natural wealth and Caribbean culture. 25

As noted earlier, the symbol was initially based on the native women of South and Central America because those areas of the Western Hemisphere were the first to be described. As England began to reap the benefits from trade with its increasingly prosperous colonies in North America in the early eighteenth century, mapmakers began to differentiate and use a separate symbol for those colonies, an Indian princess pictured before a seaport. This evolution from the queen-as-continent to the colonial princess can be traced in many different map cartouches found on the Geography and Map Division's rare maps (see Graphic Images on Maps in Geography and Map "American Women" guide).

The casting of women as universal abstractions for civic virtue and geographical spaces in Europe originated with the classical republics of Greece and Rome, whose political and intellectual elite assigned lofty ideals to womankind while excluding real women from the public and political realm. Marina Warner asks how it is possible to equate Aristotle's claim that woman is a defective male, considered by Greek law to be incapable of running her own finances or bearing witness in a court of law, with the fact that ideals of civic virtue were expressed in the feminine. The answer to this paradox, she says, was to render the female form as generic and universal, removed from all connection to individuality, whereas the male form retained individuality even when it was used to express a generalized idea. 26

As intellectuals and artists inspired the renaissance of classical ideals in Europe in the fifteenth through sixteenth centuries, a long tradition of symbolic imagery became standardized, along with more recent innovations, in a series of emblem books and dictionaries. Among these, the most influential were Cesare Ripa's Iconologia (from 1603) and George Richardson's Iconology or a Collection of Emblematical Figures (1779, found in the Rosenwald Collection), based on Ripa's compositions and published in time to ride the tide of neoclassicism. 27

European mapmakers made ample use of the emblem books, but the books were also at hand for political and intellectual leaders, artists, journalists, printers, or anyone else in search of effective ways to express revolutionary ideas to a largely illiterate populace as America began to loosen “her” bonds with England and England battled to hold onto “her” rich offspring. Following the Stamp Act of 1765, Boston craftsman Paul Revere taught himself the art of engraving and began to produce a number of propagandistic cartoons in support of the American colonies' protest against taxation without representation. Several of these can be seen in the print collections in the Prints and Photographs Division. Revere is credited with introducing the Britannia figure with liberty cap and pole as a symbol of the American rebellion, which the Sons of Liberty—still British subjects—were quick to adopt. 28 The Liberty/Britannia figure soon became part of the iconography of the American Revolution. 29

Switching to fashionable and lofty neoclassical imagery allowed American leaders to avoid associating the newly independent American colonies with now threatening indigenous tribes. 30 Some of the most powerful Indian tribes on the northwest frontier had seized the opportunity to ally with the British and ravage frontier settlements. Europe's “noble savage” again became the colonists' enemy. Even so, the positive equation of Indians with freedom may have prompted the Sons of Liberty to dress up as Mohawk Indians for the Boston Tea Party in 1773.

Would the Sons of Liberty have seen the irony, however, if they had been told that the liberty cap and pole had their origins in an ancient Roman ceremony for the manumission of a slave? 31 Freedom was unknown to the African slaves who had been brought to North America to labor for white owners, particularly in the tobacco-growing southern colonies. A jarring juxtaposition in the Pennsylvania Evening Post of July 2, 1776, of an advertisement for a runaway slave alongside a brief announcement of the Continental Congress's resolution to declare independence, reminds us that slaves—along with free Euro-American women and Native Americans—were ignored in the Declaration of Independence. Many of the runaway advertisements and broadsides that blazoned “Negroes for Sale,” while often providing individual characteristics in the text, were illustrated with crude, cookie-cutter icons representing the actual men, women, and children whose bondage made a mockery of the language of and fight for freedom from the 1760s to the 1780s (by contrast, see the Phillis Wheatley illustration). 32

While Revere was leading the way in establishing an American school of political cartooning, America's friends in England, particularly the merchant class, supported a storm of political propaganda in the form of allegorical prints as the conflict reached hurricane force. These can be seen in pamphlets and magazines in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division and in the British Cartoons collection in the Prints and Photographs Division. The Indian princess remained the preferred English symbol for America, even among her English friends, but she was increasingly shown with the attributes of liberty, alienated from her mother Britannia. In Britain, America, at Length Be Friends, from the January 1774 issue of the London Magazine, the Indian princess wears a feather bonnet and bears a cornucopia representing natural bounty, but her robes are becoming classicized and the goddess Concord is shown trying to reconcile Britannia and her daughter on the wharf of a busy port [ picture ]. 33

Three months later, however, the same magazine offered the shocking image The able doctor, or America swallowing the Bitter Draught, which was also issued as a separate print. It was quickly copied and signed by Paul Revere for publication in the June issue of Boston's Royal American Magazine. 34 On this occasion, he was apparently more taken by the depiction of America's hapless plight than he was wedded to his own preference for the Liberty figure as symbol of America.

But although Liberty was the seceding colonists' new sign for America, the “daughters of Liberty” themselves had no independent political rights, despite the many calls that were made on their own patriotism before and during the Revolutionary War in the form of boycotting English household goods, managing and defending farms and estates in their husbands' absence, and materially supporting the American soldiers. 35

Ideological justification for the effort led by Esther De Berdt Reed, wife of the president of Pennsylvania's supreme executive council, and Benjamin Franklin's daughter Sarah Franklin Bache, to solicit funds for Washington's troops can be seen in the broadside The Sentiments of an American Woman, Philadelphia, June 10, 1780 (RBSC; see essay on this broadside). Declaring that American women were “born for liberty” and that “if the weakness of our Constitution, if opinion and manners did not forbid us to march to glory by the same paths as the Men,” they would at least be found equal in their convictions and loyalty to the “Thirteen United Colonies,” Reed presented a list of historical role models for politically active women, such as Deborah, Judith, and Esther; the great European queens; and the “Maid of Orleans.” 36

While women's broadsides continued to use such biblical and classical allusions to legitimize real American women's courage under trial, the framers of America's Constitution once again chose to ignore women as an independent political class. Instead, classicized “universal woman” was proffered in a number of different guises—Liberty, Columbia, America, Minerva—in the search for a new, national identity on medals, coins, or public decoration following the establishment of the federal government in 1789, and American women were assigned a new role as the moral upholders of the Union. They should confine themselves, they were told, to the domestic sphere and dedicate themselves to “republican motherhood,”as the nurturers, educators, and moral compasses of a nation of public-spirited citizens. 37 The frontispiece for the 1789 Columbian Magazine depicts “the Genius of Foederate America” as a young woman surrounded by the symbols of prosperity and education while Apollo points her way to the Temple of Fame. 38

Personal ambition and political activism were still frowned on for American women, but the tide was in fact about to turn in favor of their education for a higher purpose, that of national unity, and their long march to establish and claim their own image had begun.

The Liberty who nurtures the presumably male bald eagle, or soaring young nationhood, in the Savage print seems to have descended from her classical pedestal and to be moving into real life to challenge the barriers of stereotype, satire, social custom, and law.

Sara Day authored the original essay in American Women: A Library of Congress Guide for the Study of Women's History and Culture in the United States (Library of Congress, 2001), from which this online version is derived.

• Quoted in Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980; HQ1418.K47 GenColl), 205. Back to Text
• Thomas Hariot, A Briefe and True Report of . . . Virginia (Frankfurt, 1590; F229.H27 1590 Rosenwald Coll item 723 RBSC). De Bry published this edition in four languages-Latin, English, French, and German. For the entire compilation, see Theodor de Bry, Historia Americae sive Novi Orbis (Frankfurt, 1624; G159.B7 Rosenwald Coll item 1309 RBSC). Back to Text
• “For mankind they say a woman was made first, which by the working of one of the goddes, conceiued and brought foorth children: And in such sort they say they had their beginning.” Hariot, A Briefe and True Report . . . , De Bry's 1590 edition with an introduction by Paul Hulton (New York: Dover Publications, 1972; F229.H27 1972 GenColl), 25. Back to Text
• A census of the editions of de Bry's works found in the Rosenwald Collection appears in A Catalog of the Gifts of Lessing J. Rosenwald (Washington: Library of Congress, 1977; Z881.U5 1977 RBSC, MRR Alc, G&M), 236-39. Back to Text
• See Pamela Scott, Temple of Liberty: Building the Capitol for a New Nation (New York: Oxford University Press with the Library of Congress, 1995; NA4412.W18 S37 1995 GenColl), 9-17, 108-11. Back to Text
• See in particular E. McClung Fleming, “The American Image as Indian Princess, 1765-1783,” Winterthur Portfolio 2 (1965), 65-81 (N9.W52 GenColl), and “From Indian Princess to Greek Goddess: The American Image, 1783-1815,” ibid., 3 (1966), 37-66. Back to Text
• Hans Staden's enormously popular account of his trials among the Tupinamba Indians as well as his woodcuts can be seen in The True History of His Captivity, 1557, translated and edited by Malcolm Letts (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1928; F2528.S753 Gen Coll). Back to Text
• Amerigo Vespucci's Mundus novus (Paris, 1503-4?; facsim., Paris: 14-L1661-END 10/25/01 6:11 PM Page 381 Fontaine, n.d.; Strassburg: J.H.E. Heitz, 1903; E125.V5 V523 RBSC, Gen-Coll). In the classical tradition, cartographer Martin Waldseemüller gave the feminized version of Vespucci's baptismal name to the vast new continent. Earlier Spanish explorers believed, as Columbus did, that the continent was part of eastern Asia, referring to it as the Indies. Back to Text
• The new continent began to be represented as a naked Indian maiden with severed heads and other signs of cannibalism as early as 1575. See Clare Le Corbeiller, “Miss America and Her Sisters: Personifications of the Four Parts of the World,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, April 1961 (N610.A4 GenColl), and Hugh Honour, The New Golden Land: European Images of America from the Discoveries to the Present Time (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975; N8214.5.U6 H58 1975 GenColl). Back to Text
• This indictment of women's sensuality was embedded in the Eve stereotype, the sexual interpretation of the Fall. Malleus maleficarum, the crudely misogynistic and dangerous Dominican treatise on witchcraft published in about 1486, asserted that “all witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which in women is insatiable. . . . Wherefore for the sake of fulfilling their lusts they consort even with devils.” John Phillips, Eve: The History of an Idea (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984; BS580.E85 P48 1984 GenColl), 62-70. Back to Text
• “Insula hyspana,” in Carlo Verardi, Historia Baetica ([Basel], 1494; Incun. 1494.V47 Voll H15942 RBSC). Back to Text
• De Bry had intended to publish Le Moyne's account of Laudonnière's ill-fated Huguenot colony in Florida as the first part of his America for, as he said in the foreword to the Virginia plates, the Florida account “should bee first sett foorthe because yt was discouuered by the Frencheman longe befor the discuerye of Virginia.” De Bry said in a brief notice in his Florida that he had acquired Le Moyne's drawings from his widow after his death in 1587. Back to Text
• The only surviving watercolor by Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, showing the Timucua Indians worshiping a column, was rediscovered at a French chateau in 1901 and is now at the New York Public Library. It shows that de Bry's translation to a copper plate is remarkably precise and that Le Moyne had already Europeanized the women worshipers. Back to Text
• Hariot, A Briefe and True Report (1590). See note 2. British maritime editor Richard Hakluyt probably persuaded de Bry, when he came to London in 1588 to buy some paintings by French artist Jacques Le Moyne, to publish Hariot's and John White's work first, maybe because White's patron, Sir Walter Raleigh, had offered financial support to promote the Virginia volume. Paul Hulton, America 1585: The Complete Drawings of John White (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press and British Museum Publications, 1984; NC242.W53 A4 1984 GenColl), 17. Back to Text
• W. John Faupel has juxtaposed reproductions of the watercolors with the relevant engravings and provides a convincing analysis of the changes made by de Bry. Faupel, A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia: A Study of the De Bry Engravings (East Grinstead, West Sussex, England: Antique Atlas Publications, 1989; G159.B8 F38 1989 GenColl). Back to Text
• Of particular interest is Father Joseph François Lafitau's Moeurs des Sauvages Amériquains, comparées aux Moeurs des premiers temps (Paris, 1724; E58.L16 RBSC, MicRR) in which he draws heavily on earlier accounts and illustrations of American Indians, including de Bry's, to make comparisons with peoples of the classical and preclassical world, or “primitive times.” His most original work comes from his observations of the Iroquois, among whom he lived as a Jesuit missionary. According to William N. Fenton and Elizabeth L. Moore, in their translation of Lafitau's classic work and exhaustive examination of his sources (Customs of the American Indians Compared with the Customs of Primitive Times, 2 vols. [Toronto: Champlain Society, 1974-77; E58. L1613 GenColl]), Lafitau was the first to describe the importance of women in Iroquoian tribal life in a chapter on the origin of the peoples of America (I:69-70). In a section on the Iroquois creation myth, he shows the similarities between the biblical story of the expulsion from Paradise and the Iroquois legend of a woman who is cast out of the heavens for being too easily seduced by one of the original six men on earth and becomes the mother of two children who fight one another (I:81-84). William Sturtevant contributed a chapter on “The Sources of Lafitau's American Illustrations”(I:271-97), many of which he traced to de Br y's engravings. Back to Text
• Cottonus Matherus S. theologiae doctor regia societatis Londone. . . ., 1727. Mezzotint by Peter Pelham, 1728 (restrike, 1860; FP—XVIII—P383, no.1). P&P. LC-USZC4-4597. As members of the newly prosperous merchant and landed classes began to acquire the material evidence of their success during the eighteenth century, their wives, dressed in the height of London or Paris elegance, were themselves depicted as status symbols in painted portraits (these are not collected by the Library). Back to Text
• Sara M. Evans, Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America (New York: The Free Press, 1989; HQ1410.E83 1989 GenColl),11, 22. Under French civil law adopted by Spain, Spanish colonial women were allowed to own land but in other ways were regarded no differently from other European women (see Property Law in the Law Library section). Back to Text
• Father Joseph François Lafitau's early eighteenth-century observations on the importance of women in the Iroquois tribe (see note 16) are confirmed and elaborated on in William C. Sturtevant, gen. ed., Handbook of North American Indians (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1978-98; E77.H25 MRR Alc), vol. 15, Northeast, 309. Back to Text
• See Carol F. Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1987; BF1576.K37 1987 GenColl), 179-80. Back to Text
• This is the central thesis of another classic, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983; HQ1438.A11 U42 1983 GenColl). Back to Text
• Phillips, Eve, 95. Back to Text
• See in particular the story of Sor Maria de Jesús de Agreda, who, in the 1620s, when not yet twenty years old, was seen on several occasions to levitate following Communion at her remote convent in Spain. She reported that she was carried by angels to preach to Indian tribes in today's New Mexico although she never left her convent. After Franciscan missionaries brought back to Spain testimony by Indians that they had been converted by a beautiful lady in blue, Sor Maria became a focus of the Inquisition. Mary E. Giles, ed., Women in the Inquisition: Spain and the New World (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999; BX1735.W59 1999 Gen Coll), 155-70. Back to Text
• Examples of captivity narratives can be found in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, the General Collections, and the Microform Reading Room. Back to Text
• Numerous examples can be seen in Donald H. Cresswell, comp., The American Revolution in Drawings and Prints: A Checklist of 1765-1790 Graphics in the Library of Congress (Washington: Library of Congress, 1975; E209.U54 1974 P&P, MRRAlc, G&M, GenColl). Back to Text
• Marina Warner, Monuments & Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (New York: Atheneum, 1985; NX650.F45 W3 1985 GenColl), 64. Thus, Uncle Sam and Brother Jonathan, the male symbols for America, were designed to typify the average American, whereas Liberty and Britannia obviously do not typify the average American or English woman. Back to Text
• George Richardson's Iconology; or, A Collection of Emblematical Figures, 2 vols. (London: Printed by G. Scott,1779; N7740.R515 Rosenwald Coll RBSC; reprint ed., New York: Garland Pub., 1979; N7740.R515 1979 Gen Coll), Richardson stated in his introduction that the source of images for abstract ideas and qualities drawn from classical myths and saints calendars was exhausted. He wanted to expand the range of the standard repertoire for new times, to aid modern artists by incorporating Poussin's and Raphael's innovations and new concepts such as “Democracy,” “Liberty,” and “America.” Martha Banta, Imaging American Women: Idea and Ideals in Cultural History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987; NX652.W6 B36 1987 GenColl), 412. Richardson's work includes an Indian woman as America, “The fourth and last part of the world . . .” (Iconology, vol. 1, fig. 6). Back to Text
• John Higham explains that Britannia was shown with the attributes of liberty in England before that symbol was adopted by the rebellious American colonists, and then Americanized following the Declaration of Independence (Higham, “Indian Princess and Roman Goddess: The First Female Symbols of America,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society (1990), 59-61 (E172.A35 GenColl). See Cresswell, American Revolution in Drawings and Prints, 638, for an etching by G. B. Cipriani after a drawing by F. Bartolozzi of such a Britannia, originally published in William Bollan, Continued Corruption, Standing Armies, and Popular Contents Considered (London: Printed by J. Almon, 1768; E211.B68). Back to Text
• See for instance, Pierre Eugène du Simitière's design for the title page of the 1775 issue of the Pennsylvania Magazine (AP2.A2 P4 RBSC) showing the goddess America with the implements of liberty and war (Cresswell, American Revolution in Drawings and Prints, 691; LC-USZ62-45557). The following year, as independence was declared, du Simitière proposed a design for the U.S. seal with a standing Liberty figure. Back to Text
• Highham, “Indian Princess,” 24. Back to Text
• See Yvonne Korsak, “The Liberty Cap as a Revolutionary Symbol in America and France,” Smithsonian Studies in American Art I:2 (Fall 1987), 53 (N6505.S56 GenColl). Back to Text
• The Pennsylvania Evening Post of July 2, 1776, is available in the Newspaper and Current Periodical Room. Some copies of original newspaper advertisements in the Serial Division collections and broadsides from the Rare Book and Special Collections Division can be studied in the Prints and Photographs Division (LOT 4422A: LC-USZ62-10293 [picture], -10474,-16876). See Barbara E. Lacey, “Visual Images of Blacks in Early American Imprints,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, 53: I(January 1996) (F221 .W71 GenColl). Back to Text
• Britain, America, at Length Be Friends, from the London Magazine, January 1774 [picture] (microfilm 01105, reel 205; Cresswell, American Revolution in Drawings and Prints, 662; LC-USZ62-45498). This allegorical image can be contrasted with the active trading image of male Indians presenting goods for barter to merchants in the cartouche for Pensylvania Nova Jersey es Nova York in Tobias Lotter, Atlas Géographique (Nuremberg, 1778; Cresswell, American Revolution in Drawings and Prints, 743; G1015.L7 1778 Vault G&M; LC-USZ62-46069). Back to Text
• Microfilm 01103, reel 26 AP; Cresswell, American Revolution in Drawings and Prints, 664; LC-USZ62-39592. Back to Text
• Other examples of women's patriotic activism before and during the Revolutionary War can be followed in newspapers, broadsides, and letters of the period, e.g, a Boston Evening Post, February 12, 1770, report that more than three hundred “Mistresses of Families” had promised “totally to abstain from the Use of TEA” (no. 1794, page 4) (N&CPR). See Kerber, Women of the Republic, chap. 2, “'Women Invited to War': Sacrifice and Survival,” 33-67, for many other examples. Back to Text
• See essay by Rosemary Plakas and Kerber, Women of the Republic, 104. Back to Text
• Ibid., 228-31. For the first time, it was made overtly clear that a “woman's place” was in the home, the beginning of the cult of domesticity. Back to Text
• See Carroll Smith Rosenbert, “Dis-Covering the Subject of the 'Great Constitutional Discussion,' 1786-1789,” Journal of American History 79 (December 1992), 841-73 (E171.J87 Gen Coll), for an analysis of the complex ideology behind new allegorical representations of America, particularly those in Columbian Magazine, or Monthly Miscellany (AP2.A2 U6 RBSC, Microfilm 01103, no. II AP MicRR). Back to Text
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How Do We Think About Womanhood?

Posted on September 25, 2018 By digitalonline

In a world where gender roles are constantly in flux and in one that increasingly understands gender and biological sex as two distinct realms, I often find myself wondering about the nature of womanhood. What does it mean to be a woman? We no longer make sense of what it means to be a woman through a set of physical characteristics or personality traits, nor through fixed societal roles. But if being a woman is not determined by these dimensions, is there some other element that is shared by all women?

I stumbled upon this line of broad questioning through an experience that focused more specifically on female sexuality, that is, on questions about what it means to be a woman who loves other women. Two summers ago, I interned at a library in Brooklyn that maintains a catalog of lesbian history and culture. I spent that summer immersed in the history of gay women — how they fought to work and love and live as an expression of who they were. My boss was a recent college graduate who was getting a degree in library sciences and serving on the board of directors for the library. She also lived upstairs from the collection with her partner, Colleen. Colleen did not identify as a woman or a man, but rather as someone who lived outside of the gender binary. Significantly, the relationship between my boss and Colleen caused some strife amongst the old guard of the library board. Only lesbians were allowed to serve on the board. And, in the eyes of some of the board members, because my boss was dating someone who did not identify as a woman, she wasn’t a lesbian. I thought a lot about how my boss had spent her life loving and protecting the history of women. However, some board members had proclaimed that she could not situate herself within the shared history of lesbians. I left my internship with questions rolling around my head. What is a lesbian? A woman who loves other women? But what about a woman dating a non-binary person? Is it wrong for her to think of herself as a lesbian?

As I started to do more work in the world of gender equality my questions broadened: if a lesbian is a woman who loves other women, what even are the specific parameters of womanhood? Do such parameters even exist?

I often think of feminism as pushing the boundary of what it means to be a woman. The suffragettes pushed this boundary to include being a fully-fledged voting citizen. Second wave feminism pushed this boundary into the economic realm through advocating greater freedom for women to work outside of the home. They further pushed into reproductive realms by pushing to grant women more control over their pregnancies and bodies.

Today another kind of push is being made around the boundaries of womanhood. The trans rights movement is working to normalize and socialize the idea that gender and biological sex are distinct. In American mainstream media, there is an emerging understanding that much of gender is socially constructed. We see mainstream television shows like Billions or Transparent with transgender and gender non-conforming characters exploring the idea that gender is not something determined by physical sex. We are also seeing huge legal strides; Oregon was recently the first state to offer more than just a binary Male/Female option on state IDs, providing a third “X” option for gender non-binary or non-conforming people.

I think it is important to note that the ideas fueling both second-wave feminism as well as the trans right movements are not radical ideas objectively, but rather radical ideas primarily to middle/ upper-class white America. Working class white American women and American women of color were working outside of the home for decades before second-wave feminism marched for such rights. Furthermore, transgender people have found an accepted identity and place in many cultures.

So if we are moving toward a society where gender is not determined by one’s sex organs and there are fewer and fewer boundaries on the way that woman can work, have families or live their lives in general, we must ask a crucial question: What does it mean to be a woman? What unites us?

I toyed with the idea that all women are united by the fact that they face gender discrimination in their lives. But I ran into two problems: The first is that not all women face the same kinds of discrimination. The type and severity of discrimination faced by women will vary largely based on other identities like race, class, and sexuality. There is no unifying female experience and liberation looks very different depending on a particular woman’s circumstances. The second problem I had is that I think that there is certainly more to being a woman than sharing a common type of oppression. I don’t believe that the whole of the identity ‘woman’ is defined through discrimination at the hands of the patriarchy. To me, there is an ineffable strength in womanhood and a deep beauty, but I am not sure if that’s enough of a definition. After all, that’s only what I think about womanhood, which says nothing about what womanhood means as a whole.

I wonder if this question about what it means to be a woman will shape movements to come. Our feminist journey is obviously far from complete. There are still too many people that deny that transgender women are women or that it is acceptable to be someone who identifies outside of the gender binary. And yet there still is a kind of panic today among some older feminists that because we are moving toward a world that has no solid definition of what a woman is, we are in danger of losing womanhood. There is a desire to preserve something that we can’t quite see. But the newfound nebulous nature of womanhood doesn’t worry me. Maybe because womanhood has always been nebulous it has always pushed against the definitions that constrained it. You can’t preserve what has always existed in flux. Maybe asking about the definition of womanhood is the wrong kind of question – perhaps it is too essentialist. Perhaps our lived experience as women is what in the end defines womanhood. This seems in line with the goals of feminism: to improve our lives and the lives of others by freeing ourselves and each other from sexism. We continue to face new challenges and push new boundaries in the world of gender equality; all the while our ideas of womanhood are flowing in previously unthought-of directions. Whatever the way that womanhood continues to morph itself, we must always be wondering: What is the question that we can be asking that will shape our feminist journey to continue to empower and to be powerful?

Sofiy I. is a President’s Office Intern at the National Organization for Women (NOW) Action Center in Washington, DC.  She is a student at the University of Chicago.

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Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender

Feminism is said to be the movement to end women’s oppression (hooks 2000, 26). One possible way to understand ‘woman’ in this claim is to take it as a sex term: ‘woman’ picks out human females and being a human female depends on various biological and anatomical features (like genitalia). Historically many feminists have understood ‘woman’ differently: not as a sex term, but as a gender term that depends on social and cultural factors (like social position). In so doing, they distinguished sex (being female or male) from gender (being a woman or a man), although most ordinary language users appear to treat the two interchangeably. In feminist philosophy, this distinction has generated a lively debate. Central questions include: What does it mean for gender to be distinct from sex, if anything at all? How should we understand the claim that gender depends on social and/or cultural factors? What does it mean to be gendered woman, man, or genderqueer? This entry outlines and discusses distinctly feminist debates on sex and gender considering both historical and more contemporary positions.

1.1 Biological determinism

1.2 gender terminology, 2.1 gender socialisation, 2.2 gender as feminine and masculine personality, 2.3 gender as feminine and masculine sexuality, 3.1.1 particularity argument, 3.1.2 normativity argument, 3.2 is sex classification solely a matter of biology, 3.3 are sex and gender distinct, 3.4 is the sex/gender distinction useful, 4.1.1 gendered social series, 4.1.2 resemblance nominalism, 4.2.1 social subordination and gender, 4.2.2 gender uniessentialism, 4.2.3 gender as positionality, 5. beyond the binary, 6. conclusion, other internet resources, related entries, 1. the sex/gender distinction..

The terms ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ mean different things to different feminist theorists and neither are easy or straightforward to characterise. Sketching out some feminist history of the terms provides a helpful starting point.

Most people ordinarily seem to think that sex and gender are coextensive: women are human females, men are human males. Many feminists have historically disagreed and have endorsed the sex/ gender distinction. Provisionally: ‘sex’ denotes human females and males depending on biological features (chromosomes, sex organs, hormones and other physical features); ‘gender’ denotes women and men depending on social factors (social role, position, behaviour or identity). The main feminist motivation for making this distinction was to counter biological determinism or the view that biology is destiny.

A typical example of a biological determinist view is that of Geddes and Thompson who, in 1889, argued that social, psychological and behavioural traits were caused by metabolic state. Women supposedly conserve energy (being ‘anabolic’) and this makes them passive, conservative, sluggish, stable and uninterested in politics. Men expend their surplus energy (being ‘katabolic’) and this makes them eager, energetic, passionate, variable and, thereby, interested in political and social matters. These biological ‘facts’ about metabolic states were used not only to explain behavioural differences between women and men but also to justify what our social and political arrangements ought to be. More specifically, they were used to argue for withholding from women political rights accorded to men because (according to Geddes and Thompson) “what was decided among the prehistoric Protozoa cannot be annulled by Act of Parliament” (quoted from Moi 1999, 18). It would be inappropriate to grant women political rights, as they are simply not suited to have those rights; it would also be futile since women (due to their biology) would simply not be interested in exercising their political rights. To counter this kind of biological determinism, feminists have argued that behavioural and psychological differences have social, rather than biological, causes. For instance, Simone de Beauvoir famously claimed that one is not born, but rather becomes a woman, and that “social discrimination produces in women moral and intellectual effects so profound that they appear to be caused by nature” (Beauvoir 1972 [original 1949], 18; for more, see the entry on Simone de Beauvoir ). Commonly observed behavioural traits associated with women and men, then, are not caused by anatomy or chromosomes. Rather, they are culturally learned or acquired.

Although biological determinism of the kind endorsed by Geddes and Thompson is nowadays uncommon, the idea that behavioural and psychological differences between women and men have biological causes has not disappeared. In the 1970s, sex differences were used to argue that women should not become airline pilots since they will be hormonally unstable once a month and, therefore, unable to perform their duties as well as men (Rogers 1999, 11). More recently, differences in male and female brains have been said to explain behavioural differences; in particular, the anatomy of corpus callosum, a bundle of nerves that connects the right and left cerebral hemispheres, is thought to be responsible for various psychological and behavioural differences. For instance, in 1992, a Time magazine article surveyed then prominent biological explanations of differences between women and men claiming that women’s thicker corpus callosums could explain what ‘women’s intuition’ is based on and impair women’s ability to perform some specialised visual-spatial skills, like reading maps (Gorman 1992). Anne Fausto-Sterling has questioned the idea that differences in corpus callosums cause behavioural and psychological differences. First, the corpus callosum is a highly variable piece of anatomy; as a result, generalisations about its size, shape and thickness that hold for women and men in general should be viewed with caution. Second, differences in adult human corpus callosums are not found in infants; this may suggest that physical brain differences actually develop as responses to differential treatment. Third, given that visual-spatial skills (like map reading) can be improved by practice, even if women and men’s corpus callosums differ, this does not make the resulting behavioural differences immutable. (Fausto-Sterling 2000b, chapter 5).

In order to distinguish biological differences from social/psychological ones and to talk about the latter, feminists appropriated the term ‘gender’. Psychologists writing on transsexuality were the first to employ gender terminology in this sense. Until the 1960s, ‘gender’ was often used to refer to masculine and feminine words, like le and la in French. However, in order to explain why some people felt that they were ‘trapped in the wrong bodies’, the psychologist Robert Stoller (1968) began using the terms ‘sex’ to pick out biological traits and ‘gender’ to pick out the amount of femininity and masculinity a person exhibited. Although (by and large) a person’s sex and gender complemented each other, separating out these terms seemed to make theoretical sense allowing Stoller to explain the phenomenon of transsexuality: transsexuals’ sex and gender simply don’t match.

Along with psychologists like Stoller, feminists found it useful to distinguish sex and gender. This enabled them to argue that many differences between women and men were socially produced and, therefore, changeable. Gayle Rubin (for instance) uses the phrase ‘sex/gender system’ in order to describe “a set of arrangements by which the biological raw material of human sex and procreation is shaped by human, social intervention” (1975, 165). Rubin employed this system to articulate that “part of social life which is the locus of the oppression of women” (1975, 159) describing gender as the “socially imposed division of the sexes” (1975, 179). Rubin’s thought was that although biological differences are fixed, gender differences are the oppressive results of social interventions that dictate how women and men should behave. Women are oppressed as women and “by having to be women” (Rubin 1975, 204). However, since gender is social, it is thought to be mutable and alterable by political and social reform that would ultimately bring an end to women’s subordination. Feminism should aim to create a “genderless (though not sexless) society, in which one’s sexual anatomy is irrelevant to who one is, what one does, and with whom one makes love” (Rubin 1975, 204).

In some earlier interpretations, like Rubin’s, sex and gender were thought to complement one another. The slogan ‘Gender is the social interpretation of sex’ captures this view. Nicholson calls this ‘the coat-rack view’ of gender: our sexed bodies are like coat racks and “provide the site upon which gender [is] constructed” (1994, 81). Gender conceived of as masculinity and femininity is superimposed upon the ‘coat-rack’ of sex as each society imposes on sexed bodies their cultural conceptions of how males and females should behave. This socially constructs gender differences – or the amount of femininity/masculinity of a person – upon our sexed bodies. That is, according to this interpretation, all humans are either male or female; their sex is fixed. But cultures interpret sexed bodies differently and project different norms on those bodies thereby creating feminine and masculine persons. Distinguishing sex and gender, however, also enables the two to come apart: they are separable in that one can be sexed male and yet be gendered a woman, or vice versa (Haslanger 2000b; Stoljar 1995).

So, this group of feminist arguments against biological determinism suggested that gender differences result from cultural practices and social expectations. Nowadays it is more common to denote this by saying that gender is socially constructed. This means that genders (women and men) and gendered traits (like being nurturing or ambitious) are the “intended or unintended product[s] of a social practice” (Haslanger 1995, 97). But which social practices construct gender, what social construction is and what being of a certain gender amounts to are major feminist controversies. There is no consensus on these issues. (See the entry on intersections between analytic and continental feminism for more on different ways to understand gender.)

2. Gender as socially constructed

One way to interpret Beauvoir’s claim that one is not born but rather becomes a woman is to take it as a claim about gender socialisation: females become women through a process whereby they acquire feminine traits and learn feminine behaviour. Masculinity and femininity are thought to be products of nurture or how individuals are brought up. They are causally constructed (Haslanger 1995, 98): social forces either have a causal role in bringing gendered individuals into existence or (to some substantial sense) shape the way we are qua women and men. And the mechanism of construction is social learning. For instance, Kate Millett takes gender differences to have “essentially cultural, rather than biological bases” that result from differential treatment (1971, 28–9). For her, gender is “the sum total of the parents’, the peers’, and the culture’s notions of what is appropriate to each gender by way of temperament, character, interests, status, worth, gesture, and expression” (Millett 1971, 31). Feminine and masculine gender-norms, however, are problematic in that gendered behaviour conveniently fits with and reinforces women’s subordination so that women are socialised into subordinate social roles: they learn to be passive, ignorant, docile, emotional helpmeets for men (Millett 1971, 26). However, since these roles are simply learned, we can create more equal societies by ‘unlearning’ social roles. That is, feminists should aim to diminish the influence of socialisation.

Social learning theorists hold that a huge array of different influences socialise us as women and men. This being the case, it is extremely difficult to counter gender socialisation. For instance, parents often unconsciously treat their female and male children differently. When parents have been asked to describe their 24- hour old infants, they have done so using gender-stereotypic language: boys are describes as strong, alert and coordinated and girls as tiny, soft and delicate. Parents’ treatment of their infants further reflects these descriptions whether they are aware of this or not (Renzetti & Curran 1992, 32). Some socialisation is more overt: children are often dressed in gender stereotypical clothes and colours (boys are dressed in blue, girls in pink) and parents tend to buy their children gender stereotypical toys. They also (intentionally or not) tend to reinforce certain ‘appropriate’ behaviours. While the precise form of gender socialization has changed since the onset of second-wave feminism, even today girls are discouraged from playing sports like football or from playing ‘rough and tumble’ games and are more likely than boys to be given dolls or cooking toys to play with; boys are told not to ‘cry like a baby’ and are more likely to be given masculine toys like trucks and guns (for more, see Kimmel 2000, 122–126). [ 1 ]

According to social learning theorists, children are also influenced by what they observe in the world around them. This, again, makes countering gender socialisation difficult. For one, children’s books have portrayed males and females in blatantly stereotypical ways: for instance, males as adventurers and leaders, and females as helpers and followers. One way to address gender stereotyping in children’s books has been to portray females in independent roles and males as non-aggressive and nurturing (Renzetti & Curran 1992, 35). Some publishers have attempted an alternative approach by making their characters, for instance, gender-neutral animals or genderless imaginary creatures (like TV’s Teletubbies). However, parents reading books with gender-neutral or genderless characters often undermine the publishers’ efforts by reading them to their children in ways that depict the characters as either feminine or masculine. According to Renzetti and Curran, parents labelled the overwhelming majority of gender-neutral characters masculine whereas those characters that fit feminine gender stereotypes (for instance, by being helpful and caring) were labelled feminine (1992, 35). Socialising influences like these are still thought to send implicit messages regarding how females and males should act and are expected to act shaping us into feminine and masculine persons.

Nancy Chodorow (1978; 1995) has criticised social learning theory as too simplistic to explain gender differences (see also Deaux & Major 1990; Gatens 1996). Instead, she holds that gender is a matter of having feminine and masculine personalities that develop in early infancy as responses to prevalent parenting practices. In particular, gendered personalities develop because women tend to be the primary caretakers of small children. Chodorow holds that because mothers (or other prominent females) tend to care for infants, infant male and female psychic development differs. Crudely put: the mother-daughter relationship differs from the mother-son relationship because mothers are more likely to identify with their daughters than their sons. This unconsciously prompts the mother to encourage her son to psychologically individuate himself from her thereby prompting him to develop well defined and rigid ego boundaries. However, the mother unconsciously discourages the daughter from individuating herself thereby prompting the daughter to develop flexible and blurry ego boundaries. Childhood gender socialisation further builds on and reinforces these unconsciously developed ego boundaries finally producing feminine and masculine persons (1995, 202–206). This perspective has its roots in Freudian psychoanalytic theory, although Chodorow’s approach differs in many ways from Freud’s.

Gendered personalities are supposedly manifested in common gender stereotypical behaviour. Take emotional dependency. Women are stereotypically more emotional and emotionally dependent upon others around them, supposedly finding it difficult to distinguish their own interests and wellbeing from the interests and wellbeing of their children and partners. This is said to be because of their blurry and (somewhat) confused ego boundaries: women find it hard to distinguish their own needs from the needs of those around them because they cannot sufficiently individuate themselves from those close to them. By contrast, men are stereotypically emotionally detached, preferring a career where dispassionate and distanced thinking are virtues. These traits are said to result from men’s well-defined ego boundaries that enable them to prioritise their own needs and interests sometimes at the expense of others’ needs and interests.

Chodorow thinks that these gender differences should and can be changed. Feminine and masculine personalities play a crucial role in women’s oppression since they make females overly attentive to the needs of others and males emotionally deficient. In order to correct the situation, both male and female parents should be equally involved in parenting (Chodorow 1995, 214). This would help in ensuring that children develop sufficiently individuated senses of selves without becoming overly detached, which in turn helps to eradicate common gender stereotypical behaviours.

Catharine MacKinnon develops her theory of gender as a theory of sexuality. Very roughly: the social meaning of sex (gender) is created by sexual objectification of women whereby women are viewed and treated as objects for satisfying men’s desires (MacKinnon 1989). Masculinity is defined as sexual dominance, femininity as sexual submissiveness: genders are “created through the eroticization of dominance and submission. The man/woman difference and the dominance/submission dynamic define each other. This is the social meaning of sex” (MacKinnon 1989, 113). For MacKinnon, gender is constitutively constructed : in defining genders (or masculinity and femininity) we must make reference to social factors (see Haslanger 1995, 98). In particular, we must make reference to the position one occupies in the sexualised dominance/submission dynamic: men occupy the sexually dominant position, women the sexually submissive one. As a result, genders are by definition hierarchical and this hierarchy is fundamentally tied to sexualised power relations. The notion of ‘gender equality’, then, does not make sense to MacKinnon. If sexuality ceased to be a manifestation of dominance, hierarchical genders (that are defined in terms of sexuality) would cease to exist.

So, gender difference for MacKinnon is not a matter of having a particular psychological orientation or behavioural pattern; rather, it is a function of sexuality that is hierarchal in patriarchal societies. This is not to say that men are naturally disposed to sexually objectify women or that women are naturally submissive. Instead, male and female sexualities are socially conditioned: men have been conditioned to find women’s subordination sexy and women have been conditioned to find a particular male version of female sexuality as erotic – one in which it is erotic to be sexually submissive. For MacKinnon, both female and male sexual desires are defined from a male point of view that is conditioned by pornography (MacKinnon 1989, chapter 7). Bluntly put: pornography portrays a false picture of ‘what women want’ suggesting that women in actual fact are and want to be submissive. This conditions men’s sexuality so that they view women’s submission as sexy. And male dominance enforces this male version of sexuality onto women, sometimes by force. MacKinnon’s thought is not that male dominance is a result of social learning (see 2.1.); rather, socialization is an expression of power. That is, socialized differences in masculine and feminine traits, behaviour, and roles are not responsible for power inequalities. Females and males (roughly put) are socialised differently because there are underlying power inequalities. As MacKinnon puts it, ‘dominance’ (power relations) is prior to ‘difference’ (traits, behaviour and roles) (see, MacKinnon 1989, chapter 12). MacKinnon, then, sees legal restrictions on pornography as paramount to ending women’s subordinate status that stems from their gender.

3. Problems with the sex/gender distinction

3.1 is gender uniform.

The positions outlined above share an underlying metaphysical perspective on gender: gender realism . [ 2 ] That is, women as a group are assumed to share some characteristic feature, experience, common condition or criterion that defines their gender and the possession of which makes some individuals women (as opposed to, say, men). All women are thought to differ from all men in this respect (or respects). For example, MacKinnon thought that being treated in sexually objectifying ways is the common condition that defines women’s gender and what women as women share. All women differ from all men in this respect. Further, pointing out females who are not sexually objectified does not provide a counterexample to MacKinnon’s view. Being sexually objectified is constitutive of being a woman; a female who escapes sexual objectification, then, would not count as a woman.

One may want to critique the three accounts outlined by rejecting the particular details of each account. (For instance, see Spelman [1988, chapter 4] for a critique of the details of Chodorow’s view.) A more thoroughgoing critique has been levelled at the general metaphysical perspective of gender realism that underlies these positions. It has come under sustained attack on two grounds: first, that it fails to take into account racial, cultural and class differences between women (particularity argument); second, that it posits a normative ideal of womanhood (normativity argument).

Elizabeth Spelman (1988) has influentially argued against gender realism with her particularity argument. Roughly: gender realists mistakenly assume that gender is constructed independently of race, class, ethnicity and nationality. If gender were separable from, for example, race and class in this manner, all women would experience womanhood in the same way. And this is clearly false. For instance, Harris (1993) and Stone (2007) criticise MacKinnon’s view, that sexual objectification is the common condition that defines women’s gender, for failing to take into account differences in women’s backgrounds that shape their sexuality. The history of racist oppression illustrates that during slavery black women were ‘hypersexualised’ and thought to be always sexually available whereas white women were thought to be pure and sexually virtuous. In fact, the rape of a black woman was thought to be impossible (Harris 1993). So, (the argument goes) sexual objectification cannot serve as the common condition for womanhood since it varies considerably depending on one’s race and class. [ 3 ]

For Spelman, the perspective of ‘white solipsism’ underlies gender realists’ mistake. They assumed that all women share some “golden nugget of womanness” (Spelman 1988, 159) and that the features constitutive of such a nugget are the same for all women regardless of their particular cultural backgrounds. Next, white Western middle-class feminists accounted for the shared features simply by reflecting on the cultural features that condition their gender as women thus supposing that “the womanness underneath the Black woman’s skin is a white woman’s, and deep down inside the Latina woman is an Anglo woman waiting to burst through an obscuring cultural shroud” (Spelman 1988, 13). In so doing, Spelman claims, white middle-class Western feminists passed off their particular view of gender as “a metaphysical truth” (1988, 180) thereby privileging some women while marginalising others. In failing to see the importance of race and class in gender construction, white middle-class Western feminists conflated “the condition of one group of women with the condition of all” (Spelman 1988, 3).

Betty Friedan’s (1963) well-known work is a case in point of white solipsism. [ 4 ] Friedan saw domesticity as the main vehicle of gender oppression and called upon women in general to find jobs outside the home. But she failed to realize that women from less privileged backgrounds, often poor and non-white, already worked outside the home to support their families. Friedan’s suggestion, then, was applicable only to a particular sub-group of women (white middle-class Western housewives). But it was mistakenly taken to apply to all women’s lives — a mistake that was generated by Friedan’s failure to take women’s racial and class differences into account (hooks 2000, 1–3).

Spelman further holds that since social conditioning creates femininity and societies (and sub-groups) that condition it differ from one another, femininity must be differently conditioned in different societies. For her, “females become not simply women but particular kinds of women” (Spelman 1988, 113): white working-class women, black middle-class women, poor Jewish women, wealthy aristocratic European women, and so on.

This line of thought has been extremely influential in feminist philosophy. For instance, Young holds that Spelman has definitively shown that gender realism is untenable (1997, 13). Mikkola (2006) argues that this isn’t so. The arguments Spelman makes do not undermine the idea that there is some characteristic feature, experience, common condition or criterion that defines women’s gender; they simply point out that some particular ways of cashing out what defines womanhood are misguided. So, although Spelman is right to reject those accounts that falsely take the feature that conditions white middle-class Western feminists’ gender to condition women’s gender in general, this leaves open the possibility that women qua women do share something that defines their gender. (See also Haslanger [2000a] for a discussion of why gender realism is not necessarily untenable, and Stoljar [2011] for a discussion of Mikkola’s critique of Spelman.)

Judith Butler critiques the sex/gender distinction on two grounds. They critique gender realism with their normativity argument (1999 [original 1990], chapter 1); they also hold that the sex/gender distinction is unintelligible (this will be discussed in section 3.3.). Butler’s normativity argument is not straightforwardly directed at the metaphysical perspective of gender realism, but rather at its political counterpart: identity politics. This is a form of political mobilization based on membership in some group (e.g. racial, ethnic, cultural, gender) and group membership is thought to be delimited by some common experiences, conditions or features that define the group (Heyes 2000, 58; see also the entry on Identity Politics ). Feminist identity politics, then, presupposes gender realism in that feminist politics is said to be mobilized around women as a group (or category) where membership in this group is fixed by some condition, experience or feature that women supposedly share and that defines their gender.

Butler’s normativity argument makes two claims. The first is akin to Spelman’s particularity argument: unitary gender notions fail to take differences amongst women into account thus failing to recognise “the multiplicity of cultural, social, and political intersections in which the concrete array of ‘women’ are constructed” (Butler 1999, 19–20). In their attempt to undercut biologically deterministic ways of defining what it means to be a woman, feminists inadvertently created new socially constructed accounts of supposedly shared femininity. Butler’s second claim is that such false gender realist accounts are normative. That is, in their attempt to fix feminism’s subject matter, feminists unwittingly defined the term ‘woman’ in a way that implies there is some correct way to be gendered a woman (Butler 1999, 5). That the definition of the term ‘woman’ is fixed supposedly “operates as a policing force which generates and legitimizes certain practices, experiences, etc., and curtails and delegitimizes others” (Nicholson 1998, 293). Following this line of thought, one could say that, for instance, Chodorow’s view of gender suggests that ‘real’ women have feminine personalities and that these are the women feminism should be concerned about. If one does not exhibit a distinctly feminine personality, the implication is that one is not ‘really’ a member of women’s category nor does one properly qualify for feminist political representation.

Butler’s second claim is based on their view that“[i]dentity categories [like that of women] are never merely descriptive, but always normative, and as such, exclusionary” (Butler 1991, 160). That is, the mistake of those feminists Butler critiques was not that they provided the incorrect definition of ‘woman’. Rather, (the argument goes) their mistake was to attempt to define the term ‘woman’ at all. Butler’s view is that ‘woman’ can never be defined in a way that does not prescribe some “unspoken normative requirements” (like having a feminine personality) that women should conform to (Butler 1999, 9). Butler takes this to be a feature of terms like ‘woman’ that purport to pick out (what they call) ‘identity categories’. They seem to assume that ‘woman’ can never be used in a non-ideological way (Moi 1999, 43) and that it will always encode conditions that are not satisfied by everyone we think of as women. Some explanation for this comes from Butler’s view that all processes of drawing categorical distinctions involve evaluative and normative commitments; these in turn involve the exercise of power and reflect the conditions of those who are socially powerful (Witt 1995).

In order to better understand Butler’s critique, consider their account of gender performativity. For them, standard feminist accounts take gendered individuals to have some essential properties qua gendered individuals or a gender core by virtue of which one is either a man or a woman. This view assumes that women and men, qua women and men, are bearers of various essential and accidental attributes where the former secure gendered persons’ persistence through time as so gendered. But according to Butler this view is false: (i) there are no such essential properties, and (ii) gender is an illusion maintained by prevalent power structures. First, feminists are said to think that genders are socially constructed in that they have the following essential attributes (Butler 1999, 24): women are females with feminine behavioural traits, being heterosexuals whose desire is directed at men; men are males with masculine behavioural traits, being heterosexuals whose desire is directed at women. These are the attributes necessary for gendered individuals and those that enable women and men to persist through time as women and men. Individuals have “intelligible genders” (Butler 1999, 23) if they exhibit this sequence of traits in a coherent manner (where sexual desire follows from sexual orientation that in turn follows from feminine/ masculine behaviours thought to follow from biological sex). Social forces in general deem individuals who exhibit in coherent gender sequences (like lesbians) to be doing their gender ‘wrong’ and they actively discourage such sequencing of traits, for instance, via name-calling and overt homophobic discrimination. Think back to what was said above: having a certain conception of what women are like that mirrors the conditions of socially powerful (white, middle-class, heterosexual, Western) women functions to marginalize and police those who do not fit this conception.

These gender cores, supposedly encoding the above traits, however, are nothing more than illusions created by ideals and practices that seek to render gender uniform through heterosexism, the view that heterosexuality is natural and homosexuality is deviant (Butler 1999, 42). Gender cores are constructed as if they somehow naturally belong to women and men thereby creating gender dimorphism or the belief that one must be either a masculine male or a feminine female. But gender dimorphism only serves a heterosexist social order by implying that since women and men are sharply opposed, it is natural to sexually desire the opposite sex or gender.

Further, being feminine and desiring men (for instance) are standardly assumed to be expressions of one’s gender as a woman. Butler denies this and holds that gender is really performative. It is not “a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is … instituted … through a stylized repetition of [habitual] acts ” (Butler 1999, 179): through wearing certain gender-coded clothing, walking and sitting in certain gender-coded ways, styling one’s hair in gender-coded manner and so on. Gender is not something one is, it is something one does; it is a sequence of acts, a doing rather than a being. And repeatedly engaging in ‘feminising’ and ‘masculinising’ acts congeals gender thereby making people falsely think of gender as something they naturally are . Gender only comes into being through these gendering acts: a female who has sex with men does not express her gender as a woman. This activity (amongst others) makes her gendered a woman.

The constitutive acts that gender individuals create genders as “compelling illusion[s]” (Butler 1990, 271). Our gendered classification scheme is a strong pragmatic construction : social factors wholly determine our use of the scheme and the scheme fails to represent accurately any ‘facts of the matter’ (Haslanger 1995, 100). People think that there are true and real genders, and those deemed to be doing their gender ‘wrong’ are not socially sanctioned. But, genders are true and real only to the extent that they are performed (Butler 1990, 278–9). It does not make sense, then, to say of a male-to-female trans person that s/he is really a man who only appears to be a woman. Instead, males dressing up and acting in ways that are associated with femininity “show that [as Butler suggests] ‘being’ feminine is just a matter of doing certain activities” (Stone 2007, 64). As a result, the trans person’s gender is just as real or true as anyone else’s who is a ‘traditionally’ feminine female or masculine male (Butler 1990, 278). [ 5 ] Without heterosexism that compels people to engage in certain gendering acts, there would not be any genders at all. And ultimately the aim should be to abolish norms that compel people to act in these gendering ways.

For Butler, given that gender is performative, the appropriate response to feminist identity politics involves two things. First, feminists should understand ‘woman’ as open-ended and “a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or end … it is open to intervention and resignification” (Butler 1999, 43). That is, feminists should not try to define ‘woman’ at all. Second, the category of women “ought not to be the foundation of feminist politics” (Butler 1999, 9). Rather, feminists should focus on providing an account of how power functions and shapes our understandings of womanhood not only in the society at large but also within the feminist movement.

Many people, including many feminists, have ordinarily taken sex ascriptions to be solely a matter of biology with no social or cultural dimension. It is commonplace to think that there are only two sexes and that biological sex classifications are utterly unproblematic. By contrast, some feminists have argued that sex classifications are not unproblematic and that they are not solely a matter of biology. In order to make sense of this, it is helpful to distinguish object- and idea-construction (see Haslanger 2003b for more): social forces can be said to construct certain kinds of objects (e.g. sexed bodies or gendered individuals) and certain kinds of ideas (e.g. sex or gender concepts). First, take the object-construction of sexed bodies. Secondary sex characteristics, or the physiological and biological features commonly associated with males and females, are affected by social practices. In some societies, females’ lower social status has meant that they have been fed less and so, the lack of nutrition has had the effect of making them smaller in size (Jaggar 1983, 37). Uniformity in muscular shape, size and strength within sex categories is not caused entirely by biological factors, but depends heavily on exercise opportunities: if males and females were allowed the same exercise opportunities and equal encouragement to exercise, it is thought that bodily dimorphism would diminish (Fausto-Sterling 1993a, 218). A number of medical phenomena involving bones (like osteoporosis) have social causes directly related to expectations about gender, women’s diet and their exercise opportunities (Fausto-Sterling 2005). These examples suggest that physiological features thought to be sex-specific traits not affected by social and cultural factors are, after all, to some extent products of social conditioning. Social conditioning, then, shapes our biology.

Second, take the idea-construction of sex concepts. Our concept of sex is said to be a product of social forces in the sense that what counts as sex is shaped by social meanings. Standardly, those with XX-chromosomes, ovaries that produce large egg cells, female genitalia, a relatively high proportion of ‘female’ hormones, and other secondary sex characteristics (relatively small body size, less body hair) count as biologically female. Those with XY-chromosomes, testes that produce small sperm cells, male genitalia, a relatively high proportion of ‘male’ hormones and other secondary sex traits (relatively large body size, significant amounts of body hair) count as male. This understanding is fairly recent. The prevalent scientific view from Ancient Greeks until the late 18 th century, did not consider female and male sexes to be distinct categories with specific traits; instead, a ‘one-sex model’ held that males and females were members of the same sex category. Females’ genitals were thought to be the same as males’ but simply directed inside the body; ovaries and testes (for instance) were referred to by the same term and whether the term referred to the former or the latter was made clear by the context (Laqueur 1990, 4). It was not until the late 1700s that scientists began to think of female and male anatomies as radically different moving away from the ‘one-sex model’ of a single sex spectrum to the (nowadays prevalent) ‘two-sex model’ of sexual dimorphism. (For an alternative view, see King 2013.)

Fausto-Sterling has argued that this ‘two-sex model’ isn’t straightforward either (1993b; 2000a; 2000b). Based on a meta-study of empirical medical research, she estimates that 1.7% of population fail to neatly fall within the usual sex classifications possessing various combinations of different sex characteristics (Fausto-Sterling 2000a, 20). In her earlier work, she claimed that intersex individuals make up (at least) three further sex classes: ‘herms’ who possess one testis and one ovary; ‘merms’ who possess testes, some aspects of female genitalia but no ovaries; and ‘ferms’ who have ovaries, some aspects of male genitalia but no testes (Fausto-Sterling 1993b, 21). (In her [2000a], Fausto-Sterling notes that these labels were put forward tongue–in–cheek.) Recognition of intersex people suggests that feminists (and society at large) are wrong to think that humans are either female or male.

To illustrate further the idea-construction of sex, consider the case of the athlete Maria Patiño. Patiño has female genitalia, has always considered herself to be female and was considered so by others. However, she was discovered to have XY chromosomes and was barred from competing in women’s sports (Fausto-Sterling 2000b, 1–3). Patiño’s genitalia were at odds with her chromosomes and the latter were taken to determine her sex. Patiño successfully fought to be recognised as a female athlete arguing that her chromosomes alone were not sufficient to not make her female. Intersex people, like Patiño, illustrate that our understandings of sex differ and suggest that there is no immediately obvious way to settle what sex amounts to purely biologically or scientifically. Deciding what sex is involves evaluative judgements that are influenced by social factors.

Insofar as our cultural conceptions affect our understandings of sex, feminists must be much more careful about sex classifications and rethink what sex amounts to (Stone 2007, chapter 1). More specifically, intersex people illustrate that sex traits associated with females and males need not always go together and that individuals can have some mixture of these traits. This suggests to Stone that sex is a cluster concept: it is sufficient to satisfy enough of the sex features that tend to cluster together in order to count as being of a particular sex. But, one need not satisfy all of those features or some arbitrarily chosen supposedly necessary sex feature, like chromosomes (Stone 2007, 44). This makes sex a matter of degree and sex classifications should take place on a spectrum: one can be more or less female/male but there is no sharp distinction between the two. Further, intersex people (along with trans people) are located at the centre of the sex spectrum and in many cases their sex will be indeterminate (Stone 2007).

More recently, Ayala and Vasilyeva (2015) have argued for an inclusive and extended conception of sex: just as certain tools can be seen to extend our minds beyond the limits of our brains (e.g. white canes), other tools (like dildos) can extend our sex beyond our bodily boundaries. This view aims to motivate the idea that what counts as sex should not be determined by looking inwards at genitalia or other anatomical features. In a different vein, Ásta (2018) argues that sex is a conferred social property. This follows her more general conferralist framework to analyse all social properties: properties that are conferred by others thereby generating a social status that consists in contextually specific constraints and enablements on individual behaviour. The general schema for conferred properties is as follows (Ásta 2018, 8):

Conferred property: what property is conferred. Who: who the subjects are. What: what attitude, state, or action of the subjects matter. When: under what conditions the conferral takes place. Base property: what the subjects are attempting to track (consciously or not), if anything.

With being of a certain sex (e.g. male, female) in mind, Ásta holds that it is a conferred property that merely aims to track physical features. Hence sex is a social – or in fact, an institutional – property rather than a natural one. The schema for sex goes as follows (72):

Conferred property: being female, male. Who: legal authorities, drawing on the expert opinion of doctors, other medical personnel. What: “the recording of a sex in official documents ... The judgment of the doctors (and others) as to what sex role might be the most fitting, given the biological characteristics present.” When: at birth or after surgery/ hormonal treatment. Base property: “the aim is to track as many sex-stereotypical characteristics as possible, and doctors perform surgery in cases where that might help bring the physical characteristics more in line with the stereotype of male and female.”

This (among other things) offers a debunking analysis of sex: it may appear to be a natural property, but on the conferralist analysis is better understood as a conferred legal status. Ásta holds that gender too is a conferred property, but contra the discussion in the following section, she does not think that this collapses the distinction between sex and gender: sex and gender are differently conferred albeit both satisfying the general schema noted above. Nonetheless, on the conferralist framework what underlies both sex and gender is the idea of social construction as social significance: sex-stereotypical characteristics are taken to be socially significant context specifically, whereby they become the basis for conferring sex onto individuals and this brings with it various constraints and enablements on individuals and their behaviour. This fits object- and idea-constructions introduced above, although offers a different general framework to analyse the matter at hand.

In addition to arguing against identity politics and for gender performativity, Butler holds that distinguishing biological sex from social gender is unintelligible. For them, both are socially constructed:

If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all. (Butler 1999, 10–11)

(Butler is not alone in claiming that there are no tenable distinctions between nature/culture, biology/construction and sex/gender. See also: Antony 1998; Gatens 1996; Grosz 1994; Prokhovnik 1999.) Butler makes two different claims in the passage cited: that sex is a social construction, and that sex is gender. To unpack their view, consider the two claims in turn. First, the idea that sex is a social construct, for Butler, boils down to the view that our sexed bodies are also performative and, so, they have “no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute [their] reality” (1999, 173). Prima facie , this implausibly implies that female and male bodies do not have independent existence and that if gendering activities ceased, so would physical bodies. This is not Butler’s claim; rather, their position is that bodies viewed as the material foundations on which gender is constructed, are themselves constructed as if they provide such material foundations (Butler 1993). Cultural conceptions about gender figure in “the very apparatus of production whereby sexes themselves are established” (Butler 1999, 11).

For Butler, sexed bodies never exist outside social meanings and how we understand gender shapes how we understand sex (1999, 139). Sexed bodies are not empty matter on which gender is constructed and sex categories are not picked out on the basis of objective features of the world. Instead, our sexed bodies are themselves discursively constructed : they are the way they are, at least to a substantial extent, because of what is attributed to sexed bodies and how they are classified (for discursive construction, see Haslanger 1995, 99). Sex assignment (calling someone female or male) is normative (Butler 1993, 1). [ 6 ] When the doctor calls a newly born infant a girl or a boy, s/he is not making a descriptive claim, but a normative one. In fact, the doctor is performing an illocutionary speech act (see the entry on Speech Acts ). In effect, the doctor’s utterance makes infants into girls or boys. We, then, engage in activities that make it seem as if sexes naturally come in two and that being female or male is an objective feature of the world, rather than being a consequence of certain constitutive acts (that is, rather than being performative). And this is what Butler means in saying that physical bodies never exist outside cultural and social meanings, and that sex is as socially constructed as gender. They do not deny that physical bodies exist. But, they take our understanding of this existence to be a product of social conditioning: social conditioning makes the existence of physical bodies intelligible to us by discursively constructing sexed bodies through certain constitutive acts. (For a helpful introduction to Butler’s views, see Salih 2002.)

For Butler, sex assignment is always in some sense oppressive. Again, this appears to be because of Butler’s general suspicion of classification: sex classification can never be merely descriptive but always has a normative element reflecting evaluative claims of those who are powerful. Conducting a feminist genealogy of the body (or examining why sexed bodies are thought to come naturally as female and male), then, should ground feminist practice (Butler 1993, 28–9). Feminists should examine and uncover ways in which social construction and certain acts that constitute sex shape our understandings of sexed bodies, what kinds of meanings bodies acquire and which practices and illocutionary speech acts ‘make’ our bodies into sexes. Doing so enables feminists to identity how sexed bodies are socially constructed in order to resist such construction.

However, given what was said above, it is far from obvious what we should make of Butler’s claim that sex “was always already gender” (1999, 11). Stone (2007) takes this to mean that sex is gender but goes on to question it arguing that the social construction of both sex and gender does not make sex identical to gender. According to Stone, it would be more accurate for Butler to say that claims about sex imply gender norms. That is, many claims about sex traits (like ‘females are physically weaker than males’) actually carry implications about how women and men are expected to behave. To some extent the claim describes certain facts. But, it also implies that females are not expected to do much heavy lifting and that they would probably not be good at it. So, claims about sex are not identical to claims about gender; rather, they imply claims about gender norms (Stone 2007, 70).

Some feminists hold that the sex/gender distinction is not useful. For a start, it is thought to reflect politically problematic dualistic thinking that undercuts feminist aims: the distinction is taken to reflect and replicate androcentric oppositions between (for instance) mind/body, culture/nature and reason/emotion that have been used to justify women’s oppression (e.g. Grosz 1994; Prokhovnik 1999). The thought is that in oppositions like these, one term is always superior to the other and that the devalued term is usually associated with women (Lloyd 1993). For instance, human subjectivity and agency are identified with the mind but since women are usually identified with their bodies, they are devalued as human subjects and agents. The opposition between mind and body is said to further map on to other distinctions, like reason/emotion, culture/nature, rational/irrational, where one side of each distinction is devalued (one’s bodily features are usually valued less that one’s mind, rationality is usually valued more than irrationality) and women are associated with the devalued terms: they are thought to be closer to bodily features and nature than men, to be irrational, emotional and so on. This is said to be evident (for instance) in job interviews. Men are treated as gender-neutral persons and not asked whether they are planning to take time off to have a family. By contrast, that women face such queries illustrates that they are associated more closely than men with bodily features to do with procreation (Prokhovnik 1999, 126). The opposition between mind and body, then, is thought to map onto the opposition between men and women.

Now, the mind/body dualism is also said to map onto the sex/gender distinction (Grosz 1994; Prokhovnik 1999). The idea is that gender maps onto mind, sex onto body. Although not used by those endorsing this view, the basic idea can be summed by the slogan ‘Gender is between the ears, sex is between the legs’: the implication is that, while sex is immutable, gender is something individuals have control over – it is something we can alter and change through individual choices. However, since women are said to be more closely associated with biological features (and so, to map onto the body side of the mind/body distinction) and men are treated as gender-neutral persons (mapping onto the mind side), the implication is that “man equals gender, which is associated with mind and choice, freedom from body, autonomy, and with the public real; while woman equals sex, associated with the body, reproduction, ‘natural’ rhythms and the private realm” (Prokhovnik 1999, 103). This is said to render the sex/gender distinction inherently repressive and to drain it of any potential for emancipation: rather than facilitating gender role choice for women, it “actually functions to reinforce their association with body, sex, and involuntary ‘natural’ rhythms” (Prokhovnik 1999, 103). Contrary to what feminists like Rubin argued, the sex/gender distinction cannot be used as a theoretical tool that dissociates conceptions of womanhood from biological and reproductive features.

Moi has further argued that the sex/gender distinction is useless given certain theoretical goals (1999, chapter 1). This is not to say that it is utterly worthless; according to Moi, the sex/gender distinction worked well to show that the historically prevalent biological determinism was false. However, for her, the distinction does no useful work “when it comes to producing a good theory of subjectivity” (1999, 6) and “a concrete, historical understanding of what it means to be a woman (or a man) in a given society” (1999, 4–5). That is, the 1960s distinction understood sex as fixed by biology without any cultural or historical dimensions. This understanding, however, ignores lived experiences and embodiment as aspects of womanhood (and manhood) by separating sex from gender and insisting that womanhood is to do with the latter. Rather, embodiment must be included in one’s theory that tries to figure out what it is to be a woman (or a man).

Mikkola (2011) argues that the sex/gender distinction, which underlies views like Rubin’s and MacKinnon’s, has certain unintuitive and undesirable ontological commitments that render the distinction politically unhelpful. First, claiming that gender is socially constructed implies that the existence of women and men is a mind-dependent matter. This suggests that we can do away with women and men simply by altering some social practices, conventions or conditions on which gender depends (whatever those are). However, ordinary social agents find this unintuitive given that (ordinarily) sex and gender are not distinguished. Second, claiming that gender is a product of oppressive social forces suggests that doing away with women and men should be feminism’s political goal. But this harbours ontologically undesirable commitments since many ordinary social agents view their gender to be a source of positive value. So, feminism seems to want to do away with something that should not be done away with, which is unlikely to motivate social agents to act in ways that aim at gender justice. Given these problems, Mikkola argues that feminists should give up the distinction on practical political grounds.

Tomas Bogardus (2020) has argued in an even more radical sense against the sex/gender distinction: as things stand, he holds, feminist philosophers have merely assumed and asserted that the distinction exists, instead of having offered good arguments for the distinction. In other words, feminist philosophers allegedly have yet to offer good reasons to think that ‘woman’ does not simply pick out adult human females. Alex Byrne (2020) argues in a similar vein: the term ‘woman’ does not pick out a social kind as feminist philosophers have “assumed”. Instead, “women are adult human females–nothing more, and nothing less” (2020, 3801). Byrne offers six considerations to ground this AHF (adult, human, female) conception.

• It reproduces the dictionary definition of ‘woman’.
• One would expect English to have a word that picks out the category adult human female, and ‘woman’ is the only candidate.
• AHF explains how we sometimes know that an individual is a woman, despite knowing nothing else relevant about her other than the fact that she is an adult human female.
• AHF stands or falls with the analogous thesis for girls, which can be supported independently.
• AHF predicts the correct verdict in cases of gender role reversal.
• AHF is supported by the fact that ‘woman’ and ‘female’ are often appropriately used as stylistic variants of each other, even in hyperintensional contexts.

Robin Dembroff (2021) responds to Byrne and highlights various problems with Byrne’s argument. First, framing: Byrne assumes from the start that gender terms like ‘woman’ have a single invariant meaning thereby failing to discuss the possibility of terms like ‘woman’ having multiple meanings – something that is a familiar claim made by feminist theorists from various disciplines. Moreover, Byrne (according to Dembroff) assumes without argument that there is a single, universal category of woman – again, something that has been extensively discussed and critiqued by feminist philosophers and theorists. Second, Byrne’s conception of the ‘dominant’ meaning of woman is said to be cherry-picked and it ignores a wealth of contexts outside of philosophy (like the media and the law) where ‘woman’ has a meaning other than AHF . Third, Byrne’s own distinction between biological and social categories fails to establish what he intended to establish: namely, that ‘woman’ picks out a biological rather than a social kind. Hence, Dembroff holds, Byrne’s case fails by its own lights. Byrne (2021) responds to Dembroff’s critique.

Others such as ‘gender critical feminists’ also hold views about the sex/gender distinction in a spirit similar to Bogardus and Byrne. For example, Holly Lawford-Smith (2021) takes the prevalent sex/gender distinction, where ‘female’/‘male’ are used as sex terms and ‘woman’/’man’ as gender terms, not to be helpful. Instead, she takes all of these to be sex terms and holds that (the norms of) femininity/masculinity refer to gender normativity. Because much of the gender critical feminists’ discussion that philosophers have engaged in has taken place in social media, public fora, and other sources outside academic philosophy, this entry will not focus on these discussions.

4. Women as a group

The various critiques of the sex/gender distinction have called into question the viability of the category women . Feminism is the movement to end the oppression women as a group face. But, how should the category of women be understood if feminists accept the above arguments that gender construction is not uniform, that a sharp distinction between biological sex and social gender is false or (at least) not useful, and that various features associated with women play a role in what it is to be a woman, none of which are individually necessary and jointly sufficient (like a variety of social roles, positions, behaviours, traits, bodily features and experiences)? Feminists must be able to address cultural and social differences in gender construction if feminism is to be a genuinely inclusive movement and be careful not to posit commonalities that mask important ways in which women qua women differ. These concerns (among others) have generated a situation where (as Linda Alcoff puts it) feminists aim to speak and make political demands in the name of women, at the same time rejecting the idea that there is a unified category of women (2006, 152). If feminist critiques of the category women are successful, then what (if anything) binds women together, what is it to be a woman, and what kinds of demands can feminists make on behalf of women?

Many have found the fragmentation of the category of women problematic for political reasons (e.g. Alcoff 2006; Bach 2012; Benhabib 1992; Frye 1996; Haslanger 2000b; Heyes 2000; Martin 1994; Mikkola 2007; Stoljar 1995; Stone 2004; Tanesini 1996; Young 1997; Zack 2005). For instance, Young holds that accounts like Spelman’s reduce the category of women to a gerrymandered collection of individuals with nothing to bind them together (1997, 20). Black women differ from white women but members of both groups also differ from one another with respect to nationality, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation and economic position; that is, wealthy white women differ from working-class white women due to their economic and class positions. These sub-groups are themselves diverse: for instance, some working-class white women in Northern Ireland are starkly divided along religious lines. So if we accept Spelman’s position, we risk ending up with individual women and nothing to bind them together. And this is problematic: in order to respond to oppression of women in general, feminists must understand them as a category in some sense. Young writes that without doing so “it is not possible to conceptualize oppression as a systematic, structured, institutional process” (1997, 17). Some, then, take the articulation of an inclusive category of women to be the prerequisite for effective feminist politics and a rich literature has emerged that aims to conceptualise women as a group or a collective (e.g. Alcoff 2006; Ásta 2011; Frye 1996; 2011; Haslanger 2000b; Heyes 2000; Stoljar 1995, 2011; Young 1997; Zack 2005). Articulations of this category can be divided into those that are: (a) gender nominalist — positions that deny there is something women qua women share and that seek to unify women’s social kind by appealing to something external to women; and (b) gender realist — positions that take there to be something women qua women share (although these realist positions differ significantly from those outlined in Section 2). Below we will review some influential gender nominalist and gender realist positions. Before doing so, it is worth noting that not everyone is convinced that attempts to articulate an inclusive category of women can succeed or that worries about what it is to be a woman are in need of being resolved. Mikkola (2016) argues that feminist politics need not rely on overcoming (what she calls) the ‘gender controversy’: that feminists must settle the meaning of gender concepts and articulate a way to ground women’s social kind membership. As she sees it, disputes about ‘what it is to be a woman’ have become theoretically bankrupt and intractable, which has generated an analytical impasse that looks unsurpassable. Instead, Mikkola argues for giving up the quest, which in any case in her view poses no serious political obstacles.

Elizabeth Barnes (2020) responds to the need to offer an inclusive conception of gender somewhat differently, although she endorses the need for feminism to be inclusive particularly of trans people. Barnes holds that typically philosophical theories of gender aim to offer an account of what it is to be a woman (or man, genderqueer, etc.), where such an account is presumed to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for being a woman or an account of our gender terms’ extensions. But, she holds, it is a mistake to expect our theories of gender to do so. For Barnes, a project that offers a metaphysics of gender “should be understood as the project of theorizing what it is —if anything— about the social world that ultimately explains gender” (2020, 706). This project is not equivalent to one that aims to define gender terms or elucidate the application conditions for natural language gender terms though.

4.1 Gender nominalism

Iris Young argues that unless there is “some sense in which ‘woman’ is the name of a social collective [that feminism represents], there is nothing specific to feminist politics” (1997, 13). In order to make the category women intelligible, she argues that women make up a series: a particular kind of social collective “whose members are unified passively by the objects their actions are oriented around and/or by the objectified results of the material effects of the actions of the other” (Young 1997, 23). A series is distinct from a group in that, whereas members of groups are thought to self-consciously share certain goals, projects, traits and/ or self-conceptions, members of series pursue their own individual ends without necessarily having anything at all in common. Young holds that women are not bound together by a shared feature or experience (or set of features and experiences) since she takes Spelman’s particularity argument to have established definitely that no such feature exists (1997, 13; see also: Frye 1996; Heyes 2000). Instead, women’s category is unified by certain practico-inert realities or the ways in which women’s lives and their actions are oriented around certain objects and everyday realities (Young 1997, 23–4). For example, bus commuters make up a series unified through their individual actions being organised around the same practico-inert objects of the bus and the practice of public transport. Women make up a series unified through women’s lives and actions being organised around certain practico-inert objects and realities that position them as women .

Young identifies two broad groups of such practico-inert objects and realities. First, phenomena associated with female bodies (physical facts), biological processes that take place in female bodies (menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth) and social rules associated with these biological processes (social rules of menstruation, for instance). Second, gender-coded objects and practices: pronouns, verbal and visual representations of gender, gender-coded artefacts and social spaces, clothes, cosmetics, tools and furniture. So, women make up a series since their lives and actions are organised around female bodies and certain gender-coded objects. Their series is bound together passively and the unity is “not one that arises from the individuals called women” (Young 1997, 32).

Although Young’s proposal purports to be a response to Spelman’s worries, Stone has questioned whether it is, after all, susceptible to the particularity argument: ultimately, on Young’s view, something women as women share (their practico-inert realities) binds them together (Stone 2004).

Natalie Stoljar holds that unless the category of women is unified, feminist action on behalf of women cannot be justified (1995, 282). Stoljar too is persuaded by the thought that women qua women do not share anything unitary. This prompts her to argue for resemblance nominalism. This is the view that a certain kind of resemblance relation holds between entities of a particular type (for more on resemblance nominalism, see Armstrong 1989, 39–58). Stoljar is not alone in arguing for resemblance relations to make sense of women as a category; others have also done so, usually appealing to Wittgenstein’s ‘family resemblance’ relations (Alcoff 1988; Green & Radford Curry 1991; Heyes 2000; Munro 2006). Stoljar relies more on Price’s resemblance nominalism whereby x is a member of some type F only if x resembles some paradigm or exemplar of F sufficiently closely (Price 1953, 20). For instance, the type of red entities is unified by some chosen red paradigms so that only those entities that sufficiently resemble the paradigms count as red. The type (or category) of women, then, is unified by some chosen woman paradigms so that those who sufficiently resemble the woman paradigms count as women (Stoljar 1995, 284).

Semantic considerations about the concept woman suggest to Stoljar that resemblance nominalism should be endorsed (Stoljar 2000, 28). It seems unlikely that the concept is applied on the basis of some single social feature all and only women possess. By contrast, woman is a cluster concept and our attributions of womanhood pick out “different arrangements of features in different individuals” (Stoljar 2000, 27). More specifically, they pick out the following clusters of features: (a) Female sex; (b) Phenomenological features: menstruation, female sexual experience, child-birth, breast-feeding, fear of walking on the streets at night or fear of rape; (c) Certain roles: wearing typically female clothing, being oppressed on the basis of one’s sex or undertaking care-work; (d) Gender attribution: “calling oneself a woman, being called a woman” (Stoljar 1995, 283–4). For Stoljar, attributions of womanhood are to do with a variety of traits and experiences: those that feminists have historically termed ‘gender traits’ (like social, behavioural, psychological traits) and those termed ‘sex traits’. Nonetheless, she holds that since the concept woman applies to (at least some) trans persons, one can be a woman without being female (Stoljar 1995, 282).

The cluster concept woman does not, however, straightforwardly provide the criterion for picking out the category of women. Rather, the four clusters of features that the concept picks out help single out woman paradigms that in turn help single out the category of women. First, any individual who possesses a feature from at least three of the four clusters mentioned will count as an exemplar of the category. For instance, an African-American with primary and secondary female sex characteristics, who describes herself as a woman and is oppressed on the basis of her sex, along with a white European hermaphrodite brought up ‘as a girl’, who engages in female roles and has female phenomenological features despite lacking female sex characteristics, will count as woman paradigms (Stoljar 1995, 284). [ 7 ] Second, any individual who resembles “any of the paradigms sufficiently closely (on Price’s account, as closely as [the paradigms] resemble each other) will be a member of the resemblance class ‘woman’” (Stoljar 1995, 284). That is, what delimits membership in the category of women is that one resembles sufficiently a woman paradigm.

4.2 Neo-gender realism

In a series of articles collected in her 2012 book, Sally Haslanger argues for a way to define the concept woman that is politically useful, serving as a tool in feminist fights against sexism, and that shows woman to be a social (not a biological) notion. More specifically, Haslanger argues that gender is a matter of occupying either a subordinate or a privileged social position. In some articles, Haslanger is arguing for a revisionary analysis of the concept woman (2000b; 2003a; 2003b). Elsewhere she suggests that her analysis may not be that revisionary after all (2005; 2006). Consider the former argument first. Haslanger’s analysis is, in her terms, ameliorative: it aims to elucidate which gender concepts best help feminists achieve their legitimate purposes thereby elucidating those concepts feminists should be using (Haslanger 2000b, 33). [ 8 ] Now, feminists need gender terminology in order to fight sexist injustices (Haslanger 2000b, 36). In particular, they need gender terms to identify, explain and talk about persistent social inequalities between males and females. Haslanger’s analysis of gender begins with the recognition that females and males differ in two respects: physically and in their social positions. Societies in general tend to “privilege individuals with male bodies” (Haslanger 2000b, 38) so that the social positions they subsequently occupy are better than the social positions of those with female bodies. And this generates persistent sexist injustices. With this in mind, Haslanger specifies how she understands genders:

S is a woman iff [by definition] S is systematically subordinated along some dimension (economic, political, legal, social, etc.), and S is ‘marked’ as a target for this treatment by observed or imagined bodily features presumed to be evidence of a female’s biological role in reproduction.

S is a man iff [by definition] S is systematically privileged along some dimension (economic, political, legal, social, etc.), and S is ‘marked’ as a target for this treatment by observed or imagined bodily features presumed to be evidence of a male’s biological role in reproduction. (2003a, 6–7)

These are constitutive of being a woman and a man: what makes calling S a woman apt, is that S is oppressed on sex-marked grounds; what makes calling S a man apt, is that S is privileged on sex-marked grounds.

Haslanger’s ameliorative analysis is counterintuitive in that females who are not sex-marked for oppression, do not count as women. At least arguably, the Queen of England is not oppressed on sex-marked grounds and so, would not count as a woman on Haslanger’s definition. And, similarly, all males who are not privileged would not count as men. This might suggest that Haslanger’s analysis should be rejected in that it does not capture what language users have in mind when applying gender terms. However, Haslanger argues that this is not a reason to reject the definitions, which she takes to be revisionary: they are not meant to capture our intuitive gender terms. In response, Mikkola (2009) has argued that revisionary analyses of gender concepts, like Haslanger’s, are both politically unhelpful and philosophically unnecessary.

Note also that Haslanger’s proposal is eliminativist: gender justice would eradicate gender, since it would abolish those sexist social structures responsible for sex-marked oppression and privilege. If sexist oppression were to cease, women and men would no longer exist (although there would still be males and females). Not all feminists endorse such an eliminativist view though. Stone holds that Haslanger does not leave any room for positively revaluing what it is to be a woman: since Haslanger defines woman in terms of subordination,

any woman who challenges her subordinate status must by definition be challenging her status as a woman, even if she does not intend to … positive change to our gender norms would involve getting rid of the (necessarily subordinate) feminine gender. (Stone 2007, 160)

But according to Stone this is not only undesirable – one should be able to challenge subordination without having to challenge one’s status as a woman. It is also false: “because norms of femininity can be and constantly are being revised, women can be women without thereby being subordinate” (Stone 2007, 162; Mikkola [2016] too argues that Haslanger’s eliminativism is troublesome).

Theodore Bach holds that Haslanger’s eliminativism is undesirable on other grounds, and that Haslanger’s position faces another more serious problem. Feminism faces the following worries (among others):

Representation problem : “if there is no real group of ‘women’, then it is incoherent to make moral claims and advance political policies on behalf of women” (Bach 2012, 234). Commonality problems : (1) There is no feature that all women cross-culturally and transhistorically share. (2) Delimiting women’s social kind with the help of some essential property privileges those who possess it, and marginalizes those who do not (Bach 2012, 235).

According to Bach, Haslanger’s strategy to resolve these problems appeals to ‘social objectivism’. First, we define women “according to a suitably abstract relational property” (Bach 2012, 236), which avoids the commonality problems. Second, Haslanger employs “an ontologically thin notion of ‘objectivity’” (Bach 2012, 236) that answers the representation problem. Haslanger’s solution (Bach holds) is specifically to argue that women make up an objective type because women are objectively similar to one another, and not simply classified together given our background conceptual schemes. Bach claims though that Haslanger’s account is not objective enough, and we should on political grounds “provide a stronger ontological characterization of the genders men and women according to which they are natural kinds with explanatory essences” (Bach 2012, 238). He thus proposes that women make up a natural kind with a historical essence:

The essential property of women, in virtue of which an individual is a member of the kind ‘women,’ is participation in a lineage of women. In order to exemplify this relational property, an individual must be a reproduction of ancestral women, in which case she must have undergone the ontogenetic processes through which a historical gender system replicates women. (Bach 2012, 271)

In short, one is not a woman due to shared surface properties with other women (like occupying a subordinate social position). Rather, one is a woman because one has the right history: one has undergone the ubiquitous ontogenetic process of gender socialization. Thinking about gender in this way supposedly provides a stronger kind unity than Haslanger’s that simply appeals to shared surface properties.

Not everyone agrees; Mikkola (2020) argues that Bach’s metaphysical picture has internal tensions that render it puzzling and that Bach’s metaphysics does not provide good responses to the commonality and presentation problems. The historically essentialist view also has anti-trans implications. After all, trans women who have not undergone female gender socialization won’t count as women on his view (Mikkola [2016, 2020] develops this line of critique in more detail). More worryingly, trans women will count as men contrary to their self-identification. Both Bettcher (2013) and Jenkins (2016) consider the importance of gender self-identification. Bettcher argues that there is more than one ‘correct’ way to understand womanhood: at the very least, the dominant (mainstream), and the resistant (trans) conceptions. Dominant views like that of Bach’s tend to erase trans people’s experiences and to marginalize trans women within feminist movements. Rather than trans women having to defend their self-identifying claims, these claims should be taken at face value right from the start. And so, Bettcher holds, “in analyzing the meaning of terms such as ‘woman,’ it is inappropriate to dismiss alternative ways in which those terms are actually used in trans subcultures; such usage needs to be taken into consideration as part of the analysis” (2013, 235).

Specifically with Haslanger in mind and in a similar vein, Jenkins (2016) discusses how Haslanger’s revisionary approach unduly excludes some trans women from women’s social kind. On Jenkins’s view, Haslanger’s ameliorative methodology in fact yields more than one satisfying target concept: one that “corresponds to Haslanger’s proposed concept and captures the sense of gender as an imposed social class”; another that “captures the sense of gender as a lived identity” (Jenkins 2016, 397). The latter of these allows us to include trans women into women’s social kind, who on Haslanger’s social class approach to gender would inappropriately have been excluded. (See Andler 2017 for the view that Jenkins’s purportedly inclusive conception of gender is still not fully inclusive. Jenkins 2018 responds to this charge and develops the notion of gender identity still further.)

In addition to her revisionary argument, Haslanger has suggested that her ameliorative analysis of woman may not be as revisionary as it first seems (2005, 2006). Although successful in their reference fixing, ordinary language users do not always know precisely what they are talking about. Our language use may be skewed by oppressive ideologies that can “mislead us about the content of our own thoughts” (Haslanger 2005, 12). Although her gender terminology is not intuitive, this could simply be because oppressive ideologies mislead us about the meanings of our gender terms. Our everyday gender terminology might mean something utterly different from what we think it means; and we could be entirely ignorant of this. Perhaps Haslanger’s analysis, then, has captured our everyday gender vocabulary revealing to us the terms that we actually employ: we may be applying ‘woman’ in our everyday language on the basis of sex-marked subordination whether we take ourselves to be doing so or not. If this is so, Haslanger’s gender terminology is not radically revisionist.

Saul (2006) argues that, despite it being possible that we unknowingly apply ‘woman’ on the basis of social subordination, it is extremely difficult to show that this is the case. This would require showing that the gender terminology we in fact employ is Haslanger’s proposed gender terminology. But discovering the grounds on which we apply everyday gender terms is extremely difficult precisely because they are applied in various and idiosyncratic ways (Saul 2006, 129). Haslanger, then, needs to do more in order to show that her analysis is non-revisionary.

Charlotte Witt (2011a; 2011b) argues for a particular sort of gender essentialism, which Witt terms ‘uniessentialism’. Her motivation and starting point is the following: many ordinary social agents report gender being essential to them and claim that they would be a different person were they of a different sex/gender. Uniessentialism attempts to understand and articulate this. However, Witt’s work departs in important respects from the earlier (so-called) essentialist or gender realist positions discussed in Section 2: Witt does not posit some essential property of womanhood of the kind discussed above, which failed to take women’s differences into account. Further, uniessentialism differs significantly from those position developed in response to the problem of how we should conceive of women’s social kind. It is not about solving the standard dispute between gender nominalists and gender realists, or about articulating some supposedly shared property that binds women together and provides a theoretical ground for feminist political solidarity. Rather, uniessentialism aims to make good the widely held belief that gender is constitutive of who we are. [ 9 ]

Uniessentialism is a sort of individual essentialism. Traditionally philosophers distinguish between kind and individual essentialisms: the former examines what binds members of a kind together and what do all members of some kind have in common qua members of that kind. The latter asks: what makes an individual the individual it is. We can further distinguish two sorts of individual essentialisms: Kripkean identity essentialism and Aristotelian uniessentialism. The former asks: what makes an individual that individual? The latter, however, asks a slightly different question: what explains the unity of individuals? What explains that an individual entity exists over and above the sum total of its constituent parts? (The standard feminist debate over gender nominalism and gender realism has largely been about kind essentialism. Being about individual essentialism, Witt’s uniessentialism departs in an important way from the standard debate.) From the two individual essentialisms, Witt endorses the Aristotelian one. On this view, certain functional essences have a unifying role: these essences are responsible for the fact that material parts constitute a new individual, rather than just a lump of stuff or a collection of particles. Witt’s example is of a house: the essential house-functional property (what the entity is for, what its purpose is) unifies the different material parts of a house so that there is a house, and not just a collection of house-constituting particles (2011a, 6). Gender (being a woman/a man) functions in a similar fashion and provides “the principle of normative unity” that organizes, unifies and determines the roles of social individuals (Witt 2011a, 73). Due to this, gender is a uniessential property of social individuals.

It is important to clarify the notions of gender and social individuality that Witt employs. First, gender is a social position that “cluster[s] around the engendering function … women conceive and bear … men beget” (Witt 2011a, 40). These are women and men’s socially mediated reproductive functions (Witt 2011a, 29) and they differ from the biological function of reproduction, which roughly corresponds to sex on the standard sex/gender distinction. Witt writes: “to be a woman is to be recognized to have a particular function in engendering, to be a man is to be recognized to have a different function in engendering” (2011a, 39). Second, Witt distinguishes persons (those who possess self-consciousness), human beings (those who are biologically human) and social individuals (those who occupy social positions synchronically and diachronically). These ontological categories are not equivalent in that they possess different persistence and identity conditions. Social individuals are bound by social normativity, human beings by biological normativity. These normativities differ in two respects: first, social norms differ from one culture to the next whereas biological norms do not; second, unlike biological normativity, social normativity requires “the recognition by others that an agent is both responsive to and evaluable under a social norm” (Witt 2011a, 19). Thus, being a social individual is not equivalent to being a human being. Further, Witt takes personhood to be defined in terms of intrinsic psychological states of self-awareness and self-consciousness. However, social individuality is defined in terms of the extrinsic feature of occupying a social position, which depends for its existence on a social world. So, the two are not equivalent: personhood is essentially about intrinsic features and could exist without a social world, whereas social individuality is essentially about extrinsic features that could not exist without a social world.

Witt’s gender essentialist argument crucially pertains to social individuals , not to persons or human beings: saying that persons or human beings are gendered would be a category mistake. But why is gender essential to social individuals? For Witt, social individuals are those who occupy positions in social reality. Further, “social positions have norms or social roles associated with them; a social role is what an individual who occupies a given social position is responsive to and evaluable under” (Witt 2011a, 59). However, qua social individuals, we occupy multiple social positions at once and over time: we can be women, mothers, immigrants, sisters, academics, wives, community organisers and team-sport coaches synchronically and diachronically. Now, the issue for Witt is what unifies these positions so that a social individual is constituted. After all, a bundle of social position occupancies does not make for an individual (just as a bundle of properties like being white , cube-shaped and sweet do not make for a sugar cube). For Witt, this unifying role is undertaken by gender (being a woman or a man): it is

a pervasive and fundamental social position that unifies and determines all other social positions both synchronically and diachronically. It unifies them not physically, but by providing a principle of normative unity. (2011a, 19–20)

By ‘normative unity’, Witt means the following: given our social roles and social position occupancies, we are responsive to various sets of social norms. These norms are “complex patterns of behaviour and practices that constitute what one ought to do in a situation given one’s social position(s) and one’s social context” (Witt 2011a, 82). The sets of norms can conflict: the norms of motherhood can (and do) conflict with the norms of being an academic philosopher. However, in order for this conflict to exist, the norms must be binding on a single social individual. Witt, then, asks: what explains the existence and unity of the social individual who is subject to conflicting social norms? The answer is gender.

Gender is not just a social role that unifies social individuals. Witt takes it to be the social role — as she puts it, it is the mega social role that unifies social agents. First, gender is a mega social role if it satisfies two conditions (and Witt claims that it does): (1) if it provides the principle of synchronic and diachronic unity of social individuals, and (2) if it inflects and defines a broad range of other social roles. Gender satisfies the first in usually being a life-long social position: a social individual persists just as long as their gendered social position persists. Further, Witt maintains, trans people are not counterexamples to this claim: transitioning entails that the old social individual has ceased to exist and a new one has come into being. And this is consistent with the same person persisting and undergoing social individual change via transitioning. Gender satisfies the second condition too. It inflects other social roles, like being a parent or a professional. The expectations attached to these social roles differ depending on the agent’s gender, since gender imposes different social norms to govern the execution of the further social roles. Now, gender — as opposed to some other social category, like race — is not just a mega social role; it is the unifying mega social role. Cross-cultural and trans-historical considerations support this view. Witt claims that patriarchy is a social universal (2011a, 98). By contrast, racial categorisation varies historically and cross-culturally, and racial oppression is not a universal feature of human cultures. Thus, gender has a better claim to being the social role that is uniessential to social individuals. This account of gender essentialism not only explains social agents’ connectedness to their gender, but it also provides a helpful way to conceive of women’s agency — something that is central to feminist politics.

Linda Alcoff holds that feminism faces an identity crisis: the category of women is feminism’s starting point, but various critiques about gender have fragmented the category and it is not clear how feminists should understand what it is to be a woman (2006, chapter 5). In response, Alcoff develops an account of gender as positionality whereby “gender is, among other things, a position one occupies and from which one can act politically” (2006, 148). In particular, she takes one’s social position to foster the development of specifically gendered identities (or self-conceptions): “The very subjectivity (or subjective experience of being a woman) and the very identity of women are constituted by women’s position” (Alcoff 2006, 148). Alcoff holds that there is an objective basis for distinguishing individuals on the grounds of (actual or expected) reproductive roles:

Women and men are differentiated by virtue of their different relationship of possibility to biological reproduction, with biological reproduction referring to conceiving, giving birth, and breast-feeding, involving one’s body . (Alcoff 2006, 172, italics in original)

The thought is that those standardly classified as biologically female, although they may not actually be able to reproduce, will encounter “a different set of practices, expectations, and feelings in regard to reproduction” than those standardly classified as male (Alcoff 2006, 172). Further, this differential relation to the possibility of reproduction is used as the basis for many cultural and social phenomena that position women and men: it can be

the basis of a variety of social segregations, it can engender the development of differential forms of embodiment experienced throughout life, and it can generate a wide variety of affective responses, from pride, delight, shame, guilt, regret, or great relief from having successfully avoided reproduction. (Alcoff 2006, 172)

Reproduction, then, is an objective basis for distinguishing individuals that takes on a cultural dimension in that it positions women and men differently: depending on the kind of body one has, one’s lived experience will differ. And this fosters the construction of gendered social identities: one’s role in reproduction helps configure how one is socially positioned and this conditions the development of specifically gendered social identities.

Since women are socially positioned in various different contexts, “there is no gender essence all women share” (Alcoff 2006, 147–8). Nonetheless, Alcoff acknowledges that her account is akin to the original 1960s sex/gender distinction insofar as sex difference (understood in terms of the objective division of reproductive labour) provides the foundation for certain cultural arrangements (the development of a gendered social identity). But, with the benefit of hindsight

we can see that maintaining a distinction between the objective category of sexed identity and the varied and culturally contingent practices of gender does not presume an absolute distinction of the old-fashioned sort between culture and a reified nature. (Alcoff 2006, 175)

That is, her view avoids the implausible claim that sex is exclusively to do with nature and gender with culture. Rather, the distinction on the basis of reproductive possibilities shapes and is shaped by the sorts of cultural and social phenomena (like varieties of social segregation) these possibilities gives rise to. For instance, technological interventions can alter sex differences illustrating that this is the case (Alcoff 2006, 175). Women’s specifically gendered social identities that are constituted by their context dependent positions, then, provide the starting point for feminist politics.

Recently Robin Dembroff (2020) has argued that existing metaphysical accounts of gender fail to address non-binary gender identities. This generates two concerns. First, metaphysical accounts of gender (like the ones outlined in previous sections) are insufficient for capturing those who reject binary gender categorisation where people are either men or women. In so doing, these accounts are not satisfying as explanations of gender understood in a more expansive sense that goes beyond the binary. Second, the failure to understand non-binary gender identities contributes to a form of epistemic injustice called ‘hermeneutical injustice’: it feeds into a collective failure to comprehend and analyse concepts and practices that undergird non-binary classification schemes, thereby impeding on one’s ability to fully understand themselves. To overcome these problems, Dembroff suggests an account of genderqueer that they call ‘critical gender kind’:

a kind whose members collectively destabilize one or more elements of dominant gender ideology. Genderqueer, on my proposed model, is a category whose members collectively destabilize the binary axis, or the idea that the only possible genders are the exclusive and exhaustive kinds men and women. (2020, 2)

Note that Dembroff’s position is not to be confused with ‘gender critical feminist’ positions like those noted above, which are critical of the prevalent feminist focus on gender, as opposed to sex, kinds. Dembroff understands genderqueer as a gender kind, but one that is critical of dominant binary understandings of gender.

Dembroff identifies two modes of destabilising the gender binary: principled and existential. Principled destabilising “stems from or otherwise expresses individuals’ social or political commitments regarding gender norms, practices, and structures”, while existential destabilising “stems from or otherwise expresses individuals’ felt or desired gender roles, embodiment, and/or categorization” (2020, 13). These modes are not mutually exclusive, and they can help us understand the difference between allies and members of genderqueer kinds: “While both resist dominant gender ideology, members of [genderqueer] kinds resist (at least in part) due to felt or desired gender categorization that deviates from dominant expectations, norms, and assumptions” (2020, 14). These modes of destabilisation also enable us to formulate an understanding of non-critical gender kinds that binary understandings of women and men’s kinds exemplify. Dembroff defines these kinds as follows:

For a given kind X , X is a non-critical gender kind relative to a given society iff X ’s members collectively restabilize one or more elements of the dominant gender ideology in that society. (2020, 14)

Dembroff’s understanding of critical and non-critical gender kinds importantly makes gender kind membership something more and other than a mere psychological phenomenon. To engage in collectively destabilising or restabilising dominant gender normativity and ideology, we need more than mere attitudes or mental states – resisting or maintaining such normativity requires action as well. In so doing, Dembroff puts their position forward as an alternative to two existing internalist positions about gender. First, to Jennifer McKitrick’s (2015) view whereby gender is dispositional: in a context where someone is disposed to behave in ways that would be taken by others to be indicative of (e.g.) womanhood, the person has a woman’s gender identity. Second, to Jenkin’s (2016, 2018) position that takes an individual’s gender identity to be dependent on which gender-specific norms the person experiences as being relevant to them. On this view, someone is a woman if the person experiences norms associated with women to be relevant to the person in the particular social context that they are in. Neither of these positions well-captures non-binary identities, Dembroff argues, which motivates the account of genderqueer identities as critical gender kinds.

As Dembroff acknowledges, substantive philosophical work on non-binary gender identities is still developing. However, it is important to note that analytic philosophers are beginning to engage in gender metaphysics that goes beyond the binary.

This entry first looked at feminist objections to biological determinism and the claim that gender is socially constructed. Next, it examined feminist critiques of prevalent understandings of gender and sex, and the distinction itself. In response to these concerns, the entry looked at how a unified women’s category could be articulated for feminist political purposes. This illustrated that gender metaphysics — or what it is to be a woman or a man or a genderqueer person — is still very much a live issue. And although contemporary feminist philosophical debates have questioned some of the tenets and details of the original 1960s sex/gender distinction, most still hold onto the view that gender is about social factors and that it is (in some sense) distinct from biological sex. The jury is still out on what the best, the most useful, or (even) the correct definition of gender is.

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Beauvoir, Simone de | feminist philosophy, approaches: intersections between analytic and continental philosophy | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on reproduction and the family | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on the self | homosexuality | identity politics | speech acts

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to Tuukka Asplund, Jenny Saul, Alison Stone and Nancy Tuana for their extremely helpful and detailed comments when writing this entry.

Copyright © 2022 by Mari Mikkola < m . mikkola @ uva . nl >

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Essay on Role of Women in Society | Role of Women in Society Essay for Students and Children in English

March 13, 2023 by Prasanna

Essay on Role of Women in Society: Women are equally important in society as men are. They are the backbone for a progressing nation. Demographically, half a population of the country constitutes women, and they deserve equal importance and rights in society.

From keeping the home safe and clean to portraying excellent outcomes in the workplace, a woman can do it all. Their capabilities must not be underestimated based on their gender, and they should be given equal opportunity to display their talents. It is essential for us to know the status of women in our society, and therefore, we have compiled some extended, short, and ten lines essay on the role of women in society.

You can read more  Essay Writing  about articles, events, people, sports, technology many more.

Long and Short Essays on Role of Women in Society for Students and Kids in English

Given below is a Role of Women in Society essay of 400-500 words and is suitable for the students of standards 7, 8, 9, and 10 and a short piece of nearly 100-150 words for the students of standard 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

Long Essay on Role of Women in Society 500 words in English

In the middle age, people had only one notion about the woman; that is, they were born to control the household chores and manage the children. But in today’s world, women empowerment has taken place which has opened new doors for the women to thrive and shine.

In the rural regions, the girls have started going to school, which is positively affecting the literacy rate in India and is taking the country in the forward direction. Campaigns are held all over the country to spread awareness about woman literacy.

In addition to literacy, personal health and hygiene are other issues that woman staying in the rural region have very less idea about. Women hold awareness programmes and free sanitary napkins are distributed amongst them. Such a programme is organised to remove a general taboo about the menstrual cycle.

Besides managing household works, women are also engaging themselves in the service sector like banks, hospitals, airlines, schools and every other possible work field as well as they have started showing interest in setting up their own business. Not to mention, they are providing excellent outcomes in their respective areas. In the world of sports, women have set up milestones for men to achieve.

Personalities like PV Sindhu and Saina Nehwal are idols. We must not limit or try to limit the role of women in society to be a homemaker or a mother because they are capable of doing so much more. The women who are homemakers are an essential member of the family who is responsible for managing the home, cooking, cleaning, doing the dishes, taking care of the elders and the kids.

Still, the saddest part is at times their efforts are overlooked, and they are never praised for the things they do. People assume these works as their duties and consider them to be a free servant. This outlook needs to change, and people should understand that she might even need some help in doing the works and she is not free labour, whatever she does is out of love and love only.

To conclude, women should be encouraged to do something out of the household works, and if they already want to work in offices to earn for themselves, no one should stop them. They are an individual identity who have full freedom of doing anything that they think is the best for them.

Short Essay on Role of Women in Society 150 words in English

In the modern world, women are progressing. The social and economic status of the women have soared to height, and they are no longer confined within the boundaries of the four walls. They are playing the roles of a working woman, an efficient homemaker, and a proud mother and daughter.

Earlier women were only associated with taking care of the household and babies. But nowadays, they are engaging in work fields to explore their inner talents and also to become independent and earn for themselves. They are one of the main reason behind the progress of the nation who makes our daily lives easy and the country proud.

10 Lines on Essay on Role of Women in Society in English

• A woman should be given equal opportunities economically and socially.
• They must be respected and never underestimated on the ground that they are women.
• Schooling should be made available for the girls in the rural area.
• Awareness must be spread on the topic of sanitary health and hygiene.
• Their choice and perspective must be looked upon on as they are great leaders.
• During the middle ages, the women’s position in the society became inferior as compared to men, and the condition of the women deteriorated.
• The women should be given freedom in whatever she does and should not be confined within four walls of the house.
• Women should be headstrong and believe in them. They must voice their option without any fear.
• People should start believing that motherhood is an option and the decision solely depends on a woman.
• We should remember the contribution of woman leaders and have a positive attitude towards woman controlling the government.

FAQ’s on Essay on Role of Women in Society

Question 1. Is there any importance of women’s perspective?

Answer: A woman does not only bring competition into the work field but also help in the collaboration of ideas and execute teamwork correctly. They help in bringing a perspective that values an open economy, modern, and social system.

Question 2. Name a few roles a woman plays in society and the family?

Answer: Some of the roles played by a woman in daily lives are as follows: a supportive daughter, wife, mother, an extraordinary co-worker who can manage a team very well, and many more. A woman has a versatile nature and is capable of doing everything a man can.

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Lady Gaga: Portrait of a Lady

For 150 years, Bazaar has explored what it means to be a woman in the modern world. Here, Lady Gaga offers her take on what it means to be one right now.

Growing up, I was always told I was a rebel. People would say things like, "You're defiant," and "Why are you dressed that way?" But I continued to do what I wanted and wear what I wanted—because, clearly I haven't changed. For a long time, though, there was a shame that I carried with me. I'm an Italian Catholic—I grew up with a lot of guilt. But what I've started to realize is that my rebelliousness, if you want to call it that, is something that was passed along to me by a long line of tough people—and tough women—in my family.

My mother and my grandmothers are without a doubt the most powerful female forces in my life. My mother grew up in West Virginia, in an Italian family. Her father was an extremely hardworking man; he worked in insurance. My grandmother's parents died when she was young, so she had to raise her sister. She really held down the fort. My father's father's family came over from Italy through Ellis Island. They lived in New Jersey. My grandfather was a shoemaker, and my father's mother worked with him when she wasn't home with their kids. They had two children. They lost one of them—my father's sister, Joanne, who I'm named after.

Joanne died when she was 19. I called my album Joanne because Joanne's presence was always important to me. The best way to describe my relationship with her is that it's like the relationship someone might have with an angel or a spirit guide or whatever you think of as a higher power. Joanne died of lupus, which is an autoimmune disease, and from what I know of the history of my family, one of the reasons her disease may have worsened was that she was assaulted when she was in college. She was sexually assaulted and groped. Joanne passed away in 1974, 12 years before I was born, so I learned about her mostly through stories and pictures. But I also learned about her through the rage of my father and watching him pour a drink every night and through seeing my grandparents cry at the Christmas dinner table when it was clear that there was an empty seat they wanted to fill.

.css-1pfpin{font-family:NewParisTextBook,NewParisTextBook-roboto,NewParisTextBook-local,Georgia,Times,Serif;font-size:1.75rem;line-height:1.2;margin:0rem;padding-left:5rem;padding-right:5rem;}@media(max-width: 48rem){.css-1pfpin{padding-left:2.5rem;padding-right:2.5rem;}}@media(min-width: 64rem){.css-1pfpin{font-size:2.5rem;line-height:1.2;}}.css-1pfpin b,.css-1pfpin strong{font-family:inherit;font-weight:bold;}.css-1pfpin em,.css-1pfpin i{font-style:normal;font-family:NewParisTextItalic,NewParisTextItalic-roboto,NewParisTextItalic-local,Georgia,Times,Serif;} "Health, happiness, love—these are the things that are at the heart of a great lady, I think. That's the kind of lady I want to be." —Lady Gaga

To me, Joanne was my hope and my faith. I always felt that I had somebody looking out for me, and I looked to her to protect me. As I've gotten older, I've also really looked to her to help understand myself. I thought about Joanne as I was watching the news during the election about the scandal surrounding the Access Hollywood tape. Here we were, in 2016, and the fact that the sort of language that was being used to talk about women was everywhere—on TV, in politics—was eye-opening. I felt depressed and hurt by it because that's what that kind of language does. Then I watched our incredible first lady, Michelle Obama, talk in New Hampshire about how hurt she felt seeing it too. She talked about how women are often afraid to say anything because we're worried that we will appear weak—that we'll be told we're being over-the-top, dramatic, emotional. But we're not. We're fighting for our lives.

Being a lady today means being a fighter. It means being a survivor. It means letting yourself be vulnerable and acknowledging your shame or that you're sad or you're angry. It takes great strength to do that. Before I made Joanne , I took some time off. I made music with Tony Bennett. I did "Til It Happens to You" with Diane Warren. But I was able to get off the train of endless work I'd been on, which was quite abusive to my body and my mind, and have some silence and some space around me. I wanted to experience music again the way I did when I was younger, when I just had to make it, instead of worrying what everybody thinks or being obsessed with things that aren't important.

Fame is the best drug that's ever existed. But once you realize who you are and what you care about, that need for more, more, more just goes away. What matters is that I have a great family, I work hard, I take care of those around me, I provide jobs for people I love very much, and I make music that I hope sends a good message into the world. I turned 30 this year, and I'm a fully formed woman. I have a clear perspective on what I want. That, for me, is success. I want to be somebody who is fighting for what's true—not for more attention, more fame, more accolades.

I look at my mother and the way she has loved my father through his pain, and I look at my grandmothers and what they've been through—the three of them are like a trifecta of strength. Health, happiness, love—these are the things that are at the heart of a great lady, I think. That's the kind of lady I want to be. You know, I never thought I'd say this, but isn't it time to take off the corsets? As someone who loves them, I think it's time to take them off.

Plus, watch Lady Gaga give details about her new album Joanne here:

[youtube ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WvDSBfK8ME&feature=youtu.be[/youtube]

This article originally appeared in the December/January issue of Harper's BAZAAR, available on newsstands November 22.

Hair: Frederic Aspiras for Amika; Makeup: Sarah Tanno for Marc Jacobs Beauty; Manicure: Naomi Yasuda for Dior Vernis; Production: Roger Dong for GE Projects; Prop styling: Jill Nicholls.

Lead image: Carolina Herrera gown, $7,290, 212-249-6552; Gladys Tamez Millinery hat, $560, gladystamez.com.

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“The Cult of True Womanhood” by Barbara Welter Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Introduction

Works cited.

Starting with Barbara Welter in the mid-1960s, feminist scholarship has explored the various issues and aspects of the ‘cult of True Womanhood.’ This phrase refers to an ideology that developed in the mid-nineteenth century that defined what it meant to be a True Woman in America during that time period as it is represented in the written records of diaries, journals, newspapers, magazines and other media. Scholarship has focused on how this ideology was promoted both by women and men, constricting others to ‘fall into line’ if they wished to be accepted in society. At the same time it was working to constrain women within a codified image, this thought process served as the catalyst to push women into the public sphere.

Although the idea of the True Woman really only defined a small percentage of the women of America, namely the white, middle-class urban woman, this ideology functioned to both constrain women from participating in the world outside of the home as well as to propel women into the outer world.

The idea of True Womanhood was based upon an Americanized version of the English Victorian ideals. “The attributes of True Womanhood, by which a woman judged herself and was judged by her husband, her neighbors and society, could be divided into four cardinal virtues – piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity. Put them all together and they spelled mother, daughter, sister, wife – woman.

Without them, no matter whether there was fame, achievement or wealth, all was ashes. With them, she was promised happiness and power” (Welter 1966 p. 152). In leaving the farms for the cities with the new modernization of the cities and factories, Welter and others hypothesized that it became necessary for women to uphold the traditional ideologies the family had held dear while in a rural setting, thereby restricting them to a single idealized image of what embodies the True Woman. “The nineteenth-century American man was … at work long hours in a materialistic society.

The religious values of his forebears were neglected in practice if not in intent, and he occasionally felt some guilt that he had turned this new land, this temple of the chosen people, into one vast countinghouse. But he could salve his conscience by reflecting that he had left behind a hostage, not only to fortune, but to all the values which he held so dear and treated so lightly. Woman, in the cult of True Womanhood … was the hostage in the home” (Welter 1966 p. 21).

The hierarchy of the four core values of True Womanhood was further delineated by Welter in their order of social importance. “Young men looking for a mate were cautioned to search first for piety, for if that were there, all else would follow” (Welter 1966 p. 152). Because religion didn’t take women away from her proper place within the home like so many other societies or movements did, piety was considered a safe avenue for a woman to pursue. “She would be another, better Eve, working in cooperation with the Redeemer, bringing the world back from its revolt and sin. The world would be reclaimed for God through her suffering” (Welter 1966 p. 152). Next to piety, purity was necessary in order to access the power inherent in the cult.

“Without [purity] she was, in fact, no woman at all, but a member of some lower order … To contemplate the loss of purity brought tears; to be guilty of such a crime … brought madness or death” (Welter 1966 p. 154). However, this power was expected to be relinquished upon the wedding night as the woman traded in her purity, setting up a paradox that proved difficult to explain away. “Woman must preserve her virtue until marriage and marriage was necessary for her happiness. Yet, marriage was, literally, an end to innocence. She was told not to question this dilemma, but simply to accept it” (Welter 1966 p. 158). Therefore, submission became a defining aspect of the feminine, also placing her squarely by her own fireside first as daughter and sister, later as wife and mother, bringing in the fourth dimension of domesticity. “If she chose to listen to other voices than those of her proper mentors, sought other rooms than those of her home, she lost both her happiness and her power” (Welter 1966 p. 173).

However, Welter also points out that the very definition of True Womanhood established the base for its own failure in that it defined Woman in such an idealized state that it was difficult to argue why her ideas should be confined to the home rather than the greater world outside, “especially since men were making such a hash of things” (Welter 1966 p. 174). Evidence in the written documents indicate that the universal acceptance of this idea of womanhood was not necessarily as widely embraced as nineteenth-century American society might have wished. Both within and without the cult, women were beginning to rebel against its constraining aspects from early on, whether they realized what they were doing or not.

For those women who felt the cult was correct in that the True Woman held a special bond with the Supreme Being that enabled her to adhere more closely to the tenets of the traditional belief system, it was a natural extension to feel that it was these individuals who should be heard within the greater community as a force to protect the very home in which she was given dominion. For others, accepting the yoke of the True Woman was a hindrance to their expressing what they felt were equally valid thoughts and ideas, wishing to be able to pursue their limits to the same degree as men without the unnatural restrictions imposed on them by those men. In describing the types of women that emerged from this culture, Welter explained “some challenged the standard, some tried to keep the virtues and enlarge the scope of womanhood. Somehow through this mixture of challenge and acceptance, or change and continuity, the True Woman evolved into the New Woman” (Welter 1966 p. 174).

There were many women who helped show the way, but two in particular, Catherine Beecher and Francis Willard, who invoked the strength of the True Woman and worked within the cult to bring about the social change they felt was necessary in obtaining the evolution of the cult to that of the New Woman, both of whom are brought forward as examples by Welter.

By explaining what was meant by the term ‘True Woman’, Welter clearly demonstrates how women were defined and constrained within a particular social ideal that had little to do with their own wants and abilities but was instead a concept that was instructed from the earliest childhood as a system of belief. Women were pure and sensible while men had good judgment and the strength and resources to battle the forces of evil. A deeper investigation into just how this translated into real life for women by looking at the four cardinal virtues of a True Woman reveals just how constraining this was for women as well as why some women bought into the system. However, even while the grounds for the two approaches, acceptance and rejection, are revealed, Welter illustrates how both of these approaches necessitated the shift in social thinking that shortly led to the idea of the New Woman and women’s liberation movement that blossomed in the mid-1900s.

Welter, Barbara. “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860.” American Quarterly. Vol. 18, N. 2, P. 1. 1966, pp. 151-74.

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IvyPanda. (2021, September 22). "The Cult of True Womanhood" by Barbara Welter. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-cult-of-true-womanhood-by-barbara-welter/

""The Cult of True Womanhood" by Barbara Welter." IvyPanda , 22 Sept. 2021, ivypanda.com/essays/the-cult-of-true-womanhood-by-barbara-welter/.

IvyPanda . (2021) '"The Cult of True Womanhood" by Barbara Welter'. 22 September.

IvyPanda . 2021. ""The Cult of True Womanhood" by Barbara Welter." September 22, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-cult-of-true-womanhood-by-barbara-welter/.

1. IvyPanda . ""The Cult of True Womanhood" by Barbara Welter." September 22, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-cult-of-true-womanhood-by-barbara-welter/.

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A Woman in Today's’ Society is a Woman with Power

by Andrienne A. Espiritu, CED-IDS | Mar 09 2020

In 2019, the Department of English of the College of Arts and Social Sciences conducted the 2nd Women's Month on-the-spot essay writing contest. 

This year's Women's Month, the Institute is featuring the winning entries of last year's essay writing competition. 

Below is the  2nd runner up essay entry written by Andrienne A. Espiritu of MSU-IIT Integrated Developmental School.

Woman. Who is she to people? Is she the Mother who lights a house with Grace and sacrifice? Is she the fiery member of the workplace who works day and night with the vision of hum but never the roar. Is she the shadow of a weary man’s success? Woman, always the essential darkness of somebody else’s night.

Throughout history, women have been marginalized and oppressed in this patriarchal society. They are often subjected to lesser roles and menial jobs; or worse, not expected to work at all. Society has always put women as an extension or being next to men. Because of this, they have learned to slowly blend in the background, to work behind the scenes, to stay silent in a world dominated by men. But when a staggering fifty percent of the world’s population is oppressed and forced to stay on the wayside, it does not take long for them to realize their worth, to start seeing a world where they may be significant. The role of women has drastically changed over the course of history, thanks to people who fought for women’s rights. However, we have not completely eradicated the division between men and women. In some parts of the globe, there are still people who stereotype women, immediately assuming they are of lesser roles, classifying them as housewives, or denying them opportunities. There are several cultures that believe a woman exists only so that she can be sold, married, and be of service to men. There are many practices that we are blind too because some of us are privileged enough to live in a society where women are rising to the same roles as men. Ironically, there are still women who have not realized their worth and freedom, women who continue to be oppressed, abused, and treated as objects. And it is up to the empowered women to raise the marginalized women along with them.

We have taught women to build themselves smaller than men. Taught them that if they can offer thunder and the man can only produce a mere clap, then they should stay silent instead. Women have shrunk themselves to a size men can conveniently handle. They try to fit in the small boxes this society has built for them when clearly, they are made for something much bigger. They stay at home brewing ideas with the knowledge that if they come out of the world, it would be a magnificent sight. Despite the struggles that women have been through and continue to go through, nothing stops them from achieving their absolute best. When we look back in history, we can see that many women have excelled in fields traditionally assigned to men or believed only men can achieve.  For example, Ada Lovelace, known to be the first computer program. Who would have thought that a woman could also excel in an area dominated by men? Marie Curie, the first person to win a Nobel prize twice in two different fields of science. She paved the way for many discoveries we now have. There was Frida Kahlo, whose bold paintings opened up conversations on taboo topics about women. These women had the courage to jump through loops, to go through needle-sized holes with the knowledge that the pathway towards success for women is laid out with more swerves and bumps. These women and many other women who fought courageously have shed light on women’s contributions in today’s society.

The women that we see today are empowered women. They continue to contribute to various aspects and excel at what they do. They radiate motivation and exude excellence; they are pioneers of change. They are equipped with the knowledge that they have the ability to change the world. They are no longer afraid to step out into the light. From the many years of living in the shadows, they have come to realize that the light they’ve been taught to stay away from is a brightness they yearn. To bathe in this light is not a fault, to find happiness in recognition is not something to be ashamed of. In this modern world, women are foundations for success. They venture into the world not as inferior beings but as equal partners alongside men. They explore new ideas and touch topics they’ve been afraid to open up before. They inspire other people. Children too looked up to women. The daughters of today’s society are filled with hope knowing that they are able to grow in a healthy world where they are not criticized for being a woman. The women of today are leaders, achievers, innovators; they are power with grace, a strict motivator with an inborn sense of love and compassion.

They say a woman finally becomes herself when she speaks without permission. And every word, every action, every deed that a woman does today without fear of being judged is a justice for all women who have fiercely fought the battle for equality. Woman. Who is she to the people? She is the raging anthem for every hopeful soul and the burning fire that swallows all fear and darkness. She is the figure that does not only stand up for herself but for thousands of other women who stand alongside her. She is no longer confined into darkness; rather, she dances underneath the warm light. She is fearless with her mouth and tongue and the unfailing courage to speak up. She is unbothered by society’s double standards and she will fight for her rights and the rights of other women who do not have voices to speak their truth. She is a woman. Fearless and brave- everything a woman is born to be.

_____________________________________________

Andrienne is an 18-year-old senior high school student from MSU-IIT IDS and is currently enrolled in the STEM strand. Her dream of becoming a board-certified ObGyn stems from the fact that she wants to dedicate her professional life working with women and empowering them. She strongly believes in being environmentally conscious and tries her best to practice an eco-friendly way of living. When she is not caught up in academic work, she likes to bake, write, watch slam poetry videos, and binge-watch tv shows. She is slowly learning to appreciate parts of herself society forces her to discard; she hopes to help others do the same.

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Unveiling the Essence of Womanhood: A Journey of Identity and Expression | Essay Writing for UPSC by Vikash Ranjan Sir | Triumph ias

Table of Contents

Unveiling the Essence of Womanhood: A Journey of Identity and Expression

(relevant for essay writing for upsc civil services examination).

Introduction

The statement “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” offers a profound reflection on the multifaceted nature of womanhood. Far beyond biology, this statement speaks to the intricate journey that individuals embark upon as they navigate the complexities of gender identity, societal expectations, and personal growth.

The Path to Womanhood: This statement encapsulates the notion that the process of becoming a woman is layered and influenced by various factors:

• Social and Cultural Influences: While biological sex is assigned at birth, the concept of womanhood is intricately woven with the cultural and societal norms surrounding femininity. These norms, often learned from a young age, shape how individuals perceive and embody their gender.
• Personal Identity and Expression: The journey of becoming a woman is deeply connected to personal identity and self-discovery. As individuals grow and learn about themselves, they develop a sense of what womanhood means to them, influenced by their feelings, experiences, and understanding of gender.
• Intersectionality: Womanhood is not a singular experience; it’s influenced by intersectionality—the merging of gender with other facets of identity like race, ethnicity, sexuality, and socio-economic background. These intersections contribute to diverse and distinct expressions of womanhood.

The Challenges and Empowerment: The statement also sheds light on both the challenges and empowerment encountered along this journey:

• Gender Expectations: Societal expectations of gender roles can be restrictive, pressuring individuals to conform to traditional norms of womanhood. This can lead to internal conflict as individuals reconcile these expectations with their evolving self-identities.
• Empowerment and Agency: On the other hand, the journey of becoming a woman presents opportunities for empowerment and self-empowerment. Individuals may choose to challenge limiting norms, forging a path toward authentic expressions of their womanhood.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, the statement “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” encapsulates the intricate and dynamic process of embracing womanhood. It underscores the pivotal role of societal influences, cultural contexts, personal experiences, and self-expression in shaping what it means to be a woman. This perspective invites us to embrace a more inclusive and evolving understanding of womanhood—one that recognizes it as a journey of growth, self-discovery, and empowerment that extends far beyond biology.

To master these intricacies and fare well in the Sociology Optional Syllabus , aspiring sociologists might benefit from guidance by the Best Sociology Optional Teacher and participation in the Best Sociology Optional Coaching . These avenues provide comprehensive assistance, ensuring a solid understanding of sociology’s diverse methodologies and techniques

womanhood, gender identity, womanhood, social influence, personal empowerment, self-discovery, gender norms, intersectionality, womanhood, gender identity, womanhood, social influence, personal empowerment, self-discovery, gender norms, intersectionality

Why Vikash Ranjan’s Classes for Sociology?

Proper guidance and assistance are required to learn the skill of interlinking current happenings with the conventional topics. VIKASH RANJAN SIR at TRIUMPH IAS guides students according to the Recent Trends of UPSC, making him the Best Sociology Teacher for Sociology Optional UPSC.

At Triumph IAS, the Best Sociology Optional Coaching platform, we not only provide the best study material and applied classes for Sociology for IAS but also conduct regular assignments and class tests to assess candidates’ writing skills and understanding of the subject.

Choose T he Best Sociology Optional Teacher for IAS Preparation?

At the beginning of the journey for Civil Services Examination preparation, many students face a pivotal decision – selecting their optional subject. Questions such as “ which optional subject is the best? ” and “ which optional subject is the most scoring? ” frequently come to mind. Choosing the right optional subject, like choosing the best sociology optional teacher , is a subjective yet vital step that requires a thoughtful decision based on facts. A misstep in this crucial decision can indeed prove disastrous.

Ever since the exam pattern was revamped in 2013, the UPSC has eliminated the need for a second optional subject. Now, candidates have to choose only one optional subject for the UPSC Mains , which has two papers of 250 marks each. One of the compelling choices for many has been the sociology optional. However, it’s strongly advised to decide on your optional subject for mains well ahead of time to get sufficient time to complete the syllabus. After all, most students score similarly in General Studies Papers; it’s the score in the optional subject & essay that contributes significantly to the final selection.

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Definition of womanhood

• womanishness
• womanliness

Examples of womanhood in a Sentence

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'womanhood.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

15th century, in the meaning defined at sense 2

Dictionary Entries Near womanhood

Cite this entry.

“Womanhood.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/womanhood. Accessed 10 Jun. 2024.

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Feminism, Womanhood, and Celebrity

The books Sophie Gilbert turns to while writing

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.

This week, Sophie Gilbert, a staff writer at The Atlantic , won the National Magazine Award for reviews and criticism ( The Atlantic took home a bunch of other awards too). Sophie’s work has long circled the way women are depicted in pop culture, and her winning set of essays all explore the constraining categories that movies and television shows and celebrities propagate and, every once in a while, try to subvert. I’ll read anything by Sophie, but I particularly enjoyed her review of Mary Gabriel’s new biography of Madonna. The pop star’s life and changing persona have been “an exercise in reinventing female power,” Sophie writes. “That people are still arguing about her—over whether she’s too old, too brazen, too narcissistic, too sexual, too deluded, too Botoxed, too shameless—underscores the scope and endurance of Madonna’s oeuvre.”

The prize presented a good opportunity for me to chat with Sophie about what she’s reading and the books that she feels offer interesting pathways for thinking about feminism today.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic ’s Books section:

• There is more good than evil in this country.
• This whale has something to say.
• What’s so bad about asking where humans came from?
• Seven books to read in the sunshine

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Gal Beckerman: Inspired by your winning essays, I’m curious if there are books about womanhood or girlhood and pop culture that you find to be particularly revealing.

Sophie Gilbert: So many! The gold standard, I think, is Melissa Febos’s 2021 book, Girlhood , which is part memoir, part cultural criticism, part historical analysis . We tend to romanticize girlhood and things that are “girly” as being somehow soft, cosseted, or frivolous, and yet the reality is that it’s often a time that is so much darker than that, filled with emotional violence and shock. Febos, who is somehow both a really poetic, lyrical writer and a bracing polemicist, makes the case that girlhood is when we learn to prioritize the feelings and beliefs of others over our own—a moment, for me at least, when so much of what I’m interested in begins. I also recently read, for the first time, Sheila Heti’s 2012 novel, How Should a Person Be? , which is a brilliant and slightly trollish work that replicates the constructed nature of reality television and parses 21st-century womanhood through The Hills , Dostoyevsky, and celebrity sex tapes.

Beckerman: How about biographies? Your Madonna essay managed to cover many eras of changing expectations for women and pop stars.

Gilbert: One of my all-time favorite autobiographies is Faithfull , Marianne Faithfull's unflinching account of what it was like trying to make art as a woman whom virtually every single 1960s music icon wrote songs about. The muse trap is quite a pernicious one, I think. But for the Madonna essay, Mary Gabriel’s book was obviously an extraordinarily detailed, thorough, and persuasive work that also felt like a powerful defense of an artist who’s been hated since the absolute beginning. There was a book in 1991, The I Hate Madonna Handbook , that was prescient in terms of pointing to the future of celebrity discourse—it can’t decide if Madonna is a feminist or a slut, a wannabe “pop tart” or a shrewd self-marketer. And one of the books I really appreciated while thinking about the essay was The Madonna Connection , a 1993 book of academic essays on Madonna that identified her (correctly) as a political postmodern artist whose medium was power as much as it was music.

Beckerman: And are there any books you love that have helped you tap into a particular feminist perspective?

Gilbert: I absolutely adored Constructing a Nervous System , by Margo Jefferson, a memoir in which Jefferson looks at her own life through the lens of criticism. The project of both her life and her career as one of the few Black female cultural critics in the 20th century, she argues, has been the same: to identify the “center” of American culture and forcibly carve out space for other, dissenting perspectives. There’s a line I haven’t stopped thinking about since I read it: “Women’s anger needs to be honored—celebrated and protected—the way virginity used to be!” Can you imagine? It blows my whole brain up in such a satisfying way.

Beckerman: Finally, any one particular novel, new or old, that you find yourself lately pressing on friends and strangers?

Gilbert: I’ve mentioned this in the past , but a brilliant friend gave me Heartburn , by Nora Ephron, when I couldn’t read anymore after my twins were born, and it’s the perfect novel but also utterly radical in how determined Ephron is to get the last word. She was pilloried at the time for airing her family’s dirty laundry in public—ironic, because it was not her who dirtied it—and I’ve come to think of Heartburn since as forcing us to acknowledge that our entire canon of literature is missing half the story. It’s only relatively recently that women have had the ability to present their own narratives, and when they do, they’re critiqued in a way that men never are. (I just read a review of Rachel Cusk’s divorce memoir, Aftermath , that called her “a brittle little dominatrix and peerless narcissist,” and that was in 2012.) So I’m grateful, always, for all the women who refuse to be quiet, and who see the power in telling the story, as Ephron writes, and controlling the version of events that endures.

The Atlantic ’s 2024 National Magazine Award Winners and Finalists

Read the stories that were recognized at this year’s ASMEs.

Read the full article.

What to Read

The Day the Earth Caved In: An American Mining Tragedy , by Joan Quigley

Quigley, the granddaughter of coal miners, grew up in Centralia, Pennsylvania, home of the nation’s worst mine fire. In her fascinating book, she returns as a trained journalist to investigate the origins of the still-ongoing burn, which began in 1962 after, some believe, a spark in a coal-mining shaft used as a makeshift garbage dump instigated an out-of-control blaze. For nearly two decades, Centralia’s residents seemed committed to collectively ignoring the fires, sulfurous steam, and fissures beneath their feet—until Valentine’s Day in 1981, when a 12-year-old was swallowed by an old tunnel that became a sinkhole in his grandmother’s backyard. The book exposes the background of the tragedy, taking in the perspectives of a local cook turned activist, a coal-magnate senator, and the handful of people who decide to remain while the town smolders. As an insider, Quigley can get the thorniest players talking while unpacking generations-old layers of working-class pride, corporate conspiracy, and the stakes of survival when an emergency becomes normalized. Ultimately, Quigley shows the collateral damage of living with a threat that is impossible to extinguish.  — Kelly McMasters

From our list: Seven books that will make you rethink your relationship to nature

Out Next Week

📚 Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America , by Beth Linker

📚 The Limits , by Nell Freudenberger

📚 Mania , by Lionel Shriver

Your Weekend Read

Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever

By Gary Shteyngart

The ship makes no sense, vertically or horizontally. It makes no sense on sea, or on land, or in outer space. It looks like a hodgepodge of domes and minarets, tubes and canopies, like Istanbul had it been designed by idiots. Vibrant, oversignifying colors are stacked upon other such colors, decks perched over still more decks; the only comfort is a row of lifeboats ringing its perimeter. There is no imposed order, no cogent thought, and, for those who do not harbor a totalitarian sense of gigantomania, no visual mercy. This is the biggest cruise ship ever built, and I have been tasked with witnessing its inaugural voyage.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic .

History | September 15, 2022

The Real Warriors Behind ‘The Woman King’

A new film stars Viola Davis as the leader of the Agojie, the all-woman army of the African kingdom of Dahomey

Meilan Solly

Associate Editor, History

At its height in the 1840s, the West African kingdom of Dahomey boasted an army so fierce that its enemies spoke of its “ prodigious bravery .” This 6,000 -strong force, known as the Agojie, raided villages under cover of darkness, took captives and slashed off resisters’ heads to return to their king as trophies of war. Through these actions, the Agojie established Dahomey’s preeminence over neighboring kingdoms and became known by European visitors as “ Amazons ” due to their similarities to the warrior women of Greek myth .

The Woman King , a new movie starring Viola Davis as a fictionalized leader of the Agojie, tells the story of this all-woman fighting force. Directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood, the film takes place as conflict engulfs the region and the specter of European colonization looms ominously. It represents the first time that the American film industry has dramatized this compelling story.

As the Hollywood Reporter ’s Rebecca Keegan writes, The Woman King is “the product of a thousand battles” fought by Davis and Prince-Bythewood, both of whom have spoken out about the obstacles the production team faced when pitching a historical epic centered on strong Black women.

“The part of the movie that we love is also the part of the movie that is terrifying to Hollywood, which is, it’s different, it’s new,” Davis tells Keegan. “We don’t always want different or new, unless you have a big star attached, a big male star. … [Hollywood studios] like it when women are pretty and blond or close to pretty and blond. All of these women are dark. And they’re beating … men. So there you go.”

From the origins of the Agojie to Dahomey’s eventual fate, here’s what you need to know about the true history behind The Woman King ahead of its arrival in theaters on September 16.

Is The Woman King based on a true story?

In short, yes, but with extensive dramatic license. Though the broad strokes of the film are historically accurate, the majority of its characters are fictional, including Davis’ Nanisca and Thuso Mbedu ’s Nawi, a young warrior-in-training. (Nanisca and Nawi share names with documented members of the Agojie but are not exact mirrors of these women.) King Ghezo (played by John Boyega) is the exception; according to Lynne Ellsworth Larsen , an architectural historian who studies gender dynamics in Dahomey, Ghezo (who reigned 1818 to 1858) and his son Glele (who reigned 1858 to 1889) presided over what’s seen as “the golden age of Dahomean history,” ushering in an era of economic prosperity and political strength.

The Woman King opens in 1823 with a successful raid by the Agojie, who free captives bound for enslavement from the clutches of the Oyo Empire , a powerful Yoruba state in what is now southwestern Nigeria. Dahomey has long paid tribute to the Oyo but is beginning to assert itself under the leadership of Ghezo and General Nanisca. A parallel plotline finds Nanisca, who disapproves of the slave trade after experiencing its horrors personally, urging Ghezo to end Dahomey’s close relationship with Portuguese slave traders and shift to production of palm oil as the kingdom's main export.

The real Ghezo did, in fact, successfully free Dahomey from its tributary status in 1823. But the kingdom’s involvement in the slave trade doesn’t align as neatly with the historical record. As historian Robin Law notes , Dahomey emerged as a key player in the trafficking of West Africans between the 1680s and early 1700s, selling its captives to European traders whose presence and demand fueled the industry—and, in turn, the monumental scale of Dahomey’s warfare.

Though the majority of individuals taken prisoner by Dahomey were enslaved abroad, a not-insignificant number remained in the kingdom, where they served on royal farms, in the army or at the palace. In truth, Ghezo only agreed to end Dahomey’s participation in the slave trade in 1852, after years of pressure by the British government , which had abolished slavery (for not wholly altruistic reasons ) in its own colonies in 1833 . Though Ghezo did at one point explore palm oil production as an alternative source of revenue, it proved far less lucrative, and the king soon resumed Dahomey’s participation in the slave trade.

In response to concerns about how her movie will depict Dahomey’s engagement with European slave traders, Prince-Bythewood told the Hollywood Reporter , “We’re going to tell the truth. We’re not going to shy away from anything. But also we’re telling a part of the story which is about overcoming and fighting for what’s right.”

Portraying the Agojie, through Nanisca’s actions, as critics of the slave trade makes for a “nice story,” says Larsen in an interview. “Do I think it’s historically accurate? I’m skeptical.” She adds, “These women are symbols of strength and of power. But … they’re [also] complicit in a problematic system. They are still under the patriarchy of the king, and they are still players in the slave trade.”

Maria Bello, an actress and producer who co-wrote the story The Woman King ’s script is based on, first learned about the Agojie during a 2015 trip to Benin. Recognizing the subject’s cinematic appeal, she persuaded producer Cathy Schulman to find a studio willing to finance the project. Prince-Bythewood and Davis joined the team soon after. “It was a constant push and fight to convince people that we deserve a big budget, that we deserved to tell a story like this,” Prince-Bythewood tells the Los Angeles Times .

That the film was greenlit at all likely stems from the blockbuster success of 2018’s Black Panther , which testified to the demand for entertainment created by and featuring Black creatives. The movie’s Dora Milaje regiment was inspired by the Agojie .

“For so long, Hollywood has only ever framed Africa in stereotypical ways,” Aje-Ori Agbese , an expert on African cinema at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, tells Ms. magazine . “So [ The Woman King ], centered on African women and African history, will generate a conversation. We have Black Panther to thank for that.”

Who were the Agojie?

The first recorded mention of the Agojie dates to 1729 . But the unit was possibly formed even earlier, toward the beginning of Dahomey’s existence, when King Huegbadja (reigned circa 1645 to 1685) created a corps of woman elephant hunters . Alternatively, Queen  Hangbe , who briefly ruled as regent following the death of her brother in the early 18th century, may have introduced the women warriors as part of her palace guard. Either way, the Agojie reached their peak in the 19th century, under Ghezo, who formally incorporated them into Dahomey’s army. Thanks to the kingdom’s ongoing wars, Dahomey’s male population had dropped significantly, creating an opportunity for women to replace men on the battlefield.

“More perhaps than any other African state, Dahomey was dedicated to warfare and slave-raiding,” wrote Stanley B. Alpern in Amazons of Black Sparta: The Women Warriors of Dahomey , the first full-length English-language study of the Agojie. “It may also have been the most totalitarian, with the king controlling and regimenting practically every aspect of social life.”

Dahomey’s standing army was an anomaly in and of itself, as most other African kingdoms disbanded their forces when not actively at war. The fact that the Agojie and their male counterparts wore uniforms also set them apart, establishing the Dahomean military as an organized, highly visible fighting force.

“They’re meant to have a public face,” says Larsen. “They wanted to … be feared by their neighbors. This was a slave-trading kingdom, so warfare was part of their annual cycle. They needed to gather humans to be part of this heinous trans-Atlantic slave trade,” as well as for human sacrifices to posthumously deified kings.

The Agojie’s ranks included volunteers and forced conscripts alike. “Regiments were recruited from slaves, some of them captured as early in age as 10 years old, also the poor, and girls who were rebellious,” said Terri Ochiagha , an expert on colonial and postcolonial Nigeria at the University of Edinburgh, in the 2018 Smithsonian Channel documentary series “ Epic Warrior Women .” In The Woman King , Nawi ends up in the army after refusing to marry an elderly suitor.

All of Dahomey’s women warriors were considered ahosi , or wives of the king. They lived in the royal palace alongside the king and his other wives, inhabiting a largely woman-dominated space. Aside from eunuchs and the king himself, no men were allowed in the palace after sunset.

As Alpern told Smithsonian magazine in 2011, the Agojie were considered the king’s “third-class” wives, as they typically didn’t share his bed or bear his children. Because they were married to the king, they were restricted from having sex with other men, although the degree to which this celibacy was enforced is subject to debate . In addition to enjoying privileged status, the warriors had access to a steady supply of tobacco and alcohol. They also had enslaved servants of their own.

To become an Agojie, recruits underwent intensive training, including exercises designed to harden them to bloodshed. In 1889, French naval officer Jean Bayol witnessed Nanisca (who likely inspired the name of Davis’ character in The Woman King ), a teenager “who had not yet killed anyone,” easily pass a test of wills. Walking up to a condemned prisoner, she reportedly “swung her sword three times with both hands, then calmly cut the last flesh that attached the head to the trunk. … She then squeezed the blood off her weapon and swallowed it.”

Another common form of training involved mock assaults that found recruits scrambling across towering walls of acacia thorns. In the words of a British traveler who examined the barriers, “I could not persuade myself that any human being, without boots or shoes, would, under any circumstances, attempt to pass over so dangerous a collection of the most efficiently armed plants I had ever seen.” The warriors bore the pain without complaint, and the bravest among them received acacia thorn belts marking their stoicism.

The Agojie’s divisions consisted of five branches: blunderbuss or artillery women, elephant hunters, musketeers, razor women and archers. Surprising the enemy was of the utmost importance. Warriors snuck up on villages at or before dawn, taking captives and decapitating those who resisted. Though European accounts of the Agojie vary widely, what “is indisputable … is their constantly outstanding performance in combat,” wrote Alpern in Amazons of Black Sparta . With the rest of the Dahomean army, these women warriors were “the scourge and terror of the whole surrounding country, always at war and generally victorious,” as an American missionary later recounted.

What happened to the Agojie?

Dahomey’s military dominance started to wane in the second half of the 19th century, when its army repeatedly failed to capture Abeokuta , a well-fortified Egba capital in what is now southwest Nigeria. An 1851 battle with the Egba, who’d settled in the region following the decline of the Oyo Empire, resulted in the deaths of up to 2,000 Agojie; in 1864, King Glele, who succeeded Ghezo a few years earlier, sought to avenge his father’s defeat at Abeokuta but was forced to retreat after just an hour and a half of fighting. Dahomean forces continued to target Egba villages until the early 1890s, when war with the French threatened the kingdom’s very existence.

Dahomey’s encounters with European colonizers had historically revolved mainly around the slave trade and religious missions . As the Scramble for Africa ramped up, however, tensions between Dahomey and France escalated. In 1863, the French declared the neighboring kingdom of Porto-Novo a colonial protectorate, angering Glele, who considered Porto-Novo a vassal of Dahomey. Glele also clashed with the French over the port city of Cotonou .

As Larsen articulates, the existence—and dominance—of Dahomey’s women warriors upset the French’s “understanding of gender roles and what women were supposed to do” in a “civilized” society. The women’s “flaunting of ferocity, physical power and fearlessness was manipulated or corrupted as Europeans started to interpret [it] in their own context of what they felt societies should be,” she says. For the French, the Agojie were simply “more fuel for their civilizing mission ,” which sought to impose European ideals on African countries.

The First Franco-Dahomean War began on February 21, 1890, just two months after the accession of Glele’s son Kondo, who took the name Béhanzin upon claiming the throne. On March 4, the Dahomean army attacked the French at Cotonou, only to fall to the Europeans’ vastly superior firepower. Nanisca, the teenager who’d left such an impression on French officer Bayol the previous year, decapitated the enemy’s chief gunner but died on the battlefield. Upon seeing Nanisca’s body, Bayol wrote that a “cleaver, its curved blade engraved with fetish symbols, was attached to her left wrist by a small cord, and her right hand was clenched round the barrel of her carbine covered with cowries.”

After facing a similar defeat at the Battle of Atchoupa on April 20, Dahomey agreed to a peace treaty assenting to French control over Porto-Novo and Cotonou. The lull in warfare lasted less than two years—an intermediary period that Béhanzin spent equipping his army with weapons equal to, or at least better matched with, the French’s. According to Alpern, upon receiving news of the French’s declaration of war, the Dahomean king said , “The first time, I was ignorant of how to make war, but now I know. … If you want war, I am ready. I wouldn’t stop even if it lasted 100 years and killed 20,000 of my men.”

Béhanzin proved true to his word. Over the course of seven weeks in fall 1892, Dahomey’s army fought valiantly to repel the French. The Agojie participated in 23 separate engagements during that short time span, earning the enemy’s respect for their valor and dedication to the cause. As one marine noted , “[N]either the cannons, nor the canister shot, nor the salvo fire stops them. … It is really strange to see women so well led, so well disciplined.” Though sources disagree on the number of women warriors who fought in the Second Franco-Dahomean War , Alpern cites 1,200 to 2,500 as a likely range.

At the village of Adégon on October 6, the Agojie suffered arguably their worst losses yet, with just 17 soldiers returning from an initial force of 434. Béhanzin’s brother Sagbaju Glele, who lived until the 1970s, told a local historian that the battle brought a moment of clarity for Dahomey’s courtiers, who now realized the inevitability of their kingdom’s destruction. The Dahomean army made a final stand at Cana in early November. The last day of fighting, reported a French marine colonel, was “one of the most murderous” of the entire war, beginning with the dramatic entrance of “the last Amazons … as well as the elephant hunters whose special assignment was to direct their fire at the officers.” The French officially seized the Dahomey capital of Abomey on November 17.

Between 2,000 and 4,000 Dahomean soldiers—including both men and women—died during the seven-week war. Of the roughly 1,200 Agojie in fighting shape at the beginning of the war, just 50 or 60 remained ready for battle by its end. Comparatively, the French side lost 52 Europeans and 33 Africans on the battlefield.

After the war, some of the surviving Agojie followed Béhanzin into exile in Martinique or served his brother, a puppet king installed by the French. Others tried to reenter society, to varying degrees of success. Still others toured Europe and the United States, performing dances and battlefield reenactments at “ living exhibitions ” that played into racist stereotypes of African people. At the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, visitors to the “ Dahomey Village ” were welcomed by a pair of juxtaposed paintings: an Agojie holding up an enemy’s severed head and a white colonizer raising his helmet. “You have these parallel images of what was considered barbaric and what the civilizers were here to correct,” says Larsen.

Last year, Leonard Wantchekon , an economist at Princeton University and native of Benin who leads research seeking to identify the Agojie’s descendants, told the Washington Post that French colonization proved detrimental to women’s rights in Dahomey, with colonizers barring women from political leadership (in addition to serving as warriors, ahosi could become royal cabinet ministers) and educational opportunities.

“The French made sure this history wasn’t known,” he explained. “They said we were backward, that they needed to ‘civilize us,’ but they destroyed opportunities for women that existed nowhere else in the world.”

Nawi, the last known surviving Agojie with battlefield experience (and the probable inspiration for Mbedu’s character), died in 1979 , at well over 100 years old. But Agojie traditions continued long after Dahomey’s fall, with descendants of the warrior women sharing stories about their formidable ancestors and participating in religious rituals. When actress Lupita Nyong’o visited Benin for a 2019 Smithsonian Channel special , she met a woman identified by locals as an Agojie who’d been trained by older warriors as a child and kept hidden within a palace for decades.

Speaking with History.com , Wantchekon emphasizes the central role played by women in Dahomean society. “When we push back against [colonialist] misconception[s] and embrace the culture of gender equality that was thriving in Benin and places like it before colonization,” he says, “it is a way to embrace the legacy of this exceptional group of African female leaders that European history tried so hard to erase.”

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Meilan Solly is Smithsonian magazine's associate digital editor, history.

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Men Fear Me, Society Shames Me, and I Love My Life

By Glynnis MacNicol

Ms. MacNicol is a writer, a podcast host and the author of the forthcoming memoir “I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself.”

I was once told that the challenge of making successful feminist porn is that the thing women desire most is freedom.

If that’s the case, one might consider my life over the past few years to be extremely pornographic — even without all the actual sex that occurred. It definitely has the makings of a fantasy, if we allowed for fantasies starring single, childless women on the brink of turning 50.

It’s not just in enjoying my age that I’m defying expectations. It’s that I’ve exempted myself from the central things we’re told give a woman’s life meaning — partnership and parenting. I’ve discovered that despite all the warnings, I regret none of those choices.

Indeed, I am enjoying them immensely. Instead of my prospects diminishing, as nearly every message that gets sent my way promises they will — fewer relationships, less excitement, less sex, less visibility — I find them widening. The world is more available to me than it’s ever been.

Saying so should not be radical in 2024, and yet, somehow it feels that way. We live in a world whose power structures continue to benefit from women staying in place. In fact, we’re currently experiencing the latest backlash against the meager feminist gains of the past half-century. My story — and those of the other women in similar shoes — shows that there are other, fulfilling ways to live.

It is disconcerting to enjoy oneself so much when there is so much to assure you to expect the opposite, just as it is strange to feel so good against a backdrop of so much terribleness in the world. But with age (hopefully) comes clarity.

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America Ferrera: ‘I Can’t Remember a Time When I Didn’t Want to Fight Injustice’

As told to Emily Maddick

Photography by Josefina Santos

Today Glamour unveils our two global Women of the Year—America Ferrera and Millie Bobby Brown —who are being honored by Glamour in the US, as well as Germany, Mexico and Latin America, Spain, and the UK. The rest of our incredible class of 2023 will be announced on November 1, 2023.

When I was five years old, I declared to my mother that when I grew up, I wanted to be both an actress and a human rights lawyer. While I already knew what I was passionate about in kindergarten, it wasn’t until many years later—well into my career as an actress—that I truly understood how these two ambitions could go hand in hand: how I could use my platform to amplify the causes I care about and use the power of storytelling to impact people’s lives for the better.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to fight injustice to incite change in this world.

From a very early age, I experienced inequity. I knew that some people had more and other people had less. Compared with those I grew up with in the San Fernando Valley, I mostly found myself on the having-less side. My early years were marked by moving from one two-bedroom apartment to another, along with my five older siblings and a single mother who worked around the clock to meet our most basic needs.

When I was in fifth grade, we lost our assistance with meals at school. It was isolating and embarrassing to be hungry at school, unable to focus on learning and socializing. Even at that age—and even without the wider context of the world’s inequalities—I understood that it wasn’t because of anything I did or deserved. I knew it was unfair and not right for a kid to be hungry while there were clearly resources all around that could help fix the problem. Adults didn’t see my unmet need, or they did and chose to look the other way. This experience helped shape my desire to be a part of making people’s lives better, to try to forge a world where families and children didn’t have to work miracles to survive or to live with dignity.

In early 2001, when I had just turned 17, I got an opportunity to start my acting career with two movies back-to-back. It was the dream that nobody ever imagined was possible for me. But I had always believed in myself because my mother had raised me to believe that, in the United States of America, being a poor, short, brown, fat daughter of immigrants did not preclude my dreams. If anything, it made me an underdog, and there’s not much that the USA loves more than a good underdog story. I was determined to build a career in an industry that didn’t reflect people like me. I refused to be deterred.

I had a hunger to succeed and a hunger to understand the world. And I knew I would only be truly fulfilled if I pursued education alongside my acting career. So I chose to go to the University of Southern California to study international relations. It was a juggling act that squeezed out most of the fun of either experience and left me mostly with work. There were times I’d get acting jobs and have to finish my term papers on the floor of an airport, flying between sets. Nevertheless, I pursued both, juggling studying, auditions, and tutoring for gas money.

But in my freshman year I started to doubt my acting career. Was I simply being frivolous and driven by my own ego and ambition? I considered quitting acting, because I had decided it was a selfish dream and I should instead become a lawyer or a legislator, someone who could actually make a difference.

I remember going to a beloved professor and sobbing as I told him what I was thinking. His reply changed everything. He told me he had a mentee, a young Latina student, at a local high school in East Los Angeles. She had asked him, a white male professor, to watch my first film— Real Women Have Curves , about an 18-year-old girl also from East Los Angeles struggling between her desire to go to college and the desire of her mother for her to stay home and work to help support the family. She wanted him to understand what she was up against at home in her own life.

He then asked her parents to watch the film to understand how they could support her dreams of education. He explained to me that my movie was life-changing for this young girl and had allowed her to have a conversation that she had never thought possible. He allowed me to see storytelling as a powerful tool for change. And from that moment on, I understood that my dreams didn’t have to be exclusive to one another—I could pursue what I wanted and also use the stories I told, and the platform I had, to impact the lives of others.

I remember in 2008, during another Hollywood writers strike, I wasn’t able to work, and it was also a presidential election year. I had always been inspired by Hillary Clinton, so I decided to campaign for her. I wanted to call out how unfairly Hillary was being treated: what people said about her, the conversations that focused on her clothing or the tone of her voice instead of her long career that included improving the lives of countless children and their families.

Through campaigning, my confidence in my own advocacy grew. I became driven toward the Latino community and our engagement in democracy. I was born and raised in a matriarchal home and understand deeply how Latina mothers and women influence what happens in a household.

It is so often the women who carry so much of the responsibility to create access and opportunity. But also, it is the women who are given the least resources to achieve it.

So I became very passionate about democracy and elections, and that’s how I got proximate to the issues of environmental racism and access to education, reproductive freedom, and bodily autonomy. All these issues mattered to me and connected to me as a woman, and as a person who wants to see the true empowerment of families and communities who are often left to fend for themselves.

In January 2017, shortly after Trump got elected, I spoke at the Women’s March in Washington, DC, about protecting the rights of women and immigrants, and the importance of defending our freedoms and democracy. That election was a turning point for so many of us, and like so many others, I was spurred into greater action. Alongside my husband [actor, writer, and director Ryan Piers Williams] and our friend actor Wilmer Valderrama, we created Harness, a nonprofit organization building community among artists, activists, and culture makers collaborating to create a more just future through art, influence, and action. I feel deeply grateful and proud to be a cofounder. As I am of my other initiative, Poderistas, another nonprofit organization and platform dedicated to amplifying Latina voices and building community.

I realize now that I helped build the kind of organizations that I wish I'd had when I was a young artist looking to use my platform for change. For so long I was trying to figure out how to benefit the issues I cared about, how to amplify the voices of marginalized communities, and how to improve the safety and lives of other women.

After a decade and a half of searching for answers through trial by fire, the best and most consistent answer I had gleaned from my experience was to build community. When the #MeToo movement exploded, I was one of many women who were gathering folks from the entertainment industry and from the front lines of social justice. We did the one thing that seemed so natural in the face of a reckoning: We started talking to each other. We built a community that became Time’s Up. Time’s Up was a moment of intersection, of blurring the lines between entertainment and social activism. And the unity was crucial to any of our voices being heard. It would’ve been very easy for interested parties to write off a movement started by mere actresses in Hollywood, or to drown out the voices of 700 women farmworkers. But standing together made it harder to ignore. This was about women from all walks of life standing together in unison against the imbalances of power that exploit and endanger women across all industries. This was about community as power.

I was newly pregnant during the beginning of #MeToo and Time’s Up.

Since becoming a parent to my now five-year-old-son and three-year-old daughter, I’ve experienced a whole new category of imbalance in the workplace. I’ve seen the inequalities that put the burden of parenting on women, the disproportionate cost of what that means to mothers and their careers, and the cultural expectations placed on women that we internalize and hold ourselves to.

I’m on multiple text chains with working moms stressing out about dilemmas like whether to go on a work trip or miss their kids’ doctor appointment. Women at every level of their careers are having to make choices that cost us money, affect our mental health, our physical health, and quality of life. Our culture and our policies must change.

In 2020 I learned that the Directors Guild of America, one of the best health care providers available in my industry, still didn’t offer parental paid leave. Documentary filmmaker Jessica Dimmock wrote an open letter campaigning the DGA to adopt a parental leave policy that did not penalize women for getting pregnant. The DGA has since added a parental paid leave policy to their latest contract. I was so proud to be a small part of rallying women to sign on. I know without a doubt that the community that has been built among women in Hollywood in the last few years has allowed for quick and effective organizing toward change. Community is power.

We have a presidential election in the US next year. But the reality is every year is an election year, and every local and state election matters. We’ve seen how local elected officials in the US and in other parts of the world have authored and passed laws harmful to vulnerable communities like trans youth, people trying to access their reproductive rights, indigenous populations, and asylum seekers.

I deeply believe that protecting democracy and human rights depends on building communities where women, and our most vulnerable populations, are safe to use their voices and to lead.

My deepest hope is that the future for women looks like genuine safety: physically, emotionally, and mentally. My commitment is to keep fighting and showing up in beloved community where women find strength and courage in each other, to continue the work toward the change that we all deserve.

Photographed by Josefina Santos Styling: Anatolli Smith Set design: WayOut Studios Makeup: Brigitte Reiss-Andersen Hair: Orlando Pita Manicure: Aja Walton Production: Leah Mara Studio: Go Studios Penthouse

By Charlie Teather

By Meg Walters

By Laura Capon

Student essays will be featured during the ‘Levy County Flag Day Ceremony’

BRONSON, Fla. (WCJB) - Schools out, but Levy County leaders are ready to feature some essays during a Flag Day ceremony.

They’re challenging students to write an essay in 100 words or less under the prompt “What the American Flag means to me.”

The winning submission will be read aloud at the ‘Levy County Flag Day Ceremony’ on June. 14.

Once the essay is written, you can send it over to this email address: [email protected]

The deadline to submit essays is by 5 p.m. Tuesday, June. 11.

TRENDING: Application for Lake City Fourth of July participants sent out

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