Tradition

Feminist existentialism

Overview

Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights for women. Existentialism is a philosophical and cultural movement which holds that the starting point of philosophical thinking must be the individual and the experiences of the individual, that moral thinking and scientific thinking together are not sufficient for understanding all of human existence, and, therefore, that a further set of categories, governed by the norm of authenticity, is necessary to understand human existence. (Authenticity, in the context of existentialism, is to recognize the responsibility we have for our existence.) This philosophy analyzes relationships between the individual and things, or other human beings, and how they limit or condition choice.

Existentialist feminists emphasize concepts such as freedom, interpersonal relationships, and the experience of living as a human body. They value the capacity for radical change, but recognize that factors such as self-deception and the anxiety caused by the possibility of change can limit it. Many are dedicated to exposing and undermining socially imposed gender roles and cultural constructs limiting women's self-determination, and criticize post-structuralist feminists who deny the intrinsic freedom of individual women. A woman who makes considered choices regarding her way of life and suffers the anxiety associated with that freedom, isolation, or nonconformity, yet remains free, demonstrates the tenets of existentialism. The novels of Kate Chopin, Doris Lessing, Joan Didion, Margaret Atwood, and Margaret Drabble include such existential heroines.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.

The belief that thought and its communication are now free simply because legal restrictions which once obtained have been done away with is absurd. Its currency perpetuates the infantile state of social knowledge.
John Dewey, The public and its problems
States what Feminist existentialism is.
Read the chapter · Open in the reader
This difficulty at once forces us from a logic of experience as it is concretely experienced into a metaphysic of a purely hypothetical experience. Constitutive thought precedes _our_ conscious thought-operations; hence it must be the working of some absolute universal thought which, unconsciously to our reflection, builds up an organized world. But this recourse only deepens the difficulty.
John Dewey, Studies in Logical Theory
States what Feminist existentialism is.
Read the chapter · Open in the reader
The passion of woman in its unconditional renunciation of its own rights presupposes in fact that there does _not_ exist on the other side an equal _pathos_, an equal desire for renunciation: for if both renounced themselves out of love, there would result—well, I don't know what, perhaps a _horror vacui_? Woman wants to be taken and accepted as a possession, she wishes to be merged in the conceptions of…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom
Close in meaning to Feminist existentialism; the term itself is not named.
Read the chapter · Open in the reader

Related ideas

Place in the tradition

Part of Existence.

Explore Feminist existentialism in the interactive graph →