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From: gcf@mydog.UUCP (Gordon Fitch)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: Is there a definition of Feminism?
Message-ID: <88833@aerospace.AERO.ORG>
Date: 17 Oct 90 21:05:06 GMT
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    (The original material, deleted here, asserted that 
    "obtaining equal rights for women" was common to all 
    definitions of feminism.)

gcf@mydog.UUCP (Gordon Fitch):
>>I don't think this is so.  Antagonists of feminism, whose
>>writings are probably available at this very moment in other
>>newsgroups, often assert that feminism is nothing but a program 
>>to get special privileges for women.  

wilber@usc.edu (John Wilber):
>Certainly this IS the case with many feminist organizations and some
>individual feminists.  It sounds like you don't agree.

To say that someone is pressing for "special privileges" is
simply putting them down, or at least taking up an adversarial
bargaining position.  It's not some kind of absolute truth, and
in fact it _can't_ be an absolute truth.  But I already bored
everyone analyzing this; so much so, that, as we can see, some
people didn't read the articles.

>>But even if it were so, so what?  Are least-common-denominator or
>>most-common-intersection definitions necessarily the best ones?
>>Or is that not what is being implied?
>
>No, I think the idea was to discover the fundamental idea behind feminism.
>Clearly, "eco-feminism" is is not fundamentally feminist, or at least 
>the views of eco-feminists are not characteristic of the majority 
>of feminists (like me for example!).

It's not clear to me that cultural or radical feminism, of which
eco-feminism is a part, isn't just as "fundamental" as equal-
rights feminism, if not moreso.  And I don't think it's clear
that "the views of the eco-feminists are not characteristic of
the majority of feminists," unless, of course, you define
_feminist_ in such a way as to exclude eco-feminists, and, I
suppose, anyone who is concerned enough about the destruction of
the environment to be political about it.

[We need to define what we mean by fundamental in order to address this.  I
think people may be talking at cross-purposes.                 - MHN]

I don't think that would leave you with a whole lot of people,
but they'd be safe from the point of view of preserving the
the current political and economic arrangements, which I guess is
the general idea.
--
Gordon Fitch  |  uunet!hombre!mydog!gcf