What does it actually mean to be a woman?

In 2013, Aimee Stephens was fired  from her job as a funeral director two weeks after coming out as a trans woman.

Her boss testified in court, explicitly stating that he fired her because she “was no longer going to  represent [herself] as a man.” Over the next seven years, this case of sex discrimination was debated and appealed, until the Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that firing someone for their LGBTQ identity  is indeed against the law.

The fight for trans rights is  unique to this moment in history, but in many ways, we're  still asking exactly the same questions as early feminist political thinkers: what does it mean to be a woman?

What did it mean centuries  ago, and what does it mean now?

I’m Ellie Anderson, and this is  Crash Course Political Theory.

[THEME MUSIC] Meet Lucy.

That’s what  paleoanthropologists named the fossilized remains of one of the  oldest known human ancestors.

Now, Lucy—[record scratch] Sorry, producer’s in my ear.

We only have ten minutes?

I can’t start with Lucy?

Ugh, fine.

Okay.

I guess we’ll start in the 1790s, with Mary Wollstonecraft’s bangin’ treatise.

In “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” she pushed back against what was then a pretty common idea: that women weren’t capable of abstract thought and reasoning, so it didn’t make sense to educate them.

Cool cool.

Wollstonecraft argued—using very sophisticated abstract thought and reasoning, I might add— that women could and should  receive formal education… well, at least upper-class white women.

Her arguments inspired women’s  suffragists down the road, who won voting rights in the United  States and Britain in the 1920s.

But the right to vote was just the beginning.

In the US, the feminist movement made several big strides during the civil rights era: the Equal Pay Act of 1963  made it illegal to pay men and women working the same job different salaries, and the Civil Rights Act of  1964 outlawed discrimination based on a lot of identities, including gender.

In the 70s, Title IX increased  women’s access to sports, and the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court  decision protected the right to abortion, which many people saw as  essential to women’s freedom.

Although, yeah, that last  one was overturned in 2022, so needless to say, abortion is still  a very contemporary feminist debate.

Anyway, this is all to say that   feminists addressed a lot of inequalities by tackling  particular laws and institutions.

But they also worked to expand  our thinking about gender equality by pointing to problems  in the very language we use.

Again with the abstract thought and reasoning… Like, in 1949, the French  writer Simone de Beauvoir argued in her book, “The Second Sex,” that for words like “equality,” to mean anything, we have to acknowledge that “man” and even “human” aren’t neutral terms.

Here’s another way to think about it: why do we just say basketball  when we mean men’s basketball, but we always specify women when  we talk about women’s basketball?

These words conceal a distinctly male perspective, where women are imagined as  the other, in contrast to men.

The book also includes such  mic-drop lines as, and I quote, “the most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women.” I’ve gotta put that on a T-shirt.

Two decades later, in the 1970s, another t-shirt-worthy slogan emerged: “the personal is political.” It objected to the boundaries  of the private vs. public sphere that so much of our modern politics is based on.

German philosopher Jürgen Habermas described the public sphere as a place where individuals get together to exchange ideas,  and it’s open to everyone.

The private sphere is a smaller  space, like a person’s home, and you need permission to enter it.

The slogan “the personal is  political” was another way of saying that things that feel like personal  problems for a lot of women, like doing an unequal share  of the household labor, are actually problems we  should all be thinking about.

Let’s take a look at the numbers, shall we?

According to Oxfam, if women  had been paid minimum wage for all the unpaid labor they did in 2019, they would’ve made ten point  eight trillion dollars.

Look at all those zeroes!!!

OK, where were we?

If you saw the Barbie movie, you know  that patriarchy isn’t about horses.

But it wasn’t until the 1980s that  political thinkers like Carole Pateman were getting us to think about  patriarchy in the context of politics.

Wollstonecraft had previously identified a sort of similar concept, a quote “tyranny of man,” which described how men held power over women and stood in the way of their freedom.

But “patriarchy” did something a bit broader.

It described a whole range of beliefs  and values that oppress women, ones that are kind of hidden and  baked right into our systems.

Like, in 248 years, we haven’t  elected a woman president, despite having no law against it.

Clearly, we’re influenced not  only by concrete legal structures, but also embedded values and biases.

And patriarchal attitudes can show up  in our policies in all kinds of ways, from the failure of police  departments to prosecute rape crimes to the fact that women get shamed  for breastfeeding in public.

Never a good look, shamers.

Shifting the focus from the  tyranny of man to patriarchy made clear that the root of women’s oppression ran deeper than just individual men in power.

And it also made room for the fact that women can and do adopt patriarchal beliefs.

So yeah, not all women are feminists.

And, in not-so-breaking news, women don’t all experience the world in the same way.

Feminist philosopher Kimberlé  Crenshaw spoke to this in 1989 when she described the ways that gender doesn’t just operate in isolation.

She pointed out that society’s  perception of race, class, and gender work together  to influence women’s lives.

She called this intersectionality.

Which brings me back to the story I started with, of the trans woman Aimee Stephens.

As feminist political theory continues to evolve, questions of what feminism stands for— and who it speaks for—are still up for debate.

One of the biggest debates within feminism today has to do with the idea of essentialism.

A gender essentialist would argue that there’s some set of properties — maybe biological, maybe metaphysical — that we can point to as the defining features of being a man or a woman, and those things can’t be changed.

But it gets really messy  here, because it’s not easy to identify or agree on what those features are.

Am I a woman because I have a uterus?

Because I grew up playing with Polly  Pockets, and I wear yoga pants?

Philosopher and gender  studies scholar Judith Butler offers another way of thinking about this.

They argue that gender isn’t something we are, but something we do.

Certain behaviors like how a person walks or sits, or the way they dress or style their hair— Butler says this is all a  version of performativity.

Not performance like playing dress-up, or when I played the title role in the esteemed middle school production of Cinderella.

A stellar performance, by the way Rather, Butler’s saying that we make our gender through our words and our embodied  ways of being in the world.

In that sense, it’s not only trans people who perform gender.

It’s all of us.

But a vocal minority of feminists called Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists, or TERFs, argue that this perspective threatens all of the progress we just walked through.

In the words of one such activist group, “If, as a matter of law, anyone can be a woman, then no one is a woman, and sex-based protections in the law have no meaning whatsoever.” These are some of the loudest voices behind laws that ban transgender people  from using public bathrooms or playing on athletic teams that  align with their gender identity.

And, in a big way, I found  that questions like this — who feminism is for, who it should protect, and at whose expense — have always been part of the story.

Just as Simone de Beauvoir pointed out that male political thinkers weren’t exactly inclusive with their definitions of “mankind,” feminist definitions have  always contained assumptions that include some and exclude others.

For example, Black feminist  thinkers like bell hooks have argued that all too often, feminism has claimed to speak  for all women but really only spoken for middle-and-upper  class white women.

We can see evidence of this from the earliest days of the feminist movement— like when Alice Paul, a suffragist leader, sent Black women to the back of marches.

During the civil rights  movement, many Black feminists felt so unheard by white leadership that they left and started  new movements, like womanism, a form of feminism focused on the experiences and concerns of Black women.

So, defining, redefining, and  expanding the definition of woman, is both as old as feminism itself and as contemporary as this very moment.

Like a lot of women today, I’m  left with a burning question: Where does feminism go from here?

Reformists say there’s more work to be done at the legal and institutional level.

They’re focused on policy,  legislation, and representation.

Whereas radical feminists are  focused on dismantling patriarchy.

They argue true feminism can’t be achieved unless we address the root of the problem through constant deconstruction  and reconstruction of our cultures.

Though, exactly how to go about  this isn’t so straightforward.

Among radical feminists, there  are those like María Lugones, who represent decolonial feminism.

She argued that our modern ideas of gender emerged during and as a  result of European colonialism — pointing to Indigenous communities that related to gender in more nuanced ways.

And so, in order to resist the patriarchy, we must also unpack the legacy of colonialism.

And then there are the democratic feminists, who argue that in order to keep  the democratic dream alive, we must constantly re-invent what we mean by freedom, gender, and feminism.

By all of it.

In their view, this process  of redefinition is part of the always-incomplete project of politics.

So what’s my takeaway?

Feminist political theory is so  much more than just one thing.

It’s the very basic notion that  women can… think complex thoughts.

But it’s also the ongoing questions  of how gender, race, and class show up and intersect in women’s everyday lives.

And the future of feminism is  being defined now as much as ever.

So, stay tuned.

Next time, we’ll talk about another  slogan: “think local, act global.” What does that really mean, and is it a good idea?