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Course info.

  • Prof. Elizabeth A. Wood

Departments

  • Women's and Gender Studies
  • Political Science
  • Linguistics and Philosophy

As Taught In

  • Gender Studies
  • Women's Studies

Learning Resource Types

Feminist thought, oral presentation, guidelines for oral presentations.

  • You will each have five (5) minutes to present with five more minutes for discussion with others.     
  • Give us a tune we can walk away whistling. What is the main point you want us to remember? 
  • Tell us what you’re going to tell us (Forecast), give us your evidence and argumentation, and tell us again what you told us. 
  • Think about your audience. Try to find a hook that will be of interest to everyone. Don’t get too technical, but also don’t assume we are completely ignorant. In other words, try not to pitch your talk too high or too low.
  • Make us want to read your paper. It’s okay not to cover everything. Give us a few highlights.
  • Consider how we can help you. After everyone has asked you questions or made suggestions, think if there is anything you especially want feedback on.
  • Practice in advance.  It is hard distilling work down to 5 minutes. If you practice, you’ll realize that you have to focus on what is most important.
  • PowerPoint slides are completely optional. If they help you, feel free to use up to five slides. Don’t make them too text-heavy, though. They should be easy to grasp.
  • Consider playing with your audience. Can you use the chat function to get us involved? Can you make a joke that is relevant to your topic? 
  • There is only one mandatory requirement: Come with your whole self. Smile. You can smile with just your eyes if you are not someone who likes to smile or if your topic is itself sad. But take time to connect with us.   Remember that we are your support team. We want to hear your paper!

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  • Feminist persuasive speech topics

108 feminist persuasive speech topics

- the top current women's rights & feminist issues.

By:  Susan Dugdale  

There are 108 persuasive speech topics here covering many current feminist issues. For example:

  • that copy-cat fast fashion reinforces the relentless consumer cycle and the poverty trap,
  • that the advertising industry deliberately manufactures and supports body image insecurities to serve its own ends,
  • that gendered language reinforces the patriarchal structure of society...

They're provocative and challenging topics raising issues that I like to think should be of concern to us all! 

Use the quick links to find a topic you want to explore

  • 25 feminist persuasive speech topics about beauty and fashion
  • 16 the media and feminism topics
  • 8 the role of language and feminism speech ideas

8 feminist speech ideas about culture and arts

9 topics on education and gendered expectations, 27 feminist topics about society & social inequality, 8 business & work related feminist speech topics.

  • Resources for preparing persuasive speeches
  • References for feminism

oral presentation feminism

What is 'feminism'?

Feminism is defined as belief in and advocacy of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes, expressed especially through organized activity on behalf of women's rights and interests.

(See: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/feminism )

Return to Top

25 feminist speech topics about beauty & fashion

  • that from puberty onward a woman is targeted by cosmetic companies
  • that the shape of woman’s body is valued over its health
  • that physical beauty in a woman is conferred by popular beliefs
  • that striving for what is regarded as the epitome of female physical perfection destroys women
  • that physical perfection is a myth
  • that compassion and collaboration is needed between women (and men) rather than competition and comparison
  • that beauty, fashion and feminism can co-exist
  • that clothing reflects social position or class
  • that the fashionable clothing of any era reflects its dominate cultural beliefs
  • that a modern feminist does not need to ban either the bra or the razor
  •  that prescriptive beauty norms (PBNs) reinforce sexism, racism, colorism, classism, ableism, ageism, and gender norms
  • that western feminine beauty standards dominate globally
  • that there is no legitimate historical or biological justification for the ‘white’ beauty myth
  • that modern beauty standards were used as “political weapons" against women’s advancement (see Naomi Wolfe - The Beauty Myth )
  • that the beauty industry cynically and callously exploits women through “self-empowerment” campaigns – eg L'Oreal's  “Because you're worth it”
  • that beauty shaming of any sort is shameful
  • that health and beauty need to work together for the empowerment of women
  • that beauty and fashion role models need to be independent of major brands
  • that fashion and cosmetic industries have a moral responsibility to use the immense power they have in shaping people’s lives for their betterment
  • that the unfair balance of power between the consumers of fashionable clothing and those who make it is a feminist issue
  • that copy-cat fast fashion reinforces the relentless consumer cycle and the poverty trap
  • that genuinely sustainable fashion is only responsible way forward
  • that clothing/fashion can make a feminist statement. For example: the 1850s “freedom” or “bloomer” dress named after women’s rights and temperance advocate Amelia Bloomer , the wearing of trousers, shorts, or mini skirts by women, or skirts and dresses by men
  • that boss dressing for women is unnecessary and toxic
  • that establishing superiority through wearing elitist fashion is an age old ploy

16 the media and feminism speech topics

  • that feminism in mainstream media is often misrepresented through lack of understanding
  • that some media deliberately encourages a narrow polarizing definition of feminism to whip up interest and drama for its own sake
  • that mainstream media plays a significant role in keeping women marginalized
  • that social media has created an independent level playing field for feminists globally
  • that the #metoo movement reaffirmed the need for community and solidarity amongst feminists
  • that the advertising industry deliberately manufactures and supports ongoing body image insecurities to serve its own ends
  • that the advertising industry decides and deifies what physical perfection looks like
  • that the ideal cover girl body/face is a myth
  • that eating disorders and negative body image problems are increased by the unrealistic beauty standards set by mainstream media
  • that women get media coverage for doing newsworthy things and being beautiful. Men get media coverage for doing newsworthy things.
  • that social media gives traditionally private issues a platform for discussion and change: abortion, domestic abuse, pay equity
  • that print media (broadsheets, magazines, newspapers...) have played and continue to play a vital role in feminist education
  • that ‘the women’s hour’ and similar radio programs or podcasts have been and are an important part in highlighting feminist issues
  • that ‘feminist wokeness’ has been hijacked by popular media
  • that social media reinforces prejudices rather than challenges them because the smart use of analytics means we mainly see posts aligned with our viewpoints
  • that social media has enabled and ‘normalized’ the spread of pornography: the use of bodies as a commodity to be traded

8 the role language and feminism speech ideas

  • that frequently repeated platitudes (eg. girls will be girls and boys will be boys) are stereotypical straitjackets stifling change
  • that the derogatory words for females and female genitalia frequently used to vent anger or frustration demonstrate the worth and value placed on women
  • that feminism is neither male nor female
  • that gendered language reinforces the patriarchal structure of society
  • that sexist language needs to be called out and changed
  • that gendered language limits women’s opportunities
  • that gendered languages (French, Spanish, Arabic, Hindi...) need to become more inclusive
  • that the real enemy of feminism is language
  • that limitations in any arena (work, sports, arts) placed on woman because they are women need challenging
  • that male bias in the organizations awarding major awards and grants needs to change
  • that the ideal woman in art is a figment of a male imagination
  • that historically art has objectified women
  • that heroic figures should be celebrated and honored for their deeds – not for what they look like or their gender
  • that strong feisty female characters in literature can inspire change eg. Elizabeth Bennet from Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre from Charlotte Bronte’s novel of the same name, and Offred from Margaret Atwood’s The Hand Maiden’s Tale.
  • that the role of feminist art in any field: literature, film, theatre, dance, sculpture..., is to transform and challenge stereotypes. Examples of feminist artists: Judy Chicago, Miriam Shapiro, Barbara Kruger (More: feminist art ) 
  • that feminist musicians have used their influence as agents of change, and to inspire: Beyonce, Queen Latifah, Pussy Riot, Lorde, Aretha Franklin, Carole King, Nina Simone
  • that there no subjects more suitable for boys than girls, or subjects more suitable for girls than boys
  • that toys, clothing, and colors should be gender neutral
  • that student achievement and behavioral expectations should be gender free
  • that feminism should be actively modelled in the classroom
  • that eligibility for educational institutions should be merit based  
  • that boys should not ‘punished’ or blamed for our patriarchal history
  • that gendered performance is actively supported and encouraged by some educational philosophies and schools in order to maintain the status quo
  • that the belief that ‘male’ and ‘female’ intelligence are different and that male intelligence is superior is false
  • that education is vital for the advancement of black feminism
  • that rigidly adhered to gendered workplace and domestic roles sustain and support inequalities
  • that domestic violence is typically a male gendered crime
  • that patriarchal attitudes toward women make sexual harassment and rape inevitable
  • that a safe legal abortion is a fundamental right for every person who wants one
  • that humiliation and control either by fear and threat of rape, or rape itself, is an act toxic entitlement
  • that a person is never ever ‘asking for it’: to be sexually harassed, or to be raped
  • that safe methods of birth control should be freely available to whomever wants them
  • that full sexual and reproductive health and rights for all people is an essential precondition to achieving gender equality
  • that men should not have control over woman's sexual and reproductive decision-making
  • that the increase in sperm donation is a feminist victory
  • that a person can be a domestic goddess and a feminist
  • that there is a positive difference between assertive and aggressive feminism
  • that the shock tactics of feminist anarchists is justified
  • that powerful feminist role models open the way for others to follow
  • that intersectional feminism is essential to fully understand the deep ingrained inequalities of those experiencing overlapping forms of oppression
  • that a feminist’s belief and practices are shaped by the country they live in, its dominant religious and cultural practices
  • that female circumcision is an example of women’s oppression disguised as a cultural tradition
  • that honor crimes are never justifiable
  • that period poverty and stigma is a global feminist issue
  • that we need to accept that some women want to remain protected by patriarchal practices and beliefs
  • that environmental issues are feminist issues
  • that everybody benefits from feminism
  • that feminism works towards equality, not female superiority
  • that anti-feminist myths (that feminists are angry women who blame men for their problems, that feminists are anti marriage, that feminists have no sense of humor, that feminists are not ‘natural’ mothers, that feminists are anti religion, that feminists are actually all lesbians ...) are desperate attempts to maintain the patriarchal status quo
  • that toxic femininity is a by-product of fear and insecurity eg. The need to ridicule another woman in order to impress a man, shaming a man for not being ‘manly’, raging against a women for being seen to be powerful, competent and successful in a leadership position ...
  • that blaming the patriarchy is far too simple
  • that one can hold religious beliefs and be feminist
  • that gendered jobs and job titles belong in the past
  • that pay scales should be based on merit, not gender
  • that adequate maternity and child care plus parental leave provisions should be mandatory
  • that flexible working hours benefits both the business and its employees
  • that token feminism is not enough
  • that corporate feminism is for wealthy white women
  • that feminism and capitalism are in conflict
  • that women in power owe it to other women to work for their empowerment

Useful resources

The first three resources below provide an excellent starting point to get a broad overview of feminism: its history, development and current issues.

I've included the fourth link because I'm a New Zealander, and proud of what its women's suffrage movement achieved: the vote for women in 1893.  

  • What’s the definition of feminism? 12 TED talks that explain it to you
  • An overview of feminist philosophy – Stanford University, USA
  • Britannica: an excellent over of the history and development of feminism
  • The symbolism of a white camellia and the Suffrage Movement in New Zealand

How to choose a good persuasive speech topic and preparing a great speech

For a more in-depth discussion about choosing a good persuasive topic, and crafting a persuasive speech please see:

  • persuasive speech ideas and read all the notes under the heading “What make a speech topic good?"
  • writing a persuasive speech . You’ll find notes covering:
  • setting a speech goal,
  • audience analysis,
  • evidence and empathy (the need for proof or evidence to back what you’re saying as well as showing you understand, or empathize with, the positions of those for and against your proposal),
  • balance and obstacles (to address points against your proposal, the obstacles, in a fair and balanced way),
  • varying structural patterns (ways to organize you material) and more. And click this link for hundreds more persuasive speech topic suggestions . ☺

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oral presentation feminism

10 Famous Speeches To Ignite The Feminist Fire Within You

Be inspired by the words of these powerful women

preview for Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Received A Handwritten letter From Dior's Maria Grazia Chiuri

Throughout history, so many of the people to make us stop and take note with their famous speeches have been women. From the women's suffrage movement in the 1800s and feminism's second wave in the 1970s to the global Women's March in 2017, the words and actions of famous figures such as Emmeline Pankhurst, Virginia Woolf, Maya Angelou and Gloria Steinhem (to name just a few) have transformed society.

It might explain then why the theme of International Women's Day 2021 was #ChooseToChallenge. We can learn so much from the powerful actions and inspiring words of the women who came before us – but, also, there's still so much work we have to do. It's our duty to carry on their work, challenging and changing and speaking up for equality .

And so here, we've rounded up the most famous speeches from a new era of women, who are continuing the task of transforming opinions, breaking boundaries and inspiring us all to keep choosing to challenge. Listen, learn and take note.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Will Not Accept Your Apology

After Florida Representative Ted Yoho reportedly called Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez 'a f*cking b*tch' on the steps of the Capitol in July 2020, he tried to excuse his behaviour by saying he has a wife and daughters. In response, AOC (as she's commonly referred to) took to the House floor with what has since been hailed 'the most important feminist speech of a generation' – fluently and passionately detailing why his 'apology' was, simply, not good enough.

Quotes of note:

'I am someone's daughter too. My father, thankfully, is not alive to see how Mr Yoho treated his daughter. My mother got to see Mr. Yoho's disrespect on the floor of this House towards me on television, and I am here because I have to show my parents that I am their daughter and that they did not raise me to accept abuse from men.

'What I believe is that having a daughter does not make a man decent. Having a wife does not make a decent man. Treating people with dignity and respect makes a decent man, and when a decent man messes up, as we all are bound to do, he tries his best and does apologise.'

Natalie Portman On Dismantling The Patriarchy

From her smart quip of 'here are all the male nominees' at the 2018 Golden Globes , calling out the women directors snubbed for the category, to her rousing 'f*ck up and thrive, sisters' speech at the ELLE Women In Hollywood event in 2019, Portman consistently calls out inequality in the film industry. And the actor's address at Variety's Women of Power event in 2019 was no different. In what is now referred to as 'Natalie Portman's Step-by-Step Guide to Toppling the Patriarchy', she made a strong case for all the ways in which we, as individuals, can make a difference.

'Be embarrassed if everyone in your workplace looks like you. Pay attention to physical ability, age, race, sexual orientation, gender identity and make sure you've got all kinds of experiences represented.

'Stop the rhetoric that a woman is crazy or difficult. If a man says a woman is crazy or difficult, ask him: What bad thing did you do to her? It's code that he is trying to discredit her reputation. Make efforts to hire people who've had their reputations smeared in retaliation.'

Michelle Obama On The Inequality Of Failure

Let's be honest: there are so many Michelle Obama speeches to choose from – the former FLOTUS is renowned for her passion for equality and her ability to uplift others with her words. But in a poignant keynote conversation with Tracee Ellis Ross at the United State of Women Summit in 2018, Obama spoke openly about the often-overlooked inequality of failure, and the disparities in repercussions for men and women.

Quote of note:

'I wish that girls could fail as bad as men do and be OK. Because let me tell you, watching men fail up, it is frustrating. It's frustrating to see a lot of men blow it and win. And we hold ourselves to these crazy, crazy standards.

'Start with what you can control. You start there. Because thinking about changing your workplace and changing the way the world thinks – that's big; that's daunting. And then you shrink from that. So start with what you can control. And that's you, first. And those questions start within. First, we must ask ourselves, "Are we using our voices? And when are we not? When are we playing it safe?" And at least be cognisant of that and understand, "These are the times that I shrunk away from doing more than I could, and let me think about why that was."'

Gina Martin On Misogyny, The Power Of Anger And How She Changed The Law

As she tells us in this refreshing TEDx talk from 2020, Gina Martin is not the kind of woman you'd expect to change the law. And yet, she did. The activist discusses the moment in 2017 when a stranger took a picture of her crotch at a festival without her consent – and how, after years of relentless campaigning, she succeeded in making upskirting a criminal offence. Martin makes it clear that anyone can make a change, no matter who they are or where they're from. And that's a lesson we all need to hear.

'Anger is a very normal response to having your human rights compromised. That's important to say. We have to stop using it to delegitimise people, with "angry feminist" or "angry Black woman" – all of these stereotypes. People are allowed to be angry about this stuff. And we have to hold space for them there. We have to realise it's not about us.

'Think about where you hold privilege – it might be in your job, as a parent, as a teacher, or just in the colour of your skin – and start this work now. Stop laughing at the jokes, buy the book, go to the event, diversify your social feeds, ask the questions. Sympathy is soothing, but it doesn't go far enough. Action does. And listen, you'll get things wrong. We all do, I've had some clangers. But it's not about perfection, it's about progress, it's about doing it because it's the right thing to do. We are so done with waiting for society to "change things" for us. We literally are society.'

Lady Gaga On Reclaiming Your Power

When Lady Gaga accepted her ELLE Women In Hollywood award in 2018, her career appeared to be at an all-time high, with Oscar buzz for her role in A Star Is Born , and her song 'Shallow' at number one in the US. But, as she explained, what people perceive a woman, especially in Hollywood, isn't always the reality.

Gaga may have made this moving speech several years ago, but it feels particularly poignant to revisit it during a period in which violence towards women is a more devastating and pressing topic than ever. In it, Gaga recounts how being sexually assaulted caused her to 'shut down' and 'hide'. She explores the debilitating effect of shame on her mental health and also the power of kindness and support in overcoming it.

Importantly, Gaga explains that she eventually found her power within herself – and how, once she took it back, she was able to use it to move beyond the prescribed expectations society puts upon women.

'What does it really mean to be a woman in Hollywood? We are not just objects to entertain the world. We are not simply images to bring smiles or grimaces to people's faces. We are not members of a giant beauty pageant meant to be pit against one another for the pleasure of the public. We women in Hollywood, we are voices. We have deep thoughts and ideas and beliefs and values about the world and we have the power to speak and be heard and fight back when we are silenced.'

'I decided today I wanted to take the power back. Today I wear the pants... I had a revelation that I had to be empowered to be myself today more than ever. To resist the standards of Hollywood, whatever that means. To resist the standards of dressing to impress. To use what really matters: my voice.'

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie On Redefining Feminism

You may not have knowingly heard to author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's speech before, but there's a good chance you will have listened to her words without realising – Beyoncé actually weaved a key part of Adichie's feminist manifesto into her track '***Flawless'. In her speech, Adichie reflects on the gender disparities still evident our society, with a focus on those in her native Africa, and dissects the meaning of 'feminist' – both the connotations and myths it carries – and how she came to define the term for herself.

'We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller, we say to girls, "You can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful, otherwise you would threaten the man." ...But what if we question the premise itself? Why should a woman's success be a threat to a man?

'I want to be respected in all of my femaleness because I deserve to be. Gender is not an easy conversation to have. For both men and women, to bring up gender is sometimes to encounter almost immediate resistance... Some of the men here might be thinking, "OK, all of this is interesting, but I don't think like that." And that is part of the problem – that many men do not actively think about gender or notice gender is part of the problem.'

Kamala Harris On Setting A New Standard For The Next Generation

On November 7 2020, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris delivered her first national address after Joe Biden 's position as President was secured. As the first woman to hold the position and the first person of colour to do so, Harris' presence alone was enough to break boundaries. But then came her words. In the speech, she reflected on triumph of democracy and credited the work of the women who came before us, plus that of 'a new generation of women in... who cast their ballots and continued the fight for their fundamental right to vote and be heard'.

'While I may be the first woman in this office, I will not be the last, because every little girl watching tonight sees that this is a country of possibilities. And to the children of our country, regardless of your gender, our country has sent you a clear message: Dream with ambition, lead with conviction, and see yourselves in a way that others may not, simply because they've never seen it before, but know that we will applaud you every step of the way.'

Amanda Gorman On Finding Your Voice

If you didn't know Amanda Gorman before this year, you'll definitely know her now, thanks to her reading at US President Joe Biden's swearing-in ceremony. The United States' first-ever youth poet laureate's powerful, rhythmic poem 'The Hill We Climb' made the world stop and listen, highlighting the many inequalities in our society and reminding us that we need to work together to overcome them.

While 2021 was the year that catapulted Gorman into the spotlight, it wasn't the first time she'd spoken out about the world around her. In her 2018 TED Talk, she discusses the power of speech, learning to find her voice and how 'poetry is actually at the centre of our most political questions about what it means to be a democracy'.

'I had a moment of realisation, where I thought, "If I choose not to speak out of fear, then there's no one that my silence is standing for."'

'When someone asks me to write a poem that's not political, what they're really asking me is to not ask charged and challenging questions in my poetic work. And that does not work, because poetry is always at the pulse of the most dangerous and most daring questions that a nation or a world might face.'

'If I choose, not out of fear, but out of courage, to speak, then there's something unique that my words can become... It might feel like every story has been told before, but the truth is, no one's ever told my story in the way I would tell it.'

Frances McDormand Demands Inclusion In Hollywood

It's one thing to make a great acceptance speech at the Oscars. But to share that honour with your fellow nominees and use it as a platform to highlight where your industry needs to do better? That's a whole other story, and one told by McDormand in a speech that got everybody on their feet as she accepted the Oscar for Best Actress at the 2018 Academy Awards.

'I want to get some perspective. If I may be so honoured to have all the female nominees in every category stand with me in this room tonight, the actors... the filmmakers, the producers, the directors, the writers, the cinematographers, the composers, the songwriters, the designers... We all have stories to tell and projects we need financed. Don't talk to us about it at the parties tonight. Invite us into your office in a couple days, or you can come to ours, whatever suits you best, and we'll tell you all about them. I have two words to leave with you tonight, ladies and gentlemen: "inclusion rider".'

Meghan Markle On Realising The Magnitude Of Individual Action

Long before she made headlines as the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle had already made the world take notice. At the UN Women Conference back in 2015, she spoke about 'accidentally' becoming a female advocate when at just 11 years old, when she convinced a dish soap company to change their sexist tagline from 'Women all over America are fighting greasy pots and pans' to 'People all over America…' instead. Here, she discusses the power of individual action, and why we need to remind women that 'their involvement matters'.

'It is just imperative: women need a seat at the table, they need an invitation to be seated there, and in some cases, where this is not available, well then, you know what, they need to create their own table. We need a global understanding that we cannot implement change effectively without women's political participation.

'It is said that girls with dreams become women with vision. May we empower each other to carry out such vision – because it isn't enough to simply talk about equality. One must believe in it. And it isn't enough to simply believe in it. One must work at it. Let us work at it. Together. Starting now.

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277 Feminism Topics & Women’s Rights Essay Topics

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  • Icon Calendar 18 May 2024
  • Icon Page 2272 words
  • Icon Clock 11 min read

Feminism topics encompass a comprehensive range of themes centered on advocating for gender equality. These themes critically address the social, political, and economic injustices primarily faced by females, aiming to dismantle patriarchal norms. Feminism topics may span from intersectional feminism, which underscores the diverse experiences of women across various intersections of race, class, and sexuality, to reproductive rights that advocate for women’s bodily autonomy and healthcare accessibility. They also involve the examination of workplace discrimination through concepts, such as the gender wage gap and the glass ceiling. Violence against women, including work and domestic abuse, sexual assault, and harassment, is a hot aspect, providing many discussions. In turn, one may explore the representation of women in media, politics, and STEM fields. Explorations of gender roles, gender identity, and the significance of male feminism are integral parts of these discussions. As society continues to evolve, feminism topics persistently adapt to confront and address emerging forms of gender inequality.

Best Feminism & Women’s Rights Topics

  • Achievements of Women in Politics: A Global Perspective
  • Emphasizing Gender Equality in the 21st-Century Workplace
  • Evolving Representation of Women in Media
  • Fight for Women’s Voting Rights: The Historical Analysis
  • Intersectionality: Examining its Role in Feminism
  • Unpacking Feminism in Third-World Countries
  • Dissecting Misogyny in Classical Literature
  • Influence of Religion on Women’s Rights Worldwide
  • Unveiling Bias in STEM Fields: Female Experiences
  • Gender Pay Gap: Global Comparisons and Solutions
  • Probing the Historical Evolution of Feminism
  • Reshaping Beauty Standards Through Feminist Discourse
  • Importance of Reproductive Rights in Women’s Health
  • Exploring Women’s Role in Environmental Activism
  • Glass Ceiling Phenomenon: Women in Corporate Leadership
  • Trans Women’s Struggles in Feminist Movements
  • Empowering Girls: The Role of Education
  • Intersection of Race, Class, and Feminism
  • Effects of Feminism on Modern Art
  • Impacts of Social Media on Women’s Rights Movements
  • Deconstructing Patriarchy in Traditional Societies
  • Single Mothers’ Challenges: A Feminist Perspective
  • Dynamics of Feminism in Post-Colonial Societies
  • Queer Women’s Struggles for Recognition and Rights
  • Women’s Contributions to Scientific Discovery: An Underrated History
  • Cybersecurity: Ensuring Women’s Safety in the Digital Age
  • Exploring the Misrepresentation of Feminism in Popular Culture
  • Repositioning Sexuality: The Role of Feminism in Health Discourse
  • Women’s Economic Empowerment: The Impact of Microfinance
  • Investigating Sexism in Video Gaming Industry
  • Female Leadership During Global Crises: Case Studies

Feminism Topics & Women’s Rights Essay Topics

Easy Feminism & Women’s Rights Topics

  • Power of Women’s Protest: A Historical Study
  • Feminist Movements’ Role in Shaping Public Policy
  • Body Autonomy: A Key Aspect of Feminist Ideology
  • Cyber Feminism: Women’s Rights in Digital Spaces
  • Violence Against Women: International Legal Measures
  • Feminist Pedagogy: Its Impact on Education
  • Depiction of Women in Graphic Novels: A Feminist Lens
  • Comparing Western and Eastern Feminist Movements
  • Men’s Roles in Supporting Feminist Movements
  • Impacts of Feminism on Marriage Institutions
  • Rural Women’s Rights: Challenges and Progress
  • Understanding Feminist Waves: From First to Fourth
  • Inclusion of Women in Peace Negotiation Processes
  • Influence of Feminism on Modern Advertising
  • Indigenous Women’s Movements and Rights
  • Reclaiming Public Spaces: Women’s Safety Concerns
  • Roles of Feminist Literature in Social Change
  • Women in Sports: Overcoming Stereotypes and Bias
  • Feminism in the Context of Refugee Rights
  • Media’s Roles in Shaping Feminist Narratives
  • Women’s Rights in Prisons: An Overlooked Issue
  • Motherhood Myths: A Feminist Examination
  • Subverting the Male Gaze in Film and Television
  • Feminist Critique of Traditional Masculinity Norms
  • Rise of Female Entrepreneurship: A Feminist View
  • Young Feminists: Shaping the Future of Women’s Rights

Interesting Feminism & Women’s Rights Topics

  • Roles of Feminism in Promoting Mental Health Awareness
  • Aging and Women’s Rights: An Overlooked Dimension
  • Feminist Perspectives on Climate Change Impacts
  • Women’s Rights in Military Service: Progress and Challenges
  • Achieving Gender Parity in Academic Publishing
  • Feminist Jurisprudence: Its Impact on Legal Structures
  • Masculinity in Crisis: Understanding the Feminist Perspective
  • Fashion Industry’s Evolution through Feminist Ideals
  • Unheard Stories: Women in the Global Space Race
  • Effects of Migration on Women’s Rights and Opportunities
  • Women’s Land Rights: A Global Issue
  • Intersection of Feminism and Disability Rights
  • Portrayal of Women in Science Fiction: A Feminist Review
  • Analyzing Post-Feminism: Its Origins and Implications
  • Cyberbullying and Its Impact on Women: Measures for Protection
  • Unveiling Gender Bias in Artificial Intelligence
  • Reimagining Domestic Work Through the Lens of Feminism
  • Black Women’s Hair Politics: A Feminist Perspective
  • Feminist Ethical Considerations in Biomedical Research
  • Promoting Gender Sensitivity in Children’s Literature
  • Understanding the Phenomenon of Toxic Femininity
  • Reconsidering Women’s Rights in the Context of Climate Migration
  • Advancing Women’s Participation in Political Activism

Feminism Argumentative Essay Topics

  • Intersectionality’s Impact on Modern Feminism
  • Evolution of Feminist Thought: From First-Wave to Fourth-Wave
  • Gender Wage Gap: Myths and Realities
  • Workplace Discrimination: Tackling Unconscious Bias
  • Feminist Theory’s Influence on Contemporary Art
  • Intersection of Feminism and Environmental Activism
  • Men’s Roles in the Feminist Movement
  • Objectification in Media: A Feminist Perspective
  • Misconceptions about Feminism: Addressing Stereotypes
  • Feminism in the Classroom: The Role of Education
  • Feminist Analysis of Reproductive Rights Policies
  • Transgender Rights: An Extension of Feminism
  • Intersection of Feminism and Racial Justice
  • Body Shaming Culture: A Feminist Viewpoint
  • Feminism’s Influence on Modern Advertising
  • Patriarchy and Religion: A Feminist Critique
  • Domestic Labor: Feminist Perspectives on Unpaid Work
  • Sexism in Sports: The Need for Feminist Intervention
  • The MeToo Movement’s Influence on Modern Feminism
  • Feminism and the Fight for Equal Representation in Politics
  • Women’s Rights in the Digital Age: A Feminist Examination
  • Feminist Critique of Traditional Beauty Standards
  • Globalization and Its Effects on Women’s Rights
  • The Role of Feminism in LGBTQ+ Rights Advocacy
  • Popular Culture and Its Reflection on Feminist Values

Controversial Feminist Research Paper Topics

  • Intersectionality in Modern Feminist Movements: An Analysis
  • Representation of Women in High-Powered Political Roles
  • Cultural Appropriation Within the Feminist Movement: An Inquiry
  • The Role of Feminism in Defining Beauty Standards
  • Women’s Reproductive Rights: A Debate of Autonomy
  • Feminism and Religion: The Question of Compatibility
  • Male Allies in the Feminist Movement: An Evaluation
  • Shift in Traditional Gender Roles: Feminist Perspective
  • Impacts of Media on Perceptions of Feminism
  • Dissecting the Wage Gap: A Feminist Examination
  • Menstrual Equity: A Battle for Feminist Activists
  • Feminism in Popular Music: Power or Appropriation?
  • Climate Change: The Unseen Feminist Issue
  • Education’s Role in Shaping Feminist Beliefs
  • Power Dynamics in the Workplace: A Feminist Scrutiny
  • Cyber-Feminism: Harnessing Digital Spaces for Activism
  • Healthcare Disparities Faced by Women: An Analysis
  • Transgender Women in Feminist Discourse: An Exploration
  • Feminist Perspectives on Monogamy and Polyamory
  • Feminist Analysis of Modern Advertising Campaigns
  • Exploring Sexism in the Film Industry through a Feminist Lens
  • Debunking Myths Surrounding the Feminist Movement
  • Childcare Responsibilities and Their Feminist Implications
  • Women’s Sports: Evaluating Equity and Feminist Advocacy

Feminist Research Paper Topics in Feminism Studies

  • Evaluating Feminist Theories: From Radical to Liberal
  • Women’s Health Care: Policies and Disparities
  • Maternal Mortality: A Global Women’s Rights Issue
  • Uncovering Sexism in the Tech Industry
  • Critique of Binary Gender Roles in Children’s Toys
  • Body Positivity Movement’s Influence on Feminism
  • Relevance of Feminism in the Fight Against Human Trafficking
  • Women in Coding: Breaking Stereotypes
  • The Role of Women in Sustainable Agriculture
  • Feminism in the Cosmetics Industry: A Dual-Edged Sword
  • The Influence of Feminism on Modern Architecture
  • Bridging the Gap: Women in Higher Education Leadership
  • The Role of Feminism in Advancing LGBTQ+ Rights
  • Menstrual Equity: A Key Women’s Rights Issue
  • Women in Classical Music: Breaking Barriers
  • Analyzing Gendered Language: A Feminist Approach
  • Women’s Rights and Humanitarian Aid: The Interconnection
  • Exploring the Role of Women in Graphic Design
  • Addressing the Lack of Women in Venture Capitalism
  • Impact of Feminism on Urban Planning and Design
  • Maternal Labor in the Informal Economy: A Feminist Analysis
  • Feminism’s Influence on Modern Dance Forms
  • Exploring the Role of Women in the Renewable Energy Sector
  • Women in Esports: An Emerging Frontier
  • Child Marriage: A Grave Violation of Women’s Rights

Feminist Topics for Discussion

  • Feminist Criticism of the Fashion Modelling Industry
  • Domestic Violence: Feminist Legal Responses
  • Analyzing the Success of Women-Only Workspaces
  • Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting: A Human Rights Issue
  • Women’s Role in the Evolution of Cryptocurrency
  • Women and the Right to Water: A Feminist Perspective
  • Gender Stereotypes in Comedy: A Feminist View
  • Intersection of Animal Rights and Feminist Theory
  • Roles of Feminism in the Fight Against Child Labor
  • Representation of Women in Folklore and Mythology
  • Women’s Rights in the Gig Economy: Issues and Solutions
  • Revisiting Feminism in Post-Soviet Countries
  • Women in the Space Industry: Present Status and Future Trends
  • The Influence of Feminism on Culinary Arts
  • Unraveling the Impact of Fast Fashion on Women Workers
  • Feminist Perspectives on Genetic Engineering and Reproduction
  • Assessing the Progress of Women’s Financial Literacy
  • Sex Work and Feminism: A Controversial Discourse
  • Women in Cybernetics: An Untapped Potential
  • Uncovering the Women Behind Major Historical Events
  • The Impact of the #MeToo Movement Globally
  • Women’s Rights in the Cannabis Industry: Challenges and Progress
  • Redefining Motherhood: The Intersection of Feminism and Adoption
  • Roles of Feminist Movements in Combatting Child Abuse

Women’s Rights Essay Topics for Feminism

  • Evolution of Women’s Rights in the 20th Century
  • Roles of Women in World War II: Catalyst for Change
  • Suffrage Movement: Driving Force Behind Women’s Empowerment
  • Cultural Differences in Women’s Rights: A Comparative Study
  • Feminist Movements and Their Global Impact
  • Women’s Rights in Islamic Societies: Perceptions and Realities
  • Glass Ceiling Phenomenon: Analysis and Impacts
  • Pioneering Women in Science: Trailblazers for Equality
  • Impacts of Media Portrayal on Women’s Rights
  • Economic Autonomy for Women: Pathway to Empowerment
  • Women’s Rights in Education: Global Perspective
  • Gender Equality in Politics: Global Progress
  • Intersectionality and Women’s Rights: Race, Class, and Gender
  • Legal Milestones in Women’s Rights History
  • Inequities in Healthcare: A Women’s Rights Issue
  • Modern-Day Slavery: Women and Human Trafficking
  • Climate Change: A Unique Threat to Women’s Rights
  • Body Autonomy and Reproductive Rights: A Feminist Analysis
  • Globalization’s Effect on Women’s Rights: Opportunities and Threats
  • Gender Violence: An Erosion of Women’s Rights
  • Indigenous Women’s Rights: Struggles and Triumphs
  • Women’s Rights Activists: Unsung Heroes of History
  • Empowerment Through Sports: Women’s Struggle and Success
  • Balancing Act: Motherhood and Career in the 21st Century
  • LGBTQ+ Women: Rights and Recognition in Different Societies

Women’s Rights Research Questions

  • Evolution of Feminism: How Has the Movement Shifted Over Time?
  • The Workplace and Gender Equality: How Effective Are Current Measures?
  • Intersectionality’s Influence: How Does It Shape Women’s Rights Advocacy?
  • Reproductive Rights: What Is the Global Impact on Women’s Health?
  • Media Representation: Does It Affect Women’s Rights Perception?
  • Gender Stereotypes: How Do They Impede Women’s Empowerment?
  • Global Disparities: Why Do Women’s Rights Vary So Widely?
  • Maternal Mortality: How Does It Reflect on Women’s Healthcare Rights?
  • Education for Girls: How Does It Contribute to Gender Equality?
  • Cultural Norms: How Do They Influence Women’s Rights?
  • Leadership Roles: Are Women Adequately Represented in Positions of Power?
  • Domestic Violence Laws: Are They Sufficient to Protect Women’s Rights?
  • Roles of Technology: How Does It Impact Women’s Rights?
  • Sexual Harassment Policies: How Effective Are They in Protecting Women?
  • Pay Equity: How Can It Be Ensured for Women Globally?
  • Politics and Gender: How Does Women’s Representation Shape Policy-Making?
  • Child Marriage: How Does It Violate Girls’ Rights?
  • Climate Change: How Does It Disproportionately Affect Women?
  • Trafficking Scourge: How Can Women’s Rights Combat This Issue?
  • Female Genital Mutilation: How Does It Contradict Women’s Rights?
  • Armed Conflicts: How Do They Impact Women’s Rights?
  • Body Autonomy: How Can It Be Safeguarded for Women?
  • Women’s Suffrage: How Did It Pave the Way for Modern Women’s Rights?
  • Men’s Role: How Can They Contribute to Women’s Rights Advocacy?
  • Legal Frameworks: How Do They Support or Hinder Women’s Rights?

History of Women’s Rights Topics

  • Emergence of Feminism in the 19th Century
  • Roles of Women in the Abolitionist Movement
  • Suffragette Movements: Triumphs and Challenges
  • Eleanor Roosevelt and Her Advocacy for Women’s Rights
  • Impacts of World War II on Women’s Liberation
  • Radical Feminism in the 1960s and 1970s
  • Pioneering Women in Politics: The First Female Senators
  • Inception of the Equal Rights Amendment
  • Revolutionary Women’s Health Activism
  • Struggle for Reproductive Freedom: Roe vs. Wade
  • Birth of the Women’s Liberation Movement
  • Challenges Women Faced in the Civil Rights Movement
  • Women’s Roles in the Trade Union Movement
  • Intersectionality and Feminism: Examining the Role of Women of Color
  • How Did the Women’s Rights Movement Impact Education?
  • Sexuality, Identity, and Feminism: Stonewall Riots’ Impact
  • Influence of Religion on Women’s Rights Activism
  • Women’s Empowerment: The UN Conferences
  • Impact of Globalization on Women’s Rights
  • Women’s Movements in Non-Western Countries
  • Women in Space: The Fight for Equality in NASA
  • Achievements of Feminist Literature and Arts
  • Evolution of the Women’s Sports Movement
  • Advancement of Women’s Rights in the Digital Age
  • Cultural Shifts: The Media’s Role in Promoting Women’s Rights

Feminism Essay Topics on Women’s Issues

  • Career Challenges: The Gender Wage Gap in Contemporary Society
  • Examining Microfinance: An Empowering Tool for Women in Developing Countries
  • Pioneers of Change: The Role of Women in the Space Industry
  • Exploring Beauty Standards: An Analysis of Global Perspectives
  • Impacts of Legislation: Progress in Women’s Health Policies
  • Maternity Leave Policies: A Comparative Study of Different Countries
  • Resilience Through Struggles: The Plight of Female Refugees
  • Technology’s Influence: Addressing the Digital Gender Divide
  • Dissecting Stereotypes: Gender Roles in Children’s Media
  • Influence of Female Leaders: A Look at Political Empowerment
  • Social Media and Women: Effects on Mental Health
  • Understanding Intersectionality: The Complexity of Women’s Rights
  • Single Mothers: Balancing Parenthood and Economic Challenges
  • Gaining Ground in Sports: A Look at Female Athletes’ Struggles
  • Maternal Mortality: The Hidden Health Crisis
  • Reproductive Rights: Women’s Control Over Their Bodies
  • Feminism in Literature: Portrayal of Women in Classic Novels
  • Deconstructing Patriarchy: The Impact of Gender Inequality
  • Body Autonomy: The Battle for Abortion Rights
  • Women in STEM: Barriers and Breakthroughs
  • Female Soldiers: Their Role in Military Conflicts
  • Human Trafficking: The Disproportionate Impact on Women
  • Silent Victims: Domestic Violence and Women’s Health

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Odyssey Essay Topics & Ideas

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Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Introduction to feminism, topics: what is feminism.

  • Introduction
  • What is Feminism?  
  • Historical Context
  • Normative and Descriptive Components
  • Feminism and the Diversity of Women
  • Feminism as Anti-Sexism
  • Topics in Feminism: Overview of the Sub-Entries

Bibliography

Works cited.

  • General Bibliography [under construction]
  • Topical Bibliographies [under construction]

Other Internet Resources

Related entries, i.  introduction, ii.  what is feminism, a.  historical context, b.  normative and descriptive components.

i) (Normative) Men and women are entitled to equal rights and respect. ii) (Descriptive) Women are currently disadvantaged with respect to rights and respect, compared with men.
Feminism is grounded on the belief that women are oppressed or disadvantaged by comparison with men, and that their oppression is in some way illegitimate or unjustified. Under the umbrella of this general characterization there are, however, many interpretations of women and their oppression, so that it is a mistake to think of feminism as a single philosophical doctrine, or as implying an agreed political program. (James 2000, 576)

C.  Feminism and the Diversity of Women

Feminism, as liberation struggle, must exist apart from and as a part of the larger struggle to eradicate domination in all its forms. We must understand that patriarchal domination shares an ideological foundation with racism and other forms of group oppression, and that there is no hope that it can be eradicated while these systems remain intact. This knowledge should consistently inform the direction of feminist theory and practice. (hooks 1989, 22)
Unlike many feminist comrades, I believe women and men must share a common understanding--a basic knowledge of what feminism is--if it is ever to be a powerful mass-based political movement. In Feminist Theory: from margin to center, I suggest that defining feminism broadly as "a movement to end sexism and sexist oppression" would enable us to have a common political goal…Sharing a common goal does not imply that women and men will not have radically divergent perspectives on how that goal might be reached. (hooks 1989, 23)
…no woman is subject to any form of oppression simply because she is a woman; which forms of oppression she is subject to depend on what "kind" of woman she is. In a world in which a woman might be subject to racism, classism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, if she is not so subject it is because of her race, class, religion, sexual orientation. So it can never be the case that the treatment of a woman has only to do with her gender and nothing to do with her class or race. (Spelman 1988, 52-3)

D.  Feminism as Anti-Sexism

 i) (Descriptive claim) Women, and those who appear to be women, are subjected to wrongs and/or injustice at least in part because they are or appear to be women. ii) (Normative claim) The wrongs/injustices in question in (i) ought not to occur and should be stopped when and where they do.

III.  Topics in Feminism: Overview of the Sub-Entries

  • Alexander, M. Jacqui and Lisa Albrecht, eds.  1998. The Third Wave: Feminist Perspectives on Racism.  New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press.
  • Anderson, Elizabeth.  1999a.  “What is the Point of Equality?”  Ethics 109(2): 287-337.
  • ______.  1999b.  "Reply” Brown Electronic Article Review Service, Jamie Dreier and David Estlund, editors, World Wide Web, (http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/bears/homepage.html), Posted 12/22/99.
  • Anzaldúa, Gloria, ed. 1990. Making Face, Making Soul: Haciendo Caras.  San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.
  • Baier, Annette C.  1994.  Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  • Barrett, Michèle.  1991. The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
  • Bartky, Sandra. 1990.  “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power.” In her Femininity and Domination. New York: Routledge, 63-82.
  • Basu, Amrita. 1995. The Challenge of Local Feminisms: Women's Movements in Global Perspective.  Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
  • Baumgardner, Jennifer and Amy Richards. 2000.  Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
  • Beauvoir, Simone de. 1974 (1952).  The Second Sex. Trans. and Ed. H. M. Parshley.  New York: Vintage Books.
  • Benhabib, Seyla.  1992.  Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics.   New York: Routledge.
  • Calhoun, Cheshire. 2000.  Feminism, the Family, and the Politics of the Closet: Lesbian and Gay Displacement.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • ______.  1989.  “Responsibility and Reproach.”  Ethics 99(2): 389-406.
  • Collins, Patricia Hill.  1990.  Black Feminist Thought. Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman.
  • Cott, Nancy.  1987.  The Grounding of Modern Feminism.  New Haven: Yale University Press.
  • Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.“ Stanford Law Review , 43(6): 1241-1299.
  • Crenshaw, Kimberlé, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller and Kendall Thomas. 1995.  “Introduction.” In Critical Race Theory, ed., Kimberle Crenshaw, et al. New York: The New Press, xiii-xxxii.Davis, Angela. 1983. Women, Race and Class.  New York: Random House.
  • Crow, Barbara.  2000.  Radical Feminism: A Documentary Reader.  New York: New York University Press.
  • Delmar, Rosalind.  2001. "What is Feminism?” In Theorizing Feminism, ed., Anne C. Hermann and Abigail J. Stewart.  Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 5-28.
  • Duplessis, Rachel Blau, and Ann Snitow, eds. 1998. The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women's Liberation.  New York: Random House (Crown Publishing).
  • Dutt, M.  1998.  "Reclaiming a Human Rights Culture: Feminism of Difference and Alliance." In Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age , ed., Ella Shohat. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 225-246.
  • Echols, Alice. 1990.  Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-75.   Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
  • Engels, Friedrich.  1972 (1845).  The Origin of The Family, Private Property, and the State.   New York: International Publishers.
  • Findlen, Barbara. 2001. Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation, 2nd edition.  Seattle, WA: Seal Press.
  • Fine, Michelle and Adrienne Asch, eds. 1988. Women with Disabilities: Essays in Psychology, Culture, and Politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
  • Fraser, Nancy and Linda Nicholson.  1990.  "Social Criticism Without Philosophy: An Encounter Between Feminism and Postmodernism." In Feminism/Postmodernism, ed., Linda Nicholson. New York: Routledge.
  • Friedan, Betty.  1963. The Feminine Mystique.   New York: Norton.
  • Frye, Marilyn.  1983. The Politics of Reality.  Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press.
  • Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. 1997.  Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press.
  • Grewal, I. 1998.  "On the New Global Feminism and the Family of Nations: Dilemmas of Transnational Feminist Practice."  In Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age, ed., Ella Shohat.  Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 501-530.
  • Hampton, Jean.  1993. “Feminist Contractarianism,” in Louise M. Antony and Charlotte Witt, eds. A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity,  Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
  • Haslanger, Sally. Forthcoming. “Oppressions: Racial and Other.”  In Racism, Philosophy and Mind: Philosophical Explanations of Racism and Its Implications, ed., Michael Levine and Tamas Pataki.  Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
  • Held, Virginia. 1993. Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  • Herrman, Anne C. and Abigail J. Stewart, eds. 1994.  Theorizing Feminism: Parallel Trends in the Humanities and Social Sciences.  Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
  • Heywood, Leslie and Jennifer Drake, eds. 1997.  Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism. 
  • Hillyer, Barbara. 1993.  Feminism and Disability. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.
  • Hoagland, Sarah L.  1989. Lesbian Ethics: Toward New Values.   Palo Alto, CA: Institute for Lesbian Studies.
  • Hooks, bell. 1989. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black.  Boston: South End Press.
  • ______.  1984. Feminist Theory from Margin to Center.  Boston: South End Press.
  • ______. 1981.  Ain't I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism.   Boston: South End Press.
  • Hurtado, Aída.  1996.  The Color of Privilege: Three Blasphemies on Race and Feminism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
  • Jagger, Alison M.  1983.  Feminist Politics and Human Nature.  Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
  • James, Susan. 2000.  “Feminism in Philosophy of Mind: The Question of Personal Identity.” In The Cambridge Companion to Feminism in Philosophy, ed., Miranda Fricker and Jennifer Hornsby.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Kiss, Elizabeth. 1995.  "Feminism and Rights." Dissent 42(3): 342-347
  • Kittay, Eva Feder.  1999.  Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency. New York: Routledge.
  • Kymlicka, Will.  1989. Liberalism, Community and Culture. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
  • Mackenzie, Catriona and Natalie Stoljar, eds.  2000.  Relational Autonomy: Feminist perspectives on Autonomy, Agency and the Social Self.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • MacKinnon, Catharine.  1989.  Towards a Feminist Theory of the State.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  • ______.  1987. Feminism Unmodified.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  • Mohanty, Chandra, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, eds.  1991.  Third  World Women and the Politics of Feminism.    Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
  • Molyneux, Maxine and Nikki Craske, eds. 2001. Gender and the Politics of Rights and Democracy in Latin America. Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillan.
  • Moody-Adams, Michele. 1997.  Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture and Philosophy.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
  • Moraga, Cherrie.  2000. "From a Long Line of Vendidas: Chicanas and Feminism." In her Loving in the War Years, 2nd edition.  Boston: South End Press.
  • Moraga, Cherrie and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds. 1981.  This Bridge Called My Back: Writings of Radical Women of Color. Watertown, MA: Persephone Press.
  • Narayan, Uma.  1997.  Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third World Feminism.   New York: Routledge.
  • Nussbaum, Martha. 1995.  "Human Capabilities, Female Human Beings." In Women, Culture and Development : A Study of Human Capabilities, ed., Martha Nussbaum and Jonathan Glover.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 61-104.
  • _______.  1999.  Sex and Social Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • O’Brien, Mary.  1979.  “Reproducing Marxist Man.”  In The Sexism of Social and Political Theory: Women and Reproduction from Plato to Nietzsche, ed., Lorenne M. G. Clark and Lynda Lange.  Toronto: Toronto University Press, 99-116.  Reprinted in (Tuana and Tong 1995: 91-103).
  • Ong, Aihwa.  1988. "Colonialism and Modernity: Feminist Re-presentation of Women in Non-Western Societies.” Inscriptions 3(4): 90. Also in (Herrman and Stewart 1994).
  • Okin, Susan Moller. 1989.  Justice, Gender, and the Family.  New York: Basic Books.
  • ______.  1979.  Women in Western Political Thought.   Princeton: Princeton University Press.
  • Pateman, Carole.  1988.  The Sexual Contract.    Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
  • Reagon, Bernice Johnson. 1983. "Coalition Politics: Turning the Century." In: Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith. New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 356-368.
  • Robinson, Fiona.  1999.  Globalizing Care: Ethics, Feminist Theory, and International Affairs. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
  • Rubin, Gayle.  1975.  “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex.”  In Towards an Anthropology of Women , ed., Rayna Rapp Reiter.  New York: Monthly Review Press, 157-210.
  • Ruddick, Sara. 1989.  Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace.  Boston: Beacon Press.
  • Schneir, Miriam, ed. 1994. Feminism in Our Time: The Essential Writings, World War II to the Present.  New York: Vintage Books.
  • ______.  1972.  Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings. New York: Vintage Books.
  • Scott, Joan W. 1988.  “Deconstructing Equality-Versus-Difference: or The Uses of Poststructuralist Theory for Feminism.” Feminist Studies 14 (1):  33-50.
  • Silvers, Anita, David Wasserman, Mary Mahowald. 1999.   Disability, Difference, Discrimination: Perspectives on Justice in Bioethics and Public Policy . Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield.
  • Simpson, J. A. and E. S. C. Weiner, ed., 1989. Oxford English Dictionary.   2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press. OED Online. Oxford University Press.  “feminism, n1” (1851).
  • Snitow, Ann.  1990.  “A Gender Diary.”  In Conflicts in Feminism, ed. M. Hirsch and E. Fox Keller.  New York: Routledge, 9-43.
  • Spelman, Elizabeth.  1988. The Inessential Woman.   Boston: Beacon Press.
  • Tanner, Leslie B.  1970  Voices From Women's Liberation.   New York:  New American Library (A Mentor Book).
  • Taylor, Vesta and Leila J. Rupp.  1996. "Lesbian Existence and the Women's Movement: Researching the 'Lavender Herring'."  In Feminism and Social Change , ed. Heidi Gottfried.  Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.
  • Tong, Rosemarie.  1993.  Feminine and Feminist Ethics.   Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
  • Tuana, Nancy and Rosemarie Tong, eds. 1995.  Feminism and Philosophy. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
  • Walker, Alice. 1990. “Definition of Womanist,” In Making Face, Making Soul: Haciendo Caras , ed., Gloria Anzaldúa.  San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 370.
  • Walker, Margaret Urban.  1998. Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics. New York: Routledge.
  • ______, ed. 1999.  Mother Time: Women, Aging, and Ethics. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
  • Walker, Rebecca, ed. 1995. To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism.   New York: Random House (Anchor Books).
  • Ware, Cellestine.  1970.  Woman Power: The Movement for Women’s Liberation .  New York: Tower Publications.
  • Weisberg, D. Kelly, ed.  1993.  Feminist Legal Theory: Foundations.  Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
  • Wendell, Susan. 1996. The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability. New York and London: Routledge.
  • Young, Iris. 1990a. "Humanism, Gynocentrism and Feminist Politics."  In Throwing Like A Girl. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 73-91.
  • Young, Iris. 1990b.  “Socialist Feminism and the Limits of Dual Systems Theory.”  In her Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory . Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
  • ______.  1990c.  Justice and the Politics of Difference.   Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
  • Zophy, Angela Howard. 1990.  "Feminism."  In The Handbook of American Women's History , ed., Angela Howard Zophy and Frances M. Kavenik.  New York: Routledge (Garland Reference Library of the Humanities).

General Bibliography

Topical bibliographies.

  • Feminist Theory Website
  • Race, Gender, and Affirmative Action Resource Page
  • Documents from the Women's Liberation Movement (Duke Univ. Archives)
  • Core Reading Lists in Women's Studies (Assn of College and Research Libraries, WS Section)
  • Feminist and Women's Journals
  • Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy
  • Feminist Internet Search Utilities
  • National Council for Research on Women (including links to centers for research on women and affiliate organizations, organized by research specialties)
  • Feminism and Class
  • Marxist, Socialist, and Materialist Feminisms
  • M-Fem (information page, discussion group, links, etc.)
  • WMST-L discussion of how to define “marxist feminism” Aug 1994)
  • Marxist/Materialist Feminism (Feminist Theory Website)
  • MatFem   (Information page, discussion group)
  • Feminist Economics
  • Feminist Economics (Feminist Theory Website)
  • International Association for Feminist Economics
  • Feminist Political Economy and the Law (2001 Conference Proceedings, York Univ.)
  • Journal for the International Association for Feminist Economics
  • Feminism and Disability
  • World Wide Web Review: Women and Disabilities Websites
  • Disability and Feminism Resource Page
  • Center for Research on Women with Disabilities (CROWD)
  • Interdisciplinary Bibliography on Disability in the Humanities (Part of the American Studies Crossroads Project)
  • Feminism and Human Rights, Global Feminism
  • World Wide Web Review: Websites on Women and Human Rights
  • International Gender Studies Resources (U.C. Berkeley)
  • Global Feminisms Research Resources (Vassar Library)
  • Global Feminism (Feminist Majority Foundation)
  • NOW and Global Feminism
  • United Nations Development Fund for Women
  • Global Issues Resources
  • Sisterhood is Global Institute (SIGI)
  • Feminism and Race/Ethnicity
  • General Resources
  • WMST-L discussion on “Women of Color and the Women’s Movement” (5 Parts) Sept/Oct 2000)
  • Women of Color Resources (Princeton U. Library)
  • Core Readings in Women's Studies: Women of Color (Assn. of College and Research Libraries, WS Section)
  • Women of Color Resource Sites
  • African-American/Black Feminisms and Womanism
  • African-American/Black/Womanist Feminism on the Web
  • Black Feminist and Womanist Identity Bibliography (Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library)
  • The Womanist Studies Consortium (Univ. of Georgia)
  • Black Feminist/Womanist Works: A Beginning List (WMST-L)
  • African-American Women Online Archival Collection (Duke U.)
  • Asian-American and Asian Feminisms
  • Asian American Feminism (Feminist Theory Website)
  • Asian-American Women Bibliography (Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe)
  • American Women's History: A Research Guide (Asian-American Women)
  • South Asian Women's Studies Bibliography (U.C. Berkeley)
  • Journal of South Asia Women's Studies
  • Chicana/Latina Feminisms
  • Bibliography on Chicana Feminism (Cal State, Long Beach Library)
  • Making Face, Making Soul: A Chicana Feminist Website
  • Defining Chicana Feminisms, In Their Own Words
  • CLNet's Chicana Studies Homepage (UCLA)
  • Chicana Related Bibliographies (CLNet)
  • American Indian, Native, Indigenous Feminisms
  • Native American Feminism (Feminist Theory Website)
  • Bibliography on American Indian Gender Roles and Relations
  • Bibliography on American Indian Feminism
  • Bibliography on American Indian Gay/Lesbian Topics
  • Links on Aboriginal Women and Feminism
  • Feminism, Sex, and Sexuality
  • 1970's Lesbian Feminism (Ohio State Univ., Women's Studies)
  • The Lesbian History Project
  • History of Sexuality Resources (Duke Special Collections)
  • Lesbian Studies Bibliography (Assn. of College and Research Libraries)
  • Lesbian Feminism/Lesbian Philosophy
  • Society for Lesbian and Gay Philosophy Internet Resources
  • QueerTheory.com
  • World Wide Web Review: Webs of Transgender

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Home > Conferences and Events > SOURCE > 2015 > Oral Presentations > 33

Oral Presentations

Feminism, Fantasy, and the Fourth Wave

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Ginny Blackson

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Oral Presentation

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SURC Theatre

Feminism, Library Science, Young Adult Literature

Fourth Wave Feminism is an evolving theoretical construct deeply based in activism outside the traditional avenues used by prior generations. This session will examine how this new generation of feminism is influenced by, and reflected in, contemporary Young Adult Fantasy novels by authors like Tamer Pierce and Melinda Lo.

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Blackson, Ginny, "Feminism, Fantasy, and the Fourth Wave" (2015). Symposium Of University Research and Creative Expression (SOURCE) . 33. https://digitalcommons.cwu.edu/source/2015/oralpresentations/33

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You are here, engl 300: introduction to theory of literature,  - the classical feminist tradition.

In this lecture on feminist criticism, Professor Paul Fry uses Virginia Woolf’s  A Room of One’s Own  as a lens to and commentary on the flourishing of feminist criticism in the twentieth century. The structure and rhetoric of  A Room of One’s Own  is extensively analyzed, as are its core considerations of female novelists such as Austen, Eliot, and the Brontës. The works of major feminist critics, such as Ann Douglas, Mary Ellman, Kate Millett, Elaine Showalter, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, are mentioned. The logocentric approach to gender theory, specifically the task of defining female language as something different and separate from male language, is considered alongside Woolf’s own endorsement of literary and intellectual androgyny.

Lecture Chapters

  • Transition into Feminist Theory: Tony the Tow Truck
  • Overlapping Identities
  • The Structure of A Room of One's Own
  • Feminist Criticism and A Room of One's Own
  • Women's Language and the Male Sentence
  • Complications and Implications of Classical Feminism
Transcript Audio Low Bandwidth Video High Bandwidth Video

This lecture, I think, starts with a series of preliminaries. The technical term for preliminaries of this kind in literary study is “prolepsis”–that is to say, the form of anticipation which, in a certain sense, covers what will be talked about later. They are prolepses of this kind. First, I wanted to say that in entering upon the phase of this course which concerns a series of particular identities as perspectives, as points of departure, we’re still thinking about the literary text; and, of course, in thinking about identity itself, we come upon a form of critical endeavor which is, in practical terms, incredibly rich and productive. It is simply amazing how, as Jonathan Culler once put it, “reading as a woman,” or reading as an African-American, or reading as any of the other sort of identity that we’re going to be talking about–it’s simply amazing how this kind of reading, if it’s done alertly, transforms everything. That is to say, it has an incredible practical payoff.

Last time in the context of the New Historicism, Stephen Greenblatt’s brilliant anecdote begins with Queen Elizabeth saying, “I am Richard II, know you not that?” Well, Stephen Greenblatt isn’t concerned with investigating a pronouncement of that sort from the standpoint of feminist criticism, or indeed from the standpoint of something we’ll be taking up later on–gender theory; but still, it’s rather an amazing thing for Queen Elizabeth to say, isn’t it? It suggests really that it’s, after all, remarkable that she, a woman, would find herself in a position not so much needing to endure the kind of suffering and peril that her own sex has traditionally endured but rather potentially enduring the suffering and peril that one would experience in the masculine gender position, made perhaps even more interesting and complicated by the fact that Elizabeth knows perfectly well that despite the rarity of her being Richard II, it’s nevertheless not a unique position. She has subjected [laughs] Mary Queen of Scots to precisely that position. She has deposed and beheaded her, ultimately, in just the way that she fears the Earl of Essex will depose and behead her. So the way in which this remark, “I am Richard II, know you not that?”–so easily commandeered and made use of from the standpoint of the New Historicism–can come to life in a completely different way when we think about it as a question of a gendered experience is, I think, in itself a fascinating one.

Now at the end of the last lecture, by way of further preliminary, I told a little fib. I said that there were no women in  and of course in your prose text of it–the one that you’ve been clutching to your bosom feverishly for the entire semester–there are no women. There are just guys talking. However, if to the prose text, and I’ve told you about these, you add the illustrations–this [gestures to board] is one of them, roughly speaking, and I did it from memory–if you add the illustrations, you’ll have to realize that it’s not just the cars. You see the little smiles on the faces of the houses there: it’s not just the cars that are happy about what’s going on when Bumpy finally comes along and pushes Tony, but it’s the houses in the background which have been expressing disapproval at the reactions of Neato and Speedy to the predicament. There are big frowns on the faces of those houses in those illustrations, houses that now express beaming approval when the morally correct thing is done.

Now in the Victorian period–and in a certain sense I think  in this regard harkens back to the Victorian period–there was a poet named Coventry Patmore who, actually a rather good poet, became notorious, however, in the feminist tradition for having written a long poem in which he describes woman as “the angel in the house.” You’re probably familiar with that expression, and it’s an idea which is also, I think, embodied in a monumental book of some twenty-five years ago by Ann Douglas called  The idea is that moral and aesthetic and cultural values are somehow or another in the hands of women in the drawing room, at the tea table, dictating to the   of society–all of which are strictly male prerogatives–what a proper ethical sense of things ought to be. In other words, the role of the angel in the house is not just to wash the dishes and take care of the kids, although that’s a big part of it. The role of the angel in the house is also to adjudicate the moral aspect of life at the domestic level, and that’s exactly what these houses, obviously inhabited by angels–how else could they be smiling and frowning?–that’s what these houses are doing. So it is the case after all that there are women in 

All right. Now, as I say, this moment is not exactly a crossroads in our syllabus. It’s not like moving from language to the psyche to the social, because obviously we’re still very much in the social. In fact, it’s not even as though we haven’t hitherto encountered the notion of perspective. Obviously, we have in all sorts of ways, but particularly in the work of Bakhtin or Jameson, we’re introduced to the way in which class conflict–that is to say, being of a certain class, therefore having an identity–gets itself expressed in literary form dialogically and gets itself expressed either as the expression of conflict between or among classes or as a more cacophonous and yet, at the same time, very frequently harmonious chorus of voices of the sort that–in notions of “carnivalization” and other such notions–one finds in Bakhtin. In other words, the way in which the language of a text, the language of a narrative or of a poem or of a play gets itself expressed, is already, as we have encountered it, a question of perspective. That is to say, it needs to be read with notions of identity, in this case notions of class identity, in mind if it’s to be understood.

Well, what’s also interesting, though, about turning to questions of identity is that perhaps more sharply now than hitherto–although I have been at pains to point out certain moments in the syllabus in which one really does arrive at a crossroads, and you simply can’t take both paths–nevertheless, within the context of thinking about identity in these ways as literary theory, we begin to feel an increased   among perspectives. I’m going to be pointing this out from time to time in the sequence of lectures that we now undertake, but from the very beginning there is a sense of actually a competition which is in some ways unresolved to this day–for example, between the feminist and the Marxist perspective. That is to say: what is the underlying determination of identity and consciousness? Is it class or gender, just for example? This is not a new topic. This isn’t a topic that we stumble on today as a result of some belated sophistication we have achieved. Listen to Virginia Woolf on page 600 of  where she says, top of the left-hand column:

Now in a way, Woolf is pulling her punches here. She is not saying class has priority over gender, nor is she saying gender has priority over class, if we’re to understand the history of the oppression of women or the history of the limits on the forms of women’s expression. She’s pulling her punches, and yet at the same time I think we can see a point of view in Woolf’s  which is, after all, rather surprising. Think of the title. Think of the later title of a tract in some ways similar about the possible scope for contemporary activity for women,  These titles are grounded in material circumstances. Woolf stands before her audience, her Oxbridge audience of women, and says all she really has to say is just this one thing: if you’re going to expect to get anything done in the way of writing or in the way of any other activity that’s genuinely independent of patriarchal limitation, you’ve really got to have 500 pounds a year and a room of your own.

That’s all she really says she has to say. In fact, as you read through the six chapters of  , you find that, as if on an elastic band after the extraordinary range of impressionist thinking that each chapter manifests, she is pulled back to this one particular–as she sees it–necessary practical precondition, a material precondition. If you want to get anything done–you’re not Jane Austen, you’re not a genius sitting in your parlor whisking your novel-in-progress under a piece of blotting paper every time a servant comes in to the room, you’re not like that–you really do need today the independence of having 500 pounds and a room of your own. In other words, I think one could show that even in  –which is, if not the greatest, certainly the most eloquent feminist treatise on the conditions of women’s writing ever written–one could show that even in that, there is a certain priority given to the perspective of class, as opposed to the perspective of gender. Gender will continue to be conditioned by the effects of money and power if in fact something isn’t done–let’s face it–to redistribute money and power. This is a perspective which, by the way, is even clearer in  and suggests that despite its main agenda, which is a feminist one–that underlying that there is a sense of the priority of class.

These sorts of tensions continue to haunt not just feminist criticism, but other forms of criticism having to do with other forms of identity really to this day. Conferences featuring a variety of identity perspectives very typically develop into debates on precisely this issue, and the one-ups-persons of conferences of this kind are always the ones who somehow get in the last word and say, “You’re all naïve. You suppose that this is the basic issue, but there’s an underlying issue which is the basic issue, and that’s the one that, I’m going to demonstrate, must absolutely prevail.” It’s not necessarily always the Marxist card which is played in this context, although it frequently is. It could be some other card, but it’s always a card played. It’s always the last word at the conference which makes everybody go away and say, “Oh. I thought this was about women. Oh, dear. It must be about something else.” We will have to come back to that because in a way, the material we cover today and the way that we’re enabled to discuss it by its own nature is something that calls for another lecture and a lecture that we will actually provide. There’s a very real sense, as I hope to show by the end of the lecture, in which traditional–I call this “classical feminist criticism”–in which traditional or classical feminist criticism needs to be supplemented, perhaps in the Derridean sense, by something more, which is gender theory. As I say, at the end of the lecture I’ll try to explain what that might entail, and then come back to it when we discuss Judith Butler and Michel Foucault a few lectures from now.

All right. So  is an absolutely amazing  . It’s actually one of my favorite books. I read it like a novel, and in many ways it is a novel. I think immediately that that might give us pause because if Charlotte Brontë is to be called to task for tendentiousness–that is to say, for writing from the standpoint of complaint, of perceived oppression; and if Charlotte Brontë’s tendentiousness gets in the way of the full expression of what she has to say–which is to say, the unfolding of a novel; and if as Virginia Woolf, I think, actually rightly remarks, at least from an aesthetic point of view, we wonder why on earth Grace Pool suddenly appears after Jane’s diatribe about wishing that she could travel and wishing that her horizons had been broadened, that somehow, Virginia Woolf says, Grace Pool is out of place and there’s been a rift in the narrative fabric: if this criticism of Charlotte Brontë is fair, and we’ll be coming back to it in other contexts, then of course it could be turned against the choice of narrative style, of narrative approach, in  itself.

This, I suppose, could only strike you forcefully if you read the whole of  all six chapters, which I urge you to do because it’s so much fun. If you read the whole of  you’d say, “Well, gee. This is sort of a novel, too.” The speaker says, “Oh, call me anybody you like,” not unlike Melville’s speaker saying, “Call me Ishmael.” You can call me Mary Beton. You can call me Mary Seton, call me Mary Carmichael. It doesn’t really matter, but I’ve had certain adventures. At least that person speaking has had certain adventures which are fictitious, or at least I reserve the right to have you suppose that they are fictitious. In other words, this is a narrative that moves quite by design in the world of fiction.

In other words, Virginia Woolf is saying it really isn’t true, as she tells us in the first chapter, that she, Mary Beton, after sitting at the river thinking, wondering what on earth she’s going to tell these young ladies about women and fiction–as she’s been thinking about that, finally she gets a little idea. It’s like pulling a bit of a fish out of the river, and the fish starts swimming around in her head. She becomes quite excited and she walks away across the grass. At that point up arises a beadle, a formidable person wearing Oxonian gowns and pointing at the gravel path where she, as an unauthorized woman, should be walking, as the grass is the province only for the men enrolled in the university; and then she has repeated encounters of that kind. She goes to the library unthinkingly, only to be told by an elderly wraithlike gentleman that since she’s a woman she needs a letter of introduction to get in. And so her day, her fictitious day of thinking about what on earth she should say to these young women about women and fiction, begins, somewhat unpleasantly for her character, as a presented fiction. In other words,  is, in a sense, a novel.

It continues with a very pleasant lunch that she has. She’s been invited to the campus as a distinguished writer. It’s okay to be a woman who is a novelist as long as you don’t rock the boat too much. In that regard, she can have been invited to such a lunch and has a very pleasant lunch because it’s provided by men in an atmosphere which is designed for men. Then she goes to visit a friend who is teaching at this fictitious college. She has dinner with the friend in that college’s dining hall, and the dinner is extremely inferior and plain, and then they go to her rooms and they start talking about the conditions in which this college was built. A bunch of women in the nineteenth century did all they could do to raise 30,000 pounds, no frills, thank you very much. None of them had any money. There were no major donations and so the grass never gets cut, the brick is plain and unadorned, and that’s the way life is in this particular women’s college.

The next day she goes to the library because she decides she’s really got to find out something about what people think of women; and so, what is a woman? I don’t know so I’d better look it up in the library, she thinks. She finds out that hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of men have written books about women: on the inferiority of women, the moral sensitivity of women, the lack of physical strength of women, on and on and on. She lists them as items in the library catalog which actually are there [laughs] in the library catalog–all of them, of course, getting themselves expressed in these hundreds and hundreds of books about women by men. Well, this is very frustrating but, as you can imagine, it’s an occasion for wonderful satire–one has to say tendentious satire, because obviously it’s male-bashing. My point is that she wouldn’t let Charlotte Brontë get away with that. Charlotte Brontë has to suspend her anger, Virginia Woolf wants to say, if she’s going to get the whole of what’s on her mind expressed. Well, Virginia Woolf, who sort of doesn’t sound very angry, but you could well be mistaken about that–she’s venting her anger in comic effects–Virginia Woolf allows herself, because that really   the case, a measure of anger.

So it is in that chapter. Then she goes home and the rest of  takes place in her home. She’s in her study pulling books off the shelf of her library, and this is more or less chronological. It starts with a time when she looks on the shelf where the women writers ought to be and there aren’t any women writers, and then later, yes, there are women writers, there are quite a few novelists. Then later in the twentieth century, women writers get a little bit more scope for their activity, and as she passes all of this in review, we continue to get her reflections on the state of literary possibility for women in literary history.

That’s the structure of  overall and it is within this structure, which is an impressionistic and narrative, undoubtedly novelistic structure–there are precedents for it. Oscar Wilde’s  is one in particular–and which is, in a way, itself what it’s talking about: It is a novella, and in the context of the novella, as I say, there’s a certain tension or contradiction in an author who is allowing herself tendentious opinions while denying the right to have such opinions on the part of one of her predecessors. As you can imagine, what she says about Charlotte Brontë has been controversial in subsequent feminist criticism. There are a number of ways in which feminist critics feel that Virginia Woolf is misguided or needs to be supplemented, and this is one of them. By and large, feminist critics feel that Charlotte Brontë, or any other writer, has the right to be tendentious. We’ll have more to say about Virginia Woolf’s criterion of androgyny, which is not thinking like either sex, in part. We’ll come back to that, but most feminist criticism has felt for a variety of reasons that androgyny isn’t necessarily the ideal toward which women’s prose ought to be aspiring and takes Virginia Woolf to task therefore for having taken this view of Charlotte Brontë.

Now yes, feminist criticism has taken  to task in a variety of ways, but at the same time–and I think this is freely and handsomely acknowledged by feminist criticism–it is amazing–when you read the whole text, and even when you read the excerpts that you have in your anthology–it is amazing how completely Virginia Woolf’s arguments anticipate the subsequent course of the history of feminist criticism. I just want to point out a few of the ways in which it does. As Showalter points out, the first phase of modern feminist criticism was the kind of work that primarily paid attention to men’s treatment of women in fiction. Mary Ellmann’s book of 1968 called  Kate Millett’s  in 1970 are both books which focus primarily on sexist male novelists whose demeaning treatment of women is something that the feminist perspective needed to bring out. This criticism is superseded in Elaine Showalter’s account by what she calls, and prefers, “gynocriticism” or “the gynocritics.” Gynocriticism is not so much concerned with men’s treatment of women in fiction as with the place of women as writers in literary history and as characters–regardless of whether they are characters in men’s or women’s books in their own right–in the history of fiction. In other words, gynocriticism turns the topic of feminist criticism in the late sixties and early seventies from the history of oppression by men to the history of a women’s tradition.

Now this sense of the unfolding of things, it seems to me, is already fully present in Woolf. She, too, wants to talk about the possibilities for women writers, about the need for women writers to feel that they’re not alone. Above all at the same time, however, she frames this emphasis on the woman’s perspective with the sort of trenchant, frequently satirical observations about men’s treatment of women and men’s way of demeaning women and keeping them in their place–as, for example, all the men, most of them professors, who wrote books about women, as she discovered in the British library, do. All of this is very much in the tradition of that first phase of feminist criticism that Showalter identifies with Ellmann and Millett and others of that generation. So the capaciousness of Woolf’s approach in one sense can be understood as precisely her ability to bridge both sorts of modern tradition–no longer chronological as Showalter presents them as being, correctly–but rather as a kind of simultaneity in which the emphasis on men’s marginalization of women and the emphasis on women’s consciousness and traditions can be set forth at the same time.

Now also in Virginia Woolf there is what–Since the publication of the fascinating book by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar called  this is also an allusion to  , you remember Bertha, the madwoman in the attic of  since the publication of  feminist criticism has talked about the madwoman thesis: the idea, in other words, that because they could not openly express themselves creatively as writers or as artists of other kinds, women were forced to channel their creativity into subversive, devious and perhaps psychologically self-destructive forms, as in, for example, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s  . You find Woolf already on page 600–just actually below the passage about class and gender that I read before–you find her touching on this madwoman theme long before Gilbert and Gubar. She says:

There, in other words, one strongly suspects that there is a person whose creativity has been oppressed and unfortunately channeled in unsocial or antisocial directions. This, as I say, is a tradition that’s sustained. It still exists in Showalter. In her gynocritical perspective–that is to say, her insistence on our registering, chronicling, and becoming familiar as scholars with the history of women as well as the history of women’s writing–the recognition of such forms of repression as witchcraft, as madness, as herbalism, as whatever it might be, need to be taken into account.

Also very much on the mind of Woolf already, as it still is particularly for Showalter because this is Showalter’s understanding of the task of gynocriticism, is the notion that one needs a tradition, that one of the great difficulties and shortcomings facing the woman’s writer is that, yes, there are a few greats–the same ones always named, Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot–but there is not a sense of an ongoing tradition, of a developing tradition within which one could write; so that Woolf on page 606, the right-hand column, talks about “the man’s sentence,” the difficulty of coming to terms with not having, not just a room of one’s own, but a language of one’s own. This is toward the top of the right-hand column: “Perhaps the first thing she would find, setting pen to paper, was that there was no common sentence ready for her use.” All the literary models, all the models of novelistic prose–most of them, in any case, are engendered male; because the atmosphere of writing–and this is a point that we’ll be getting to soon–the very fact of writing is something that we have to understand as having a male stamp on it.

Further down in the right-hand column:

By the way, this is disputable because certainly it’s possible to understand Jane Austen’s prose style as emerging from the work of Samuel Johnson and Samuel Richardson, in particular, so it is disputable. At the same time, Woolf’s point is that Austen was able to shake herself free from this terrible problem of wanting to say something but finding that one doesn’t have one’s own language, a language suitable to– appropriated by and for and as one’s identity–for saying it. “So I want to write as a woman, I want to say the things that a woman wants to say, but all I’ve got to say it with is a man’s sentence.” That’s Woolf’s point, and of course it has many and long ramifications.

I’m holding at bay the criticism of a great deal of this that has to be leveled at it by feminist criticism and gender theory roughly since 1980, but in the meantime the ramifications are interesting and they are reinforced by the theoretically very sophisticated wing of feminist criticism that we call French feminism. Some of you may know the work of Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous. Writers of this kind insist that there is such a thing as women’s language. Women write not just with their heads and their phalluses but with their whole bodies. Women don’t write carefully constructed periodic sentences. Women write ongoing paratactic, impressionist, digressive,   sentences: sentences without ego–being without structure more or less corresponding to being without ego. We’ll come back to this in a minute in Showalter, but in the meantime French feminism was willing to settle on and for an idea of women’s writing and, implicitly behind this idea, an idea of what a woman is that is very easy to identify as somehow or another essentializing.

Why   a woman write a rigorous periodic sentence? After all, that’s the kind of sentence that Jane Austen did, in fact, write. In a whole variety of ways that one might think of, why can’t a woman, if she is to be free to be whatever she wants to be, write a sentence which isn’t necessarily of this gendered feminine sort? Why does women’s writing, in other words, have to be   writing?

It seems to me that it is French feminism and the possible critique of French feminism that Virginia Woolf is anticipating when she embarks on this perilous idea of androgyny, of the kind of mind that needs to be both male and female and that needs to write in a way that Virginia Woolf says is actually very sexy, precisely in the moment when one is not thinking about one’s sex–the moment, in other words, when there is no longer a question of the man’s sentence and the woman’s sentence. I think it has to be said that although one could emphasize in  this sort of advanced criticism of French feminism, and also of the idea that there is essentially something that we call woman–and I’m not through with that topic–I think it has to be said that although we could read  in this way, at the same time we have to recognize an ambivalence on Virginia Woolf’s part on this subject. There is a difference between her insistence that Jane Austen wrote like a woman, that she shrugged off the tyranny of the man’s sentence and wrote her own kind of sentence, a woman’s sentence–regardless of whether or not that is actually in literary historical terms true–between the idea, on the one hand, that it’s important to write like a woman and the idea, on the other hand, that it’s important to write androgynously.

We have to concede, I think, the impressionistic form of these lectures that she’s giving. We have to concede that she wavers on this point; that somehow or another it’s very difficult to pin down in Woolf the question of whether there is essentially something to be called “women’s writing”; just as the question behind that, whether there is essentially something to be called “woman,” or the question on the contrary–whether the ideal of all writing is to shed as fully as it can precisely its gendered aspects. There is perhaps a kind of creative or rich inconsistency on this point that, it should be said, one also finds and needs to take into account in reading 

All right. Now getting a little closer to this whole question of beyond the gynocritical–because Showalter, for example, in talking about the history of the novel talks about those three phases: first the “feminine,” the phase in which women try very much to write as though they were men by deferring completely to male values in all the ways that they can; perhaps introducing a kind of, again, “angel in the house” cultural benevolence and benignity into perspectives of men that can be sometimes rather militaristic and harsh. but nevertheless hiding behind frequently male names like Currer Bell, Acton Bell, George Eliot, and so on, and not really entering into questions of the place of women in society. Showalter then says this is a phase supplanted by a feminist moment in the history of the novel in which novels like the late work of Mrs. Gaskell, for example, and other such novels become tendentious, and the place and role of women becomes the dominant theme of novels of this kind. By the way, this takes Woolf’s critique of Charlotte Brontë a little bit out of chronology, because presumably Charlotte Brontë belongs to what Showalter is calling “the feminine phase” in the history of the novel, and so it’s interesting that Woolf finds a kind of proto-feminism, damaging to the texture of  , already in Charlotte Brontë’s novel.

Then finally what Elaine Showalter likes best: the supplanting of the feminist novel–because Elaine Showalter, too, is nervous about the tendentiousness of fiction–the supplanting of that by what she calls “the female novel,” which is the novel that simply takes for granted the authenticity and legitimacy of the woman’s point of view, writes from that point of view but, as in Virginia Woolf, having shed or shaken off the elements of anger or adversary consciousness that earlier novels had typically manifested. This history of the novel is very similar to what Showalter is doing with her sense of the history of recent feminist criticism. That’s in two phases: first the feminist, as she calls it, when the treatment of women by men in fiction is the main focus; and then the gynocritical, which is the appropriation for women of a literary tradition. Showalter is at pains to point out that much of the most important work of recent feminist scholarship, the feminist scholarship of the 1970s, is in simply the unearthing of and expanding of a canon of women’s writing not exclusively novelistic, because there had been a time when the novel was sort of half conceded to women as a possible outlet for their writing. But this concession was accompanied by the sovereign assertion that they couldn’t write poetry and plays, and so an expansion of the canon such that all forms of writing are available and made visible and recognized as actually existing in a tradition–so that we can trace women’s writing, as Showalter puts it, from decade to decade and not from great book to great book, so that there really is a tradition comparable to the male tradition that one can think about, think within, and draw on as a creative writer oneself, is necessary. So both Showalter’s history of the novel and her history of modern feminist criticism–or modern women’s criticism, one had better say–end at the point when it is still a question of the woman’s perspective.

But this raises a question–and I’ve been touching on it in a variety of ways–but it really raises the question that has to haunt thinking of this kind. We’re going to be encountering it again and again and again as we move through other forms of identity perspective in criticism and theory. It raises the question whether if I say that a woman’s or women’s writing is of a certain sort, if I identify a woman in a way that I take somehow to be recognizable–let’s say I identify a woman as intuitive, imaginative, impressionistic, sensitive, illogical, opposed to reason, a refuser of that periodic sort of subject-predicate sentence that we associate with men’s writing–I can appropriate that for women like the French feminists and I can identify women in so doing as such people–but isn’t that simply inverting what men say in Virginia Woolf’s discoveries in the British museum in the second chapter of  isn’t that just inverting all the negative values that men have attached to women all along? Isn’t it ultimately to accept men’s opinions of women, men’s ways of saying that because they are avatars of reason, science, logic and all the rest of it–isn’t a way of saying that the head is higher than the heart and accepting, in other words, the lower or inferior status of this organ to this organ even though one supposes oneself to have transvalued them and insisted, in promoting women’s consciousness, that the heart is higher than the head? One hasn’t done anything, in other words, to the essential identities that have governed patriarchal thought from the beginning. It is precisely this characterization of women that has enabled and engendered patriarchy. This is where the theoretical problem arises. It calls for, it seems to me, a sense that somehow or another one has to put the possibility–and there’s really no other way to say it, and this is something that Judith Butler frequently says and people who work in the mode of Judith Butler say–one has to put the suggestion that perhaps the best thing one can say as a feminist is there is no such thing as a woman; there is no woman.

Now of course this is perilous, and this is what drives such an unfortunate wedge in the midst of feminist thought. In real life, in real material existence, there certainly are women. They are oppressed by laws, they are oppressed by men, and their rights and their very lives need to be protected with perpetual vigilance. The theoretical idea, in other words, that there’s no such thing as a woman is not an idea that can be sustained in life. Yet at the same time, the implications of what the language of identity politics is always calling “essentialism,” the implications of saying “woman” is one particular thing–and it might be better if we said “woman” was one particular thing, but something other than what men have been saying she was all along–but making the problem worse, saying that “woman” is one particular thing, which is just what men have always said she was–only it’s a good thing, right, that positions of this kind are taken up in this way, despite the fact that they’re absolutely necessary for practical feminism and for real-world feminism–is nevertheless detrimental to a more sensitive theoretical understanding of gender and of the possibilities of gender.

It’s all very well to be intuitive and emotional and impressionistic, but one wants to say two things about that. In the first place, a guy gets to be that if he wants to, right? [laughs] In the second place, why does a woman   to be that, right? It’s perfectly clear in both cases that there are exceptions which go vastly beyond the exception that proves the rule. It’s perfectly clear that in both cases there are sensibilities across gender that completely mix up and discredit these categories, and so for all of those reasons there is a problem.

Just very quickly I want to point out, looking at Showalter’s essay, that this is a bind that criticism around 1980 really hasn’t gotten past. Time’s up. I’m not going to take the time to quote passages, but notice her animus–and here, in a way, we go back to the beginning–her animus against Marxism and structuralism on the grounds–and of course we’ve said this ourselves–on the grounds that both of them present themselves as “sciences.” Aha! They’re gendered male! Marxism and structuralism aren’t anything we want to have to do with because this is just Virginia Woolf’s beadle raising its ugly head again and imposing its will–through its superior rationality–on women. So we don’t want any of that. What we want instead is a form of criticism, and this is what she says in effect at the end of the essay on pages 1385 and 1386, that evades scientificity; a form of criticism that engages with the reality of texts and of the textual tradition but doesn’t trouble its head with theoretical matters. In other words, a form that dissociates itself from the logical, from overarching structure, from scientificity.

Showalter leaves herself in this position, and she leaves feminist criticism in this position as–how might one put it?–a colonized enterprise that can do anything it likes as long as it’s not reasonable. If that’s the case, then of course it imposes an essentializing limit on the possibilities of feminist criticism, just as of course the characterization of men’s criticism in the way that it’s characterized, needless to say, also imposes limits on that. Whether fair and legitimate limits, or perhaps exaggerated limits, is open to question. That’s not nearly as important a point as the reminder that there is a kind of marginalization of the possibilities for feminist criticism involved in saying that it has to be something other than the sort of thing that Marxist and structuralist paradigms make available.

Okay. Now I think that Henry Louis Gates, influenced by Bakhtin, will have a very interesting way of coming to terms with this question of what’s available for a marginalized minority criticism once it avoids or has succeeded in avoiding the terms of the mainstream criticism. I want you to read Gates’ essay with that particularly in mind. Then we’ll come back with the question of, as it were, the future of feminist criticism, in a way since 1980, when we turn to the work of the gender theorists, in particular Judith Butler.

[end of transcript]

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How to prepare and deliver an effective oral presentation

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  • Lucia Hartigan , registrar 1 ,
  • Fionnuala Mone , fellow in maternal fetal medicine 1 ,
  • Mary Higgins , consultant obstetrician 2
  • 1 National Maternity Hospital, Dublin, Ireland
  • 2 National Maternity Hospital, Dublin; Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Medicine and Medical Sciences, University College Dublin
  • luciahartigan{at}hotmail.com

The success of an oral presentation lies in the speaker’s ability to transmit information to the audience. Lucia Hartigan and colleagues describe what they have learnt about delivering an effective scientific oral presentation from their own experiences, and their mistakes

The objective of an oral presentation is to portray large amounts of often complex information in a clear, bite sized fashion. Although some of the success lies in the content, the rest lies in the speaker’s skills in transmitting the information to the audience. 1

Preparation

It is important to be as well prepared as possible. Look at the venue in person, and find out the time allowed for your presentation and for questions, and the size of the audience and their backgrounds, which will allow the presentation to be pitched at the appropriate level.

See what the ambience and temperature are like and check that the format of your presentation is compatible with the available computer. This is particularly important when embedding videos. Before you begin, look at the video on stand-by and make sure the lights are dimmed and the speakers are functioning.

For visual aids, Microsoft PowerPoint or Apple Mac Keynote programmes are usual, although Prezi is increasing in popularity. Save the presentation on a USB stick, with email or cloud storage backup to avoid last minute disasters.

When preparing the presentation, start with an opening slide containing the title of the study, your name, and the date. Begin by addressing and thanking the audience and the organisation that has invited you to speak. Typically, the format includes background, study aims, methodology, results, strengths and weaknesses of the study, and conclusions.

If the study takes a lecturing format, consider including “any questions?” on a slide before you conclude, which will allow the audience to remember the take home messages. Ideally, the audience should remember three of the main points from the presentation. 2

Have a maximum of four short points per slide. If you can display something as a diagram, video, or a graph, use this instead of text and talk around it.

Animation is available in both Microsoft PowerPoint and the Apple Mac Keynote programme, and its use in presentations has been demonstrated to assist in the retention and recall of facts. 3 Do not overuse it, though, as it could make you appear unprofessional. If you show a video or diagram don’t just sit back—use a laser pointer to explain what is happening.

Rehearse your presentation in front of at least one person. Request feedback and amend accordingly. If possible, practise in the venue itself so things will not be unfamiliar on the day. If you appear comfortable, the audience will feel comfortable. Ask colleagues and seniors what questions they would ask and prepare responses to these questions.

It is important to dress appropriately, stand up straight, and project your voice towards the back of the room. Practise using a microphone, or any other presentation aids, in advance. If you don’t have your own presenting style, think of the style of inspirational scientific speakers you have seen and imitate it.

Try to present slides at the rate of around one slide a minute. If you talk too much, you will lose your audience’s attention. The slides or videos should be an adjunct to your presentation, so do not hide behind them, and be proud of the work you are presenting. You should avoid reading the wording on the slides, but instead talk around the content on them.

Maintain eye contact with the audience and remember to smile and pause after each comment, giving your nerves time to settle. Speak slowly and concisely, highlighting key points.

Do not assume that the audience is completely familiar with the topic you are passionate about, but don’t patronise them either. Use every presentation as an opportunity to teach, even your seniors. The information you are presenting may be new to them, but it is always important to know your audience’s background. You can then ensure you do not patronise world experts.

To maintain the audience’s attention, vary the tone and inflection of your voice. If appropriate, use humour, though you should run any comments or jokes past others beforehand and make sure they are culturally appropriate. Check every now and again that the audience is following and offer them the opportunity to ask questions.

Finishing up is the most important part, as this is when you send your take home message with the audience. Slow down, even though time is important at this stage. Conclude with the three key points from the study and leave the slide up for a further few seconds. Do not ramble on. Give the audience a chance to digest the presentation. Conclude by acknowledging those who assisted you in the study, and thank the audience and organisation. If you are presenting in North America, it is usual practice to conclude with an image of the team. If you wish to show references, insert a text box on the appropriate slide with the primary author, year, and paper, although this is not always required.

Answering questions can often feel like the most daunting part, but don’t look upon this as negative. Assume that the audience has listened and is interested in your research. Listen carefully, and if you are unsure about what someone is saying, ask for the question to be rephrased. Thank the audience member for asking the question and keep responses brief and concise. If you are unsure of the answer you can say that the questioner has raised an interesting point that you will have to investigate further. Have someone in the audience who will write down the questions for you, and remember that this is effectively free peer review.

Be proud of your achievements and try to do justice to the work that you and the rest of your group have done. You deserve to be up on that stage, so show off what you have achieved.

Competing interests: We have read and understood the BMJ Group policy on declaration of interests and declare the following interests: None.

  • ↵ Rovira A, Auger C, Naidich TP. How to prepare an oral presentation and a conference. Radiologica 2013 ; 55 (suppl 1): 2 -7S. OpenUrl
  • ↵ Bourne PE. Ten simple rules for making good oral presentations. PLos Comput Biol 2007 ; 3 : e77 . OpenUrl PubMed
  • ↵ Naqvi SH, Mobasher F, Afzal MA, Umair M, Kohli AN, Bukhari MH. Effectiveness of teaching methods in a medical institute: perceptions of medical students to teaching aids. J Pak Med Assoc 2013 ; 63 : 859 -64. OpenUrl

oral presentation feminism

Essay on Feminism

500 words essay on feminism.

Feminism is a social and political movement that advocates for the rights of women on the grounds of equality of sexes. It does not deny the biological differences between the sexes but demands equality in opportunities. It covers everything from social and political to economic arenas. In fact, feminist campaigns have been a crucial part of history in women empowerment. The feminist campaigns of the twentieth century made the right to vote, public property, work and education possible. Thus, an essay on feminism will discuss its importance and impact.

essay on feminism

Importance of Feminism

Feminism is not just important for women but for every sex, gender, caste, creed and more. It empowers the people and society as a whole. A very common misconception is that only women can be feminists.

It is absolutely wrong but feminism does not just benefit women. It strives for equality of the sexes, not the superiority of women. Feminism takes the gender roles which have been around for many years and tries to deconstruct them.

This allows people to live freely and empower lives without getting tied down by traditional restrictions. In other words, it benefits women as well as men. For instance, while it advocates that women must be free to earn it also advocates that why should men be the sole breadwinner of the family? It tries to give freedom to all.

Most importantly, it is essential for young people to get involved in the feminist movement. This way, we can achieve faster results. It is no less than a dream to live in a world full of equality.

Thus, we must all look at our own cultures and communities for making this dream a reality. We have not yet reached the result but we are on the journey, so we must continue on this mission to achieve successful results.

Impact of Feminism

Feminism has had a life-changing impact on everyone, especially women. If we look at history, we see that it is what gave women the right to vote. It was no small feat but was achieved successfully by women.

Further, if we look at modern feminism, we see how feminism involves in life-altering campaigns. For instance, campaigns that support the abortion of unwanted pregnancy and reproductive rights allow women to have freedom of choice.

Moreover, feminism constantly questions patriarchy and strives to renounce gender roles. It allows men to be whoever they wish to be without getting judged. It is not taboo for men to cry anymore because they must be allowed to express themselves freely.

Similarly, it also helps the LGBTQ community greatly as it advocates for their right too. Feminism gives a place for everyone and it is best to practice intersectional feminism to understand everyone’s struggle.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Conclusion of the Essay on Feminism

The key message of feminism must be to highlight the choice in bringing personal meaning to feminism. It is to recognize other’s right for doing the same thing. The sad part is that despite feminism being a strong movement, there are still parts of the world where inequality and exploitation of women take places. Thus, we must all try to practice intersectional feminism.

FAQ of Essay on Feminism

Question 1: What are feminist beliefs?

Answer 1: Feminist beliefs are the desire for equality between the sexes. It is the belief that men and women must have equal rights and opportunities. Thus, it covers everything from social and political to economic equality.

Question 2: What started feminism?

Answer 2: The first wave of feminism occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It emerged out of an environment of urban industrialism and liberal, socialist politics. This wave aimed to open up new doors for women with a focus on suffrage.

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There are three main strands within the feminist movement. Namely, radical feminism, liberal feminism, and socialist feminism. The present research focuses on those main strands and how they interact with one another to accomplish a common goal: the termination of sexist oppression implemented by the patriarchy. The relationship between feminism and the established ideology of liberalism is also used to explain the similarities and differences between liberal feminists, radical feminists, and socialist feminists. These similarities and rival tendencies are further analyzed to indicate the benefits and challenges of the political application of feminism as a whole. More specifically, this work will examine the differing perception of politics that each strand holds to explain the rival tendencies that prevent unanimity among feminists. Additionally, this work will scrutinize the core themes of feminism (i.e. the private/public divide, the patriarchy, sex and gender, and equality and difference) to explain rival tendencies within the feminist ideology. And most importantly, this work will explore gender and its use as a social cleavage to define, arguably, the most prominent rival tendency: the definition of politics in private and public spheres (e.g. family roles and relations, versus employment opportunities). This is a video of the presentation, "Feminism" given at the 2022 Undergraduate Projects & Research Conference at Salt Lake Community College. The presenter: Sol Vargas-Carrillo. The video can be accessed via YouTube here: https://youtu.be/Ua3TPzcS8O4

Video recording of presentation at UPRC created by Salt Lake Community College and hosted on YouTube Channel SLCCTV Vid Archive.- This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).

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  • Prof. Elizabeth A. Wood

Departments

  • Women's and Gender Studies
  • Political Science
  • Linguistics and Philosophy

As Taught In

  • Gender Studies
  • Women's Studies

Learning Resource Types

Feminist thought, oral presentation, guidelines for oral presentations.

  • You will each have five (5) minutes to present with five more minutes for discussion with others.     
  • Give us a tune we can walk away whistling. What is the main point you want us to remember? 
  • Tell us what you’re going to tell us (Forecast), give us your evidence and argumentation, and tell us again what you told us. 
  • Think about your audience. Try to find a hook that will be of interest to everyone. Don’t get too technical, but also don’t assume we are completely ignorant. In other words, try not to pitch your talk too high or too low.
  • Make us want to read your paper. It’s okay not to cover everything. Give us a few highlights.
  • Consider how we can help you. After everyone has asked you questions or made suggestions, think if there is anything you especially want feedback on.
  • Practice in advance.  It is hard distilling work down to 5 minutes. If you practice, you’ll realize that you have to focus on what is most important.
  • PowerPoint slides are completely optional. If they help you, feel free to use up to five slides. Don’t make them too text-heavy, though. They should be easy to grasp.
  • Consider playing with your audience. Can you use the chat function to get us involved? Can you make a joke that is relevant to your topic? 
  • There is only one mandatory requirement: Come with your whole self. Smile. You can smile with just your eyes if you are not someone who likes to smile or if your topic is itself sad. But take time to connect with us.   Remember that we are your support team. We want to hear your paper!

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IMAGES

  1. Oral Presentation

    oral presentation feminism

  2. PPT

    oral presentation feminism

  3. Feminist PowerPoint Presentation Template & Google Slides

    oral presentation feminism

  4. Talking about Feminism is easy with this Google Slides theme and

    oral presentation feminism

  5. PPT

    oral presentation feminism

  6. PPT

    oral presentation feminism

VIDEO

  1. Feminism: Origins , Waves , Branches , Major Feminist Writers / Women's Writing

  2. PFV Interview with Brinton Lykes: The Oral History Interview Process

  3. POWES Interview with Lynne Segal

  4. POWES Interview Excerpt with Meg-John (MJ) Barker: On the Value of Informal Mentorship

  5. EcoFeminism by Vet and Philosopher Fiona Dalzell

  6. CTU552- FEMINISM (PRESENTATION)

COMMENTS

  1. Oral Presentation

    Beginnings, Middles, and Ends: Some Writing Tips for Feminist Thought Student Examples Oral Presentation. Guidelines for Oral Presentations. You will each have five (5) minutes to present with five more minutes for discussion with others. Give us a tune we can walk away whistling. ...

  2. 108 feminist persuasive speech topics for college students

    25 feminist speech topics about beauty & fashion. that from puberty onward a woman is targeted by cosmetic companies. that the shape of woman's body is valued over its health. that physical beauty in a woman is conferred by popular beliefs. that striving for what is regarded as the epitome of female physical perfection destroys women.

  3. 10 Famous Speeches You Need To Hear From Women On Feminism

    Quotes of note: 'Be embarrassed if everyone in your workplace looks like you. Pay attention to physical ability, age, race, sexual orientation, gender identity and make sure you've got all kinds ...

  4. 277 Feminism Topics & Women's Rights Essay Topics

    Economic Autonomy for Women: Pathway to Empowerment. Women's Rights in Education: Global Perspective. Gender Equality in Politics: Global Progress. Intersectionality and Women's Rights: Race, Class, and Gender. Legal Milestones in Women's Rights History. Inequities in Healthcare: A Women's Rights Issue.

  5. The Power of Feminism Presentation

    The Power of Feminism Presentation. Free Google Slides theme, PowerPoint template, and Canva presentation template. Feminism is a trending topic that advocates for the equality of women and men. This simple, versatile and effective template is great to explain any sort of detail or research about this social, political and cultural movement.

  6. Introduction to Feminism, Topics

    Important topics for feminist theory and politics include: the body, class and work, disability, the family, globalization, human rights, popular culture, race and racism, reproduction, science, the self, sex work, and sexuality. Extended discussion of these topics is included in the sub-entries. Introduction.

  7. Oral Presentations

    Fourth Wave Feminism is an evolving theoretical construct deeply based in activism outside the traditional avenues used by prior generations. This session will examine how this new generation of feminism is influenced by, and reflected in, contemporary Young Adult Fantasy novels by authors like Tamer Pierce and Melinda Lo. ... Oral Presentation ...

  8. PDF Voices of Feminism Oral History Project: Smith, Barbara

    Feminism Project also includes an oral history with Ross. Abstract. In this oral history Barbara Smith describes her childhood in an emotionally warm and culturally rich family that valued education and race work. The interview focuses on her activism as a grassroots organizer, writer, and publisher. Smith's story details the political

  9. Free Google Slides and PowerPoint Templates about Feminism

    Feminism is a trending topic that advocates for the equality of women and men. This simple, versatile and effective template is great to explain any sort of detail or research about this social, political and cultural movement. The different graphs, reviews, charts, maps and illustrations of women will support in...

  10. Goffman on Gender, Sexism, and Feminism: A Summary of Notes on a

    Feminist praxis calls for liberating knowledge from its patriarchal language, metaphor, and theory that takes for granted, and thus helps perpetuate, women's unequal role in everyday life (Deegan 1989, 1998; Feagin and Vera 2008). The feminist dramaturgy outlined here lays the groundwork for releasing the liberating potential of Goffman's texts.

  11. Oral Presentation

    I. Oral Presentation Ethics: Different organizations and institutions have their own views of ethics, and they hold people to the standards that they have established. Feminism: Discusses gender relationships, but it was primarily created to combat gender stereotypes, particularly those held by men who believe that men are naturally superior to ...

  12. ENGL 300

    Lecture 20 - The Classical Feminist Tradition Overview. In this lecture on feminist criticism, Professor Paul Fry uses Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own as a lens to and commentary on the flourishing of feminist criticism in the twentieth century.The structure and rhetoric of A Room of One's Own is extensively analyzed, as are its core considerations of female novelists such as Austen ...

  13. Oral presentation

    The negative representation of women in the musical Les Miserables. Feminism in France can be divided up into three main sections, First wave Feminism which began at the end of the 1700's, the Second wave which began in the 1940's and ended in the 1990's and the third wave spans from the early 2000's onwards.

  14. How to prepare and deliver an effective oral presentation

    Delivery. It is important to dress appropriately, stand up straight, and project your voice towards the back of the room. Practise using a microphone, or any other presentation aids, in advance. If you don't have your own presenting style, think of the style of inspirational scientific speakers you have seen and imitate it.

  15. My friend's daughter did her oral presentation on feminism ...

    159 votes, 28 comments. 287K subscribers in the Feminism community. Welcome to the feminism community! This is a space for discussing and promoting…

  16. Essay On Feminism in English for Students

    500 Words Essay On Feminism. Feminism is a social and political movement that advocates for the rights of women on the grounds of equality of sexes. It does not deny the biological differences between the sexes but demands equality in opportunities. It covers everything from social and political to economic arenas.

  17. Oral presentation : r/Feminism

    Oral presentation . Hey Folks, I'm in year 12 in Australia and for my oral presentation I am presenting on feminism. I have a few simple questions to ask, if this is the wrong place to ask them then is someone could please point me in the right direction it'd be much appreciated.

  18. 2022

    Undergraduate Projects and Research Conference (UPRC) at SLCC. Accession Number. 22-0256

  19. Oral presentation about feminism and women ideas? : r/vce

    This is a place to ask feminists your questions and to discuss the issues with feminists. If you've wondered what most feminists think about certain things, what our response is to certain issues, how we think certain things should be handled, or why we have adopted the positions and stands that we have, this is your place to get your questions answered!

  20. Oral Presentation

    Beginnings, Middles, and Ends: Some Writing Tips for Feminist Thought Student Examples Oral Presentation. Guidelines for Oral Presentations. You will each have five (5) minutes to present with five more minutes for discussion with others. Give us a tune we can walk away whistling. ...