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Feminists and the Republican Party

The purpose of this research is to examine whether feminists can find a home in the Republican Party. The plan of the research will be to set forth the social and political context in which feminism has emerged in recent years as a force or voice in and influence on major-party policy and praxis, and then to discuss conceptual and strategic issues arising out of the encounter between and among strands of thought identified with feminist social critique and with the Republican Party, with a view toward evaluating whether and to what extent feminists could find political confluence with the Republican Party.

The Enlightenment environment in which Mary Wollstonecraft published her pamphlet titled Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792 was contemporary with the success of the American and French Revolutions. Weigel attributes the increase in women's rights discourse starting in this period to "new possibilities in poetic expression . . . brought by the aesthetic of the Romantics" (Weigel 67). From the Romantic period to the present, there have been ebbs and flows in the forcefulness of feminist social critique, and contemporary feminism does not speak with one voice. But the critique of patriarchal culture, defined by Millett in Sexual Politics (1969, p. 64) as "the ideology of male supremacy and the traditional socialization by which it is upheld in matters of status, role, and temperament," looms large in the discourse about the political affinities of feminism. In no small measure does the critique persist because of the view, widely shared by feminists, that "while patriarchal ideology was eroded and patriarchy reformed, the essential patriarchal social order remained" (Millett, 1969, p. 157).

Clark's analysis of the conservative perspective of political economy is consistent with Millett's characterization. Conservatives feel that government should "maintain the natural order of society" (1991, p. 79), i.e., its hierarchical...

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Feminists and the Republican Party. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 03:15, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1693308.html