Feminists and 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

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tional support to and interest in his wife's career while leaving to her the messy chores (except maybe mowing the lawn) and child care, while characterizing chores not traditionally associated with women as a "man's job" and (say) child care as "quality time." Now the husband publicly praises the marvelous job his wonderful wife does; he's better at child care than he is (Hochschild & Machung, 1989, p. 77ff). But a practical effect of all of this is that traditional, sex-specific social and household roles are preserved. And men achieve moral credit more for breaking into a household role than women do for breaking out of it. By no means is feminist discourse unitary, and by no means has it gone unanswered, either in the academy or in the culture. One answer to feminist critique is that it argues not for parity but for partiality, on the view that exposure of hierarchy inevitably elides toward social favoritism, or a replacement of one kind of injustice for another: "If reversing the gender hierarchy is not the objective, why is there such a significant emphasis on the attributes of female thinking?" (Hayman & Levit, 1994, p. 349). One feminist rejoinder is that the need is to focus on "the centrality of the political cultural hi
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Approximate Word count = 5134
Approximate Pages = 21 (250 words per page)