blog 1

In my opinion, the original definition of feminism that is “a belief in equal rights, and taking a stand against discrimination based on gender and also race, ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation” is not complete enough. According to my own comprehension of feminism, I think it should take some consideration about the relationship between the economic status and sexism. So, I define feminism as “a belief in equal rights, and women should have independent and equal economic status, and taking a stand against discrimination based on gender and also race, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation”, which is based on the original one and my own understanding.

And some examples in the readings have informed my definition. First, women lost their freedom and rely on men for their economic situation is not independent. As illustrated in “Homophobia: A Weapon on Sexism”, “when battered women tell why they stayed with a batterer or why they returned to a batterer, over and over they say it was because they could not support themselves and their children financially, they had no skills for jobs, they could not get housing, transportation, medical care for their children” (Pharr 29), we could find that women did not leave their husbands even suffering from home violence because they do not have the economic status strong enough to support them and their children. And this is a significant reason of why women could not evade the home violence efficiently: they could not live on themselves.

Second, economics is the root cause of sexism. “Men profit not only from women’s unpaid work in the home but from our underpaid work within horizontal female segregation” (Pharr 30) tells us that women have been suffering unequal treatments in both housework and job work for their work and payment are not in balance. So, that is another significant part to support that the definition of feminist should contain the importance of economic independence of women.

Third, economics is also the underlying, driving force that keeps all the oppressions in place (Pharr 31). Described in the same paragraph (Pharr 31), sexism and racism are intersected as women and people in color both consist the bottom of the economic system in United States as unpaid or low-paid workers. So we could know that unfair economics is not only significant in oppressions of gender, but also significant in race.

In a nutshell, the equal and independent economic status should be considered in the definition of feminism for it stands for the freedom to get away from battering, the ability to live on self, the balance between work and payment, and the power against sexism and racism.