As long as I have known the word, I have labeled myself as a feminist. These values were instilled in me and my younger brother by my parents, who are some of the strongest feminists I know. The uniqueness of my last name, █████ █████, is an emblem of my upbringing, in which my parents, Ms. █████ and Mr. █████, strove to be equal partners. My understanding of feminism was shaped to be that it is largely an ideology of commonality: before we become men or women, we are people first. I certainly still agree with that sentiment, but after taking this course, I would now add that feminism is (or should be) an ideology of difference: patriarchy is oppressive in differing ways, depending on more factors than just the man-woman binary.

This idea grew from the first real class of the semester, when we analyzed two speeches by Audre Lorde. In these speeches, Lorde stressed the importance of including the perspectives of all women into feminism. In her speech “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” Lorde indicted white women in particular for excluding women of color from the very category of woman: “As white women ignore their built-in privilege of whiteness and define woman in terms of their own experience alone, then women of color become ‘other,’ the outsider whose experience and tradition is too ‘alien’ to comprehend” (Lorde 117). In her speech “The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House,” Lorde tackled the strategy that feminism has traditionally taken in regards to difference: “As women, we have been taught either to ignore our differences, or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. … But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.” So in the spirit of Audre Lorde, I'd like to dissect a few areas of differences between women that we examined in the course, in order to show how understanding such differences can strengthen, not weaken, feminism.

One area of difference is women's expression or lack thereof of their sexuality. Whether various expressions of sexuality are upholding the patriarchy or not has been a topic of debate throughout the history of the feminist project. However, this debate seems to have an implicit focus on women who are white, able-bodied, cisgender, heterosexual, etc. When considering the unique experiences of disabled women, it is clear that there is more to the story. In her essay “Golem Girl Gets Lucky,” Riva Lehrer details her experience as a disabled woman being desexualized. In the section “The Street,” Lehrer recounts her experiences walking the street as a disabled woman. Walking the “catwalk,” as she calls the sidewalk for women (Lehrer 234), is to be the subject of stares and degrading comments. But for the disabled woman, the imposition of male sexual standards serves a different harmful function: while the able-bodied woman is sexualized, the disabled woman is desexualized. Lehrer writes, “In the sidewalk mating dance we're winnowed out as undesirable breeders. They don't look long enough to decide whether we're attractive or not. The pack just knows prey when they see it” (Lehrer 236). She later explains how the only images of disabled women in straight pornography were as “fetish objects,” while the images of disabled women in lesbian erotica were “less than hot, as they were as interested in making a feminist theory point as in making a girl horny” (Lehrer 245). She was finally able to find loving sexual desire with her first female lover and her first disabled lover (Lehrer 244, 250). Feminist analysis must examine why it is that ability-disability is a component of sexual oppression, and perhaps look to queer relationships and “crip” relationships, where it isn't as present (according to Lehrer), for solutions.

Considering race in the examination of female sexuality presents yet another perspective. In her 1987 book Reconstructing Womanhood, Hazel Carby details how the slave woman failed to fit into the 19th-century "cult of true womanhood,” as termed by Barbara Welter. “True womanhood” was composed of four virtues, according to Welter: piety, (sexual) purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. These values delegated the ideal female sexuality to “within a shell of modesty, meekness, and chastity; in other words, it must be repressed” (Carby 27). The slave woman, however, could not be meek or modest; they had to possess the strength to perform harsh physical labor. Thus, the slave woman was portrayed as brutish, animalistic, and overtly sexual, in contrast to the civilized, pure white woman. This representation benefited white men, allowing them to evade responsibility for raping their slaves; Carby writes, “the white male, in fact, was represented as being merely prey to the rampant sexuality of his female slaves” (Carby 27). Failing to account for how black women didn't fit into the cult of true womanhood limits feminist history of 19th-century patriarchy, because the representation of black female sexuality was essential for upholding that system. Carby explains,

Any historical investigation of the ideological boundaries of the cult of true womanhood is a sterile field without recognition of the dialectical relationship with the alternate sexual code associated with the black woman. Existing outside the definition of true womanhood, black female sexuality was nevertheless used to define what those boundaries were. (Carby 30)

Contemporary feminist analysis then, must consider this history and how it persists into the present.

The unique history of racialized women allows us to examine another area of difference: reproductive rights. The historical feminist fight for this right was first for “voluntary motherhood,” which encompassed the right to to refuse their husbands' sexual advances and the right to use contraception, and later, for the right to abortion. In her 1981 book Women, Race and Class, Angela Davis examines how women had different goals in their fight for the right to birth control based on their socioeconomic status. While upper-class white women were expected to produce many children, the reproduction of lower-class women and racialized women was deemed undesirable. When native-born white women began to curtail their sexual activity by the end of the nineteenth century, the threat of “race suicide” became prevalent. In response, as Davis observes, “birth control advocates either acquiesced to or supported the new arguments invoking birth control as a means of preventing the proliferation of the ‘lower classes’ and as an antidote to race suicide” (Davis 210). For the underprivileged, limiting offspring not only became a moral obligation, but was forced through sterilization abuse, the extent of which is shocking. Some of the horrifying statistics include: 24% of Native American women of childbearing age had been sterilized by 1976 (Davis 218); over 35% of Puerto Rican women of childbearing age had been sterilized by the 1970s (Davis 219); 43% of women sterilized through federally subsidized programs by 1970 were Black (Davis 219). While women can be united by the principle of birth control (for themselves at least), two related but separate struggles have actually been taking place: upper-class white women have struggled to abstain from motherhood, while lower-class and racialized women have struggled to participate in motherhood.

A third area of difference is regarding housework, a central topic of feminism since the second wave and the “wages for housework” campaign. In her 2000 essay “Maid to Order: The Politics of Other Women's Work,” Barbara Ehrenreich described how, during the 1970s and 1980s, women began to reject the imposition of the burden of housework onto them, sparking the “chore wars.” However, the “squabbling” largely didn't lead to men picking up their end of the bargain, and for upper-class households, it instead led to the hiring of outside help. Ehrenreich observes, “Housework, as radical feminists once proposed, defines a human relationship and, when unequally divided among social groups, reinforces preexisting inequalities” (Ehrenreich 434). Of course, unlike housewives, “cleaning ladies” are paid (albeit poor wages), but their work is still exhausting, undervalued, and invisible. As Françoise Vergès notes in “Capitalocene, Waste, Race, and Gender,” in the capitalist economy is “the dialectical relation between the white male performing body and the racialized female exhausted body,” the latter of whom supports the former through cleaning and caring work (Vergès 2). Along this analysis, the upper-class white woman hiring outside help for housework is an abandonment of solidarity with the other women who do this work. While hiring outside help may have allowed upper-class women to exit the home in pursuit of careers that are more valuable, lucrative, and fulfilling than housework, that effort is being supported only by keeping lower-class women in housework. As Ehrenreich writes, “We are dividing along the lines of traditional Latin American societies — into a tiny overclass and a huge underclass, with the latter available to perform intimate household services for the former” (Ehrenreich 432).

Through a closer look at these three areas — expressions of sexuality, reproductive rights, and the distribution of housework — and more, I have found that many of the traditional feminist solutions I learned previously are inadequate. Only by considering women's differences can feminist analysts develop solutions that don't ignore or rely on other intersecting inequalities. A sexual paradigm has to be developed that doesn't ignore or rely on the desexualization and fetishization of disabled women or the hypersexualization of black women. Birth control movements have to confront their history with sterilization abuse, as well as take into account the differing historical struggles of upper-class white women and lower-class/racialized women. We cannot ignore the importance and value of housework, and if the “chore wars” begin again, they must end in truly equitable distributions of housework within households, not in a reliance on an underclass of servants. If one considers feminism to be the ideology promoting gender equality — which I do — then it must consider the conditions of all women, and that requires examining their differences.