School of thought

Feminist Philosophy

Movement

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Classification

Period
c. 1792 CE onward
Regions
Europe (origin), North America
Domains
Epistemology, Ethics, Political Philosophy

Overview

Feminist philosophy interrogates the ways gender shapes knowledge, ethics, politics, and experience. Its roots reach back to Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women (1869). In the twentieth century, de Beauvoir's claim that 'one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman' catalyzed new waves of feminist thought. Feminist thinkers have exposed how philosophical traditions have marginalized women's perspectives, and developed new frameworks — from standpoint epistemology to the ethics of care — that take seriously the situated, embodied nature of knowing and acting.

Key ideas

  • Gender as Construct: De Beauvoir argued that femininity is not a biological given but a social construction. Butler radicalized this insight, arguing that gender is performative — constituted through repeated acts rather than expressing an inner essence.
  • Intersectionality: Coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, this concept insists that gender cannot be understood in isolation from race, class, sexuality, and other axes of oppression. bell hooks and other Black feminist thinkers showed that mainstream feminism often universalized the experience of white, middle-class women.
  • Ethics of Care: Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings challenged the dominance of abstract, rule-based ethics (Kantian and utilitarian) by foregrounding care, relationships, and responsiveness to particular others as central moral concerns.

Key figures

Mary Wollstonecraft · Simone de Beauvoir · Judith Butler · bell hooks · Luce Irigaray · Martha Nussbaum

Questions engaged

  • Structural Injustice

    Feminist philosophy analyses patriarchy as a structure that distributes advantage and burden by gender across institutions rather than through individual wrongs, so gender injustice is treated as structural; the tradition carries several accounts of what makes the structure unjust rather than one named position.

Influenced by

  • Critical Theory

    This is the engagement of feminist critical theorists from the 1980s, not of the movement's first writers. Nancy Fraser took up Marx's view that social theory should clarify the struggles of its age to argue that the Frankfurt School must answer to the women's movement, faulting Habermas for leaving gender untheorized, and Seyla Benhabib pressed the same objection.

  • Existentialism

    This is Beauvoir's engagement rather than Wollstonecraft's: The Second Sex borrows the vocabulary of freedom, situation and bad faith to argue that women are cast as the Other and held in immanence instead of the open future a free project requires.

  • Post-Structuralism

    Butler took up Foucault's point that systems of power produce the subjects they claim only to represent, and argued from it that sex, not just gender, may be culturally constructed.

  • Social Contract Tradition

References