Second/third wave feminists argued against a biological definition of womanhood??

[resistingreality]

I just saw this by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. I know she has form ... but did all second and third wave feminists argue against a biological definition of womanhood? I wasn't aware of that. I mean Butler maybe ... but otherwise? Overall, this seems such a weird place to shoehorn something on TERFs and what it takes to be a woman. I don't think women have to suffer with childbirth etc to be a woman, but I do know only women experience childbirth.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/10/jennifer-aniston-fertility-obsession-ivf

All seems unlikely but I'd bet there are others besides Butler who did.

Second- and third-wave feminists used to argue fiercely against a reductive, biological definition of womanhood.

The argument is that women aren't defined by biology alone. Being female doesn't mean you should become a mother. But that's not the same as saying biology has nothing to do with being a woman, e.g a woman can as easily be male as female. In fact, a lot of feminist argument comes back to oppression on the basis of sex.

does it matter?

reality has a biological definition of motherhood

*womanhood
d'oh

As a girl who came of age in the 90s I was able to have children (something I always wanted) and have a career.

There is nothing to be ashamed of wanting to be a mother, just like there is nothing to be ashamed of not wanting to he a mother.

I went through my own fertility struggles so I do sympathise with how difficult it must have been for Jen and she had the added difficulty of being in the public eye.

FwIW I don't feel that things will be as good for my daughter as they were for me and god help her if she ever needs to seek refuge.

I don't blame feminists for that. I blame people like this Guardian reporter.

Sex is defined by biology, but we should not be limited by it. Can I write a graun collumn, now?

Seems odd that she's lumping second and third wave feminism together. They were waves for a reason.

Secondly, she's the one guilty of reductionism here, not feminists.

Thirdly, feminists aren't a homogeneous group all spouting the same echo chamber ideals. I once read (I want to say it was Binford, the archaeologist, but I'm not sure) something that said if an academic discipline isn't in a healthy state of debate it's become stagnant and is dying. So it seems particularly ridiculous to try and reduce any academic standpoint (or the cultural movement aspect) to a single unified voice, and almost seems to be intentionally implying that it is dying out.

And I will not accept that feminism is in its death throes when so much is being achieved.

I'm not expert enough to give specific quotes on this.

I believe that it's actually the direct opposite of ZW's comment though.

I do know that it was pretty much the whole point of feminism of all types to say that you were still a woman whether or not you had children, had sex with men, had sex with women, had sex with nobody: because you had a female body. That what you did with your female body did not make you 'really a bloke', 'manly', 'a failed woman'. And that this rose out of the massive wave of 1940s popular Freudianism in the USA, translated into the Ladies Home Journal etc, that did LITERALLY say that you were a failed and inadequate woman if you didn't get married to a man, have regular vaginal orgasms due to having a penis inside you, and have kids. Lots of them.

Half the trouble with these pieces is that we don't even remember what used to be quite seriously argued about women. But I can recognise the misogyny of believing a female body is irrelevant to 'womanhood' (i loathe that term).

Additionally, Greer has been asserting for a very long time that sex is immutable and therefore that womanhood's definition must be biological. I know this because I first had an argument with someone about it over a decade ago, back when we could still talk about such things openly.

Not sure which age group of women are second and third-wave feminists, but I am 74 and have never heard that 20c feminists ever 'used to argue against a biological definition of womanhood'. This is a 21c argument. Most of our time was spent arguing for equality with men e.g. wages for doing the same job. We all know that a woman is an adult female human being, right?

There are a few second-wave feminists who do: Shulamith Firestone, for example. But it’s very much a minority of the second-wave, and more complicated than Zoe Williams suggests.

Methinks Zoe (who has jumped the shark a long time ago now), is just recycling the usual TRA nonsense about past feminist movements. Most of them just make it up as they go along.

No the argument was that being a biological woman didn't automatically mean engagement, marriage, kids, grandkids, death.

There were so many other things out there to do.

It's a corrupted interpretation of the "biology is not destiny" argument as far as I can tell, which, as I understand it, means being a woman is a biological fact but that should not limit our choices in life.

Supporters of anti women activism always seem to weaponise "biology is not destiny" to lend weight to claims humans can change sex or to imply feminists who think you can't are hypocritical.

Its just more of bending the real meaning of something to fit their delusional agenda.

I can't bear to read it. I can't understand how it is possible for someone with her education to be that stupid. JacquelinePot above puts it beautifully and succinctly:

"Sex is defined by biology, but we should not be limited by it."

That is all that needs to be said on the matter.

It feels like this is all wrapped up in the idea that being a woman is some kind of hindrance that we should try and minimise and deny if we want full human rights.

Treating pregnant women, menopausal women, menstruating women as disposable, repulsive and to be hidden away is age old.

If you feel like writing a letter in, the more GC ones seem to get printed in the Saturday paper. Just sayin’

It's a much longer history & theoretical argument than I can go into here, but in 2nd wave feminisms, [I stress the plural] there WAS a move away from - or perhaps CAUTION - about insisting on sexual difference, in terms of biological essentialism.

This was because women's biology - sexual difference - has been used against us for thousands and thousands of years. Particularly menstruation (a source of fear amongst many men, and patriarchy) and childbirth. I am old enough to remember "Oh women can't do X, because they'll only go & get pregnant" & so on & on & on. In the 19th century, education was thought to be harmful to girls & young women, because we menstruate.

So it is totally logical that in campaigning & pushing for ALL the things we take for granted now - basically, equal treatment in all sorts of public institutions - some areas of feminisms of the 1960s and 70s elided or deliberately overlooked sexual difference.

That doesn't mean we didn't recognise it! We knew only too well who was being raped, who was being denied jobs because "there are no suitable toilets" , who got sacked when they got pregnant. And so on.

It's a corrupted interpretation of the "biology is not destiny" argument as far as I can tell, which, as I understand it, means being a woman is a biological fact but that should not limit our choices in life.

Yes, yes, yes! Thanks for putting it so neatly @FOJN

I think it probably does, if we want to understand how we got where we are today, in terms of the intellectual/political landscape.

It's a corrupted interpretation of the "biology is not destiny" argument as far as I can tell, which, as I understand it, means being a woman is a biological fact but that should not limit our choices in life.

What I would say, though, is that if you take that conclusion as stated - that biology should not limit our choices in life - you have to give up biology in the end. Because it doesn't matter whether you believe that to be true ideologically, biology always has it's say.

I always think of these female-empowerment films in the 90s, maybe the late 80s even, which had women compete against men and win in sports or similar settings. Girlfight or GI Jane being examples. That's the starting place - we should not be limited by biology. And what you end up with is something that is simply departed from reality.

This is also, I suspect, why that kind of feminism largely failed to deal with motherhood.

I always think of these female-empowerment films in the 90s, maybe the late 80s even, which had women compete against men and win in sports or similar settings. Girlfight or GI Jane being examples.

I suspect that those examples are much more influenced by liberal or "choice" feminisms, than 2nd wave Women's Lib-style feminisms.

There have ALWAYS been divisions & differences in the women's movement. I can remember, as a teenaged women's libber in the late 1970s, the divisions between socialist feminists and lesbian separatists, for example.

I think we gloss over them, because we need to be united against the common "enemy" - and any division is an excuse for misogynists & anti-feminists to point at us, and say "See, even the women don't know what they want!"

“Womanhood completed by fertility, meaningless without it, was a peculiar creed in the late 90s;”

This bit is bollox, women were (and still are) avoiding motherhood like never before. After a mild jump in the very early 90s, the birth rate was down (and age at first birth was on the rise) in the late 90s. There was another minor blip a few years into the 2000s, but childbirth has been basically been declining for a century, and it hasn’t signaled “womanhood” in a culturally significant way for many decades. I think Zoe may be confusing her clique of friends for society as a whole.

I think some women are limited by their biology, not in mental ability, but physically. I am incapacitated for at least one day every month with pain. No endometriosis or fibroids or anything like that. I am just bloody unlucky (if the dreadful pun can be excused). Some women sail through their periods and are able to ignore them. And I still feel that to prove our capacity, we must pretend that periods do not exist. I don't know what we do about acknowledging physical limitations as a result of biology without letting it impact on views of our mental ability. Bit of a ramble there, sorry.

Biological denialism isn't sexy.