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| UN Photo/Eric Kanalstein. |
“Men have presumed to create a female domain”
Simone de Beauvoir
A person’s identity is defined according to his or her relationship to others. Historically speaking, women have always been socially considered as the partners of men, or in the words of American philosopher Sarah Conly: “Society, dominated by men, has come to see women not just as a particular kind of thing, but a kind defined by its difference from men”
So how do relationships between men and women influence the problem of violence? And how does the reality in which women live influence their struggle for equal rights? We will get to that. But first, let’s look at the historical background of the feminist movement.
WOMEN IN THE “FREE” WEST. In the 1960s, primarily through the global movement of emancipation of the western societies that touched the young generations, some women started to construct a specific discourse mainly influenced by a new consciousness of women themselves. This consciousness was based on liberal ideas and values such as freedom and independence that emerged in the 18th century and have been outlined since by several important characters. Among them were Olympe de Gouges, a writer and political activist whose feminist and abolitionist writings reached a large audience in the 18th century, the French revolutionary anarchist Louise Michel who was part of the events of the Commune de Paris in the 1870s, and the writer Virginia Woolf. After the turn of the century the French philosopher Simone Weil in the 1930s and Simone de Beauvoir after World War II also fought for these ideas.
Later on, on a more structural aspect, the 1960’s atmosphere was also influenced by the struggle against the western systems and values in what is called the Third World. This also revealed an increasing will of finding and asserting another path than the European/North American model of a consumer society and its consideration towards women, development, education, etc.
The typical Western-European model relied on the ideas, inherited from the French Revolution, of freedom, equality and fraternity. Over the years, those ideas led to great achievements for humanity, such as the banishment of slavery (1848 in France) and torture (Geneva Convention, 1949). This progress occurred over a long period of time before eventually being shared equally in the world without racial and/or sexual discrimination. In France, for example, women only got the right to vote in 1945.
Many facts and ideas have “allowed” the emergence of the feminist movement. One of these is the “masculine domination” that was exposed by Pierre Bourdieu in his book, The masculine domination (1991), but also in some of his articles in the 1980s.
MASCULINE DOMINATION. Though the feminist discourse has been influenced by several periods and ideas, the 1960’s are usually defined as the second wave of assertion of the feminist movement. The first wave can be seen in the construction of several values which have influenced the struggle, for example, the identification of the masculine domination as the main cause of sexual segregation.
Radical feminism is one of the many forms of feminism that emerged in the 1960’s. It denounces patriarchy as a system of power that organizes society into a compound of relationships based on the assumption that "male supremacy" oppresses women.
STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE. That considered, how should we characterize such ‘male supremacy’? Does any violence necessarily reflect ‘physical’ aspects? Research shows that the violence can be expressed in the structure of the society and in the relationships between individuals. For example, one can claim that the Indian lower castes are a subject of structural violence in their society. Thus, in the 1990’s, Pierre Bourdieu introduced the concept of symbolic violence, which he describes as ‘the tacit almost unconscious modes of cultural/social domination occurring within the every-day social habits maintained over conscious subjects’.
Feminists based their struggle on the social position of women. To stop the scourge (the unfortunate social position of women) from spreading, ‘activists’ fought against all types of violence that women can face every day. The struggle is twofold; women must fight against a violent outcome in individual situations, and also against the societal causes that make violence happen in the first place.
The difference between women and men, more than being ‘biologically printed’ in our genes is also socially constructed. Indeed, you just have to take a toy-shop magazine just before Christmas and you’ll see that boys are expected to become a “Do it yourselfer”, while young ladies are expected to learn how to iron and clean. That can seem pointless but, for the feminist activists (from the Black women in the 1960s in the United States, to the “Ni pûtes, ni soumises” association in France today), that differential socialization defined as the process of inheriting norms, customs and ideology, is the main cause, wherever it may take place, of sexual segregations and violence.
THE POWER OF THEORY. The theoretical background of feminism is hard to grasp as it has been constructed over the years but one of their main ideas is the interpretation of the social reality.
A theoretical examination is useful if we want to understand the background of the feminist fight to see the female status recognized. The fact that some people have tried to deconstruct the social interactions and see in them the foundations of sexual discrimination is extremely powerful for the ‘feminist struggle’. Indeed, from the young women who are victims of rape or sexual mutilations to the sexual domination of males in their recognition of the attributes of femininity or virility, the social construction can be identified through the new lens of the ‘gender aspect’.
As a result, many concepts that are supposed to demonstrate something universal are biased. Historically, the terms ‘Sex’, ‘Women’ and ‘Men’ can indeed be defined as a system of knowledge, discourse and power.
Organizations such as the United Nations Development Fund for Women, or since 2011 - UN WOMEN, have for years fought to see the status of women recognized as equal to that of men.
The feminist struggle has been influenced by the theoretical reflections of the construction of social reality. That reflection has been influenced by the moral values we have fought for before: the political rights for every citizen living on earth, as noted in the second article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from 1948 (otherwise the last sentence of the article doesn’t make sense) : Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.’
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