Charlotte Perkins Gilman - ✔✔✔- an early socialist feminist
- gender as a social construct
- young girls forced to conform in society and prepare for motherhood through playing with
toys/clothing etc
- sex and domestic economics go hand in hand, women were reliant on their sexual assets to survive and
please their husbands
- the domestic environment is an instrument of patriarchy, women are economically dependent on men.
Nuclear family needs to be destroyed and replaced by communal living
- solution lies in equality of opportunity
Simone De Bouvoir - ✔✔✔- existentialist philosopher and socialist feminist
- gender is a social construct
- 'otherness' concept, man is dominant and women is 'the other', women are deviants from the norm
- housework as a Sisyphean task
- to achieve equality society must change to provide universal childcare, equal education, contraception,
and legal abortion, as well as women's economic freedom and independence from man in non-
exploitative labour
Kate Millett - ✔✔✔- radical feminist
- sex-based oppression is both political and cultural
- there is overt sexism and heterosexism in Western literature
- undoing the tradition family was the key to true sexual revolution
- all heterosexual relationships essentially political in a patriarchal society, women who are able to
accept lesbianism place themselves on the road to liberation
- the complete destruction of tradition marriage and the nuclear family is the goal of feminism