Feminism (Jessica Valenti, Human Rights, Justice)

How does Valenti define feminism?
Despite drastic changes in the broader societal connotations of feminism and its portrayal in popular culture and media, the core definition has remained the same: feminism is the doctrine advocating social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men.

What reason do the authors and presenters of this module provide for why we would all be feminist?

Explain transnational feminism and why it is important?

Transnational feminists examine issues from a global perspective while considering how they intersect with our lived experiences in the United States. While Western feminism overemphasizes commonalities with women across nations, transnational feminism recognizes inequalities across different groups of women, so that in essence, it's a series of feminisms addressing particular issues and not one uniform movement. If we look at it from the Chinese perspective there are several factors that go into the invisibility. For one thing the long practiced dynastic regime forced Chinese feminism to be invisible. Men had more rights and more opportunities under this regime. Additionally, men took credit for early feminism, as we learned through the video, and they selfishly used it to better their own lives rather than better the lives of women. Another factor was that the schools for men and women were different. Women's schools "the effort was said to be about educating women for motherhood and the more efficient raising of sons to be good citizens" (Liu 34). In the United States the invisibility was caused by men, the government, and by upper middle class white women. Men blocked it from view by not being good advocates for women and by maintaining the status quo. Men said things such as "We [women] are frivolous, that we [women] are weak" (Guglielmo 17). Women were afraid of the repercussions of their actions that the government would take on them. "Many of the authors concealed their identities, presumably to enjoy greater creative and political license, and to evade harassment, the loss of employment, and deportation, which always plagued the movement" (Guglielmo 17).