General
Individualist feminists attempt to change legal systems in order to eliminate class privileges and gender privileges and to ensure that individuals have equal rights, including an equal claim under the law to their own persons and property. Individualist feminism encourages women to take full responsibility for their own lives. It also opposes any government interference into the choices adults make with their own bodies because, it contends, such interference creates a coercive hierarchy (such as patriarchy).
Individualist feminism was cast to appeal to "younger women ... of a more conservative generation" and includes concepts from Rene Denfeld and Naomi Wolf, essentially that "feminism should no longer be about communal solutions to communal problems but individual solutions to individual problems", and concepts from Wendy McElroy.
The Association of Libertarian Feminists, founded in 1973 by Tonie Nathan, the Libertarian Party's Vice Presidential nominee in 1972, is one of a number of different kinds of individualist feminist organizations. It takes a strong anti-government and pro-choice stand. Other libertarian feminist organizations include Mothers for Liberty, the Mother's Institute, and the Ladies of Liberty Alliance.
Wendy McElroy and Christina Hoff Sommers define individualist feminism in opposition to what they call political or gender feminism. Some scholars and critics have commented that the label "feminist" is often used cynically in this context, as a way to co-opt general feminism rather than actually be part of feminism. Other scholars note that individualist feminism has a long history that is somewhat different in tone that currently advocated by McElroy and Sommers.
Read more about this topic: Individualist Feminism
Famous quotes containing the word general:
“They make a great ado nowadays about hard times; but I think that ... this general failure, both private and public, is rather occasion for rejoicing, as reminding us whom we have at the helm,—that justice is always done. If our merchants did not most of them fail, and the banks too, my faith in the old laws of the world would be staggered.”
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“There is a mortifying experience in particular, which does not fail to wreak itself also in the general history; I mean “the foolish face of praise,” the forced smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease, in answer to conversation which does not interest us. The muscles, not spontaneously moved but moved, by a low usurping wilfulness, grow tight about the outline of the face, with the most disagreeable sensation.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)