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:
“Pleasure is necessarily reciprocal; no one feels it who does not at the same time give it. To be pleased, one must please. What pleases you in others, will in general please them in you.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“The reputation of generosity is to be purchased pretty cheap; it does not depend so much upon a man’s general expense, as it does upon his giving handsomely where it is proper to give at all. A man, for instance, who should give a servant four shillings, would pass for covetous, while he who gave him a crown, would be reckoned generous; so that the difference of those two opposite characters, turns upon one shilling.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“A bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular, and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)