Cultural feminism

Cultural feminism is a term used to criticize the view that there is a "female nature" or "female essence" or related attempts to revalidate attributes ascribed to femaleness. It is also used to describe theories that commend innate differences between women and men.

Unlike radical feminism or socialist feminism, cultural feminism was not an ideology widely claimed by proponents, but was more commonly a pejorative label ascribed by its opponents. Alice Echols, a feminist historian and cultural theorist, credits Brooke Williams with applying the term "cultural feminism" in 1975 to describe the depoliticisation of radical feminism, which led to the term being picked during the 1990s by academic feminists to describe various individuals. However, the term surfaced as early as 1971, when Tor Bay, in a letter printed in Off Our Backs, condemned the literary magazine Aphra as having "served the cause of cultural feminism." Socialist feminist Elizabeth Diggs, in 1972, used the label "cultural feminism" to apply to all of radical feminism. In 1974, editors of The Lesbian Tide asked: "[I]s dyke-separatism a logical extension of cultural feminism?" As these varied uses reveal, no single definition of the term existed even among participants in the women's movement.

Although the term "cultural feminist" is generally applied to individuals in the 1970s, similar lines of thought have been traced to earlier periods. Jane Addams and Charlotte Perkins Gilman argued that in governing the state, cooperation, caring, and nonviolence in the settlement of conflicts society seem to be what was needed from women’s virtues.Josephine Donovan argues that the nineteenth century journalist, critic and women's rights activist, Margaret Fuller, initiated cultural feminism in Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). She stressed the emotional, intuitive side of knowledge and expressed an organic worldview that is quite different from the mechanistic view of Enlightenment rationalists.

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