Feminism

= "women’s aggregate response to the impact of technology on our specific embodied interests as female human beings, encompassing all that ought to be implied by “female human beings” properly understood". [1]

Discussion

Mary Harrington:

"Facing toward the conservatives, I made the case that when understood historically, the women’s movement is a wholly legitimate entity. It’s better (and more sympathetically) understood neither as evidence of the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice, as the progressives have it, nor as some inexplicable urge by wicked, witch ladies to destroy Western Civilisation. Rather, the women’s movement emerged originally as a response to revolution: that is, as a set of contingent adaptations to the way women’s lives were transformed, and sometimes upended, by industrialisation.

This revolution rewrote the economic map, forcing what Karl Polanyi called “the Great Transformation” into a “market society” where the basic economic unit was not households but individuals, and where increasingly work happened somewhere outside the home. This precipitated a huge range of consequences for women, depending on their class and situation, and triggered large-scale social reform campaigns as a consequence.

These included (to name a few) campaigns for sex-specific workplace protection for manual labourers, against sex-specific workplace protection for knowledge workers, numerous subtypes of campaign to update the legacy legal and political status of women to reflect the new socioeconomic environment, to elevate and value the role of motherhood in private bourgeois homes drained of economic activity, to control the availability of hard liquor, and much else besides. In all this, two themes intertwine and sometimes compete: a feminism that calls for recognition of women in our distinctive reproductive role, and a feminism that calls for women’s entry into the market on the same terms as men. At times these sets of interests could clash along social class lines, with feminists on both sides.

In other words: first-wave feminism was not evidence of some miraculous frenzy of moral progress, after the endless premodern “Dark Ages”. It was rather an effect of technological change, as it interacted with the reality of women’s embodied lives and interests, and also with existing sociocultural norms and legacy legal and religious frameworks.

With this in place I turned to face the progressives and argued further that the set of beliefs we inherited from this first wave of feminism no longer applies. Because since that era we’ve begun a new industrial revolution, or perhaps a new phase of our ongoing technological revolution."

(https://www.maryharrington.co.uk/p/feminism-and-identity-in-the-transhuman)