Feminists I

This chapter begins with a brief discussion of what we mean by feminism. I then discuss the place of property in the earliest feminist texts—of Mary Astell and Mary Wollstonecraft—where it is associated, above all, with the institution of marriage. In early feminist texts, the oppression of women is often likened to (or identified with) chattel slavery. This is clear, for example, in the work of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor and in the historical materialist accounts of Friedrich Engels and August Bebel. The single most remarkable treatment of property in feminist texts comes in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Built around a critique of Engels and Bebel, de Beauvoir argues that the will to acquire property (including property in women) is a characteristic of men’s behaviour which goes all the way down and all the way back—and which must change if men and women are to forge a new and more equal relationship. A key component of contemporary feminist work on property is the emphasis upon the lived experience of gendered inequality in the ownership of property. The final third of this chapter reviews the evidence of an earnings gap, a poverty gap, and an assets gap between men and women.