Cultural feminism is a variety of feminism that attempts to revalue and redefine attributes culturally ascribed to femaleness.
Cultural feminists diverged from radical feminism when they rejected the problematization of femininity and returned to an essentialist view of gender differences in which they regard female nature as superior.
History
Unlike radical or socialist feminism, cultural feminism was not an ideology widely claimed by proponents but was more commonly a pejorative label ascribed by its opponents. The term had surfaced as early as 1971, when Frances Chapman, in a letter printed in Off Our Backs, condemned the literary magazine Aphra as having "served the cause of cultural feminism". In 1972, socialist feminist Elizabeth Diggs, used the label "cultural feminism" to apply to all of radical feminism. Brooke Williams was the first to describe the "depoliticization of radical feminism" as "cultural feminism" in 1975. However, there are scholars such as Rosemarie Tong who conceptualize cultural feminism as a perspective within radical feminism.
Theory
Cultural feminism places women in a position overdetermined by patriarchal systems. Linda Alcoff makes the point that "the cultural feminist reappraisal construes woman's passivity as her peacefulness, her sentimentality as her proclivity to nurture, her subjectiveness as her advanced self-awareness". 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.
However, it was Alice Echols' article, "Cultural Feminism: Feminist Capitalism and the Anti-Pornography Movement", that led to the widespread adoption of the term to describe contemporary feminists, not their historical antecedents. According to Echols, cultural feminism "equates women's liberation with the development and preservation of a female counterculture". Her examples of cultural feminists are Kathleen Barry, Susan Brownmiller, Mary Daly, Andrea Dworkin, Susan Griffin, Robin Morgan, Janice Raymond, Adrienne Rich, and Florence Rush.
Mary Daly linked "female energy", or her term Gyn/Ecology, to the female "life-affirming, life-creating biological condition" that is victimized by male aggression as a result of "male barrenness". This form of separatism within cultural feminism was criticized for ignoring structural patriarchy to instead blame men as individuals for women's oppression. Cultural feminists declare the relationship between mother and daughter, and therefore all women, has been destroyed by patriarchy and must be repaired. Notably, this chapter of Douglas' book is titled Male biology as a problem and the analysis of Griffin's ideas is subtitled Woman the Natural.
Criticisms
Ethnographer Kristen Ghodsee describes several forms of criticism coming from women of color and women of developing countries, who believe that "the idea of a global sisterhood erases important differences in power and access to resources among women of varying races, ethnicities, and nationalities". A common concern, particularly among women of color and women of developing countries, is that cultural feminism only includes white, upper-class women, instead of taking into account women of different color and status.
Another concern is the belief that cultural feminists "have not challenged the defining of woman but only the definition given by men" and therefore perpetuate gender essentialism When cultural feminists claim issues like patriarchy and rape are inherent products of male biology and behavior, the opportunity to critique and challenge the structures behind these issues disappears.
Cultural feminism has also been criticized for engaging in capitalism, a practice which some feminists consider contradictory to feminist values and counterproductive to the feminist movement. To highlight problems with feminist capitalism, Echols analyzed the implementation, practices, and outcomes of the Feminist Economic Network (FEN), a feminist business that intended to use capitalism to help women overcome patriarchal barriers by lending money from feminist credit unions to feminist-owned businesses. She found the network exploited employees, rejected democracy, collectivity, and accountability, and justified hierarchies of power within the business by claiming sisterhood ensures that individual empowerment leads to collective empowerment for women.
Verta Taylor and Leila J. Rupp have argued that critiques of cultural feminism are often an attack on lesbian feminism. Suzanne Staggenbourg's case study of Bloomington, Indiana led her to conclude that engagement in activities labeled as cultural feminist "provides little evidence that cultural feminism led to a decline in political activity in the women's movement".