Cultural Feminism

In Feminist Perspectives, Sellnow says that “cultural feminists argue that stereotypically feminine skills, activities, behaviors, and characteristics (e.g., cooking, cleaning, child-rearing, nurturing) are valuable and should be embraced by both women and men.” On a personal level I actually found this very interesting and comforting in a sense. All growing up I heard about feminism and what it was from different people who had different perspectives. In my mind, feminists were all crazy, outspoken, reject femininity, and tried to be more like men. I see now that feminism is a multi-faceted and complex theory. 

If I subscribed to a single type of feminism, I would have to say I am more drawn to cultural feminism. Much of this is due to my personal upbringing which includes the experiences and lessons learned from my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, as well as religious teachings about the roles of men and women in life. To me, women will not achieve true equality by only striving to have access to everything men do (although I think this is still important). I think it is important for men to learn skills and behaviors that are traditionally feminine to make them more universal skills and behaviors, like cooking, cleaning, child-rearing, grocery shopping etc. I don’t mean men have no idea how to do these things, I just feel like there is a problem if these basic life skills are thought of as traditionally feminine. This is a very obvious issue in many marriages and I think it contributes to some of the fears women have about getting married. How can we encourage the de-feminization of these home-making skills even if women may take over many of these skills out of necessity for their family dynamic? 

I believe cultural feminism can be used as a tool to help men and women better understand each other without one trying to be too much like the other and still preserving important differences between genders.