Feminism is a range of socio-political movements and ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social equality of the sexes. Feminism holds the position that societies prioritize the male point of view and that women are treated unjustly in these societies. Efforts to change this include fighting against gender stereotypes and improving educational, professional, and interpersonal opportunities and outcomes for women.
Feminist sociology is an interdisciplinary exploration of gender and power throughout society. Here, it uses conflict theory and theoretical perspectives to observe gender in its relation to power, both at the level of face-to-face interaction and reflexivity within social structures at large. Focuses include sexual orientation, race, economic status, and nationality.
Susan Moller Okin was a liberal feminist political philosopher and author.
Carole Pateman is a feminist and political theorist. She is known as a critic of liberal democracy and has been a member of the British Academy since 2007.
Sheila Jeffreys is a former professor of political science at the University of Melbourne, born in England. A lesbian feminist scholar, she analyses the history and politics of human sexuality.
Feminist anthropology is a four-field approach to anthropology that seeks to transform research findings, anthropological hiring practices, and the scholarly production of knowledge, using insights from feminist theory. Simultaneously, feminist anthropology challenges essentialist feminist theories developed in Europe and America. While feminists practiced cultural anthropology since its inception, it was not until the 1970s that feminist anthropology was formally recognized as a subdiscipline of anthropology. Since then, it has developed its own subsection of the American Anthropological Association – the Association for Feminist Anthropology – and its own publication, Feminist Anthropology. Their former journal Voices is now defunct.
Saba Mahmood (1961–2018) was professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, she was also affiliated with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Institute for South Asia Studies, and the Program in Critical Theory. Her scholarly work straddled debates in anthropology and political theory, with a focus on Muslim majority societies of the Middle East and South Asia. Mahmood made major theoretical contributions to rethinking the relationship between ethics and politics, religion and secularism, freedom and submission, and reason and embodiment. Influenced by the work of Talal Asad, she wrote on issues of gender, religious politics, secularism, and Muslim and non-Muslim relations in the Middle East.
Valentine Moghadam is a feminist scholar, sociologist, activist, and author whose work focuses on women in development, globalization, feminist networks, and female employment in the Middle East.
Anne Phillips, is Emeritus Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics (LSE), where she was previously Graham Wallas Professor of Political Science. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2003.
Georgina Nicola Alexandra Waylen, is a British political scientist, specialising in comparative politics, political economy, and gender and politics. Since April 2012, she has been Professor of Politics at the University of Manchester. She previously taught at the University of Sheffield, the University of Salford and the University of East Anglia. She was a visiting scholar at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University from 2016 to 2017, and has been a visiting professor in the Department of Gender Studies at the London School of Economics since 2018.
Victoria Schuck (1909–1999) was an American political scientist who was the president of Mount Vernon College from 1977 to 1983. As an expert on the political participation of women and women as political candidates, she contributed to the development of the study of women and politics as a subfield of political science. She also specialized in the state politics of New England, and the politics of South Vietnam. As one of the first 80 women to earn a PhD in political science, Schuck published extensively on the status of women in the profession. In total she published more than 80 articles or monographs, and co-edited several academic books. Schuck spent most of her career at Mount Holyoke College, where she was a Professor of Political Science from 1940 until 1977, and prior to that she was a professor at Florida State University.
S. Laurel Weldon is a Canadian and American political scientist, currently a Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Simon Fraser University. She is a democratic and feminist theorist, known for studies of the cross-national evolution of women's rights, policies on the prevention of violence against women, and the inclusion of women in political decision-making. Weldon's work has been noted for contributing to both substantive political theory and empirical methods.
The Sexual Contract is a 1988 non-fiction book by British feminist and political theorist Carole Pateman which was published through Polity Press. This book is a seminal work which discusses how contract theory continues to affirm the patriarchy through methods of contractual submission where there is ultimately a power imbalance from systemic sexism. The focus of The Sexual Contract is on the false narrative that there is a post-patriarchal or anti-patriarchal society that presently exists as a result of the conception of a civil society. Instead, Pateman argues that civil society continues to aid feminine oppression and that the orthodoxy of contracts such as marriage cannot become equitable to both women and men. Pateman uses a feminist lens when rationalising the argument proposed in The Sexual Contract through the use of works by classic political and liberal philosophers Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and later interpreted by the Founding Fathers whom Pateman has before critiqued as being responsible for the development of modern rights and freedoms derived from archaic standards of contract that are deeply embedded within Western Spheres, particularly America, England and Australia, which are the focus areas for her work.
Christina Wolbrecht is an American political scientist. She is a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, where she is also Director of the Rooney Center for the Study of American Democracy, and the C. Robert and Margaret Hanley Family Director of the Notre Dame Washington Program. She studies the representation of women in politics, American voting behavior during the 20th century, the effects of women's suffrage, and how women in politics can function as public role models.
Mona Lena Krook is an American political scientist. She is a Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University, where she is also the Chair of the Women and Politics Ph.D. Program. She studies the political representation of women, particularly gender quotas in governments and the phenomenon of violence against women in politics.
Louise A. Chappell is an Australian political scientist. She is a Scientia Professor at the University of New South Wales, where she is also the director of the Australian Human Rights Institute. She studies gender and politics, the politics of the International Criminal Court, and the politics of Australia in comparative perspective.
Jacqui True is a political scientist and expert in gender studies. She is a professor of international relations at Monash University, where she is also Director of the Centre for Gender, Peace and Security. She studies international relations, gender mainstreaming, violence against women and its connections to political economy, and the methodology of feminist social science.
Lisa Baldez is an American political scientist and scholar of Latin American Studies. She is a professor of government and Latin American, Latino and Caribbean studies at Dartmouth College, where she was also Cheheyl Professor and director of the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning at Dartmouth College from 2015 until 2018. She studies the relationship between political institutions and gender equality, and has written about the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, women's protests in Chile, gender quota laws, and the Equal Rights Amendment.
Shireen Hassim is an South African political scientist, historian, and scholar of gender studies and African studies. She is a Professor in the Department of Political Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, where she is also affiliated with the Institute for Social and Economic Research. In 2019 she became a Canada 150 Research Chair in Gender and African Politics, beginning a seven-year term in the Institute for African Studies at Carleton University. Hassim was the first black woman full professor of political science in South Africa.
Kristin Bumiller is an American political scientist. She is the George Daniel Olds Professor in Economic and Social Institutions at Amherst College. She has published work on the structure of anti-discrimination law and the legal responses to rape and domestic violence.
