Assignment task:
Using the following primary source below, can you help me identify quotes to answer the questions below.
1. What does Lindermann mean when she claims that feminism is about power and gender?
2. What does it mean to say that gender is a norm and not a natural fact?
3. What are the two moral commitments of feminism, according to Lindermann?
Hilde Lindemann
My own view is that feminism isn't-at least not directly-about equality, and it isn't about women, and it isn't about difference. It's about power. Specifically, it's about the social pattern, widespread across cultures and history, that distributes power asymmetrically to favor men over women. This asymmetry has been given many names, including the subjugation of women, sexism, male dominance, patriarchy, systemic misogyny, phallocracy, and the oppression of women. A number of feminist theorists simply call it gender, and . . . I will too.
Most people think their gender is a natural fact about them, like their hair and eye color. . . . But gender is a norm, not a fact. It's a prescription for how people are supposed to act; what they must or must not wear; how they're supposed to sit, walk, or stand; what kind of person they're supposed to marry; what sorts of things they're supposed to be interested in or good at; and what they're entitled to. And because it's an effective norm, it creates the differences between men and women in these areas.
Gender doesn't just tell women to behave one way and men another, though. It's a power relation, so it tells men that they're entitled to things that women aren't supposed to have, and it tells women that they are supposed to defer to men and serve them. It says, for example, that men are supposed to occupy positions of religious authority and women are supposed to run the church suppers. It says that mothers are supposed to take care of their children but fathers have more important things to do. And it says that the things associated with femininity are supposed to take a back seat to the things that are coded masculine. . . .
Gender, then, is about power. But it's not about the power of just one group over another. Gender always interacts with other social markers-such as race, class, level of education, sexual orientation, age, religion, physical and mental health, and ethnicity-to distribute power unevenly among women positioned differently in the various social orders, and it does the same to men. . . .
Feminist ethics is normative as well as descriptive. It's fundamentally about how things ought to be. . . . Feminist ethicists differ on a number of normative issues, but as the philosopher Alison Jaggar has famously put it, they all share two moral commitments: "that the subordination of women is morally wrong and that the moral experience of women is worthy of respect." The first commitment-that women's interests ought not systematically to be set in the service of men's-can be understood as a moral challenge to power under the guise of gender. The second commitment-that women's experience must be taken seriously-can be understood as a call to acknowledge how that power operates. These twin commitments are the two normative legs on which any feminist ethics stands.