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Feminist Political Theory

Feminist political theory is a field of feminist theory that loosely encompasses a set of approaches with such goals as: 1) to understand and critique the role of gender in how political theory is conventionally construed, 2) to re-conceptualize and re-articulate political theory to advance feminist issues, and 3) to support political science presuming and pursuing gender equality. Feminist political theory overlaps related areas including: feminist jurisprudence (feminist legal theory); feminist political philosophy; female-centered research in political science; and feminist methods for the social sciences. The field is relatively new and inherently innovative; the Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy notes that "feminist political philosophy serves as a field for developing new ideals, practices, and justifications for how political institutions and practices should be organized and reconstructed."

Feminist political theory consolidated in the West during Women's Liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s. Previously, very few works of political theory explicitly considered women's political situation; John Stuart Mill’s 1861 call for women's suffrage in The Subjection of Women is a notable exception. In the early 20th Century, Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 work The Second Sex exposed the power dynamics surrounding womanhood and laid the foundation for subsequent feminist theories exposing women's social subjugation. In the 1980s and 1990s, feminist theory expanded into the legal realm lead by Catharine MacKinnon’s andAndrea Dworkin’s campaigns against pornography.

A key aspect of feminist political theory is feminist epistemology. Feminist epistemologists question the objectivity of social and philosophical sciences by contending that standards of authority and credibility are socially constructed and thus reflect and re-entrench the sociopolitical status quo. On solution is to include many diverse voices reflecting all parts of society in the process of knowledge-making.