Talk:Protofeminism

Opening Definition
I would just like to object to the wording of the opening definition for this article. A feminist does not need to necessarily be a woman. So why would a proto-feminist need to be? I suggest a rewording to change the gender-exclusivity of the opening statement.


 * That's controversial. See pro-feminism. Nick Levinson (talk) 21:23, 11 July 2010 (UTC)

Film contrasts
The "film contrasts" section is entirely unnecessary and I, for one, suggest removing it. Roscelese (talk) 00:30, 31 January 2009 (UTC)

Ancient Feminism
Although feminism as a movement can trace it's roots to suffrage rights in the 19th/20th centuries, we can see episodic manifestations and occurrences further way back; in the dialogue Aspasia by Aeschines the Socratic, Aspasia, who was a courtesan that lived in Athens in 5th century BC, and was mistress of Pericles, was represented as criticizing the manners and training of the women of her time. In a section of the dialogue, preserved in Latin by Cicero, Aspasia figures as a "female Socrates". Some scholars believe that Aspasia opened an academy for young women of good families or even invented the Socratic method. According to Sr. Prudence Allen, a philosopher and seminary professor, Aspasia moved the potential of women to become philosophers one step forward from the poetic inspirations of Sappho. --Wcris (talk) 00:35, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

defining protofeminism in parallel to protohistory
Isn't protofeminism defined as 'feminist protohistory', i.e., that which would be history but for being of the time preceding feminist written records but contemporaneously evidenced by other written records, e.g., those of antifeminist men (who would have been most men)?

History by definition is evidenced in part by contemporaneous written records. Prehistory is evidenced exclusively by nonwritten sources, because writing that modern scholars can decipher apparently didn't exist at the time and place. But, e.g., the protohistory of a nation is the record of a nation without writing by natives but evidenced in the writing of another nation, such as when what is now China observed what is now Russia (I think China had writing first and had observers along the border).

What may be the oldest writings known have not been deciphered and so history and protohistory are based on writings that are understood or understandable today, i.e., back to about 5,000 years B.P. (the undeciphered earliest writings may date to 30,000 B.P. while verbal language has been reconstructed (with general agreement among today's linguists) only to about 9,000 B.P., with some doubt about whether it's even possible to reconstruct language before 10,000 B.P., the first or world language being from about 35,000 B.P.) (my figures may be outdated by newer research).

I don't have a source for this explanation but does someone?

Thank you. Nick Levinson (talk) 21:29, 11 July 2010 (UTC)

preherstory sources?
Can we cite any feminist preherstory or prehistory? I may have read some, but I don't remember any book titles.

One book on prehistory reconstructed weaving, including figuring out that women spent all day rolling short cotton threads into long threads that were then made into clothing that was so labor-intensive it was effectively extremely expensive. However, the only feminism (prefeminism) that we probably could identify from that would be in our modern imagination of how females and males related to each other as a consequence of clothing-making as it was back then. I suspect almost no credible academic anthropologist would dare do that in peer-reviewed work.

Is there anything?

Thank you. Nick Levinson (talk) 21:36, 11 July 2010 (UTC)

postfeminism coinage history deleted
I deleted the parenthetical sentence in the History section crediting Toril Moi with coining the word postfeminism, and did so for several reasons. This article is about protofeminism, not postfeminism, so, while an analogy to postfeminism may belong, an etymology of postfeminism is beyond this article's scope. While Misha Kavka's journal article makes an interesting claim about the word's origin being in Toril Moi's Sexual/Textual Politics, the word does not appear anywhere in the first or second edition of that book, according to the index, Google Books, and the Amazon look-inside-the-book feature. While the journal article cites p. 13 of the first edition and pp. 12–13 support part of what Misha Kavka says, nothing even vaguely resembling the coinage appears in either edition at the cited page or nearby or even at p. xiii. And Wikipedia's article on postfeminism has an earlier etymology.

Sources:
 * Moi, Toril, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London: Routledge (Taylor & Francis) (perh. New Accents ser. (?)), 2d ed. pbk. 2002 (reprinted 2003) (ISBN 0-415-28012-5)) (author then prof. lit. & Romance studies, Duke Univ., N. Car., per id., cover IV)
 * Moi, Toril, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London: Methuen (New Accents ser.), pbk. 1985 (reprinted 1986) (ISBN 0-416-35370-3)), p. 13 (author then lecturer in French, at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, per id., cover IV)
 * Kavka, Misha, Feminism, Ethics, and History, or, What Is the 'Post' in Postfeminism?, in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, vol. 21, no. 1 (Spring, 2002), p. 29 & n. 3 (p. 2 in PDF viewer), as accessed Mar. 20, 2011, 5:23p (Stable URL) (author Misha Kavka was of Univ. of Auckland, per id., p. 29)

Searches in Google Books and in Amazon that produced no results in either edition of Toril Moi's book were for postfeminism, post-feminism, postfeminist, and post-feminist.

I doubt the clause in the protofeminism article preceding the sentence I deleted, the clause being about postfeminism, belongs in the article, since it seems pretty much irrelevant unless explained (two feminism words being rejected by some scholars and maybe not the same scholars doesn't seem relevant enough), but maybe there's a consensus to have that in, so I left it.

Nick Levinson (talk) 16:13, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

Plato??
Shouldn't we add a little bit about Plato "feminism" actually being about how women should become more like men rather than anything about meeting the needs of women. (2) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Faro0485 (talk • contribs) 21:24, 13 September 2011 (UTC)

“Socrates has said”
I'm not a native speaker, so I might be missing something here, but how could it be that “Socrates has said” something, considering that he has long since become a dead man? EIN (talk) 11:24, 31 January 2013 (UTC)
 * You asked a good question and I corrected the word. Nick Levinson (talk) 21:53, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

Non-eurocentric viewpoints + lead up to feminism?
Much of the article seems to be focused on Europe, even though there is available literate of African, Asian, Native American womanhood. Is this literature not relevant to the ideas of protofeminism, hence why it wasn't added? Additionally, is there available literature to add a section which explains the early (late 17th century) ideas that shifted into the feminist movement?Lmf9 (talk) 03:10, 18 October 2021 (UTC)