Talk:Men and feminism

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[edit] page created

This article is being created as part of a class at Washington University in St. Louis. More will be added over the next few months, but please feel free to edit it.

--Sphmiel 02:35, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Article needs serious work

Please have a look at Wikipedia:Guide_to_writing_better_articles this page needs some serious attention. It's structure is way off and it lacks references. The tabulation of responses is good for an essay but bad for an encyclopedia article, views should be summarized and links to other articles should be made via summary style. Drop me a line if you have any questions--Cailil talk 00:38, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Antifeminist response

This section overflows with POV language. The very conflation of the men's rights position and "the claim that men are naturally superior to women" is an outright slander against the men's rights circles. "Unfortunately" in the last sentence is a value judgement. I will now try to clean it up a bit as a quick fix, but the section needs a thorough rewrite.

Rulatir (talk) 17:04, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

Yeah it was an opinion piece really. I've replaced it with a very short summary - which although imperfect is a better start--Cailil talk 17:57, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] This article exhibits a bug in Wikipedia software

To see the bug, open the article and search for text "This view actually reinforced", without quotes. In the rendered article, this text appears directly in the "Profeminist men’s response to ‘men’s rights’" section. Now if you try to edit the section, you can see that in the source the fragment between "This view actually reinforced" and "a backlash from women and men alike" appears in a different section, way below where it shows in the rendered page, with several sections in between. (Placed in the wrong context, the fragment appears so POV that I wanted to delete it, and that's how I discovered the bug).

Verified not to be a browser problem by checking in Opera, Firefox and Konqueror.

Rulatir (talk) 17:23, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

well spotted Rulatir, it wasn't a bug just somebody screwing up code. The template <ref name=Flood> needed a " / " before the last >. Omitting this last / prevents the template from closing and so it hid all the missing text. It's fixed now--Cailil talk 17:31, 25 December 2007 (UTC)
I still consider it a bug unless references can be nested, which I doubt. If references cannot be nested, then Wiki software should emit a warning when encountering an opening <ref> tag while another is open, as this is certainly screwed-up code. Rulatir (talk) 17:38, 25 December 2007 (UTC)
Your right that would be helpful. Actually I think refs can be nested using a {{ABC : xyz}} system, there are a number of styles (which you can see at Wikipedia:Footnotes) but you're right the short coming of all of them is coding language - all of us even the most experienced code-slingers occasionally typo (or in my case quite often) and will cause serious problems. You could propose such a warning at Wikipedia talk:Footnotes - it certainly is an excellent suggestion. Merry Christmas--Cailil talk 20:54, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] changes

I've made a number of changes to the page. A lot of them are removals and reductions. There is a lot of OR here and it has to go. The other problem is structure. The way the 3 responses are listed is horrendous for readability as well as being confusing from a logical perspective. What needs to happen is the page needs to summarize the 3 pages in question: Profeminism, Antifeminism and Masculism. It then needs to show the interaction of these ideas with feminism, chronologically or thematically. What we have at the moment is a hodge podge of chronological strcuture and thematic structure--Cailil talk 17:56, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Started expanding intro, will try to incorporate summaries for the three pages in question. Phyesalis (talk) 04:25, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] feminism and abolitionism common ground (intro)

I have a problem with this sentence:

In the 19th century, first wave feminists and abolitionists found common ground as they worked together in order to promote the rights of women and slaves.

This strikes me as a "noble case" PR plug for feminism. Feminists and abolitionists did find common ground in that both fought for improving the position of a group they perceived as oppressed, but it is not true that the interaction taking place on this common ground was always friendly (however it did stimulate dialogue). Rulatir (talk) 20:31, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

Its unsourced and it does look like OR. I'd say delete that paragraph. When a sourced one can be found summarizing pro-feminism it could go into that space--Cailil talk 20:44, 6 January 2008 (UTC)
There is an undeniable relationship between feminism and abolitionism, as suggested by the term "feminist abolitionist". I don't understand how this is dubious or harmful to the article, although I am open to arguments to the contrary. It may need to be reworded, but I think removing it is a bit excessive. Perhaps there is some understanding of the abolitionist movement as an exclusively male discourse? I have to say, I think not. And yes, many men disputed the relationship between feminism and abolitionism, I don't see how the previous unreliable source contradicts the idea that discourses between feminists and abolitionists influenced one another.
Perhaps we could start with a source like this:
"As an organized force, feminism dates from abolitionism in the early 1830s.(5) Abolitionism was the radical anti-slavery movement which demanded the immediate cessation of slavery on the grounds that every man was a self-owner; that is, every human being has moral jurisdiction over his or her own body. It was the first organized, radical movement in which women played prominent roles and from which a woman's movement sprang. Abbie Kelley (1810-1887), an abolitionist-feminist, observed: "We have good cause to be grateful to the slave, for the benefit we have received to ourselves, in working for him. In striving to strike his irons off, we found most surely that we were manacled ourselves."(6) The modern historian, Aileen S. Kraditor, wrote:
"A few women in the abolitionist movement in the 1830s ... found their religiously inspired work for the slave impeded by prejudices against public activity by women. They and many others began to ponder the parallels between women's status and the Negro's status, and to notice that white men usually applied the principles of natural rights and the ideology of individualism only to themselves."(7)
In the early 19th century, married women could not enter into contracts without their husband's consent, women lost all title to property or future earnings upon marriage, children were legally controlled by the father, and women were often without recourse against kidnapping or imprisonment by husbands and other male relatives.
Within abolitionism, women's rights stirred hot debate. The strongest advocate of women's rights was the libertarian William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879), editor of the Liberator, who insisted that anti-slavery was a battle for human rights, not male rights.(8) Many of the abolitionists who opposed Garrison on this agreed that women were self-owners but resisted mixing woman's rights with anti-slavery for fear it would hurt the latter cause; Theodore Weld (1803-1895) exemplified this position. Through his encouragement, Angelina Grimke (1805-1879), Sarah Grimke (1792-1873), and Abbie Kelley became the first women in America to do lecture tours before audiences that included men.' Nevertheless, he admonished them to stop introducing woman's rights into their speeches."
There might be undeniable relationship between feminism and abolitionism, but discussion of such relationship belongs to an article that is directly about feminism. This article here is about men's responses to feminism, and I don't see how feminism's ties with abolitionism are specifically relevant to this. There were a couple of preocuppying political issues at that time, and feminism's involvement in any of these issues would result in increased dialogue between feminists and men, simply because politicians were men back then. Rulatir (talk) 22:55, 6 January 2008 (UTC)
So when we consider the known discourse that took place between abolitionists like Garrison and Douglass (if this too is in doubt, I'd be happy to provide more info on this) and feminists like Anthony, the Grimkes, and others, how can we deny that the two influenced one another? I'd be happy to find some more sources for the article if anyone would like it.Phyesalis (talk) 21:11, 6 January 2008 (UTC)
I don't deny it, I just think it is undue detail that doesn't belong here. Plus, your examples of the "known discourse" above mention feminist support for abolitionism, abolitionist support for feminism, and abolitionist objections to feminism, but fail to mention feminist objections to abolitionism, and the racist leanings of some feminists after the Civil War, mentioned later in the same source. Telling all about feminism-abolitionism interaction would by encyclopaedic, though still undue weight in this article. Telling only the part that puts feminism in good light is a PR plug. Rulatir (talk) 22:55, 6 January 2008 (UTC)
Actually, if all you wanted to do was change "together" to "respectively", it's not that big of a deal, but why don't we just take out "respectively" or reword it for more accuracy and detail? Phyesalis (talk) 21:22, 6 January 2008 (UTC)
Because removing "respectively" would leave the implication that the political interaction between feminists and abolitionists has always been friendly and cooperative, which is counter-factual. Rulatir (talk) 22:57, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

This is going off-topic. First this article is about "men and feminism" that is male interactions with, not just responses to feminism. However the relationship of the abolitionist movement to feminism is not all that relevant. Male feminists/Profeminism and Antifeminism should be the broad political focus of this article. The work of people like Raymond Williams and Elaine Showalter's response to it could be at least one academic focus of the article.

The problem with doing anything else is unless the sources explicitly deals with the issue as the interaction of men and feminism using it here creates OR. Linking histories of movements will turn this into an essay not an article. The piece Rulatir is mentioning needs to be replaced.

I'm going to recommend a few books: Men in Feminism Alice A. Jardine and Paul Smith and Men Doing Feminism ed. by Sandra Bartky & Tom Digby and also Warren Farrell's books and Hoff Sommers' The war against boys. This where some of teh research is we need to record it--Cailil talk 23:17, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

Good point about the focus of the article. I wasn't keeping that specific lens in mind. Phyesalis (talk) 01:07, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] pro-feminist response section intro

Even those men who have identified as profeminists (in support of the feminist movement) have occasionally fallen short of the goals of the feminist movement. Others have sometimes been prematurely self-congratulatory. Frequently, men who were profeminists were already well-positioned to support feminism because of strong feminist influences in their lives. That being said, male profeminists have contributed in many significant ways to the feminist movement.

This paragraph contains blatantly POV language. Phrases like "fallen short of" and "prematurely self-congratulatory" position pro-feminism as the ultimate enlightenment male thinkers are expected to strive for, and do with varying success. I now boldly remove all of it but the last sentence which is factual and to the point. Rulatir (talk) 22:44, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] pro-feminism's last word privilege

  • 2.2.1.1 Profeminist response to the mythopoetic men's movement
  • 2.3.1.1 Profeminist men’s response to ‘men’s rights’

These sections unduly privilege the pro-feminist POV with the last word opportunity. Of all the three discourses identified by Kimmel (who is btw. an adherent of one, not a neutral researcher), only pro-feminism's responses to the other factions are mentioned. Rulatir (talk) 22:44, 6 January 2008 (UTC)