The Problem That Has a Name: The Feminine Concentration Camp

Abstract

“Feminist consciousness is consciousness of victimization”, Sandra Lee Bartky notes in her examination of the phenomenology of oppression, explaining that “to come to see oneself as victim” is to have “an altered perception of oneself and one’s society” (15; emphasis in original). She is convinced that for women such consciousness of victimization is “immediate and revelatory”, allowing us to “discover what social reality is really like” and gain knowledge of, in Bartky’s words, “an alien and hostile force outside of oneself” that creates and perpetuates “the blatantly unjust treatment of women” and enforces “a stifling and oppressive system of sex-role differentiation” (15–16). While feminists have debated at length what exactly this “hostile power” refers to — “society” and “patriarchy” for some; for others, it is simply men — the recognition of women’s victim status is inexorably linked to the awakening of a feminist awareness, on a personal as well as collective level. Some proto-feminist treatises are well aware of women’s disadvantaged social position and their exclusion from “man-kind” — indeed modern feminism begins with Mary Wollstonecraft’s famous Vindication (1792), in which she examines how social constructions of femininity misdirect women away from the “first object of laudable ambition”, that is, “to obtain a character as a human being, regardless of the distinction of sex” — yet it was only in the latter half of the twentieth century and with the advent of second wave feminism that women’s individual and combined victimization became the focus ofa sustained women-centred politics and activism.