Feminist criticism of contemporary Western political thought

Abstract

Feminism is an intellectual trend and intellectual system that seeks to achieve women's rights and interests. It calls for gender equality politically, economically and socially. Strengthening the role of women in political participation. It works to change conditions to achieve that equality. It is intended to restore the intellectual and actual balance of power relations between men and women. And the struggle with the patriarchal system. Masculinity refers to the socially constructed characteristics that society expects of the male gender. With the increasing male dominance over women’s capabilities, they were deprived of lordship, priesthood, and wealth. They were removed from power, knowledge, work, and production, and all of these activities became the preserve of the male priesthood. The masculine ideology generated by the media, artists, teachers, historians, fathers, priests and public figures controls how men think about themselves. Feminism is essentially based on rejecting masculine discourse and its centrality in Western civilization. It attempts to strike at the logical foundations of masculine ideology. Feminism represents cognitive and intellectual awareness against male hegemony. Feminism requires a closer look at history, because it embodies male interests. So feminism rejected Western political thought, rejected the theories of Western male political thought and demanded a new field. She accused traditional philosophers of having formulated their theories, teachings, and standards related to women based on their own male experiences. Feminist intellectual awareness advances over male discourse. Its goal can be to identify the feminist movement's most important criticisms of Western political thought, and analyze the extent of its influence, as well as to highlight its most important thinkers and state its critical ideas. Based on the importance of the study and its hypothesis, and in order to understand feminism in Western political thought and the role of feminism in it, more than one scientific research method was relied upon, including the descriptive, analytical and critical method.