Rationalist Elements

To identify advocacy objectives you are geared to go to the roots of things. To start from the beginning and gain some experience to match your intellectual. It would be wise to steep in the traditions of the required field or clan, so to tap the spirit and ideas of predecessors as well as their knowledge.

In recent feminist politics we have had to acknowledge that we cannot identify how women who are different from ourselves-- women of other races, ethnicities, religions, classes, sexual orientations -- experience oppression,; nor can we know this for women of the past.

Feminism of the late 1820s turns our attention to the most extraordinary of early women's movements that grew out of a social movement whose members called themselves Saint-Simonians after their deceased leader, Saint-Simon. They pledged themselves to develop his ideas for a world order based on peace, love, and cooperation. Having first developed the more rationalist elements of Saint-Simon's ideas on social and economic justice, they had, by the late 1820s, begun to emphasize the more romantic elements of his work and especially his ideas for new religion based on love. Woman and the social relationship between the sexes emerged as the movement's central concern.

Although their ideas and acts belong to the specific historical and cultural context of the romantic age, the Saint-Simoniennes share with our contemporaries striking similarities that set them apart from other feminists. These so called radicals analyze the repression of women's bodies as structurally fundamental to a system of social and economic oppression. Claire Demar, called a "parole de femme" (word of woman)" and her essay Ma Loi d'avenir (My Law of the Future)- Many of these writings have never been published; all were until recently unavailable in English.

Although we have put behind us romantic version of phenomenon - living a moment of hardheadedness - a review on the romantic decay which delighted in knights in armour is revealing how far we have gone in cashing out differences. Perhaps it is because of the rock and the ruins that art has now committed to - competitive urbanism, hard body, praised for its functionality, governance of banal, and common, advocating shallow approach to life experiences.

Historicaly we challenged religion to strengthen individuality and sense of self; however we plunged indifferently in to the banal wave. By reducing to common and ordinary we have eluded our experience of art. Incessant strive for development and expansion have seized boarders of locality and sense of belonging. The excitement of the moment of inspiration and finding is replaced by flow of data through the one time magic box of TV. Rationality to return to the system of established diffinitions that we have freed ourselves is likely.

Society, science, education, art strikes us, both man and woman, when brief and witty even brutal amongst younger generation. Only efficient clarity is respected.
The obsession with hard-hitting, populist, eye-catching, has become a form of consiousness of todays - that eradicates introspection. At the beginning it was daring and modern but now it has been prisoning our creativity, progress and the direction that is taking is far from social justice and social inclusion. Hooligans, in numbers, are seizing the driving seats.

The fast and easy is dominating human experiences to the point of elimination of the aesthetic in contemporary taste, eliminating the genteel cultural of the old as a way of neutralising the old elite education as well as culture and creating new class identity. In this class war, even at Oxford, the city of dreaming spires, dons are going through historic challenge, not to hand over more powers to business. These were the democratic dons who took oxford to the masses through out England and Wales, in the form of lectures or seminars given in town halls, public libraries, mechanics institutes, village schoolrooms or cooperative societies to bring liberal education to the masses.

The rescue operas of 19th century, although inferior productions intended for a mass audience, still in each of the operas—in both Britain and France— participates in the ongoing national debate about the shock of sudden 'class transformation', and the anxiety of changing gender roles within the family structure. An examination of the theory and practice of French feminists in the 1830s can also help to clarify the many meanings of "difference" used by contemporary feminists. Their blending of sex and class analysis is a model for a feminism that is both radical and socialist, sensitive to the specificity of both sexual and class experience and dedicated to the attainment of universal ideal of equality. The same claims were advanced by Etta Palm. She wrote that "justice. . . calls all individuals to the equality of rights, without discrimination of sex; the laws of a free people must be equal for all beings. . . . The powers of husband and wife must be equal. . . . Girls [must have] a moral education equal to that of their brothers; for education is for the soul what watering is for plants."