Women and the Five Faces of Oppression

Sammy Karon

1 February 2015

Iris Young defines oppression as “structural phenomena that immobilize or diminish a group” (42). Catherine MacKinnon’s discussion of gender discrimination thus focuses on women as a social group oppressed by privilege men and the legal structures of capitalist society. MacKinnon specifically disagrees with how women are either evaluated by their similarities or differences to men, with men being the standard measure of value in all aspects of life. Because women are measured in comparison to men, they are automatically less than men because they are the “other,” and anything they generate in their life is still evaluated in terms of male value, not female. Young would categorize this issue as exploitation, or the transferring of results of labor from one group to benefit another (49). America’s economy is structured so that women work for men, and the results of their labor continue this system in a positive-feedback loop, with men growing richer and more powerful by each dollar a woman generates. MacKinnon notes that women face “material desperation” that drives them to the lowest paying jobs in society, which I see as an example of marginalization and powerlessness (88). Although women are less marginalized than some other groups in terms of employment, the current system does marginalize women in the way that it cannot or will make room for them in executive positions of industry. I see the lack of women in top business positions as evidence that the system wants to protect male dominance by preventing women from entering the elite workforce, and I see it as an issue of Young’s powerlessness: because women cannot get executive positions in significant numbers, they cannot mediate the decisions of men which are harming them in the first place. Thus, women are exploited for their labor and powerless to the extent that they cannot take control of their industries to change the pattern of injustice. MacKinnon’s argument does not take up the issue of cultural imperialism, because women are so distinctly different than men that they do not feel invisible. In other words, men depend on blatant gender differences to enforce discrimination. However, MacKinnon does bring up Young’s last category of oppression, violence, in her paper. The fact that one out three women face rape or attempted rape in their lifetime just because of their gender exemplifies Young’s definition of violence, “living with fear of random, unprovoked attacks” (61). Because Young considers a group to be oppressed if they can be said to face any one of the five categories of oppression, women would without a doubt be considered an oppressed group by Young’s standard.

Works Cited

MacKinnon, Catherine. “Difference and Dominance: On Sex Discrimination,” in The Moral          Foundation of Civil Rights, eds. Robert K. Fullinwinder and Claudia Mills. Rowman and         Littlefield, 1986, pp. 32-45.

Young, Iris Marion. “Five Faces of Oppression,” in Rethinking Power, ed. Thomas Wartenberg.   Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992, pp.39-65.