Caplan's Definition of Feminism

Why it's wrong and how to fix it

Feminists have sometimes been wary of defining feminism. According to one feminist, “definition is a male prejudice”—“the day we start defining feminism it’s lost its vitality.”¹ I don’t know what that means quite, but one worry about defining feminism is that feminism is too intellectually diverse to be responsibly captured by a single definition.

It would still be nice to have a definition though. People need a way to know if they’re a feminist, a non-feminist, or an anti-feminist, and they can’t do that without a definition of feminism to measure themselves against. Also, it looks bad when representatives of an intellectual movement refuse to define contentious terms. When theists insist that God is wholly indefinable, or LGBTQ+ advocates refuse to say what a woman is, they invite mockery, and well-meaning people who sincerely want to know what their position is are are left in the dark.

In his recent essay, “Don’t be a Feminist”—the title piece in a provocative new book you can buy here—economist Bryan Caplan defends his own definition of feminism. I’m going to argue it doesn’t work. But neither—and here I side with Caplan—do some of the more common definitions.

As Caplan notes, many common colloquial definitions of feminism are trivial, and don’t accurately sort people who are feminists from people who aren’t feminists. Consider:

“Feminism is the view that men and women should be treated equally”

and:

“Feminism is the radical view that women are people”

These definitions are trivial: They state positions almost no one disagrees with. And they fail to accurately sort people who are feminists from people who aren’t feminists. As Caplan notes,

“virtually all non-feminists in the United States believe exactly the same thing. In this careful 2016 survey², for example, only 33% of men said they were feminists, yet 94% of men agreed that ‘men and women should be social, political, and economic equals’.”

Caplan is right here. If the position picked out by ‘feminism’, in ordinary English, really were just the view that men and women should be treated equally, or just the view that women are people, we’d expect its usage in English to behave accordingly. That is, we would not expect to see the vast majority of non-feminists explicitly affirming a moral claim that non-feminists are supposed to disagree with by definition.

By analogy, consider the disagreement between theists and atheists. Theists say God exists, atheists that he doesn’t. Suppose theists started defining ‘theism’ as ‘the radical view that there is something out there’. This would be a bad definition of ‘theism’ because it makes theism, a controversial position, uncontroversially true (obviously, there is “something” out there), and it fails to accurately sort people who are theists from people who are atheists. Atheists deny what theists believe. Yet no atheist, unless she is a solipsist, denies that “there is something out there”.

As Caplan writes,

“Any sensible definition of feminism must [. . .] specify what feminists believe that non-feminists dis-believe. Defining feminism as ‘the view that men and women should be treated equally’ makes about as much sense as defining feminism as ‘the view that the sky is blue.’ Sure, feminists believe in the blueness of the sky - but who doesn’t?

In place of these definitions, Caplan offers his own. Feminism, according to Caplan, is ‘the view that society generally treats men more fairly than women’. This definition is better, by Caplan’s lights, because it accurately divides feminists from non-feminists along non-trivial lines. Ask a feminist whether society generally treats men more fairly than women, and she’ll almost certainly say yes. Ask a non-feminist the same question and she’ll probably say either that she doesn’t know, or isn’t sure.

I think Caplan’s definition is quite good, but not good enough. Here is an obvious type of counter-example: suppose there were a Society of Patriarchs, comprised of evil men, controlling the world, who’s job it is to make sure society treats men more fairly than women. Assuming they succeed in this, the patriarchs would believe that society treats women less fairly. By Caplan’s definition, the patriarchs would be feminists. But the patriarchs would not be feminists, because they actively promote unequal treatment.

For this reason, feminism can’t merely be the belief that society treats men more fairly than women. The definition also needs a normative element, saying something to the effect of, ‘feminists find this fact regrettable and support its undoing’.³

I think Caplan’s definition faces a second problem as well: Plausibly, there could be feminists who believed that society treats women more fairly than men, even if there are few actual feminists who hold this belief.

Suppose there’s another world war—I think we’re on our third—and all fighting-age men are drafted. Suppose the remaining adult men are kept at home, but ritually humiliated and beaten for their lack of bravado, and all under-age boys trained in sub-human conditions for the day they’ll eventually be drafted.

The women and girls, by contrast, are treated as they’re treated now. No unjust burdens placed on women and girls are abolished; no new ones are added, either.

In this scenario, the moral priority would be to make things better for the men and boys, and the majority of society’s attention would be on ending the war, the draft, the beatings, etc. But suppose that a group of activists got together who reasoned as follows: “Obviously, society treats men more unfairly than women. But there are still ways that society treats women unfairly. Since almost all the attention is focused on the men’s issues, we are going to prioritize women’s issues, and focus on those in our activism. Abortion, violence against women, respect in the workplace—those are our priorities.”

Question: What would this group of activists be called?

Answer: Feminists, no?

It seems bizarre to suppose that because these activists believe that men are treated more unfairly than women, the activists must not be feminists. The way we decide if a word appropriately refers to a thing in general is to apply the word to the thing, consult our linguistic intuitions, and see if it feels right to do so. And when we try applying the ‘feminist’ adjective to these hypothetical women’s rights activists, it feels right to do so and unnatural not to. The word ‘feminist’, when appropriately deployed in English, does not entail that its object believes that women are treated less fairly than men, even if nearly all actual feminists do hold that belief.

This in mind, here is a loose working definition of feminism with an edge on Caplan’s:

Feminism is the view that society treats women unfairly, plus the view that that’s bad, plus a sufficiently high prioritization of women’s equality (socially, politically, etc.) among the issues one is concerned about.

This definition is as good as Caplan’s, because it predicts the data that spurred Caplan’s redefinition: If people think society treats men more fairly than women, they are more likely to give high priority to injustices faced by women and girls among the issues they’re most concerned about. And if people don’t think society treats women less fairly than men, they are less likely to rank women’s equality among the issues they’re most concerned about. So the proposed definition—like Caplan’s—explains why feminists tend to think that society treats women less fairly than men, and why non-feminists tend not to.

But the proposed definition is better in two respects: It captures the normative aspect of feminism, and allows—as seems intuitively correct—that there could be feminists who think society treats women more fairly than men.

You might worry that “. . . a sufficiently high prioritization of women’s equality . . .” is objectionably vague, since there’s no sharp way to classify what counts as ‘sufficient’. If the worry here is just that there’s vagueness in the proposed definition, that’s a worry for almost all definitions. We can’t say precisely when stubble becomes a beard, but that shouldn’t stop us from defining ‘stubble’ and ‘beard’ at all.

If the worry is more that there’s just too much imprecision, the objection has more force. I admit, there is no clear way to define what counts as a “sufficiently high” prioritization of women’s equality among the issues one’s most concerned about—but, then again, this problem is equally present when we’re trying to sort people into other political ideologies. For example, you might think that to count as a conservative your political views need to reflect a significant prioritisation of tradition, hierarchy, institutional authority, and so on. We manage well enough in cases like that, so I doubt the vagueness worry undoes this proposal.

One set of cases the proposed definition has trouble with are cases of past thinkers, living prior to any feminist tradition, who meet all the definition’s criteria, but for whom it would be anachronistic to call feminists. The thing to do there is probably to add a fourth condition—that the thinker’s beliefs must somehow be causally tethered to the feminist tradition—and then, to avoid circularity, define ‘feminist tradition’ in terms of a cluster of relatively recent, historically specific beliefs, labels, and practices that are recognisably part of the feminist movement. I don’t know enough feminist intellectual history to try that, so I won’t, but in any case, this problem doesn’t make trouble for the proposed definition when it comes to sorting thinkers in the here and now.

1. Quoted in: Offen, Karen. 1988. “Defining Feminism: A Comparative Historical Approach”, Signs, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Autumn), p. 121n4

2. https://files.kff.org/attachment/topline-methodology-washington-post-kaiser-family-foundation-feminism-survey

3. This, by the way, is present in many standard definitions of feminism. See:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/feminism

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminist-philosophy/

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/feminism