conservative feminists

• traditionally emphasised the social and political significance of gender divisions, arguing that they imply that the sexual division of labour between women and men is natural and inevitable. Gender is thus one of the factors that give society its organic and hierarchical character.
•  some attempts to construct a theory of female liberation based on the belief in ‘equal but different’ roles and the natural division between the public and private areas of social life
• Conservative feminists take the view that women should have ‘sovereignty’ within their own sphere of life. Cultural manifestations of this approach, such as the strict dress code of many Islamic countries, may appear repressive but in reality, they strengthen respect for women and their freedom.
•  conservative feminists argue that too much feminist theory attacks the vital role of women in child rearing and homemaking. Indeed, many women actually want to be family-centred, and find deep fulfilment there, rather than in careers and salaried work in the public sphere.
• feminist writers, such as Jean Bethke Elshtain in Public Man, Private Woman (1981), have evolved a variation of these views and claim that women’s life experience, for example of motherhood, has nourished values such as cooperation, tenderness and sensitivity that have universal application