ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the suffrage as an equality campaign; by contrast, laws protecting women from hazardous working conditions may be seen as reflecting a difference strategy. It describes a similar split in feminist emphases between, for example, “leaning in” and provides for nursing mothers. The chapter shows how feminist interventions serve to reorient the field of everyday life studies and explores the feminist contributions made to this field by two women – one well-known, the other neglected, and both overshadowed by male colleagues. It demonstrates that the continued explanatory value of “equality versus difference” in parsing feminist approaches. In the 1980s, as women’s studies was gaining a foothold in the US academy, feminist theorists commonly made a distinction between “equality” and “difference” approaches to the project of unseating patriarchy. Generally speaking, the first pursues equal access to traditionally male institutions and prerogatives, while the second recognizes the specificity of women’s lives and redeems qualities traditionally denigrated as “feminine.”.
