The development of feminism from a social trend of thought to philosophical thought did not happen overnight, but went through many stages of theoretical and practical struggle. Judging from the development of contemporary western feminist theory and practice, Julia Kristeva divides the development of feminism into three stages: the first stage is "free feminism", which emphasizes women's right to join the established social order as equal participants and considers women's problems under the background of "universality"; The second stage is "differential feminism", which emphasizes the inherent enthusiasm of women, abandons social order and advocates the establishment of a society or group where women can survive without the influence of men; The third stage is the contemporary feminist theory formed under the post-modern background, with the dichotomy of "equality" and "difference" and "male/female" as mandatory metaphysical categories, and the goal of feminism must be to develop a society that transcends the gender opposition between men and women. The first stage or the first wave of feminist movement rose and developed from19th century to 1940s. The combination of feminist movement and anti-feudal movement began to appear as early as the French Revolution, and grew in scale in the middle of19th century. This stage, together with the revolutionary movement of social freedom and liberation, has become an important part of social revolution and a standard and yardstick to measure social liberation. Women pursue equal political rights with men and think that as a part of human beings, men and women are equal. By the 1920s, this goal was basically achieved. In the early study of feminist theoretical differences, it was mainly around natural gender (gender). The feminist gender survey points out that gender is given or imposed on women, and describes the physiological differences between women and men, which is enlightening. Simon Beauvoir's The Second Sex; Paying attention to gender differences refers to the natural gender shown by the physiological characteristics of men and women, but she breaks the view that gender is innate. Beauvoir pointed out that the so-called natural gender is not naturally formed, and the gender distinction of people is not innate, but is endowed and imposed, especially that women are the lower sex and men are the upper sex, which is a manifestation of social inequality. Simon Beauvoir pointedly pointed out in the preface, "What is a woman? Some people say, "A woman is just a uterus". But when talking about some women, she pointed out, "Today, the situation of women shows that women are as free and independent as men, although men try to oppress them everywhere in this world, pushing them to a position less important than men, hoping that they will always be in a subordinate position and limit their fate in a narrow range. "

The second stage, or the second wave of feminism, arose in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, and its keynote was to eliminate gender differences, which led to the upsurge of feminist theoretical research. More women devoted themselves to the struggle for more freedom of culture, history and customs for women. Pay attention to the investigation of social categories, analyze the personality differences caused by gender categories, and form the theoretical creation of feminism in all aspects; The difference between masculinity and femininity; As a formal academic research, feminist theory has gradually developed into an important research field of humanities. Although The Second Sex was published earlier here (1949), it played a great role in promoting the second wave of feminist movement. Beauvoir urged women to go beyond physical restrictions and pay more attention to the constraints of politics and law on women's freedom. Kate. Xiaomi's Sex Politics (1969) introduced the concept of "patriarchy" into feminist theory and injected new meaning into it. Patriarchy not only means that men rule women as the center of power, but also includes male elders ruling the younger generation. Xiaomi directly and prominently linked gender with politics, and was ruled by chauvinism. He regarded men's oppression of women as the most basic, universal and unreasonable political form of human social and historical rule, and aroused women to unite with all mankind to overthrow the patriarchal rule. Miller brought this radical political attitude into literary criticism in order to resist the absolutely authoritative new criticism theory at that time and become a model of feminist literary criticism.

Therefore, people began to put forward the concept of gender, that is, social gender, or historical gender, or cultural gender. The concept of sex is an illustrative criticism, from which we can see the imprint of social inequality on gender, the distinction between primary and secondary sex and the distinction between superior and subordinate sex. Teresa de Laudy pointed out in the article "Gender/Gender Mechanism" that for gender, "it is not just a representation in the sense that every word and every symbol refers to an object, a thing or a living organism. Gender is actually a representation of a relationship, a relationship belonging to a class, a group and a category. ..... So, gender does not refer to individuals, but refers to a relationship, a social relationship. In other words, it refers to a class of individuals. " It can be said that it is "organically linked to the social inequality system". In his view, gender-social gender system is not only a social and cultural construction, but also a language mechanism, a re-expression system that defines the meaning of individuals in society (identity, value, prestige, position in blood relationship and social status, etc.). ). If the restatement of gender represents social status with different meanings, then someone is represented or represents himself as a man or a woman, which means that the whole meaning system of gender is recognized.

It is found that women are endowed with inferior gender and social affiliation by society, which leads to the bankruptcy of natural gender theory. The representation of gender is also the construction of gender, which reveals the social differences between men and women. On the one hand, we can see the insurmountable gap between men and women, and at the same time, it shows completely different femininity and masculinity endowed by social values. The social regulations on femininity have shaped the image of women, and also stipulated their fate, life state and family life state. It has been seen that the contribution of gender theory lies in the concept that sex belongs to "gender", and human beings realize that gender exists at any stage of human society since class history. I just didn't make conscious observation and understanding. In the process of realizing the existence and development of sex genus, human body and mind are constructed as a historical and social gender-sex genus. These processes are constantly changing over time. Historian Scott summed up gender/gender in Gender: An Effective Category of Historical Analysis. Gender/gender is an integral part of social relations based on gender differences and a basic way to distinguish rights relations. Here, he emphasized two points: first, sex/gender is the expression of social relations, not determined by physical gender; Second, gender/gender is a way of existence of power relations.