How has feminism changed our understanding of power inequalities in western societies?
In pre-Cartesian, pre-Enlightenment western societies, the concepts of power and its distribution, were sparingly, if ever, discussed. Power of the era was assumed to be centralized in the hands of One, or the few and their claim to power was, often times, facilitated by the Divine and, as such, was not to be challenged.
It took Descartes to exclaim his famous cogito ergo sum and draw sharp distinction between human mind and body. Further, it took philosophers of the Enlightenment to formulate the notion that truth is the ultimate source of power for first challenges of centralized power to appear.
These, mostly verbal, confrontations culminated in the French Revolution and in the post-Enlightenment period where several schools of thought emerged and theorized social power.
