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WOMEN IN THE SCIENTIFIC ELITE Separating womanhood and femininity, categories of identification with women and feminists It can be concluded from the subheading that certain authors” separate femininity and womanhood from each other. The concept of womanhood refers to biological considerations, sex in our interpretation, while femininity however refers to womanliness, signifying characteristics that are picked up during socialisation, or those characteristics considered feminine.”“* Toril Moi has been able to create the most comprehensive summary as to how the latter are interwoven or differentiated. Moi believes that no matter how we interpret femininity (be it the classical, patriarchal or the new, feminist approach), one thing remains true: that “patriarchalism intends to make us believe there is something we can view as the essence of womanhood, and that this is what we can call femininity. Feminists intend to dissolve this belief however; they posit that women do without a doubt belong to the female gender, this in itself does not mean that they all become feminine.” Similarly to a number of other social identities, gender carries a strong cultural component as well.*“° Moreover, learning the social gender role and the categorisations attached to it is one of the earliest and strongest forms of the internalisation of a collective identity. People are much more likely to tend to categorise and define others based on their gender rather than their race, age or social status. The foundation of the social gender is discrimination stemming from physical differences.**° This is exactly why the initial point of papers examining female identity is that while one could not consider them to be ahomogenous collective, women do feel some kind of commonality with their own collective (which has developed upon the shared destiny, the shared political-ideological minority identity originating from the onset of suffrage movements). Maria Neményi writes that the situation of women is therefore similar to other disadvantaged and/or minority groups.*”” Feminism is a political discourse, the history of which can be interpreted through the effort to 242 Moi: Feminista irodalomkritika, 240. 2 Chen and associates, when asking women in their survey to name five characteristics that can be applied to women as a collective, found that those strongly identifying with women have listed the same traits as those identifying themselves to a lesser degree. Those having a stronger identification with women have rather defined themselves with positive traits used to describe women, unlike those having a lower commitment to women as a collective. (Chen et al., quoted in: Van Breen et al.: A Multiple Identity, 2) This latter phenomenon appeared in group no. 5 of the groups established by me. Moi: Feminista irodalomkritika, 239. 245 Van Breen et al.: A Multiple Identity, 2. 24 Glick-Fiske: The Ambivalent Sexism Inventory, 492. 247 Acsády: Megtettük-e azt..., 179. a + 79 +
