Postmodernism is a movement that relies on experience over abstract principles that focuses on relative truths of the individual rather than an explanation considered valid for all groups and cultures. The concepts of postmodernism lead to an understanding of feminist theory.

An example of the re-interpretation of a generally considered to be true concept occurs when the fifties era is examined in the United States. Every one knows that many women who worked for the war effort married their boy friends returning home after World War II. The myth is that afterward, all of them were content to stay home and raise their families while their husbands worked.

The truth was that many of the men who returned from World War II did not have college educations and the skills needed to adequately support their families. If a couple did not have the means or the extended family to rely on, the mother often had to return to work.

Capitalism is based on consumerism and women were willing to work if they wanted to compete for material objects in order to keep up with their friends. Latch-key children existed in the fifties and sixties, not just in the last twenty years.

When re-interpreting history, literature, and philosophy, feminism comes into play where women seek to have their own identity based on what they have, not from what they lack because of gender. In this pure form, women seek power and ways to get it.

There is so much confusion about feminism as simply being a movement about receiving equal pay for equal work. Again, that concept defines women by pointing out women in terms of what they lack. John Stuart Mill advocated women receiving less pay than men in order that they would stay home and raise their children.

His utilitarian concept of “working for the greater good,” meant that it was a greater good for men to be out working in the world while the wife stayed home. However, he did not test his theory in his own marriage. He and his wife, Harriet Taylor Mill, had no children together. 

Postmodernism includes post-structural feminism which is the weaving of power and structure into a discourse that forces the individual back on herself for her identity. Post-structural feminism is freeing because it provides women with a way of viewing themselves by their actions rather than defining themselves by what they failed to accomplish the same things that men could have.

Using a post-modern approach can incorporate three ideas. The ideas are post-structuralism, intertextualism that challenges the closed structure of a text by weaving it among other disciplines, and the new historicism which tries to incorporate the linking of networks such as institutions, practices and beliefs of a period of culture in order to be able to examine it in its entirety.

Using these ideas, feminist theory is born. Using a post-modern approach, women can then examine themselves intellectually with all of their beauty and their flaws, instead of in spite of them.