INTRODUCTION TO FEMINISM

You educate a man; you educate a man. You educate a woman; you educate a generation. Brigham Young Feminism is the radical notion that women are people." Rebecca West Feminism is a movement associated with the doctrine of advocating rights of women equal to those of men. The movement aims to define, establish, and defend equal political, economic, and social rights for women across all spheres. Feminism promotes gender equality and opposes the perpetuation of gender discrimination in economic, political, legal, and social structures. In addition to it feminism also seeks to establish equal opportunities for women in the fields of education and employment. It is essentially normative and reforming or anarchistic movement. The question which arises is that what was the reason for Feminism? In earlier times, women were deprived of basic rights such as the right to vote or right to ancestral property. They were kept at bay from politics and higher education, and their existence was limited to doing household chores. Physical violence and emotional abuse by men was customary. It was this gross injustice that prompted women to rise against the oppression they faced, and collectively assert their rights. This is because gender is one the main factors that divides the society. All feminists are of the view that understanding of gender is crucial to understanding of society. All the social structures that are based in gender casts women as inferior. It creates a hierarchy with men at the top and women at the bottom which is commonly known as a patriarchal society. The word patriarchy simply means rule of the father. Simply put, this is the kind of society that advantages men and disadvantages women. Therefore, patriarchy society is unfair to women and needs reform. Feminists differ in their views as to the sorts of change that are necessary. For some, legal change is sufficient for example, so that women are protected by anti discrimination legislation. For other, change in social norms is needed, such that women are no longer seen
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as destined for motherhood and domestic work, for example. For still other feminists, even deeper change is needed, because patriarchy is rooted deeply in our attitudes and preferences. Nonetheless, all feminists share the goal of gender equality. They want women and men to have an equal status, and to enjoy equal respect. For most feminists, an important part of gender equality of opportunity and, for many, greater equality of resources is also needed. Feminists are also concerned to increase or protect womens freedom. For many feminists, women should be free to choose their own ways of life and should not be constrained by traditional or stereotypical rules about feminine behaviour.1 Feminist activists campaign for women's rights such as in contract law, property, and voting while also promoting bodily integrity, autonomy, and reproductive rights for women. Feminist campaigns have changed societies, particularly in the West, by achieving women's suffrage, gender neutrality in English, equal pay for women, reproductive rights for women (including access to contraceptives and abortion), and the right to enter into contracts and own property. Feminists have worked to protect women and girls from domestic violence, sexual harassment, and sexual assault. They have also advocated for workplace rights, including maternity leave, and against forms of discrimination against women. Feminism is mainly focused on women's issues, but because feminism seeks gender equality, some feminists argue that men's liberation is a necessary part of feminism, and that men are also harmed by sexism and gender roles.2 The journey of Feminism from 19th century to the 21st century can be discussed under three waves of feminism.

Catrina Mckinnon, Issues in Political Theory (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012)

Feminism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism (accessed on September 26, 2012)

FIRST WAVE FEMINISM VOTES FOR WOMEN

The woman who strengthens her body and exercises her mind will, by managing her family and practising various virtues, become the friend, and not the humble dependent of her husband. Mary Wollstonecraft (17591797)

The first wave feminism started in late nineteenth and early twentieth century in United Kingdom, Canada, the Netherlands and the United States. It focused on de jure (officially mandated) inequalities and primarily on gaining women's suffrage (the right to vote). The wave formally began at the Seneca Falls Convention in New York in 1848 in which around 300 men and women rallied to the cause of equality for women. The Seneca Falls Convention was outlined by Elizabeth Cady Stanton (18151902), claiming the natural equity of women and outlining the political strategy of equal access and opportunity. This declaration gave rise to the suffrage movement. In the early stages, the first wave of feminism in the United States was interwoven with other reform movements, such as abolition and temperance, and initially closely involved women of the working classes. However, it was also supported by Black women abolitionists, such as Maria Stewart (18031879), Sojourner Truth (17971883), and Frances E. W. Harper (1825 1911), who agitated for the rights of women of colour. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and several others from the more radical parts of the womens rights movement appeared as delegates to the National Labor Union Convention as early as 1868, before any successful attempts to organize female labour (Firestone, 1968).3 Suffragists confronted stereotypes of women and, in particular, claims of proper female behavior and talk. First, they engaged in public persuasion, which in those days was considered most unwomanly. Campbell (1989) put it this way: No true woman could be a public persuader (pp. 910). Second, their very activity challenged the cult of domesticity, which in those days dictated that a true womans place was in the home, meeting the needs of
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Three Waves of Feminism. http://www.sagepub.com/upmdata/6236_Chapter_1_Krolokke_2nd_Rev_Final_Pdf.pdf (accessed on September 26, 2012)

husband and children. Women were further required to be modest and to wield only indirect influence, and certainly not engage in public activities. So, when a woman spoke in public, she was, by definition, displaying masculine behaviours. She was even ignoring her biological weaknesses a smaller brain and a more fragile physiquewhich she was supposed to protect in order to ensure her reproductive abilities. Such claims led some womens rights activists to argue that women should indeed gain the right to vote from an argument of expediency (Campbell, 1999). This argument was based on the claim that women and men are, in fact, fundamentally different and that women have a natural disposition toward maternity and domesticity. However, the argument ran that it would therefore be advantageous to society to enfranchise women, so they would then enrich politics with their innately female concerns. Furthermore, if women had the vote, the argument ran, they would perform their roles as mothers and housewives even better. On the other hand, we find another well-used argument: justice (Campbell, 1989). Following this argument, women and men are, at least in legal terms, equal in all respects; therefore, to deny women the vote was to deny them full citizenship. Socialist feminists such as Rosa Luxemburg and, in particular, Alexandra Kollontai and Emma Goldman, paved the way for second-wave feminism, fighting both politically and in their own private lives for womens right to abortion, divorce, and non legislative partnershipand against sexism both in bourgeois society and within the socialist movements.4

Three Waves of Feminism. http://www.sagepub.com/upmdata/6236_Chapter_1_Krolokke_2nd_Rev_Final_Pdf.pdf (accessed on September 26, 2012)

SECOND WAVE FEMINISM THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL

Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender. Alice Walker Courage is the key to the revelatory power of the feminist revolution. Mary Daly

The second wave feminism started in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The second wave unravelled itself in the context of the anti-war and civil rights movements and the growing self-consciousness of a variety of minority groups around the world. The New Left was on the rise, and with that the voice of the second wave was increasingly radical. French writer Simone de Beauvoir in her 1963 bestselling book The Feminine Mystique explicitly objected to the mainstream media image of women, stating that placing women at home limited their possibilities, and wasted talent and potential. The perfect nuclear family image depicted and strongly marketed at the time, she wrote, did not reflect happiness and was rather degrading for women. This book is widely credited with having begun secondwave feminism. The first-wave feminism focused mainly on suffrage and overturning legal obstacles to gender equality (i.e. voting rights, property rights), second-wave feminism broadened the debate to a wide range of issues: sexuality, family, the workplace, reproductive rights, de facto inequalities, and official legal inequalities. At a time when mainstream women were making job gains in the professions, the military, the media, and sports in large part because of second-wave feminist advocacy, second-wave feminism also focused on a battle against violence with proposals for marital rape laws, establishment of rape crisis and battered women's shelters, and changes in custody and divorce law. Its major effort was passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the United States Constitution, in which they were defeated by anti-feminists led by Phyllis Schlafly, who argued as an anti-ERA view that the ERA meant women would be drafted into the military.

Many historians view the second-wave feminist era as ending with the intra-feminism disputes of the Feminist Sex Wars over issues such as sexuality and pornography, which ushered in the era of third-wave feminism.5 The second wave began with the protests against the Miss America pageant which was held in Atlantic City in 1968 and 1969. The Redstockings, the New York Radical Feminists, and other significant feminist groups joined the 1969 protest to show how women in pageant competitions were paraded like cattle, highlighting the underlying assumption that the way women look is more important than what they do, what they think, or even whether they think at all (Freeman, 1975). Marching down the Atlantic City boardwalk and close to the event itself, feminists staged several types of theatrical activism: crowning a sheep Miss America and throwing oppressive gender artifacts, such as bras, girdles, false eyelashes, high heels, and makeup, into a trash can in front of reporters (Freeman, 1975). Carrying posters reading, Cattle Parades Are Degrading to Human Beings, Boring Job: Woman Wanted, and Low Pay: Woman Wanted, feminists made their message loud and clear: Women were victims of a patriarchal, commercialized, oppressive beauty culture (Freeman, 1975). It was a perfectly staged media event. A small group of women bought tickets to the pageant show and smuggled in a banner that read WOMENS LIBERATION, while shouting Freedom for Women and No More Miss America, hereby exposing the public to an early second-wave feminist agenda (Freeman, 1969).6 The Redstockings was one of the influential but short-lived radical feminist groups of the 1960 to 1970s and produced many of the expressions that have become household words in the United States: Sisterhood is powerful, consciousness raising, The personal is political, the politics of housework, the prowoman line, and so on. Key to this branch of feminism was a strong belief that women could collectively empower one other.7 The need to address the differences among women simultaneously promoted the theory of different standpoints and the divergences between them. As a consequence, difference feminism gradually grew into what is now often referred to as identity politics. Id entity second-wave feminism was marked by a growing criticism from Black, working-class, and lesbian feminists, outlined by, among others, bell hooks in Aint I A Woman? Black Woman
5 6

Feminism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism (accessed on September 26, 2012) Three Waves of Feminism. http://www.sagepub.com/upmdata/6236_Chapter_1_Krolokke_2nd_Rev_Final_Pdf.pdf (accessed on September 26, 2012)
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ibid

and Feminism (1981) and Trinh T. Minh-ha in Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989). In the context of the complex power relations of a postcolonial but still imperial and capitalist world, they questioned what they saw as a predominantly White, middle-class and heterosexual, feminist agenda and raised the issue of a differentiated-identity politics based on the contingent and diversified but no less decisive intersections of gender, class, race/ethnicity, and sexuality.8 Second-wave feminism is not one, but many. As expressed by feminist communication scholar Julia Wood (1994), the question may not be whether you are a feminist, but which kind of feminist you are (p. 106). This question is multiplied by the emergence of third-wave feminism. But before we turn to emergent feminisms, let us conclude that second-wave feminisms have been highly theoretical and consequently have had strong affiliations with the academy. Starting in the 1970s, second-wave feminisms have generated an explosion of research and teaching on womens issues, which has now grown into a diverse disciplinary field of womens, gender, or feminist studies.9

8 9

ibid ibid

THIRD WAVE FEMINISM TRANSVERSAL POLITICS

Yr a big grrrl now; youve got NO REASON NOT TO FIGHT!!! Bikini Kill Cyber Grrls Get On-Line! Internet Tour, by Karen McNaughton

Third wave feminism began in the mid 1990s arising as a response to the failures of the second wave and also to address the backlash of the initiatives and movements which happened in the second wave feminism. Lipstick feminism, girlie feminism, riot grrl feminism, cybergrrl feminism, transfeminism, or just grrl feminismfeminism is alive and kicking. Born with the privileges that first- and second-wave feminists fought for, third wave feminists generally see themselves as capable, strong, and assertive social agents: The Third Wave is buoyed by the confidence of having more opportunities and less sexism (Baumgartner & Richards, 2000, p. 83). Young feminists now reclaim the term girl in a bid to attract another generation, while enga ging in a new, more self-assertiveeven aggressivebut also more playful and less pompous kind of feminism. They declare, in the words of Karen McNaughton (1997), And yes thats G.r.r.l.s which is, in our case, cyber-lingo for Great-Girls. Grrl is also a young at heart thing and not limited to the under 18s.10 In addition to the recognition of the diversity of the subject women and their differing, often interrelated oppressions, feminists recognized other concerns and as a result, developed new emphases. Among these features is the tendency to move away from foundational theoretical schools, often accompanied by a loss of faith in the ability of established socio-political theories to account for womens situations. Third-wave feminism, instead, thoughtfully selects from among the tenets of different foundational theories, while expanding on an

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Three Waves of Feminism. http://www.sagepub.com/upmdata/6236_Chapter_1_Krolokke_2nd_Rev_Final_Pdf.pdf (accessed on September 26, 2012)

emphasis developed in the second wave of adding womens perspectives to established explanations. Like some authors in later second-wave feminism, third-wave feminists work to make womens situated embodied perspectives the explanations while embracing the diversity and differences in perspectives among women. Third-wave feminism, in particular, refutes dualistic thinking in generalthinking that divides the world into hierarchical dichotomies with one aspect regarded as superior and the other regarded inferior, recognizing instead the existence of multiplicities.11 Third wave is seen as an evolution, albeit a less than even one, in feminist thought generally, not a break from the past. While second wave worked for the need to include women in the public sphere, together with the need to recognize that private concerns merited public attention, and later second wave began to work for a general recognition of the interrelatedness of class, race, and heterosexism with sexism, third wave responds to additional concerns, some significant to its historical times. Among these problems is the fundamentalist backlash to the womens movement, the so-called post feminist feminism, cultural sexualization of girls, traditional sex and gender categorization, an increasingly globalizing economy, with its accompanying maldevelopment projects, particularly their disproportionate effects on women and children, and increasingly precarious environmental problems.12 In combination, third-wave feminism constitutes a significant move in both theory and politics toward the performance turn we introduced earlier. The performance turn marks a move away from thinking and acting in terms of systems, structures, fixed power relations, and thereby also suppression toward highlighting the complexities, contingencies, and challenges of power and the diverse means and goals of agency. Embedded in the scientific paradigm shift from structuralism to post structuralism, the performance turn is connected to a broader intellectual transformation.13

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COLLEEN MACK-CANTY,Third-Wave Feminism and the Need to Reweave the Nature/Culture Duality 12 ibid 13 Three Waves of Feminism. http://www.sagepub.com/upmdata/6236_Chapter_1_Krolokke_2nd_Rev_Final_Pdf.pdf (accessed on September 26, 2012)

CONCLUSION

Feminism initially started as a movement to give women equal rights as men. From the nineteenth century to the twenty-first century the position of women in the society has undergone a change. Women have progressed in every field and can be found in every sphere possible at par with men. Though of condition of women in the twenty-first century is remarkably better than the condition of women in the nineteenth century, there still exists a class of women who are still deprived of their basic rights. Feminism in the twenty-first century has become more of a fashion statement. What started out as a strong and supportive initiative for women has turned into a fancy time pass for most women now. Especially since most of the times, feminist movements like Slut Walk, Pink Chaddi campaign are associated with over-the-top and overt expressions of sexualism, it might turn out be a perfect ticket to a restless girls fifteen minutes of fame. Where feminism will go from here is unclear, but the point it that feminism, by whatever name, is alive and well both in academia and outside of it. Some older feminists feel discouraged by the younger generation's seeming ignorance of or disregard for the struggles and achievements of the early movement. They see little progress (the pay gap has not significantly narrowed in 60 years), and are fearful that the new high-healed, red-lipped college grrls are letting us backslide. This, however, is not likely the case. There have always been feminisms in the movement, not just one ideology, and there have always been tensions, points and counter-points. The political, social and intellectual feminist movements have always be chaotic, multi balanced, and disconcerting; and let's hope they continue to be so; it's a sign that they are thriving and growing.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

BOOKS REFERRED Catrina Mckinnon, Issues in Political Theory (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012)

WEBSITES REFFERED
http://www.pacificu.edu/magazine_archives/2008/fall/echoes/feminism.cfm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism http://feminist.org/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-topics/ http://www.sagepub.com/upm-data/6236_Chapter_1_Krolokke_2nd_Rev_Final_Pdf.pdf

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