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HISTORY AND THEORY OF FEMINISM

The term feminism can be used to describe a political, cultural or

economic movement aimed at establishing equal rights and legal
protection for women. Feminism involves political and sociological
theories and philosophies concerned with issues of gender
difference, as well as a movement that advocates gender equality
for women and campaigns for women's rights and interests.
Although the terms "feminism" and "feminist" did not gain
widespread use until the 1970s, they were already being used in the
public parlance much earlier; for instance, Katherine Hepburn
speaks of the "feminist movement" in the 1942 film Woman of the
Year.

According to Maggie Humm and Rebecca Walker, the history of

feminism can be divided into three waves. The first feminist wave
was in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the second was
in the 1960s and 1970s, and the third extends from the 1990s to the
present. Feminist theory emerged from these feminist movements.
It is manifest in a variety of disciplines such as feminist geography,
feminist history and feminist literary criticism.

Feminism has altered predominant perspectives in a wide range of

areas within Western society, ranging from culture to law. Feminist
activists have campaigned for women's legal rights (rights of
contract, property rights, voting rights); for women's right to bodily
integrity and autonomy, for abortion rights, and for reproductive
rights (including access to contraception and quality prenatal care);
for protection of women and girls from domestic violence, sexual
harassment and rape;for workplace rights, including maternity leave
and equal pay; against misogyny; and against other forms of
gender-specific discrimination against women.

During much of its history, most feminist movements and theories

had leaders who were predominantly middle-class white women
from Western Europe and North America. However, at least since
Sojourner Truth's 1851 speech to American feminists, women of
other races have proposed alternative feminisms. This trend
accelerated in the 1960s with the Civil Rights movement in the
United States and the collapse of European colonialism in Africa,
the Caribbean, parts of Latin America and Southeast Asia. Since
that time, women in former European colonies and the Third World
have proposed "Post-colonial" and "Third World" feminisms. Some
Postcolonial Feminists, such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty, are
critical of Western feminism for being ethnocentric. Black
feminists, such as Angela Davis and Alice Walker, share this view.

History

Simone de Beauvoir wrote that "the first time we see a woman take
up her pen in defense of her sex" was Christine de Pizan who wrote
Epitre au Dieu d'Amour (Epistle to the God of Love) in the 15th
century. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa and Modesta di Pozzo di Forzi
worked in the 16th century. Marie Le Jars de Gournay, Anne
Bradstreet and Francois Poullain de la Barre wrote during the 17th.

Feminists and scholars have divided the movement's history into

three "waves". The first wave refers mainly to women's suffrage
movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (mainly
concerned with women's right to vote). The second wave refers to
the ideas and actions associated with the women's liberation
movement beginning in the 1960s (which campaigned for legal and
social rights for women). The third wave refers to a continuation of,
and a reaction to the perceived failures of, second-wave feminism,
beginning in the 1990s.

First wave

First-wave feminism refers to an extended period of feminist

activity during the nineteenth century and early twentieth century in
the United Kingdom and the United States. Originally it focused on
the promotion of equal contract and property rights for women and
the opposition to chattel marriage and ownership of married women
(and their children) by their husbands. However, by the end of the
nineteenth century, activism focused primarily on gaining political
power, particularly the right of women's suffrage. Yet, feminists
such as Voltairine de Cleyre and Margaret Sanger were still active
in campaigning for women's sexual, reproductive, and economic
rights at this time. In 1854, Florence Nightingale established female
nurses as adjuncts to the military.

In Britain the Suffragettes and, possibly more effectively, the

Suffragists campaigned for the women's vote. In 1918 the
Representation of the People Act 1918 was passed granting the vote
to women over the age of 30 who owned houses. In 1928 this was
extended to all women over twenty-one. In the United States,
leaders of this movement included Lucretia Mott, Lucy Stone,
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony, who each
campaigned for the abolition of slavery prior to championing
women's right to vote; all were strongly influenced by Quaker
thought. American first-wave feminism involved a wide range of
women. Some, such as Frances Willard, belonged to conservative
Christian groups such as the Woman's Christian Temperance
Union. Others, such as Matilda Joslyn Gage, were more radical, and
expressed themselves within the National Woman Suffrage
Association or individually. American first-wave feminism is
considered to have ended with the passage of the Nineteenth
Amendment to the United States Constitution (1919), granting
women the right to vote in all states.

The term first wave was coined retrospectively after the term
second-wave feminism began to be used to describe a newer
feminist movement that focused as much on fighting social and
cultural inequalities as political inequalities.

Second wave

Second-wave feminism refers to the period of activity in the early

1960s and lasting through the late 1980s. The scholar Imelda
Whelehan suggests that the second wave was a continuation of the
earlier phase of feminism involving the suffragettes in the UK and
USA. Second-wave feminism has continued to exist since that time
and coexists with what is termed third-wave feminism. The scholar
Estelle Freedman compares first and second-wave feminism saying
that the first wave focused on rights such as suffrage, whereas the
second wave was largely concerned with other issues of equality,
such as ending discrimination.

The feminist activist and author Carol Hanisch coined the slogan
"The Personal is Political" which became synonymous with the
second wave. Second-wave feminists saw women's cultural and
political inequalities as inextricably linked and encouraged women
to understand aspects of their personal lives as deeply politicized
and as reflecting sexist power structures.

Simone de Beauvoir and The Second Sex

The French author and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir wrote

novels; monographs on philosophy, politics, and social issues;
essays; biographies; and an autobiography. She is now best known
for her metaphysical novels, including She Came to Stay and The
Mandarins, and for her treatise The Second Sex, a detailed analysis
of women's oppression and a foundational tract of contemporary
feminism. Written in 1949, its English translation was published in
1953. It sets out a feminist existentialism which prescribes a moral
revolution. As an existentialist, she accepted Jean-Paul Sartre's
precept existence precedes essence; hence "one is not born a
woman, but becomes one." Her analysis focuses on the social
construction of Woman as the Other. This de Beauvoir identifies as
fundamental to women's oppression. She argues women have
historically been considered deviant and abnormal and contends
that even Mary Wollstonecraft considered men to be the ideal
toward which women should aspire. De Beauvoir argues that for
feminism to move forward, this attitude must be set aside.

The Feminine Mystique

Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963) criticized the idea

that women could only find fulfillment through childrearing and
homemaking. According to Friedan's obituary in the The New York
Times, The Feminine Mystique ignited the contemporary women's
movement in 1963 and as a result permanently transformed the
social fabric of the United States and countries around the world
and is widely regarded as one of the most influential nonfiction
books of the 20th century. In the book Friedan hypothesizes that
women are victims of a false belief system that requires them to
find identity and meaning in their lives through their husbands and
children. Such a system causes women to completely lose their
identity in that of their family. Friedan specifically locates this
system among post-World War II middle-class suburban
communities. At the same time, America's post-war economic
boom had led to the development of new technologies that were
supposed to make household work less difficult, but that often had
the result of making women's work less meaningful and valuable.

Women's Liberation in the USA

The phrase "Womens Liberation" was first used in the United

States in 1964 and first appeared in print in 1966. By 1968,
although the term Womens Liberation Front appeared in the
magazine Ramparts, it was starting to refer to the whole womens
movement. Bra-burning also became associated with the
movement, though the actual prevalence of bra-burning is
debatable. One of the most vocal critics of the women's liberation
movement has been the African American feminist and intellectual
Gloria Jean Watkins (who uses the pseudonym "bell hooks") who
argues that this movement glossed over race and class and thus
failed to address "the issues that divided women." She highlighted
the lack of minority voices in the women's movement in her book
Feminist theory from margin to center (1984).

Third wave

Third-wave feminism began in the early 1990s, arising as a

response to perceived failures of the second wave and also as a
response to the backlash against initiatives and movements created
by the second wave. Third-wave feminism seeks to challenge or
avoid what it deems the second wave's essentialist definitions of
femininity, which (according to them) over-emphasize the
experiences of upper middle-class white women.

A post-structuralist interpretation of gender and sexuality is central

to much of the third wave's ideology. Third-wave feminists often
focus on "micro-politics" and challenge the second wave's
paradigm as to what is, or is not, good for females. The third wave
has its origins in the mid-1980s. Feminist leaders rooted in the
second wave like Gloria Anzaldua, bell hooks, Chela Sandoval,
Cherrie Moraga, Audre Lorde, Maxine Hong Kingston, and many
other black feminists, sought to negotiate a space within feminist
thought for consideration of race-related subjectivities.

Third-wave feminism also contains internal debates between

difference feminists such as the psychologist Carol Gilligan (who
believes that there are important differences between the sexes) and
those who believe that there are no inherent differences between the
sexes and contend that gender roles are due to social conditioning.

Post-feminism

Post-feminism describes a range of viewpoints reacting to

feminism. While not being "anti-feminist," post-feminists believe
that women have achieved second wave goals while being critical
of third wave feminist goals. The term was first used in the 1980s to
describe a backlash against second-wave feminism. It is now a label
for a wide range of theories that take critical approaches to previous
feminist discourses and includes challenges to the second wave's
ideas. Other post-feminists say that feminism is no longer relevant
to today's society. Amelia Jones wrote that the post-feminist texts
which emerged in the 1980s and 1990s portrayed second-wave
feminism as a monolithic entity and criticized it using
generalizations.

One of the earliest uses of the term was in Susan Bolotin's 1982
article "Voices of the Post-Feminist Generation," published in New
York Times Magazine. This article was based on a number of
interviews with women who largely agreed with the goals of
feminism, but did not identify as feminists.

Some contemporary feminists, such as Katha Pollitt or Nadine

Strossen, consider feminism to hold simply that "women are
people". Views that separate the sexes rather than unite them are
considered by these writers to be sexist rather than feminist'.'

In her book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American

Women, Susan Faludi argues that a backlash against second wave
feminism in the 1980s has successfully re-defined feminism
through its terms. She argues that it constructed the women's
liberation movement as the source of many of the problems alleged
to be plaguing women in the late 1980s. She also argues that many
of these problems are illusory, constructed by the media without
reliable evidence. According to her, this type of backlash is a
historical trend, recurring when it appears that women have made
substantial gains in their efforts to obtain equal rights.

Angela McRobbie argues that adding the prefix post to feminism

undermines the strides that feminism has made in achieving
equality for everyone, including women. Post-feminism gives the
impression that equality has been achieved and that feminists can
now focus on something else entirely. McRobbie believes that post-
feminism is most clearly seen on so-called feminist media products,
such as Bridget Jones's Diary, Sex and the City, and Ally McBeal.
Female characters like Bridget Jones and Carrie Bradshaw claim to
be liberated and clearly enjoy their sexuality, but what they are
constantly searching for is the one man who will make everything
worthwhile.

French feminism

French feminism refers to a branch of feminist thought from a

group of feminists in France from the 1970s to the 1990s. French
feminism, compared to Anglophone feminism, is distinguished by
an approach which is more philosophical and literary. Its writings
tend to be effusive and metaphorical, being less concerned with
political doctrine and generally focused on theories of "the body."
The term includes writers who are not French, but who have
worked substantially in France and the French tradition such as
Julia Kristeva and Bracha Ettinger.

In the 1970s French feminists approached feminism with the

concept of ecriture feminine, which translates as female, or
feminine writing. Helene Cixous argues that writing and philosophy
are phallocentric and along with other French feminists such as
Luce Irigaray emphasizes "writing from the body" as a subversive
exercise. The work of the feminist psychoanalyst and philosopher,
Julia Kristeva, has influenced feminist theory in general and
feminist literary criticism in particular. From the 1980s onwards the
work of artist and psychoanalyst Bracha Ettinger has influenced
literary criticism, art history and film theory. However, as the
scholar Elizabeth Wright pointed out, "none of these French
feminists align themselves with the feminist movement as it
appeared in the Anglophone world.

Theoretical schools

Feminist theory is an extension of feminism into theoretical or

philosophical fields. It encompasses work in a variety of
disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, economics,
women's studies, literary criticism, art history, psychoanalysis and
philosophy. Feminist theory aims to understand gender inequality
and focuses on gender politics, power relations and sexuality. While
providing a critique of these social and political relations, much of
feminist theory focuses on the promotion of women's rights and
interests. Themes explored in feminist theory include
discrimination, stereotyping, objectification (especially sexual
objectification), oppression and patriarchy.

The American literary critic and feminist Elaine Showalter

describes the phased development of feminist theory. The first she
calls "feminist critique," in which the feminist reader examines the
ideologies behind literary phenomena. The second Showalter calls
"gynocriticism," in which the "woman is producer of textual
meaning" including "the psychodynamics of female creativity;
linguistics and the problem of a female language; the trajectory of
the individual or collective female literary career and literary
history." The last phase she calls "gender theory," in which the
"ideological inscription and the literary effects of the sex/gender
system" are explored. The scholar Toril Moi criticized this model,
seeing it as an essentialist and deterministic model for female
subjectivity that fails to account for the situation of women outside
the West.

Movements and ideologies

Several submovements of feminist ideology have developed over

the years; some of the major subtypes are listed below. These
movements often overlap, and some feminists identify themselves
with several types of feminist thought.

Anarcha

Anarcha-feminism (also called anarchist feminism and anarcho-

feminism) combines anarchism with feminism. It generally views
patriarchy as a manifestation of involuntary hierarchy. Anarcha-
feminists believe that the struggle against patriarchy is an essential
part of class struggle, and the anarchist struggle against the State. In
essence, the philosophy sees anarchist struggle as a necessary
component of feminist struggle and vice-versa. As L. Susan Brown
puts it, "as anarchism is a political philosophy that opposes all
relationships of power, it is inherently feminist".

Important historic anarcha-feminists include Emma Goldman,

Federica Montseny, Voltairine de Cleyre and Lucy Parsons. In the
Spanish Civil War, an anarcha-feminist group, Mujeres Libres
("Free Women") linked to the Federacion Anarquista Iberica,
organized to defend both anarchist and feminist ideas.

Contemporary anarcha-feminist writers/theorists include Germaine

Greer, L. Susan Brown and the eco-feminist Starhawk.
Contemporary anarcha-feminist groups include Bolivia's Mujeres
Creando, Radical Cheerleaders, the Spanish anarcha-feminist squat
La Eskalera Karakola, and the annual La Rivolta! conference in
Boston.

Socialist and Marxist

Socialist feminism connects the oppression of women to Marxist

ideas about exploitation, oppression and labor. Socialist feminists
think unequal standing in both the workplace and the domestic
sphere holds women down.[59] Socialist feminists see prostitution,
domestic work, childcare and marriage as ways in which women
are exploited by a patriarchal system that devalues women and the
substantial work they do. Socialist feminists focus their energies on
broad change that affects society as a whole, rather than on an
individual basis. They see the need to work alongside not just men,
but all other groups, as they see the oppression of women as a part
of a larger pattern that affects everyone involved in the capitalist
system.

Marx felt when class oppression was overcome, gender oppression

would vanish as well. According to some socialist feminists, this
view of gender oppression as a sub-class of class oppression is
naive and much of the work of socialist feminists has gone towards
separating gender phenomena from class phenomena. Some
contributors to socialist feminism have criticized these traditional
Marxist ideas for being largely silent on gender oppression except
to subsume it underneath broader class oppression. Other socialist
feminists, many of whom belong to Radical Women and the
Freedom Socialist Party, two long-lived American organizations,
point to the classic Marxist writings of Frederick Engels and
August Bebel as a powerful explanation of the link between gender
oppression and class exploitation.

In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century both Clara
Zetkin and Eleanor Marx were against the demonization of men and
supported a proletarian revolution that would overcome as many
male-female inequalities as possible. As their movement already
had the most radical demands of women's equality, most Marxist
leaders, including Clara Zetkin and Alexandra Kollontai,
counterposed Marxism against feminism, rather than trying to
combine them.

Radical

Radical feminism considers the male controlled capitalist hierarchy,

which it describes as sexist, as the defining feature of womens
oppression. Radical feminists believe that women can free
themselves only when they have done away with what they
consider an inherently oppressive and dominating patriarchal
system. Radical feminists feel that there is a male-based authority
and power structure and that it is responsible for oppression and
inequality, and that as long as the system and its values are in place,
society will not be able to be reformed in any significant way. Some
radical feminists see no alternatives other than the total uprooting
and reconstruction of society in order to achieve their goals.

Over time a number of sub-types of Radical feminism have

emerged, such as Cultural feminism, Separatist feminism and Anti-
pornography feminism. Cultural feminism is the ideology of a
"female nature" or "female essence" that attempts to revalidate what
they consider undervalued female attributes. It emphasizes the
difference between women and men but considers that difference to
be psychological, and to be culturally constructed rather than
biologically innate. Its critics assert that because it is based on an
essentialist view of the differences between women and men and
advocates independence and institution building, it has led feminists
to retreat from politics to life-style Once such critic, Alice Echols
(a feminist historian and cultural theorist), credits Redstockings
member Brooke Williams with introducing the term cultural
feminism in 1975 to describe the depoliticisation of radical
feminism.

Separatist feminism is a form of radical feminism that does not

support heterosexual relationships. Its proponents argue that the
sexual disparities between men and women are unresolvable.
Separatist feminists generally do not feel that men can make
positive contributions to the feminist movement and that even well-
intentioned men replicate patriarchal dynamics. Author Marilyn
Frye describes separatist feminism as "separation of various sorts or
modes from men and from institutions, relationships, roles and
activities that are male-defined, male-dominated, and operating for
the benefit of males and the maintenance of male privilege this
separation being initiated or maintained, at will, by women".

Liberal

Liberal feminism asserts the equality of men and women through

political and legal reform. It is an individualistic form of feminism,
which focuses on womens ability to show and maintain their
equality through their own actions and choices. Liberal feminism
uses the personal interactions between men and women as the place
from which to transform society. According to liberal feminists, all
women are capable of asserting their ability to achieve equality,
therefore it is possible for change to happen without altering the
structure of society. Issues important to liberal feminists include
reproductive and abortion rights, sexual harassment, voting,
education, "equal pay for equal work", affordable childcare,
affordable health care, and bringing to light the frequency of sexual
and domestic violence against women.

Black

Black feminism argues that sexism, class oppression, and racism

are inextricably bound together. Forms of feminism that strive to
overcome sexism and class oppression but ignore race can
discriminate against many people, including women, through racial
bias. The Combahee River Collective argued in 1974 that the
liberation of black women entails freedom for all people, since it
would require the end of racism, sexism, and class oppression. One
of the theories that evolved out of this movement was Alice
Walker's Womanism. It emerged after the early feminist
movements that were led specifically by white women who
advocated social changes such as womans suffrage. These
movements were largely white middle-class movements and had
generally ignored oppression based on racism and classism. Alice
Walker and other Womanists pointed out that black women
experienced a different and more intense kind of oppression from
that of white women.

Angela Davis was one of the first people who articulated an

argument centered around the intersection of race, gender, and class
in her book, Women, Race, and Class. Kimberle Crenshaw, a
prominent feminist law theorist, gave the idea the name
Intersectionality while discussing identity politics in her essay,
"Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and
Violence Against Women of Color".

Postcolonial and third-world

Postcolonial feminists argue that oppression relating to the colonial

experience, particularly racial, class, and ethnic oppression, has
marginalized women in postcolonial societies. They challenge the
assumption that gender oppression is the primary force of
patriarchy. Postcolonial feminists object to portrayals of women of
non-Western societies as passive and voiceless victims and the
portrayal of Western women as modern, educated and empowered.

Postcolonial feminism emerged from the gendered history of

colonialism: colonial powers often imposed Western norms on
colonized regions. In the 1940s and 1950s, after the formation of
the United Nations, former colonies were monitored by the West
for what was considered "social progress". The status of women in
the developing world has been monitored by organizations such as
the United Nations and as a result traditional practices and roles
taken up by womensometimes seen as distasteful by Western
standardscould be considered a form of rebellion against colonial
oppression. Postcolonial feminists today struggle to fight gender
oppression within their own cultural models of society rather than
through those imposed by the Western colonizers.

Postcolonial feminism is critical of Western forms of feminism,

notably radical feminism and liberal feminism and their
universalization of female experience. Postcolonial feminists argue
that cultures impacted by colonialism are often vastly different and
should be treated as such. Colonial oppression may result in the
glorification of pre-colonial culture, which, in cultures with
traditions of power stratification along gender lines, could mean the
acceptance of, or refusal to deal with, inherent issues of gender
inequality. Postcolonial feminists can be described as feminists who
have reacted against both universalizing tendencies in Western
feminist thought and a lack of attention to gender issues in
mainstream postcolonial thought.

Third-world feminism has been described as a group of feminist

theories developed by feminists who acquired their views and took
part in feminist politics in so-called third-world countries. Although
women from the third world have been engaged in the feminist
movement, Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Sarojini Sahoo criticize
Western feminism on the grounds that it is ethnocentric and does
not take into account the unique experiences of women from third-
world countries or the existence of feminisms indigenous to third-
world countries. According to Chandra Talpade Mohanty, women
in the third world feel that Western feminism bases its
understanding of women on "internal racism, classism and
homophobia". This discourse is strongly related to African
feminism and postcolonial feminism. Its development is also
associated with concepts such as black feminism, womanism,
"Africana womanism", "motherism", "Stiwanism",
"negofeminism", chicana feminism, and "femalism".

Multiracial

Multiracial feminism (also known as women of color feminism)

offers a standpoint theory and analysis of the lives and experiences
of women of color. The theory emerged in the 1990s and was
developed by Dr. Maxine Baca Zinn, a Chicana feminist and Dr.
Bonnie Thornton Dill, a sociology expert on African American
women and family.

Libertarian

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Classical

liberal or libertarian feminism conceives of freedom as freedom
from coercive interference. It holds that women, as well as men,
have a right to such freedom due to their status as self-owners."

There are several categories under the theory of libertarian

feminism, or kinds of feminism that are linked to libertarian
ideologies. Anarcha-feminism (also called anarchist feminism or
anarcho-feminism) combines feminist and anarchist beliefs,
embodying classical libertarianism rather than contemporary
conservative libertarianism. Anarcha-feminists view patriarchy as a
manifestation of hierarchy, believing that the fight against
patriarchy is an essential part of the class struggle and the anarchist
struggle against the state. Anarcha-feminists such as Susan Brown
see the anarchist struggle as a necessary component of the feminist
struggle. In Brown's words, "anarchism is a political philosophy
that opposes all relationships of power, it is inherently feminist".
Recently, Wendy McElroy has defined a position (which she labels
"ifeminism" or "individualist feminism") that combines feminism
with anarcho-capitalism or contemporary conservative
libertarianism, arguing that a pro-capitalist, anti-state position is
compatible with an emphasis on equal rights and empowerment for
women. Individualist anarchist-feminism has grown from the US-
based individualist anarchism movement.

Individualist feminism is typically defined as a feminism in

opposition to what writers such as Wendy McElroy and Christina
Hoff Sommers term, political or gender feminism. However, there
are some differences within the discussion of individualist
feminism. While some individualist feminists like McElroy oppose
government interference into the choices women make with their
bodies because such interference creates a coercive hierarchy (such
as patriarchy), other feminists such as Christina Hoff Sommers hold
that feminism's political role is simply to ensure that everyone's,
including women's, right against coercive interference is respected.
Sommers is described as a "socially conservative equity feminist"
by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Critics have called her
an anti-feminist.

Standpoint

Since the 1980s, standpoint feminists have argued that feminism

should examine how women's experience of inequality relates to
that of racism, homophobia, classism and colonization. In the late
1980s and 1990s postmodern feminists argued that gender roles are
socially constructed, and that it is impossible to generalize women's
experiences across cultures and histories.

Post-structural and postmodern

Post-structural feminism, also referred to as French feminism, uses

the insights of various epistemological movements, including
psychoanalysis, linguistics, political theory (Marxist and post-
Marxist theory), race theory, literary theory, and other intellectual
currents for feminist concerns. Many post-structural feminists
maintain that difference is one of the most powerful tools that
females possess in their struggle with patriarchal domination, and
that to equate the feminist movement only with equality is to deny
women a plethora of options because equality is still defined from
the masculine or patriarchal perspective.
Postmodern feminism is an approach to feminist theory that
incorporates postmodern and post-structuralist theory. The largest
departure from other branches of feminism is the argument that
gender is constructed through language. The most notable
proponent of this argument is Judith Butler. In her 1990 book,
Gender Trouble, she draws on and critiques the work of Simone de
Beauvoir, Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan. Butler criticizes the
distinction drawn by previous feminisms between biological sex
and socially constructed gender. She says that this does not allow
for a sufficient criticism of essentialism. For Butler "woman" is a
debatable category, complicated by class, ethnicity, sexuality, and
other facets of identity. She states that gender is performative. This
argument leads to the conclusion that there is no single cause for
women's subordination and no single approach towards dealing
with the issue.

In A Cyborg Manifesto Donna Haraway criticizes traditional

notions of feminism, particularly its emphasis on identity, rather
than affinity. She uses the metaphor of a cyborg in order to
construct a postmodern feminism that moves beyond dualisms and
the limitations of traditional gender, feminism, and politics.
Haraway's cyborg is an attempt to break away from Oedipal
narratives and Christian origin-myths like Genesis. She writes:
"The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the
organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg
would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and
cannot dream of returning to dust."

A major branch in postmodern feminist thought has emerged from

the contemporary psychoanalytic French feminism. Other
postmodern feminist works highlight stereotypical gender roles,
only to portray them as parodies of the original beliefs. The history
of feminism is not important in these writings - only what is going
to be done about it. The history is dismissed and used to depict how
ridiculous past beliefs were. Modern feminist theory has been
extensively criticized as being predominantly, though not
exclusively, associated with Western middle class academia. Mary
Joe Frug, a postmodernist feminist, criticized mainstream feminism
as being too narrowly focused and inattentive to related issues of
race and class.

Environmental

Ecofeminism links ecology with feminism. Ecofeminists see the

domination of women as stemming from the same ideologies that
bring about the domination of the environment. Patriarchal systems,
where men own and control the land, are seen as responsible for the
oppression of women and destruction of the natural environment.
Ecofeminists argue that the men in power control the land, and
therefore they are able to exploit it for their own profit and success.
Ecofeminists argue that in this situation, women are exploited by
men in power for their own profit, success, and pleasure.
Ecofeminists argue that women and the environment are both
exploited as passive pawns in the race to domination. Ecofeminists
argue that those people in power are able to take advantage of them
distinctly because they are seen as passive and rather helpless.
Ecofeminism connects the exploitation and domination of women
with that of the environment. As a way of repairing social and
ecological injustices, ecofeminists feel that women must work
towards creating a healthy environment and ending the destruction
of the lands that most women rely on to provide for their families.

Ecofeminism argues that there is a connection between women and

nature that comes from their shared history of oppression by a
patriarchal Western society. Vandana Shiva claims that women
have a special connection to the environment through their daily
interactions with it that has been ignored. She says that "women in
subsistence economies, producing and reproducing wealth in
partnership with nature, have been experts in their own right of
holistic and ecological knowledge of natures processes. But these
alternative modes of knowing, which are oriented to the social
benefits and sustenance needs are not recognized by the capitalist
reductionist paradigm, because it fails to perceive the
interconnectedness of nature, or the connection of womens lives,
work and knowledge with the creation of wealth.

However, feminist and social ecologist Janet Biehl has criticized

ecofeminism for focusing too much on a mystical connection
between women and nature and not enough on the actual conditions
of women.

Society

The feminist movement has effected change in Western society,

including women's suffrage; greater access to education; more
nearly equitable pay with men; the right to initiate divorce
proceedings and "no fault" divorce; and the right of women to make
individual decisions regarding pregnancy (including access to
contraceptives and abortion); as well as the right to own property.

Civil rights
From the 1960s on the women's liberation movement campaigned
for women's rights, including the same pay as men, equal rights in
law, and the freedom to plan their families. Their efforts were met
with mixed results. Issues commonly associated with notions of
women's rights include, though are not limited to: the right to
bodily integrity and autonomy; to vote (universal suffrage); to hold
public office; to work; to fair wages or equal pay; to own property;
to education; to serve in the military; to enter into legal contracts;
and to have marital, parental and religious rights.

In the UK a public groundswell of opinion in favour of legal

equality gained pace, partly through the extensive employment of
women in men's traditional roles during both world wars. By the
1960s the legislative process was being readied, tracing through MP
Willie Hamilton's select committee report, his Equal Pay for Equal
Work Bill, the creation of a Sex Discrimination Board, Lady Sear's
draft sex anti-discrimination bill, a government Green Paper of
1973, until 1975 when the first British Sex Discrimination Act, an
Equal Pay Act, and an Equal Opportunities Commission came into
force. With encouragement from the UK government, the other
countries of the EEC soon followed suit with an agreement to
ensure that discrimination laws would be phased out across the
European Community.

In the USA, the US National Organization for Women (NOW) was

created in 1966 with the purpose of bringing about equality for all
women. NOW was one important group that fought for the Equal
Rights Amendment (ERA). This amendment stated that equality of
rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United
States or any state on account of sex. But there was disagreement
on how the proposed amendment would be understood. Supporters
believed it would guarantee women equal treatment. But critics
feared it might deny women the right be financially supported by
their husbands. The amendment died in 1982 because not enough
states had ratified it. ERAs have been included in subsequent
Congresses, but have still failed to be ratified.

In the final three decades of the 20th century, Western women

knew a new freedom through birth control, which enabled women
to plan their adult lives, often making way for both career and
family. The movement had been started in the 1910s by US
pioneering social reformer Margaret Sanger and in the UK and
internationally by Marie Stopes.

The United Nations Human Development Report 2004 estimated

that when both paid employment and unpaid household tasks are
accounted for, on average women work more than men. In rural
areas of selected developing countries women performed an
average of 20% more work than men, or an additional 102 minutes
per day. In the OECD countries surveyed, on average women
performed 5% more work than men, or 20 minutes per day. At the
UN's Pan Pacific Southeast Asia Women's Association 21st
International Conference in 2001 it was stated that "in the world as
a whole, women comprise 51% of the population, do 66% of the
work, receive 10% of the income and own less than one percent of
the property".

CEDAW

The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination

Against Women (CEDAW) is an international convention adopted
by the United Nations General Assembly. Described as an
international bill of rights for women, it came into force on 3
September 1981. Several countries have ratified the Convention
subject to certain declarations, reservations and objections. Iran,
Sudan, Somalia, Qatar, Nauru, Palau, Tonga and the United States
have not ratified CEDAW. Expecting a U.S. Senate vote, NOW has
encouraged President Obama to remove U.S. reservations and
objections added in 2002 before the vote.

Language

Gender-neutral language is a description of language usages which

are aimed at minimizing assumptions regarding the biological sex
of human referents. The advocacy of gender-neutral language
reflects, at least, two different agendas: one aims to clarify the
inclusion of both sexes or genders (gender-inclusive language); the
other proposes that gender, as a category, is rarely worth marking in
language (gender-neutral language). Gender-neutral language is
sometimes described as non-sexist language by advocates and
politically-correct language by opponents.

Heterosexual relationships

The increased entry of women into the workplace beginning in the

twentieth century has affected gender roles and the division of labor
within households. Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild in The
Second Shift and The Time Bind presents evidence that in two-
career couples, men and women, on average, spend about equal
amounts of time working, but women still spend more time on
housework. Feminist writer Cathy Young responds to Hochschild's
assertions by arguing that in some cases, women may prevent the
equal participation of men in housework and parenting.

Feminist criticisms of men's contributions to child care and

domestic labor in the Western middle class are typically centered
around the idea that it is unfair for women to be expected to
perform more than half of a household's domestic work and child
care when both members of the relationship also work outside the
home. Several studies provide statistical evidence that the financial
income of married men does not affect their rate of attending to
household duties.

In Dubious Conceptions, Kristin Luker discusses the effect of

feminism on teenage women's choices to bear children, both in and
out of wedlock. She says that as childbearing out of wedlock has
become more socially acceptable, young women, especially poor
young women, while not bearing children at a higher rate than in
the 1950s, now see less of a reason to get married before having a
child. Her explanation for this is that the economic prospects for
poor men are slim, hence poor women have a low chance of finding
a husband who will be able to provide reliable financial support.

Although research suggests that to an extent, both women and men

perceive feminism to be in conflict with romance, studies of
undergraduates and older adults have shown that feminism has
positive impacts on relationship health for women and sexual
satisfaction for men, and found no support for negative stereotypes
of feminists.

Religion

Feminist theology is a movement that reconsiders the traditions,

practices, scriptures, and theologies of religions from a feminist
perspective. Some of the goals of feminist theology include
increasing the role of women among the clergy and religious
authorities, reinterpreting male-dominated imagery and language
about God, determining women's place in relation to career and
motherhood, and studying images of women in the religion's sacred
texts.

Christian feminism is a branch of feminist theology which seeks to

interpret and understand Christianity in light of the equality of
women and men. Because this equality has been historically
ignored, Christian feminists believe their contributions are
necessary for a complete understanding of Christianity. While there
is no standard set of beliefs among Christian feminists, most agree
that God does not discriminate on the basis of biologically-
determined characteristics such as sex. Their major issues are the
ordination of women, male dominance in Christian marriage, and
claims of moral deficiency and inferiority of abilities of women
compared to men. They also are concerned with the balance of
parenting between mothers and fathers and the overall treatment of
women in the church.

Islamic feminism is concerned with the role of women in Islam and

aims for the full equality of all Muslims, regardless of gender, in
public and private life. Islamic feminists advocate women's rights,
gender equality, and social justice grounded in an Islamic
framework. Although rooted in Islam, the movement's pioneers
have also utilized secular and Western feminist discourses and
recognize the role of Islamic feminism as part of an integrated
global feminist movement. Advocates of the movement seek to
highlight the deeply rooted teachings of equality in the Quran and
encourage a questioning of the patriarchal interpretation of Islamic
teaching through the Quran, hadith (sayings of Muhammad), and
sharia (law) towards the creation of a more equal and just society.

Jewish feminism is a movement that seeks to improve the religious,

legal, and social status of women within Judaism and to open up
new opportunities for religious experience and leadership for
Jewish women. Feminist movements, with varying approaches and
successes, have opened up within all major branches of Judaism. In
its modern form, the movement can be traced to the early 1970s in
the United States. According to Judith Plaskow, who has focused
on feminism in Reform Judaism, the main issues for early Jewish
feminists in these movements were the exclusion from the all-male
prayer group or minyan, the exemption from positive time-bound
mitzvot, and women's inability to function as witnesses and to
initiate divorce.

The Dianic Wicca or Wiccan feminism is a female focused,

Goddess-centered Wiccan sect; also known as a feminist religion
that teaches witchcraft as every womans right. It is also one sect of
the many practiced in Wicca.

Theology

Feminist theology is a movement found in several religions to

reconsider the traditions, practices, scriptures, and theologies of
those religions from a feminist perspective. Some of the goals of
feminist theology include increasing the role of women among the
clergy and religious authorities, reinterpreting male-dominated
imagery and language about God, determining women's place in
relation to career and motherhood, and studying images of women
in the religion's sacred texts. In Wicca "the Goddess" is a deity of
prime importance, along with her consort the Horned God. In the
earliest Wiccan publications she is described as a tribal goddess of
the witch community, neither omnipotent nor universal, and it was
recognised that there was a greater "Prime Mover", although the
witches did not concern themselves much with this being.

Architecture

Gender-based inquiries into and conceptualization of architecture

have also come about in the past fifteen years or so. Piyush Mathur
coined the term "archigenderic" in his 1998 article in the British
journal Women's Writing. Claiming that "architectural planning has
an inextricable link with the defining and regulation of gender roles,
responsibilities, rights, and limitations," Mathur came up with that
term "to explore...the meaning of 'architecture" in terms of gender"
and "to explore the meaning of "gender" in terms of architecture"

Culture

Women's writing

Women's writing came to exist as a separate category of scholarly

interest relatively recently. In the West, second-wave feminism
prompted a general reevaluation of women's historical
contributions, and various academic sub-disciplines, such as
Women's history (or herstory) and women's writing, developed in
response to the belief that women's lives and contributions have
been underrepresented as areas of scholarly interest. Virginia Balisn
et al. characterize the growth in interest since 1970 in women's
writing as "powerful". Much of this early period of feminist literary
scholarship was given over to the rediscovery and reclamation of
texts written by women. Studies such as Dale Spender's Mothers of
the Novel (1986) and Jane Spencer's The Rise of the Woman
Novelist (1986) were ground-breaking in their insistence that
women have always been writing. Commensurate with this growth
in scholarly interest, various presses began the task of reissuing
long-out-of-print texts. Virago Press began to publish its large list
of nineteenth and early-twentieth-century novels in 1975 and
became one of the first commercial presses to join in the project of
reclamation. In the 1980s Pandora Press, responsible for publishing
Spender's study, issued a companion line of eighteenth-century
novels written by women. More recently, Broadview Press has
begun to issue eighteenth- and nineteenth-century works, many
hitherto out of print and the University of Kentucky has a series of
republications of early women's novels. There has been
commensurate growth in the area of biographical dictionaries of
women writers due to a perception, according to one editor, that
"most of our women are not represented in the 'standard' reference
books in the field".

Another early pioneer of Feminist writing is Charlotte Perkins

Gilman, whose most notable work was The Yellow Wallpaper.

Science fiction

In the 1960s the genre of science fiction combined its

sensationalism with political and technological critiques of society.
With the advent of feminism, questioning womens roles became
fair game to this "subversive, mind expanding genre". Two early
texts are Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
and Joanna Russ' The Female Man (1970). They serve to highlight
the socially constructed nature of gender roles by creating utopias
that do away with gender. Both authors were also pioneers in
feminist criticism of science fiction in the 1960s and 70s, in essays
collected in The Language of the Night (Le Guin, 1979) and How
To Suppress Women's Writing (Russ, 1983). Another major work
of feminist science fiction has been Kindred by Octavia Butler.

Riot grrrl movement

Riot grrrl (or riot grrl) is an underground feminist punk movement

that started in the 1990s and is often associated with third-wave
feminism (it is sometimes seen as its starting point). It was
Grounded in the DIY philosophy of punk values. Riot grrls took an
anti-corporate stance of self-sufficiency and self-reliance. Riot
grrrl's emphasis on universal female identity and separatism often
appears more closely allied with second-wave feminism than with
the third wave. Riot grrrl bands often address issues such as rape,
domestic abuse, sexuality, and female empowerment. Some bands
associated with the movement are: Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, Excuse
17, Free Kitten, Heavens To Betsy, Huggy Bear, L7, and Team
Dresch. In addition to a music scene, riot grrrl is also a subculture;
zines, the DIY ethic, art, political action, and activism are part of
the movement. Riot grrrls hold meetings, start chapters, and support
and organize women in music.

The riot grrrl movement sprang out of Olympia, Washington and

Washington, D.C. in the early 1990s. It sought to give women the
power to control their voices and artistic expressions. Riot grrrls
took a growling double or triple r, placing it in the word girl as a
way to take back the derogatory use of the term.

The Riot Grrrls links to social and political issues are where the
beginnings of third-wave feminism can be seen. The music and zine
writings are strong examples of "cultural politics in action, with
strong women giving voice to important social issues though an
empowered, a female oriented community, many people link the
emergence of the third-wave feminism to this time". The movement
encouraged and made "adolescent girls standpoints central,"
allowing them to express themselves fully.

Pornography

The "Feminist Sex Wars" is a term for the acrimonious debates

within the feminist movement in the late 1970s through the 1980s
around the issues of feminism, sexuality, sexual representation,
pornography, sadomasochism, the role of transwomen in the lesbian
community, and other sexual issues. The debate pitted anti-
pornography feminism against sex-positive feminism, and parts of
the feminist movement were deeply divided by these debates.

Anti-pornography movement

For more details on this topic, see

Feminist_views_on_pornography#Anti-pornography_feminism.
Anti-pornography feminists, such as Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea
Dworkin, Robin Morgan and Dorchen Leidholdt, put pornography
at the center of a feminist explanation of women's oppression.

Some feminists, such as Diana Russell, Andrea Dworkin, Catharine

MacKinnon, Susan Brownmiller, Dorchen Leidholdt, Ariel Levy,
and Robin Morgan, argue that pornography is degrading to women,
and complicit in violence against women both in its production
(where, they charge, abuse and exploitation of women performing
in pornography is rampant) and in its consumption (where, they
charge, pornography eroticizes the domination, humiliation, and
coercion of women, and reinforces sexual and cultural attitudes that
are complicit in rape and sexual harassment).

Beginning in the late 1970s, anti-pornography radical feminists

formed organizations such as Women Against Pornography that
provided educational events, including slide-shows, speeches, and
guided tours of the sex industry in Times Square, in order to raise
awareness of the content of pornography and the sexual subculture
in pornography shops and live sex shows. Andrea Dworkin and
Robin Morgan began articulating a vehemently anti-porn stance
based in radical feminism beginning in 1974, and anti-porn feminist
groups, such as Women Against Pornography and similar
organizations, became highly active in various US cities during the
late 1970s.

Sex-positive movement

Sex-positive feminism is a movement that was formed in order to

address issues of women's sexual pleasure, freedom of expression,
sex work, and inclusive gender identities. Ellen Willis' 1981 essay,
"Lust Horizons: Is the Women's Movement Pro-Sex?" is the origin
of the term, "pro-sex feminism"; the more commonly-used variant,
"sex positive feminism" arose soon after.

Although some sex-positive feminists, such as Betty Dodson, were

active in the early 1970s, much of sex-positive feminism largely
began in the late 1970s and 1980s as a response to the increasing
emphasis in radical feminism on anti-pornography activism.

Sex-positive feminists are also strongly opposed to radical feminist

calls for legislation against pornography, a strategy they decried as
censorship, and something that could, they argued, be used by
social conservatives to censor the sexual expression of women, gay
people, and other sexual minorities. The initial period of intense
debate and acrimony between sex-positive and anti-pornography
feminists during the early 1980s is often referred to as the Feminist
Sex Wars. Other sex-positive feminists became involved not in
opposition to other feminists, but in direct response to what they
saw as patriarchal control of sexuality.

Relationship to political movements

Socialism

Since the early twentieth century some feminists have allied with
socialism. In 1907 there was an International Conference of
Socialist Women in Stuttgart where suffrage was described as a tool
of class struggle. Clara Zetkin of the Social Democratic Party of
Germany called for women's suffrage to build a "socialist order, the
only one that allows for a radical solution to the women's question".

In Britain, the women's movement was allied with the Labour party.
In America, Betty Friedan emerged from a radical background to
take command of the organized movement. Radical Women,
founded in 1967 in Seattle is the oldest (and still active) socialist
feminist organization in the U.S. During the Spanish Civil War,
Dolores Ibarruri (La Pasionaria) led the Communist Party of Spain.
Although she supported equal rights for women, she opposed
women fighting on the front and clashed with the anarcho-feminist
Mujeres Libres.

Revolutions in Latin America brought changes in women's status in

countries such as Nicaragua where Feminist ideology during the
Sandinista Revolution was largely responsible for improvements in
the quality of life for women but fell short of achieving a social and
ideological change.

Fascism

Scholars have argued that Nazi Germany and the other fascist states
of the 1930s and 1940s illustrates the disastrous consequences for
society of a state ideology that, in glorifying traditional images of
women, becomes anti-feminist. In Germany after the rise of Nazism
in 1933, there was a rapid dissolution of the political rights and
economic opportunities that feminists had fought for during the
prewar period and to some extent during the 1920s. In Franco's
Spain, the right wing Catholic conservatives undid the work of
feminists during the Republic. Fascist society was hierarchical with
an emphasis and idealization of virility, with women maintaining a
largely subordinate position to men.

Scientific discourse

Some feminists are critical of traditional scientific discourse,

arguing that the field has historically been biased towards a
masculine perspective. Evelyn Fox Keller argues that the rhetoric of
science reflects a masculine perspective, and she questions the idea
of scientific objectivity.

Many feminist scholars rely on qualitative research methods that

emphasize womens subjective, individual experiences. According
to communication scholars Thomas R. Lindlof and Bryan C.
Taylor, incorporating a feminist approach to qualitative research
involves treating research participants as equals who are just as
much an authority as the researcher. Objectivity is eschewed in
favor of open self-reflexivity and the agenda of helping women.
Also part of the feminist research agenda is uncovering ways that
power inequities are created and/or reinforced in society and/or in
scientific and academic institutions. Lindlof and Taylor also explain
that a feminist approach to research often involves nontraditional
forms of presentation.

Primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy notes the prevalence of

masculine-coined stereotypes and theories, such as the non-sexual
female, despite "the accumulation of abundant openly available
evidence contradicting it". Some natural and social scientists have
examined feminist ideas using scientific methods.

Biology of gender

Modern feminist science challenges the biological essentialist view

of gender, however it is increasingly interested in the study of
biological sex differences and their effect on human behavior. For
example, Anne Fausto-Sterling's book Myths of Gender explores
the assumptions embodied in scientific research that purports to
support a biologically essentialist view of gender. Her second book,
Sexing the Body discussed the alleged possibility of more than two
true biological sexes. This possibility only exists in yet-unknown
extraterrestrial biospheres, as no ratios of true gametes to polar cells
other than 4:0 and 1:3 (male and female, respectively) are produced
on Earth. However, in The Female Brain, Louann Brizendine
argues that brain differences between the sexes are a biological
reality with significant implications for sex-specific functional
differences. Steven Rhoads' book Taking Sex Differences Seriously
illustrates sex-dependent differences across a wide scope.

Carol Tavris, in The Mismeasure of Woman, uses psychology and

sociology to critique theories that use biological reductionism to
explain differences between men and women. She argues rather
than using evidence of innate gender difference there is an over-
changing hypothesis to justify inequality and perpetuate
stereotypes.

Evolutionary biology

Sarah Kember - drawing from numerous areas such as evolutionary

biology, sociobiology, artificial intelligence, and cybernetics in
development with a new evolutionism - discusses the biologization
of technology. She notes how feminists and sociologists have
become suspect of evolutionary psychology, particularly inasmuch
as sociobiology is subjected to complexity in order to strengthen
sexual difference as immutable through pre-existing cultural value
judgments about human nature and natural selection. Where
feminist theory is criticized for its "false beliefs about human
nature," Kember then argues in conclusion that "feminism is in the
interesting position of needing to do more biology and evolutionary
theory in order not to simply oppose their renewed hegemony, but
in order to understand the conditions that make this possible, and to
have a say in the construction of new ideas and artefacts."

Male reaction

The relationship between men and feminism has been complex.

Men have taken part in significant responses to feminism in each
'wave' of the movement. There have been positive and negative
reactions and responses, depending on the individual man and the
social context of the time. These responses have varied from pro-
feminism to masculism to anti-feminism. In the twenty-first century
new reactions to feminist ideologies have emerged including a
generation of male scholars involved in gender studies, and also
men's rights activists who promote male equality (including equal
treatment in family, divorce and anti-discrimination law).
Historically a number of men have engaged with feminism.
Philosopher Jeremy Bentham demanded equal rights for women in
the eighteenth century. In 1866, philosopher John Stuart Mill
(author of "The Subjection of Women") presented a womens
petition to the British parliament; and supported an amendment to
the 1867 Reform Bill. Others have lobbied and campaigned against
feminism. Today, academics like Michael Flood, Michael Messner
and Michael Kimmel are involved with men's studies and pro-
feminism.

A number of feminist writers maintain that identifying as a feminist

is the strongest stand men can take in the struggle against sexism.
They have argued that men should be allowed, or even be
encouraged, to participate in the feminist movement. Other female
feminists argue that men cannot be feminists simply because they
are not women. They maintain that men are granted inherent
privileges that prevent them from identifying with feminist
struggles, thus making it impossible for them to identify with
feminists. Fidelma Ashe has approached the issue of male feminism
by arguing that traditional feminist views of male experience and of
"men doing feminism" have been monolithic. She explores the
multiple political discourses and practices of pro-feminist politics,
and evaluates each strand through an interrogation based upon its
effect on feminist politics.

A more recent examination of the subject is presented by author and

academic Shira Tarrant. In Men and Feminism (Seal Press, May
2009), the California State University, Long Beach professor
highlights critical debates about masculinity and gender, the history
of men in feminism, and mens roles in preventing violence and
sexual assault. Through critical analysis and first-person stories by
feminist men, Tarrant addresses the question of why men should
care about feminism in the first place and lays the foundation for a
larger discussion about feminism as an all-encompassing, human
issue.

Tarrant touches on similar topics in Men Speak Out: Views on

Gender, Sex, and Power (Routledge, 2007).

Pro-feminism

Pro-feminism is the support of feminism without implying that the

supporter is a member of the feminist movement. The term is most
often used in reference to men who are actively supportive of
feminism and of efforts to bring about gender equality. The
activities of pro-feminist men's groups include anti-violence work
with boys and young men in schools, offering sexual harassment
workshops in workplaces, running community education
campaigns, and counseling male perpetrators of violence. Pro-
feminist men also are involved in men's health, activism against
pornography including anti-pornography legislation, men's studies,
and the development of gender equity curricula in schools. This
work is sometimes in collaboration with feminists and women's
services, such as domestic violence and rape crisis centers. Some
activists of both genders will not refer to men as "feminists" at all,
and will refer to all pro-feminist men as "pro-feminists".

Anti-feminism

Anti-feminism is opposition to feminism in some or all of its forms.

Writers such as Camille Paglia, Christina Hoff Sommers, Jean
Bethke Elshtain and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese have been labeled
"anti-feminists" by feminists. Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge
argue that in this way the term "anti-feminist" is used to silence
academic debate about feminism. Paul Nathanson and Katherine K.
Young's books Spreading Misandry and Legalizing Misandry
explore what they argue is feminist-inspired misandry. Christina
Hoff-Sommers argues feminist misandry leads directly to misogyny
by what she calls "establishment feminists" against (the majority of)
women who love men in Who Stole Feminism: How Women Have
Betrayed Women. Marriage rights advocates criticize feminists like
Sheila Cronan who take the view that marriage constitutes slavery
for women, and that freedom for women cannot be won without the
abolition of marriage.
 : Wikipedia

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YOU ARE HERE: HOME / FEATURED HOME / A BRIEF HISTORY: THE THREE WAVES OF FEMINISM

A Brief History: The Three Waves of

Feminism
SEPTEMBER 22, 2015 BY CAROLINE DOREY-STEIN 12 COMMENTS

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While the roots of feminism are buried in ancient Greece, most recognize the movement
by the three waves of feminism. The third being the movement in which we are currently
residing.

The first wave (1830s early 1900s): Womens fight for equal contract and
property rights

Often taken for granted, women in the late 19th to early 20th centuries, realized that
they must first gain political power (including the right to vote) to bring about change
was how to fuel the fire. Their political agenda expanded to issues concerning sexual,
reproductive and economic matters. The seed was planted that women have the
potential to contribute just as much if not more than men.
 [Image from Pixabay]

The second wave (1960s-1980s): Broadening the debate

Coming off the heels of World War II, the second wave of feminism focused on
the workplace, sexuality, family and reproductive rights. During a time when the United
States was already trying to restructure itself, it was perceived that women had met their
equality goals with the exception of the failure of the ratification of the Equal Rights
Amendment (which has still yet to be passed).

Misconceptions

This time is often dismissed as offensive, outdated and obsessed with middle class
white womens problems. Conversely, many women during the second wave were
initially part of the Black Civil Rights Movement, Anti Vietnam Movement, Chicano
Rights Movement, Asian-American Civil Rights Movement, Gay and Lesbian Movement
and many other groups fighting for equality. Many of the women supporters of the
aforementioned groups felt their voices were not being heard and felt that in order to
gain respect in co-ed organizations they first needed to address gender equality
concerns.

Women cared so much about these civil issues that they wanted to strengthen their
voices by first fighting for gender equality to ensure they would be heard.

The third wave (1990s present): The micropolitics of gender equality

Today and unlike the former movements, the term feminist is received less critically by
the female population due to the varying feminist outlooks. There are the ego-cultural
feminists, the radicals, the liberal/reforms, the electoral, academic, ecofeminists the
list goes on.
 [Image from Pixabay]

The main issues we face today were prefaced by the work done by the previous waves
of women. We are still working to vanquish the disparities in male and female pay and
the reproductive rights of women. We are working to end violence against women in our
nation as well as others.
We are still fighting for acceptance and a true understanding of the term feminism, it
should be noted that we have made tremendous progress since the first wave. It is a
term that has been unfairly associated first, with ladies in hoop skirts and ringlet curls,
then followed by butch, man-hating women. Due to the range of feminist issues today, it
is much harder to put a label on what a feminist looks like.

Quite frankly, it all comes down to the dictionarys very simple yet profound definition:
the theory of the political, economic and social equality of the sexes. If thats
what a feminist is who wouldnt want to be called that?

Learn more about how Feminism is defined: Feminism: Why Not Egalitarianism or
Humanism?

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FILED UNDER: FEATURED HOME, LEADERSHIP

About Caroline Dorey-Stein

I play on a team bound by the goal to empower women in
professional achievement. We attack gender bias and challenge
antiquated work structures to create an equal playing field for
women and men. My drive for equality stems from my parents,
brother and sister who have all fought barriers to score
successful lives.

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Comments
1. HAPPY SIPUKA says

JANUARY 23, 2016 AT 3:16 AM

I real like this handout about empowering women and they fight for there emancipation,
I would like to join or to work with different organizations which concerns about women
Issues as am pursuing my degree in gender and development

Reply

o Ruth Agala says

FEBRUARY 8, 2016 AT 3:06 AM

I really like this handout too I think its due time we continue empowering the grassroots
women on the importance of their reproductive rights and encouraging women to participate
and work together with men so that we may achieve gender mainstreaming Im a student
undertaking a degree in gender,women and development studies

Reply

Nicole Teillon Riegl says

 FEBRUARY 9, 2016 AT 9:05 AM

Ruth Great response. Its all about the grassroots about moving the womens movement
forward both in the workplace and academic settings.

Reply

o Nicole Teillon Riegl says

FEBRUARY 9, 2016 AT 9:04 AM

Happy Sipuka Thank you for response. We hope that this and our other articles inspire you
to follow your passion of working on womens issues.

Reply

2. Dr. Monikah Ogando says

MAY 31, 2016 AT 1:17 AM

I appreciate the light being shed on womens issues and how elevating and empowering
women leaders is imperative not only socially, but to our companies bottom lines.

However, I must note that the inaccuracies and generalizations in this article render
invisible an entire culture and generations of women. Feminism most certainly DID NOT
start in Ancient Greece if anything, they appropriated adoration to and elevation of the
 feminine from their teachers, the Egyptians, whose documented matriarchal culture
predates Greeks and Romans by thousands of years.

Secondly, the first wave you reference (from 1830s to early 1900s), black and brown
women couldnt fight for property rights because they were considered property, and
didnt gain the right to vote along their white counterparts. They didnt get the right to
vote until about 50 years ago.

You are right to mention that many racial equality and civil rights movements challenged
middle class white women in their hypocrisy. Being considered offensive or outdated
was not a misconception, and it was not a dismissal. It was a call to the carpet for
essentially saying let me do me and Ill consider your issues later. Or as you so
demurely put it, [white] Women cared so much about these civil issues that they
wanted to strengthen their voices by first fighting for gender equality to ensure they
would be heard.

I agree that feminism is far too broad to be pinned down into one monolithic point of
view. Feminism will be better served (and thought leadership more trusted) when we
own up to our own biases, especially when being checked by team mates fighting the
same cause.

Reply

o Nicole Teillon Riegl says

MAY 31, 2016 AT 10:42 AM

Monikah Thank you for the reminder that African-American women in the South had a
longer fight on this issue because of lingering racism. We appreciate our careful readers
who help to further educate us all.

Reply

Trackbacks
1. An Intimate Conversation with Evan Roskos and Dana Harrison of Rowans
Teaching Staff on Women in Literature | Famished Feminism says:

December 14, 2015 at 8:55 am

[] and feminism go hand in hand, seeing as the first wave of feminism brought out all
of the great writers such as []

Reply

2. What Does It Mean to be a Feminist? Sex(uality) & the City says:

January 31, 2016 at 1:37 pm

[] of plagiarizing, I would encourage you to read Caroline Dorey-Steins brief survey of

Feminism. There, she reminds her readers that, Due to the range of feminist issues
today, it is much []

Reply

3. Waves of FOAM: Does the discussion of quality and impact suggest #FOAMed's
maturation? - CanadiEM says:

February 12, 2016 at 9:46 am

[] have come in multiple waves. Feminism, for instance, is thought by many scholars
to have at least 3 waves (some would argue 4), each with its own characteristics and
stance on how to achieve its []

Reply

4. Letter From the Editor Sheezus Magazine says:

March 20, 2016 at 6:09 pm

[] the topiclike dipping my big toe in the ocean surf; I wasnt ready to throw myself
into the waves of feminism (see what I did []

Reply

5. Some to know | Women know how to fight for what they want. says:
 March 24, 2016 at 2:40 pm

[] https://www.progressivewomensleadership.com/a-brief-history-the-three-waves-of-
feminism/ []

Reply

6. Why I no longer use the label feminist when I am one | The Pink Heretic says:

April 26, 2016 at 12:05 pm

[] to those who assume feminists are all third wave social justice warriors. All
feminists are NOT all third wave social justice warriors. Social justice is important, but
taking things to overly politically []

Reply

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v
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For most of historical time, women were oppressed not through their reproductive
sexuality - that is, through the need of society to assign most of a womans adult
lifespan to tasks of child-bearing and child-rearing - but through the devaluing of such
activities by men as they institute organized society. Women are oppressed also
through sexual exploitation, as manifested in the rape of women of the conquered
group by the victors, the rape of women of subordinate classes by the masters, in the
millennia of organized prostitution, and in the constant pressure on single women to
make marriage and family service their main career. Women as a group are oppressed
through the denial of access to educational opportunities on equality with men and,
finally, through the denial to them - for longer than to any other group - of political
representation and power in government.[1] The history of feminism is
the chronological narrative of the movements and ideologies aimed at equal rights for
women. While feminists around the world have differed in causes, goals, and
intentions depending on time, culture, and country, most Western feminist historians
assert that all movements that work to obtain women's rights should be
considered feminist movements, even when they did not (or do not) apply the term to
themselves.[2][3][4][5][6] Other historians limit the term to the modern feminist
movement and its progeny, and instead use the label "protofeminist" to describe
earlier movements.[7]

Modern Western feminist history is split into three time periods, or "waves", each
with slightly different aims based on prior progress.[8][9] First-wave feminism of the
19th and early 20th centuries focuses on overturning legal inequalities,
particularly women's suffrage. Second-wave feminism (1960s1980s) broadened
debate to include cultural inequalities, gender norms, and the role of women in
society. Third-wave feminism (1990s2000s) refers to diverse strains of feminist
activity, seen as both a continuation of the second wave and a response to its
perceived failures.[10] Although the waves construct has been commonly used to
describe the history of feminism, the concept has also been criticized for ignoring and
erasing the history between the "waves", by choosing to focus solely on a few famous
figures, and popular events.[11]

Contents
1 Early feminism
2 18th century: the Age of Enlightenment
o 2.1 Jeremy Bentham
o 2.2 Marquis de Condorcet
o 2.3 Olympe de Gouges and A Declaration
o 2.4 Wollstonecraft and A Vindication
3 19th century
o 3.1 The feminine ideal
o 3.2 Feminism in fiction
o 3.3 Marion Reid and Caroline Norton
o 3.4 Florence Nightingale and Frances Power Cobbe
o 3.5 Ladies of Langham Place
o 3.6 Educational reform
o 3.7 Women's campaigns
4 19th to 21st centuries
 o 4.1 First wave
o 4.2 Suffrage
4.2.1 The suffragettes
4.2.2 International suffrage
o 4.3 Early 20th century
4.3.1 Feminist science fiction
o 4.4 Mid-20th century
4.4.1 Electoral reform
4.4.2 Social reform
4.4.3 Reproductive rights
o 4.5 1940s
o 4.6 Second wave
4.6.1 Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, and Women's
Liberation
o 4.7 Feminist writing
o 4.8 Feminist views on pornography
o 4.9 Third wave
4.9.1 Sexual politics
4.9.2 Global feminism
o 4.10 Fourth wave
4.10.1 Arguments for a new wave
4.10.2 The Everyday Sexism Project
o 4.11 Criticisms of the Wave Metaphor
5 National histories of feminism
o 5.1 France
o 5.2 Germany
o 5.3 Iran
o 5.4 Egypt
o 5.5 India
o 5.6 China
o 5.7 Japan
o 5.8 Norway
o 5.9 Poland
6 Histories of selected feminist issues
o 6.1 Feminist theory
7 See also
8 References
9 Bibliography
o 9.1 General
9.1.1 Books
9.1.2 Articles
 o 9.2 International
9.2.1 Europe
9.2.2 Great Britain
9.2.3 Italy
9.2.4 India
9.2.5 Iran
9.2.6 Japan
9.2.7 Latin America
9.2.8 USA
9.2.9 Sexuality
10 Further reading
11 External links

Early feminism[edit]
See also: Protofeminism

Christine de Pizan presents her book to Queen Isabeau of Bavaria.

People and activists who discuss or advance women's equality prior to the existence of
the feminist movement are sometimes labeled as protofeminist.[7]Some scholars,
however, criticize this term's usage.[5][12][why?] Some argue that it diminishes the
importance of earlier contributions,[13] while others argue that feminism does not have
a single, linear history as implied by terms such as protofeminist or postfeminist.[14]

Around 24 centuries ago,[15] Plato, according to Elaine Hoffman Baruch, "[argued] for
the total political and sexual equality of women, advocating that they be members of
his highest class, ... those who rule and fight".[16]

French writer Christine de Pizan (1364 c. 1430), the author of The Book of the City
of Ladies and Eptre au Dieu d'Amour (Epistle to the God of Love) is cited by Simone
de Beauvoir as the first woman to denounce misogyny and write about the relation of
the sexes.[17] Other early feminist writers include Heinrich Cornelius
Agrippa and Modesta di Pozzo di Forzi, who worked in the 16th century,[18] and the
17th-century writers Hannah Woolley in England,[19] Juana Ins de la Cruz in
Mexico,[20] Marie Le Jars de Gournay, Anne Bradstreet, and Franois Poullain de la
Barre.[18]

One of the most important 17th-century feminist writers in the English language
was Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.[21][22][23][why?]

18th century: the Age of Enlightenment[edit]

The Age of Enlightenment was characterized by secular intellectual reasoning and a
flowering of philosophical writing. Many Enlightenment philosophers defended the
rights of women, including Jeremy Bentham (1781), Marquis de Condorcet (1790),
and, perhaps most notably, Mary Wollstonecraft (1792).[24]Other important writers of
the time that expressed feminist views included Abigail Adams, Catharine
Macaulay,[25] and Hedvig Charlotta Nordenflycht.

Jeremy Bentham[edit]

The English utilitarian and classical liberal philosopher Jeremy Bentham said that it
was the placing of women in a legally inferior position that made him choose the
career of a reformist at the age of eleven. Bentham spoke for complete equality
between sexes including the rights to vote and to participate in government. He
opposed the asymmetrical sexual moral standards between men and women.[26]

In his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1781), Bentham

strongly condemned many countries' common practice to deny women's rights due to
allegedly inferior minds.[27] Bentham gave many examples of able female regents.

Marquis de Condorcet[edit]

Nicolas de Condorcet was a mathematician, classical liberal politician, leading French

Revolutionary, republican, and Voltairean anti-clericalist. He was also a fierce
defender of human rights, including the equality of women and the abolition of
slavery, unusual for the 1780s. He advocated for women's suffrage in the new
government in 1790 with De l'admission des femmes au droit de cit (For the
Admission to the Rights of Citizenship For Women) and an article for Journal de la
Socit de 1789.[28][29][30]

Olympe de Gouges and A Declaration[edit]

Main articles: Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female
Citizen and Olympe de Gouges

Following de Condorcet's repeated, yet failed, appeals to the National Assembly in

1789 and 1790, Olympe de Gouges (in association with the Society of the Friends of
Truth) authored and published the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the
Female Citizen in 1791. This was another plea for the French Revolutionary
government to recognize the natural and political rights of women.[31] De Gouges
wrote the Declaration in the prose of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and
Citizen, almost mimicking the failure of men to include more than a half of the French
population in egalit. Even though,the Declaration did not immediately accomplish
its goals, it did set a precedent for a manner in which feminists could satirize their
governments for their failures in equality, seen in documents such as A Vindication of
the Rights of Woman and A Declaration of Sentiments.[32]

Wollstonecraft and A Vindication[edit]

Main articles: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Mary Wollstonecraft

First edition print of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Perhaps the most cited feminist writer of the time was Mary Wollstonecraft, often
characterized as the first feminist philosopher. A Vindication of the Rights of
Woman (1792) is one of the first works that can unambiguously be called feminist,
although by modern standards her comparison of women to the nobility, the elite of
society (coddled, fragile, and in danger of intellectual and moral sloth) may at first
seem dated as a feminist argument. Wollstonecraft identified the education and
upbringing of women as creating their limited expectations based on a self-image
dictated by the typically male perspective.[33]Despite her perceived inconsistencies
(Miriam Brody referred to the "Two Wollstonecrafts")[34] reflective of problems that
had no easy answers, this book remains a foundation stone of feminist thought.[2]

Wollstonecraft believed that both genders contributed to inequality. She took women's
considerable power over men for granted, and determined that both would require
education to ensure the necessary changes in social attitudes. Given her humble
origins and scant education, her personal achievements speak to her own
determination. Wollstonecraft attracted the mockery of Samuel Johnson, who
described her and her ilk as "Amazons of the pen". Based on his relationship
with Hester Thrale,[35] he complained of women's encroachment onto a male territory
of writing, and not their intelligence or education. For many commentators,
Wollstonecraft represents the first codification of equality feminism, or a refusal of
the feminine role in society.[36][37]

19th century[edit]

Author and scholar Helen Kendrick Johnson opposed women's suffrage.

The feminine ideal[edit]

19th-century feminists reacted to cultural inequities including the pernicious,

widespread acceptance of the Victorian image of women's "proper" role and
"sphere."[38] The Victorian ideal created a dichotomy of "separate spheres" for men
and women that was very clearly defined in theory, though not always in reality. In
this ideology, men were to occupy the public sphere (the space of wage labor and
politics) and women the private sphere (the space of home and children). This
"feminine ideal," also called "The Cult of Domesticity," was typified in
Victorian conduct books such as Mrs Beeton's Book of Household
Management and Sarah Stickney Ellis's books.[39] The Angel in the House (1854)
and El ngel del hogar, bestsellers by Coventry Patmore and Maria del Pilar Sinus
de Marco, came to symbolize the Victorian feminine ideal.[40] Queen Victoria herself
disparaged the concept of feminism, which she described in private letters as the
"mad, wicked folly of 'Woman's Rights'".[41][42]

Feminism in fiction[edit]
As Jane Austen addressed women's restricted lives in the early part of the
century,[43] Charlotte Bront, Anne Bront, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George
Eliot depicted women's misery and frustration.[44] In her autobiographical novel Ruth
Hall (1854),[45] American journalist Fanny Fern describes her own struggle to support
her children as a newspaper columnist after her husband's untimely death.[46] Louisa
May Alcott penned a strongly feminist novel,[47] A Long Fatal Love Chase (1866),
about a young woman's attempts to flee her bigamist husband and become
independent.[48]

Male authors also recognized injustices against women. The novels of George
Meredith, George Gissing,[49] and Thomas Hardy,[50] and the plays of Henrik
Ibsen[51] outlined the contemporary plight of women. Meredith's Diana of the
Crossways (1885) is an account of Caroline Norton's life.[52] One critic later called
Ibsen's plays "feministic propaganda".[14]

Marion Reid and Caroline Norton[edit]

At the outset of the 19th century, the dissenting feminist voices had little to no social
influence.[citation needed] There was little sign of change in the political or social order,
nor any evidence of a recognizable women's movement. Collective concerns began to
coalesce by the end of the century, paralleling the emergence of a stiffer social model
and code of conduct that Marion Reid described as confining and repressive for
women.[2] While the increased emphasis on feminine virtue partly stirred the call for a
woman's movement, the tensions that this role caused for women plagued many early-
19th-century feminists with doubt and worry, and fueled opposing views.[53]

In Scotland, Reid published her influential A Plea for Woman in 1843,[54] which
proposed a transatlantic Western agenda for women's rights, including voting rights
for women.[55]

Caroline Norton advocated for changes in British law. She discovered a lack of legal
rights for women upon entering an abusive marriage.[56] The publicity generated from
her appeal to Queen Victoria[57] and related activism helped change English laws to
recognize and accommodate married women and child custody issues.[56]

Florence Nightingale and Frances Power Cobbe[edit]

Florence Nightingale

While many women including Norton were wary of organized movements,[58] their
actions and words often motivated and inspired such movements.[citation needed] Among
these was Florence Nightingale, whose conviction that women had all the potential of
men but none of the opportunities[59] impelled her storied nursing career.[60] At the
time, her feminine virtues were emphasized over her ingenuity, an example of
the bias against acknowledging female accomplishment in the mid-1800s.[60]

Due to varying ideologies, feminists were not always supportive of each other's
efforts. Harriet Martineau and others dismissed Wollstonecraft's[61]contributions as
dangerous, and deplored Norton's[61] candidness, but seized on
the abolitionist campaign that Martineau had witnessed in the United States[62] as one
that should logically be applied to women. Her Society in America[63] was pivotal: it
caught the imagination of women who urged her to take up their cause.[citation needed]

Frances Cobbe

Anna Wheeler was influenced by Saint Simonian socialists while working in France.
She advocated for suffrage and attracted the attention of Benjamin Disraeli, the
Conservative leader, as a dangerous radical on a par with Jeremy Bentham.[citation
needed]
She would later inspire early socialist and feminist advocate William
Thompson,[64] who wrote the first work published in English to advocate full equality
of rights for women, the 1825 "Appeal of One Half of the Human Race".[65]

Feminists of previous centuries charged women's exclusion from education as the

central cause for their domestic relegation and denial of social advancement, and
women's 19th-century education was no better.[citation needed] Frances Power Cobbe,
among others, called for education reform, an issue that gained attention alongside
marital and property rights, and domestic violence.

Female journalists like Martineau and Cobbe in Britain, and Margaret Fuller in
America, were achieving journalistic employment, which placed them in a position to
influence other women. Cobbe would refer to "Woman's Rights" not just in the
abstract, but as an identifiable cause.[66]

Ladies of Langham Place[edit]

For more details on this topic, see English Woman's Journal.

Barbara Leigh Smith and her friends met regularly during the 1850s in London's
Langham Place to discuss the united women's voice necessary for achieving reform.
These "Ladies of Langham Place" included Bessie Rayner Parkes and Anna Jameson.
They focused on education, employment, and marital law. One of their causes became
the Married Women's Property Committee of 1855.[citation needed] They collected
thousands of signatures for legislative reform petitions, some of which were
successful. Smith had also attended the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention in
America.[56][67]

Smith and Parkes, together and apart, wrote many articles on education and
employment opportunities. In the same year as Norton, Smith summarized the legal
framework for injustice in her 1854 A Brief Summary of the Laws of England
concerning Women.[68] She was able to reach large numbers of women via her role in
the English Women's Journal. The response to this journal led to their creation of
the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women (SPEW). Smith's Married
Women's Property committee collected 26,000 signatures to change the law[clarification
needed]
for all women, including those unmarried.[56][67]

Harriet Taylor published her Enfranchisement in 1851, and wrote about the inequities
of family law. In 1853, she married John Stuart Mill, and provided him with much of
the subject material for The Subjection of Women.
Emily Davies also encountered the Langham group, and with Elizabeth
Garrett created SPEW branches outside London.

Educational reform[edit]

Main article: Female education

The interrelated barriers to education and employment formed the backbone of 19th-
century feminist reform efforts, for instance, as described by Harriet Martineau in her
1859 Edinburgh Journal article, "Female Industry".[clarification needed] These barriers did
not change in conjunction with the economy. Martineau, however, remained a
moderate, for practical reasons, and unlike Cobbe, did not support the emerging call
for the vote.[citation needed]

The education reform efforts of women like Davies and the Langham group slowly
made inroads. Queen's College (1848) and Bedford College (1849) in London began
to offer some education to women from 1848. By 1862, Davies established a
committee to persuade the universities to allow women to sit for the recently
established Local Examinations,[clarification needed] and achieved partial success in 1865.
She published The Higher Education of Women a year later. Davies and Leigh Smith
founded the first higher educational institution for women and enrolled five students.
The school later became Girton College, Cambridge in 1869, Newnham College,
Cambridge in 1871, and Lady Margaret Hall at Oxford in 1879. Bedford began to
award degrees the previous year. Despite these measurable advances, few could take
advantage of them and life for female students was still difficult.[clarification needed]

In the 1883 Ilbert Bill controversy, a British India bill that proposed Indian judicial
jurisdiction to try British criminals, Bengali women in support of the bill responded
by claiming that they were more educated than the English women opposed to the bill,
and noted that more Indian women had degrees than British women at the
time.[69][clarification needed]

As part of the continuing dialogue between British and American feminists, Elizabeth
Blackwell, one of the first American women to graduate in medicine (1849), lectured
in Britain with Langham support. They[who?] also supported Elizabeth Garrett's
attempts to receive a British medical education despite virulent opposition. She
eventually took her degree in France. Garrett's very successful 1870 campaign to run
for London School Board office is another example of a how a small band of very
determined women were beginning to reach positions of influence at the local
government level.[citation needed]

Women's campaigns[edit]
Josephine Butler

Campaigns gave women opportunities to test their new political skills and to conjoin
disparate social reform groups. Their successes include the campaign for the Married
Women's Property Act (passed in 1882) and the campaign to repeal the Contagious
Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866, and 1869, which united women's groups and utilitarian
liberals like John Stuart Mill.[70]

Generally, women were outraged by the inherent inequity and misogyny of the
legislation.[citation needed] For the first time, women in large numbers took up the rights
of prostitutes. Prominent critics included Blackwell, Nightingale, Martineau, and
Elizabeth Wolstenholme. Elizabeth Garrett, unlike her sister, Millicent, did not
support the campaign, though she later admitted that the campaign had done
well.[citation needed]

Josephine Butler, already experienced in prostitution issues, a charismatic leader, and

a seasoned campaigner, emerged as the natural leader[71] of what became the Ladies
National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts in
1869.[72][73] Her work demonstrated the potential power of an organized lobby group.
The association successfully argued that the Acts not only demeaned prostitutes, but
all women and men by promoting a blatant sexual double standard. Butler's activities
resulted in the radicalization of many moderate women. The Acts were repealed in
1886.[citation needed]

On a smaller scale, Annie Besant campaigned for the rights of matchgirls (female
factory workers) and against the appalling conditions under which they worked. Her
work became a method for raising public concern over social issues.[citation needed]
19th to 21st centuries[edit]
Feminists did not recognize separate waves of feminism until the second wave was so
named by journalist Martha Lear, according to Jennifer
Baumgardner.[74] Baumgardner reports criticism by professor Roxanne Dunbar-
Ortiz of the division into waves[75] and the difficulty of categorizing some feminists
into specific waves,[76] argues that the main critics of a wave are likely to be members
of the prior wave who remain vital,[76] and that waves are coming faster.[76] The
"waves debate" has influenced how historians and other scholars have established the
chronologies of women's political activism.[1]

First wave[edit]

Main articles: First-wave feminism and History of women in the United States

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (seated) and Susan B. Anthony

The 19th- and early 20th-century feminist activity in the English-speaking world that
sought to win women's suffrage, female education rights, better working conditions,
and abolition of gender double standards is known as first-wave feminism. The term
"first-wave" was coined retrospectively when the term second-wave feminism was
used to describe a newer feminist movement that fought social and cultural
inequalities beyond basic political inequalities.[77] In the United States, feminist
movement leaders campaigned for the national abolition of
slavery and Temperance before championing women's rights.[citation needed] American
first-wave feminism involved a wide range of women, some belonging to conservative
Christian groups (such as Frances Willard and the Woman's Christian Temperance
Union), others resembling the diversity and radicalism of much of second-wave
feminism (such as Stanton, Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and the National Woman
Suffrage Association, of which Stanton was president). First-wave feminism in the
United States is considered to have ended with the passage of the Nineteenth
Amendment to the United States Constitution (1920), which granted white women the
right to vote in the United States.

Activism for the equality of women was not limited to the United States. In mid-
nineteenth century Persia, Thirih was active as a poet and religious reformer, and is
recorded as proclaiming the equality of women at her execution. She inspired later
generations of Iranian feminists.[78] Louise Dittmar campaigned for women's rights, in
Germany, in the 1840s.[79] Although slightly later in time, Fusae Ichikawa was in the
first wave of women's activists in her own country of Japan, campaigning for women's
suffrage. Mary Lee was active in the suffrage movement in South Australia, the first
Australian colony to grant women the vote in 1894. In New Zealand, Kate
Sheppard and Mary Ann Mller worked to achieve the vote for women by 1893.

The Nineteenth Amendment

In the United States, the antislavery campaign of the 1830s served as both a cause
ideologically compatible with feminism and a blueprint for later feminist political
organizing. Attempts to exclude women only strengthened their convictions.[citation
needed]
Sarah and Angelina Grimk moved rapidly from the emancipation of slaves to
the emancipation of women. The most influential feminist writer of the time was the
colourful journalist Margaret Fuller, whose Woman in the Nineteenth Century was
published in 1845. Her dispatches from Europe for the New York Tribune helped
create to synchronize the women's rights movement.
Matilda Joslyn Gage

Bessie Rayner Parkes

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott met in 1840 while en route to London
where they were shunned as women by the male leadership of the first World's Anti-
Slavery Convention. In 1848, Mott and Stanton held a woman's rights convention in
Seneca Falls, New York, where a declaration of independence for women was
drafted. Lucy Stone helped to organize the first National Women's Rights
Convention in 1850, a much larger event at which Sojourner Truth, Abby Kelley
Foster, and others spoke sparked Susan B. Anthony to take up the cause of women's
rights. In December 1851, Sojourner Truth contributed to the feminist movement
when she spoke at the Womens Convention in Akron, Ohio. She delivered her
powerful Aint I a Woman speech in an effort to promote womens rights by
demonstrating their ability to accomplish tasks that have been traditionally associated
with men.[80] Barbara Leigh Smith met with Mott in 1858,[81] strengthening the link
between the transatlantic feminist movements.

Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage saw the Church as a major obstacle to women's
rights,[82] and welcomed the emerging literature on matriarchy. Both Gage and
Stanton produced works on this topic, and collaborated on The Woman's Bible.
Stanton wrote "The Matriarchate or Mother-Age"[83] and Gage wrote Woman, Church
and State, neatly inverting Johann Jakob Bachofen's thesis and adding a
unique epistemological perspective, the critique of objectivity and the perception of
the subjective.[83][jargon]

Stanton once observed regarding assumptions of female inferiority, "The worst feature
of these assumptions is that women themselves believe them".[84] However this
attempt to replace androcentric (male-centered) theological[clarification needed] tradition
with a gynocentric (female-centered) view made little headway in a women's
movement dominated by religious elements; thus she and Gage were largely ignored
by subsequent generations.[85][86]

By 1913, Feminism (originally capitalized) was a household term in the United

States.[87] Major issues in the 1910s and 1920s included suffrage, women's partisan
activism, economics and employment, sexualities and families, war and peace, and
a Constitutional amendment for equality. Both equality and difference were seen as
routes to women's empowerment.[clarification needed] Organizations at the time included
the National Woman's Party, suffrage advocacy groups such as the National American
Woman Suffrage Association and the National League of Women Voters, career
associations such as the American Association of University Women, the National
Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs, and the National Women's
Trade Union League, war and peace groups such as the Women's International League
for Peace and Freedom and the International Council of Women, alcohol-focused
groups like the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the Women's Organization
for National Prohibition Reform, and race- and gender-centered organizations like
the National Association of Colored Women. Leaders and theoreticians included Jane
Addams, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Alice Paul, Carrie Chapman Catt, Margaret Sanger,
and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.[88]

Suffrage[edit]
Emily Davison

Lucy Stone

Sylvia Pankhurst
Nellie McClung
Main articles: Women's suffrage and Timeline of women's suffrage

The women's right to vote, with its legislative representation, represented a paradigm
shift where women would no longer be treated as second-class citizens without a
voice. The women's suffrage campaign is the most deeply embedded campaign of the
past 250 years.[89][dubious discuss]

At first, suffrage was treated as a lower priority. The French Revolution accelerated
this,[clarification needed] with the assertions of Condorcet and de Gouges, and the women
who led the 1789 march on Versailles. In 1793, the Society of Revolutionary
Republican Women was founded, and originally included suffrage on its agenda
before it was suppressed at the end of the year. As a gesture, this showed that issue
was now part of the European political agenda.[citation needed]

German women were involved in the Vormrz, a prelude to the 1848 revolution. In
Italy, Clara Maffei, Cristina Trivulzio Belgiojoso, and Ester Martini Currica were
politically active[clarification needed] in the events leading up to 1848. In Britain, interest in
suffrage emerged from the writings of Wheeler and Thompson in the 1820s, and from
Reid, Taylor, and Anne Knight in the 1840s.[citation needed] The Australian State of South
Australia was the first place in the world to officially grant full suffrage to women.

The suffragettes[edit]

Main article: Suffragette

The Langham Place ladies set up a suffrage committee at an 1866 meeting at

Elizabeth Garrett's home, renamed the London Society for Women's Suffrage in
1867.[90] Soon similar committees had spread across the country, raising petitions, and
working closely with John Stuart Mill. When denied outlets by establishment
periodicals, feminists started their own, such as Lydia Becker's Women's Suffrage
Journal in 1870.

Other publications included Richard Pankhurst's Englishwoman's

Review (1866).[clarification needed] Tactical disputes were the biggest problem,[clarification
needed]
and the groups' memberships fluctuated.[clarification needed] Women considered
whether men (like Mill) should be involved. As it went, Mill withdrew as the
movement became more aggressive with each disappointment.[clarification needed] The
political pressure ensured debate, but year after year the movement was defeated in
Parliament.

Despite this, the women accrued political experience, which translated into slow
progress at the local government level. But after years of frustration, many women
became increasingly radicalized. Some refused to pay taxes, and the Pankhurst
family emerged as the dominant movement influence, having also founded
the Women's Franchise League in 1889, which sought local election suffrage for
women.[citation needed]

International suffrage[edit]

For more details on this topic, see Women's suffrage Details by country.

The Isle of Man was the first free standing jurisdiction to grant women the vote
(1881), followed by New Zealand in 1893, where Kate Sheppard[91] had pioneered
reform. Some Australian states had also granted women the vote. This included
Victoria for a brief period (18635), South Australia (1894), and Western Australia
(1899). Australian women received the vote at the Federal level in 1902, Finland in
1906, and Norway initially in 1907 (completed in 1913).[92]

Early 20th century[edit]

In the Netherlands, Wilhelmina Drucker (18471925) fought successfully for the vote
and equal rights for women through political and feminist organisations she founded.
In 191719 her goal of women's suffrage was reached.

In the early part of the 20th century, also known as the Edwardian era, there was a
change in the way women dressed from the Victorian rigidity and complacency.
Women, especially women who married a wealthy man, would often wear what we
consider today, practical.[93]

Books, articles, speeches, pictures, and papers from the period show a diverse range
of themes other than political reform and suffrage discussed publicly.[citation needed] In
the Netherlands, for instance, the main feminist issues were educational rights, rights
to medical care,[94] improved working conditions, peace, and dismantled gender
double standards.[95][96][97][98][99][100] Feminists identified as such with little
fanfare.[citation needed]

The charismatic and controversial[clarification needed] Pankhursts formed the Women's

Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1903. As Emmline Pankhurst put it, they
viewed votes for women no longer as "a right, but as a desperate necessity".[this quote
needs a citation]
At the state level, Australia and the United States had already granted
suffrage to some women. American feminists such as Susan B. Anthony (1902)
visited Britain.[clarification needed] While WSPU was the best-known suffrage group,[citation
needed]
it was only one of many, such as the Women's Freedom League and
the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) led by Millicent Garrett
Fawcett.[clarification needed] WSPU was largely a family affair,[clarification needed] although
externally financed. Christabel Pankhurst became the dominant figure and gathered
friends such as Annie Kenney, Flora Drummond, Teresa Billington, Ethel
Smyth, Grace Roe, and Norah Dacre Fox (later known as Norah Elam) around her.
Veterans such as Elizabeth Garrett also joined.

In 1906, the Daily Mail first labeled these women "suffragettes" as a form of ridicule,
but the term was quickly embraced[by whom?] in Britain to describe the more militant
form of suffragism visible in public marches, distinctive green, purple, and white
emblems, and the Artists' Suffrage League's dramatic graphics. Even underwear in
WPSU colors appeared in stores.[citation needed] They feminists learned to exploit
photography and the media, and left a vivid visual record including images such as the
1914 photograph of Emmeline.[citation needed] As the movement gained momentum, deep
divisions separated the former leaders from the radicals. The splits were usually
ideological or tactical.[citation needed] Even Christabel's sister, Sylvia, was expelled.[citation
needed]

Suffrage parade in New York, May 6, 1912

Cover of WSPU's The Suffragette, April 25, 1913 (after Delacroix's Liberty Leading
the People, 1830)

The protests slowly became more violent, and included heckling, banging on doors,
smashing shop windows, and arson. Emily Davison, a WSPU member, unexpectedly
ran onto the track during the 1913 Epsom Derby and died under the King's horse.
These tactics produced mixed results of sympathy and alienation.[citation needed] As many
protesters were imprisoned and went on hunger-strike, the British government was left
with an embarrassing situation. From these political actions, the suffragists
successfully created publicity around their institutional discrimination and sexism.
Ida B. Wells

Feminist science fiction[edit]

Main article: Feminist science fiction

At the beginning of the 20th century, feminist science fiction emerged as a subgenre
of science fiction that deals with women's roles in society. Female writers of
the utopian literature movement at the time of first-wave feminism often addressed
sexism. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915) did so.[clarification needed] Sultana's
Dream (1905) by Bengali Muslim feminist Roquia Sakhawat Hussain depicts a
gender-reversed purdah in a futuristic world.

During the 1920s, writers such as Clare Winger Harris and Gertrude Barrows
Bennett published science fiction stories written from female perspectives and
occasionally dealt with gender- and sexuality-based topics while popular 1920s and
30s pulp science fiction exaggerated masculinity alongside sexist portrayals of
women.[101] By the 1960s, science fiction combined sensationalism with political and
technological critiques of society. With the advent of feminism, women's roles were
questioned in this "subversive, mind expanding genre".[102]

Feminist science fiction poses questions about social issues such as how society
constructs gender roles, how reproduction defines gender, and how the political power
of men and women are unequal.[citation needed] Some of the most notable feminist science
fiction works have illustrated these themes using utopias to explore societies where
gender differences or gender power imbalances do not exist, and dystopias to explore
worlds where gender inequalities are escalated, asserting a need for feminist work to
continue.[103]

Mid-20th century[edit]

Women entered the labor market during the First World War in unprecedented
numbers, often in new sectors, and discovered the value of their work. The war also
left large numbers of women bereaved and with a net loss of household income. The
scores of men killed and wounded shifted the demographic composition. War also
split the feminist groups, with many women opposed to the war and others involved in
the white feather campaign.[citation needed]

Feminist scholars like Francoise Thebaud and Nancy F. Cott note a conservative
reaction to World War I in some countries, citing a reinforcement of traditional
imagery and literature that promotes motherhood. The appearance of these traits in
wartime has been called the "nationalization of women".[citation needed]

In the years between the wars, feminists fought discrimination and establishment
opposition.[clarification needed] In Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, Woolf describes
the extent of the backlash and her frustration at the waste of so much talent.[who?] By
now, the word "feminism" was in use, but with a negative connotation from mass
media, which discouraged women from self-identifying as such.[citation needed] In 1938,
Woolf wrote of the term in Three Guineas, "an old word ... that has much harm in its
day and is now obsolete".[this quote needs a citation] When Rebecca West, another prominent
writer, had been attacked as "a feminist", Woolf defended her. West has perhaps best
been remembered[citation needed] for her comment, "I myself have never been able to find
out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I
express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat, or a prostitute."[104] Woolf's
writing also examined gender constructs and portrayed lesbian sexuality positively.

In the 1920s, the nontraditional styles and attitudes of flappers were popular among
American and British women.[105]

Electoral reform[edit]

The United Kingdom's Representation of the People Act 1918[106] gave near-universal
suffrage to men, and suffrage to women over 30. The Representation of the People
Act 1928 extended equal suffrage to both men and women. It also shifted the
socioeconomic makeup of the electorate towards the working class, favoring
the Labour Party, who were more sympathetic to women's issues.[citation
needed]
The following election and gave Labour the most seats in the house to date. The
electoral reforms also allowed women to run for Parliament. Christabel
Pankhurst narrowly failed to win a seat in 1918, but in 1919 and 1920, both Lady
Astor and Margaret Wintringham won seats for the Conservatives and Liberals
respectively by succeeding their husband's seats. Labour swept to power in
1924. Constance Markievicz (Sinn Fin) was the first woman elected in Ireland in
1918, but as an Irish nationalist, refused to take her seat. Astor's proposal to form a
women's party in 1929 was unsuccessful, which some historians[who?]feel was a missed
opportunity, as there were only 12 women in Parliament by 1940. Women gained
considerable electoral experience over the next few years as a series of minority
governments ensured almost annual elections. Close affiliation with Labour also
proved to be a problem for the National Union of Societies for Equal
Citizenship (NUSEC), which had little support in the Conservative party. However,
their persistence with Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin was rewarded with the passage
of the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act 1928.[citation needed]

European women received the vote in Denmark and Iceland in 1915 (full in 1919),
the Russian Republic in 1917, Austria, Germany and Canada in 1918, many countries
including the Netherlands in 1919, Czechoslovakia (today Czech
Republic and Slovakia) in 1920, and Turkey and South Africa in 1930. French women
did not receive the vote until 1945. Liechtenstein was one of the last countries, in
1984.[107]

Social reform[edit]

The political change did not immediately change social circumstances. With the
economic recession, women were the most vulnerable sector of the workforce. Some
women who held jobs prior to the war were obliged to forfeit them to returning
soldiers, and others were excessed. With limited franchise, the UK National Union of
Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) pivoted into a new organization, the National
Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (NUSEC),[108] which still advocated for
equality in franchise, but extended its scope to examine equality in social and
economic areas. Legislative reform was sought for discriminatory laws (e.g., family
law and prostitution) and over the differences between equality and equity, the
accommodations that would allow women to overcome barriers to fulfillment (known
in later years as the "equality vs. difference conundrum").[109] Eleanor Rathbone, who
became a British Member of Parliament in 1929, succeeded Millicent Garrett as
president of NUSEC in 1919. She expressed the critical need for consideration
of difference in gender relationships as "what women need to fulfill the potentialities
of their own natures".[this quote needs a citation] The 1924 Labour government's social
reforms created a formal split, as a splinter group of strict egalitarians formed
the Open Door Council in May 1926.[110] This eventually became an international
movement, and continued until 1965.[citation needed] Other important social legislation of
this period included the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 (which opened
professions to women), and the Matrimonial Causes Act 1923. In 1932, NUSEC
separated advocacy from education, and continued the former activities as
the National Council for Equal Citizenship and the latter as the Townswomen's Guild.
The council continued until the end of the Second World War.[citation needed]

Reproductive rights[edit]

Margaret Sanger

Marie Stopes

Laws prevented feminists from discussing and addressing reproductive rights. Annie
Besant was tried under the Obscene Publications Act 1857 in 1877 for
publishing Charles Knowlton's Fruits of Philosophy, a work on family
planning.[111][112] Knowlton had previously been convicted in the United States. She
and her colleague Charles Bradlaugh were convicted but acquitted on appeal. The
subsequent publicity resulted in a decline in the birth rate.[113][114][where?] Besant later
wrote The Law of Population.[115]

In America, Margaret Sanger was prosecuted for her book Family Limitation under
the Comstock Act in 1914, and fled to Britain until it was safe to return. Sanger's
work was prosecuted in Britain. She met Marie Stopes in Britain, who was never
prosecuted but regularly denounced for her promotion of birth control. In 1917,
Sanger started the Birth Control Review.[116] In 1926, Sanger gave a lecture on birth
control to the women's auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan in Silver Lake, New Jersey,
which she referred to as a "weird experience".[117][clarification needed] The establishment of
the Abortion Law Reform Association in 1936 was even more controversial. The
British penalty for abortion had been reduced from execution to life imprisonment by
the Offences against the Person Act 1861, although some exceptions were allowed in
the Infant Life (Preservation) Act 1929.[118][119] Following Aleck Bourne's prosecution
in 1938, the 1939 Birkett Committee made recommendations for reform that were set
aside at the Second World War's outbreak, along with many other women's issues.[120]

In the Netherlands, Aletta H. Jacobs, the first Dutch female doctor, and Wilhelmina
Drucker led discussion and action for reproductive rights. Jacobs imported
diaphragms from Germany and distributed them to poor women for free.[citation needed]

1940s[edit]

In most front line countries, women volunteered or were conscripted for various
duties in support of the national war effort. In Britain, women were drafted and
assigned to industrial jobs or to non-combat military service. The British services
enrolled 460,000 women. The largest service, Auxiliary Territorial Service, had a
maximum of 213,000 women enrolled, many of whom served in anti-aircraft gun
combat roles.[121][122] In many countries, including Germany and the Soviet Union,
women volunteered or were conscripted. In Germany, women volunteered in
the League of German Girls and assisted the Luftwaffe as anti-aircraft gunners, or as
guerrilla fighters in Werwolf units behind Allied lines.[123] In the Soviet Union, about
820,000 women served in the military as medics, radio operators, truck drivers,
snipers, combat pilots, and junior commanding officers.[124]

Many American women retained their domestic chores and often added a paid job,
especially one related to a war industry. Much more so than in the previous war, large
numbers of women were hired for unskilled or semi-skilled jobs in munitions, and
barriers against married women taking jobs were eased. The popular Rosie the
Riveter icon became a symbol for a generation of American working women.[citation
needed]
In addition, some 300,000 women served in U.S. military uniform with
organizations such as Women's Army Corps and WAVES. With many young men
gone, sports organizers tried to set up professional women's teams, such as the All-
American Girls Professional Baseball League, which closed after the war. After the
war, most munitions plants closed, and civilian plants replaced their temporary female
workers with returning veterans, who had priority.[125]

Second wave[edit]
Main article: Second-wave feminism

Gloria Steinem at news conference, Women's Action Alliance, January 12, 1972

Women's Liberation march in Washington, D.C., 1970

Betty Friedan 1960

"Second-wave feminism" identifies a period of feminist activity from the early 1960s
through the late 1980s that saw cultural and political inequalities as inextricably
linked. The movement encouraged women to understand aspects of their personal
lives as deeply politicized and reflective of a sexist power structure. As first-wave
feminists focused on absolute rights such as suffrage, second-wave feminists focused
on other cultural equality issues, such as ending discrimination.[126]

Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, and Women's Liberation[edit]

In 1963, Betty Friedan's expos The Feminine Mystique became the voice for the
discontent and disorientation women felt in being shunted into homemaking positions
after their college graduations. In the book, Friedan explored the roots of the change
in women's roles from essential workforce during World War II to homebound
housewife and mother after the war, and assessed the forces that drove this change in
perception of women's roles.[citation needed]

Over the following decade, "Women's Liberation" became a common phrase and
concept.[citation needed]

The expression "Women's Liberation" is sometimes used to refer to feminism

throughout history,[127] but the term only became widespread
recently.[when?] "Liberation" has been associated with feminist aspirations since
1895,[128][129] and appears in the context of "women's liberation" in Simone de
Beauvoir's 1949 The Second Sex, which appeared in English translation in 1953. The
phrase "women's liberation" was first used in 1964,[130] in print in 1966,[131] though the
French equivalent, libration des femmes, occurred as far back as 1911.[132] "Women's
liberation" was in use at the 1967 American Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)
convention, which held a panel discussion on the topic. In 1968, the term "Women's
Liberation Front" appeared in Ramparts magazine, and began to refer to the whole
women's movement.[133] In Chicago, women disillusioned with the New Left met
separately in 1967, and published Voice of the Women's Liberation Movement in
March 1968. When the Miss America pageant took place in Atlantic City in
September 1968,[134] the media referred to the resulting demonstrations as "Women's
Liberation". The Chicago Women's Liberation Union was formed in 1969.[135]Similar
groups with similar titles appeared in many parts of the United States. Bra-burning,
although fictional,[136] became associated with the movement, and the media coined
other terms such as "libber".[clarification needed] "Women's Liberation" persisted over the
other rival terms for the new feminism, captured the popular imagination, and has
endured alongside the older term "Women's Movement".[137]

1960s feminism, its theory, and its activism was informed and fueled by the social,
cultural, and political climate of that decade.[citation needed] This time was marked by
increased female enrollment in higher education, the establishment of
academic women's studies courses and departments,[138] and feminist ideology in other
related fields, such as politics, sociology, history, and literature.[12] This academic
shift in interests questioned the status quo, and its standards and authority.[139]

The rise of the Women's Liberation movement revealed "multiple feminisms", or

different underlying feminist lenses, due to the diverse origins from which groups had
coalesced and intersected, and the complexity and contentiousness of the issues
involved.[140] bell hooks is noted as a prominent critic of the movement for its lack of
voice given to the most oppressed women, its lack of emphasis on the inequalities of
race and class, and its distance from the issues that divide women.[141]

Feminist writing[edit]

Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, 1975 book by Susan Brownmiller.

Empowered by The Feminine Mystique, new feminist activists of the 1970s addressed
more political and sexual issues in their writing,[citation needed] including Gloria
Steinem's Ms. magazine and Kate Millett's Sexual Politics. Millett's bleak survey of
male writers, their attitudes and biases, to demonstrate that sex is politics, and politics
is power imbalance in relationships. Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of
Sex described a revolution[clarification needed] based in Marxism, referenced as the "sex
war". Considering the debates over patriarchy, she claimed that male domination
dated to "back beyond recorded history to the animal kingdom itself".

Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch, Sheila Rowbotham's Women's Liberation and
the New Politics, and Juliet Mitchell's Woman's Estate represent the English
perspective.[citation needed] Mitchell argued that the movement should be seen as an
international phenomenon with different manifestations based on local culture. British
women drew on left-wing politics and organized small local discussion groups, partly
through the London Women's Liberation Workshop and its publications, Shrew and
the LWLW Newsletter.[142] Although there were marches, the focus was
on consciousness-raising, or political activism intended to bring a cause or condition
to a wider audience.[130][143] Kathie Sarachild of Redstockings described its function as
such that women would "find what they thought was an individual dilemma is social
predicament".[this quote needs a citation] Women found that their own personal experiences
were information that they could trust in formulating political analyses.[citation needed]

Meanwhile, in the U.S., women's frustrations crystallized around the failure to ratify
the Equal Rights Amendment during the 1970s.[citation needed] Susan Brownmiller's
1975 Against Our Will introduced an explicit agenda against male violence,
specifically male sexual violence, in a treatise on rape. Her assertion that
"pornography is the theory and rape the practice" created deep fault lines[clarification
needed][144]
around the concepts of objectification[145] and commodification.
Brownmiller's other major book, In our Time (2000), is a history of women's
liberation.

Feminist views on pornography[edit]

Catharine MacKinnon
Further information: Feminist Sex Wars

Susan Griffin was one of the first[citation needed] feminists to write on pornography's
implications in her 1981 Pornography and Silence. Beyond Brownmiller and Griffin's
positions, Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin influenced debates and
activism around pornography and prostitution, particularly at the Supreme Court of
Canada.[146] MacKinnon, a lawyer, has stated, "To be about to be raped is to be gender
female in the process of going about life as usual."[147] She explained sexual
harassment by saying that it "doesn't mean that they[who?] all want to fuck us, they just
want to hurt us, dominate us, and control us, and that is fucking us."[148] Some[who?] see
radical feminism as the only movement that truly expresses the pain of being a woman
in an unequal society, as it portrays that reality with the experiences of the battered
and violated, which they claim to be the norm.[149] Critics, including some feminists,
civil libertarians, and jurists, have found this position uncomfortable and
alienating.[2][150][151]

This approach has evolved to transform the research and perspective on rape from an
individual experience into a social problem.[152]

Third wave[edit]

bell hooks
Main article: Third-wave feminism

Third-wave feminism began in the early 1990s in response to what young women
perceived as failures of the second-wave. It also responds to the backlash against the
second-wave's initiatives and movements.[citation needed] Third-wave feminism seeks to
challenge or avoid second-wave "essentialist" definitions of femininity, which over-
emphasized the experiences of white, upper middle class women. A post-
structuralist interpretation of gender and sexuality, or an understanding of gender as
outside binary maleness and femaleness, is central to much of the third wave's
ideology.[citation needed] Third-wave feminists often describe "micropolitics",[clarification
needed]
and challenge second-wave paradigms about whether actions are unilaterally
good for females.[126][153][154][155][clarification needed]

These aspects of third-wave feminism arose in the mid-1980s. Feminist leaders rooted
in the second wave like Gloria Anzalda, bell hooks, Chela Sandoval, Cherre
Moraga, Audre Lorde, Luisa Accati, Maxine Hong Kingston, and many other
feminists of color, called for a new subjectivity in feminist voice. They wanted
prominent feminist thought to consider race-related subjectivities.[clarification needed]This
focus on the intersection between race and gender remained prominent through the
1991 HillThomas hearings, but began to shift with the Freedom Ride 1992,[citation
needed]
a drive to register voters in poor minority communities whose rhetoric intended
to rally young feminists. For many, the rallying of the young is the common link
within third-wave feminism.[126][153]

Sexual politics[edit]

Lesbianism during the second wave was visible within and without feminism.
Lesbians felt sidelined by both gay liberation and women's liberation, where they
were referred to as the "Lavender Menace", provoking The Woman-Identified Woman,
a 1970 manifesto that put lesbian women at the forefront of the liberation
movement.[citation needed] Jill Johnston's 1973 Lesbian Nation: The Feminist
Solution argued for lesbian separatism.[clarification needed] In its extreme form, this was
expressed as the only appropriate choice for a woman.[citation needed] Eventually the
lesbian movement was welcomed into the mainstream women's movement. This
union's threat to male normativity was substantiated by the male backlash that
followed.[citation needed]

In reproductive rights, feminists sought the right to contraception and birth control,
which were almost universally restricted until the 1960s.[citation needed] Feminists hoped
to use the first birth control pill to free women to decide the terms under which they
will bear children. They felt that reproductive self-control was essential for full
economic independence from men. Access to abortion was also widely demanded for
these reasons, but was more difficult to secure due to existing, deep societal divisions
over the issue.

Third-wave feminists also fought to hasten social acceptance of female sexual

freedom. As societal norms allowed men to have multiple sexual partners without
rebuke, feminists sought sexual equality for that freedom and encouraged "sexual
liberation" for women, including sex for pleasure with multiple partners, if desired.

Global feminism[edit]

Following World War II, the United Nations (UN) extended feminism's global reach.
They established a Commission on the Status of Women in 1946.,[156][157] which later
joined the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). In 1948, the UN issued
its Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which protects "the equal rights of men
and women",[158] and addressed both equality and equity.[clarification needed]Starting with
the 1975 World Conference of the International Women's Year in Mexico City as part
of their Decade for Women (197585), the UN has held a series of world conferences
on women's issues. These conferences have worldwide female representation and
provide considerable opportunity to advance women's rights.[citation needed] They also
illustrate deep cultural divisions and disagreement on universal principles,[159] as
evidenced by the successive Copenhagen (1980) and Nairobi (1985)
conferences.[clarification needed] Examples of such intrafeminism divisions have included
disparities between economic development, attitudes towards forms of oppression, the
definition of feminism, and stances on homosexuality, female circumcision, and
population control.[citation needed] The Nairobi convention revealed a less monolithic
feminism that "constitutes the political expression of the concerns and interests of
women from different regions, classes, nationalities, and ethnic backgrounds. There is
and must be a diversity of feminisms, responsive to the different needs and concerns
of women, and defined by them for themselves. This diversity builds on a common
opposition to gender oppression and hierarchy which, however, is only the first step in
articulating and acting upon a political agenda."[160] The fourth conference was held in
Beijing in 1995,[161] where the Beijing Platform for Action was signed. This included
a commitment to achieve "gender equality and the empowerment of
women"[162] through "gender mainstreaming", or letting women and men "experience
equal conditions for realising their full human rights, and have the opportunity to
contribute and benefit from national, political, economic, social and cultural
development".[163]

Fourth wave[edit]

Main article: Fourth-wave of feminism

The fourth wave of feminism is a recent development within the feminist

movement. Jennifer Baumgardner identifies fourth-wave feminism as starting in 2008
and continuing into the present day.[164] Kira Cochrane, author of All the Rebel
Women: The Rise of the Fourth Wave of Feminism,[165] defines fourth-wave feminism
as a movement that is connected through technology.[166][167] Researcher Diana
Diamond defines fourth-wave feminism as a movement that
"combines politics, psychology, and spirituality in an overarching vision of
change." [168]

Arguments for a new wave[edit]

In 2005, Pythia Peay first argued for the existence of a fourth wave of feminism,
combining justice with religious spirituality.[169] According to Jennifer
Baumgardner in 2011, a fourth wave, incorporating online resources such as social
media, may have begun in 2008, inspired partly by Take Our Daughters to Work
Days. This fourth wave in turn has inspired or been associated with: the Doula Project
for children's services; post-abortion talk lines; pursuit of reproductive justice; plus-
size fashion support; transgenderism support; male feminism; sex work acceptance;
and developing media including Feministing, Racialicious, blogs,
and Twitter campaigns.[170]

According to Kira Cochrane, a fourth wave had appeared in the U.K. and several
other nations by 2012-13. It focused on: sexual inequality as manifested in "street
harassment, sexual harassment, workplace discrimination[,] ... body-
shaming";[171] media images, "online misogyny",[171] "assault[s] on public
transport";[171] on intersectionality; on social media technology for communication
and online petitioning for organizing; and on the perception, inherited from prior
waves, that individual experiences are shared and thus can have political
solutions.[171] Cochrane identified as fourth wave such organizations and websites as
the Everyday Sexism Project and UK Feminista; and events such as Reclaim the
Night, One Billion Rising, and "a Lose the Lads' mags protest",[171] where "many of
[the leaders] ... are in their teens and 20s".[171]

In 2014, Betty Dodson, who is also acknowledged as one of the leaders of the early
1980s pro-sex feminist movement, expressed that she considers herself a fourth wave
feminist. Dodson expressed that the previous waves of feminist were banal and anti-
sexual, which is why she has chosen to look at a new stance of feminism, fourth wave
feminism. In 2014, Dodson worked with women to discover their sexual desires
through masturbation. Dodson says her work has gained a fresh lease of life with a
new audience of young, successful women who have never had an orgasm. This
includes fourth-wave feminists - those rejecting the anti-pleasure stance they believe
third-wave feminists stand for.[172]

In 2014, Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett and Holly Baxter released their book, The
Vagenda. The authors of the book both consider themselves fourth wave feminists.
Like their website "The Vagenda", their book aims to flag and debunk the stereotypes
of femininity promoted by the mainstream women's press.[173] One reviewer of the
book has expressed disappointment with The Vagenda, saying that instead of being
the "call to arms for young women" that it purports to be, it reads like a joyless
dissertation detailing "everything bad the media has ever done to women."[174]

The Everyday Sexism Project[edit]

The Everyday Sexism Project began as a social media campaign on 16 April 2012 by
Laura Bates, a British feminist writer. The aim of the site was to document everyday
examples of sexism as reported by contributors around the world.[175] Bates
established the Everyday Sexism Project as an open forum where women could post
their experiences of harassment. Bates explains the Everyday Sexism Project's goal,
""The project was never about solving sexism. It was about getting people to take the
first step of just realising there is a problem that needs to be fixed."[176]
The website was such a success that Bates decided to write and publish a
book, Everyday Sexism, which further emphasizes the importance of having this type
of online forum for women. The book provides unique insight into the vibrant
movement of the upcoming fourth wave and the untold stories that women shared
through the Everyday Sexism Project.[177]

Click! The Ongoing Feminist Revolution

In November 2015, a group of historians working with Clio Visualizing

History [2] launched Click! The Ongoing Feminist Revolution.[3] This digital history
exhibit examines the history of American feminism from the era of World War Two
to the present. The exhibit has three major sections: Politics and Social Movements;
Body and Health; and Workplace and Family. There are also interactive timelines
linking to a vast array of sources documenting the history of American feminism and
providing information about current feminist activism.

Criticisms of the Wave Metaphor[edit]

The wave metaphor has been critiqued as inappropriate, limiting, and misleading by a
number of feminist scholars.[164][178]

While this metaphor was once useful for United States feminists in order to gain the
attention required to make large-scale political changes, as was the case for the
womens suffrage movement of the 1940s, its relevance may have not only run its
course but its usage has been argued as completely inappropriate.[164] For example, the
suffragettes did not use the term feminism to describe themselves or their
movement.[164] This critique is perhaps most famously shown through one early
twentieth century feminists words: All feminists are suffragists, but not all
suffragists are feminists.[179]

The wave metaphor has been described as misleading and even dangerous because it
not only renders the periods of time in-between waves as silent and irrelevant, but it
also contributes to the faulty conceptualization of a particular brand hegemonic
feminism as the ultimate (and perhaps only) understanding of what feminism
is.[164][178] These critiques advocate for the recognition of periods of mass social
organizing rather than waves.[164] It is argued that the wave metaphor weakens the
strength and relevance of feminist arguments, since waves necessarily must peak and
then retreat, which is not an accurate picture of feminist progress in the United States
or elsewhere.[164] Feminism does not retreat or disappear in-between
waves'.[164][178] For example, after the explosion of mass social organizing in the
1960s 70s and 80s, feminism was being worked into our institutions a much less
glamorous but just as important job that did not require such large-scale
attention.[164] As a result, we have seen more and more women in more areas of the
job force, higher education, and the installation and success of Womens and Gender
Studies programs across the United States, to name just a few examples of feminisms
continuous and very relevant presence in this time between the waves.[164]

The wave metaphor has further been criticized for privileging not only particular races
and classes of women in the United States, but for privileging the feminism of the
United States in general over other locations in the world.[178] Amrita Basu argues for,
the politics and conditions of emergence, instead of the wave metaphor, which does
not allow for this privileging of particular people and nations but instead allows for
the importance and understanding of any and all peoples in the world who have
contributed to feminism and its many understandings and meanings.[178]

National histories of feminism[edit]

France[edit]

Main article: Feminism in France

The 18th century French Revolution's focus on galit (equality) extended to the
inequities faced by French women. The writer Olympe de Gouges amended the
1791 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen into the Declaration of the
Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, where she argued that women accountable
to the law must also bear equal responsibility under the law. She also addressed
marriage as a social contract between equals and attacked women's reliance on beauty
and charm as a form of slavery.[180]

The 19th century, conservative, post-Revolution France was inhospitable for feminist
ideas, as expressed in the counter-revolutionary writings on the role of women
by Joseph de Maistre and Viscount Louis de Bonald.[181] Advancement came mid-
century under the 1848 revolution and the proclamation of the Second Republic,
which introduced male suffrage amid hopes that similar benefits would apply to
women.[citation needed] Although the Utopian Charles Fourier is considered a feminist
writer of this period, his influence was minimal at the time.[182] With the fall of the
conservative Louis-Philippe in 1848, feminist hopes were raised, as in 1790.
Movement newspapers and organizations appeared, such as Eugnie Niboyet's La
Voix des Femmes (The Women's Voice), the first feminist daily newspaper in France.
Niboyet was a Protestant who had adopted Saint-Simonianism, and La Voix attracted
other women from that movement, including the seamstress Jeanne Deroin and the
primary schoolteacher Pauline Roland. Unsuccessful attempts were also made to
recruit George Sand. Feminism was treated as a threat due to its ties with socialism,
which was scrutinized since the Revolution.[citation needed] Deroin and Roland were both
arrested, tried, and imprisoned in 1849. With the emergence of a new, more
conservative government in 1852, feminism would have to wait until the Third French
Republic.

The Groupe Franais d'Etudes Fministes were women intellectuals at the beginning
of the 20th century who translated part of Bachofen's canon into French[183] and
campaigned for the family law reform. In 1905, they founded L'entente, which
published articles on women's history, and became the focus for the intellectual avant-
garde. It advocated for women's entry into higher education and the male-dominated
professions.[184] Meanwhile, the Parti Socialiste Fminin socialist feminists, adopted a
Marxist version of matriarchy.[clarification needed] Like the Groupe Franais, they toiled for
a new age of equality, not for a return to prehistoric models of
matriarchy.[185][186][clarification needed] French feminism of the late 20th century is mainly
associated with psychoanalytic feminist theory, particularly the work of Luce
Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Hlne Cixous.[187]

Germany[edit]

Alice Schwarzer, 2009

Main article: Feminism in Germany

Modern feminism in Germany began during the Wilhelmine period (18881918) with
feminists pressuring a range of traditional institutions, from universities to
government, to open their doors to women. The organized German women's
movement is widely attributed to writer and feminist Louise Otto-Peters (18191895).
This movement culminated in women's suffrage in 1919. Later waves of feminists
continued to ask for legal and social equality in public and family life. Alice
Schwarzer is the most prominent contemporary German feminist.
Iran[edit]

Board of directors of "Jam'iat e nesvan e vatan-khah", a women's rights association in

Tehran (19231933)
Main article: Women's rights movement in Iran

The Iranian women's rights movement first emerged some time after the Iranian
Constitutional Revolution, in the year in which the first women's journal was
published, 1910. The movement lasted until 1933, when the last women's association
was dissolved by the Reza Shah's government.[citation needed] The status of women
further deteriorated after the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Many of the rights women
gained under Shah were systematically abolished through legislation, elimination of
women from work, and forced hijab (veils for women).[188] The movement later grew
again under feminist figures such as Bibi Khanoom Astarabadi, Touba
Azmoudeh, Sediqeh Dowlatabadi, Mohtaram Eskandari, Roshank No'doost, Afaq
Parsa, Fakhr ozma Arghoun, Shahnaz Azad, Noor-ol-Hoda Mangeneh, Zandokht
Shirazi, Maryam Amid (Mariam Mozayen-ol Sadat).[189][190]

In 1992, Shahla Sherkat founded Zanan (Women) magazine, which covered Iranian
women's concerns and tested political boundaries with edgy reportage on reform
politics, domestic abuse, and sex. It is the most important Iranian women's journal
published after the Iranian revolution.[citation needed] It systematically criticized the
Islamic legal code and argued that gender equality is Islamic and religious literature
had been misread and misappropriated by misogynists. Mehangiz Kar, Shahla Lahiji,
and Shahla Sherkat, the editor of Zanan, lead the debate on women's rights and
demanded reforms.[191] On August 27, 2006, the One Million Signatures Iranian
women's rights campaign was started. It aims to end legal discrimination against
women in Iranian laws by collecting a million signatures.[clarification needed] The
campaign supporters include many Iranian women's rights activists, international
activists, and Nobel laureates. The most important post-revolution feminist figures
are Mehrangiz Kar, Azam Taleghani, Shahla Sherkat, Parvin Ardalan, Noushin
Ahmadi khorasani, and Shadi Sadr.[citation needed][clarification needed]
Egypt[edit]

Huda Shaarawi, founder of the Egyptian Feminist Union

In 1899, Qasim Amin, considered the "father" of Arab feminism, wrote The
Liberation of Women, which argued for legal and social reforms for women.[192] Hoda
Shaarawi founded the Egyptian Feminist Union in 1923 and became its president and
a symbol of the Arab women's rights movement. Arab feminism was closely
connected with Arab nationalism.[193][clarification needed] In 1956, President Gamal Abdel
Nasser's government initiated "state feminism", which outlawed gender-based
discrimination and granted women's suffrage. Despite these reforms, "state feminism"
blocked feminist political activism and brought an end to the first-wave
feminist movement in Egypt.[194] During Anwar Sadat's presidency, his wife, Jehan
Sadat, publicly advocated for expansion of women's rights, though Egyptian policy
and society was in retreat from women's equality with the new Islamist movement and
growing conservatism. However, writers such as Al Ghazali Harb, for example,
argued that women's full equality is an important part of Islam.[195] This position
formed a new feminist movement, Islamic feminism, which is still active today.[196]

India[edit]

Main article: Feminism in India

A new generation of Indian feminists emerged following global feminism. Indian

women have greater independence from increased access to higher education and
control over their reproductive rights.[197]Medha Patkar, Madhu Kishwar, and Brinda
Karat are feminist social workers and politicians who advocate for women's rights in
post-independence India.[197] Writers such as Amrita Pritam, Sarojini Sahoo, and
Kusum Ansal advocate for feminist ideas in Indian languages.[citation needed] Rajeshwari
Sunder Rajan, Leela Kasturi, and Vidyut Bhagat are Indian feminist essayists and
critics writing in English.[clarification needed]
China[edit]

Wealthy Chinese women with bound feet (Beijing, 1900). Foot binding was a symbol
of women's oppression during the reform movements in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Feminism in China began in the late Qing period as Chinese society re-evaluated
traditional and Confucian values such as foot binding and gender segregation, and
began to reject traditional gender ideas as hindering progress
towards modernization.[198] During the 1898 Hundred Days' Reform, reformers called
for women's education, gender equality, and the end of foot binding. Female
reformers formed the first Chinese women's society, the Society for the Diffusion of
Knowledge among Chinese Women (Nxuehui).[199] After the Qing Dynasty's
collapse, women's liberation became a goal of the May Fourth Movement and
the New Culture Movement.[200] Later, the Chinese Communist Revolution adopted
women's liberation as one of its aims and promoted women's equality, especially
regarding women's participation in the workforce. After the revolution and progress in
integrating women into the workforce, the Chinese Communist Party claimed to have
successfully achieved women's liberation, and women's inequality was no longer seen
as a problem.[201][clarification needed]

Second- and third-wave feminism in China was characterized by a re-examination of

women's roles[where?] during the reform movements of the early 20th century and the
ways in which feminism was adopted by those various movements in order to achieve
their goals. Later and current feminists have questioned whether gender equality has
actually been fully achieved, and discuss current gender problems, such as the
large gender disparity in the population.[201]

Japan[edit]

Main article: Feminism in Japan

Japanese feminism as an organized political movement dates back to the early years
of the 20th century when Kato Shidzue pushed for birth control availability as part of
a broad spectrum of progressive reforms. Shidzue went on to serve in the National
Diet following the defeat of Japan in World War II and the promulgation of the Peace
Constitution by US forces.[202] Other figures such as Hayashi Fumiko and Ariyoshi
Sawako illustrate the broad socialist ideologies of Japanese feminism that seeks to
accomplish broad goals rather than celebrate the individual achievements of powerful
women.[202][203]

Norway[edit]

Camilla Collett

Norwegian feminism's political origins are in the women's

suffrage movement. Camilla Collett (18131895) is widely considered the first
Norwegian feminist. Originating from a literary family, she wrote a novel and several
articles on the difficulties facing women of her time, and, in particular, forced
marriages. Amalie Skram (18461905), a naturalist writer, also served as the women's
voice.[204]

The Norwegian Association for Women's Rights was founded in 1884 by Gina
Krog and Hagbart Berner. The organization raised issues related to women's rights to
education and economic self-determination, and, above all, universal suffrage. The
Norwegian Parliament passed the women's right to vote into law on June 11, 1913.
Norway was the second country in Europe (after Finland) to have full suffrage for
women.[204]

Poland[edit]
Irena Krzywicka
Main article: Feminism in Poland

The development of feminism in Poland (re-recreated in modern times in 1918) and

Polish territories has traditionally been divided into seven successive "waves".[205]

Radical feminism emerged in 1920s Poland. Its chief representatives, Irena

Krzywicka and Maria Morozowicz-Szczepkowska, advocated for women's personal,
social, and legal independence from men. Krzywicka and Tadeusz eleski both
promoted planned parenthood, sexual education, rights to divorce and abortion, and
equality of sexes. Krzywicka published a series of articles in Wiadomoci
Literackie in which she protested against interference by the Roman Catholic
Church in the intimate lives of Poles.[205]

After the Second World War, the Polish Communist state (established in 1948)
forcefully promoted women's emancipation at home and at work. However, during
Communist rule (until 1989), feminism in general and second-wave feminism in
particular were practically absent. Although feminist texts were produced in the 1950s
and afterwards, they were usually controlled and generated by the Communist
state.[206] After the fall of Communism, the Polish government, dominated by Catholic
political parties, introduced a de facto legal ban on abortions. Since then, some
feminists have adopted argumentative strategies from the 1980s American pro-choice
movement.[205]

Histories of selected feminist issues[edit]

Feminist theory[edit]

Main article: Feminist theory

Simone de Beauvoir

The sexuality and gender historian Nancy Cott distinguishes between modern
feminism and its antecedents, particularly the struggle for suffrage.[citation needed] She
argues that in the two decades surrounding the Nineteenth Amendment's 1920
passage, the prior woman movement primarily concerned women as universal entities,
whereas over this 20-year period, the movement prioritized social differentiation,
attention to individuality, and diversity.[clarification needed] New issues dealt more with
gender as a social construct, gender identity, and relationships within and between
genders. Politically, this represented a shift from an ideological alignment comfortable
with the right, to one more radically associated with the left.[207][non-primary source needed]

In the immediate postwar period, Simone de Beauvoir opposed the "woman in the
home" norm. She introduced an existentialist dimension to feminism with the
publication of Le Deuxime Sexe (The Second Sex) in 1949. While less an activist than
a philosopher and novelist, she signed one of the Mouvement de Libration des
Femmes manifestos.

The resurgence of feminist activism in the late 1960s was accompanied by an

emerging literature of what might be considered female-associated issues, such as
concerns for the earth, spirituality, and environmental activism.[208] The atmosphere
this created reignited the study of and debate on matricentricity[jargon] as a rejection
of determinism, such as with Adrienne Rich in Of Woman Born and Marilyn
French in Beyond Power. For socialist feminists like Evelyn Reed, patriarchy held the
properties of capitalism.
Ann Taylor Allen[5] describes the differences between the collective male pessimism
of male intellectuals such as Ferdinand Tnnies, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel at
the beginning of the 20th century,[209]compared to the optimism of their female
counterparts, whose contributions have largely been ignored by social historians of the
era.[210]

See also[edit]
Coverture
History of brassieres
List of suffragists and suffragettes
List of women's rights activists
List of women's organizations
New Woman
Timeline of women's suffrage
Timeline of women's rights (other than voting)
Victorian dress reform
Women's music
Women's suffrage organizations
Women's rights in 2014
1975 Icelandic women's strike

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203. ^ Mackie, Vera, Feminism in Modern Japan Citizenship, Embodiment
and Sexuality (Curtin University of Technology, 2003), ISBN 978-0-521-
82018-9
204. ^ a b Andersen, Arlow W., Rough Road to Glory: The Norwegian-
American Press Speaks Out on Public Affairs 1875 to 1925 (Balch Institute
Press, 1990).
205. ^ a b c och, Eugenia (ed.) 2001. Modernizm i feminizm. Postacie kobiece
w literaturze polskiej i obcej. Lublin: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu M.Curie-
Skodowskiej.
206. ^ leczka, Kazimierz, 1997. "Feminizm czy feminizmy". In: Zofia
Gorczyska, Sabina Kruszyska, Irena Zakidalska (eds.). Pe, kobieta,
feminizm. Gdask: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdaskiego.
207. ^ Cott, Nancy F. The Grounding of Modern Feminism. New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1987.
208. ^ Marler, Joan. "The Myth of Universal Patriarchy: A Critical Response
to Cynthia Eller's Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory". Feminist Theology, Vol. 14,
No. 2, 163-87 (2006). For an earlier version of this article, see Marija
Gimbutas.
209. ^ Eksteins, Modris. Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the
Modern Age, Boston, 1989, xiv.
210. ^ Hughes, H. Stuart. Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of
European Social Thought, 18901930, New York, 1958.

Bibliography[edit]
For a chronological list of historically important individual books, see the list of
notable feminist literature.

General[edit]

Books[edit]

Cott, Nancy F. The Bonds of Womanhood. New Haven: Yale University Press,
1977.
Cott, Nancy F. The Grounding of Modern Feminism. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1987.
Duby, George and Perrot, Michelle (eds). A History of Women in the West. 5
vols. Harvard, 1992-4
 o I. From Ancient Goddesses to Christian Saints
o II. Silences of the Middle Ages
o III. Renaissance and the Enlightenment Paradoxes
o IV. Emerging Feminism from Revolution to World War
o V. Toward a Cultural Identity in the Twentieth Century
Ezell, Margaret J. M. Writing Women's Literary History. Johns Hopkins
University, 2006. 216 pp. ISBN 0-8018-5508-X
Foot, Paul. The Vote: How it was won and how it was lost. London: Viking,
2005
Freedman, Estelle No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future
of Women, Ballantine Books, 2002, ISBN B0001FZGQC
Fulford, Roger. Votes for Women. London: Faber and Faber, 1957
Jacob, Margaret C. The Enlightenment: A Brief History With Documents,
Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001, ISBN 0-312-17997-9
Kramarae, Cheris and Paula Treichler. A Feminist Dictionary. University of
Illinois, 1997. ISBN 0-252-06643-X
Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Feminist Consciousness From the Middle Ages
to Eighteen-seventy. Oxford University Press, 1993
McQuiston, Liz. Suffragettes and She-devils: Women's liberation and beyond.
London: Phaidon, 1997
Mill, John Stuart. The Subjection of Women. Okin, Susan M (ed.). Newhaven,
CT: Yale, 1985
Prince, Althea and Susan Silva-Wayne (eds). Feminisms and Womanisms: A
Women's Studies Reader. Women's Press, 2004. ISBN 0-88961-411-3
Radical Women. The Radical Women Manifesto: Socialist Feminist Theory,
Program and Organizational Structure. Red Letter Press, 2001. ISBN 0-
932323-11-1
Rossi, Alice S. The Feminist Papers: from Adams to Beauvoir. Boston:
Northeastern University, 1973. ISBN 1-55553-028-1
Rowbotham, Sheilah. A Century of Women. Viking, London 1997
Schneir, Miriam. Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings. Vintage,
1994. ISBN 0-679-75381-8
Scott, Joan Wallach Feminism and History (Oxford Readings in Feminism),
Oxford University Press, 1996, ISBN 0-19-875169-9
Smith, Bonnie G. Global Feminisms: A Survey of Issues and Controversies
(Rewriting Histories), Routledge, 2000, ISBN 0-415-18490-8
Spender, Dale (ed.). Feminist Theorists: Three centuries of key women thinkers,
Pantheon, 1983, ISBN 0-394-53438-7

Articles[edit]
 Allen, Ann Taylor. "Feminism, Social Science, and the Meanings of
Modernity: The Debate on the Origin of the Family in Europe and the United
States, 18601914". The American Historical Review, 1999 October 104(4)
Cott, Nancy F. "Feminist Politics in the 1920s: The National Woman's
Party". Journal of American History 71 (June 1984): 4368.
Cott, Nancy F. "What's In a Name? The Limits of Social Feminism; or,
Expanding the Vocabulary of Women's History". Journal of American
History 76 (December 1989): 809829.
Hicks, Philip (13 August 2014). "Women Worthies and Feminist Argument in
Eighteenth-Century Britain". Women's History Review. 24 (2): 174
190. doi:10.1080/09612025.2014.945795.
Offen, Karen. "Defining Feminism: A Comparative Historical
Approach". Signs 1988 Autumn 14(1):119-57

International[edit]

Parpart, Jane L., Conelly, M. Patricia, Barriteau, V. Eudine (eds). Theoretical

Perspectives on Gender and Development. Ottawa: IDRC, 2000. ISBN 0-
88936-910-0

Europe[edit]

Anderson, Bonnie S. and Judith P. Zinsser. A History of Their Own: Women in

Europe from Prehistory to the Present, Oxford University Press, 1999 (revised
edition), ISBN 0-19-512839-7
Offen, Karen M. European Feminisms, 17001950: A Political History.
Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2000

Great Britain[edit]

Caine, Barbrara. Victorian Feminists. Oxford, 1992

Chandrasekhar, S. "A Dirty, Filfthy Book": The Writing of Charles Knowlton
and Annie Besant on Reproductive Physiology and British Control and an
Account of the Bradlaugh-Besant Trial. University of California Berkeley,
1981
Craik, Elizabeth M. (ed.). "Women and Marriage in Victorian England",
in Marriage and Property. Aberdeen University, 1984
Forster, Margaret. Significant Sisters: The grassroots of active feminism 1839-
1939. Penguin, 1986
Fraser, Antonia. The Weaker Vessel. NY: Vintage, 1985. ISBN 0-394-73251-0
Manvell, Roger. The Trial of Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh. London:
Elek, 1976
 Pankhurst, Emmeline. My Own Story. London: Virago, 1979
Pankhurst, Sylvia. The Suffragette Movement. London: Virago, 1977
Phillips, Melanie. The Ascent of Woman A History of the Suffragette
Movement and the ideas behind it, London: Time Warner Book Group,
2003, ISBN 0-349-11660-1
Pugh, Martin. Women and the Women's Movement in Britain, 1914 -1999,
Basingstoke [etc.]: St. Martin's Press, 2000
Walters, Margaret. Feminism: A very short introduction. Oxford, 2005 (ISBN
0-19-280510-X)

Italy[edit]

Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, Liberazione della Donna. Feminism in Italy,

Wesleyan University Press, 1986

India[edit]

Maitrayee Chaudhuri (ed.), Feminism in India, London [etc.]: Zed Books, 2005

Iran[edit]

Edward G. Browne, The Persian Revolution of 1905-1909. Mage Publishers

(July 1995). ISBN 0-934211-45-0
Farideh Farhi, "Religious Intellectuals, the "Woman Question," and the
Struggle for the Creation of a Democratic Public Sphere in Iran", International
Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, Vol. 15, No.2, Winter 2001.
Ziba Mir-Hosseini, "Religious Modernists and the 'Woman Question':
Challenges and Complicities", Twenty Years of Islamic Revolution: Political
and Social Transition in Iran since 1979, Syracuse University Press, 2002, pp
7495.
Shirin Ebadi, Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope, Random
House (May 2, 2006), ISBN 1-4000-6470-8

Japan[edit]

Vera MacKie, Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship, Embodiment and

Sexuality, Paperback edition, Cambridge University Press, 2003, ISBN 0-521-
52719-8

Latin America[edit]

Nancy Sternbach, "Feminism in Latin America: from Bogot to San Bernardo",

in: Signs, Winter 1992, pp. 393434
USA[edit]

Brownmiller, Susan. In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution, Dial Books, 1999

Cott, Nancy and Elizabeth Pleck (eds), A Heritage of Her Own; Toward a New
Social History of American Women, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979
Echols, Alice. Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975,
University of Minnesota Press, 1990
Flexner, Eleanor. Century of Struggle: The Woman's Rights Movement in the
United States, Paperback Edition, Belknap Press 1996
Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth., "Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life": How
Today's Feminist Elite Has Lost Touch With the Real Concerns of Women,
Doubleday, 1996
Keetley, Dawn (ed.) Public Women, Public Words: A Documentary History of
American Feminism. 3 vols.:
o Vol. 1: Beginnings to 1900, Madison, Wisconsin: Madison House, 1997
o Vol. 2: 1900 to 1960, Lanham, Md. [etc.]: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002
o Vol. 3: 1960 to the present, Lanham, Md. [etc.]: Rowman & Littlefield,
2002
Messer-Davidow, Ellen: Disciplining feminism: from social activism to
academic discourse, Duke University Press, 2002
O'Neill, William L. Everyone Was Brave: A history of feminism in America.
Chicago 1971
Roth, Benita. Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White
Feminist Movements in America's Second Wave, Cambridge University Press,
2004
Stansell, Christine. The Feminist Promise: 1792 to the Present (2010). ISBN
978-0-679-64314-2, 528 pp.

Sexuality[edit]

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Random House, New York, 1978
Soble, Alan (ed.) The Philosophy of Sex: Contemporary readings. Lanham,
MD: & Littlefield, 2002. ISBN 0-7425-1346-7

Further reading[edit]
Browne, Alice (1987) The Eighteenth-century Feminist Mind. Brighton:
Harvester
Swanwick, H. M. (1913). The Future of the Women's Movement. London: G.
Bell & Sons Ltd.
External links[edit]
Click! The Ongoing Feminist Revolution
UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Division for the Advancement
of Women
Timeline of feminist history in the USA
The Women's Library, online resource of the extensive collections at the LSE
The history of poetry in the women's movement by Honor Moore in the Boston
Review

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Feminism comprises a number of social, cultural and political movements, theories

and moral philosophies concerned with gender inequalities and equal rights for
women. The term feminism originated from the French word feminisme, coined
by the utopian socialist Charles Fourier, and was first used in English in the 1890s, in
association with the movement for equal political and legal rights for women.
Feminism takes a number of forms in a variety of disciplines such as feminist
geography, feminist history and feminist literary criticism. Feminism has changed
aspects of Western society. Feminist political activists have been concerned with
issues such as individual autonomy, political rights, social freedom, economic
independence, abortion and reproductive rights, divorce, workplace rights (including
maternity leave and equal pay), and education; and putting an end to domestic
violence, gender stereotypes, discrimination, sexism, objectification, and
prostitution.[1][2]

Contents
1 History of Feminism
o 1.1 First-wave feminism
o 1.2 Second-wave feminism
1.2.1 Women's liberation in the USA
1.2.1.1 The Feminine Mystique
o 1.3 Third-wave feminism
o 1.4 Contemporary feminism
o 1.5 French feminism
1.5.1 Simone de Beauvoir
1.5.2 1970s until the present
o 1.6 Indian feminism
2 Feminist Theory
3 Feminism's Many Forms
o 3.1 Liberal feminism
o 3.2 Radical feminism
o 3.3 Individualist feminism
o 3.4 Black feminism
o 3.5 Socialist and Marxist feminisms
o 3.6 Post-structural feminism and postmodern feminism
o 3.7 Postcolonial feminism and third-world feminism
o 3.8 Ecofeminism
o 3.9 Post-feminism
4 Issues in Defining Feminism
5 Feminism and Society
o 5.1 Language
o 5.2 Heterosexual relationships
o 5.3 Religion
5.3.1 Christian feminism
5.3.2 Jewish feminism
5.3.3 Islamic feminism
6 Scientific Research into Feminist Issues
7 Other Concepts
o 7.1 Anti-feminism
8 Notes
9 References
10 External links
o 10.1 General Philosophy Sources
11 Credits
Historians of feminism have identified three waves of feminist thought and
activity.[3][4] The first wave, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focused
primarily on gaining legal rights, political power and suffrage for women. The second,
in the 1960s and 1970s, encouraged women to understand aspects of their own
personal lives as deeply politicized, and was largely concerned with other issues of
equality, such as the end to discrimination in society, in education and in the work
place. The third arose in the early 1990s as a response to perceived failures of the
second-wave, and a response to the backlash against initiatives and movements
created by the second-wave. Throughout most of its history, most leaders of feminist
social and political movements, and feminist theorists, have been middle-class white
women, predominantly in Britain, France and the US. At least since Sojourner
Truth's 1851 speech to US feminists, however, women of other races have proposed
alternative feminisms, and women in former European colonies and the Third World
have proposed alternative "post-colonial" and "Third World" feminisms.

History of Feminism

A 1932 Soviet poster for International Women's Day.

Feminism comprises a number of social, cultural and political movements, theories

and moral philosophies concerned with gender inequalities and equal rights for
women. In its narrowest interpretation, it refers to the effort to ensure legal and
political equality for women; in its broadest sense it comprises any theory which is
grounded on the belief that women are oppressed or disadvantaged by comparison
with men, and that their oppression is in some way illegitimate or unjustified.[5]
The term feminism originated from the French word feminisme, coined by the
utopian socialist Charles Fourier, and was first used in English in the 1890s, in
association with the movement for equal political and legal rights for women.[6]There
is some debate as to whether the term feminism can be appropriately applied to the
thought and activities of earlier women (and men) who explored and challenged the
traditional roles of women in society.

Contemporary feminist historians distinguish three waves in the history of

feminism. The first-wave refers to the feminism movement of the nineteenth through
early twentieth centuries, which dealt mainly with the Suffrage movement. The
second-wave (1960s-1980s) dealt with the inequality of laws, as well
as cultural inequalities. The third-wave of Feminism (1990s-present), is seen as both a
continuation of and a response to the perceived failures of the second-wave.[7]

First-wave feminism

First-wave feminism refers to a period of feminist activity during the nineteenth

century and early twentieth century in the United Kingdom and the United States.
Originally it focused on equal legal rights of contract and property, and opposition to
chattel marriage and ownership of married women (and their children) by husbands. A
Vindication of the Rights of Women, written by Mary Wollstonecraft in 1742, is
considered a germinal essay of feminism. Wollstonecraft protested against the
stereotyping of women in domestic roles, the failure to regard women as individuals
in their own right, and the failure to educate girls and women to use their intellect.

By the end of the nineteenth century, activism focused primarily on gaining political
power and women's suffrage, though feminists like Voltairine de Cleyre (1866
1912) and Margaret Sanger (1879 1966) were active in campaigning for women's
sexual, reproductive and economic rights. In Britain the Suffragettes campaigned for
the women's vote. In 1918 the Representation of the People Act 1918 was passed,
granting the vote to women over the age of 30 who owned houses. In 1928 this was
extended to all women over eighteen.[8]

In the United States leaders of this movement include Elizabeth Cady

Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, who each campaigned for the abolition of slavery
prior to championing women's right to vote. Other important leaders included Lucy
Stone, Olympia Brown, and Helen Pitts. American first-wave feminism involved
women from a wide range of backgrounds, some belonging to conservative Christian
groups (such as Frances Willard and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union),
others representing the diversity and radicalism of much of second-wave feminism
(such as Stanton, Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage and the National Woman Suffrage
Association, of which Stanton was president).
In the United States first-wave feminism is considered to have ended with the passage
of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (1919), granting
women the right to vote.[9][10][11][12]

Second-wave feminism

Second-wave feminism refers to a period of feminist activity beginning in the early

1960s and lasting through the late 1980s. It was a continuation of the earlier phase of
feminism which sought legal and political rights in the United Kingdom and the
United States.[13] Second-wave feminism has existed continuously since then, and
coexists with what is termed third-wave feminism. Second-wave feminism saw
cultural and political inequalities as inextricably linked. The movement encouraged
women to understand aspects of their own personal lives as deeply politicized, and
reflective of a gender-biased structure of power. While first-wave feminism focused
upon absolute rights such as suffrage, second-wave feminism was largely concerned
with other issues of equality, such as the end to gender discrimination in society,
in education and in the workplace. The title of an essay by Carol Hanisch, "The
Personal is Political," became a slogan synonymous with second-wave feminism and
the women's liberation movement.[14]

Women's liberation in the USA

The term Womens Liberation was first used in 1964,[15] and first appeared in print
in 1966.[16]By 1968, although the term Womens Liberation Front appeared in
Ramparts, the term womens liberation was being used to refer to the whole
womens movement.[17] Although no burning took place, a number of feminine
products including bras were thrown into a "Freedom Trash Can," the term "bra-
burning" became associated with the movement.[18]

The Feminine Mystique

The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963 by Betty Friedan, criticized the idea that
women could only find fulfillment through childbearing and homemaking. According
to Friedan's obituary in the The New York Times The Feminine Mystique ignited the
contemporary women's movement in 1963 and as a result permanently transformed
the social fabric of the United States and countries around the world and is widely
regarded as one of the most influential nonfiction books of the 20th
century.[19] Friedan hypothesized that women are victims of a false belief system that
requires them to find identity and meaning in their lives through their husbands and
children. Such a system causes women to completely lose their identity in that of their
family. Friedan specifically located this system among post-World War II middle-
class suburban communities. She pointed out that though America's post-war
economic boom had led to the development of new technologies that were supposed
to make household work less difficult, they often had the result of making women's
work less meaningful and valuable. She also critiqued Freud's theory that women
were envious of men. Friedans book played an important role in encouraging women
to question traditional female roles and seek self-fulfillment.[20]

Third-wave feminism

Third-wave feminism has its origins in the mid 1980s, with feminist leaders rooted in
the second-wave like Gloria Anzaldua, bell hooks, Chela Sandoval, Cherrie Moraga,
Audre Lorde, Maxine Hong Kingston, and other black feminists, who sought to
negotiate prominent space within feminist thought for consideration of race-related
subjectivities.[21][22][23] The third-wave of feminism arose in the early 1990s as a
response to perceived failures of the second-wave, and a response to the backlash
against initiatives and movements created by the second-wave. Third-wave feminism
seeks to challenge or avoid what it deems the second-wave's "essentialist" definitions
of femininity, claiming that these definitions over-emphasized the experiences of
upper middle class white women and largely ignored the circumstances of lower-class
women, minorities and women living in other cultures. A post-
structuralist interpretation of gender and sexuality is central to much of the third-
wave's ideology. Third-wave feminists often focus on "micropolitics," and challenge
the second-wave's paradigm as to what is, or is not, good for females.[24][21][25]

In 1991, Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas, a man nominated to the United States
Supreme Court, of sexual harassment. Thomas denied the accusations and after
extensive debate, the US Senate voted 52-48 in favor of Thomas.[21][22][23] In response
to this case, Rebecca Walker published an article entitled "Becoming the Third Wave"
in which she stated, "I am not a post-feminism feminist. I am the third-wave."[4]

Contemporary feminism

Contemporary feminism comprises a number of different philosophical strands. These

movements sometimes disagree about current issues and how to confront them. One
side of the spectrum includes a number of radical feminists, such as Mary Daly, who
argue that society would benefit if there were dramatically fewer men.[26] Other
figures such as Christina Hoff Sommers and Camille Paglia identify themselves as
feminist but accuse the movement of anti-male prejudice.[27]

Some feminists, like Katha Pollitt, author of Reasonable Creatures, or Nadine

Strossen, consider feminism to hold simply that "women are people." Views that
separate the sexes rather than unite them are considered by these writers to
be sexist rather than feminist.[28] There are also debates between difference feminists
such as Carol Gilligan, who believe that there are important differences between the
sexes, which may or may not be inherent, but which cannot be ignored; and those who
believe that there are no essential differences between the sexes, and that their societal
roles are due to conditioning.[29]Individualist feminists such as Wendy McElroy are
concerned with equality of rights, and criticize sexist/classist forms of feminism as
"gender feminism."

French feminism

Feminism in France originated during the French Revolution, with the organization of
several associations such as the Socit fraternelle de l'un et l'autre sexe (Fraternal
Society of one and the other Sex), the Socit des rpublicaines
rvolutionnaires (Society of Revolutionary Republicansthe final "e" implicitly
referring to Republican Women), which boasted 200 exclusively female members.
The feminist movement developed itself again in Socialist movements of
the Romantic generation, in particular among Parisian Saint-Simonians. Women
freely adopted new life-styles, often arousing public indignation. They claimed
equality of rights and participated in the production of an abundant literature
exploring freedom for women. Charles Fourier's Utopian Socialist theory of passions
advocated "free love," and his architectural model of the phalanstre community
explicitly took into account women's emancipation. A few famous figures emerged
during the 1871 Paris Commune, including Louise Michel, Russian-born Elisabeth
Dmitrieff, Nathalie Lemel and Rene Vivien.

Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir, a French author and philosopher who wrote on philosophy,

politics, and social issues, published a treatise in 1949, The Second Sex, a detailed
analysis of women's oppression and a foundational tract of contemporary feminism. It
set out a feminist existentialism which prescribed a moral revolution. As an
existentialist, de Beauvoir accepted the precept that "existence precedes essence";
hence "one is not born a woman, but becomes one." Her analysis focused on the social
construction of Woman as the quintessential Other as fundamental to women's
oppression.[30] She argued that women have historically been considered deviant and
abnormal, and that even Mary Wollstonecraft had considered men to be the ideal
toward which women should aspire. According to Beauvoir, this attitude had limited
women's success by maintaining the perception that they are a deviation from the
normal, and are outsiders attempting to emulate "normality." [30]

1970s until the present

French feminists have a tendency to attack the rationalist Enlightenment thinking
which first accorded them intellectual freedom as being itself male-oriented, and
approach feminism with the concept of criture fminine (female, or feminine,
writing).[31] Helene Cixous argues that traditional writing and philosophy are
'phallocentric,' and along with other French feminists such as Luce Irigaray,
emphasizes "writing from the body" as a subversive exercise.[31] Another theorist
working in France (but originally from Bulgaria) is Julia Kristeva, whose work on the
semiotic and abjection has influenced feminist criticism. However, according to
Elizabeth Wright, "none of these French feminists align themselves with the feminist
movement as it appeared in the Anglophone world."[31]

Indian feminism

With the rise of a new wave of feminism across the world, a new generation of Indian
feminists emerged. Increasing numbers of highly-educated and professional Indian
women have entered the public arena in fields such as politics, business and scientific
research. Contemporary Indian feminists are fighting for individual autonomy,
political rights, social freedom, economic independence, tolerance, co-operation,
nonviolence and diversity, abortion and reproductive rights, divorce, equal pay,
education, maternity leave, breast feeding; and an end to domestic violence, gender
stereotypes, discrimination, sexism, objectification, and prostitution. Medha Patkar,
Madhu Kishwar, and Brinda Karat are some of the feminist social workers and
politicians who advocate women's rights in post-independent India. In literature,
Amrita Pritam, Sarojini Sahoo and Kusum Ansal are eminent Indian writers (in Indian
languages) who link sexuality with feminism, and advocate women's rights.
Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan, Leela Kasturi, Sharmila Rege, Vidyut Bhagat are some of
the essayists and social critics who write in favor of feminism in English.

Feminist Theory
Feminist theory is the extension of feminism into theoretical, or philosophical, fields.
It encompasses work in a variety of disciplines, including approaches to women's
roles and life experiences; feminist politics in anthropology and sociology, economics,
women's studies; gender studies; feminist literary criticism; and philosophy. Feminist
theory aims to understand gender inequality and focuses on gender politics, power
relations and sexuality. While providing a critique of social relations, much of
feminist theory also focuses on analyzing gender inequalities and on the promotion of
women's rights, interests, and issues. Themes explored in feminism include
discrimination, stereotyping, objectification (especially sexual objectification),
oppression, and patriarchy.[32] [33]
Elaine Showalter describes the development of feminist theory as having a number of
phases. The first she calls "feminist critique" - where the feminist reader examines the
ideologies behind literary phenomena. The second Showalter calls "Gynocritics" -
where the "woman is producer of textual meaning" including "the psychodynamics of
female creativity; linguistics and the problem of a female language; the trajectory of
the individual or collective female literary career [and] literary history." The last
phase she calls "gender theory" - where the "ideological inscription and the literary
effects of the sex/gender system" are explored."[34] This model has been criticized by
Toril Moi who sees it as an essentialist and deterministic model for female
subjectivity. She also criticized it for not taking account of the situation for women
outside the west.[35]

Feminism's Many Forms

Several subtypes of feminist ideology have developed over the years; some of the
major subtypes are listed as follows:

Liberal feminism

Betty Friedan in 1960

Liberal feminism asserts the equality of men and women through political and legal
reform. It is an individualistic form of feminism and feminist theory, which focuses
on womens ability to show and maintain their equality through their own actions and
choices. Liberal feminism looks at the personal interactions between men and women
as the starting ground from which to introduce gender-equity into society. According
to liberal feminists, all women are capable of asserting their ability to achieve
equality; therefore it is possible for change to come about without altering the
structure of society. Issues important to liberal feminists include reproductive and
abortion rights, sexual harassment, voting, education, "equal pay for equal work,"
affordable childcare, affordable health care, and bringing to light the frequency of
sexual and domestic violence against women.[36]
People of interest

Betty Friedan
Gloria Steinem
Rebecca Walker
Naomi Wolf

Radical feminism

Radical feminism identifies the capitalist sexist hierarchy as the defining feature of
womens oppression. Radical feminists believe that women can free themselves only
when they have done away with what they consider an inherently oppressive and
dominating system. Radical feminists feel that male-based authority and power
structures are responsible for oppression and inequality, and that as long as the system
and its values are in place, society will not be able to reform in any significant way.
Radical feminism sees capitalism as a barrier to ending oppression. Most radical
feminists see no alternatives other than the total uprooting and reconstruction of
society in order to achieve their goals.[14]

Separatist feminism is a form of radical feminism that rejects heterosexual

relationships, believing that the sexual disparities between men and women are
unresolvable. Separatist feminists generally do not feel that men can make positive
contributions to the feminist movement, and that even well-intentioned men replicate
the dynamics of patriarchy.[37] Author Marilyn Frye describes separatist feminism as
"separation of various sorts or modes from men and from institutions, relationships,
roles and activities that are male-defined, male-dominated, and operating for the
benefit of males and the maintenance of male privilegethis separation being
initiated or maintained, at will, by women."[38]

Both the self-proclaimed sex-positive and the so-called sex-negative forms of present-
day feminism can trace their roots to early radical feminism. Ellen Willis's 1981
essay, "Lust Horizons: Is the Women's Movement Pro-Sex?" is the origin of the term,
"pro-sex feminism." In it, she argues against feminism making alliances with the
political right in opposition to pornography and prostitution, as occurred, for example,
during the Meese Commission hearings in the United States.[39]

Another strand of radical feminism is "Anarcha-feminism" (also called anarchist

feminism or anarcho-feminism). It combines feminist ideas and anarchist beliefs.
Anarcha-feminists view patriarchy as a manifestation of hierarchy, believing that the
struggle against patriarchy is an essential part of class struggle and the anarchist
struggle against the state.[40] Anarcha-feminists like Susan Brown see the anarchist
struggle as a necessary component of feminist struggle, in Brown's words "anarchism
is a political philosophy that opposes all relationships of power, it is inherently
feminist." [41]Wendy McElroy has defined a position (she describes it as "ifeminism"
or "individualist feminism") that combines feminism with anarcho-capitalism or
libertarianism, arguing that a pro-capitalist, anti-state position is compatible with an
emphasis on equal rights and empowerment for women.[42]

People of interest

Charlotte Bunch
Susan Brownmiller
Mary Daly
Andrea Dworkin
Melissa Farley
Shulamith Firestone
Catharine Mackinnon
Adrienne Rich

Individualist feminism

Individualist feminists define "Individualist feminism" in opposition to political or

gender feminism.[43][27] Some individualist feminists trace the movement's roots to the
classical liberal tradition.[44] It is closely linked to the libertarian ideas of individuality
and personal responsibility of both women and men. Critics believe that individual
feminism reinforces patriarchal systems because it does not view the rights or political
interests of men and women as being in conflict, nor does it rest upon class/gender
analysis.[45] Individualist feminists attempt to change legal systems in order to
eliminate class privileges, including gender privileges, and to ensure that individuals
have an equal right, an equal claim under law to their own persons and property.
Individualist feminism encourages women to take full responsibility over their own
lives. It also opposes any government interference into the choices adults make with
their own bodies, contending that such interference creates a coercive hierarchy.[46]

Black feminism
Angela Davis speaking at the University of Alberta, March 28, 2006

Black feminism argues that sexism and racism are inextricable from one another[47].
Forms of feminism that strive to overcome sexism and class oppression but ignore
race can discriminate against many people, including women, through racial bias.
Black feminists argue that the liberation of black women entails freedom for all
people, since it would require the end of racism, sexism, and class oppression.[48]One
of the theories that evolved out of this movement was Alice Walker's Womanism. It
emerged after the early feminist movements that were led specifically by white
women who advocated social changes such as womans suffrage. These movements
were largely a white middle-class movements and ignored oppression based
on racism and classism. Alice Walker and other Womanists pointed out that black
women experienced a different and more intense kind of oppression from that of
white women.[49]

Angela Davis was one of the first people who formed an argument centered on
intersection of race, gender and class in her book, Women, Race, and
Class.[50] Kimberle Crenshaw, prominent feminist law theorist, gave the idea a name
while discussing Identity Politics in her essay, "Mapping the Margins:
Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence Against Women of Color."

People of interest

Alice Walker
Angela Davis
Barbara Smith
Hattie Gossett
Patricia Hill Collins

Socialist and Marxist feminisms

Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg, 1910

Socialist feminism connects the oppression of women to Marxist ideas about

exploitation, oppression and labor. Socialist feminists see women as being held down
as a result of their unequal standing in both the workplace and the domestic
sphere.[51] Prostitution, domestic work, childcare, and marriage are all seen as ways in
which women are exploited by a patriarchal system which devalues women and the
substantial work that they do. Socialist feminists focus their energies on broad change
that affects society as a whole, and not just on an individual basis. They see the need
to work alongside not just men, but all other groups, as they see the oppression of
women as a part of a larger pattern that affects everyone involved in the capitalist
system.[52]

Karl Marx taught that when class oppression was overcome, gender oppression would
vanish as well. According to socialist feminists, this view of gender oppression as a
sub-class of class oppression is naive, and much of the work of socialist feminists has
gone towards separating gender phenomena from class phenomena. Some contributors
to socialist feminism have criticized traditional Marxist ideas for being largely silent
on gender oppression except to subsume it underneath broader class
oppression.[53] Other socialist feminists, notably two long-
lived American organizations Radical Women and the Freedom Socialist Party, point
to the classic Marxist writings of Frederick Engels[54] and August Bebel[55] as a
powerful explanation of the link between gender oppression and class exploitation.
In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century both Clara Zetkin and
Eleanor Marx were against the demonization of men and supported a proletarian
revolution that would overcome as many male-female inequalities as possible.[56]

People of interest

Michel Barrett
Friedrich Engels
Clara Fraser
Emma Goldman
Sheila Rowbotham
Clara Zetkin
Eleanor Marx

Post-structural feminism and postmodern feminism

Post-structural feminists, also referred to as French feminists, use the insights of

various epistemological movements, including psychoanalysis, linguistics, political
theory (Marxist and neo-Marxist theory), race theory, literary theory, and other
intellectual currents to explore and define feminist concerns.[57] Many post-structural
feminists maintain that difference is one of the most powerful tools that females
possess in their struggle with patriarchal domination, and that to equate feminist
movement only with gender equality is to deny women a plethora of options, as
"equality" is still defined within a masculine or patriarchal perspective.[57][58]

Judith Butler at a lecture at the University of Hamburg.

Postmodern feminism is an approach to feminist theory that incorporates postmodern

and post-structuralist theory. The largest departure from other branches of feminism,
is the argument that sex as well as gender is constructed through language.[59] The
most notable proponent of this argument is Judith Butler, in her 1990 book, Gender
Trouble, which draws on, and criticizes the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Michel
Foucault and Jacques Lacan. Butler criticizes the distinction drawn by previous
feminisms between (biological) sex and socially constructed gender. She says that this
does not allow for a sufficient criticism of essentialism(the concept that certain
qualities or characteristics are essential to the definition of gender). For Butler
"women" and "woman" are fraught categories, complicated by class,
ethnicity, sexuality, and other facets of identity. She suggests that gender is
performative. This argument leads to the conclusion that there is no single cause for
women's subordination, and no single approach towards dealing with the issue.[60]

Donna Haraway, author of A Cyborg Manifesto, with her dog Cayenne

In A Cyborg Manifesto Donna Haraway criticizes traditional notions of feminism,

particularly its emphasis on identity, rather than affinity. She uses the metaphor of a
cyborg(an organism that is a self-regulating integration of artificial and natural
systems) in order to construct a postmodern feminism that moves
beyond dualisms and the limitations of traditional gender, feminism, and
politics.[61] Haraway's cyborg is an attempt to break away from Oedipal narratives and
Christian origins doctrines like Genesis. In the Cyborg Manifesto, she writes: "The
cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time
without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is
not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust."[61]

Other postmodern feminist works emphasizes stereotypical female roles, only to

portray them as parodies of the original beliefs. The history of feminism is not
important to them, their only concern is what is going to be done about it. In fact, the
history of feminism is dismissed and used to depict better how ridiculous the past
beliefs were. Modern feminist theory has been extensively criticized as being
predominantly, though not exclusively, associated with western middle class
academia. Mainstream feminism has been criticized as being too narrowly focused,
and inattentive to related issues of race and class.[62]
People of interest

Judith Butler
Helene Cixous
Mary Joe Frug
Donna Haraway
Luce Irigaray
Julia Kristeva
Monique Wittig

Postcolonial feminism and third-world feminism

Since the 1980s, standpoint feminists have argued that the feminist movement should
address global issues (such as rape, incest, and prostitution) and culturally specific
issues (such as female genital mutilation in some parts of Africa and the Middle East
and glass ceiling practices that impede women's advancement in developed
economies) in order to understand how gender inequality interacts
with racism, colonialism, and classism in a "matrix of domination."[63][64] Postcolonial
and third world feminists argue that some cultural and class issues must be understood
in the context of other political and social needs which may take precedence for
women in developing and third world countries.

Postcolonial feminism emerged from the gendered history of colonialism. Colonial

powers often imposed Western norms on the regions they colonized. In the 1940s and
1950s, after the formation of the United Nations, former colonies were monitored by
the West for what was considered "social progress." The status of women in the
developing world has been monitored and evaluated by organizations such as the
United Nations, according to essentially Western standards. Traditional practices and
roles taken up by women, sometimes seen as distasteful by Western standards, could
be considered a form of rebellion against the gender roles imposed by colonial
powers.[65] Postcolonial feminists today struggle to fight gender oppression within
their own cultural models of society, rather than those imposed by the Western
colonizers.[66]

Postcolonial feminists argue that racial, class, and ethnic oppressions relating to the
colonial experience have marginalized women in postcolonial societies. They
challenge the assumption that gender oppression is the primary force of patriarchy.
Postcolonial feminists object to portrayals of women of non-Western societies as
passive and voiceless victims, as opposed to the portrayal of Western women as
modern, educated and empowered.[67]
Postcolonial feminism is critical of Western forms of feminism, notably radical
feminism and liberal feminism and their universalization of female experience.
Postcolonial feminists argue that, in cultures impacted by colonialism, the
glorification of a pre-colonial culture, in which power was stratified along lines of
gender, could include the acceptance of, or refusal to deal with, inherent issues of
gender inequality.[68] Postcolonial feminists can be described as feminists who have
reacted against both universalizing tendencies in Western feminist thought and a lack
of attention to gender issues in mainstream postcolonial thought.[69]

Third-world feminism has been described as a group of feminist theories developed

by feminists who acquired their views and took part in feminist politics in so-called
third world countries[70]. Although women from the third world have been engaged in
the feminist movement, Chandra Talpade Mohanty criticizes Western feminism on the
grounds that it is ethnocentric and does not take into account the unique experiences
of women from third world countries or the existence of feminisms indigenous to
third world countries. According to her, women in the third world feel that Western
feminism bases its understanding of women on its "internal racism, classism and
homophobia"[71]. This discourse is strongly related to African feminism and
postcolonial feminism. Its development is also associated with concepts such as black
feminism, womanism[22][72][73], "Africana womanism"[74], "motherism"[75],
"Stiwanism"[76], "negofeminism"[77], chicana feminism and "femalism."

People of interest

Amrita Pritam
Gayatri Spivak
Sarojini Sahoo
Trinh T. Minh-ha
Uma Narayan
Chandra Talpade Mohanty
Taslima Nasrin

Ecofeminism
Vandana Shiva 2007 in Cologne, Germany

Ecofeminism links ecology with feminism. Ecofeminists see the domination of

women as stemming from the same ideologies that bring about the domination of the
environment. Patriarchal systems, where men own and control the land, are seen as
responsible for both the oppression of women and destruction of the natural
environment. Since the men in power control the land, they are able to exploit it for
their own profit and success, in the same sense that women are exploited by men in
power for their own profit, success, and pleasure. As a way of repairing social and
ecological injustices, ecofeminists feel that women must work towards creating a
healthy environment and ending the destruction of the lands that most women rely on
to provide for their families.[78]

Ecofeminism argues that there is a connection between women and nature that comes
from their shared history of oppression by a patriarchal western society. Vandana
Shiva explains how women's special connection to the environment through their
daily interactions with it have been ignored. She says that "women in subsistence
economies, producing and reproducing wealth in partnership with nature, have been
experts in their own right of holistic and ecological knowledge of natures processes.
But these alternative modes of knowing, which are oriented to the social benefits and
sustenance needs are not recognized by the [capitalist] reductionist paradigm, because
it fails to perceive the interconnectedness of nature, or the connection of womens
lives, work and knowledge with the creation of wealth.[79]Ecofeminists also criticize
Western lifestyle choices, such as consuming food that has traveled thousands of
miles and playing sports (such as golf and bobsledding) which inherently require
ecological destruction.

Feminist and social ecologist Janet Biehl has criticized ecofeminism for focusing too
much on a mystical connection between women and nature, and not enough on the
actual conditions of women.[80]
People of interest

Rosemary Radford Ruether

Vandana Shiva
Wangari Maathai
Mary Daly
Karen J. Warren
Gerda Lerner
Val Plumwood

Post-feminism

The term 'post-feminism' comprises a wide range of theories, some of which argue
that feminism is no longer relevant to today's society.[81] One of the earliest uses of the
term was in Susan Bolotin's 1982 article "Voices of the Post-Feminist Generation,"
published in New York Times Magazine. This article was based on a number of
interviews with women who largely agreed with the goals of feminism, but did not
identify themselves as feminists.[82] Post-feminism takes a critical approach to
previous feminist discourses, including challenges to second-wave ideas.[31]

Sarah Gamble argues that feminists such as Naomi Wolf, Katie Roiphe, Natasha
Walter and Rene Denefeld are labeled as 'anti-feminists,' whereas they define
themselves as feminists who have shifted from second-wave ideas towards an
"individualistic liberal agenda".[83] Denefeld has distanced herself from feminists who
see pornography and heterosexuality as oppressive and also criticized what she sees
as, the second-wave's "reckless" use of the term patriarchy.[84] Gamble points out that
post-feminists like Denfeld are criticized as "pawns of a conservative 'backlash'
against feminism."[83]

People of interest

Camille Paglia
Katie Roiphe
Natasha Walter
Naomi Wolf

Issues in Defining Feminism

One of the difficulties in defining and circumscribing a complex and heterogeneous
concept such as feminism[85] is the extent to which women have rejected the term
from a variety of semantic and political standpoints. Many women engaged in
activities intimately grounded in feminism have not considered themselves feminists.
It is assumed that only women can be feminists. However, feminism is not grounded
in a person's gender, but in their commitment to rejecting and refuting sexist
oppression politically, socially, privately, linguistically, and otherwise. Defining
feminism in this way reflects the contemporary reality that both men and women
openly support feminism, and also openly adhere to sexist ideals.[86] Politically, usage
of the term "feminism" has been rejected both because of fears of labeling, and
because of its innate ability to attract broad misogyny.[87]Virginia Woolf was one of
the more prominent women to reject the term[88] early in its history in 1938, although
she is regarded as an icon of feminism.[89][90] Betty Friedan revisited this concern in
1981 in The Second Stage.

Ann Taylor,[91] offers the following definition of a feminist, after Karen Offen:[92]

Any person who recognizes "the validity of women's own interpretation of their lived
experiences and needs," protests against the institutionalized injustice perpetrated by
men as a group against women as a group, and advocates the elimination of that
injustice by challenging the various structures of authority or power that legitimate
male prerogatives in a given society.

Another way of expressing this concept is that a primary goal of feminism is to

correct androcentric bias.[93]

Other attempts at defining feminism have been made by the United

Nations.[94] However, one of feminism's unique characteristics, strengths and
weaknesses is its persistent defiance of being constrained by definition. Charlotte Witt
observes that this reflects the "contested nature of the "us" of contemporary feminism
and is a part of, on-going debates within feminism over its identity and self-image
in the final analysis, the result of debate within feminist philosophy over what
feminism is, and what its theoretical commitments should be, and what its core values
are."[95] This is the subject of one of the more lively debates in feminism, that which
Nannerl Keohane has called the "perpetual oscillation between essentialism
and nominalism (constructionism) in feminist theory."[96]

Some contemporary women and men have distanced themselves from the
term "femin"ism in favor of more inclusive terminology such as "equal rights
activist/advocate," "equalist" or similar non-gendered phrasings.[97]

Feminism and Society

By campaigning for the right to vote, suffragettes began the feminist struggle for
equality in the West.
Woman Suffrage Headquarters, Cleveland, 1912

The feminist movement has effected a number of changes in Western society,

including women's suffrage; the right to initiate divorce proceedings and "no fault"
divorce; access to university education; and the right of women to make individual
decisions regarding pregnancy (including access to contraceptives and abortion).[2][98]

According to studies by the United Nations, when both paid employment and unpaid
household tasks are accounted for, on average women work more than men. In rural
areas of selected developing countries, women performed an average of 20 percent
more work than men, or an additional 102 minutes per day. In the OECD countries
surveyed, on average women performed 5 percent more work than men, or 20 minutes
per day. At the UN's Pan Pacific Southeast Asia Women's Association Twenty First
International Conference in 2001 it was stated that "in the world as a whole, women
comprise 51 percent of the population, do 66 percent of the work, receive 10 percent
of the income and own less than one percent of the property."[99]

Language

Gender-neutral language is the usage of terminology which is aimed at minimizing

assumptions regarding the biological sex of human referents. Gender-neutral language
is advocated both by those who aim to clarify the inclusion of both sexes or genders
(gender-inclusive language); and by those who propose that gender, as a category, is
rarely worth marking in language (gender-neutral language). Gender-neutral language
is sometimes described as non-sexist language by advocates, and politically-correct
language by opponents.[100]

Heterosexual relationships
The increased entry of women into the workplace which began during the Industrial
Revolution and increased rapidly during the twentieth and century has affected gender
roles and the division of labor within households. The sociologist, Arlie Russell
Hochschild, presents evidence in her books, The Second Shift and The Time Bind, that
in two-career couples, men and women on the average spend about equal amounts of
time working, but women still spend more time on housework.[101][102]

Feminist criticisms of men's contributions to child care and domestic labor in the
Western middle class are typically centered around the idea that it is unfair for women
to be expected to perform more than half of a household's domestic work and child
care when both members of the relationship also work outside the
home.[103][104] Feminism has affected womens choices to bear a child, both in and out
of wedlock, by making the choice less dependent on the financial and social support
of a male partner.[105]

Religion

Feminist theology is a movement that reconsiders the traditions, practices, scriptures,

and theologies of their religion from a feminist perspective. Some of the goals of
feminist theology include increasing the role of women among the clergy and
religious authorities, reinterpreting male-dominated imagery and language about God,
determining women's place in relation to career and motherhood, and studying images
of women in the religion's sacred texts.[106]

Christian feminism

Christian feminism is a branch of feminist theology which seeks to interpret and

understand Christianity in terms of the equality of women and men morally, socially,
and in leadership. Because this equality has been historically ignored,
Christian feminists believe their contributions are necessary for a complete
understanding of Christianity. While there is no standard set of beliefs among
Christian feminists, most agree that God does not discriminate on the basis of
biologically-determined characteristics such as gender. Their major issues are the
ordination of women, male dominance in Christian marriage, and claims of moral
deficiency and inferiority of the abilities of women compared to men. They also are
concerned with issues such as the balance
of parenting between mothers and fathers and the overall treatment of women in the
church.[107][108]

Jewish feminism
Jewish feminism is a movement that seeks to improve the religious, legal, and social
status of women within Judaism and to open up new opportunities for religious
experience and leadership for Jewish women. Feminist movements, with varying
approaches and successes, have opened up within all major branches of Judaism. In its
modern form, the movement can be traced to the early 1970s in the United States.
According to Judith Plaskow, who has focused on feminism in Reform Judaism, the
main issues for early Jewish feminists in these movements were the exclusion from
the all-male prayer group or minyan, the exemption from positive time-
bound mitzvot (coming of age ceremony), and women's inability to function as
witnesses and to initiate divorce.[109]

People of interest

Rachel Adler
Nina Hartley
Tova Hartman
Susan Sontag
Yona Wallach

Islamic feminism

Mukhtaran Bibi, Glamour Magazine Woman of the Year 2005

Islamic feminism is concerned with the role of women in Islam. It aims for the full
equality of all Muslims, regardless of gender, in public and private life. Islamic
feminists advocate women's rights, gender equality, and social justice grounded in an
Islamic framework. Although rooted in Islam, the movement's pioneers have also
utilized secular and Western feminist discourses and recognize the role of Islamic
feminism as part of an integrated global feminist movement[110]. Advocates of the
movement seek to highlight the deeply rooted teachings of equality in the Qur'an and
encourage a questioning of the patriarchal interpretation of Islamic teaching through
the Qur'an (holy book), hadith (sayings of Muhammed) and sharia (law) towards the
creation of a more equal and just society.

People of interest

Fadela Amara
Asma Barlas
Samira Bellil
Mukhtaran Bibi
Zilla Huma Usman
Amina Wadud

Scientific Research into Feminist Issues

Some natural and social scientists have considered feminist ideas and feminist forms
of scholarship using scientific methods.

One core scientific controversy involves the issue of the social construction versus the
biological formation of gender- or sex-associated identities. Modern feminist science
examines the view that most, if not all, differences between the sexes are based on
socially constructed gender identities rather than on biological sex differences. Anne
Fausto-Sterling's book Myths of Gender explores the assumptions, embodied in
scientific research, that purport to support a biologically essentialist view of
gender.[111] In The Female Brain, Louann Brizendine argues that brain differences
between the sexes are a biological reality, with significant implications for sex-
specific functional differences.[112] Steven Rhoads' book Taking Sex Differences
Seriously, illustrates sex-dependent differences in a variety of areas.[113]

Carol Tavris, in The Mismeasure of Woman (the title is a play on Stephen Jay
Gould's The Mismeasure of Man), uses psychology, sociology, and analysis in a
critique of theories that use biological reductionism to explain differences between
men and women. She argues that such theories, rather being based on an objective
analysis of the evidence of innate gender difference, have grown out of an over-
arching hypothesis intended to justify inequality and perpetuate stereotypes.[114]

Evelyn Fox Keller has argued that the rhetoric of science reflects a masculine
perspective, and questions the idea of scientific objectivity. Primatologist Sarah
Blaffer Hrdy notes the prevalence of masculine-coined stereotypes and theories, such
as the non-sexual female, despite the accumulation of abundant openly available
evidence contradicting it".[115]

Sarah Kember, drawing from numerous areas such as evolutionary biology,

sociobiology, artificial intelligence, and cybernetics in development with a new
evolutionism, discusses the biologization of technology. She notes how feminists and
sociologists have become suspect of evolutionary psychology, particularly inasmuch
as sociobiology is subjected to complexity in order to strengthen sexual difference as
immutable through pre-existing cultural value judgments about human nature
and natural selection. Where feminist theory is criticized for its "false beliefs about
human nature," Kember then argues in conclusion that "feminism is in the interesting
position of needing to do more biology and evolutionary theory in order not to simply
oppose their renewed hegemony, but in order to understand the conditions that make
this possible, and to have a say in the construction of new ideas and artefacts."[116]

Other Concepts
Pro-feminism is support of feminism without implying that the supporter is a member
of the feminist movement. The term is most often used in reference to men who are
actively supportive of feminism and of efforts to bring about gender equality. The
activities of pro-feminist men's groups include anti-violence work with boys and
young men in schools, offering sexual harassment workshops in workplaces, running
community education campaigns, and counseling male perpetrators of violence. Pro-
feminist men also are involved in men's health, activism
against pornography including anti-pornography legislation, men's studies, the
development of gender equity curricula in schools, and many other areas. This work is
sometimes in collaboration with feminists and women's services, such as domestic
violence and rape crisis centers. Some activists of both genders will not refer to men
as "feminists" at all, and will refer to all pro-feminist men as "pro-feminists".[117][118]

Anti-feminism

Opposition to feminism comes in many forms, either criticizing feminist ideology and
practice, or arguing that it should be restrained. Antifeminism is often equated with
male chauvinism.
Feminists such as Camille Paglia, Christina Hoff Sommers, Jean Bethke Elshtain and
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese have been labeled "antifeminists" by other
feminists.[119] [120] Patai and Koerge argue that in this way the term "antifeminist" is
used to silence academic debate about feminism.[121] Paul Nathanson and Katherine K.
Young's books Spreading Misandry and Legalizing Misandry explore what they argue
is feminist-inspired misandry (hatred of men as a sex).[122]. In Who Stole Feminism:
How Women Have Betrayed Women, Christina Hoff-Sommers argues that feminist
misandry leads directly to misogyny by what she calls "establishment feminists"
against (the majority of) women who love men. "Marriage rights" advocates criticize
feminists like Shelia Cronan, who take the view that marriage constitutes slavery for
women, and that freedom for women cannot be won without the abolition of marriage.

Notes
1. Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick. (eds.) Feminist Theory and the Body: A
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academic discourse. (Duke University Press, 2002. ISBN 9780822328437)
3. Maggie Humm. 1995. The Dictionary of Feminist Theory. (Columbus: Ohio
State University Press), 251
4. 4.0 4.1 Rebecca Walker, "Becoming the Third Wave,"
in Ms. (January/February, 1992): 39-41
5. Concise Routledge encyclopedia of philosophy. (London: Routledge,
2000. ISBN 0203169948), 275
6. Ted Honderich. 1995. The Oxford companion to philosophy. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press. ISBN 0198661320), 292
7. Charlotte Krolokke and Anne Scott Sorensen, "From Suffragettes to Grrls."
in Gender Communication Theories and Analyses: From Silence to
Performance. (Sage, 2005)
8. Melanie Phillips. The Ascent of Woman: A History of the Suffragette
Movement. (Abacus, 2004. ISBN 9780349116600)
9. Ellen Carol DuBois. Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman
Suffrage. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. ISBN 9780300065620)
10. Eleanor Flexner. Century of Struggle: The Woman's Rights Movement in the
United States. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 1996. ISBN
9780674106539)
11. Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, (ed.) One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the
Woman Suffrage Movement. (NewSage Press, 1995. ISBN 9780939165260)
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14. 14.0 14.1 Alice Echols. Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-
1975. (University of Minnesota Press, 1989)
15. Kathie Sarachild, "Consciousness-Raising: A Radical Weapon," in K.
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16. Juliet Mitchell, "Women: The longest revolution," in New Left Review (Nov-
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17. Warren Hinckle and Marianne Hinckle, "Women
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18. Jo Freeman, The politics of women's liberation (New York: David McKay,
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20. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W.W. Norton and
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24. Astrid Henry. Not My Mother's Sister: Generational Conflict and Third-Wave
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Harding, Sandra. The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and
Political Controversies. Routledge, 2003. ISBN 978-0415945011
Henry, Astrid. Not My Mother's Sister: Generational Conflict and Third-Wave
Feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003. ISBN 978-
0253217134
Heywood, Leslie, Jennifer Drake, eds. Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist,
Doing Feminism. University of Minnesota Press, 1997. ISBN 978-0816630054
Hill Collins, P. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the
politics of empowerment. New York: Routledge, 2008. ISBN 978-0415964722
Hochschild, Arlie Russell. The Second Shift. Penguin, 2003. ISBN 978-
0142002926
Hochschild, Arlie Russell. The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and
Home Becomes Work. Owl Books U.S, 2003. ISBN 978-0805066432
 hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Cambridge, MA: South
End Press, 2000. ISBN 978-0896086135
Humm, Maggie. The Dictionary of Feminist Theory. Edinburgh University Press,
2003. ISBN 978-0748619085
Irigaray, Luce. "When Our Lips Speak Together" in Feminist Theory and the
Body: A Reader ed. by Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick. Routledge, 1999. ISBN
978-0415925662
Johnson, Barbara. The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race
and Gender. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. ISBN 978-
0674298811
Luker, Kristin. Dubious Conceptions: The Politics of the Teenage Pregnancy
Crisis. Harvard University Press, 1996. ISBN 0674217039
MacGregor, Sherilyn. Beyond Mothering Earth: Ecological
Citizenship. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007. ISBN 0774812028
Messer-Davidow, Ellen. Disciplining feminism: from social activism to
academic discourse. Duke University Press, 2002. ISBN 978-0822328437
Mills, S. "Postcolonial Feminist Theory," 106, in S. Jackson and J. Jones
eds., Contemporary Feminist Theories. NYU Press, 1998. ISBN 978-0814742495
Mitchell, Julie, and Ann Oakley (eds.). Who's Afraid of Feminism?: Seeing
Through the Backlash. New Press, 1997. ISBN 1565843851
Modleski, Tania. Feminism without Women: Culture and Criticism in a
Postfeminist Age. New York: Routledge, 1991. ISBN 978-0415904179
Mohanty, C. "Introduction" 7 in Third World Women and the Politics of
Feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991. ISBN 978-
0253206329
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(Autumn, 1988): 61-88.
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Home > A brief history of feminism

A brief history of feminism

To celebrate International Womens Day, here is an extract on feminism from the Dictionary of
Critical Theory, edited by Ian Buchanan.

Feminism
One of the most important social movements of the past two centuries and certainly the social
movement which has brought about the most enduring and progressive transformation of human
society on a global scale. It is customary to divide the history of feminism into a First, Second,
and Third Wave, with each period signalling a different era in the struggle to attain equality
between the sexes. Today feminism means many different things to different people, but at its
core, if one goes back to its origins in the late 18th century, it is primarily a social movement for
the emancipation of women. That movement was slow to start, and it wasnt until the late 1880s
that the term feminism actually appeared. Before then, the more usual term was womens
rights. The first advocates for womens rights were for the most part lonely voices pleading
against obvious and manifest iniquities in societys treatment of women.
This was certainly the case in one of the earliest self-consciously feminist works, namely Mary
Wollstonecrafts A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), which was written at the height
of the French Revolution. Establishing what would become a common theme throughout much
feminist writing, Wollstonecraft conducts her critique on two fronts: on the one hand, she
criticizes patriarchal society (as it would later be called) for the unjust way it limits womens
rights, as well as their opportunity for education, self-expression, and economic independence;
while on the other hand, she criticizes women for buying into femininity which, in her view,
turns women into mere spaniels and toys. Wollstonecrafts solution was better education for
young women, not the granting of equal rights. So in this sense, one might say feminism begins
not with Wollstonecraft but rather with the various Womens Suffrage movements that sprang up
in the early 1800s.

A century of struggle
Achieving full voting rights for all women regardless of age, race, or marital status took more
than a century of struggle, easily justifying Juliet Mitchells claim that feminism is the longest
revolution. The focus on voting rights, as important as these are, tends to obscure the fact that it
was not only the right to vote that women were fighting for, though this was of course
emblematic inasmuch that once they could vote they would be able to use the democratic process
to bring about other forms of change. In point of fact, however, even after women obtained the
right to vote in most parts of the world at the turn of the 20th century, it was still several decades
before full equality was obtained. And many would say that it has not yet been obtained.
It is worth mentioning that throughout the long First Wave of feminism women fought against
several other injustices as well, of which three are key. (i) Women were restricted in terms of the
ownership of property, requiring them to marry so as to inherit, thus preventing them from
attaining true independence (it is this issue which exercises proto-feminist writers like Jane
Austen and Charlotte Bront). (ii) Women did not have full rights over their own body, which
meant they had no legal protection against sexual violence (e.g. the idea that a husband could
rape his wife was not admitted as law until late in the 20th century). (iii) Women were
discriminated against in the workplace, which not only meant women were paid less than men
for the same work, it also restricted them from applying for certain jobs, denied them promotion,
and made no allowance for maternity leave. Many of these problems persist today.

The Second Wave of feminism

Once suffrage was granted, the womens rights movement fell into decline, and
remained quiescent until the late 1950s and early 1960s when it was reignited by a new
generation of activists who called themselves the Second Wave of feminism. Betty Friedans The
Feminine Mystique(1963) is generally credited as the tipping point for this second round of
political struggle. Echoing Wollstonecraft, she argued that women were victims of a false belief
in the promise of femininity and urged them to look beyond their domestic situation for
fulfilment. The National Organization for Women (NOW) was formed in 1966 and became the
central focus, in the US, for feminist activism. Its goal was the ratification of an Equal Rights
Amendment to the Constitution, which it did not manage to achieve in full, but it nonetheless
made giant strides towards it. Second Wave feminism also took the view that equality between
the sexes would only come about if there was a sea change in cultural attitudes on the part of
both women and men. Authors like Germaine Greer and Kate Millett called for a sexual
liberation as well, arguing that women could alter their status as the second sex (to borrow the
title of Simone de Beauvoirs important book) by overturning the double standards applied to
their sexuality and behaviour.
The Second Wave of feminism came to an end in the early 1980s partly as a result of its
successesmany women felt that all the relevant battles had been fought and wonbut
primarily because of the change in political climate. The Reagan-Thatcher era was very
unfriendly to equal rights and it rolled back many of the gains that had been made. This is the
period of the so-called culture wars when feminism was caricatured as mere political
correctness and its political agenda scorned in the press. Third Wave feminist scholar Susan
Faludi documents this in her Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women (1991). But there
 were also problems within feminism. Feminist scholars of colour, particularly those from the
Third World, argued very forcefully that feminism neglected race and class. These issues are
central to the Third Wave, which many cite as beginning with the outraged response of feminist
critics to the treatment of Anita Hill during the Senate-confirmation hearings for US Supreme
Court nominee Clarence Thomas in 1991. Hill testified that Thomas sexually harrassed her when
she was working in the Department of Education, and later at the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission. Thomas flatly denied this, and was subsequently confirmed by the
Senate.
The opinions and other information contained in OxfordWords blog posts and comments do not
necessarily reflect the opinions or positions of Oxford University Press.

Author
Oxford Dictionaries
Published
March 8 / 2011
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Dictionary of Critical Theory, emancipation, feminism, International Women's Day
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Resources > Articles > Women's History
Women's history, feminist history

June Hannam

The writing of women's history has always been closely linked with contemporary feminist
politics as well as with changes in the discipline of history itself. When women sought to question
inequalities in their own lives they turned to history to understand the roots of their oppression
and to see what they could learn from challenges that had been made in the past. If a woman's
role could be shown to be socially constructed within a specific historical context, rather than
natural and universal, then feminists could argue that it was open to change.

Activists within the first organised women's movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries
found that women were largely absent from standard history texts and this inspired them to
write their own histories. Detailed studies of women's work, trade unionism and political
activities were produced by authors such as Barbara Hutchins, Barbara Drake and Alice Clark.(1)

Suffrage campaigners were also anxious that the achievement of the vote, and women's part in
gaining this victory, should not become lost from view and therefore they took an active part in
constructing a narrative of the campaign that would have a long-lasting influence on subsequent
generations of historians. The Suffragette Fellowship and the Library of the London Society for
Women's Service (successor of the London women's suffrage organisation led by Millicent
Fawcett) were established in the 1920s to collect source material about the militant and
constitutional sides of the movement respectively, while many campaigners produced
autobiographies about the suffrage years. Ray Strachey and Sylvia Pankhurst, both participants
in the suffrage campaign, wrote histories of the movement that are now considered classic
texts.(2)

With the fragmentation of the women's movement after the First World War, however, these
pioneering histories tended to be lost from view. Women's history continued to be written
there was a renewed interest, for example, in the history of women's suffrage during the 1950s
and early 60s but these studies had little influence on the writing of history more generally or
on the academic curriculum.

It was the Women's Liberation Movement (WLM), or 'second wave feminism', from the late
1960s that would have the greatest impact on the writing of women's history. Political activists
again pointed to the lack of references to women in standard texts and sought to re-discover
women's active role in the past. Sheila Rowbotham produced a pioneering study, Hidden From
History,(3) that was followed by detailed investigations into varied aspects of women's lives,
including employment, trade unionism, women's organisations, family life and sexuality. A
context was provided by developments in social history and the social sciences that sought to
recover the history of less powerful groups 'history from below' and challenged conventional
wisdoms about what should be seen as historically significant.

Feminists made a distinctive contribution to these developments by highlighting women's specific

experiences in institutions such as the family, drawing attention to the significance of sexual
divisions in the workplace and in the home and exploring the interconnections between public
and private life. By looking at history through women's eyes they questioned familiar
chronologies and notions of time and argued that family concerns, emotional support and
personal relationships were just as important as waged work and politics. In doing so they went
beyond putting women back into a familiar framework and began to reconfigure the way in which
history in the broadest sense was written.

Women's history and feminist history are often used interchangeably but this serves to play
down the specific approach of feminist historians. Feminists argue that the power relationship
between men and women is just as important as that between social classes in understanding
social change, and that a recognition of conflicts between men and women leads to a re-
interpretation of standard accounts of social movements and ideas, as well as opening up new
areas of enquiry. Thus, Barbara Taylor's study of women's involvement in Owenite Socialism (4)
provided a new lens through which to understand the aims and ideas of that movement.
Although women are usually the subject of feminist history that is not invariably the case, since
a feminist approach can be used to understand all areas of history. For example, Sonya Rose and
Wendy Webster have brought feminist insights to the study of national identity, race and
citizenship during the Second World War and the post-war years.(5)

The writing of women's history flourished in the 1970s and 80s, in particular in the United States
and Britain, although there were differences of emphasis and approach that mirrored divisions
within the contemporary women's movement, in particular between radical and socialist
feminists. In the United States research concentrated on a separate women's culture, the growth
of all-female institutions, the family and sexuality. In Britain, where labour history was much
stronger and many feminists had come out of a socialist politics, the emphasis was on waged
work, trade union organisation and labour politics.

In trying to make sense of women's specific experiences socialist historians explored the complex
relationship between Marxism and feminism and introduced the concept of patriarchy to help
make sense of the fact that 'women have not only worked for capital, they have worked for
men'.(6) The boundaries between the different approaches did, however, become more fluid
over time for example Sally Alexander's study of working-class movements (7) in the early
19th century examined how the unconscious entered politics and how the understanding of self
and sexual identity would change our understanding of class.

Within the women's movement there was growing criticism about the predominance of white,
western heterosexual women and their concerns and this affected the writing of women's history.
Greater attention was paid to the differences between women, including race, ethnicity, class
and sexual orientation. Lesbian historians sought to rescue their history from invisibility and
drew attention to the ways in which men's control over women's bodies underpins patriarchy. In
the Spinster and her Enemies, for instance, Sheila Jeffreys argued that the social construction of
heterosexuality in the late 19th century helped to maintain male power.(8)

Studies of Black and Asian women highlighted the importance of race as well as sex and class in
shaping their lives, while insisting that they were not a monolithic group but had a diverse range
of experiences. Similarly, important studies by Antoinette Burton, Vron Ware and Claire Midgley
(9) drew attention to the complex relationship between 'first wave' feminists and empire, and to
the ethnocentrism of their views.

Despite the growth of research into women's history mainstream history texts and educational
courses often ignored women's experiences and there was a tendency to view women's history
as separate from other developments. In the 1990s, therefore, Jane Rendall and others called for
a new gender history that would apply the themes raised by women's history to both sexes and
would focus on the varied ways in which gender differences across time and place have been
constructed and understood. In its first editorial, Gender and History claimed that the journal's
intentions were to study male institutions as well as those defined as female and to address men
and masculinity as well as women and femininity.

Davidoff and Hall's study of family and work in Birmingham (10) during early industrialisation is
a good example of such an approach, where the complex connections between family
relationships, sex roles, work and the development of class identity are seen to be gendered. An
emphasis on gender-centred history has been controversial for some feminists it implies that
women's specific experiences will be lost from view within an approach that sees the interests of
the sexes as similar. It is suggested, therefore, that a focus on women's history is the only way
to ensure that sexual inequalities and the power relationship between men and women remain
central to historical enquiry.

Postmodernism has also influenced the theory and practice of gender and women's history. The
emphasis on language and discourse has challenged old feminist certainties about lived
experience, the nature of women's subordination and the use of the category woman. There has
been a shift away from an interest in the material conditions of women's lives towards a concern
with representation, symbolism, discourse and the text. The 'new cultural history', however, has
proved to be contentious. Mary Maynard (11) has argued that lived experience is mediated not
just through discourse and the text but also through material structures and relationships.
Nonetheless, it has opened up new areas of enquiry such as the female body, the emotions and
the construction of historical memory as well as drawing attention to the shifting, multiple and
often conflicting ways in which women develop gendered identities.

Although gender history has increased in popularity, research into women's history continues to
thrive. In contrast to the period of 'first wave feminism' the study of women's history did not
become lost once the WLM began to lose momentum. The expansion of higher education opened
up more jobs for women academics who were able to influence the curriculum and to introduce
women's history courses. Publishing outlets increased with the development of a women's press,
notably Virago and Honno, and new journals, including the Journal of Women's History, Gender
and History and the Women's History Review.

Various groups have been formed to give women's history a voice, to promote the study of
women's history and to maintain links with contemporary feminist activists. In 1991 leading
women historians came together to launch the Women's History Network (WHN). The WHN
encourages contact between all people with an interest in women's history, whatever their
background or qualifications, and aims to promote research into all areas of women's history. Its
annual conference provides a space for sharing recent developments in the field and for meeting
other researchers.

The International Federation for Research in Women's History (IFRWH), established in 1987, has
similar aims and encourages co-operation across national boundaries. The retrieval of sources
has also been crucial in ensuring the continuing growth of women's history. The Women's
Library, part of London Metropolitan University, plays a pivotal role here as well as providing
an internationally renowned resource, it also promotes women's history through varied events
and seeks to inspire debate in the area. Regional archives, including the Feminist Archive
(North and South) and Women's Archive of Wales have also played a key part in rescuing
sources and promoting the study of women's history.

Women's history is now far more embedded in the curriculum in higher education than half a
century ago, the number of professors in women's history has increased and there are far more
publishing outlets. On the other hand women's studies courses both at undergraduate and at
postgraduate level have declined over the same period and many mainstream history texts still
give little space to women and their specific experiences. In this context it remains important to
promote research into women's history both inside the academy and in the wider community.
The close relationship between contemporary feminist politics and historical practice means that
women's history is still able to excite enthusiasm and is constantly changing, developing new
areas to research and new concepts and approaches with which to analyse them.

Back to the top

1. Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1919); Barbara
Drake, Women and Trade Unions (London, 1920); Barbara Hutchins, Women in Modern

Industry (London, 1915).

 2. E. Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement (London, 1931; 1977); Ray Strachey, The

Cause (London, 1928; 1978).

3. Sheila Rowbotham, Hidden From History (London, 1973).

4. Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth

Century (London, 1983).

5. Sonya Rose, Which People's War: National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain,
19391945 (Oxford, 2003); Wendy Webster, Imagining Home: Gender, Race and

National Identity, 194564 (London, 1998).

6. Sex and Class in Women's History, ed. Judith Newton, Mary Ryan and Judith Walkowitz

(London, 1983), p. 3.
7. Sally Alexander, 'Women, class and sexual differences in the 1830s and 1840s: some
reflections on the writing of a feminist history', History Workshop Journal, 17 (Spring

1984), 12549.
8. Sheila Jeffreys, The Spinster and her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality, 1880

1930 (London, 1985).

9. Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminism, Indian Women and Imperial
Culture, 18651915 (Bloomington, Ind., 1995); Clare Midgley, Women Against Slavery:
the British Campaigns, 17801870 (London, 1992); Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White

Women, Racism and History (London, 1992).

10. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English

Middle Class, 17801850 (London, 1987).

11. Mary Maynard, 'Beyond the big three: the development of feminist theory into the

1990s', Women's History Review, 4 (1995), 25981.

June Hannam is professor of Modern British History at the University of the West of England. She
has been closely involved in the Women's History Network since its inception and is a member of
the editorial board of the Women's History Review.

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Increasingly, women recognised that campaigning was limited wh
until 1928 that all women - not just those over 30 and of the right
local suffrage, or universal male suffrage, or limited suffrage, the
women workers during war time pressurised the Government to g
campaigning for women's rights. But it was a CRUCIAL LANDMA

1940s and 1950s

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some of the burden of family responsibility needed to be shifted o
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CENTURY.

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These decades saw the radicalisation of the feminist movement, l
traditional role within the family. Feminists demanded the right t

The Future
As is probably clear from our history many of our demands have s
the importance of female voters, more and more women are chall
wage. When the women's movements have linked up with other g
like winning the vote. This is the way forward for the 1990s. A spe
 Remember.......

It took 70 years for women to get voting rights, some even gave th
SERIOUSLY.

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The Women's Movement

By Martin Pugh

Published in History Review Issue 27 March 1997

USA, Europe Civil Rights, Gender

Print
 Email

Martin Pugh charts the Women's Movement's

origins and growth 1850-1939.
When did modern feminism begin? We usually see its origin in the political
ideas of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the French Revolution,
which regarded all human beings as rational creatures who enjoyed the
same fundamental rights. This gave rise to what is usually called liberal
feminism or equal-rights feminism. When the French Revolution broke out
in 1789 thirty-three of the famous lists of grievances presented to the
Estates General expressed female demands. The intellectual excitement
generated in France soon provoked feminist tracts elsewhere. In England
Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792)
and the German Theodore Gottlieb von Hippel published On the Civil
Improvement of Women (1794).
However, little came of this early flourish of feminist propaganda. The
French constitution of 1792 actually banned women from public life and the
Emperor Napoleon's Civil Code of 1804 was subsequently implemented in
much of continental Europe. It effectively denied legal rights and access to
divorce to married women, placed their properly and income in the control
of their husbands, and generally confined them to a subordinate, domestic
role.

Women in Public
This helps us to explain why an organised women's movement first
emerged in certain parts of the western world and was slow to develop in
others. It was associated with the United States, Britain, Australia, New
Zealand and the Scandinavian countries. These societies shared certain key
features - an Anglo-Saxon, Protestant culture combined with comparatively
liberal, parliamentary political systems. Even here, however, women's route
into the public arena was indirect at first. Women participated to an
unusual extent in the activities of several Christian groups such as Quakers
and Unitarians; this often led them into moral reform campaigns organised
by men - for example, the abolition of the slave trade, temperance societies
and international peace. In the hard-drinking frontier societies of Australia,
New Zealand and the American West the women's movement was closely
associated with the temperance cause. In Britain temperance was less
central but it certainly gave many women practical experience of public
work and influenced the tactics of the suffrage campaigns later in the
century.
In the United States slavery proved to be an especially formative influence.
At an anti-slavery convention in 1840 female delegates were prevented
from taking their seats. This refusal to treat them equally led to a revolt and
forced many women to ask how much difference there really was between
the legal status of a slave and that of a woman. After the 1860s, when
Americans fought a civil.war to establish political rights for blacks, the
continued exclusion of white women from the electorate seemed
intolerable.

An organised movement emerges

The appearance of the women's movement in the United States is usually
dated to the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. In Britain a number of
women's pressure groups appeared around. 1858-59 under the leadership
of Barbara Leigh Smith and Bessie Rayner Parkes whose associates were
known as 'the Ladies of Langham Place'. Denmark had a Womens
Association by 1871, Sweden an Association for Married Women by 1873,
Norway an Association for the Promotion of Women's Interests by 1884
and Finland a Women's Association in the same year.
These organisations shared several features. First, they were largely drawn
from middle-class women in the early period. Second, although they
maintained women-only organisations, they co-operated closely with men
to achieve their goals. In Britain the National Society for Women's Suffrage
employed John Stuart Mill, Jacob Bright and other MPs to present
petitions to parliament and introduce regular suffrage bills. Third, in most
countries Radical Liberal and Socialist politicians provided the original
allies for feminists; indeed, in Denmark and Norway the success of the
campaign for the women's vote was closely bound up with the advance of
Liberal and Labour parties.
On the other hand the fortunes of feminism were obviously affected,
favourably and adversely, by factors peculiar to each country. In Finland
and Norway, for example, female emancipation benefited enormously by
association with a. broader struggle for self-determination. Finland was still
under Russian rule in 1897 when the Tsarist government rejected women's
suffrage, thereby neatly uniting the feminist and nationalist causes. In 1906
Finland gave women the vote shortly after breaking away from. Russia.
Similarly, when Norway gained her independence from Sweden in 1905 this
paved the way for women's enfranchisement in 1913.
In Britain, on the other hand, domestic politics complicated and delayed
female enfranchisement. While the women enjoyed allies amongst Radical
Liberals, they had to adjust to the unexpected dominance of Conservatism
in the late Victorian era. In time the suffragists' arguments began to reflect
a Conservative view, and a growing number of Conservative MPs supported
them. Yet this advance only aroused suspicions amongst Liberal and
Labour politicians as to whether women voters would favour the
Conservatives and whether a limited measure designed to enfranchise
property-owning women would damage their party interests. This
antagonism between feminists and the left-wing parties eventually
provoked die militant suffragette campaign which was a distinctive feature
of the movement in Britain'. But militancy actually delayed
enfranchisement in the sense that by repudiating and alienating the labour
movement the Pankhursts deprived their campaign, of die working-class
support which would have frightened the government.

Colonial successes for women

Finland and Norway were by no means the first states to give women the
vote. Rather to the surprise of the Europeans, New Zealand achieved this
honour in 1893. Close behind came Australia where the federal government
enfranchised women in 1902. The pressure for this had been built up by the
Australian states; enfranchisement began in South Australia in 1894 and
Western Australia in 1899 but was riot complete until 1908 when Victoria
finally extended the vote. A similar if more protracted process unfolded in
the United States where Wyoming granted women's suffrage in 1869and
Utah in 1870. By 1913 eleven western states had done so, though the
national vote was not won until 1919.
There is a clear pattern in these developments. The thinly populated
frontier societies proved to be more willing to enfranchise women than the
longer-established, sophisticated states. In Australia it was Victoria that
held out the longest, while in America the old British colonies along the
eastern seaboard refused to follow the western states for many years. This
was not because the frontier states were feminist. But they needed women,
expected them to play a full part and hoped they would have an improving
influence on society. They also prided themselves on their democratic spirit
and enjoyed exposing the conservatism of the older states where the
traditional male elite was so deeply established.

Catholicism and autocracy

However severe the obstacles to women's aims in north-west Europe may
have been, they paled into insignificance, beside those in other parts of the
continent. For example, wherever the Catholic Church exercised a
dominant influence, as in Spain, Italy and to a lesser degree in France, it
proved difficult to establish an, effective feminist movement. Italian women
suffered from particularly severe legal discrimination; for example, while
adultery was an offence for them, men could commit it without penalty. In
1898 and 1903 Italian feminists established pressure groups designed to
reform the law for married women, open up the professions and win the
vole, but they lacked popular support. The Church exercised its control over
most of the population, and the political parties felt reluctant to become
involved with women's issues.
Women faced even stronger resistance in the great imperial autocracies of
central and eastern Europe - the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Tsarist
Russia. Feminist organisations did appear in Austria and in Bohemia where
Czech nationalists supported demands for the vote. However, the absence
of a large middle class and the influence of the Catholic Church deprived
them of influential support. In any ease in the absence of an effective
parliament women had no obvious constitutional means of obtaining
redress of their grievances.
In the repressive atmosphere of Russia all. political organisations struggled
to survive. Such feminists as existed there came from Jewish or
intelligentsia families in St Petersburg and Moscow. They focused on the
relatively uncontentious demand for access to higher education. But before
long the government decided that this was a subversive notion and simply
closed down courses that were open to women. Feminists had to face the
fact that their only real chance of success lay in revolution. An All-Russian
Union of Equal Rights sprang up following the revolution of 1905, but
within two years its members had been so intimidated by the police that it
virtually ceased to exist. Only the revolution of 1917 would resuscitate the
women's cause, and then only briefly.
French feminism
In between the liberal western states on the one hand and the autocracies
on the other stood, two important exceptions -France and Germany. In
both cases the fortunes of the women's movement were greatly complicated
by cultural and political conditions. During the nineteenth century the
French were very much to the fore in developing the idea of feminism;
indeed we owe the word itself to them. Moreover, after 1871 they had a
republican political system which, on the face of it, should have been
conducive to the propagation of women's causes. Yet French feminists
made far less progress than their colleagues in Britain or America. While
the vote had been extended to women in all of north-west Europe and north
America by the end of the first World War, in France women had to wait
until 1945 to vote.
Although the French established a moderate suffrage movement, using
similar tactics to the British, in the late-nineteenth century, it remained
marginal and was largely confined to writers, journalists and academics.
Much of the explanation for this lay in the reluctance of Republican
politicians to support them, because they were primarily concerned about
maintaining the stability of the Third Republic against its clerical and
monarchical enemies. Like politicians in other western countries the
Republicans believed that women were especially subject to Church
influence and were inclined to hold right-wing opinions. If they voted
today, the Republic would not last six months', declared one French
Republican. Consequently it was not until 1901 that a women's suffrage bill
was even introduced into the chamber of deputies, and the first full debate
took place as late as 1919. During the inter-war years support for
enfranchisement grew - partly because the Catholic Church itself decided
that its interests would he best served by a female electorate.

The German socialist-feminists

In Germany the situation was almost the opposite. While cultural factors
favoured the women's movement, they were handicapped by a repressive
political system. Most of Germany was Protestant and among the political
parties the. Social Democrats gradually adopted women's causes, including
the vote in 1891 and equal pay in 1896. They also recruited as many as
141,000 female members by 1913. However, the German Socialists were not
really feminists; they simply used women as allies in their campaign to
reform the Bismarckian political system. Middle class feminists realised
this and therefore set up separate organisations, including the Association
of German Women in 1894 and the German Union for Women's Suffrage in
1901. But the price of independence was marginalisation. For all its vigour
German politics remained rather ineffectual; for a time the Socialists had
been banned by Bismarck, and the voting rights possessed by men carried
little real influence. Thus, like the Russians, German feminists really
awaited the overthrow of the system in order to achieve equal rights with
men. Defeat in the First World War accelerated this development by
replacing the Kaiser's rule with the democratic Weimar Republic.

Women and international peace

It was not long before the isolated groups of feminists scattered across the
western world began to draw together to find strength in their common
grievances and achievements. For example, after New Zealand won the vote
in 1893 a succession of suffragists and politicians from that country spoke
on womens platforms in Britain to emphasise that the dire predictions
made by anti-suffragists had not materialised. Some of the key feminist
tracts were widely distributed; for example J.S. Mill's The Subjection of
Women (1869) was translated into French, German, Swedish, Danish,
Polish and Italian. The famous play, A Doll's House, by the Norwegian,
Henrik Ibsen, was first performed in Britain in 1889 where it helped to
stimulate the debate over the institution of marriage daring the 1890s.
International feminism look on an institutional form from 1888 onwards
when the Americans Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B, Anthony
established the International Council of Women, which attracted
representatives from almost all the European states by 1900. In 1904 a
second organisation, the International Women's Suffrage Alliance, was set
up in Berlin. A more radical organisation, it focused its efforts on winning
the vote and extending women's employment. However, when war broke
out in August 1914 many women felt the call of patriotism so strongly that
they withdrew from women's campaigns to support the national war effort.
Some left-wing feminists, took the view that the war and the pre-1914 arms
race proved conclusively the folly of allowing men a monopoly of political
power. Against the wishes of their governments they met at the Hague in
1915 to establish the Women's International League for Peace and
Freedom, whose aim was to seek a negotiated peace settlement rather than
a complete military victory.
So long as the war lasted, this remained a hopeless cause; but it bore fruit
after 1918 once the reaction against the arms race and the Treaty of
Versailles set in. In this climate the W.I.L.R.F. and similar organisations
began to flourish. In Britain, for example, women flocked into the League of
Nations Union during the 1920s; they organised Women's Peace Crusades
and Peacemakers Pilgrimages; and during Armistice Weeks they pointedly
challenged the official commemoration ceremonies by selling white poppies
and laying wreaths of them at war memorials throughout the country.

The vote and beyond

In this way the cause of peace and disarmament became, in effect, part of
the agenda of feminism between the wars. By this time many western
countries had granted women the vote, and so it became necessary to find a
fresh focus or priority for the movement. Even in those countries where
enfranchisement had occurred much earlier, the post-war era posed
dilemmas for feminists. The underlying problem lay in the downturn in the
world economy. Economic depression meant mass unemployment which,
in turn, stimulated a reaction against the demands of women in most
countries. It was taken for granted that women should withdraw from their
wartime employment and vacate jobs for the soldiers now returning from
the war in their millions. Indeed, during the 1920s and 1930s
discrimination reached new levels in the labour force. Married women were
frequently sacked on the grounds that they had husbands to. support them;
and new 'protective legislation' was widely enacted, ostensibly to spare
women from working unsocial hours or from using dangerous materials,
but in reality to maximise male employment opportunities.
In the face of this, what tactics could feminists adopt? Especially in
countries such as Britain where the vote had recently been won, some
women chose to carry on their work through the existing political parties.
Both Labour and the Conservatives built up a large female membership in
the 1920s backed by women's conferences and professional organisers.
However, many feminists felt suspicious, partly because of their earlier
experience with the politicians. It rapidly emerged that the parties wanted,
women's voluntary work, not to mention their votes, but continued to
subordinate their interests, especially in matters of employment, to those of
men. No party would take up equal pay for example. Women also found it
difficult to become candidates and MPs because winnable seats were
reserved for men. Although Australia had enfranchised women in 1902, no
Australian woman was elected to the national parliament until 1943. By
comparison the performance of women in Europe appears impressive. For
example, in Germany 36 women were elected in 1919, the first election in
which they were eligible. In Britain Nancy Astor became the first woman to
take her seat after a by-election in 1919; by 1919 14 women MPs sat in the
House of Commons out of a total of 615, and in that year Margaret
Bondfield was appointed the first female cabinet minister. On the other
hand, after the initial breakthrough in the 1920s women's representation
stagnated for several decades.

A movement in decline
Against this background it is not surprising that many feminists considered
it essential to maintain independent women's pressure groups and avoid
being absorbed into male-dominated organisations where their interests
were invariably sacrificed. Yet this proved to be an unrewarding strategy in
the inter-war period. In the United States a National Women's Party
appeared in 1916, but it dwindled rapidly after 1919. Once the vote had been
secured, the National American Women's Suffrage Association changed its
name to the League of Women Voters; but it, too, failed to retain more than
a fraction of its previous membership. Many female activists found
themselves drawn into the campaign for Prohibition, a traditional interest
for moral-reform feminists. However, Prohibition was, in effect, another
diversion from strictly feminist issues and organisations.
In Britain the old National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies became
the National Union for Equal Citizenship after the war, and maintained
traditional pressure on politicians and parties with considerable effect. The
Pankhursts and the other suffragettes had completely abandoned militancy
by this time, so there was link argument about tactics. However, new
organisations began to spring up, including the Women's Citizen's
Association (1917), the Six Point Group (1921), the Open Door Council
(1926) and the Towns-women's Guilds (1929). This proliferation was an
indication of some uncertainty as to the main objectives for women now
that the achievement of the vote had removed the focus for the movement.
In several European countries, including Britain and Scandinavia, many of
the activists developed what became known as New Feminism. This
reflected a desire to attract ordinary women, who, had never been involved
in the suffrage campaigns, into the movement by giving priority to issues of
immediate relevance to wives and mothers -such as maternity clinics,
widows' pensions and birth control.
Pressure along these lines undoubtedly enjoyed some success. This was
partly because politicians were anxious to appease wives and mothers
precisely so that they would not be attracted into supporting an extreme
feminist programme. Also, the war had forced diem to attend to the needs
of mothers and children because of the immense casualties and because of
the rapidly declining birth rate. All kinds of inducements were therefore
offered to boost family size, including gold medals to Russian women who
produced ten children. During the 1930s and 1940s child or family
allowances were introduced in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Britain,
Norway and Sweden. In this way women exercised some influence on the
welfare states that were emerging in this period.
But was this feminism? Many equal-rights feminists thought nor. They
believed that to pursue social and welfare reforms was simply to play into
the hands of the male establishment by encouraging women to remain
trapped in domesticity. The flaw in their approach was, that between the
wars few women were prepared to participate in the equal-rights
organisations; indeed, the very word feminism went oat of fashion and by
193 9 the whole movement had gone into a decline. By that stage many of
the pre-1914 activists had died but had not been replaced by recruits from
the younger generation.
But at least an organised feminist movement continued to exist in the
western liberal democracies. In Russia the overthrow of the Tsar in the
revolution of February 1917 led to the enfranchisement of women. But in
October of that year the Bolshevik revolution resulted in the effective
suppression of the women's movement. It was a similar story in those
countries which fell to fascism between the wars. In Spain women briefly
gained the vote as a result of the victory of the Republicans in 1932, only to
lose it again as a result of the civil war which brought General Franco to
power. In both Italy and Germany die fascist leaders destined the role of
women solely in terms of motherhood and service to the state. In this
respect Mussolini enjoyed the backing of the Pope who issued an encyclical
in 1930 which declared that the true equality of the sexes could be found
only within marriage. Hitler denounced feminism as the kind of decadent
idea which had been promoted by the Weimar Republic. Nonetheless, both
Hitler and Mussolini found it necessary to mobilise women to support their
regimes and especially to promote the idea of motherhood. However, the
effect of their control was that organised feminism ceased to exist until
after the Second World War.
In some ways World War Two imparted a fresh impetus to feminism all
across the western world. Even Hider desperately wanted women to leave
the home and join the labour force. In Britain Ernest Bevin imposed
industrial conscription on women in 1941 in order to boost the output of
war equipment at a time when many workers had been lost. However, this
proved to be a temporary breakthrough. Although several states extended
the vote after the war, the movement generally had reached, the end of its
first cycle by the 1950s. It awaited a new generation of women in the United
States, Britain, France and Germany to emerge in the late 1960s and 1970s
to restore its momentum and to redefine die aims of feminism.
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Feminism
SOCIOLOGY
WRITTEN BY:
Laura Brunell, Elinor Burkett
LAST UPDATED:
7-14-2016 See Article History
RELATED TOPICS
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Feminism, the belief in the social, economic, and political equality of the
sexes. Although largely originating in the West, feminism
is manifested worldwide and is represented by various institutions committed
to activity on behalf of womens rights and interests.
Throughout most of Western history, women were confined to the domestic
sphere, while public life was reserved for men. In medieval Europe, women
were denied the right to own property, to study, or to participate in public life.
At the end of the 19th century in France, they were still compelled to cover
their heads in public, and, in parts of Germany, a husband still had the right to
sell his wife. Even as late as the early 20th century, women could neither vote
nor hold elective office in Europe and in most of the United States (where
several territories and states granted woman suffrage long before the federal
government did so). Women were prevented from conducting business
without a male representative, be it father, brother, husband, legal agent, or
even son. Married women could not exercise control over their own children
without the permission of their husbands. Moreover, women had little or no
access to education and were barred from most professions. In some parts of
the world, such restrictions on women continue today.

History Of Feminism
The ancient world
There is scant evidence of early organized protest against such circumscribed
status. In the 3rd century BCE, Roman women filled the Capitoline Hill and
blocked every entrance to the Forum when consul Marcus Porcius
Cato resisted attempts to repeal laws limiting womens use of expensive
goods. If they are victorious now, what will they not attempt? Cato cried. As
soon as they begin to be your equals, they will have become your superiors.
That rebellion proved exceptional, however. For most of recorded history, only
isolated voices spoke out against the inferior status of women, presaging the
arguments to come. In late 14th- and early 15th-century France, the first
feminist philosopher, Christine de Pisan, challenged prevailing attitudes
toward women with a bold call for female education. Her mantle was taken up
later in the century by Laura Cereta, a 15th-century Venetian woman who
published Epistolae familiares (1488; Personal Letters; Eng. trans. Collected
Letters of a Renaissance Feminist), a volume of letters dealing with a panoply
of womens complaints, from denial of education and marital oppression to the
frivolity of womens attire.
SIMILAR TOPICS
justice
suffrage
equality
The defense of women had become a literary subgenre by the end of the 16th
century, when Il merito delle donne (1600; The Worth of Women), a feminist
broadside by another Venetian author, Moderata Fonte, was published
posthumously. Defenders of the status quo painted women as superficial and
inherently immoral, while the emerging feminists produced long lists of women
of courage and accomplishment and proclaimed that women would be
the intellectual equals of men if they were given equal access to education.
The so-called debate about women did not reach England until the late 16th
century, when pamphleteers and polemicists joined battle over the true nature
of womanhood. After a series of satiric pieces mocking women was published,
the first feminist pamphleteer in England, writing as Jane Anger, responded
with Jane Anger, Her Protection for Women (1589). This volley of opinion
continued for more than a century, until another English author, Mary Astell,
issued a more reasoned rejoinder in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694,
1697). The two-volume work suggested that women inclined neither
toward marriage nor a religious vocation should set up secular convents
where they might live, study, and teach.

Influence of the Enlightenment

The feminist voices of the Renaissance never coalesced into
a coherent philosophy or movement. This happened only with
the Enlightenment, when women began to demand that the new
reformist rhetoric about liberty, equality, and natural rights be applied to both
sexes.
 TEST YOUR KNOWLEDGE

Caliphs and Caliphates

Initially, Enlightenment philosophers focused on the inequities of social

class and caste to the exclusion of gender. Swiss-born French
philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example, portrayed women as silly
and frivolous creatures, born to be subordinate to men. In addition, the
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which defined French
citizenship after the revolution of 1789, pointedly failed to address the legal
status of women.
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Female intellectuals of the Enlightenment were quick to point out this lack of
inclusivity and the limited scope of reformist rhetoric. Olympe de Gouges, a
noted playwright, published Dclaration des droits de la femme et de la
citoyenne (1791; Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the [Female]
Citizen), declaring women to be not only mans equal but his partner. The
following year Mary Wollstonecrafts A Vindication of the Rights of
Woman (1792), the seminal English-language feminist work, was published in
England. Challenging the notion that women exist only to please men, she
proposed that women and men be given equal opportunities in education,
work, and politics. Women, she wrote, are as naturally rational as men. If they
are silly, it is only because society trains them to be irrelevant.

Mary Wollstonecraft, detail of an oil painting on canvas by John Opie, c. 1797; in the
National Portrait Gallery, London
Title page of the 1792 American edition of Mary Wollstonecrafts A Vindication of
Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

The Age of Enlightenment turned into an era of political ferment marked by

revolutions in France, Germany, and Italy and the rise of abolitionism. In the
United States, feminist activism took root when female abolitionists sought to
apply the concepts of freedom and equality to their own social and political
situations. Their work brought them in contact with female abolitionists in
England who were reaching the same conclusions. By the mid-19th century,
issues surrounding feminism had added to the tumult of social change, with
ideas being exchanged across Europe and North America.
In the first feminist article she dared sign with her own name, Louise Otto, a
German, built on the work of Charles Fourier, a French social theorist, quoting
his dictum that by the position which women hold in a land, you can see
whether the air of a state is thick with dirty fog or free and clear. And after
Parisian feminists began publishing a daily newspaper entitled La Voix des
femmes (The Voice of Women) in 1848, Luise Dittmar, a German writer,
followed suit one year later with her journal, Soziale Reform.

The suffrage movement

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These debates and discussions culminated in the first womens rights

convention, held in July 1848 in the small town of Seneca Falls, New York. It
was a spur-of-the-moment idea that sprang up during a social gathering
of Lucretia Mott, a Quaker preacher and veteran social activist, Martha Wright
(Motts sister), Mary Ann McClintock, Jane Hunt, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
the wife of an abolitionist and the only non-Quaker in the group. The
convention was planned with five days notice, publicized only by a small
unsigned advertisement in a local newspaper.

Lucretia Mott.
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Stanton drew up the Declaration of Sentiments that guided the Seneca Falls
Convention. Using the Declaration of Independence as her guide to proclaim
that all men and women [had been] created equal, she drafted 11
resolutions, including the most radical demandthe right to the vote.
With Frederick Douglass, a former slave, arguing eloquently on their behalf, all
11 resolutions passed, and Mott even won approval of a final declaration for
the overthrowing of the monopoly of the pulpit, and for the securing to woman
equal participation with men in the various trades, professions and
commerce.
Yet by emphasizing education and political rights that were the privileges of
the upper classes, the embryonic feminist movement had little connection with
ordinary women cleaning houses in Liverpool or picking cotton in Georgia.
The single nonwhite womans voice heard at this timethat of Sojourner
Truth, a former slavesymbolized the distance between the ordinary and the
elite. Her famous Aint I a Woman speech was delivered in 1851 before
the Womens Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, but Truth did not dedicate her
life to womens rights. Instead, she promoted abolitionism and a land-
distribution program for other former slaves. In the speech, Truth remarked,
That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and
lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps
me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And aint
I a woman?
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Although Seneca Falls was followed by womens rights conventions in other

states, the interest spurred by those first moments of organizing quickly faded.
Concern in the United States turned to the pending Civil War, while in Europe
the reformism of the 1840s gave way to the repression of the late 1850s.
When the feminist movement rebounded, it became focused on a single
issue, woman suffrage, a goal that would dominate international feminism for
almost 70 years.
After the U.S. Civil War, American feminists assumed that woman suffrage
would be included in the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which
prohibited disfranchisement on the basis of race. Yet leading abolitionists
refused to support such inclusion, which prompted Stanton and Susan B.
Anthony, a temperance activist, to form the National Woman Suffrage
Association in 1869. At first they based their demand for the vote on the
Enlightenment principle of natural law, regularly invoking the concept of
inalienable rights granted to all Americans by the Declaration of
Independence. By 1900, however, the American passion for such principles
as equality had been dampened by a flood of Eastern European immigrants
and the growth of urban slums. Suffragist leaders, reflecting that shift in
attitude, began appealing for the vote not on the principle of justice or on the
common humanity of men and women but on racist and nativist grounds. As
early as 1894, Carrie Chapman Catt declared that the votes of literate,
American-born, middle-class women would balance the votes of foreigners:
[C]ut off the vote of the slums and give to womanthe ballot.
This elitist inclination widened the divide between feminist organizers and the
masses of American women who lived in those slums or spoke with foreign
accents. As a result, working-class womenalready more concerned with
wages, hours, and protective legislation than with either the vote or issues
such as womens property rightsthrew themselves into the trade
union movement rather than the feminists ranks. Anthony, however, ceded no
ground. In the 1890s she asked for labours support for woman suffrage but
insisted that she and her movement would do nothing about the demands
made by working women until her own battle had been won. Similarly, when
asked to support the fight against Jim Crow segregation on the nations
railroads, she refused.
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Radical feminists challenged the single-minded focus on suffrage as the sine
qua non of womens liberation. Emma Goldman, the nations leading
anarchist, mocked the notion that the ballot could secure equality for women,
since it hardly accomplished that for the majority of American men. Women
would gain their freedom, she said, only by refusing the right to anyone over
her bodyby refusing to be a servant to God, the state, society, the husband,
the family, etc., by making her life simpler but deeper and richer.
Likewise, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in Women and Economics (1898),
insisted that women would not be liberated until they were freed from the
domestic mythology of home and family that kept them dependent on men.
Mainstream feminist leaders such as Stanton succeeded
in marginalizing more extreme demands such as Goldmans and Gilmans, but
they failed to secure the vote for women. It was not until a different kind of
radical, Alice Paul, reignited the woman suffrage movement in the United
States by copying English activists. Like the Americans, British suffragists, led
by the National Union of Woman Suffrage Societies, had initially approached
their struggle politely, with ladylike lobbying. But in 1903 a dissident faction led
by Emmeline Pankhurst began a series of boycotts, bombings, and pickets.
Their tactics ignited the nation, and in 1918 the British Parliament extended
the vote to women householders, householders wives, and female university
graduates over the age of 30.


Emmeline Pankhurst in prison clothes, 1908
BBC Hulton Picture Library
Suffragists, including Sylvia Pankhurst (a member of the Pankhurst family of suffrage activists),
Stock footage courtesy The WPA Film Library

Following the British lead, Pauls forces, the shock troops of the American
suffrage crusade, organized mass demonstrations, parades, and
confrontations with the police. In 1920 American feminism claimed its first
major triumph with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the
Constitution.

The postsuffrage era

Once the crucial goal of suffrage had been achieved, the feminist movement
virtually collapsed in both Europe and the United States. Lacking
an ideologybeyond the achievement of the vote, feminism fractured into a
dozen splinter groups: the Womens Joint Congressional Committee, a
lobbying group, fought for legislation to promote education and maternal and
infant health care; the League of Women Voters organized voter registration
and education drives; and the Womens Trade Union League launched a
campaign for protective labour legislation for women.
Each of these groups offered some civic contribution, but none was
specifically feminist in nature. Filling the vacuum, the National Womans Party,
led by Paul, proposed a new initiative meant to remove discrimination from
American laws and move women closer to equality through an Equal Rights
Amendment (ERA) that would ban any government-
sanctioned discrimination based on sex. Infighting began because many
feminists were not looking for strict equality; they were fighting for laws that
would directly benefit women. Paul, however, argued that protective
legislationsuch as laws mandating maximum eight-hour shifts for female
factory workersactually closed the door of opportunity on women by
imposing costly rules on employers, who would then be inclined to hire fewer
women.
Questions abounded. Could women be freed from discrimination without
damaging the welfare and protective apparatus so many needed? What was
the goal of the feminist movementto create full equality, or to respond to the
needs of women? And if the price of equality was the absence of protection,
how many women really wanted equality? The debate was not limited to the
United States. Some proponents of womens rights, such as Aletta Jacobs of
the Netherlands or Beatrice Webb of England, agreed with Pauls demand for
equality and opposed protective legislation for women. Women members of
trade unions, however, defended the need for laws that would help them.
This philosophical dispute was confined to relatively rarefied circles.
Throughout the United States, as across Europe, Americans believed that
women had achieved their liberation. Women were voting, although in small
numbers and almost exactly like their male counterparts. Even Suzanne
LaFollette, a radical feminist, concluded in 1926 that womens struggle is very
largely won. Before any flaws in that pronouncement could be probed, the
nationand the worldplunged into the Great Depression. Next, World War
II largely obliterated feminist activism on any continent. The war did open
employment opportunities for womenfrom working in factories (Rosie the
Riveter became an American icon) to playing professional baseballbut
these doors of opportunity were largely closed after the war, when women
routinely lost their jobs to men discharged from military service. This turn of
events angered many women, but few were willing to mount any organized
protest.
In the United States the difficulties of the preceding 15 years were followed by
a new culture of domesticity. Women began marrying younger and having
more children than they had in the 1920s. Such television programs as Father
Knows Best and Ozzie and Harriet reflected what many observers called
an idyllicsuburban life. By 1960 the percentage of employed female
professionals was down compared with figures for 1930.

The Second Wave Of Feminism

The womens movement of the 1960s and 70s, the so-called second wave
of feminism, represented a seemingly abrupt break with the tranquil suburban
life pictured in American popular culture. Yet the roots of the new rebellion
were buried in the frustrations of college-educated mothers whose discontent
impelled their daughters in a new direction. If first-wave feminists were
inspired by the abolition movement, their great-granddaughters were swept
into feminism by the civil rights movement, the attendant discussion of
principles such as equality and justice, and the revolutionary ferment caused
by protests against the Vietnam War.
Womens concerns were on Pres. John F. Kennedys agenda even before this
public discussion began. In 1961 he created the Presidents Commission on
the Status of Women and appointed Eleanor Roosevelt to lead it. Its report,
issued in 1963, firmly supported the nuclear family and preparing women for
motherhood. But it also documented a national pattern of employment
discrimination, unequal pay, legal inequality, and meagre support services for
working women that needed to be corrected through legislative guarantees of
equal pay for equal work, equal job opportunities, and expanded child-care
services. The Equal Pay Act of 1963 offered the first guarantee, and the Civil
Rights Act of 1964 was amended to bar employers from discriminating on the
basis of sex.
Some deemed these measures insufficient in a country where classified
advertisements still segregated job openings by sex, where state laws
restricted womens access to contraception, and where incidences
of rape and domestic violence remained undisclosed. In the late 1960s, then,
the notion of a womens rights movement took root at the same time as
the civil rights movement, and women of all ages and circumstances were
swept up in debates about gender, discrimination, and the nature of equality.
Dissension and debate
Mainstream groups such as the National Organization for Women (NOW)
launched a campaign for legal equity, while ad hoc groups staged sit-ins and
marches for any number of reasonsfrom assailing college curricula that
lacked female authors to promoting the use of the word Ms. as a neutral form
of addressthat is, one that did not refer to marital status.
Health collectives and rape crisis centres were established. Childrens books
were rewritten to obviate sexual stereotypes. Womens studies departments
were founded at colleges and universities. Protective labour laws were
overturned. Employers found to have discriminated against female workers
were required to compensate with back pay. Excluded from male-dominated
occupations for decades, women began finding jobs as pilots, construction
workers, soldiers, bankers, and bus drivers.
Unlike the first wave, second-wave feminism provoked extensive theoretical
discussion about the origins of womens oppression, the nature of gender, and
the role of the family. Kate Milletts Sexual Politics made the best-seller list in
1970, and in it she broadened the term politics to include all power-structured
relationships and posited that the personal was actually political. Shulamith
Firestone, a founder of the New York Radical Feminists, published The
Dialectic of Sex in the same year, insisting that love disadvantaged women by
creating intimate shackles between them and the men they lovedmen who
were also their oppressors. One year later, Germaine Greer, an Australian
living in London, published The Female Eunuch, in which she argued that the
sexual repression of women cuts them off from the creative energy they need
to be independent and self-fulfilled.
Any attempt to create a coherent, all-encompassing feminist ideology was
doomed. While most could agree on the questions that needed to be asked
about the origins of gender distinctions, the nature of power, or the roots of
sexual violence, the answers to those questions were bogged down by
ideological hairsplitting, name-calling, and mutual recrimination. Even the
term liberation could mean different things to different people.
Feminism became a river of competing eddies and currents. Anarcho-
feminists, who found a larger audience in Europe than in the United States,
resurrected Emma Goldman and said that women could not be liberated
without dismantling such institutions as the family, private property, and state
power. Individualist feminists, calling on libertarian principles of minimal
government, broke with most other feminists over the issue of turning to
government for solutions to womens problems. Amazon feminists
celebrated the mythical female heroine and advocated liberation through
physical strength. And separatist feminists, including many lesbian feminists,
preached that women could not possibly liberate themselves without at least a
period of separation from men.

Ultimately, three major streams of thought surfaced. The first was liberal, or
mainstream, feminism, which focused its energy on concrete
and pragmaticchange at an institutional and governmental level. Its goal was
to integratewomen more thoroughly into the power structure and to give
women equal access to positions men had traditionally dominated. While
aiming for strict equality (to be evidenced by such measures as an equal
number of women and men in positions of power, or an equal amount of
money spent on male and female student athletes), these liberal feminist
groups nonetheless supported the modern equivalent of protective legislation
such as special workplace benefits for mothers.
In contrast to the pragmatic approach taken by liberal feminism, radical
feminism aimed to reshape society and restructure its institutions, which they
saw as inherently patriarchal. Providing the core theory for modern feminism,
radicals argued that womens subservient role in society was too closely
woven into the social fabric to be unraveled without a revolutionary revamping
of society itself. They strove to supplant hierarchical and traditional power
relationships they saw as reflecting a male bias, and they sought to develop
nonhierarchical and antiauthoritarian approaches to politics and organization.
Finally, cultural or difference feminism, the last of the three currents, rejected
the notion that men and women are intrinsically the same and advocated
celebrating the qualities they associated with women, such as their greater
concern for affective relationships and their nurturing preoccupation with
others. Inherent in its message was a critique of mainstream feminisms
attempt to enter traditionally male spheres. This was seen
as denigrating womens natural inclinations by attempting to make women
more like men.
The race factor
Like first-wave feminism, the second wave was largely defined and led by
educated middle-class white women who built the movement primarily around
their own concerns. This created an ambivalent, if not contentious,
relationship with women of other classes and races. The campaign against
employment and wage discrimination helped bridge the gap between the
movement and white labour union women. But the relationship of feminism
to African American women always posed greater challenges. White feminists
defined gender as the principal source of their exclusion from full participation
in American life; black women were forced to confront the interplay between
racism and sexism and to figure out how to make black men think about
gender issues while making white women think about racial issues. Such
issues were addressed by black feminists including Michele Wallace, Mary
Ann Weathers, bell hooks, Alice Walker, and Bettina Aptheker.
The call by white feminists for unity and solidarity was based on their
assumption that women constituted a gender-based class or caste that was
unified by common oppression. Many black women had difficulty seeing white
women as their feminist sisters; in the eyes of many African Americans, after
all, white women were as much the oppressor as white men. How relevant
are the truths, the experiences, the findings of White women to Black
women? asked Toni Cade Bambara in The Black Woman: An
Anthology (1970). I dont know that our priorities are the same, that our
concerns and methods are the same. As far back as Sojourner Truth, black
feminists had seen white feminists as incapable of understanding their
concerns.
Yet some black women, especially middle-class black women, also insisted
that it was fundamentally different to be black and female than to be black and
male. During the first conference of the National Black Feminist Organization,
held in New York City in 1973, black women activists acknowledged that many
of the goals central to the mainstream feminist movementday care,
abortion, maternity leave, violencewere critical to African American women
as well. On specific issues, then, African American feminists and white
feminists built an effective working relationship.

The globalization of feminism

By the end of the 20th century, European and American feminists had begun
to interact with the nascent feminist movements of Asia, Africa, and Latin
America. As this happened, women in developed countries, especially
intellectuals, were horrified to discover that women in some countries were
required to wear veils in public or to endure forced marriage,
female infanticide, widow burning, or female genital cutting (FGC). Many
Western feminists soon perceived themselves as saviours of Third
World women, little realizing that their perceptions of and solutions to social
problems were often at odds with the real lives and concerns of women in
these regions. In many parts of Africa, for example, the status of women had
begun to erode significantly only with the arrival of European colonialism. In
those regions, then, the notion that patriarchy was the chief problemrather
than European imperialismseemed absurd.
The conflicts between women in developed and developing nations played out
most vividly at international conferences. After the 1980 World Conference of
the United Nations Decade for Women: Equality, Development and Peace, in
Copenhagen, women from less-developed nations complained that the veil
and FGC had been chosen as conference priorities without consulting the
women most concerned. It seemed that their counterparts in the West were
not listening to them. During the 1994 International Conference on Population
and Development, in Cairo, women from the Third World protested outside
because they believed the agenda had been hijacked by Europeans and
Americans. The protesters had expected to talk about ways that
underdevelopment was holding women back. Instead, conference organizers
chose to focus on contraception and abortion. [Third World women] noted
that they could not very well worry about other matters when their children
were dying from thirst, hunger or war, wrote Azizah al-Hibri, a law professor
and scholar of Muslim womens rights. The conference instead centred
around reducing the number of Third World babies in order to preserve the
earths resources, despite (or is it because of) the fact that the First World
consumes much of these resources. In Beijing, at the Fourth World
Conference on Women in 1995, Third World women again criticized the
priority American and European women put on reproductive rights language
and issues of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and their
disinterest in the platform proposal that was most important to less-developed
nationsthat of restructuring international debt.

Woman with child walking in a Hutu refugee camp, 1996, Ntamba, Burundi.
Malcolm LintonLiaison/Getty Images
Opening session of the UN World Conference of the International Womens Year, held in Mexico
City
Stock footage courtesy The WPA Film Library

Still, the close of the 20th century saw women around the world advancing
their interests, although often in fits and starts. Feminism was derailed in
countries such as Afghanistan, where the staunchly reactionary and
antifeminist Taliban banned even the education of girls. Elsewhere, however,
feminism achieved significant gains for women, as seen in the eradication of
FGC in many African countries or government efforts to end widow burning in
India. More generally, and especially in the West, feminism had influenced
every aspect of contemporary life, communication, and debate, from the
heightened concern over sexist language to the rise of academic fields such
as womens studies and ecofeminism. Sports, divorce laws, sexual mores,
organized religionall had been affected, in many parts of the world, by
feminism.
Yet questions remained: How would Western feminism deal with the
dissension of women who believed the movement had gone too far and grown
too radical? How uniform and successful could feminism be at the global
level? Could the problems confronting women in the mountains of Pakistan or
the deserts of the Middle East be addressed in isolation, or must such issues
be pursued through international forums? Given the unique economic,
political, and cultural situations that obtained across the globe, the answers to
these questions looked quite different in Nairobi than in New York.
Elinor Burkett
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Feminism is the belief in the social, economic, and political
equality of women and men. Feminists are committed to
activity on behalf of womens rights and interests.

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Introduction
History of feminism
o The ancient world
o Influence of the Enlightenment
o The suffrage movement
o The postsuffrage era
The second wave of feminism
o Dissension and debate
o The race factor
o The globalization of feminism
The third wave of feminism
o Foundations
o Manifestations
o Controversies
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Contributors:Laura Brunell and Elinor Burkett

Article Title:feminism
Website Name:Encyclopdia Britannica
Publisher:Encyclopdia Britannica, inc.
Date Published:July 14, 2016
URL:https://www.britannica.com/topic/feminism

Access Date:March 13, 2017