Feminism: A History

‘There have been three major 'waves' of feminism thus far, the first rising as recently as the 19th century. Feminism is an awareness that dawned openly as a response to the Abolition Movement in the mid-nineteenth century and it has matured over the last century. Currently, there are many different expressions of feminism, but the core value of feminism remains. To be feminist is to actively recognize the need for, and work to create equality for women.’ (1)

First Wave FeminismFirst-wave feminism refers to a period of feminist activity during the nineteenth and early twentieth century in the United Kingdom and the United States. It focused primarily on gaining women's suffrage (the right to vote).

United Kingdom

Mary Wollstonecraft published one of the first feminist treatises in Britain, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which she advocated the social and moral equality of the sexes, extending the work of her 1790 pamphlet, A Vindication of the Rights of Man. Her later unfinished work "Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman" earned her considerable criticism as she discussed women's sexual desires.

Wollstonecraft is regarded as the grandmother of British feminism and her ideas shaped the thinking of the suffragettes, who campaigned for the women's vote. After generations of work, this was eventually granted - to some women in 1918, and equally with men in 1928.

Today Wollstonecraft is regarded as one of the founding feminist philosophers, and feminists often cite both her life and work as important influences.

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Early 20th century

During the early 20th century English women achieved civil equality, in theory. World War I saw more women go to work outside the home. Women gained the right to sit in parliament, although it was only slowly that women were actually elected. Women started serving on school boards and local bodies, and numbers kept increasing after the war. This period also saw more women starting to become more educated.

A Matrimonial Causes Act in 1923 gave women the right to the same grounds for divorce as men. However the recession which started in the 1920s meant unemployment rose, which women were the first to face. Many feminist writers and women's rights activists argued that it was not equality to men which they needed but a recognition of what women need to fulfil their potential of their own natures, not only within the aspect of work but society and home life too.

Virginia Woolf produced her essay A Room of One's Own based on the ideas of women as writers and characters in fiction. Woolf said that a woman must have money and a room of her own to be able to write.

United States of America

Woman in the Nineteenth Century by Margaret Fuller has been considered the first major feminist work in the United States and is often compared to Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Prominent leaders of the feminist movement in the United States include Lucretia Coffin Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, and Susan B. Anthony; all of whom campaigned for the abolition of slavery prior to

championing women's right to vote. The majority of first-wave feminists were more moderate and conservative than radical or revolutionary; they were willing to work within the political system and they understood the clout of joining with sympathetic men in power to promote the cause of suffrage.

The end of the first wave is often linked with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (1920), granting women the right to vote. This was the major victory of the movement, which also included reforms in higher education, in the workplace and professions, and in health care.

Second Wave Feminism

Second-wave feminism refers to the period of activity in the early 1960s and lasting through the late 1980s.

Whereas first-wave feminism focused mainly on overturning legal obstacles to equality (i.e. voting rights, property rights), second-wave feminism successfully addressed a wide range of unofficial inequalities associated with sexuality, family, the workplace, and, perhaps most controversially, reproductive rights.

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.

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Simone de Beauvoir and The Second Sex

The French author and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir is now best known for her treatise The Second Sex, a detailed analysis of women's oppression and an influential

text of contemporary feminism. It sets out a feminist philosophy which prescribes a moral revolution. 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.

In it she argues that women throughout history have been defined as the ‘other’ sex, an aberration from the ‘normal’ male sex.

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’.(2)

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

1950s Culture

1950s: Sexual Repression or Obsession?

‘While sexual desires were recognized as a fact of lie, western society sought to contain sexuality within the confines of marriage. But the sexual revolution of the 1960s began in the 1950s.

The strict moral codes of the 1950s created a paradox in that a society which sought to contain sexuality was obsessed with sexuality.

Hugh Hefner created an empire catering to male sexual fantasies, and Marilyn Monroe, the sexual icon of the era, was an unique combination of smoldering sensuality and child-like innocence.’

www.history.com/classroom

Sexual Revolution

During the 1960s, shifts in regards to how society viewed sexuality began to take place, heralding a period of de-conditioning in some circles away from old world antecedents, and developing new codes of sexual behaviour.

The 1960s heralded a new culture of ‘free love’ with millions of young people in the Western World embracing the hippie ethos and preaching the power of love and the beauty of sex as a natural part of ordinary life. Hippies believed that sex was a natural biological phenomenon which should not be denied or repressed. The feminist movement embraced this sexual liberation of women.

Sexual liberalisation heralded a new ethos in experimenting with sex in and outside of marriage,contraception and the pill, public nudity, and liberalisation of abortion.

Third Wave FeminismThird-wave feminism is a term identified with several diverse strains of feminist activity and study from 1990 to the present.

The movement arose as a response to perceived possible failures and backlash against initiatives and movements created by second-wave feminism of the 1960s through the 1970s and the realisation that women are of many colours, ethnicities, nationalities, religions and cultural backgrounds.

The third wave embraces contradictions and conflict, and accommodates diversity and change.There is however no all-encompassing single feminist idea.

Proponents of third-wave feminism claim that it allows women to define feminism for themselves by incorporating their own identities into the belief system of what feminism is and what it can become through one's own perspective.

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In their introduction to the idea of third-wave feminism in Manifesta, authors Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards suggest that feminism can change with every generation and individual:

‘We're not doing feminism the same way that the seventies feminists did it; being liberated doesn't mean copying what came before but finding one's own way-- a

way that is genuine to one's own generation.’ (3)

Some contemporary feminists, such as Katha Pollitt or Nadine Strossen, consider feminism to hold simply that ‘women are people’.(4)

Views that separate the sexes rather than unite them are considered by these writers to be sexist rather than feminist.

Third-wave feminism's central issues are that of race, social class and sexuality. However, they are also concerns of workplace issues such as the glass ceiling, sexual harassment, unfair maternity leave policies, motherhood—support for single mothers by means of welfare and child care and respect for working mothers and mothers who decide to leave their careers to raise their children full-time.

Third-wave feminists want women to be seen as intelligent, political beings with intelligent, political minds; some claim that there is a lack of diverse, positive female representatives in pop culture. They also want to put attention to alleged unhealthy standards for women in media; the glamorization of eating disorders; the portrayal of women as sexualized objects catering solely to the man’s needs, and anti-intellectualism.

Women Empowered or Repressed?

References

1. What is Feminism? (www.essortment.com)

2. Fox, Margalit Betty Friedan: Who Ignited Cause in 'Feminine Mystique,' Dies at 85 - (The New York Times, February 5, 2006)

3. Baumgardner, Jennifer; Amy Richards: ManifestA: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

4. Pollitt, Katha, Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism (Vintage, 1995)

BibliographyAll other text from Wikipedia

www.wikipedia.org

First Wave Feminism

Second Wave Feminism

Third Wave Feminism