Feminism

Feminism is a social movement focused on the political, economic, and social rights, feminism was founded on the principle that women are entitled to the same rights as men. Feminism attempts to expose and eradicate gender inequality.

HISTORY

For most of human history, little has been done to challenge the lower status of women. Published volumes by feminist writers in the late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-centuries in France were mainly concerned with the lack of educational opportunities for women. Further protests, issued in books and pamphlets by feminist authors in France, Italy, and England, continued well into the sixteenth century, but it was not until the Enlightenment (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) that the feminist movement achieved a coherent and unified purpose.

The Age of Enlightenment brought with it a number of social transformations—including the abolition of the slave trade in England—based on the new political and philosophical principles of liberty, equality, and freedom for all men. Declarations to this effect, however, did not address the inequities suffered by women, a fact that did not go unnoticed by female intellectuals of the time. In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Women, in which she appeals for equal access to political and educational opportunities for women and refutes the claims made by other eighteenth-century authors that women were merely silly, frivolous, or contemptuous creatures.

In the United States, members of the abolitionist movement were also quick to point out the inferior political and social status of women. By the nineteenth century, organized movements on both continents had begun to gain momentum and in July 1848, the first-ever women’s rights convention was held in Seneca Falls, New York. Elizabeth Cady Stanton presented the Declaration of Sentiments, which, among other things, demanded that women be granted the right to vote. Following the Civil War, the struggle for women’s suffrage (the right of women to vote in local and national elections) and access to educational and professional opportunities would continue well into the early twentieth century.

In 1923, at the seventy-fifth anniversary celebration of the Seneca Falls Conference, Alice Paul introduced the “Lucretia Mott Amendment,” also known as the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which simply stated that “Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction.” The ERA was brought to Congress in 1923 and has been introduced in almost every session since but was not passed in both the House of Representatives and the Senate until 1972 as the Twenty-Seventh Amendment to the US Constitution. However, it failed to obtain ratification by the states. As of 2018, thirty-seven states had ratified the amendment, one short of the required thirty-eight states.

THE SECOND WAVE

With the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, women in the United States were at last given voting rights in 1920 (1928 in Britain), but following this, the feminist movement lay fractured and dormant. However, the publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) and the civil rights movement in the 1960s reenergized the women’s rights movement. Feminists now focused attention on gender inequality and male domination at work, reproductive rights, and rape and domestic violence. In 1966, the National Organization for Women (NOW) was formed in the United States, eventually becoming one of the chief promoters of the ERA and challenging sex discrimination in the workplace. Although the ERA has still not obtained the votes necessary to ratify it, Congress did manage to pass the Equal Pay Act in 1963 and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, with the latter prohibiting employment discrimination on the basis of gender, race, religion, and national origin. In 1972, similar legislation prohibited discrimination in education and was followed by the 1973 Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade, effectively guaranteeing a women’s right to an abortion.

Also during this period, differing views of feminism resulted in the formation of several groups within the movement. Liberal, or mainstream, feminists focused on the integration of women into the existing social and political structures and equal access to traditionally male-dominated professions while radical feminists viewed female subordination as a symptom of society’s inherent, male-dominated structure. They argued that change could only happen by reshaping society itself and would require restructuring the relationships between men and women through changes in the political and organizational power structures. Other types of feminism include cultural feminism, Marxist-social feminism, and ecofeminism. Many of these different views survived this second wave of feminism and still exist today.

Toward the end of the twentieth century, feminists had begun reaching out to women around the world, and the feminist agenda began to take hold throughout Asian, African, and Latin American countries. Feminists in America and Europe, however, were still mostly educated, white, middle-class females who, while enjoying the gains established earlier in the movement, turned their attention to issues such as reproductive rights, forced marriage, or wearing of the hijab (head covering for Muslim women). However, these issues did not reflect what mattered most to women in developing countries whose daily lives were being impacted by war, famine, poverty, and disease, as well as other forms of female oppression, such as widow burning and forced clitorectomies. Despite these differences, global feminism has evolved around several key issues, including freedom from oppression and discrimination; equal access to economic, educational, and healthcare resources; and the power to control their own lives both inside and outside the home.

THE THIRD WAVE

Following a brief period of conservative backlash against the feminist movement in the 1980s, it evolved yet again a decade later, creating a so-called “third-wave” of feminism. Many western feminists have maintained their focus on issues related to reproductive rights and freedoms, as well as employment discrimination, the “glass ceiling,” and other economic concerns. Third-wave feminism seeks change not through political action aimed at institutions but through personal empowerment and expression and also aims to spread feminist ideology into other areas of social and political activism, such as race relations, environmental conservation, AIDS education and awareness, and poverty reduction. These modern feminists choose to create a positive image of their sexuality, embracing their femininity and challenging the traditional gender classifications within their culture.

THE FOURTH WAVE

A fourth wave of feminism began to emerge in the late 2000s and early 2010s as the result of modern feminists’ increasing use of the Internet and online activism. Adopting various elements of the preceding waves, the fourth wave of feminism was driven primarily by the ability the Internet gives feminists to ”call out” misogyny and sexism and directly challenge it where it exists. Critics argued that the growing use of the Internet alone was not sufficient to delineate a new wave, and for this reason, there was, for a time, no consensus on whether a fourth wave of feminism had truly begun. However, the recent rise of movements such as #MeToo and “Time’s Up,” and the 2017 “Women’s March on Washington” have brought renewed focus on feminist concerns around sexual abuse and harassment.