WOMEN’S RIGHTS MOVEMENT & LEGISLATIONS ACROSS THE WORLD

The women's movement is made up of both men and women who work and struggle for
gender equality and the betterment of women as a social group. Women were generally
limited to the house as daughters, wives, and mothers in most societies, and we are often only
aware of women in history because of their relationship to renowned men. Of doubt, many
women have played major roles in cultural and political life throughout history, but they are
often overlooked. An organised women's movement did not emerge until the nineteenth
century, despite the fact that women activists and the battle for equality have always been a
feature of all human cultures.

The women's rights movement, also known as the women's liberation movement, was a broad
social movement rooted mostly in the United States that sought equal rights and opportunities
for women as well as more personal freedom in the 1960s and 1970s. It was
contemporaneous with, and is acknowledged as part of, the "second wave" of feminism.
While the first-wave feminism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries focused on
women's legal rights, particularly the right to vote (see women's suffrage), the second-wave
feminism of the women's rights movement addressed every aspect of women's lives,
including politics, work, family, and sexuality.

Christine de Pisan, the first feminist philosopher, challenged prevalent attitudes about women
in late 14th and early 15th-century France with a bold appeal for female education. 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 wide range of women's complaints, from denial of education and marital oppression to
the frivolity of women's attire, took up her mantle later in the century. The feminist voices of
the Renaissance never consolidated into a unified theory or movement. This occurred only
after the Enlightenment, when women began to demand that the new reformist rhetoric about
liberty, equality, and natural rights be applied to both sexes.

The Age of Enlightenment became a period of political upheaval, marked by revolutions in

France, Germany, and Italy, as well as the rise of abolitionism. Feminist activism gained root
in the United States when female abolitionists sought to apply the principles of freedom and
equality to their own social and political situations. Their efforts brought them into contact
with English female abolitionists who were coming to the same views. Feminist issues had
added to the turbulence of social change by the mid-nineteenth century, with ideas being
disseminated across Europe and North America.

The women's movement began in North America, primarily because women in North
America were allowed to attend school earlier than in Europe - and women who can read and
write, and are encouraged to think for themselves, usually begin to question how society
works. The earliest activists travelled across North America, fighting for the abolition of
slavery as well as women's oppression. In 1848, they organised the "First Women's Rights
Convention," and they continued to struggle to enhance the social status of all women. The
movement began in Europe with the same general goals: campaigners gathered signatures
requesting that working women earn their own wages rather than their husbands', that women
be permitted to buy a home and have custody of their children.

The first wave of feminism emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, in the
context of urban industrialism and liberal, socialist politics. The purpose of this wave was to
provide possibilities for women, with a particular emphasis on suffrage. The wave formally
began in 1848 at the Seneca Falls Convention, when three hundred men and women rallied to
the cause of women's equality. The Seneca Falls Declaration, written by Elizabeth Cady
Stanton (d.1902), outlined the new movement's ideas and political strategies. In its early
phases, feminism was linked to temperance and abolitionist movements, giving voice to now-
famous campaigners such as African-American Sojourner Truth (d. 1883), who demanded,
"Ain't I a woman?" Women in Victorian America were seen acting in highly "un-ladylike"
ways (public speaking, demonstrating, incarceration), challenging the "cult of domesticity."
Discussions regarding the vote and women's political participation led to a study of the
disparities between men and women as they were perceived at the time. Some contended that
because women were morally superior to males, their presence in civic life would improve
public behaviour and the democratic process.

The second wave started in the 1960s and lasted into the 1990s. This wave arose in the
backdrop of the anti-war and civil rights movements, as well as the growing self-
consciousness of a number of minority groups worldwide. The New Left was on the rise, and
the second wave's voice was becoming more extreme. Sexuality and reproductive rights were
important topics during this period, and much of the movement's energy was focused on
adopting the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, which guaranteed social equality
regardless of gender. Protests against the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City in 1968 and
1969 kicked off this phase. Feminists mocked what they saw as a demeaning "cattle parade"
that reduced women to objects of beauty and was ruled by a patriarchy that wanted to keep
them at home or in monotonous, low-paying occupations. The Redstockings, a radical New
York group, organised a counter-pageant in which they crowned a sheep Miss America and
trashed "oppressive" feminine artefacts such as bras, girdles, high heels, makeup, and false
eyelashes. Because the second wave of feminism emerged amid so many other social
movements, it was easily neglected and dismissed as less important than, say, Black Power or
efforts to end the Vietnam War. Feminists replied by establishing women-only organisations
(such as NOW) and "awareness building" organisations. Feminists pushed for their place in
the sun in publications such as "The BITCH Manifesto" and "Sisterhood is Powerful." The
second wave became more theoretical, based on a merger of neo-Marxism and
psychoanalytic theory, and began to link women's subjection to broader critiques of
patriarchy, capitalism, normative heterosexuality, and the woman's role as wife and mother.
Sex and gender were distinguished, with the former being biological and the latter a social
construct that varies from culture to culture and over time.

Whereas the first wave of feminism was mostly driven by middle-class, Western, cisgender,
white women, the second wave pulled in women of colour and women from poor countries in
search of sisterhood and solidarity, asserting that "women's struggle is class struggle."
Feminists spoke of women as a social class and invented expressions like "the personal is
political" and "identity politics" to highlight how oppression of race, class, and gender are all
intertwined. They launched a concerted attempt to eradicate sexism throughout society, from
children's cartoons to the highest levels of government.

Women's lives in industrialised countries changed substantially in the aftermath of World

War II. Household technology reduced the duties of housework, life expectancy increased
considerably, and the expansion of the service sector created thousands of occupations that
did not require physical strength. Despite these economical changes, cultural attitudes
(particularly toward women's work) and legal precedents continued to promote sexual
inequities. Simone de Beauvoir, a French writer and philosopher, wrote an articulate analysis
of the oppressive implications of dominant views of femininity in Le Deuxième Sexe (1949;
The Second Sex). It became an international best-seller and expanded feminist awareness by
emphasising that liberty for women meant liberation for men as well.
There was an influx of jobs in the economy during the industrial revolution and women
stepped in to fill this labour demand and they started working alongside men. Women worked
hard but were treated unfairly; they were paid less than males, despite the fact that they
worked harder in the factories and also managed their households. Women now began
fighting for workplace equality and the right to vote. They were denied the right to vote
during the 1800s, but this began to alter in most industrial societies in the early 1900s, when
governments sought to increase women's rights. This was known as the suffrage movement
and the women who advocated for it were known as suffragettes.

People began to campaign for women's voting rights in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century. New Zealand became the first country to provide women the right to vote on a
national level in 1893. This campaign extended throughout the world, and today, thanks to
the efforts of everyone involved in this struggle, women's suffrage is recognised as a right
under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women
(1979).

Despite such divisions in its leadership and ranks, the women's rights movement
accomplished a great deal in a relatively short amount of time. With the final support of the
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (1965), women gained access to jobs in every
sector of the American economy, and companies with a lengthy history of discrimination
were compelled to present timelines for expanding the proportion of women in their
workforces.

By the end of the twentieth century, European and American feminists were interacting with
embryonic feminist movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. As this occurred, women
in industrialised countries, particularly intellectuals, were shocked to learn that women in
some countries were compelled to wear veils in public or undergo forced marriage, female
infanticide, widow burning, or female genital mutilation (FGC). Many Western feminists
quickly saw themselves as saviours of Third World women, oblivious to the fact that their
ideas of and solutions to societal problems were frequently at conflict with the real lives and
concerns of women in these places. Only with the advent of Europeans did the status of
women in many parts of Africa, for example, begin to deteriorate considerably.