A History of Feminism

History
• “Three Waves” of Feminism
– 19th through early 20th centuries
– 1960s-1980s
– 1990’s-Present
• First Wave:
– First-wave feminism refers to a period of feminist activity during the
nineteenth century and early twentieth century. It focused primarily
on gaining the right of women's suffrage.
Images of First Wave Feminism
 First Wave Feminism
• First wave feminism movement arose in the context of
industrialization in the late 19th and early 20th century.
• First wave feminism mean sought equal access to
political power by extending voting rights to women
on the same basis as men.
• The First wave also involved campaigns for equal
opportunities for women and access to all of societies
institutions including higher education.
• Ideas and activities of the first wave continued
throughout the first half of the 20th century.
• The Seneca Falls Convention, July 19–20, 1848
– Held in Seneca Falls, New York over two days.
– The convention was seen by some of its contemporaries, including
organizer and featured speaker Lucretia Mott, as a single step in the
continuing effort by women to gain for themselves a greater
proportion of social, civil and moral rights, but it was viewed by
others as a revolutionary beginning to the struggle by women for
complete equality with men.
• Frances Willard and the Woman’s Christian
Temperance Union
– Although still unable to vote in the late nineteenth century, women
were far from apolitical; the WCTU demonstrated the breadth of
women's political activity in the late nineteenth century.
– Frances Willard radically changed the direction of the WCTU,
moving it away from religiously oriented programs to a campaign
that stressed alcoholism as a disease rather than a sin and poverty
as a cause rather than a result of drink.
– In a shrewd political tactic, Willard capitalized on the cult of
domesticity to move women into public life and gain power to
ameliorate social problems.
– The WCTU, which had over 200,000 members in the 1890s, gave
women valuable experience in political action.
 History
– Progressives tackled the problems of the city with many approaches,
among them: the settlement house movement, the social gospel, and
the social purity movement.
– The settlement house movement, begun in England, came to the
United States in 1886 with the opening of the University Settlement
House in New York City .
– Women, particularly college-educated women such as Jane Addams
and Lillian Wald, formed the backbone of the settlement house
movement and stood in the forefront of the progressive movement;
the number of settlement houses grew from six in 1891 to more than
four hundred by 1911.
– Some churches confronted the urban social problems by enunciating a
new social gospel, one that saw its mission as to reform not only the
individual, but also society.
 History
– Margaret Sanger promoted a progressive new
cause, birth control, as a movement for social
change.
– Sanger and her followers saw birth control not
only as a sexual and medical reform, but also as
a means to alter social and political power
relationships and to alleviate human misery.
– Birth control became linked with freedom of
speech when Margaret Sanger's feminist journal,
The Woman Rebel, was confiscated by the post
office for violating social purity laws, and Sanger
faced arrest, forcing her to flee to Europe.
 History
– Women made real strides during the Progressive Era,
but World War I presented them with new
opportunities; more than 25,000 women served in
France as nurses, ambulance drivers, canteen
managers, and war correspondents.
– At home, long-standing barriers against hiring women
fell when millions of working men became soldiers and
few new immigrant workers made it across the Atlantic.
– In 1918, Wilson gave his support to suffrage, calling the
amendment “vital to the winning of the war” and by
August 1920, the states had ratified the Nineteenth
Amendment, granting woman suffrage.
Key Tenets of First Wave Feminism
• Women’s suffrage
• Birth control movement
• Jobs for women
• Female-led political and social movements
such as the settlement houses in New York
and Chicago
Images of Second Wave Feminism
Images of Second Wave Feminism
 History
• Second Wave Feminism:
– The "second-wave" of the Women's Movement began
during the early 1960s and lasted throughout the late
1970s. Whereas first-wave feminism focused mainly on
overturning legal (de jure) obstacles to equality (i.e. voting
rights, property rights), second-wave feminism addressed
a wide range of issues, including unofficial (de facto)
inequalities, official legal inequalities, sexuality, family, the
workplace, and, perhaps most controversially,
reproductive rights
 History
– The movement is usually believed to have begun in 1963,
when Betty Friedan published her bestseller, The Feminine
Mystique and President John F. Kennedy's Presidential
Commission on the Status of Women released its report on
gender inequality.
– The report, which revealed great discrimination against
women in American life, along with Friedan's book, which
spoke to the discontent of many women (especially
housewives), led to the formation of many local, state, and
federal government women's groups as well as many
independent women's liberation organizations. Friedan was
referencing a "movement" as early as 1964.
• Second wave feminism originated within a broader
movement for civil rights in the 1960s and 1970s which
involve students, black people movements, lesbian and gay
movements and disabled people movements.
• It focused on ideas of women’s liberation and
empowerment
• The second wave was a more radical movement for change.
• The idea that women as a social group were oppressed by
their male dominated, patriarchal society and its
institutions was a radical shift.
• Feminists campaign among many other things against a
beauty contest, the use of hetero(sexist) language, male
violence, both in the home and in aggressive national
politics, and in favour of payment for house work as
valuable contribution to society.
• The second wave also gave rise to attempts to connect feminism with
existing political positions and ideologies such as socialism.
• Marxism and liberalism and to find ways of bringing feminist issues
into discourses of class exploitation, capitalism and equal legal rights.
• The second wave of feminism focus on the similarities among all
women promoting the idea that women as a group had much in
common with one another, regardless of social class position or
geographical location in the world.
• However, from the early 1980s onwards the insistence on the
universal women experience came under challenge from within the
movement.
• The early second wave feminism was seen as the product mainly of
white, middle class women with a particular view of the world which
should not be illegitimately portrayed as universal.
• By the mid 1990s the universal ambition of all the second wave
activists and theorists had effectively been ended by new recognition
that the fundamental characteristics of women’s experience around
the world was in fact, difference.
 History
– Legal victories:
• Title IX and women’s educational Equity Act
• Equal Opportunity Act (non-discrimination in regard to gender)
• Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 (no discrimination in the
workplace for pregnant women)
• Illegalization of marital rape
• Legalization of no-fault divorce in all states
• Military admittance of women
• Roe v. Wade
 Key Tenets of Second Wave Feminism
• Sexual Revolution
• Non-discrimination in the workplace and in
education
• Women’s empowerment in the military
Images of Third Wave Feminism
Images of Third Wave Feminism
 History
• Third Wave Feminism:
– 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. Feminist leaders rooted in the second wave like Gloria Anzaldua,
bell hooks, Chela Sandoval, Cherrie Moraga, Audre Lorde, Maxine
Hong Kingston, and many other feminists of color, sought to negotiate
a space within feminist thought for consideration of race-related
subjectivities
– Intersectionality—Third Wave Feminists argued that the discussion
of feminism could not be solely a female conversation, but must also
include an understanding of race, class, and sexual orientation
 History
– The “Third Wave” Agenda:
• the creation of domestic abuse shelters for women and children
• the acknowledgment of abuse and rape of women on a public
level
• access to contraception and other reproductive services
including the legalization of abortion, the creation
• enforcement of sexual harassment policies for women in the
workplace
• child care services
• equal or greater educational and extracurricular funding for
young women, women’s studies programs
• Between 1990s and on the 21st century the world underwent
major changes: globalization, the demise of eastern Europe,
communism, multiculturalism, global terrorism, religious
fundamentalism, the digital revolution in communications,
the spread of the internet and genetic biotechnologies. A
new generation of women was growing up in less ordered
and predictable world than the previous one and embraced
cultural diversity and difference.
• One recent theme is the attempt to reclaim the derogatory
terms used to describe women such as bitch and slut. Rather
than to try to prevent their use altogether, they reclaim the
word as representing independent women who claim the
right to dress however they like without being sexually
harassed or raped. Thereby completely reversing its
previously negative meaning and diffusing it stigmatizing
impact.
Key Tenets of Third Wave Feminism
• Intersection of gender, race, geography, and
class is important
• Power to women of color
• Power to women in poverty
• Power to the GLBTQ community
• Empowering women against gender violence
and rape
 Recap
First Wave Second Wave Third Wave
• Women’s • Sexual • The intersection
suffrage revolution of gender, race,
• Women’s voice • Non- class,
in politics discrimination geography,
• Reproductive in the work language, and
Rights place heritage.
• Women of color