Feminism is the advocacy of women's rights on the basis of equality between sexes. It seeks political, economic, personal, and social equality. Feminist movements have campaigned for women's right to vote, hold office, work, own property, receive education, and be protected from violence and harassment. While isolated voices spoke out throughout history, organized feminist movements emerged during periods like the Enlightenment, suffrage movement, and subsequent waves addressing issues left unfinished by previous movements and utilizing new technologies to further their goals.
Feminism is the advocacy of women's rights on the basis of equality between sexes. It seeks political, economic, personal, and social equality. Feminist movements have campaigned for women's right to vote, hold office, work, own property, receive education, and be protected from violence and harassment. While isolated voices spoke out throughout history, organized feminist movements emerged during periods like the Enlightenment, suffrage movement, and subsequent waves addressing issues left unfinished by previous movements and utilizing new technologies to further their goals.
Feminism is the advocacy of women's rights on the basis of equality between sexes. It seeks political, economic, personal, and social equality. Feminist movements have campaigned for women's right to vote, hold office, work, own property, receive education, and be protected from violence and harassment. While isolated voices spoke out throughout history, organized feminist movements emerged during periods like the Enlightenment, suffrage movement, and subsequent waves addressing issues left unfinished by previous movements and utilizing new technologies to further their goals.
Feminism is the advocacy of women's rights on the basis of equality between sexes. It seeks political, economic, personal, and social equality. Feminist movements have campaigned for women's right to vote, hold office, work, own property, receive education, and be protected from violence and harassment. While isolated voices spoke out throughout history, organized feminist movements emerged during periods like the Enlightenment, suffrage movement, and subsequent waves addressing issues left unfinished by previous movements and utilizing new technologies to further their goals.
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Feminis
What is “FEMinism”?
Feminism is the advocacy of women's rights on the basis
of the equality of the sexes. It is a range of political movements, ideologies, and social movements that share a common goal: to define, establish, and achieve political, economic, personal, and social equality of sexes. This includes seeking to establish educational and professional opportunities for women that are equal to those for men. Campaign of feminists
• Feminist movements have campaigned and continue to
campaign for women's rights, including the right to vote, to hold public office, to work, to earn fair wages or equal pay, to own property, to receive education, to enter contracts, to have equal rights within marriage, and to have maternity leave. Feminists have also worked to ensure access to legal abortions and social integration, and to protect women and girls from rape, sexual harassment, and domestic violence. Changes in dress and acceptable physical activity have often been part of feminist movements. 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 women’s 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. • 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. 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. • 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. • 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. The suffrage movement
• These debates and discussions culminated in the first women’s
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 (Mott’s 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 • 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 woman’s voice heard at this time—that of Sojourner Truth, a former slave— symbolized the distance between the ordinary and the elite. The post-suffrage era
• Once the crucial goal of suffrage had been achieved, the
feminist movement virtually collapsed in both Europe and the United States. Lacking an ideology beyond the achievement of the vote, feminism fractured into a dozen splinter groups: the Women’s 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 Women’s 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 Woman’s 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. The Second Wave Of Feminism • The women’s 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. • Women’s concerns were on Pres. John F. Kennedy’s agenda even before this public discussion began. In 1961 he created the President’s 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 The Third Wave Of Feminism
• The third wave of feminism emerged in the mid-1990s.
It was led by so-called Generation Xers who, born in the 1960s and ’70s in the developed world, came of age in a media-saturated and culturally and economically diverse milieu. Although they benefitted significantly from the legal rights and protections that had been obtained by first- and second-wave feminists, they also critiqued the positions and what they felt was unfinished work of second-wave feminism. • The third wave was made possible by the greater economic and professional power and status achieved by women of the second wave, the massive expansion in opportunities for the dissemination of ideas created by the information revolution of the late 20th century, and the coming of age of Generation X scholars and activists. • These women and others like them grew up with the expectation of achievement and examples of female success as well as an awareness of the barriers presented by sexism, racism, and classism. They chose to battle such obstacles by inverting sexist, racist, and classist symbols, fighting patriarchy with irony, answering violence with stories of survival, and combating continued exclusion with grassroots activism and radical democracy. Rather than becoming part of the “machine,” third wavers began both sabotaging and rebuilding the machine itself. • Influenced by the postmodernist movement in the academy, third-wave feminists sought to question, reclaim, and redefine the ideas, words, and media that have transmitted ideas about womanhood, gender, beauty, sexuality, femininity, and masculinity, among other things. There was a decided shift in perceptions of gender, with the notion that there are some characteristics that are strictly male and others that are strictly female giving way to the concept of a gender continuum. Fourth wave • Fourth-wave feminism refers to a resurgence of interest in feminism that began around 2012 and is associated with the use of social media. According to feminist scholar Prudence Chamberlain, the focus of the fourth wave is justice for women and opposition to sexual harassment and violence against women. Its essence, she writes, is "incredulity that certain attitudes can still exist". • Fourth-wave feminism is "defined by technology", according to Kira Cochrane, and is characterized particularly by the use of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and blogs such as Feministing to challenge misogyny and further gender equality. • Issues that fourth-wave feminists focus on include street and workplace harassment, campus sexual assault and rape culture. Scandals involving the harassment, abuse, and murder of women and girls have galvanized the movement. Thank You mega!