Feminism

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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. 
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