Feminism
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HISTORICAL OVERVIEW Although the term ‘feminism’ may be of recent origin, feminist views have been expressed in many different cultures and can be traced back as far as the ancient civilizations of Greece and China. Christine de Pisan’s Book of the City of Ladies , published in Italy in 1405, foreshadowed many of the ideas of modern feminism in recording the deeds of famous women of the past and advocating women’s right to education and political influence. Nevertheless, it was not until the nineteenth century that an organized women’s movement developed. The first text of modern feminism is usually taken to be Mary Wollstonecraft’s (see p. 28) AVindication of the Rights of Woman ([1792] 1967), written against the backdrop of the French Revolution. By the mid-nineteenth century, the women’s movement had acquired a central focus: the campaign for female suffrage, the right to vote, which drew inspiration from the progressive extension of the franchise to men. This period is usually referred to as first-wave feminism , and was characterized by the demand that women should enjoy the same legal and political rights as men. Female suffrage was the principal goal of first-wave or liberal feminism because it was believed that if women could vote, all other forms of sexual discrimination or prejudice would quickly disappear. The women’s movement was strongest in those countries where political democracy was most advanced. The famous Seneca Falls convention, held in 1848, marked the birth of the US women’s rights movement. It adopted a Declaration of Sentiments, written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902), which deliberately drew on the language and principles of the Declaration of Independence and called, among other things, for female suffrage. The National Women’s Suffrage Association, led by Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (1820– 1906), was set up in 1869 and merged with the more conservative American Women’s Suffrage Association in 1890. Similar movements developed in other Western countries. In the UK, an organized movement developed during the 1850s and, in 1867, the House of Commons defeated the first attempt to introduce female suffrage, an amendment to
the Second Reform Act, proposed by John Stuart Mill (see p. 25). The UK suffrage movement adopted increasingly militant tactics after the formation in 1903 of the Women’s Social and Political Union, led by Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1928) and her daughter Christabel (1880–1958). From their underground base in Paris, the Pankhursts coordinated a campaign of direct action in which ‘suffragettes’ carried out wholesale attacks on property and mounted a series of well-publicized public demonstrations. Feminism’s ‘first-wave’ ended with the achievement of female suffrage, introduced first in New Zealand in 1893. The Nineteenth Amendment of the US Constitution granted the vote to American women in 1920. The franchise was extended to women in the UK in 1918, but they did not achieve equal voting rights withmen for a further decade. Ironically, inmany ways, winning the right to vote weakened and undermined the women’s movement. The struggle for female suffrage had united and inspired the movement, giving it a clear goal and a coherent structure. Furthermore, many activists naively believed that in winning suffrage rights, women had achieved full emancipation. It was not until the 1960s that the women’s movement was regenerated, with the emergence of feminism’s ‘second wave’. The publication in 1963 of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique did much to relaunch feminist thought. Second-wave feminism , as it became
First-wave feminism: The early form of feminism which developed in the mid-nineteenth century and was based on the pursuit of sexual equality in the areas of political and legal rights, particularly suffrage rights. Liberal feminism: A form of feminism that is grounded in the belief that sexual differences are irrelevant to personal worth, and calls for equal rights for women and men in the public sphere. Second-wave feminism: The form of feminism that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, and was characterized by a more radical concern with ‘women’s liberation’, including, and perhaps especially, in the private sphere.
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