What was feminism

The 19th Amendment to the U. It took activists and reformers nearly years to win that right, and the campaign was not easy: Disagreements over strategy threatened to cripple the movement more Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton Women gained the right to vote in with the passage of the 19 Amendment. On Election Day in , millions of American women exercised this right for the first time. These are just a few of the remarkable accomplishments by She came from a privileged background and decided early in life to fight for equal rights for women.

Stanton worked closely with Susan B. Jeannette Rankin was a Montana politician who made history in as the first woman ever elected to the United States Congress. She was also the only member of Congress to cast a vote against participation in both world wars.

Unafraid to take controversial positions on several Raised on the Quaker tenet that all people are equals, Mott spent her entire life fighting for social and political reform on behalf of Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. Recommended for you. Susan B. Women, due whether to their long "subjugation" or to their biology, were thought by some to be more humane, collaborative, inclusive, peaceful, nurturing, democratic, and holistic in their approach to problem solving than men.

The term eco-feminism was coined to capture the sense that because of their biological connection to earth and lunar cycles, women were natural advocates of environmentalism. The third wave of feminism began in the mid's and was informed by post-colonial and post-modern thinking.

In this phase many constructs were destabilized, including the notions of "universal womanhood," body, gender, sexuality and heteronormativity.

An aspect of third wave feminism that mystified the mothers of the earlier feminist movement was the readoption by young feminists of the very lip-stick, high-heels, and cleavage proudly exposed by low cut necklines that the first two phases of the movement identified with male oppression.

Pinkfloor expressed this new position when she said that it's possible to have a push-up bra and a brain at the same time. The "grrls" of the third wave stepped onto the stage as strong and empowered, eschewing victimization and defining feminine beauty for themselves as subjects, not as objects of a sexist patriarchy.

They developed a rhetoric of mimicry, which appropriated derogatory terms like "slut" and "bitch" in order to subvert sexist culture and deprive it of verbal weapons. The web is an important tool of "girlie feminism. At the same time — rife with the irony of third-wave feminism because cyberspace is disembodied — it permits all users the opportunity to cross gender boundaries, and so the very notion of gender has been unbalanced in a way that encourages experimentation and creative thought.

This is in keeping with the third wave's celebration of ambiguity and refusal to think in terms of "us-them. Grrl-feminism tends to be global, multi-cultural, and it shuns simple answers or artificial categories of identity, gender, and sexuality.

Its transversal politics means that differences such as those of ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, etc. Reality is conceived not so much in terms of fixed structures and power relations, but in terms of performance within contingencies.

Third wave feminism breaks boundaries. The fourth wave of feminism is still a captivating silhouette. I replied that the second wave of feminism ought not be characterized as having failed, nor was glitter all that it generated. However, the second wave only quieted down in the public forum; it did not disappear but retreated into the academic world where it is alive and well—incubating in the academy. However, generally those programs have generated theorists rather than activists.

Returning to the question the Elle Magazine columnist asked about the third wave and the success or failure of its goals. It is hard to talk about the aims of the third wave because a characteristic of that wave is the rejection of communal, standardized objectives.

Third wave women and men are concerned about equal rights, but tend to think the genders have achieved parity or that society is well on its way to delivering it to them.

This wave supports equal rights, but does not have a term like feminism to articulate that notion. But the times are changing, and a fourth wave is in the air. Well, perhaps that is the way to view the fourth wave of feminism. The 19th Amendment was the grand legislative achievement of the first wave. Although individual groups continued to work — for reproductive freedom, for equality in education and employment, for voting rights for black women — the movement as a whole began to splinter.

It no longer had a unified goal with strong cultural momentum behind it, and it would not find another until the second wave began to take off in the s. Sojourner Truth Remarks by Susan B. Anthony at her trial for illegal voting There were prominent feminist thinkers before Friedan who would come to be associated with the second wave — most importantly Simone de Beauvoir, whose Second Sex came out in France in and in the US in — but The Feminine Mystique was a phenomenon.

It sold 3 million copies in three years. Women were right to be unhappy; they were being ripped off. Instead, it was revolutionary in its reach.

It made its way into the hands of housewives, who gave it to their friends, who passed it along through a whole chain of well-educated middle-class white women with beautiful homes and families.

And it gave them permission to be angry. And once those 3 million readers realized that they were angry, feminism once again had cultural momentum behind it.

It had a unifying goal, too: not just political equality, which the first-wavers had fought for, but social equality. The phrase cannot be traced back to any individual woman but was popularized by Carol Hanisch.

Wade guaranteed women reproductive freedom. The second wave worked on getting women the right to hold credit cards under their own names and to apply for mortgages.

It worked to outlaw marital rape, to raise awareness about domestic violence and build shelters for women fleeing rape and domestic violence. It worked to name and legislate against sexual harassment in the workplace. The second wave cared about racism too, but it could be clumsy in working with people of color. Earning the right to work outside the home was not a major concern for black women, many of whom had to work outside the home anyway. In response, some black feminists decamped from feminism to create womanism.

Even with its limited scope, second-wave feminism at its height was plenty radical enough to scare people — hence the myth of the bra burners. Despite the popular story, there was no mass burning of bras among second-wave feminists. But women did gather together in to protest the Miss America pageant and its demeaning, patriarchal treatment of women. That the Miss America protest has long lingered in the popular imagination as a bra-burning, and that bra-burning has become a metonym for postwar American feminism, says a lot about the backlash to the second wave that would soon ensue.

In the s, the comfortable conservatism of the Reagan era managed to successfully position second-wave feminists as humorless, hairy-legged shrews who cared only about petty bullshit like bras instead of real problems, probably to distract themselves from the loneliness of their lives, since no man would ever want a shudder feminist.

Another young woman chimed in, agreeing. That image of feminists as angry and man-hating and lonely would become canonical as the second wave began to lose its momentum, and it continues to haunt the way we talk about feminism today. It would also become foundational to the way the third wave would position itself as it emerged.

The Second Sex , Simone de Beauvoir The Feminine Mystique , B e tty Fried a n MacKinnon Gilbert and Susan Gubar Black Women and Feminism , bell hooks Sister Outsider , Audre Lorde But generally, the beginning of the third wave is pegged to two things: the Anita Hill case in , and the emergence of the riot grrrl groups in the music scene of the early s. And for the young women watching the Anita Hill case in real time, it would become an awakening.

Early third-wave activism tended to involve fighting against workplace sexual harassment and working to increase the number of women in positions of power. Aesthetically, the third wave is deeply influenced by the rise of the riot grrrls, the girl groups who stomped their Doc Martens onto the music scene in the s.