Feminist Movement Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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There have been a number of discrete but related movements for women’s equality and for the social transformation of gender relations. Early texts such as Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies (1405) and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) contributed to as well as reflected women’s challenges to male authority and their vision of a more just, egalitarian, and beautiful society.

While women have been political actors in a wide variety of economic, social, and religious contexts, organized political action by groups of women with sufficient numbers and presence to rise to visibility as a political movement began in the mid-nineteenth century. Each of these movements involves a set of organizations, ideologies, and cultural practices that are extensive, often contradictory, and dynamic, leading feminist scholars to stress the importance of movement both as the actions of a body of persons and as the process of motion itself.

Feminism is often described as occurring in three waves. Each emergence has been closely linked to political activism around racial and class injustices. In the United States, the first wave, from about the mid-1800s to the 1920s, emerged largely out of the abolition movement and is symbolically represented by the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments issued by the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention of 1848. The first wave eventually narrowed around demands for women’s suffrage, finally achieved in 1920, but the movement actually had a much broader theoretical and practical reach, including radical critiques of capitalism, religion, sexuality, and war. Across Europe, Japan, and Australia, the first wave combined middle-class women’s agitation for property rights, legal equality, and marriage reform with working-class women’s trade union activism. In Africa, South America, the Middle East, and Asia, first-wave feminism generally emerged in the context of anticolonial movements for national liberation. Success in achieving suffrage, along with the devastating consequences of economic collapse, Fascism, and war, led to a decline of feminist movements after 1920.

Second wave refers to the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s through 1980s. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) was perhaps the foundational text, along with Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963). In the United States and Europe, feminism emerged in connection with the civil rights movement as well as antiwar activism, environmentalism, and cultural revolution. In the third world, national liberation movements again provided the context for feminist organizing. Women of color in both the developed and the developing worlds confronted the white, middle-class orientation of mainstream groups such as the National Organization for Women, while lesbians problematized homophobia in the movement as well as the larger society. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings of Radical Women of Color (1981), edited by Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherrié Moraga, was a pivotal text. The academic field of women’s studies was initially the creation of the second wave, as were a host of reforms involving legal equality, health care, domestic violence, and reproduction.

While many aspects of the second wave continue to thrive, particularly the insistence on bringing race and class into conversation with sex and gender, a third wave of feminist organizing emerged in the 1990s. Third-wave feminism often attracts younger women, who may distinguish themselves from their aging second-wave counterparts, as reflected in Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richard’s book Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism and the Future (2000). Third-wave feminism reflects the rise of postmodernism in the sense that it deconstructs the categories of women and men as well as gay and straight that had often been taken for granted as necessary for political organizing, as shown by one of the most influential texts of the third wave, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990). Third-wave feminism is more self-consciously global than its predecessors, energized by the series of United Nations conferences on women, and has campaigned worldwide for women’s rights as human rights. Critical analyses of neoliberal models of globalization, environmental destruction, and rape in war are prominent contributions of an increasingly global feminism.

Bibliography:

Aikau, Hokulani K., Karla A. Erickson, and Jennifer L. Pierce, eds. Feminist Waves, Feminist Generations. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
Evans, Richard. The Feminists:Women’s Emancipation Movements in Europe, America and Australasia, 1840–1920. London: C. Helm, 1977.
Evans, Sara. Personal Politics:The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left. New York:Vintage, 1980.
Freedman, Estelle. No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women. New York: Random House, 2002.
hooks, bell. Feminism Is for Everybody. Boston: South End, 2000.