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Although feminism as a social movement dates back to the nineteenth century, feminist political parties are relatively recent phenomena in most countries. Feminist parties, like environmentalist parties, are oriented around specific political issues and concentrate on addressing the needs of women in the context of patriarchal and masculine political cultures. For example, in Sweden, the Feminist Initiative was founded in 2005 and focused during the 2006 elections on the premise that “women’s lives, choices and opportunities are restricted by the patriarchal power structure” (Feminist Initiative).

The Historical Background

Calls for female suffrage and political representation increased during the second half of the nineteenth century, especially following the Second Industrial Revolution (1870–1914), when a great number of women entered the workforce in the 1850s. While early feminist movements concentrated on the specific issues of abuse of women in the sex trade, marital rape, sexual abuse of children, and equal educational, employment, and legal rights for women, it was the focus on the universal suffrage of women that united all feminists.

The second wave of feminist movements emerged in the 1960s with the shift from civil and political rights to changing socially accepted values, beliefs, and attitudes toward women in society. This movement managed to politicize women by mobilizing around a wide range of issues, including unofficial (de facto) and official legal inequalities, sexuality, family, the workplace, and reproductive rights.

Recent Developments And The Emergence Of Feminist Parties

The third wave of feminism began in the early 1990s. Argumentatively, it challenged what many considered the second movement’s view of a universal female identity with an overemphasis on the experiences of upper-middle-class white women (although this claim is disputed). Instead, under the influence of poststructuralist, the third feminist movement focused on micro politics, avoiding the normative approaches to what is or is not good for women and instead concentrating on the discursive power and ambiguity of gender. Thus, this movement emphasized the importance of incorporating women’s ethnic, national, religious, and cultural identities into everyday politics.

Swiss political scientist Simon Hug offers one convincing explanation of how these feminist social movements developed into formal political parties by suggesting that women needed to form their own political parties to protect their own interests when existing political parties failed to incorporate the demands of these feminist movements. Other scholars argued that additional factors must also have contributed to the establishment of feminist parties, such as a greater public consciousness of the palpable inequality between men and women, a politicized social cleavage between men and women, and a low threshold for party entry in the political system. For example, the two-party presidential system and a high threshold for congressional party representations in the United States offer a difficult political environment for women in which to establish political parties and win elections. Multiparty election systems with lower thresholds for representation, such as those in the United Kingdom, Sweden, Germany, Israel, and Poland, provide more political incentives for women to formally organize under a specific political party.

The politicization of women’s issues has proven that parties can accommodate feminist demands in two ways: through rhetoric, as in most countries, and through affirmative action and positive discrimination (by filling certain quotas), such as in the Labour Party in Norway and Social Democratic Parties in Denmark and Sweden. However, most political parties in Europe encouraged the integration of women into politics by creating separate women’s groups within their own parties instead of having women create their own separate parties.

Conclusion

The desire to eliminate discrimination and gender-based inequalities and promote women’s issues in politics has resulted in a number of feminist parties currently found worldwide, including the Shamiram Women’s Party in Armenia, the Australian Women’s Party in Australia, the Cambodian Women’s Party, the FemINist INitiative of BC in Canada, the Feminist Party of Germany, the Gabriela Women’s Party in the Philippines, the Women of Russia Party in Russia, the Feminist Initiative in Sweden, and the parties of the AllUkrainian Party of Women’s Initiative in the Ukraine.

However, these political parties do not overcome the low representation of women in politics, as, for example, the world average of women in Parliament was only 18.8 percent as of January 30, 2010. Feminist parties, while not a recent phenomenon, still have a long way to go to succeed in achieving equal representation and parity for women in the societies.

Bibliography:

Benhabib, Seyla. “From Identity Politics to Social Feminism: A Plea for the Nineties.” Philosophy of Education 1, no. 2 (1995): 14.
Harding, Sandra. The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Kenney, Sally J., and Helen Kinsella, eds. Politics and Feminist Standpoint Theories. New York: Haworth, 1997.
Lockwood, Bert B. Women’s Rights: A Human Rights Quarterly Reader. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.
News, Feminist Party, gofeminist.com/news/Feminist-Party.html (accessed January 20, 2010).
“Political Platform for a Feminist Initiative.” Feminist Initiative. http://www.feministisktinitiativ.se/engelska.php?text=plattform. Women in National Parliaments, www.ipu.org/wmn-e/world.htm (accessed January 31, 2010).