Women’s Movement, Comparative Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

It is useful to both historical and sociological understanding to use the term feminist to describe the organizational activities, as well as the intellectual dialogues, of those networks of women that have consciously challenged male hegemony.

Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

Feminist networks have been international and cosmopolitan in scope. Nineteenth-century feminists made use of different technologies, such as postal mail and steam powered trains and ships, as compared with twentieth and twenty-first technologies of the telephone, electronic mail, Web sites, and air travel. English-based feminist scholar Dale Spender argues that there has “always” been a women’s movement—her time frame is the English-speaking world of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. She argues that women’s activities have been historically marginalized by the media and the academy. In this she has a commonality with British writer, Virginia Woolf, who wrote passionately about the “puffery” of the male world of the academy and politics that so often ignored the writings of women and mocked the activities of political women such as the suffragists and those early women members of the British Parliament. In that climate a woman speaker, like a woman writer, was a contradiction in terms.

Feminist activism had often been prompted by other causes, such as the antislavery movement in the United States. Feminist networks from the mid-nineteenth until the early twentieth centuries also were organized around “domestic” issues, notably restricting the availability of alcohol, and they generally lobbied the political world of politicians, party leaders, and members of parliament. While the focus was on national governments, the networks and organizations were often international. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was politically active in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States,. The WCTU quickly saw that change would be achieved more quickly if women had the vote: politicians would be forced to listen. Hence, in New Zealand the WCTU in concert with the Women’s Franchise League was instrumental in organizing a petition for women’s franchise, which resulted in the suffrage of both European and Maori women in 1893. Australian women gained the right to vote and to be nominated for parliament in 1902. However, Aboriginal women were excluded until the 1960s.

Early Twentieth Century

Then, as now, women’s groups debated important matters of public policy. The WCTU, for example, was not clear whether it was necessary for women themselves to participate in public life as candidates and MPs; flurries of letters were exchanged when feminist Vida Goldstein was nominated by the Women’s Party for the Australian Parliament in 1903. She and three others running in the same election are generally credited as being the first women to run for elected national office in the British Empire. Victoria Woodhull was nominated for the U.S. presidency in 1872, before women could vote.

In the United Kingdom and the United States, feminists argued over prostitution and birth control. In the United Kingdom, for example, an innocuous sounding bill, the Infectious Diseases Bill, designed to force prostitutes to submit to “health” examinations, split feminists. Some—opposing prostitution—saw it as a move to close the industry; whereas, others saw it as a massive infringement on the common law rights of those individuals.

Much feminist activism in the West was designed to win the vote for women and to allow them to run for elected office. The phase “removing the barriers” was accompanied by strong attempts to change national laws and often to improve international relations. The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom was founded in 1915 as a response to the horrors of war and has continued to be active with branches in thirty-seven countries and consultative nongovernmental organization (NGO) status with the United Nations. Once adult women gained the vote—generally after the First World War (1914–1918)—feminist activism was increasingly linked to international peace movements. British writer, and later MP, Vera Brittan, has described her active involvement in issues such as the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) (anti-Franco) and the League of Nations Association, the predecessor of the UN. Feminist activism also focused on equal pay, infant welfare, and antipoverty campaigns.

Most feminist activism was conducted by educated women of European extraction, although the role of African American women in the United States has been described by Mary Hawkesworth, and the role of Maori (indigenous) women in New Zealand discussed by Patricia Grimshaw. The Global Fund for Women—headquartered in the United States and cofounded in 1987 by New Zealander Anne Firth Murray— has an international fourteen-person board.

Cold War Era

The cold war era, which followed the Second World War (1939–1945) and lasted until the 1980s, and which prefigured the emergence of the so-called second wave of feminism, encouraged its citizens to focus on national survival, rather than on internationalism. Western citizens who participated in international peace movements tended to be seen as potential security risks. However, the focus on domestic issues, especially equal pay, and the reform of marriage and divorce laws, continued unabated. The national-feminism of this per iod was an exception and was already being transformed by the United Nations. Thus began the UN’s role as a forum and a promoter of feminist activism. It is impossible to overestimate the UN’s role in making women’s issues visible, in establishing crucial international congresses, and in promoting new networks of feminism. Jane Bayes and Nayereh Tohidi have examined the activities of religious women around the UN’s Fourth World Congress on Women at Beijing in 1995, specifically on sexuality, reproductive health, and women’s rights. They found that women adopted a range of approaches and strategies around issues of sexuality, reproduction, health, and women’s rights, and developed interesting new dialogues across traditional religious divisions.

Post–Cold War Era

Globalization, which fully emerged in the post–cold war era, created new types of inequalities between men and women of different races, creeds, and ethnicities, and its responses have resulted in new networks, sometimes linked to UN agencies such as the United Nations Development Program. Key issues have emerged, such as people trafficking, including the sexual trafficking of women and children, that have generated activist and research networks. Globalization has encouraged strong networks across national boundaries, as compared with the previous cold war era. This has been particularly important for those strands of feminism that have conceptualized themselves as international in nature. Whereas historically the peace agenda had constituted an important cosmopolitan theme, debates surrounding development and environmentalism were additional themes in the 1990s. Feminists had historically constructed international dialogues and debates around common issues, and globalization has permitted those discussions to be conducted in real time.

Bibliography:

Bayes, Jane, and Nayereh Tohidi, eds. Globalization, Gender, and Religion: The Politics of Women’s Rights in Catholic and Muslim Contexts. Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.
Brittain,Vera. Testament of Experience: An Autobiographical Story of the Years 1925–1950. London: Virago, 1978.
Caine, Barbara. English Feminism, 1780–1980. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Darien-Smith, Kate, Patricia Grimshaw, and Stuart Macintyre. Britishness Abroad: Transnational Movements and Imperial Cultures. Melbourne, Australia: Melbourne University Press, 2007.
Grimshaw, Patricia. Women’s Suffrage in New Zealand. London: Oxford University Press, 1972.
Hawkesworth, Mary. “Congressional Enactments of Race-Gender: Toward a Theory of Race-Gendered Institutions.” American Political Science Review 97, no. 4 (2003): 529–550.
Spender, Dale. Three Centuries of Women’s Intellectual Tradition. London: Women’s Press, 1983.
Woolf, Virginia. The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. London: Hogarth, 1942.

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