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Ideas / Histories of Feminism Ideas / histories of feminism Feminism is theory that men and women should be equal politically, economically and socially. definition of patriarchy: The term “patriarchal” refers to power relations in which women’s interests are subordinated to the interests of men. These power relations take on many forms, from the sexual division of labor and social organization of procreation to the internalized norms of femininity by which we live. Patriarchal power rests on social meaning given to biological sexual difference. - Chris Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory (1987) Early feminism (1550-1700) ! !! ! Concerns:! 1. No recourse to law for equality for pay or working conditions. 2. Married women had no legal independence ( including no legal rights over children ) 3. Economic access = marriage 4. Woman as ‘inferior race’ { Judeo-Christian negative associations/interpretations as woman as temptation, secondary - from the rib of Adam} Improvements: (upper class women only) • Conditions for education • Womens’ argument against inferiority leads to questions about culture and nature. • Small networking community established of British women writers" The Woman Controversy The Debate About the Nature of Womankind in Early Modern England Though European scholars before the early modern era had written about the nature of women (notably Christine de Pizan, Bocaccio, and Chaucer in the fourteenth century), the controversy (often called the querelle des femmes or "debate about women") heated up in England in the late sixteenth century, partly as a result of the religious debates of the era (the Reformation) about human nature in general. Many of the debaters grounded their arguments in a their particular readings of the first two creation stories of the book of Genesis, especially the Eden narrative (the story of Adam and Eve). You may want to read the biblical accounts in Genesis 1 (the first creation story) and Genesis 2-3 (the second) •! One of the first women to enter the debate in print called herself Jane Anger. Her book, Jane Anger, her Protection for Women To defend them against the Scandalous Reports of a Late Surfeiting Lover . (1589) was written in response to an anti-woman pamphlet now lost, probably the 1588 Boke his Surfeit in Love. •! Probably the most well-known of the querelle polemicists was Joseph Swetnam, whose pamphlet, The Arraignment of Lewd, idle, froward, and unconstant women or the vanity of them . (1615), was reprinted in 1615, 1619, 1628, 1634, 1645, 1690, and several times in the eighteenth century. First wave feminism 1800’s - 1920’s Concerns: women's social and legal inequalities education, employment, the marriage laws, and the plight of intelligent middle-class single women. They were not primarily concerned with the problems of working-class women, nor did they necessarily see themselves as feminists in the modern sense (the term was not coined until 1895). First Wave Feminists largely responded to specific injustices they had themselves experienced. Improvements:" •!opening of higher education for women; •!reform of the girls' secondary-school system, including participation in formal national examinations •! the widening of access to the professions, especially medicine; •! married women's property rights, recognized in the Married Women's Property Act of 1870 •! some improvement in divorced and separated women's child custody rights. Mary Wollstonecraft’s book “Vindication of the rights of women” 1792 In the book she attacked the educational restrictions that kept women in a state of "ignorance and slavish dependence." She was especially critical of a society that encouraged women to be "docile and attentive to their looks to the exclusion of all else." Wollstonecraft described marriage as "legal prostitution" and added that women "may be convenient slaves, but slavery will have its constant effect, degrading the master and the abject dependent." feminism and abolitionism Abolitionism was the radical anti-slavery movement which demanded the immediate cessation of slavery on the grounds that every man was a self-owner; that is, every human being has moral jurisdiction over his or her own body. It was the first organized, radical movement in which women played prominent roles and from which a woman's movement sprang. Abbie Kelley (1810-1887), an abolitionist-feminist, observed: "We have good cause to be grateful to the slave, for the benefit we have received to ourselves, in working for him. In striving to strike his irons off, we found most surely that we were manacled ourselves." Lucretia Mott Issued a declaration of (1793-1880), independence for women, encouraged civil demanding full legal disobedience through her equality, full educational involvement in the and commercial underground railroad, opportunity, equal equality meant equal compensation, the right to protection under just law collect wages, and the right and the equal opportunity to vote. to protest injustice. Individualist Feminism While mainstream feminism concentrated on suffrage, more radical feminists looked elsewhere for progress. Individualist feminists became especially involved in the reform of birth control and marriage laws. Believe that freedom and diversity benefit women, whether or not the choices that particular women make are politically correct. They respect all sexual choices, from motherhood to porn. Second wave feminism • Increase in feminist activity which occurred in America, Britain, and Europe from the late sixties onwards. In America, second wave feminism rose out of the Civil Rights and anti-war movements in which women, disillusioned with their second-class status even in the activist environment of student politics, began to band together to contend against discrimination. • The tactics employed by Second Wave Feminists varied from highly-published activism, such as the protest against the Miss America beauty contest in 1968, to the establishment of small consciousness-raising groups. However, it was obvious early on that the movement was not a unified one, with differences emerging between black feminism, lesbian feminism, liberal feminism, and social feminism. • Second Wave Feminism in Britain was similarly Authors associated with 2nd wave multiple in focus, although it was based more strongly in working-class socialism, as demonstrated by the strike feminism : " of women workers at the Ford car plant for equal pay in * Bella Abzug * Gloria E. Anzaldúa * Simone de 1968. The slogan 'the personal is political' sums up the way in which Second Wave Feminism did not just strive to Beauvoir * Lorraine Bethel * Susan Brownmiller* extend the range of social opportunities open to women, Charlotte Bunch * Thérèse Casgrain but also, through intervention within the spheres of reproduction, sexuality and cultural representation, to Mary Daly * Angela Davis* Heather Dean * Carol change their domestic and private lives. Second Wave Downer * Andrea Dworki * Susan Faludi * Carol Feminism did not just make an impact upon western Hanisch * Donna Haraway* Nancy Hartsock * Dorothy societies, but has also continued to inspire the struggle for women's rights across the world. Hewett* bell hooks * Shulamith Firestone * Jo Freeman * Marilyn French * Betty Friedan * Carol Gilligan * Germaine Greer * Bonnie Kreps * Jacqueline Livingston * Catharine MacKinnon * Kate Millett * Cherrie Moraga * Robin Morgan * Bernice Johnson Reagon * Gloria Steinem * Second wave feminism 1960 late 70’s 2nd Wave Feminist Criticism * Maintains that "the personal is political" & views women's personal experience as a valuable source of political insight. * Highlights ways that traditional criticism ignored women readers & the way women were portrayed in literature from a male- centered viewpoint. * Seeks to recover neglected women authors of the past and value female experience. Sometimes posited a "universal sisterhood" or uniquely female experience. * Works in concert with cultural feminism's effort to create, recover, and foster a distinctively women's culture. Third wave feminism Third wave feminism purports to encompass the young women born in the 1960s and 70s who feel their personal experience of their history set them apart from older women. Barbara Findlen in the introduction to Listen Up: Voices from the Next Generation of Feminism states, "I strongly believe that the experiences that led me to identify as a feminist were significantly different from those that inspired the previous generation" (xi). Women who came of age in the 1980s were influenced by issues such as AIDS, high divorce rates, and gay and lesbian rights and radicalized by social injustices such as the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, anti- abortion legislation and violence, and the Rodney King beating. We were also the first generation to grow up with feminism as part of our cultural and political wallpaper, and in striving to form our own feminist identity, naming and navigating feminism's contradictions has become a primary theme of the third wave (Orr 1997). The third wave texts position themselves as criticisms of second wave feminisms, defining itself against as well as through it. Third wavers believe that the negotiation and contradiction of our differences is the main concept of modern feminism, requiring us to rethink what our movements and activism look like as well as our meanings of identity and community. This celebration of difference welcomes the influence of feminists of color and queer feminists who feel that their voices previously left out
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