What is a feminist?
Excerpt from the British Library website:
The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘a feminist’ simply as ‘An advocate or supporter of the rights and equality of women’. Yet the term ‘feminist’ has always been contentious. This is partly because it connotes militancy and an ‘anti-men’ stance, but also because it has come to be associated with elite groups of women.
The first recorded use of the word ‘feminist’ in English is from 1852, when a conservative (indeed, pro-slavery) American magazine, the Debow's Review, used it as an insult: ‘Our attention has happened to fall upon Mrs. E.O. Smith, who is, we are informed, among the most moderate of the feminist reformers!’ The term, however, soon gained international currency in the 19th-century women’s rights movements – French féministe (1872, used as an adjective), Catalan feminista (c. 1910), Spanish feminista (1902), Portuguese feminista (1909) and Italian femminista (1897) are all early examples.
Some women hesitate to identify themselves as feminists, despite having a commitment to equal rights in principle. The Fawcett Society’s ongoing t-shirt campaign ‘This is what a feminist looks like’ (featuring, among others, comedian Bill Bailey, physicist Brian Cox and artist Tracey Emin) is an attempt to strip the word of its narrow connotations and remind people that the actual meaning of feminism is a commitment to equal rights, opportunities and choices for people of all genders. At the same time, there is no doubt that the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM), which this website and oral history document and celebrate, was a radical expression of long-standing campaigns for equal pay, parliamentary representation and the like. The WLM tried to bring a deeper analysis and a new lifestyle with it.
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The three waves of feminism.
Short summaries of each wave.
The first wave:
First-wave feminism refers to a period of feminist activity during the 19th and early 20th century throughout the world, particularly in the United Kingdom, Canada, the Netherlands and the United States. It focused on legal issues, primarily on gaining women's suffrage (the right to vote).
The first organised movement for English feminism was the Langham Place Circle of the 1850s. The group campaigned for many women's causes, including improved female rights in employment, and education. It also pursued women's property rights through its Married Women's Property Committee. In 1854, Bodichon published her
Brief Summary of the Laws of England concerning Women,
which was used by the Social Science Association after it was formed in 1857 to push for the passage of the Married Women's Property Act 1882.
This allowed women to own property in their own right, for the first time.
In 1918 Marie Stopes published the very influential
Married Love, in which she advocated gender equality in marriage and the importance of women's sexual desire.
Many feminist writers and women's rights activists argued that it was not equality to men which they needed but a recognition of what women need to fulfill their potential of their own natures, not only within the aspect of work but society and home life too. Virginia Woolf produced her essay
A Room of One's Own based on the ideas of women as writers and characters in fiction. Woolf said that a woman must have money and a room of her own to be able to write.
The second wave:
Second-wave feminism is a period of feminist activity that first began in the early 1960s in the United States, and eventually spread throughout the Western world and beyond. In the United States, the movement lasted through the early 1980s. It later became a worldwide movement that was strong in Europe.
Whereas first-wave feminism focused mainly on suffrage and overturning legal obstacles to gender equality (
i.e., voting rights, property rights), second-wave feminism broadened the debate to a wide range of issues: sexuality, family, the workplace, reproductive rights, de facto inequalities, and official legal inequalities. At a time when mainstream women were making job gains in the professions, the military, the media, and sports, second-wave feminism also drew attention to domestic violence and marital rape issues; establishment of rape crisis and battered women's shelters; and changes in custody and divorce law.
The third wave:
Third-wave feminism refers to several diverse strains of feminist activity and study, whose exact boundaries in the history of feminism are a subject of debate, but are generally marked as beginning in the early 1990s and continuing to the present. The movement arose partially as a response to the perceived failures of and backlash against initiatives and movements created by second-wave feminism during the 1960s, '70s, and '80s. Third wave feminism acknowledges the perception that women are of "many colors, ethnicities, nationalities, religions, and cultural backgrounds". Subscribers of third-wave feminism claim that second-wave feminism was based more around the experiences of white, middle-class women and was not a proper representation of all women. This wave of feminism expands the topic of feminism to include a diverse group of women with a diverse set of identities.
Third Wave feminists have broadened their goals, focusing on ideas like queer theory, and abolishing gender role expectations and stereotypes.
Unlike the determined position of second wave feminists about women in pornography, sex work, and prostitution,
third-wave feminists were rather ambiguous and divided about these themes.
Wikipedia
For more information about the three waves of feminism, and about the emergence of a new, fourth wave, read
this short article.
