Origins and developments -- Feminist ideas can be traced back to the ancient civilisations of
Greece and China
- Christine De Pisan's Book of the City of Ladies published in Italy (1405) foreshadowed many ideas of
modern feminism such as advocating women's rights to education
- The first text o...
Feminism 5 100% PASSED
Origins and developments -✔✔✔- Feminist ideas can be traced back to the ancient civilisations of
Greece and China
- Christine De Pisan's Book of the City of Ladies published in Italy (1405) foreshadowed many ideas of
modern feminism such as advocating women's rights to education
- The first text of modern feminism is Mary Wollstonecraft's the Vindication of the Rights of Women
(1792)
- By the mid 19th C the women's movement acquired a central focus which was the right to vote
Origins and developments, 2 -✔✔✔FIRST WAVE FEMINISM:
- the 19th C was characterised by the pursuit of sexual equality in terms of political and legal rights with
men
- the women's movement was strongest on countries where political democracy was most advanced and
where women demanded that they have the same rights as their husbands and sons
- John Locke and Thomas Paine asserted the "rights of man" as did the American Independence (1776) -
"all men are created equal"
Origins and developments, 3 -✔✔✔FIRST WAVE FEMINISM CONT...
- JS Mill and Harriet Taylor's "Subjection of women" (1869) sought to reduce sexual discrimination
primarily through campaigning for equal suffrage
- The famous Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, marked the birth of the US women's rights movement, it
adopted the sentiments written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, which deliberately drew on the language/
principles of the Declaration of Independence
- the National Women's Suffrage Association led by Stanton was established in 1896and merged with
the American Women's Suffrage Association in 1890
Origins and developments, 4 -✔✔✔FIRST WAVE FEMINISM CONT...
- in the UK the movement developed during the 1850s
,- In 1807 the House of Commons defeated the first attempt to introduce women's suffrage proposed by
JS Mill
- It was seen to adopt many militant tactics, after the formation of the Women's Social and Political
Union led by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel . The campaign was coordinated with
direct attacks in which "suffragettes" carried out wholesale attacks on property and public
demonstrations
Origins and developments, 5 -✔✔✔FIRST WAVE FEMINISM CONT....
- There was firstly the achievement of women's suffrage in New Zealand in 1898
- In the USA, the 19th Amendment of the US constitution granted the vote to American women in 1920
Origins and developments, 6 -✔✔✔SECOND WAVE FEMINISM
- the feminist ideology was revived in the 1950s with Simone De Beauvoir's The Second Sex, she
depicted women as being defined by their relationship to men and also they was in which domesticity
and femininity had been artificially constructed
- Second wave feminism focuses on the economic and social rights of women and argues that political
and legal rights had not solved the women's question
- The publication of Betty Friedman's The Feminine Mystique (1963) relaunched feminist thought. She
asked "the problem with no name" - why women were unhappy of being confined to the roles of the
housewife and mother
Origins and developments, 7 -✔✔✔SECOND WAVE FEMINISM, CONT
- feminist ideas became increasingly radical such as with Kate Millet's Sexual Politics (1970) and
Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch (1970), these have focused on the personal, psychological and
sexual aspects of female oppression
- The goal of second wave feminism was "women's liberation"
- Feminism has developed into a distinctive and established ideology whose ideas and value challenge
the most basic assumptions of conventional political thought
- Feminism has raised consciousness about gender issues in public life in general
, -by the 1990s feminist organisations existed in most western countries and developing countries - NOW
in the USA which campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment to the constitution
Origins and developments, 8 -✔✔✔SECOND WAVE FEMINISM CONT
- There have been issues with feminism...
- The idea of "postfeminism" that feminist goals have largely been achieved
- Feminism has gone through a process of radical diversification, making it difficult to identify "common
ground" within feminism
CORE THEMES -✔✔✔- until the 1960s it was highly questionable if feminism was even an ideology
- it was seen as a subset of liberalism and socialism
- However, these ideologies were criticised for having patriarchal attitudes
- It has been suggested that feminism is hopelessly fragmented
Redefining the political -✔✔✔- The traditional view of what is political took place in the public sphere.
Liberalism encouraged this viewpoint with its stress between the state (public sphere) and civil society
(the private sphere)
- Family and personal relationships were seen to be part of the private sphere
- However, feminists argue that everything is political where social conflict occurs such as, government
and citizens,employers and workers, husband and wife
- Kate Millet definition of politics: "power-structured relationships, arrangements whereby one group of
persons is controlled by another"
- "the personal is political"
Redefining the political, 2 -✔✔✔- Traditionally, there has been a sexual division of labour, men as
breadwinners in the public sphere and women as the homemakers in the private sphere
- feminists argue that sexual inequality has been preserved as the sexual division of labour has been
seen as "natural" rather than "political". Women have been restricted to the private sphere of life.
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