Feminist Movement

Waves

Three waves are normally distinguished in the course of feminist history. The first wave (1848–1918) coincides with the suffragette movement, a phenomenon seen to have three factions: the liberal-bourgeois, the conservative-religious, and the socialist wing inspired by Friedrich Engels's study The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884). The second wave (1960–1980) coincides with the civil rights movements and the criticism of the patriarchal, capitalist power structure. The third wave, of poststructuralist inspiration (from 1990), focalizes on the reaction to the backlash of the 1980s.

Hubertine Auclair used the term feminism around 1882, although some women in Great Britain had previously referred to this concept. In France, women fought for new family rights during the Revolution: in the wake of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, Olympe de Gouges wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, in which she pointed out the contradiction in the so-called universality of rights of the French Revolution. In England, in 1792, writer Mary Wollstonecraft wrote the Vindication of the Rights of Woman; in 1837, utopian socialist Charles Fourier used the term féminisme, specifying how the woman's role was an indication of the progress of every society.

The first date of the feminist movement may be considered to be the Women's Rights Convention in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York. Another fundamental date is March 8, 1857, when hundreds of women textile workers in New York went on strike in protest against their own working conditions and those of minors, and were suppressed by the police. There are conflicting theories about the origins of March 8 as an important date within the feminist movement: another version indicates March 8, 1911, as the date on which about a hundred women workers lost their lives in a factory fire.

This date was proposed as International Women's Day by Rosa Luxemburg and Clara Zetkin during the Women's Conference of the International Socialist Women in Copenhagen (1910). It was also on this occasion that the universal right to vote was called for. March 8 was celebrated for the first time in the United States in 1909, the year in which the “Revolt of Twenty-Thousand” began, a strike that ended in 1910 when workers won the right to establish rules concerning working hours and wages.

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