Feminist Movement

The feminist movement refers to historically specific and culturally contextual political movements that seek justice for women. A concerted effort to address women's social and legal inequalities in 19th- and early 20th-century Europe and America is recognized as the “first wave” of the feminist movement. British women joined together to begin publishing the English Woman's Journal in 1858; the First International Women's Conference in Paris in 1892 established the word feminism as the belief in and advocacy of equal rights for women based on the idea of the equality of the sexes; and in the United States, feminism that emerged out of the abolitionist movement culminated in the suffrage movement that won a decades-long struggle for women's right to vote in 1920. This first wave of the feminist movement is characterized as “liberal” feminism, an activist movement dedicated to social and political equality.

After winning the right to vote, the U.S. feminist movement remained dormant with no significant political activism around women's subordination until the 1960s. A “second wave” of the feminist movement then rose out of the civil rights and anti-war movements, in which women, disillusioned with their second-class status even in an activist environment, began to organize to contend against discrimination. In this second wave, feminists pushed beyond the early quest for political rights to fight for greater equality across the board, for example, in education, the workplace, and at home. The National Organization of Women (NOW), the National Women's Political Caucus, and the Women's Equity Action League all were formed at that time. NOW's first president Betty Friedan wrote the groundbreaking book The Feminine Mystique in 1963, defining the “mystique” as the worthlessness women feel in roles that require them to be financially, intellectually, and emotionally dependent upon their husbands. The movement was not a unified one, with multiple “feminisms” emerging to join liberal feminism, including black feminism that recognizes the duality of racial and sexual oppression, radical feminism that rejects all feminine and all masculine gender roles, and Marxist/socialist feminism that is concerned with economic oppression. In Britain, the movement also had multiple focuses but was based more strongly in working-class socialism.

The “third wave” of the feminist movement refers to feminist sensibilities that evolved from the 1990s up to the present day. It has critiqued second-wave feminism for its lack of attention to the differences among women due to their age, gender, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, religion, and level of education. The third-wave feminist movement reflects postmodern sensibilities; it rejects dogma and academia, celebrates diversity, welcomes ambiguities, negotiates contradictions, sees gender as performance rather than a fixed binary, has a broader political focus, and engages in social activism that often takes the form of music, art, or theater performance, new media Web logs, and e-zines.