Tracking feminism’s progress and setbacks
Firstly, it’s difficult to completely track feminism, as there have been many feminists that existed before the 19th Century. The first wave of feminism is said to have started during the mid-to-late 19th Century, though feminists such as Mary Wollstonecraft were active much earlier and basically set the foreground for first-wave feminists. Medieval women such as Christine de Pizan greatly contributed to the feminist movement, though they are not included in the first-wave.
The first-wave was heavily focused on women’s suffrage, and also coincided with the abolitionist (anti-slavery) movement. In this wave, we can see Sojourner Truth as an abolitionist, and her famous speech entitled “Ain’t I a Woman?”
…feminism is a complex movement that is interrelated with race, sex, class, religion, and ethnicity.
The second-wave of feminism hit in the 1960s, and the world saw a much more radical depiction of feminism. Though this is the movement that has caused many people to criticize feminism as being too radical, this movement also accomplished great change for women. Second-wave feminism coincided with the Civil Rights Movement, which resulted in the Black Power Movement, the Sexual Revolution, and also brought about the rise of the New Left. Not to mention anti-Vietnam protests were also actively going on.
Second-wave feminism fought for reproductive and sexual rights for women, equal pay and equal opportunity, and overall equality in women’s social and economic status. Thanks to the work of second-wave feminists, the Civil Rights Act not only banned discrimination based on race and religion, but also on sex.
Strong feminist thinkers inhabited the space of the second-wave feminists, and this era also established the difference between sex and gender. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was widely used by feminists of the second-wave, especially in terms of fighting for sexual freedom. Second-wave feminist thinkers also used Simone de Beauvoir’s, The Second Sex, and Mary Wollstonecraft’s, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, heavily in feminist theory. The second-wave also brought us Gloria Steinem, who became famous as a journalist for going under-cover as a Playboy Bunny.
The emergence of third-wave feminism is more difficult to pinpoint. It started around the mid 1990s, and is often known as postmodern feminism, though many theorists question its existence.
Feminism is often criticized for being racially and socially exclusive. There are all sorts of socioeconomic factors that contribute to this setback, and, as we begin to see a larger dialogue in terms of intersectional feminism, we can only hope that feminism can learn to become intersectional.
As far as I’m concerned, as gender becomes increasingly diverse, we need feminism now more than ever. We need the ideas of queer theorists and fellow feminists, such as Judith Butler and Gayle Rubin. We need to realize that feminism does not mean fighting for the rights of an exclusive group of women – feminism is a complex movement that is interrelated with race, sex, class, religion, and ethnicity. With feminism comes a fight not only for gender equality, but also a fight for racial and social equality. We need to take the work that our foremothers of the first and second-waves have accomplished, and build on that to morph feminism into something that fits the issues of our time, right now, in 2015. Yes, the movement has been notorious for fighting for an exclusive group of women’s rights, but first and second-wave feminists brought to this country women’s suffrage, sexual and reproductive rights (how many of us take the pill? You can thank our second-wave feminists for that), and the right for equal economic opportunity.
We’ve had the opportunity to not only view the successes of previous feminists, but we’ve also had the privilege of being able to see their flaws through an outsider’s lens. We can see that race and class are still systems of oppression that have yet to be dealt with. We can see that we still have a long way to go in terms of queer theory. We can see that feminism needs to be adjusted to fight for the needs of LGBQTA+ women. This means we need more education, more dialogue, and more voices to be heard.
We need to take the work that our foremothers of the first and second-waves have accomplished, and build on that.
The setbacks of education play a role in impacting feminism. Only a limited fraction of this country has access to post-secondary education, and that is largely dependent on socioeconomic status. A variety of universities, including the U of G, have cut women’s studies programs altogether. Tuition fees are constantly on the rise, leaving people to decide between falling into student debt or finding a job out of high school. How can we expect feminism to reach its potential, when only a small fraction of this country’s population has access to learning about feminist theory? And within that fraction, as the arts become increasingly defunded, what will happen when women’s studies programs slowly become unavailable? Knowledge is power – in order to fully understand the movement, we need to have access to the intellect behind it.