The Rise Of The Feminist - Essay Example

THE RISE OF THE FEMINIST What is feminism and how did it rise? Websters defines feminism as "the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes" (Websters) but in order to truly understand feminism and its impact in the United States, you must go back to the beginning. Organized feminism evolved from various groups pushing social reform such as the Abolition of Slavery, the Social Purity and Temperance movements. Women soon realized that if they wished to change society they would need to create their own organizations to do so. The first Womens Conference was held in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848. It was there, three years later, that Susan B. Anthony met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had organized the 1848 convention. Together they led the womens rights movement for the next half-century. They first tried to organize a womens temperance society, but that reform proved too church-bound for their feminist concerns. In 1854, they turned to the creation of a womens rights movement per se. (Moore) While Cady Stanton wrote articles and declarations to legislatures, Anthony worked to organize women into a sustained political movement. They campaigned on everything from guardianship to access to higher educations. Womens suffrage was one of the first major feminist issues. The womens suffrage movement lasted at least 70 years, from the first formal womens convention in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York, to the passage of the 19th amendment. The first public appeal for woman suffrage came in 1848 at the Seneca Falls convention. The men and women at the convention adopted a Declaration of Sentiments that called for women to have equal rights in education, property, voting and other matters. This declaration used the Declaration of Independence as a model. Suffrage quickly became the chief goal of the womens rights movement. Feminism is a general term used to describe a very broad and complex ideology. There are lots of different feminist theories and approaches, as well as several different types of feminists. The most straightforward meaning however describes it as ‘a movement advocating the rights of women and of their social, political and economic equality with men’1 (Roger Scruton). Feminism views the personal experiences of women and men through gender – gender identity (how people think of themselves), gender roles (how people act), and gender stratification (each sex’s social standing) are all rooted in the operation of society. Although feminists are united by their common desire for sexual justice and their concern for women’s welfare, there is a wide spectrum of ‘feminisms’ (Ann Oakley). These can be divided into four broad groups, liberal, radical, Marxist/socialist and Black. This essay will only however look at the former two in more detail. Those who consider themselves to be feminists disagree about many things (this mainly depends on which of variants they fall into); most feminists usually support some general principles however: ‘All the varieties of feminism contain at their heart a paradox – requiring gender consciousness for their basis, their political rallying cry is the elimination of gender roles.’2 The importance of change is obviously paramount in feminist thinking as feminism is definitely political since it links ideas to action. Feminism is critical of status quo, and promotes social equality for women and men. Feminists use the word patriarchy to describe the power relationship between men and women as it stands now, whereby men rule and dominate over women in today’s society, in both public life, through politics and in the economy and in private life, in the roles played in the family. Most feminists believe that sex differences between men and women are relatively minor and therefore these differences can neither explain nor justify gender division and therefore women and men should not be judged on their sex but on who they are as individuals. Feminists want to develop human choices as they maintain that the cultural perception of gender, divides the full range of human qualities into two opposing and limited spheres: the female world of emotion and cooperation and the male world of rationality and competition. As an alternative, feminists want to pursue a ‘reintegration of humanity’3 (French, 1985) by which each person develops all human traits regardless of whether they are male or female. The movement as a whole strongly opposes gender stratification and wants to see it eliminated from society as any laws and cultural norms that limit the education, income and job opportunities of women maintain and further promote inequality between women and men. Leaders of the movement believed that if women had the vote, they could use it to gain other rights. However, these men and women faced strong opposition. Most people who opposed woman suffrage believed that women were not as smart and were therefore less capable to make political decisions then men. They thought that men could represent their wives better than the wives could represent themselves. Some people feared that womens participation in politics would lead to the end of family life. The fight for woman suffrage gained strength after the passage of the 15th Amendment to the Constitution, which gave black men the right to vote. In 1869, two national organizations were formed to work for the right to vote. One was the National Woman Suffrage Association, and the other was the American Woman Suffrage Association. Stanton and Anthony led the National Woman Suffrage Association, which was the more radical of the two organizations. Its goal was an amendment to the Constitution giving women the vote. In 1872, Anthony and a group of women voted in the presidential election in Rochester, N.Y. She was arrested and fined for voting illegally. Finally, though neither woman was alive to see the victory, in 1920 the 19th amendment gave women the right to vote. In the 1940s and 1950s, war challenged stereotypes in the workplace. This gave women the opportunity to enter into the work force more so then ever before. As men returned home from war however, women had to fight to keep their jobs. Many people felt that the womens place was at home and that they had only taken on the jobs temporarily. Some men felt threatened and fought to keep women out of work. Because so many women were now at work instead of in the home, many feminists felt that it was necessary to shift some of the responsibilities of the family to the state. Feminists fought for a welfare system that would aid with the family burden. In the 1970s feminism came to be perceived as simply anti-family, anti-marriage, anti-children, and even anti-religion, not to mention anti-men. Feminism presented the family as a kind of prison, with a working career on the outside as a kind of liberation. Feminism is an ideology as I mentioned before which has different variants, the most well known ones are Liberal feminists and Radical feminists, although all feminists’ have their goal of overthrowing the patriarchal order of society, the different groups in feminism see different means of accomplishing this goal. Liberal feminism is the dominant ideology of modern society and is grounded in classic liberal thinking that individuals should be free to develop their own talents and pursue their own interests and should be treated according to their individual merits rather than on others basis’s such as in the feminists case, sexual characteristics. But because liberalism evolved in a context in which the private sphere of the family was excluded from political demands for equality, in which traditional social arguments remained strong, and in which the Church upheld women’s subordinate role in the family, liberal feminism developed. The first major feminist political statement was Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of women in 1792. She argued that women should be entitled to the same rights and privileges as men on the grounds that they too were ‘human beings’.4 She believed the key to liberating women lay in education. Education has always been advocated my liberals as a way of replacing ignorance and prejudice and liberal feminists have looked to education to widen the ‘narrow mental horizons imposed on women by domesticity.’5 But later feminists saw this as only the beginning, they argued that freedom and equality for women could only really come about through legal reform, for example the right to influence political decisions through the vote. John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor developed this idea, saying that equal rights for women were necessary not only to correct the injustices they faced but also to promote the moral and intellectual progress of humanity. 6 Liberal feminists accept the basic organisation of society and politics but seek to expand the rights and opportunities of women. Liberal feminists support equal rights and oppose prejudice and discrimination that get in the way of the ambitions of women. So liberal feminists campaign for the removal of the social, economic, political and legal obstacles that deny women the same freedom as men. Liberal feminists also endorse reproductive freedom for all women. Some respect aspects of the family as a social institution, calling for such things as widely available maternity leave and childcare for women who wish to work. Others are critical of the way in which family reproduces gender and argue that freedom is not possible for women until families are dramatically changed. With their strong belief in the rights of individuals, liberal feminists do not believe that all women need to march in step towards any political goal. Rather, both women and men, working individually, would be able to improve their lives if society simply ended legal and cultural barriers rooted in gender. Radical feminists, meanwhile, find the reforms called for by liberal feminism to be inadequate and superficial. The main goal for radical feminists is not to introduce equal rights, (they do not want women to become like men) but to free women from patriarchal control, the main challenge to patriarchy being in the form of separatism. While liberal feminists wish to create equality in society and are quite happy to live with men so long as they are not treated as lesser citizens, some radical feminists wish to see a policy, which would see women, cut themselves off from men entirely both socially and sexually. The feminist writings of the 1970’s and 1980’s (second-wave feminism) raised questions about the nature of the female condition and sought to uncover the influence of patriarchy, not just in politics and the economy but in all aspects of social, personal and sexual existence which ‘ensures male superiority’ (Coote and Campbell)7. Kate Millet developed this idea in Sexual Politics in which she defined the ‘patriarchal government’ as an institution ‘whereby that half of the population which is female is controlled by the half which is male’. Radical feminism holds that gender equality can only be obtained only by ending the cultural notion of gender itself. Fundamentally, according to radical feminists, patriarchy rests on the subordination of women through sexuality and reproduction. Men exert power over and through women’s bodies and the only way to end this according to radical feminists is to seek to revolutionarily overthrow the patriarchal order. Merely changing people’s attitudes through liberalist recommendations of education is not enough according to radical feminists. There are many disagreements within the radicals however. Some would support new reproductive technologies - where conception would be able to take place outside the body so that there would be no necessary link between women’s bodies, men and child bearing. Shulamith Firestone, in her book The Dialectic of Sex believes that it is this burden of child bearing which has placed women at a considerable disadvantage in the past. With this end to motherhood, radical feminists like Firestone, believe that the entire family system, including the conventional definitions of motherhood, fatherhood and childhood, could be left behind, liberating women, men and children from the oppression that the family, gender and the sex itself (Dworkin, 1987)8. However, other feminists see the new reproductive technologies as based on patriarchy and male science – a way of robbing women’s rights over their own wombs. Furthermore, they celebrate women’s key role as mothers. Differences such as these in opinion within radical feminism are somewhat confusing. Feminist theory is still a well – known and widely supported ideology, however, its high point was during the 1960’s and 1970’s in which many of the goals that were sought, particularly by the liberal feminists, for instance the vote, equal opportunities at work and so forth have been more or less achieved. Some radical feminist ideas too, such as the legalisation of abortion etc have also now been accomplished, although the other recommendations, concerning reproduction outside the female body have more or less been dismissed as too radical. The basic goal however for feminists from the beginning of the movement had been to emancipate women from society’s patriarchal order and this on the surface seems to have been achieved. More and more women are being employed in influential posts at work, men are seen to do more domestic and child associated activities and women of course now have the same access to education as men. However, it can also be seen that the majority of women in today’s society are still playing the stereotypical female role in society. Bibliography 1. Kourany, Sterba, Tong, “Feminist Philosophies”, Prentice Hall, 1991 2. Roger Scruton, “The Dictionary of Political Thought”, Macmillan, 1982 3. Michael Freeden, “Ideologies and Political Theory”, Oxford, 1996 4. Andrew Heywood, “Political Ideologies”, Palgrave, 2003 5. Vicky Randall, “Women and Politics”, Macmillan, 1993 6. Mitchell, Oakley, “What is Feminism?”, Basil Blackwell, 1986 7. Websters. "Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary" Springfield, Mass: G & C Merriam Company. 1982 Read More