Divisha Singh, Dr. Mayank Tomar

Department of Sociology, Amity Institute of Social Science (AISS)

Amity University, Noida 201303

Acknowledgement

I would like to profoundly express my gratitude to my mentor and guide Dr. Mayank Tomar who introduced me to the NTCC. Through his expert guidance, I was able to complete this project. I express my gratitude towards his guiding hand. I would also like to express my heartfelt gratitude to the Youth Empowerment Foundation (YEF) for their invaluable support and resources throughout my research journey. Their commitment to empowering youth and providing opportunities, such as the NTCC internship, has been instrumental in my personal and professional growth. I am truly grateful for their contribution to my success. I am also thankful to the AISS for providing me an opportunity to learn about society in such an early phase of life.

I would also like to extend my gratitude to my family and friends for providing me resources that helped me in completing my research with my full potential and my peers for the endless motivation and support.

An Introduction to Feminism And Why It Was Needed

A belief in the social, economic, and political equality of the sexes is known as feminism. Feminism, which has its roots primarily in the West, has spread throughout the world and is represented by numerous organisations that work to advance the rights and interests of women.

Women were restricted to domestic life for the majority of Western history, while men were expected to participate in the public sphere. Women were prohibited from owning property, going to school, and taking part in public life in medieval Europe. In France at the turn of the 20th century, they were still required to cover their heads in public, and in some regions of Germany, a husband could still legally sell his wife.

In most of Europe and the United States (where a few territories and states granted women’s suffrage long before the federal government did), women were still unable to vote or hold elective office as recently as the early 20th century. Without a male representative—a father, brother, husband, attorney, or even a son—women were not allowed to conduct business. Without the consent of their husbands, married women were unable to exercise parental authority over their own children. In addition, women had limited or no access to education and were excluded from the majority of professions. These limitations on women are still existent in some regions of the world.

History of feminism

The ancient world

There is very little proof of early organised opposition to this restricted status. Roman women occupied the Capitoline Hill and blocked all Forum entrances in the third century BCE when consul Marcus Porcius Cato resisted efforts to repeal laws prohibiting women from using pricey goods.  “If they are victorious now, what will they not attempt?”  Cato wept. “As soon as they begin to be your equals, they will have become your superiors.”

But that uprising turned out to be unique. Only a few individuals spoke out against women’s inferior status for the majority of recorded history, setting the stage for later debates. The first feminist philosopher, Christine de Pisan, challenged traditional views of women by making a forceful argument for female education in late 14th and early 15th century France. Later in the century, Laura Cereta, a Venetian woman, picked up her mantle. She published Epistolae Familiares, a collection of letters that addressed a wide range of women’s complaints, from the denial of education and marital oppression to the frivolity of women’s clothing.

By the time another Venetian author, Moderata Fonte, published Il Merito Delle Donne (1600; The Worth of Women), a feminist broadside, posthumously, the defence of women had developed into a literary subgenre. Defenders of the status quo painted women as shallow and inherently immoral, while emerging feminists produced extensive lists of courageous and successful women and declared that if women were given equal access to education, they would be on par with men intellectually.

Influence of the Enlightenment

The feminist voices of the Renaissance failed to unite into a cogent movement or philosophy. Women only started to demand that the new reformist rhetoric about liberty, equality, and natural rights be applied to both sexes during the Enlightenment.

To the exclusion of gender, Enlightenment philosophers initially concentrated on the injustices of social class and caste. For instance, the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was born in Switzerland, thought of women as silly, frivolous beings who were meant to serve men. Furthermore, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which established French citizenship following the Revolution of 1789, glaringly ignored the legal status of women.

The suffrage movement

The first women’s rights convention was held in the small New York town of Seneca Falls in July 1848 as a result of these discussions and debates. Lucretia Mott, a Quaker preacher and seasoned social activist, Martha Wright, Mary Ann McClintock, Jane Hunt, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the only non-Quaker in the group, came up with the idea in the spur of the moment during a social gathering. The convention was organised with just five days’ notice, and only a small, anonymous advertisement in a local newspaper served as publicity.

The “Declaration of Sentiments” that Stanton drafted served as the Seneca Falls Convention’s blueprint. She drafted 11 resolutions, including the most radical demand—the right to vote—proclaiming that “all men and women [had] been created equal.” She did this by using the Declaration of Independence as her model. All 11 resolutions were approved with the eloquent advocacy of Frederick Douglass, a former slave, and Mott even succeeded in getting a final declaration passed that called for “securing to woman equal participation with men in the various trades, professions, and commerce” in addition to overthrowing the pulpit’s monopoly.

Although women’s rights conventions in other states were held after Seneca Falls, the interest generated by those early moments of organising quickly waned. While in Europe the reformism of the 1840s gave way to the repression of the late 1850s, concern in the United States shifted to the impending Civil War. Women’s suffrage, which would dominate global feminism for nearly 70 years, was the single issue on which the feminist movement re-emerged.

Feminists believed that after the American Civil War, the U.S. Constitution’s Fifteenth Amendment, which forbade racial discrimination in voting, would also include provisions for women’s suffrage. Leading abolitionists, however, rejected such inclusion, leading Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to found the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869. They initially based their demand for the vote on the natural law principle advanced by the Enlightenment, frequently citing the idea of unalienable rights guaranteed to all Americans by the Declaration of Independence.

However, by 1900, a wave of Eastern European immigrants and the rise of urban slums had tempered Americans’ enthusiasm for ideas like equality. Suffragist leaders started pleading for the vote on racist and nativist grounds rather than on the basis of the justice principle or the shared humanity of men and women, reflecting this shift in mentality. Carrie Chapman Catt stated in 1894: “Cut off the vote of the slums and give to woman…the ballot” that the votes of literate, American-born, middle-class women would balance the votes of foreigners.

Though they were able to push back against more extreme demands like Goldman and Gilman’s, mainstream feminist figures like Stanton failed to win the right for women to vote. It wasn’t until Alice Paul, a different kind of radical, revived the American women’s suffrage movement by imitating English activists. Similar to the Americans, British suffragists under the leadership of the National Union of Woman Suffrage Societies began their fight with ladylike lobbying and a polite demeanour. A dissident group, however, headed by Emmeline Pankhurst, started a series of boycotts, bombings, and pickets in 1903.

Their strategies sparked a national uprising, and the British Parliament gave women householders, householders’ wives, and female university graduates over 30 the right to vote in 1918.

Paul’s forces, the “shock troops” of the American suffrage movement, organised large-scale protests, parades, and clashes with the police in response to the British example. The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution was passed in 1920, giving American feminism its first significant victory.

SECOND WAVE OF FEMINISM:

The so-called “second wave” of feminism, or the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s, marked a seemingly abrupt break from the idyllic suburban life portrayed in American popular culture. However, the dissatisfaction of college-educated mothers, whose discontent drove their daughters in a new direction, lay at the heart of the new rebellion. If the abolitionist movement inspired the first wave of feminists, the civil rights movement, the discourse surrounding equality and justice, and the revolutionary fervour sparked by anti-Vietnam War protests swept the great-granddaughters into feminism.

Even before this open discussion, President John F. Kennedy had women’s issues on the top of his priority list. Eleanor Roosevelt was chosen to serve as the head of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, which he established in 1961. Its 1963 report, which advocated strongly for the nuclear family and preparing women for motherhood, was published. But it also revealed a pattern of discrimination against working women in the workplace, as well as in pay, employment opportunities, and support services. This pattern needed to be changed through legislative guarantees of equal pay for equal work, as well as expanded child-care services. The first guarantee was provided by the Equal Pay Act of 1963, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was modified to forbid sexism in the workplace.

Some people viewed these measures as insufficient in a nation where classified ads still separated job openings based on gender, state laws restricted women’s access to contraception, and rape and domestic violence incidents were still not publicly reported. Thus, the idea of a women’s rights movement emerged in the late 1960s at the same time as the civil rights movement, and discussions about gender, discrimination, and the definition of equality ensnared women of all ages and backgrounds.

THIRD WAVE OF FEMINISM

The second wave established a foundation of institutional power that the third wave inherited, including women’s studies programmes at colleges, long-standing feminist groups, and reputable publishing houses like Ms. Magazine and several scholarly journals. These venues lost some of their significance in the third wave’s culture compared to the second.

Third-wave feminists actively subverted, appropriated, and exploited what appeared to be sexist images and symbols in order to voice their concerns. This was clear from the double entendre and irony in the language that people frequently used to present themselves. Most slang that was previously used in derogatory contexts became labels that were proud and defiant.

In comparison to the first and second waves, the third wave significantly increased the inclusion of women and girls of colour. The third wave redefined women and girls as assertive, powerful, and in control of their own sexuality in opposition to stereotypical images of women as passive, weak, virginal, and faithful or alternatively as domineering, demanding, slutty, and emasculating. This redefined idea of a woman gave rise to icons of strong women in popular culture, such as singers Madonna, Queen Latifah, and Mary J. Blige, as well as women portrayed in television series.

FOURTH WAVE OF FEMINISM

Many assert that a fourth wave of feminism began around 2012, although this is controversial for some. This wave focused on issues such as rape culture, body shaming, and sexual harassment. Utilising social media to bring these issues to light and address them was a crucial element. The emergence of the new wave coincided with several prominent incidents. A young woman was brutally gang-raped in India in December 2012, and she later died. This incident sparked local unrest and outrage around the world. The Gamergate campaign, a manifestation of the so-called “men’s rights movement” with roots in the 4chan forum, came two years later.

In the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton against this backdrop. Trump had made several offensive statements about women, and the day after the election, a grandmother suggested organising a march on Washington, D.C. on Facebook. The idea quickly caught on and evolved into a call for social change, particularly with regard to gender equality. It became known as the Women’s March and grew to include protests all over the world and in the United States. As many as 4.6 million people turned out for the various demonstrations on January 21, 2017, the day after Trump was inaugurated, making the Women’s March possibly the biggest single-day protest in American history.

The Me Too movement, which was started in 2006 in the United States to support survivors of sexual violence, particularly females of colour, was arguably even more significant. After it was revealed that movie mogul Harvey Weinstein had harassed and assaulted women in the business for years with impunity, the campaign began to receive a lot of attention. Using the hashtag #MeToo, victims of sexual harassment or assault from all over the world and across all racial and ethnic groups started sharing their stories online. Over the following months, the movement grew to include dozens of influential men in news media, business, entertainment, and politics.

REFERENCES