feminismus essay

Essay on Feminism

500 words essay on feminism.

Feminism is a social and political movement that advocates for the rights of women on the grounds of equality of sexes. It does not deny the biological differences between the sexes but demands equality in opportunities. It covers everything from social and political to economic arenas. In fact, feminist campaigns have been a crucial part of history in women empowerment. The feminist campaigns of the twentieth century made the right to vote, public property, work and education possible. Thus, an essay on feminism will discuss its importance and impact.

Importance of Feminism

Feminism is not just important for women but for every sex, gender, caste, creed and more. It empowers the people and society as a whole. A very common misconception is that only women can be feminists.

It is absolutely wrong but feminism does not just benefit women. It strives for equality of the sexes, not the superiority of women. Feminism takes the gender roles which have been around for many years and tries to deconstruct them.

This allows people to live freely and empower lives without getting tied down by traditional restrictions. In other words, it benefits women as well as men. For instance, while it advocates that women must be free to earn it also advocates that why should men be the sole breadwinner of the family? It tries to give freedom to all.

Most importantly, it is essential for young people to get involved in the feminist movement. This way, we can achieve faster results. It is no less than a dream to live in a world full of equality.

Thus, we must all look at our own cultures and communities for making this dream a reality. We have not yet reached the result but we are on the journey, so we must continue on this mission to achieve successful results.

Impact of Feminism

Feminism has had a life-changing impact on everyone, especially women. If we look at history, we see that it is what gave women the right to vote. It was no small feat but was achieved successfully by women.

Further, if we look at modern feminism, we see how feminism involves in life-altering campaigns. For instance, campaigns that support the abortion of unwanted pregnancy and reproductive rights allow women to have freedom of choice.

Moreover, feminism constantly questions patriarchy and strives to renounce gender roles. It allows men to be whoever they wish to be without getting judged. It is not taboo for men to cry anymore because they must be allowed to express themselves freely.

Similarly, it also helps the LGBTQ community greatly as it advocates for their right too. Feminism gives a place for everyone and it is best to practice intersectional feminism to understand everyone’s struggle.

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Conclusion of the Essay on Feminism

The key message of feminism must be to highlight the choice in bringing personal meaning to feminism. It is to recognize other’s right for doing the same thing. The sad part is that despite feminism being a strong movement, there are still parts of the world where inequality and exploitation of women take places. Thus, we must all try to practice intersectional feminism.

FAQ of Essay on Feminism

Question 1: What are feminist beliefs?

Answer 1: Feminist beliefs are the desire for equality between the sexes. It is the belief that men and women must have equal rights and opportunities. Thus, it covers everything from social and political to economic equality.

Question 2: What started feminism?

Answer 2: The first wave of feminism occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It emerged out of an environment of urban industrialism and liberal, socialist politics. This wave aimed to open up new doors for women with a focus on suffrage.

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5 Essays About Feminism

On the surface, the definition of feminism is simple. It’s the belief that women should be politically, socially, and economically equal to men. Over the years, the movement expanded from a focus on voting rights to worker rights, reproductive rights, gender roles, and beyond. Modern feminism is moving to a more inclusive and intersectional place. Here are five essays about feminism that tackle topics like trans activism, progress, and privilege:

“Trickle-Down Feminism” – Sarah Jaffe

Feminists celebrate successful women who have seemingly smashed through the glass ceiling, but the reality is that most women are still under it. Even in fast-growing fields where women dominate (retail sales, food service, etc), women make less money than men. In this essay from Dissent Magazine, author Sarah Jaffe argues that when the fastest-growing fields are low-wage, it isn’t a victory for women. At the same time, it does present an opportunity to change the way we value service work. It isn’t enough to focus only on “equal pay for equal work” as that argument mostly focuses on jobs where someone can negotiate their salary. This essay explores how feminism can’t succeed if only the concerns of the wealthiest, most privileged women are prioritized.

Sarah Jaffe writes about organizing, social movements, and the economy with publications like Dissent, the Nation, Jacobin, and others. She is the former labor editor at Alternet.

“What No One Else Will Tell You About Feminism” – Lindy West

Written in Lindy West’s distinct voice, this essay provides a clear, condensed history of feminism’s different “waves.” The first wave focused on the right to vote, which established women as equal citizens. In the second wave, after WWII, women began taking on issues that couldn’t be legally-challenged, like gender roles. As the third wave began, the scope of feminism began to encompass others besides middle-class white women. Women should be allowed to define their womanhood for themselves. West also points out that “waves” may not even exist since history is a continuum. She concludes the essay by declaring if you believe all people are equal, you are a feminist.

Jezebel reprinted this essay with permission from How To Be A Person, The Stranger’s Guide to College by Lindy West, Dan Savage, Christopher Frizelle, and Bethany Jean Clement. Lindy West is an activist, comedian, and writer who focuses on topics like feminism, pop culture, and fat acceptance.

“Toward a Trans* Feminism” – Jack Halberstam

The history of transactivsm and feminism is messy. This essay begins with the author’s personal experience with gender and terms like trans*, which Halberstam prefers. The asterisk serves to “open the meaning,” allowing people to choose their categorization as they see fit. The main body of the essay focuses on the less-known history of feminists and trans* folks. He references essays from the 1970s and other literature that help paint a more complete picture. In current times, the tension between radical feminism and trans* feminism remains, but changes that are good for trans* women are good for everyone.

This essay was adapted from Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability by Jack Halberstam. Halberstam is the Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Gender Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. He is also the author of several books.

“Rebecca Solnit: How Change Happens” – Rebecca Solnit

The world is changing. Rebecca Solnit describes this transformation as an assembly of ideas, visions, values, essays, books, protests, and more. It has many layers involving race, class, gender, power, climate, justice, etc, as well as many voices. This has led to more clarity about injustice. Solnit describes watching the transformation and how progress and “ wokeness ” are part of a historical process. Progress is hard work. Not exclusively about feminism, this essay takes a more intersectional look at how progress as a whole occurs.

“How Change Happens” was adapted from the introduction to Whose Story Is it? Rebecca Solnit is a writer, activist, and historian. She’s the author of over 20 books on art, politics, feminism, and more.

“Bad Feminist” extract – Roxane Gay

People are complicated and imperfect. In this excerpt from her book Bad Feminist: Essays , Roxane Gay explores her contradictions. The opening sentence is, “I am failing as a woman.” She goes on to describe how she wants to be independent, but also to be taken care of. She wants to be strong and in charge, but she also wants to surrender sometimes. For a long time, she denied that she was human and flawed. However, the work it took to deny her humanness is harder than accepting who she is. While Gay might be a “bad feminist,” she is also deeply committed to issues that are important to feminism. This is a must-read essay for any feminists who worry that they aren’t perfect.

Roxane Gay is a professor, speaker, editor, writer, and social commentator. She is the author of Bad Feminist , a New York Times bestseller, Hunger (a memoir), and works of fiction.

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About the author, emmaline soken-huberty.

Emmaline Soken-Huberty is a freelance writer based in Portland, Oregon. She started to become interested in human rights while attending college, eventually getting a concentration in human rights and humanitarianism. LGBTQ+ rights, women’s rights, and climate change are of special concern to her. In her spare time, she can be found reading or enjoying Oregon’s natural beauty with her husband and dog.

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Feminism: An Essay

Feminism: An Essay

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on April 27, 2016 • ( 6 )

Feminism as a movement gained potential in the twentieth century, marking the culmination of two centuries’ struggle for cultural roles and socio-political rights — a struggle which first found its expression in Mary Wollstonecraft ‘s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). The movement gained increasing prominence across three phases/waves — the first wave (political), the second wave (cultural) and the third wave (academic). Incidentally Toril Moi also classifies the feminist movement into three phases — the female (biological), the feminist (political) and the feminine (cultural).

The first wave of feminism, in the 19th and 20th centuries, began in the US and the UK as a struggle for equality and property rights for women, by suffrage groups and activist organisations. These feminists fought against chattel marriages and for polit ical and economic equality. An important text of the first wave is Virginia Woolf ‘s A Room of One’s Own (1929), which asserted the importance of woman’s independence, and through the character Judith (Shakespeare’s fictional sister), explicated how the patriarchal society prevented women from realising their creative potential. Woolf also inaugurated the debate of language being gendered — an issue which was later dealt by Dale Spender who wrote Man Made Language (1981), Helene Cixous , who introduced ecriture feminine (in The Laugh of the Medusa ) and Julia Kristeva , who distinguished between the symbolic and the semiotic language.

The second wave of feminism in the 1960s and ’70s, was characterized by a critique of patriarchy in constructing the cultural identity of woman. Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949) famously stated, “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman” – a statement that highlights the fact that women have always been defined as the “Other”, the lacking, the negative, on whom Freud attributed “ penis-envy .” A prominent motto of this phase, “The Personal is the political” was the result of the awareness .of the false distinction between women’s domestic and men’s public spheres. Transcending their domestic and personal spaces, women began to venture into the hitherto male dominated terrains of career and public life. Marking its entry into the academic realm, the presence of feminism was reflected in journals, publishing houses and academic disciplines.

Mary Ellmann ‘s Thinking about Women (1968), Kate Millett ‘s Sexual Politics (1969), Betty Friedan ‘s The Feminine Mystique (1963) and so on mark the major works of the phase. Millett’s work specifically depicts how western social institutions work as covert ways of manipulating power, and how this permeates into literature, philosophy etc. She undertakes a thorough critical understanding of the portrayal of women in the works of male authors like DH Lawrence, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller and Jean Genet.

In the third wave (post 1980), Feminism has been actively involved in academics with its interdisciplinary associations with Marxism , Psychoanalysis and Poststructuralism , dealing with issues such as language, writing, sexuality, representation etc. It also has associations with alternate sexualities, postcolonialism ( Linda Hutcheon and Spivak ) and Ecological Studies ( Vandana Shiva )

Elaine Showalter , in her “ Towards a Feminist Poetics ” introduces the concept of gynocriticism , a criticism of gynotexts, by women who are not passive consumers but active producers of meaning. The gynocritics construct a female framework for the analysis of women’s literature, and focus on female subjectivity, language and literary career. Patricia Spacks ‘ The Female Imagination , Showalter’s A Literature of their Own , Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar ‘s The Mad Woman in the Attic are major gynocritical texts.

The present day feminism in its diverse and various forms, such as liberal feminism, cultural/ radical feminism, black feminism/womanism, materialist/neo-marxist feminism, continues its struggle for a better world for women. Beyond literature and literary theory, Feminism also found radical expression in arts, painting ( Kiki Smith , Barbara Kruger ), architecture( Sophia Hayden the architect of Woman’s Building ) and sculpture (Kate Mllett’s Naked Lady).

Feminism in the Past and Nowadays Essay

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Introduction

Liberal feminism, radical feminism, works cited.

The feminist movement is spread all over the world, and more and more people are sharing their values. In the context of the modern era, the position of women has changed. Discrimination based on gender is slowly vanishing from our reality, though it is still an issue in emerging countries. The patriarchal type of relations has almost disappeared, and household duties are usually shared by family members. Such positive changes would be impossible without the influence of passionate women, who stand for their rights. Although the feminist movement is still making a huge impact on global society, some of its aspects have changed throughout time, and this paper is focused on observing the present-day agenda in comparison with previous goals and achievements of feminism.

The definition of liberal feminism is the following: “a particular approach to achieving equality between men and women that emphasizes the power of an individual person to alter discriminatory practices against women” (“Liberal Feminism: Definition & Theory” par. 2). In other words, it is based on the idea that in a democratic system women can create an equal society where law and men respect them. It should be noted that democratic institutions have developed significantly, so nowadays women have more opportunities for action. However, every movement has different directions, and liberal feminism can be addressed from two points of view: middle-class and working-class feminism.

Middle-class Feminism

The division by class here is for a reason. A famous activist bell hook claims that in the US middle-class white women had more opportunities to fight for their interests than women from other class and race (hooks 6). It means that privileged women had access to media, universities, and other public institutions, unlike others, so they could easier address the large audience.

The problems that middle-class feminists were highlighting mostly concerned about their isolation and inequality in the labor market. “The Feminine Mystique” by Betty Friedan, which illustrated the sad truth about the life goals of women, provoked a massive reaction and protest. Friedan disagreed with the nationwide promotion of early marriages and family as the only goal for women and revealed the problem of never questioning. It was torturing women, who did not even realize their true state of mind (Friedan 54). Hence, the movement became focused on highlighting women’s individuality and abilities to make an impact in society along with men.

Working-class Feminism

The status of working-class women was always vulnerable and open to debate. Firstly, as workers, they had to face the dehumanizing nature of labor and suffered from poverty daily. Furthermore, they were suspicious about middle-class women’s attempts to get a place at the labor market and knew that this liberation movement threatened their jobs (hooks 98). Therefore, the main struggle for them was to get decently paid and to avoid total discrimination.

All in all, liberal feminism was reflected in massive protests and public speeches, which finally reached many of its primary goals. In 1920 American women finally obtained the right to vote. Later, it became possible for women to work in the same positions as men. Today’s feminism missions would be much more complicated without this progress. Gender discrimination at work is gradually vanishing, and women keep raising awareness about it in order to eliminate it completely. Erasing these inequalities contributes to making a healthy society, where people respect each other and value work of the others.

Another school of feminism is called radical and focuses on fighting against male violence and patriarchy. Challenging the patriarchy means dealing with male dominance at home and at work (Mackay 4). Unfortunately, men’s supremacy has been a feature of every community for a long time. Hence, the concepts of radical feminism are interconnected with ideas of the liberal school, as male supremacy was always one of the major concerns for all women.

Radicals stress the topic of rape and violence. This is a critical issue that has always been hard to discuss. Women had never been eager to share their traumatic experiences and to combat violence at home until some brave activists began the public protest. It caused a tidal wave of disagreement, and it is noteworthy that women living in civilized countries can feel safe nowadays. Law protects them and brings confidence to millions of women across the world.

However, there are still many countries where the state does not protect from violence. It happens because of the reluctance of members of these societies to make a change. Possibly, they underestimate the features of healthy societies, and it results in indifference.

Modern feminism would not have been what it is without influencers and activists from the past. Literature, music, and other cultural ways of transferring a message helped feminists to widespread their ideas and beliefs. Second-wave feminism was the period when the movement was at its peak, so most of the remarkable works concerning the position of women in society were created at this time. Along with authors who discussed basic women’s rights, like bell hooks, others promoted the topics which had never been talked about before. For example, Erica Jong developed a theme of female sexuality in her novel “Fear of Flying” published in 1973. It was a provocative subject for those days, but it was time for the society to reconsider conservative views and accept the natural causes of the phenomenon.

Another outstanding example in modern feminism is Alice Walker, a writer who coined the term “womanism.” It was meant to symbolize all women, including the black ones, as “feminism” did not usually encompass them. According to Walker, “womanism” is a philosophy of women who love their gender, which also addresses all issues mentioned above (Junior 16). Although the opposite term “misogyny” has been popular lately, there are still many proponents of Walker’s views.

In the context of education, the feminist movement became a global appeal for critical thinking and overviewing the common concepts of the position of women. Women started asking themselves, and they finally realized that their opinion and self-respect matter. It is important that the ideas of feminism gave a sense of community to women, and this sense of participation brought power and confidence to many of them. Women became capable of debating openly over controversial topics. This is how the slogan “the personal is political” occurred – it addressed the connection between the self and political reality. It was one of the first steps in discussing the subject of political consciousness among women, and it seems especially important today when we finally see women-politicians, women-presidents.

To sum up, the contemporary feminist movement has progressed to the state of a global and powerful philosophy which helps women worldwide. Fashion claims that the future is feminine, men join the movement and support active women, and this would never be true without the founders and previous activists, who were first to declare women’s rights. Besides, today’s agenda has become more diversified, and feminists’ concerns are not only about women but also about global development in general. Thus, the efforts of the first feminists were not useless, and future generations can rely on modern activists.

Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique . W.W. Norton and Co, 1963

Hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center . Routledge, 2014.

Jong, Erica. Fear of Flying . Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973.

Junior, Nyasha. An Introduction to Womanist Biblical Interpretation . Presbyterian Publishing Corp, 2015.

Mackay, Finn. Radical Feminism: Feminist Activism in Movement. Springer, 2015.

“Liberal Feminism: Definition & Theory.” Web.

Feminism in Latin America
Feminism in "My Life on the Road" by Gloria Steinem
Feminism: Reflection of Cultural Feminism
Modern Feminism and Its Major Directions
Womanism from Alice Walker's Perspective
Female Empowerment and Women’s Health Movements
Methods of Feminism Education and Its Modern Theories
Feminism in Lorrie Moore's "You're Ugly, Too"
The Theory of Feminism Through the Prism of Time
Concept of "Western Feminism"
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Essays About Feminism: Top 5 Examples Plus Prompts

When writing essays about feminism, there are a lot of aspects you can focus on. We have collected some of the best essay examples with prompts.

Feminism is a socio-political movement that is about fighting for equal rights and opportunities for all genders. While many point its beginnings to the women’s rights movements in the 19th century, when women were liberated and finally allowed to vote, feminist thinking can actually be traced back to as early as the late 14th century with the works of French writer Christine De Pizan , touted the first feminist philosopher.

Today, the definition of feminism has expanded to end discrimination, oppression and stereotyping of all genders from all walks of life. It aims to make radical reforms to eliminate cultural norms and push the legislation of equality-supporting laws.

Because feminism is a widely relevant topic, you may be asked to write an essay about feminism either as a student or a professional. However, it may be difficult to find a starting point given the broad spectrum of areas in which feminism is found relevant.

For help with your essays, check out our round-up of the best essays on feminism to provide inspiration:

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1. Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit

2. bad feminist by roxane gay, 3. civic memory, feminist future by lidia yuknavitch, 4. trickle-down feminism by sarah jaffe, 5. emily ratajkowski explores what it means to be hyper feminine by emily ratajkowski , 1. definition of feminism, 2. does feminism still matter in the workplace, 3. would you consider yourself a feminist, 4. historical evolution of feminism, 5. criticisms against feminism, 6. how can we achieve gender equality , 7. who are the feminists in your community and what are they fighting for.

“The battle with Men Who Explain Things has trampled down many women — of my generation, of the up-and-coming generation we need so badly, here and in Pakistan and Bolivia and Java, not to speak of the countless women who came before me and were not allowed into the laboratory, or the library, or the conversation, or the revolution, or even the category called human.

Solnit starts with amusing narratives of real-life experiences with men who have critiqued her books wrongly. Solnit points out that men’s arrogance and tendency to explain things to women, thinking they know better, have forced women into silence and weakened their credibility even in places where their voices are crucial – such as in the court stand when women testify to being raped. Solnit, thus, emphasizes that the fight against mansplainers is important to the feminist movement. For more, check out these articles about feminism .

“I want to be independent, but I want to be taken care of and have someone to come home to. I have a job I’m pretty good at. I am in charge of things. I am on committees. People respect me and take my counsel. I want to be strong and professional, but I resent how hard I have to work to be taken seriously, to receive a fraction of the consideration I might otherwise receive. Sometimes I feel an overwhelming need to cry at work, so I close my office door and lose it.”

Gay reveals a series of secrets that make her believe she is a “bad feminst.” At first, she had tried to hide her fondness for men, fashion and thuggish rap, among many other things that gave her joy but went against the ideal feminist image etched in the mind of many. Eventually, Gay embraces the “mess of contradictions” that she is, proudly owning the label of a “bad feminist” while she speaks up on issues critical to the feminist movement and debunks myths on the unrealistic standards surrounding the sisterhood.

“There is no photo for what my father did to his daughters. It came into our bodies as a habit of being, a structure of consciousness, a way of life. Maybe it is akin to feeling discovered and conquered and colonized. Maybe the first colonizations are of the bodies of women and children, and from there they extend like the outstretched hand of a man grabbing land. Cultures.”

Yuknavitch highlights her rage against “fathers” both in her personal life and in each political administration that she survived. Yuknavitch described how these fathers and father images try to take control of others’ bodies and lives and crush others’ spirits. In her confrontation and memory of such men, however, Yuknavitch also learned to create art and find her feminist purpose.

“Women may be overrepresented in the growing sectors of the economy, but those sectors pay poverty wages. The public sector job cuts that have been largely responsible for unemployment remaining at or near 8 percent have fallen disproportionately on women (and women of color are hit the hardest). Those good union jobs disappear, and are replaced with a minimum-wage gig at Walmart—and even in retail, women make only 90 percent of what men make.”

Jaffe gives an in-depth view of the gains and impasse in the fight to improve women’s working opportunities. She stresses that women’s breakthroughs in the workplace may not always be a cause for celebration if these do not translate to long-term and more concrete changes for women to be treated better in the workplace. Jaffe encouraged feminists to continue organizing themselves to focus on solutions that can address the continued low wages of women, gender pay gaps and the minimal choice of professions offered to women.

“I often think about this. Why, as a culture, do we insist on separating smart and serious from sexy? Give women the opportunity to be whatever they want and as multifaceted as they can be.”

American model Ratajkowski writes a candid memoir on what it means to be hyper feminine in a society that represses and shames sexuality. She recounts how a misogynistic culture heavily influenced her early adventures on exploring her feminine side, how she took it to her advantage and turned being “sexy” into her strength. Ratajkowski also reveals how she feels about feminism today and women, in general, having their own decision and choices.

Writing Prompts on Essays about Feminism

For more help in picking your next essay topic, check out these seven essay prompts that can get you started:

Feminism is largely believed to be women’s fight against the patriarchy. Could it be a fight against all forms of oppression, discrimination, objectification and stereotyping? Could it be something more? You may even investigate some common myths about feminism. You might be interested in our list of adjectives for strong women .

Essays about Feminism: Does feminism still matter in the workplace?

Now that several women are climbing to the top of corporate ladders, have the right to vote and could get a doctorate, does feminism remain relevant?

Your article can explore the continued challenges of women in the workplace. You may also interview some working women who have faced obstacles toward certain goals due to discrimination and how they overcame the situation.

This would tie in closely to the topic on the definition of feminism. But this topic adds value and a personal touch as you share the reasons and narratives that made you realize you are or are not a feminist.

A common misconception is that only women can be feminists.

The First Wave of feminism started in the 19th century as protests on the streets and evolved into today’s Fourth Wave where technologial tools are leveraged to promote feminist advocacies. Look at each period of feminism and compare their objectives and challenges.

While feminism aims to benefit everybody, the movement has also earned the ire of many. Some people blame feminism for enabling hostility towards men, promiscuity and pornography, among others. You can also touch on the more controversial issue on abortion which feminists fight for with the popularizd slogan “My body, my choice.” You can discuss the law of abortion in your state or your country and what feminist groups have to say about these existing regulations.

Gender equality is pursued in various fields, especially where women have had little representation in the past. One example is the tech industry. Choose one sector you relate closely with and research on how gender equality has advanced in this area. It may be fun to also interview some industry leaders to know what policy frameworks they are implementing, and what will be their strategic direction moving forward.

Everyone surely knows a handful of feminists in their social media networks. Interview some friends and ask about feminist projects they have worked on or are working on. Of course, do not forget to ask about the outcomes or targets of the project and find out who has benefitted from the cause. Are these mothers or young women?

WRITING TIPS: Before you head on to write about feminism, check out our essay writing tips so you can have a struggle-free writing process.

If writing an essay still feels like a lot of work, simplify it. Write a simple 5 paragraph essay instead

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Feminism Takes Form in Essays, Questions and Manifestos

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By Moira Weigel

June 7, 2017

DEAR IJEAWELE, Or, A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 63 pp. Knopf, $15.

When historians write about the mainstreaming of feminism in the early 21st century, they may well begin with “We Should All Be Feminists,” a TED talk Adichie gave in 2012. One year later, Beyoncé sampled it in “Flawless,” and by the time Adichie published a version as a short book, countless listeners knew her words by heart.

Her new book is another brief manifesto, and it is easy to imagine her speaking it in the same contralto. “A couple of years ago,” Adichie begins, “a friend of mine from childhood, who’d grown into a brilliant, strong, kind woman, asked me to tell her how to raise her baby girl a feminist.” Adichie decided to write her a letter. “This book is a version of that letter, with some details changed.”

Each suggestion starts with an imperative. Some are concrete: “Teach Chizalum to read.” Others are more abstract: “Teach her that the idea of ‘gender roles’ is absolute nonsense.” Embedding us in the intimacy of a friendship, the prose makes reflections that might seem common sense in the abstract feel like discoveries. The form of the letter also enacts what Adichie says is her one fixed belief: “Feminism is always contextual.”

WHY I AM NOT A FEMINIST A Feminist Manifesto By Jessa Crispin 151 pp. Melville House, paper, $15.99.

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Democracy Is Feminist

A ugust 26, 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of Women’s Equality Day . Proposed in 1971 by Bella Abzug , the formidable feminist organizer and federal lawmaker from New York, and passed as a joint resolution by Congress in 1973, Women’s Equality Day recognizes the fight for women’s suffrage and hard won ratification of the 19th Amendment.

Around the time Women’s Equality Day was first envisioned, Abzug joined forces with other leaders and activists—Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisolm, and Fannie Lou Hamer among them—to form the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC). Through both endeavors they sought to acknowledge that political representation belongs at the center of the quest for gender justice—and, according to the NWPC archives , that “legal, economic, and social equity would come about only when women were equally represented among the nation’s political decision-makers.”

Historically, women in the United States have participated voraciously in civic life, registering and voting at higher rates than men in every presidential election since 1980. Black women show up at the polls and in voter mobilization efforts in even greater numbers, with turnout rates of upward of 66% in 2020. In July 1972, Steinem wrote for the newly launched Ms . magazine, “Black women come out stronger on just about every feminist issue, whether it is voting for a woman candidate, ending violence and militarism, or believing that women are just as rational as men and have more human values.”

The same article by Steinem forecasted, “We’ve been delivering our votes [and] now women want something in return. Nineteen seventy-two is just the beginning …” And in many ways, it was. That year, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) handily passed the U.S. Senate and seemed destined for swift ratification. Chisolm’s public service—as the first Black Congresswoman, followed by her groundbreaking 1972 presidential campaign—altered the discourse about whether “White Male Only” remained a qualifier to lead the nation. And by January 1973, the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, affirming a constitutional right to abortion.

Read More: Women's Equality Day Is a Reminder That the Fight for Women’s Rights Didn’t End With the 19th Amendment

Fast forward half a century, and Vice President Kamala Harris shattered the White House glass ceiling. Women’s overall leadership on Capitol Hill has continued to climb, reaching an all-time high in the 118th Congress—just over 28% (149 members). In the House, women broke records in the 2022 midterms, with 124 now serving, 27 of whom are Black and 18 are Latin. Women now comprise nearly a third of all legislators and elected executives, including a record 12 serving as governor.

And still, the U.S. remains far from achieving fully representative governance compared to women’s actual population footprint; this is especially so for women of color. The U.S. pales in comparison to women’s political authority in much of the world, too, including among peer democracies.

As for the other advances on the 1972 agenda? The ERA remains unfinished business and is still not enshrined in the Constitution. And Roe was overturned on June 24, 2022 by the Supreme Court’s new conservative supermajority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization .

Backlash to the ERA, and the very text of the Dobbs decision, crudely distort the principles undergirding Women’s Equality Day and the goals of the NWPC. Justice Samuel Alito, who authored the majority opinion for Dobbs , claimed women’s political advancement itself is an antidote to the Court’s reversal of a fundamental right. Of this, he wrote, “Women are not without electoral or political power. It is noteworthy that the percentage of women who register to vote and cast ballots is consistently higher than the percentage of men who do so.”

Yes, women are now doing exactly that: running for office on, and voting consistently, overwhelmingly, and successfully for abortion rights everywhere the issue has appeared on the ballot since Dobbs . But there are obvious flaws in Justice Alito’s appeal to women’s electoral and political power—and, for that matter, to the NWPC’s founding documents—suggesting gender parity alone should be a singular or even sufficient metric for achieving feminist goals.

It is exponentially hard to out-run and out-vote anti-democratic maneuvers like partisan gerrymandering, voter suppression—or, as we just saw in Ohio, an attempt to raise the threshold for winning a citizen-led ballot initiative as a way to stymie abortion rights. (The Ohio measure was soundly defeated on August 8 in a special election.) These are not examples of one-off transgressions or piecemeal degradation of our democratic systems, but rather deliberate and systemic mechanisms for defying the popular will. It is why decidedly anti-feminist policy outcomes persist, like book bans in the name of parental rights or the maddening inability to advance common sense gun safety measures. It is how 14 state legislatures succeeded in outlawing abortion since Dobbs , despite public polling in favor of abortion rights reaching record highs .

Women’s Equality Day was initially a way to express the belief that, as noted in public policy scholars Zoe Marks and Erica Chenoweth's 2023 article in Ms . , a democracy in which "half the population is subordinated—politically, socially, economically—is not a true democracy at all." 50 years later, we must be clear that women’s autonomy, well-being, and rights are inextricably tied to the integrity and durability of our democratic systems.

As we look ahead, two states , Michigan and Minnesota, offer hope. Both have committed to reforms that increase voter participation, fair representation, and direct democracy; in turn, both have seen feminist priorities thrive, from codifying reproductive care and establishing green energy goals, to expanding paid family leave and protecting trans youth.

As we trace the 50-year arc of Women’s Equality Day, among the lessons we might glean today: women’s voices and votes surely matter, transformative change is possible—and the fight for robust democracy is, at its core, a central and urgent feminist goal.

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How To Write a College Essay on Feminism

Given today’s political climate, every person and institution is becoming more vocal about their stances and opinions. In a way this is great because your choice of essay topics has expanded to include politically-focused narratives. It is tricky, though, for a couple of reasons: 1) many people will be writing with this in mind and 2) your essay still has to be about you. It has to be your own and tell a story that reflects who you are and what you have experienced, not just a statement about something you believe.

Feminism is a topic that many people feel very strongly about. People are inclined to write about it because their experience with feminism reflects who they are. But feminism is multidimensional and feminism is intersectional. The topic spans centuries of history and has a place in everything that is happening today, politically and socially. We want to give you some tips on writing a feminist Common App essay, because here’s the good news: there’s no need to be scared to “go there” right now. We’re already there.

An important thing to consider about your feminist story is making sure that it centers around you and YOUR personal narrative . A truthful and genuine moment or series of moments that you experienced and your own personal evolution of thought on the matter(s). This is not the time to pontificate on second wave vs. third wave vs. whatever this wave is feminism. This is not a research paper , nor is it a time to put your foot down politically and spend 650 words defending the right to choose. Rather, this is a time to share a critical growth moment that happened intellectually and/or emotionally. Just like any other Common App essay, there needs to be a beginning, a middle, and an end . The difference with writing an essay about your experience with feminism is that it’s critical to incorporate the origins of your beliefs and outlook in a creative way.

Our students routinely write political essays rooted in feminism, and we always suggest is that they read some feminist texts that are based in personal narrative. When you read these, take note of how they voice their experiences and keep them local. They do not globalize their experiences or aggrandize them to make sweeping generalizations about feminism or race. They stay focused on their story and keep you deeply invested in understanding their perspective and the ramifications of their experiences. Some books that we recommend to familiarize yourself with this story-telling method include:

Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay
Sex Object by Jessica Valenti
Men Explain Things To Me by Rebecca Solnit
All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks

A way to approach this essay if you want to address the larger feminist movement is to tell a story about your actual lived experience that--through your story--you can tie to the larger feminist movement. But again, this is not a research paper or a synthesis essay. Even if you’ve read 100 feminist texts, the essay needs to be about you.

There’s no doubt that top universities are becoming more vocal about their viewpoints and are looking for change-makers and thought leaders who are opinionated. More than that, though, they are looking for curious students who are talented at articulating their opinions in such a way that weaves into a larger, thought-provoking history and who are eager to learn about the complexity of the narratives at play. Going down this path for your Common App essay is undoubtedly challenging. It will take a lot of work to craft an essay that tells a compelling story and also subtly comments on our current political atmosphere, but the payoff has the potential to be huge. And by that we mean: acceptance letters.

18 Essential Feminist Reads, According to 6 Feminist Authors

A collage of 12 Essential Feminist reads

As the great bell hooks stated, “feminism is for everybody.” Indeed, every person on earth is affected by the patriarchy in some way—though certainly, some more so than others. Thanks to the work of renowned professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, society has begun to understand the myriad ways in which race, class, sexual orientation, and other individual characteristics intersect to aggravate oppression. But the point is, we are all tasked with the responsibility of creating a new, just reality in which sexism and oppression have no place.

So where to begin when seeking to learn the ins and outs of the feminist movement? And what books can someone turn to when yearning to go deeper into its implications? To help us chart a way forward, we asked six feminist authors—across a wide array of backgrounds and literary genres—to share a few of the books they regard as essential reading for understanding both the myriad manifestations of the female experience and the sustained importance of feminism. Here are their suggested must-reads —in their own words.

Kate Baer, Author of What Kind of Woman and I Hope This Finds You Well

Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay : By now, most have heard of writer, feminist, and cultural critic Roxane Gay. Known for her funny, insightful, and moving essays, her reach is ever expanding and necessary. This book in particular has become my go-to recommendation for anyone searching for memoir, humor, or essays on intersectional feminism. Gay also stands out for her acceptance of imperfection, noting, “I am a bad feminist. I would rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all.” [It’s a] phenomenal read.

Feminism Is for Everybody by bell hooks: This book should be required reading for every high school student, every first-time mother and father, every woman, and every man. Pair it with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists , and you’ll find the perfect place to start if you’re interested in feminist studies and [desire to be] well-read on the subject. This book is literally for everyone.

Diving Into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972 by Adrienne Rich: Reading any Adrienne Rich is like taking a shot of feminine rage—it leaves a burning in your belly and a face flushed with indignation. This collection in particular calls the reader to examine how both men and women contribute to a harmful patriarchy. “You worship the blood you call it hysterical bleeding / you want to drink it like milk / you dip your finger into it and write / you faint at the smell of it / you dream of dumping me into the sea.” To know Rich’s poetry is to know the power of language.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou: Angelou’s 1969 autobiography turned American classic is perhaps one of our country’s most important reads on racism, sexism, and identity. Not only is this book a master class on prose, it gives readers a poignant and nuanced look into the upbringing of a remarkable American woman. Incredible and worth a reread if it’s been a decade or two.

Leah Thomas , Author of The Intersectional Environmentalist

All About Love by bell hooks: This is one of the most transformational books I’ve read, which explores the question “What is love?,”—love for ourselves, for others, for society. For Black women living in a patriarchal society built on racism, learning to love ourselves is a revolutionary act. Taking the time to assess generational trauma and unhealthy relational dynamics, [working toward] receiving healthy love between ourselves, our communities, and others is crucial to promoting a society rooted in love vs. oppression. bell hooks is a feminist icon, and this book demonstrates how love can be a healing tool for not only ourselves, but society as a whole.

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston: Black feminism flows throughout this book, even though it’s not explicitly stated. But the experiences of the main character, Janie, demonstrate the struggles of Black women navigating both gender-based and racial discrimination and their ongoing quest for respect, rights, and dignity in the U.S. It also touches on colorism and lateral oppression, dynamics that occur within a minority group; through Janie’s struggles and experiences, she gets closer and closer to expressing her independence and finding empowerment in a patriarchal and racist society.

Rebecca Solnit, Author of Men Explain Things to Me and Recollections of My Nonexistence

Women and Power by Mary Beard: Mary Beard’s “The Public Voice of Women” [from] her small volume Women and Power is a great summary of the history of the problem of unequal voices—unequal in who is allowed to speak, who is listened to, who is believed and respected—all central to questions of inequality.

Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her by Susan Griffin: Susan Griffin’s furious, lyrical Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her still gives us valuable ways to think about gender in relationship to speed, technology, violence, domestic animals, to all the metaphors and analogies that stitch our world together in often-constricting ways.

How to Raise a Feminist Son by Sonora Jha: I love Sonora Jha’s How to Raise a Feminist Son because it addresses something really important, that how we raise children to see themselves, others, and the world is a central act in making a better world, and so feminism is taking place in a billion tiny acts every day, everywhere.

Know My Name by Chanel Miller: Chanel Miller’s memoir Know My Name describes how an act of violence and violation against an individual can ripple through dozens of lives, how the legal system often serves as a long episode of punishment and degradation following the original attack, and how a young woman can find her voice and use it to define herself, reach out to others, and claim the power she deserves.

Gabriela García, Author of Of Women and Salt

The Selected Works of Audre Lorde edited by Roxane Gay: I first encountered Audre Lorde’s essays and speeches as a young woman coming into my own feminist politic, particularly Sister Outsider , often quoted but sometimes divorced of its radical underpinnings. But I’d never read her essays alongside her poetry as in this new collection, and I was struck by the resonances between them—how theory grounded in the communal makes way for poetics of yearning, seething, loving that is painstakingly personal yet grounded in collaborative liberation and care.

Diving Into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich: I turn to Adrienne Rich’s poems often, and almost half a century after its publication, Diving Into the Wreck still strikes me as an utterly relevant exploration of both patriarchal power and mythology, and the complicated contours of feminine interiority. Rich explored varied territory–motherhood, the figure of daughter-in-law, the mechanical processing of a sexual assault by a cop–with language that was precise, incisive, and nuanced; the poems in this collection yield new insights each time I revisit.

Angela Garbes, Author of Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy and Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change (Forthcoming May 2022)

Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong: Reading Minor Feelings in early 2020, just after it was published, I experienced the rare, intense pleasure of realizing, with each page, that it would be canonical to me. Here was the confusion, hypervigilance, desire, and pride and painful self-awareness that defines my (I thought) illegible, private journey into consciousness excised and biopsied with microscopic precision. Each essay is specific to Hong's experience as a Korean American woman, but as a Filipina American I am equally included and implicated. Here too, is anger—anger Asian women are not publicly entitled to, that increasingly threatens to consume us—finally directed outward, sublimated into powerful, destabilizing art.

“Welfare is a Women’s Issue,” essay by Johnnie Tillmon: Since the 1960s, mainstream American feminism has preached satisfaction and self-expression through work outside the home, a “lean-in” approach that values personal growth and gain. The beneficiaries have primarily been white women, as this empowerment has relied on outsourcing domestic labor to women of color at low wages. We hear a lot about Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique but far less about women such as Johnnie Tillmon and the National Welfare Rights Organization who, working at the same time, developed a platform for a Guaranteed Adequate Income to benefit all Americans. This essay, published in Ms. Magazine in 1972, shows that true feminism—inclusive and aimed at capitalist patriarchy’s root—can change everything. That, in Tillmon’s words, “Maybe it is we poor welfare women who will really liberate women in this country.”

“Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” from Sister Outsider , by Audre Lorde: “ As women, we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and nonrational knowledge,” Lorde writes. “Uses of the Erotic” instantly clarified something I had always suspected as a young woman: that the feeling of being “too much,” too emotional, too dark, too big, too sensitive, was not actually a problem. That it may actually be my great power. This essay is a loving, sensual invitation for all of us to see that we are not in conflict with ourselves, but with a culture that insists we'd be better off without our bodies. It’s true that all of Sister Outsider is essential reading, but I recommend doubling down and going deep on “Uses of the Erotic,” a short essay so densely packed with provocations and dares to live a full, embodied, and pleasurable physical life that I still marvel at it—and Lorde’s power—with every reading.

Zaina Arafat, Author of You Exist Too Much

Master of the Eclipse , Etel Adnan: The stories in Lebanese poet Etel Adnan’s Master of the Eclipse subversively resist an ingrained patriarchy through romantic relationships and female friendships. What results is a cauldron of displacement, nostalgia, love, and loss, all manifested in the trajectories of empowered female characters.

Meaty: Essays by Samantha Irby: This book, like so much of Irby’s work, delves into the unruly and at times uncooperative female body, along with love of food. By unabashedly displaying societally deemed “shameful” acts and realities, Irby empowers us to do the same, and to embrace our own bodily chaos and appetites.

Chloe Caldwell, The Red Zone: A Love Story (forthcoming April 2022): The necessity and urgency of The Red Zone made me wonder how I—or any woman—had lived so long without it. Through the lens of PMDD [premenstrual dysphoric disorder] and the female body, Caldwell refracts every issue imaginable, from relationships to hormones to queerness to stepmotherhood to blended families, all with hilarity, intimacy, and depth. Feeling seen by this book is an understatement; it’s a survival guide.

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By: History.com Editors

Updated: April 8, 2022 | Original: February 28, 2019

Feminism, a belief in the political, economic and cultural equality of women, has roots in the earliest eras of human civilization. It is typically separated into three waves: first wave feminism, dealing with property rights and the right to vote; second wave feminism, focusing on equality and anti-discrimination, and third wave feminism, which started in the 1990s as a backlash to the second wave’s perceived privileging of white, straight women.

From Ancient Greece to the fight for women’s suffrage to women’s marches and the #MeToo movement, the history of feminism is as long as it is fascinating.

Early Feminists

In his classic Republic , Plato advocated that women possess “natural capacities” equal to men for governing and defending ancient Greece . Not everyone agreed with Plato; when the women of ancient Rome staged a massive protest over the Oppian Law, which restricted women’s access to gold and other goods, Roman consul Marcus Porcius Cato argued, “As soon as they begin to be your equals, they will have become your superiors!” (Despite Cato’s fears, the law was repealed.)

In The Book of the City of Ladies , 15th-century writer Christine de Pizan protested misogyny and the role of women in the Middle Ages . Years later, during the Enlightenment , writers and philosophers like Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and Mary Wollstonecraft , author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman , argued vigorously for greater equality for women.

READ MORE: Milestones in U.S. Women's History

Abigail Adams, first lady to President John Adams, specifically saw access to education, property and the ballot as critical to women’s equality. In letters to her husband John Adams , Abigail Adams warned, “If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice.”

The “Rebellion” that Adams threatened began in the 19th century, as calls for greater freedom for women joined with voices demanding the end of slavery . Indeed, many women leaders of the abolitionist movement found an unsettling irony in advocating for African Americans rights that they themselves could not enjoy.

First Wave Feminism: Women’s Suffrage and The Seneca Falls Convention

At the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention , abolitionists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott boldly proclaimed in their now-famous Declaration of Sentiments that “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal.” Controversially, the feminists demanded “their sacred right to the elective franchise,” or the right to vote.

Many attendees thought voting rights for women were beyond the pale, but were swayed when Frederick Douglass argued that he could not accept the right to vote as a Black man if women could not also claim that right. When the resolution passed, the women’s suffrage movement began in earnest, and dominated much of feminism for several decades.

READ MORE: American Women's Suffrage Came Down to One Man's Vote

The 19th Amendment: Women’s Right to Vote

Slowly, suffragettes began to claim some successes: In 1893, New Zealand became the first sovereign state giving women the right to vote, followed by Australia in 1902 and Finland in 1906. In a limited victory, the United Kingdom granted suffrage to women over 30 in 1918.

In the United States, women’s participation in World War I proved to many that they were deserving of equal representation. In 1920, thanks largely to the work of suffragists like Susan B. Anthony and Carrie Chapman Catt , the 19th Amendment passed. American women finally earned the right to vote. With these rights secured, feminists embarked on what some scholars refer to as the “second wave” of feminism.

Women And Work

Women began to enter the workplace in greater numbers following the Great Depression , when many male breadwinners lost their jobs, forcing women to find “ women’s work ” in lower paying but more stable careers like housework, teaching and secretarial roles.

During World War II , many women actively participated in the military or found work in industries previously reserved for men, making Rosie the Riveter a feminist icon. Following the civil rights movement , women sought greater participation in the workplace, with equal pay at the forefront of their efforts

The Equal Pay Act of 1963 was among the first efforts to confront this still-relevant issue.

Second Wave Feminism: Women's Liberation

But cultural obstacles remained, and with the 1963 publication of The Feminine Mystique , Betty Friedan —who later co-founded the National Organization for Women —argued that women were still relegated to unfulfilling roles in homemaking and child care. By this time, many people had started referring to feminism as “women’s liberation.” In 1971, feminist Gloria Steinem joined Betty Friedan and Bella Abzug in founding the National Women’s Political Caucus. Steinem’s Ms. Magazine became the first magazine to feature feminism as a subject on its cover in 1976.

The Equal Rights Amendment , which sought legal equality for women and banned discrimination on the basis of sex, was passed by Congress in 1972 (but, following a conservative backlash, was never ratified by enough states to become law). One year later, feminists celebrated the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade , the landmark ruling that guaranteed a woman’s right to choose an abortion.

READ MORE: Why the Fight Over the Equal Rights Amendment Has Lasted Nearly a Century

Third Wave Feminism: Who Benefits From the Feminist Movement?

Critics have argued that the benefits of the feminist movement , especially the second wave, are largely limited to white, college-educated women, and that feminism has failed to address the concerns of women of color, lesbians, immigrants and religious minorities. Even in the 19th century, Sojourner Truth lamented racial distinctions in women’s status in a speech before the 1851 Ohio Women's Rights Convention. She was later quoted as saying:

In fact, contemporaneous reports of Truth’s speech did not include the words “Ain’t I a Woman?” and quoted Truth in standard English. The distortion of Truth's words in later years reflected the false belief that as a formerly enslaved woman, Truth would have had a Southern accent. Truth was, in fact, a New Yorker.

#MeToo and Women’s Marches

By the 2010s, feminists pointed to prominent cases of sexual assault and “rape culture” as emblematic of the work still to be done in combating misogyny and ensuring women have equal rights. The #MeToo movement gained new prominence in October 2017, when the New York Times published a damning investigation into allegations of sexual harassment made against influential film producer Harvey Weinstein. Many more women came forward with allegations against other powerful men—including President Donald Trump.

On January 21, 2017, the first full day of Trump’s presidency, hundreds of thousands of people joined the Women’s March on Washington in D.C., a massive protest aimed at the new administration and the perceived threat it represented to reproductive, civil and human rights. It was not limited to Washington: Over 3 million people in cities around the world held simultaneous demonstrations, providing feminists with a high-profile platforms for advocating on behalf of full rights for all women worldwide.

Women in World History Curriculum Women's history, feminist history, Making History , The Institute of Historical Research A Brief History of Feminism, Oxford Dictionaries Four Waves of Feminism, Pacific Magazine, Pacific University

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Essay on Feminism | 500+ Words Long

Feminism is a powerful movement that has played a significant role in shaping our world. It is a belief in the equal rights, opportunities, and treatment of all genders. In this essay, I will argue for the importance of feminism, a movement that has made significant strides towards gender equality. By exploring its history, examining its goals, and highlighting its impact on society, I aim to convey why feminism is vital for a fair and just world.

The History of Feminism

Feminism has a long and diverse history that dates back to the 19th century. It emerged as a response to the widespread inequality and discrimination faced by women. Early feminists, such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, fought for women’s suffrage, paving the way for women to have the right to vote. The history of feminism is marked by countless individuals and movements that have pushed for gender equality and challenged societal norms.

Equality for All Genders

One of the core principles of feminism is the belief in equality for all genders. It acknowledges that discrimination and inequality affect not only women but also people of all gender identities. Feminism seeks to break down traditional gender roles and stereotypes, allowing everyone to pursue their interests and dreams without limitations. It advocates for a society where every person’s worth and potential are recognized, regardless of their gender.

Empowerment and Choice

Feminism empowers individuals to make choices about their lives, bodies, and careers based on their own desires and goals. Moreover, it emphasizes that women and all individuals should have control over their bodies, including decisions about reproductive health. Consequently, by advocating for choice, feminism ensures that people can lead fulfilling lives that align with their values and aspirations

Challenging Gender Stereotypes

Feminism challenges harmful gender stereotypes that limit the potential of individuals. Stereotypes, such as the idea that women are less capable in STEM fields or that men should not express vulnerability, have long hindered progress. Feminism encourages society to break free from these stereotypes, allowing people to pursue their interests and talents regardless of societal expectations.

Addressing Gender-Based Violence

Gender-based violence, including domestic violence and sexual harassment, is a pressing issue that feminism addresses. It advocates for the safety and well-being of all individuals, working to create a world where no one has to live in fear of violence due to their gender. Feminism has been instrumental in raising awareness about these issues and pushing for legal and social changes to protect survivors.

Intersectionality

Intersectionality is a crucial concept within feminism, recognizing that individuals face overlapping forms of discrimination and privilege based on factors such as race, class, sexuality, and more. Feminism strives to be inclusive and intersectional, acknowledging that the fight for gender equality is interconnected with broader struggles for social justice. This approach ensures that feminism is accessible and relevant to people from diverse backgrounds.

Progress and Achievements

Over the years, feminism has achieved significant progress. Women’s suffrage, reproductive rights, and anti-discrimination laws are just a few examples of the victories won through feminist activism. Women have broken barriers in various fields, from science to politics to sports, showcasing the immense potential that can be unlocked when gender equality is pursued.

Ongoing Challenges

While feminism has made remarkable progress, challenges still exist. Gender pay gaps, underrepresentation of women in leadership roles, and violence against women continue to be issues that require attention and action. Feminism remains a driving force in addressing these challenges and pushing for a more equitable society.

Conclusion of Essay on Feminism

In conclusion, feminism is a powerful movement that promotes equality, empowerment, and justice for all genders. It has a rich history of challenging discrimination, advocating for equal rights, and empowering individuals to make choices about their lives. Feminism’s impact on society is undeniable, as it has brought about significant progress while continuing to address ongoing challenges. By acknowledging and supporting feminism, we contribute to a world where every person can live free from discrimination and fully realize their potential. Feminism is not just a movement; it is a vision for a more equitable and inclusive future that benefits us all.

Also Check: List of 500+ Topics for Writing Essay

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✍️Essay on Feminism for Students: Samples 150, 250 Words

Updated on
Nov 2, 2023

In a society, men and women should be considered equal in every aspect. This thought is advocated by a social and political movement i.e. feminism . The word feminism was coined by the French Philosopher Charles Fourier in 1837. He was known for his strong belief in equal rights for women as men in every sector, be it the right to vote, right to work, right to decide, right to participate in public life, right to own property, etc. Feminism advocates the rights of women with respect to the equality of gender . There are different types of feminism i.e. liberal, radical, Marxist, cultural, and eco-feminism. Stay tuned and have a look at the following sample essay on feminism!

Also Read: Popular Struggles and Movements

Essay on Feminism 150 Words

India is a land of diversity of which 52.2% are women as per an estimate for the year 2023. This doesn’t mean that every woman is getting basic fundamental rights in society. We should not neglect the rights of women and treat them as a weaker sex. Women are equally strong and capable as men. To advocate this thought a movement called Feminism came into existence in 1837. Feminism is a movement that advocates the equality of women in social, political, and economic areas.

India is up eight notches in #WorldEconomicForum ’s annual gender ranking. And Iceland is #1 for women, again, for the 14th year in a row. @namitabhandare ’s newsletter, #HTMindtheGap looks at why. Plus the week’s other gender stories https://t.co/9Fen6TaEnb Subscribe here… pic.twitter.com/r6XfFMINO0 — Hindustan Times (@htTweets) June 25, 2023

Traditionally, women were believed to stay at home and there were severe restrictions imposed on them. They were not allowed to go out, study, work, vote, own property, etc. However, with the passage of time, people are becoming aware of the objective of feminism. Any person who supports feminism and is a proponent of equal human rights for women is considered a feminist.

Feminism is a challenge to the patriarchal systems existing in society. Despite this strong movement burning in high flames to burn the orthodox and dominant culture, there are still some parts of the world that are facing gender inequality. So, it is our duty to make a world free of any discrimination.

Essay on Feminism 250 Words

Talking about feminism in a broader sense, then, it is not restricted only to women. It refers to the equality of every sex or gender. Some people feel offended by the concept of feminism as they take it in the wrong way. There is a misconception that only women are feminists. But this is not the case. Feminists can be anyone who supports the noble cause of supporting the concept of providing equal rights to women.

Feminism is not restricted to single-sex i.e. women, but it advocates for every person irrespective of caste, creed, colour, sex, or gender. As an individual, it is our duty to help every person achieve equal status in society and eradicate any kind of gender discrimination .

Equality helps people to live freely without any traditional restrictions. At present, the Government of India is also contributing to providing equal rights to the female sector through various Government schemes like Beti Bachao Beti Padhao, Pradhan Mantri Mahila Shakti Kendra, One Stop Center, and many more.

Apart from these Government policies, campaigns like reproductive rights or abortion of unwanted pregnancy also give women the right to choose and lead their life without any external authority of a male.

Feminism has also supported the LGBTIQA+ community so that people belonging to this community could come out and reveal their identity without any shame. The concept of feminism also helped them to ask for equal rights as men and women. Thus, it could be concluded that feminism is for all genders and a true feminist will support every person to achieve equal rights and hold a respectable position in society.

Check Out: Women Equality Day

Kajal Thareja

Hi, I am Kajal, a pharmacy graduate, currently pursuing management and is an experienced content writer. I have 2-years of writing experience in Ed-tech (digital marketing) company. I am passionate towards writing blogs and am on the path of discovering true potential professionally in the field of content marketing. I am engaged in writing creative content for students which is simple yet creative and engaging and leaves an impact on the reader's mind.

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Women's Studies: Essential Writings of Feminism

Library Databases
Indexes & Bibliographies
Statistical Sources
Women's History on the Web
eArchives of Women's Writings
Special Topics on Women
Biographical Resources
Essential Writings of Feminism
General Women's Studies Portals
Groups and Associations
Special Library Collections
Selected Print and E-Book Sources

Internet Sources of Core Writings and Rhetoric on Women's Rights

Here are some links to online archives of classic feminist writings not covered elsewhere in this LibGuide. See below box for selected print collections of feminist writings.

Documents from the Women's Liberation Movement "The materials in this on-line archival collection document various aspects of the Women's Liberation Movement in the United States, and focus specifically on the radical origins of this movement during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Items range from radical theoretical writings to humorous plays to the minutes of an actual grassroots group. The items in this on-line collection are scanned and transcribed from original documents held in Duke's Special Collections Library. We are making these documents available on-line in order to support current teaching and research interests related to this period in U.S. history."
Classic Feminist Writings This nice page, from the The Chicago Women's Liberation Union (CWLU) Herstory Website, provides a basic, browsable annotated list of a few primary documents. However, although the word "classic" appears in the title, all of these materials are from the 1960s and 1970s, so they are useful only in the study of the second wave. Note, too, that the group maintains files related to the "Jane" abortion activists. Click the Historical Archive link in the top frame to explore other web document options.
Marxists Internet Archive Library of Feminist Writers Starting with Mary Wollstonecraft and Harriet Taylor, this webpage provides "Selected writings of feminists of each of the “three waves” of feminist political activity. Intellectual Property laws prevent the Marxists Internet Archive from reproducing the works of most of the major feminist writers of recent decades. However, key chapters and articles have been reproduced for educational purposes only."
Fragen Project (Frames on Gender) Archive "For the first time, core feminist texts from the second wave of feminism in Europe have been made available to researchers in an easily accessible online database. The FRAGEN project brings together books, articles and pamphlets that were influential in the development of feminist ideas in 29 countries during the second half of the 20th century."
Andrea Dworkin Web Site The late Andrea Dworkin was one of the most articulate, passionate and controversial voices from the second wave of American feminism. This webpage excerpts sections from a variety of her writings. Click on the large button for "Andrea Dworkin Online Library" to read selections from Intercourse, Right-Wing Women, Pornography: Men Possessing Women, Our Blood:Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics, Woman Hating, and Life and Death. The site also includes many memorial statements by other feminist leaders posted after her Spring 2005 death.
Jo Freeman.com: Articles by Jo Freeman o Freeman is another feminist activist and scholar whose work has spanned the earliest days of the "women's movement" til today. This good-looking, well-organized website presents many of Ms. Freeman's writings, including several written under the pseudonym Joreen. (These classic pieces include "The BITCH Manifesto" and "The Tyranny of Structurelessness.")
No Turning Back: Feminist Resource Site Designed to support this book , which we have in both print and eBook, this webpage suggests other websites, recommends appropriate films, and even links to the full-text of few classic "Primary Source Documents from Feminist History."

Print and eBook Collections of Feminist Writings and Primary Documents

Here are just a few examples of the types of anthologies Sawyer Library owns that gather and reprint interesting journalism, essays and primary documents about women's lives and feminist activism.

Subject Guide

<< Previous: Biographical Resources
Next: General Women's Studies Portals >>
Last Updated: Jun 12, 2024 9:54 AM
URL: https://suffolk.libguides.com/WomensStudies

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Introduction to feminism, topics: what is feminism.

Introduction
What is Feminism?
Historical Context
Normative and Descriptive Components
Feminism and the Diversity of Women
Feminism as Anti-Sexism
Topics in Feminism: Overview of the Sub-Entries

Bibliography

Works cited.

General Bibliography [under construction]
Topical Bibliographies [under construction]

Other Internet Resources

Related entries, i. introduction, ii. what is feminism, a. historical context, b. normative and descriptive components.

i) (Normative) Men and women are entitled to equal rights and respect. ii) (Descriptive) Women are currently disadvantaged with respect to rights and respect, compared with men.

Feminism is grounded on the belief that women are oppressed or disadvantaged by comparison with men, and that their oppression is in some way illegitimate or unjustified. Under the umbrella of this general characterization there are, however, many interpretations of women and their oppression, so that it is a mistake to think of feminism as a single philosophical doctrine, or as implying an agreed political program. (James 2000, 576)

C. Feminism and the Diversity of Women

Feminism, as liberation struggle, must exist apart from and as a part of the larger struggle to eradicate domination in all its forms. We must understand that patriarchal domination shares an ideological foundation with racism and other forms of group oppression, and that there is no hope that it can be eradicated while these systems remain intact. This knowledge should consistently inform the direction of feminist theory and practice. (hooks 1989, 22)

Unlike many feminist comrades, I believe women and men must share a common understanding--a basic knowledge of what feminism is--if it is ever to be a powerful mass-based political movement. In Feminist Theory: from margin to center, I suggest that defining feminism broadly as "a movement to end sexism and sexist oppression" would enable us to have a common political goal…Sharing a common goal does not imply that women and men will not have radically divergent perspectives on how that goal might be reached. (hooks 1989, 23)

…no woman is subject to any form of oppression simply because she is a woman; which forms of oppression she is subject to depend on what "kind" of woman she is. In a world in which a woman might be subject to racism, classism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, if she is not so subject it is because of her race, class, religion, sexual orientation. So it can never be the case that the treatment of a woman has only to do with her gender and nothing to do with her class or race. (Spelman 1988, 52-3)

D. Feminism as Anti-Sexism

i) (Descriptive claim) Women, and those who appear to be women, are subjected to wrongs and/or injustice at least in part because they are or appear to be women. ii) (Normative claim) The wrongs/injustices in question in (i) ought not to occur and should be stopped when and where they do.

III. Topics in Feminism: Overview of the Sub-Entries

Alexander, M. Jacqui and Lisa Albrecht, eds. 1998. The Third Wave: Feminist Perspectives on Racism. New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press.
Anderson, Elizabeth. 1999a. “What is the Point of Equality?” Ethics 109(2): 287-337.
______. 1999b. "Reply” Brown Electronic Article Review Service, Jamie Dreier and David Estlund, editors, World Wide Web, (http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/bears/homepage.html), Posted 12/22/99.
Anzaldúa, Gloria, ed. 1990. Making Face, Making Soul: Haciendo Caras. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.
Baier, Annette C. 1994. Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Barrett, Michèle. 1991. The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Bartky, Sandra. 1990. “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power.” In her Femininity and Domination. New York: Routledge, 63-82.
Basu, Amrita. 1995. The Challenge of Local Feminisms: Women's Movements in Global Perspective. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Baumgardner, Jennifer and Amy Richards. 2000. Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Beauvoir, Simone de. 1974 (1952). The Second Sex. Trans. and Ed. H. M. Parshley. New York: Vintage Books.
Benhabib, Seyla. 1992. Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics. New York: Routledge.
Calhoun, Cheshire. 2000. Feminism, the Family, and the Politics of the Closet: Lesbian and Gay Displacement. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
______. 1989. “Responsibility and Reproach.” Ethics 99(2): 389-406.
Collins, Patricia Hill. 1990. Black Feminist Thought. Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman.
Cott, Nancy. 1987. The Grounding of Modern Feminism. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.“ Stanford Law Review , 43(6): 1241-1299.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller and Kendall Thomas. 1995. “Introduction.” In Critical Race Theory, ed., Kimberle Crenshaw, et al. New York: The New Press, xiii-xxxii.Davis, Angela. 1983. Women, Race and Class. New York: Random House.
Crow, Barbara. 2000. Radical Feminism: A Documentary Reader. New York: New York University Press.
Delmar, Rosalind. 2001. "What is Feminism?” In Theorizing Feminism, ed., Anne C. Hermann and Abigail J. Stewart. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 5-28.
Duplessis, Rachel Blau, and Ann Snitow, eds. 1998. The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women's Liberation. New York: Random House (Crown Publishing).
Dutt, M. 1998. "Reclaiming a Human Rights Culture: Feminism of Difference and Alliance." In Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age , ed., Ella Shohat. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 225-246.
Echols, Alice. 1990. Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-75. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Engels, Friedrich. 1972 (1845). The Origin of The Family, Private Property, and the State. New York: International Publishers.
Findlen, Barbara. 2001. Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation, 2nd edition. Seattle, WA: Seal Press.
Fine, Michelle and Adrienne Asch, eds. 1988. Women with Disabilities: Essays in Psychology, Culture, and Politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Fraser, Nancy and Linda Nicholson. 1990. "Social Criticism Without Philosophy: An Encounter Between Feminism and Postmodernism." In Feminism/Postmodernism, ed., Linda Nicholson. New York: Routledge.
Friedan, Betty. 1963. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Norton.
Frye, Marilyn. 1983. The Politics of Reality. Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press.
Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. 1997. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press.
Grewal, I. 1998. "On the New Global Feminism and the Family of Nations: Dilemmas of Transnational Feminist Practice." In Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age, ed., Ella Shohat. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 501-530.
Hampton, Jean. 1993. “Feminist Contractarianism,” in Louise M. Antony and Charlotte Witt, eds. A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity, Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Haslanger, Sally. Forthcoming. “Oppressions: Racial and Other.” In Racism, Philosophy and Mind: Philosophical Explanations of Racism and Its Implications, ed., Michael Levine and Tamas Pataki. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Held, Virginia. 1993. Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Herrman, Anne C. and Abigail J. Stewart, eds. 1994. Theorizing Feminism: Parallel Trends in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Heywood, Leslie and Jennifer Drake, eds. 1997. Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism.
Hillyer, Barbara. 1993. Feminism and Disability. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.
Hoagland, Sarah L. 1989. Lesbian Ethics: Toward New Values. Palo Alto, CA: Institute for Lesbian Studies.
Hooks, bell. 1989. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. Boston: South End Press.
______. 1984. Feminist Theory from Margin to Center. Boston: South End Press.
______. 1981. Ain't I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Boston: South End Press.
Hurtado, Aída. 1996. The Color of Privilege: Three Blasphemies on Race and Feminism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Jagger, Alison M. 1983. Feminist Politics and Human Nature. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
James, Susan. 2000. “Feminism in Philosophy of Mind: The Question of Personal Identity.” In The Cambridge Companion to Feminism in Philosophy, ed., Miranda Fricker and Jennifer Hornsby. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kiss, Elizabeth. 1995. "Feminism and Rights." Dissent 42(3): 342-347
Kittay, Eva Feder. 1999. Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency. New York: Routledge.
Kymlicka, Will. 1989. Liberalism, Community and Culture. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Mackenzie, Catriona and Natalie Stoljar, eds. 2000. Relational Autonomy: Feminist perspectives on Autonomy, Agency and the Social Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
MacKinnon, Catharine. 1989. Towards a Feminist Theory of the State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
______. 1987. Feminism Unmodified. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Mohanty, Chandra, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, eds. 1991. Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Molyneux, Maxine and Nikki Craske, eds. 2001. Gender and the Politics of Rights and Democracy in Latin America. Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillan.
Moody-Adams, Michele. 1997. Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture and Philosophy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Moraga, Cherrie. 2000. "From a Long Line of Vendidas: Chicanas and Feminism." In her Loving in the War Years, 2nd edition. Boston: South End Press.
Moraga, Cherrie and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds. 1981. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings of Radical Women of Color. Watertown, MA: Persephone Press.
Narayan, Uma. 1997. Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third World Feminism. New York: Routledge.
Nussbaum, Martha. 1995. "Human Capabilities, Female Human Beings." In Women, Culture and Development : A Study of Human Capabilities, ed., Martha Nussbaum and Jonathan Glover. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 61-104.
_______. 1999. Sex and Social Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
O’Brien, Mary. 1979. “Reproducing Marxist Man.” In The Sexism of Social and Political Theory: Women and Reproduction from Plato to Nietzsche, ed., Lorenne M. G. Clark and Lynda Lange. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 99-116. Reprinted in (Tuana and Tong 1995: 91-103).
Ong, Aihwa. 1988. "Colonialism and Modernity: Feminist Re-presentation of Women in Non-Western Societies.” Inscriptions 3(4): 90. Also in (Herrman and Stewart 1994).
Okin, Susan Moller. 1989. Justice, Gender, and the Family. New York: Basic Books.
______. 1979. Women in Western Political Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Pateman, Carole. 1988. The Sexual Contract. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
Reagon, Bernice Johnson. 1983. "Coalition Politics: Turning the Century." In: Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith. New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 356-368.
Robinson, Fiona. 1999. Globalizing Care: Ethics, Feminist Theory, and International Affairs. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Rubin, Gayle. 1975. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex.” In Towards an Anthropology of Women , ed., Rayna Rapp Reiter. New York: Monthly Review Press, 157-210.
Ruddick, Sara. 1989. Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace. Boston: Beacon Press.
Schneir, Miriam, ed. 1994. Feminism in Our Time: The Essential Writings, World War II to the Present. New York: Vintage Books.
______. 1972. Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings. New York: Vintage Books.
Scott, Joan W. 1988. “Deconstructing Equality-Versus-Difference: or The Uses of Poststructuralist Theory for Feminism.” Feminist Studies 14 (1): 33-50.
Silvers, Anita, David Wasserman, Mary Mahowald. 1999. Disability, Difference, Discrimination: Perspectives on Justice in Bioethics and Public Policy . Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield.
Simpson, J. A. and E. S. C. Weiner, ed., 1989. Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press. OED Online. Oxford University Press. “feminism, n1” (1851).
Snitow, Ann. 1990. “A Gender Diary.” In Conflicts in Feminism, ed. M. Hirsch and E. Fox Keller. New York: Routledge, 9-43.
Spelman, Elizabeth. 1988. The Inessential Woman. Boston: Beacon Press.
Tanner, Leslie B. 1970 Voices From Women's Liberation. New York: New American Library (A Mentor Book).
Taylor, Vesta and Leila J. Rupp. 1996. "Lesbian Existence and the Women's Movement: Researching the 'Lavender Herring'." In Feminism and Social Change , ed. Heidi Gottfried. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Tong, Rosemarie. 1993. Feminine and Feminist Ethics. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Tuana, Nancy and Rosemarie Tong, eds. 1995. Feminism and Philosophy. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Walker, Alice. 1990. “Definition of Womanist,” In Making Face, Making Soul: Haciendo Caras , ed., Gloria Anzaldúa. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 370.
Walker, Margaret Urban. 1998. Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics. New York: Routledge.
______, ed. 1999. Mother Time: Women, Aging, and Ethics. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Walker, Rebecca, ed. 1995. To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism. New York: Random House (Anchor Books).
Ware, Cellestine. 1970. Woman Power: The Movement for Women’s Liberation . New York: Tower Publications.
Weisberg, D. Kelly, ed. 1993. Feminist Legal Theory: Foundations. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Wendell, Susan. 1996. The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability. New York and London: Routledge.
Young, Iris. 1990a. "Humanism, Gynocentrism and Feminist Politics." In Throwing Like A Girl. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 73-91.
Young, Iris. 1990b. “Socialist Feminism and the Limits of Dual Systems Theory.” In her Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory . Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
______. 1990c. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Zophy, Angela Howard. 1990. "Feminism." In The Handbook of American Women's History , ed., Angela Howard Zophy and Frances M. Kavenik. New York: Routledge (Garland Reference Library of the Humanities).

General Bibliography

Topical bibliographies.

Feminist Theory Website
Race, Gender, and Affirmative Action Resource Page
Documents from the Women's Liberation Movement (Duke Univ. Archives)
Core Reading Lists in Women's Studies (Assn of College and Research Libraries, WS Section)
Feminist and Women's Journals
Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy
Feminist Internet Search Utilities
National Council for Research on Women (including links to centers for research on women and affiliate organizations, organized by research specialties)
Feminism and Class
Marxist, Socialist, and Materialist Feminisms
M-Fem (information page, discussion group, links, etc.)
WMST-L discussion of how to define “marxist feminism” Aug 1994)
Marxist/Materialist Feminism (Feminist Theory Website)
MatFem (Information page, discussion group)
Feminist Economics
Feminist Economics (Feminist Theory Website)
International Association for Feminist Economics
Feminist Political Economy and the Law (2001 Conference Proceedings, York Univ.)
Journal for the International Association for Feminist Economics
Feminism and Disability
World Wide Web Review: Women and Disabilities Websites
Disability and Feminism Resource Page
Center for Research on Women with Disabilities (CROWD)
Interdisciplinary Bibliography on Disability in the Humanities (Part of the American Studies Crossroads Project)
Feminism and Human Rights, Global Feminism
World Wide Web Review: Websites on Women and Human Rights
International Gender Studies Resources (U.C. Berkeley)
Global Feminisms Research Resources (Vassar Library)
Global Feminism (Feminist Majority Foundation)
NOW and Global Feminism
United Nations Development Fund for Women
Global Issues Resources
Sisterhood is Global Institute (SIGI)
Feminism and Race/Ethnicity
General Resources
WMST-L discussion on “Women of Color and the Women’s Movement” (5 Parts) Sept/Oct 2000)
Women of Color Resources (Princeton U. Library)
Core Readings in Women's Studies: Women of Color (Assn. of College and Research Libraries, WS Section)
Women of Color Resource Sites
African-American/Black Feminisms and Womanism
African-American/Black/Womanist Feminism on the Web
Black Feminist and Womanist Identity Bibliography (Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library)
The Womanist Studies Consortium (Univ. of Georgia)
Black Feminist/Womanist Works: A Beginning List (WMST-L)
African-American Women Online Archival Collection (Duke U.)
Asian-American and Asian Feminisms
Asian American Feminism (Feminist Theory Website)
Asian-American Women Bibliography (Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe)
American Women's History: A Research Guide (Asian-American Women)
South Asian Women's Studies Bibliography (U.C. Berkeley)
Journal of South Asia Women's Studies
Chicana/Latina Feminisms
Bibliography on Chicana Feminism (Cal State, Long Beach Library)
Making Face, Making Soul: A Chicana Feminist Website
Defining Chicana Feminisms, In Their Own Words
CLNet's Chicana Studies Homepage (UCLA)
Chicana Related Bibliographies (CLNet)
American Indian, Native, Indigenous Feminisms
Native American Feminism (Feminist Theory Website)
Bibliography on American Indian Gender Roles and Relations
Bibliography on American Indian Feminism
Bibliography on American Indian Gay/Lesbian Topics
Links on Aboriginal Women and Feminism
Feminism, Sex, and Sexuality
1970's Lesbian Feminism (Ohio State Univ., Women's Studies)
The Lesbian History Project
History of Sexuality Resources (Duke Special Collections)
Lesbian Studies Bibliography (Assn. of College and Research Libraries)
Lesbian Feminism/Lesbian Philosophy
Society for Lesbian and Gay Philosophy Internet Resources
QueerTheory.com
World Wide Web Review: Webs of Transgender

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Feminism Essay | Essay on Feminism for Students and Children in English

February 14, 2024 by Prasanna

Feminism Essay: Feminism is defined as a social and political movement that advocates for women’s rights on the grounds of equality of sexes. Feminism in no way denies the biological differences between the sexes but demands equality in opportunity social, political and economic arenas.

Most scholars believe feminist campaigns to be the reason for the crucial historical developments of women empowerment. The right to vote, right to public property, right to work and receive education, all own their roots to the feminist campaigns of the twentieth century.

Modern-day feminists are also involved in life-altering campaigns supporting abortion of unwanted pregnancy and reproductive rights. They have ground-breaking achievements on women’s suffrage, questioning Patriarchy and renouncing gender roles.

You can also find more Essay Writing articles on events, persons, sports, technology and many more.

Long and Short Essays on Feminism for Students and Kids in English

We are providing students with essay samples on a long essay of 500 words and a short essay of 150 words on the topic Feminism.

Long Essay on Feminism Essay 500 Words in English

Long Essay on Feminism Essay is usually given to classes 7, 8, 9, and 10.

French philosopher and a utopian socialist Charles Fourier coined the term “Feminism” in the year 1837. The history of modern western Feminism consists of four distinct waves.

The first wave-

The first wave began in the 19th and 20th century for women’s suffrage movement and advocating for women’s right to vote. It specifically began in the UK and US and led to the passing of several laws.

It marked the equality in marriage, parenting and property with laws like the Custody of Infants Act 1839, Married women’s Property Act in 1870 in the UK.

The second wave-

The second wave comprised pf the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s, where campaigns were held demanding legal and social equality of women. Though more attention was paid to women empowerment in the European countries, women still had very few rights of their own.

They still required the permission of their husbands to work and earn. Simon De Beauvoir’s book, “The Second Sex” provided a Marxist solution to this dependency on Patriarchy, thus leading to the second wave of Feminism.

The third wave-

The third wave was mostly focused on the individual and personal developments of women to become more independent and confident. It also brought in focus the constricted views of Feminism which focused mainly on the upper class and middle-class western whites and their outlook of life.

This paved the way for a more inclusive set of ideologies like Black Feminism and Interracial Feminism.

The fourth wave-

The fourth and the latest wave of the twenty-first-century Feminism is directed towards curbing of sexual harassment, abuses and more importantly rape cases. One of the most important movements of the fourth wave of Feminism is the #MeToo Movement.

You can now access more Essay Writing on this topic and many more. The feminist ideology is varied and has a vast spectrum of action. Hence, it is required for different kinds of Feminism to develop a more focused outlook on certain sections. The kinds of Feminism are-

Liberal Feminism: It attempts to focus on women’s individuality and independence. It demands equality and liberty. Freedom of choices is the key to development. Some of the notable Liberal Feminists are Abigail Adams and Mary Wollstonecraft.
Radical Feminism: The body of Feminism that arose from the civil liberties movement of 1967-68. Radical Feminism believes the male -capitalist mentality as well as the forces of the state to be the sole reason for women’s oppression.
Marxist and Socialist Feminism: The Marxist Feminism believes that to liberate women from age-old oppression, the forces of the capitalist society need to be overthrown; otherwise, equality of sexes cannot be achieved.
Cultural Feminism: Cultural Feminism is a more recent transformation of radical Feminism. Radical Feminism tried to transform the dominant patriarchal society into a more inclusive one. However, Cultural Feminism is an attempt to create an alternative to the dominant society and try to increase its acceptance.
Eco Feminism: Eco Feminism is more of a spiritual ideology which beliefs on the exploitation of patriarchal resources to be the solution for women’s liberation.

Short Essay on Feminism Essay 150 Words in English

Short Essay on Feminism Essay is usually given to classes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

The ideology of Feminism is a movement initiated in the 19th century advocating for Women’s rights on the grounds of equality of sexes. It demands equality of opportunity of every gender irrespective of their biological differences.

The movement is distinctly divided into four waves. The first wave was the wave of movements that led to the voting rights for women. The second wave began during the civil liberty movement of the 1960s.

The third wave focused on individuality and personal liberty and was against the constricted Feminism of the upper class and pave the way for black Feminism and interracial Feminism.

The fourth and the most recent movement is focused upon addressing sexual harassment and rape cases.

Feminism can be divided into different kinds. The different types of Feminism are-

Liberal Feminism
Radical Feminism
Marxist Feminism
Cultural Feminism

Eco- Feminism

Modern-Day Feminism is no more restricted to women empowerment but also has extended its hands towards the LGBTQ+ community.

10 Lines on Feminism Essay in English

1. Postfeminism is a range of viewpoints that began in the 1980s. 2. It is mainly divided into four phases. 3. Feminism believes for equality of opportunity. 4. It is often misunderstood as a hostile movement. 5. #MeToo Movement is an organ of the Feminist movement. 6. Feminism believes in a woman’s right to sexual autonomy. 7. Some notable Feminist are-Virginia Wolf, Emma Watson, Malala Yousufzai. 8. Feminism is not essentially a woman’s movement only but a movement for all genders. 9. “Pseudo Feminism” is a term often called to the constricted Feminist viewpoint. 10. Feminism is a basic Human Rights movement in today’s world.

FAQ’s on Feminism Essay

Question 1. Is Feminism only for women?

Answer: No, Feminism ensures equal rights for everyone irrespective of their gender.

Question 2. Can men be Feminists too?

Answer: Absolutely, yes. It is open for anyone who believes in equality.

Question 3. Is Feminism against Men?

Answer: No, Feminism is against Patriarchy and not individual men.

Question 4. Does Feminism advocate for female supremacy?

Answer: No, Feminism advocates for equal rights of all genders and doesn’t encourage the supremacy of one gender over the others.

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Feminism in Literature

Ginette castro (essay date 1984).

SOURCE: Castro, Ginette. "Feminism and the Law." In American Feminism: A Contemporary History, translated by Elizabeth Loverde-Bagwell, pp. 199-222. New York: New York University Press, 1990. In the following essay, originally published in French in 1984, Castro details the political goals of the women's movement, including the struggle to pass the Equal Rights Amendment and efforts to ensure equality for women in the workplace.

The Program

About 1973, the liberal branch of the Women's movement began trying to establish a detailed program. This new orientation seems to us to have been a realistic adjustment to take account of two factors. First, some basis for action appeared necessary in order to enable the movement to move forward coherently and to use its energy constructively toward external goals instead of wasting it in internal quarrels. Second, it was essential to build as broad a base as possible to unify women, particularly so as to make available to the struggle the resources of nonfeminist women's organizations that had been alienated from the movement by shock actions or outrageous declarations, and that could weigh heavily in determining the outcome of the battle. The development of a platform for reform would reveal how much common interest there was between feminist and non-feminist women's organizations. Moreover, the inclusion of a wide range of proposals in this platform would have another advantage: every woman, from radical militant to nonfeminist, and every organization, from political caucus to labor union, could find something in it to support.

The first formal program platform developed by the new feminist movement in the United States was the National Women's Agenda, presented on 2 December 1975 to President Gerald Ford, the governors of the fifty states, and members of Congress. It had been signed by ninety women's organizations, who recognized in the preamble the priority of their common interest in every sector and at every level of American society, while affirming their continuing desire for pluralism in their purposes and points of view. The platform covered eleven headings for bold and substantial reforms.

The second platform was developed at the National Women's Conference held in Houston in November 1977. It, too, corresponded to a pragmatic spirit of coalition: "We must agree when we can, disagree when we have to, but never lose sight of our overall objectives." 1

Adopted within the framework of a conference financed by federal funds, the Houston action plan was duly made official on 17 August 1978 by the publication of a 308-page report, The Spirit of Houston, and the nomination of a National Advisory Committee for Women, cochaired by Bella Abzug and Carmen Delgado Votaw. The committee's assignment under the Department of Labor was to advise the president and Congress with a view toward gradual execution of the plan. This official recognition corresponded to the will of the Houston delegates, as expressed in Resolution 26 of the platform, and translated their desire to make the government face up to its responsibilities and recognize women's issues as a national concern.

ON THE SUBJECT OF…

BELLA ABZUG (1920-1998)

"We are bringing women into politics to change the nature of politics, to change the vision, to change the institutions. Women are not wedded to the policies of the past. We didn't craft them. They didn't let us." Abzug, Bella. "Plenary Speech, Fourth World Conference on Women. September 12, 1995, Beijing, People's Republic of China." Gifts of Speech at Sweet Briar College (online) < http://gos.sbc.edu/a/abzug.html >.

Sporting her trademark floppy hats, attorney, activist, congresswoman, and author Bella Abzug was outspoken in her efforts to bring awareness to women's issues, to defend her clients against Senator Joseph McCarthy's investigation into alleged communist activities, to end the war in Vietnam, to advocate civil rights, and to impeach President Richard M. Nixon following the Watergate scandal. Born July 24, 1920, in New York City, Abzug began her career as an attorney, being admitted to the Bar of New York State in 1947. She worked as a private practice attorney from 1947 to 1970. In 1961 she served as legislative director of the Women's Strike for Peace, a position she held until 1970 when she became the first Jewish woman elected to Congress. She served in the House of Representatives from 1970 until 1976. On her first day in Congress in 1971, Abzug introduced a resolution calling for the withdrawal of all troops from Indochina, and in 1975 she introduced the first bill addressing civil rights for gays and lesbians. Abzug became an assistant whip to House Speaker Thomas "Tip" O'Neill, Jr., and coauthored legislation concerning privacy acts and the freedom of information act. Abzug served as co-chair of President Jimmy Carter's National Advisory Committee on Women from 1978 to 1979, and assisted and founded a number of women's advocacy groups, including Women-USA, Women's Foreign Policy Council, Women's Environmental and Development Organization, and the National Women's Political Caucus. Abzug's published works include Bella! Ms. Abzug Goes to Washington (1972) and Gender Gap: Bella Abzug's Guide to Political Power for American Women (1984; coauthored with Mim Kelber).

The Houston action plan contains twenty-six resolutions, three of which have been widely publicized because of the bitter divisions they have provoked among women and the doubt that has reigned over their adoption. We are speaking of the Equal Rights Amendment, the right to the voluntary interruption of pregnancy, and freedom of choice in sexual preference. With deliberate regularity, each of the twenty-six resolutions is introduced in the platform by a time-honored phrase placing the issue in the hands of legislators at the federal or state level, either demanding the establishment of permanent structures (as in the case of all the resolutions on violence), recommending new legislation (supporting child care centers and opposing discrimination against pregnant working women), or demanding enforcement of existing laws.

Political Power

RELATIONS WITH THE POWER STRUCTURE

Having obtained official recognition of their demands, the feminists who believed in reforming the existing system particularly favored one method of action over others: political pressure on government agencies, the president, or Congress. A powerful feminist lobby developed, of which the leading voices were the National Women's Political Caucus (NWPC), the Women's Lobby, Inc., founded by Carol Burris and Flora Crater, and the National Organization for Women (NOW).

Political pressure from liberal feminists was considerably increased in the 1976 presidential election campaign. The NWPC had formed a Democratic Task Force in 1974 and a Republican Task Force in 1975, which participated in the state party caucuses and the national party conventions. In 1976, Republican women had obtained their party's support for the Equal Rights Amendment, although not a declaration in favor of the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion; however, they suffered a dual setback in 1980 when President-elect Ronald Reagan and the New Right vowed firm opposition to both abortion and the ERA. Democratic feminists, who were much more numerous in the NWPC than Republicans, no doubt because most women in Congress were Democrats, had no difficulty in persuading their party to support the ERA. More delicate were their negotiations that led the Democratic party to approve the Supreme Court decision allowing the voluntary interruption of pregnancy. Needless to say, the sexual preference plank of the feminist platform was rejected out of hand by both Democrats and Republicans.

Although the women of the NWPC were close to the traditional parties and had entrée to the inner circles of national politics, the same could not be said of NOW. Some of its officers, Karen de Crow and Artie Scott, were asked by the NWPC Republican Task Force to leave Kansas City, where the 1976 Republican party convention was being held, for fear that their mere presence might suffice to jeopardize the negotiations for adoption of the ERA in the party platform. Similarly, the evening reception to which NOW invited delegates to the Democratic convention was ostentatiously snubbed by many of them, while the one given by the NWPC was a huge success. In the eyes of politicians, NOW was a frighteningly militant organization, incarnating their worst nightmares of feminism. We see this factor as both positive and necessary, in that NOW's independence from traditional politics enabled it to retain its uniqueness as a feminist organization, and was the only way to guarantee the support of the radical minority of feminists, whose presence in the ranks was, we believe, the best guarantee against the movement's being co-opted. By the end of the 1970s, NOW had lost its aura of middle-class respectability, and was even perceived as belonging to the radical Left, as Elinor Langer 2 points out. In any case, it was a force to be reckoned with; if we can take the word of Gloria Steinem, it was collecting more money than even the Democratic party.

The 1976 presidential campaign also saw the appearance in the liberal feminist press of political profiles of the candidates according to their positions on women's issues. Ms., for instance, measured the views of five presidential hopefuls and forty congressional candidates. The NWPC, after having passed feminist judgment in 1976 on the respective positions of presidential candidates Ford and Carter, came back to the charge in the 1978 congressional elections and devoted five pages of the Women's Political Times to the voting records of all the members of the House of Representatives on sixteen feminist bills submitted in the intervening two years, scoring them from 0 to 100. The practice was continued in subsequent elections.

In the lead-up to Ronald Reagan's election, it appears, therefore, that liberal feminists were gambling on the strength of the women's vote, counting feminists and nonfeminists. However, this would not be a block vote resulting from any specifically feminine characteristic, but rather would be a reflection of women's new political awareness and participation, inspired by feminists of the androgynous approach. Militants were cheered in this gamble by the results of a 1980 Harris poll showing that significantly more women intended to vote, as well as a twenty-point difference between male and female voters among supporters of Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential campaign. The gender gap was born, and it continued to make headlines in all the publications of the Women's movement. Gloria Steinem and her staff at Ms. even devoted the magazine's cover to it in March 1984, inviting readers to participate in a new Harris poll on their intention to vote and their views for or against the reelection of Ronald Reagan. As another publication subsequently reported, "the 1984 election results showed the same gender gap that had first appeared in 1980. Women were still 8% more likely to vote Democratic than men. But because the gap did not increase, the press coverage gave the impression that it had disappeared." 3

Only time will tell whether the new factor of the women's vote will have a durable existence as such in a still sexually polarized society, or whether it is a temporary phenomenon, as a personally directed reaction against a president who, after campaigning on his opposition to the ERA, blamed rising unemployment on the increased number of women in the labor market and did everything possible to overturn the 1973 Supreme Court ruling permitting abortion. In August 1983, American women's antipathy for Ronald Reagan was intensified when Barbara Honnegger resigned from her position in charge of women's affairs at the Department of Justice, denouncing the hypocrisy of the "demagogue" in the White House who publicly claimed to oppose sexual discrimination but privately had blocked Honnegger's report on a hundred discriminatory statutes.

GETTING INVOLVED IN THE POLITICAL POWER STRUCTURE

The Ninety-eighth Congress of the United States, elected in November 1982, counted only twenty-four women. Granted, thanks to a theatrical gesture from President Reagan, a woman, Sandra Day O'Connor, had finally been appointed to the Supreme Court; granted, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations (Jeanne Kirkpatrick) and the secretary of transportation (Elizabeth Dole) were women; but, important though they were, these promotions remained exceptions to the rule and ought not to mask the dramatic underrepresentation of women in American politics.

In 1976, according to figures gathered in the bicentennial year by the National Women's Education Fund, in the course of two centuries of American history, the Senate had seated only 11 women in contrast to 1,715 men, and the House of Representatives, 87 women against 9,521 men. In the same period, only 5 women had held cabinet posts, and none had ever sat on the Supreme Court.

These statistics were scrupulously published by the Women's Political Times, demonstrating that the NWPC was actively aware of this underrepresentation of women. Faced with the reluctance of lawmakers to enact legislation responding to feminist demands, the NWPC, in keeping with the philosophy of liberal feminists, presented itself as a lobbying organization whose purpose was to build a "national feminist network." This expression used by Mildred Jeffrey, then president of the NWPC, seems to have been calling for a counterpart to the "old boy network." Congresswoman Barbara Nikulski (Democrat from Maryland) parodied the way in which key posts were assigned: "You know," she said, "Pete Preppy looks through his yearbook, calls up Mike Macho and says 'Got anyone good for State?' 'Sure,' answers Mike, 'try Tom Terrifico.'" 4

Clearly, the NWPC's main concern has been effectiveness. A program of feminist demands already has existed for more than a decade; its execution depends upon bringing more women into political life. The introduction of women, in the NWPC's view, should be done according to the traditional rules of the political game, and within the two-party system. The NWPC has never foreseen a third-party effort; this stance was reiterated in 1989 when the NWPC resisted NOW's call for one. Therefore, the first level of action by NWPC militants has been to gain more representation by women at the national Democratic and Republican party conventions. Their work has met with partial success, since in 1980, the goal of equal sexual representation among delegates was attained among Democrats, but not among Republicans. 5

The NWPC itself also has held national conventions. The one held in San Antonio in July 1983 attracted a number of candidates for the Democratic nomination. "I am a feminist," Walter Mondale was not afraid to declare, but his proposals on women's issues, like those of the other candidates, were rather vague. The NWPC strengthened its efforts to promote the election of more women by making financial contributions to their campaigns, knowing full well that money is the overriding problem of all candidates.

But what precisely has become of feminism among women candidates and women elected to office? In the light of ten sample candidacies followed by the NWPC in 1976, it appeared that even if the candidates were known to hold feminist views, they never campaigned solely on feminist issues. Some even restrained their ardor when appearing in heartland areas. The position of those already elected is obviously more comfortable. Several interesting initiatives and successes can be signaled here. First, there are the results obtained in the Ninety-third and Ninety-fourth Congresses. The passage of the landmark Equal Credit Opportunity Act, forbidding sexual discrimination in the granting of credit, was due to the work of Margaret Heckler, Leonor Sullivan, and Bella Abzug. Minimum wage legislation was extended to domestic workers thanks to the initiative of Shirley Chisholm, and the military academies were opened to women on a bill introduced by Patricia Schroeder. The honors, again, are due to a woman, Martha Keys, for the measure granting a 20 percent tax deduction to low-income families for expenses related to child care. During the Ninety-fifth Congress, for the first time in the history of the United States, fifteen of the eighteen congresswomen formed a bipartisan women's committee to transcend party differences and to join forces, whenever possible, on issues concerning women. The committee agreed to meet every Tuesday and invite various cabinet members to discuss their policies, particularly regarding the hiring and promotion of women.

The NWPC congratulated itself for another initiative, presenting it as a good illustration of the feminist network in operation, as a chain of solidarity linking elected women to their women constituents. In one of the first examples of this networking, the NWPC president Mildred Jeffrey testified, in January 1978, before the congressional committee charged with studying proposed amendments to the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act, and made several suggestions for modifying the bill. Some days later, Barbara Mikulski took up the relay, and introduced in Congress a number of measures proposed by the NWPC. On 9 March 1978, two of these measures were enacted by the legislators: increased child care facilities for single mothers, and greater representation of women and ethnic minorities on the consulting committees proposed by the Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act, in proportion to their members in the labor force.

Again, the rule of equal representation, dear to liberal feminists, has been at work in the ultimate illustration of how feminist networking has enabled women to gain access to power. According to the NWPC, the federal agencies which, under President Jimmy Carter, were directed by women—Patricia Robert Harris at Housing and Urban Development, Juanita Kreps at Commerce, Eleanor Holmes Norton at the EEOC, and Grace Olivarez at the Community Services Administration—recruited as many women staff members as men.

The picture darkened considerably under President Ronald Reagan. Sandra Day O'Connor appeared little disposed to support feminist claims, as witness her dissenting vote in June 1983 when the Supreme Court reasserted the right of American women to the voluntary interruption of pregnancy. As for Elizabeth Dole, in an interview granted to Judith Mann soon after taking office as secretary of transportation, she was content to repeat President Reagan's statements on sexual discrimination, without lending any support to the Equal Rights Amendment.

The Constitutional Battle and the Struggle against the Antifeminist Backlash

THE EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT

At the start of the 1980s the liberal forces of the Women's movement were still fighting for the same cause that the National Women's party had been championing since the end of World War I: the Equal Rights Amendment. This had become the primary objective of the egalitarian feminists, and they threw all their resources into this battle. This factor contributed to the general impression that the liberal wing had taken over the Women's movement at the expense of the radical influence, an impression that was reinforced by the forming of coalitions around the egalitarian battle plan.

The reasons for such crystallizations are obvious. Although militants recognized that the Equal Rights Amendment alone could not eradicate sexist prejudices from individuals or the society, they nevertheless believed that an amendment to the Constitution was the only possible remedy to destroy the underlying prejudice of the fundamental law of the land. The soundness of their argument cannot be denied, if we recall the government interpretation, in the case of women army doctors in World War II claiming equal pay, that the accepted constitutional meaning of the term person did not include the female sex. It was all the more frustrating and humiliating for American feminists, in the best-organized women's rights movement in the world, to be facing defeat, after more than half a century of combat, for lack of three ratifying votes. In 1980, in fact, thirty-five states had ratified the amendment, thirty-three having done so in the three years following the historic vote of Congress in 1972 passing the ERA. But after 1975, only two further ratifications had been scored, and in three states, legislatures that had already voted ratification now voted in favor of rescinding their previous votes, although the constitutionality of this rescission was doubtful. Not surprisingly, the strongest opposition came from the South. The same nine southern states that had earlier refused to ratify the amendment granting women the vote now refused to ratify the one granting sexual equality. The taste of defeat was all the more bitter in that numerous surveys had shown that, with little variation, there was a constant majority of public support for the ERA. When President Reagan took office, this majority even rose sharply from 58 to 63 percent.

How, then, can we explain the ERA's successive failures to be ratified, either through legislative votes, as in North Carolina and Florida, or by local referendum for the adoption of a home-grown ERA modifying the state constitution, as in New Jersey and New York? Feminist analysts have decided that the main reason lies in their previous underestimation of the opposition. It had been naive of them to believe that their only opponents were sincere but misguided housewives. In the analysis of the NWPC, NOW, and the editors of Ms., the ERA's real adversaries have been the organized political forces of the extreme Right. Of the women who have made careers out of urging other women not to have careers but to stay home and vote against sexual equality, the most notorious include the following: Phyllis Schlafly, an outspoken ultraconservative and head of the National Stop ERA Movement; Helen Andelin, author of The Secret Power of Femininity and founder of the Femininity Forum, under whose banner the California anti-ERA forces were assembled; Maureen Startup, also from California, who organized a convention for that state's annulment of its previous ratification of the ERA; Annette Stern, a "home executive" in her own preferred term, leader of the New York group most hostile to the ERA, Operation Wake Up, and founder of WUNDER. 6 According to feminist sources, the funding for these groups has come, partially or entirely, from openly racist organizations like the John Birch Society, from anti-Communist groups like the Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation, or from bastions of traditionalism like the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution. Powerful opposition has also come from the direction of organized religion, led by the Baptist, Mormon, and Catholic churches. Last but far from least, the economic implications of equality must not be overlooked. As the NOW leaders observed, big business has been visible by its absence from the coalitions supporting passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. The hostility of the world of high finance is definitive proof of early feminist successes. Courtordered retroactive correction of sexual discrimination has cost big companies a lot of money: $100 million for AT& T, for example, and $75 million for Sears. But these sums are minuscule in comparison with the real amounts involved, according to the estimate of a private economist consulted by Elinor Langer:

If, in 1970, women who worked had earned the same amount per hour as men who worked, it would have cost employers an additional $96 billion in payroll alone.…If women had earned the same as men and worked the same number of hours, the addition to the payroll would have been $303 billion. 7

More recent figures from the Labor Department show that in 1988, women made up 44.8 percent of the U.S. labor force, and that in the 1990s, they will fill 60 percent of new jobs, so that by the year 2000, women will account for about half of the work force.

It is understandable what worry this can cause in powerful and recalcitrant business sectors, such as insurance companies, for example, which furthermore are well represented in state legislatures, according to a NOW study of the Illinois state senate.

In state legislatures called to vote for or against the federal amendment, therefore, it has been easy for multinational companies to defend their special interests. The ERA has become a political hot potato, and this, say the feminist analysts, is the second reason for its defeat. The vote of Florida legislators on the ERA, for example, as the local press objectively reports, was not really for or against sexual equality; instead, the ERA vote was used by them as a bargaining chip for unrelated political transactions, some negotiating to retain their chairmanship of a committee, others wanting to put an obstacle in the path of a political adversary favorable to the amendment. As the editorial writer of the Women's Political Times bluntly put it, "They're playing political football with our issue." 8

Naturally, this sport has been concealed behind a smokescreen. When speaking publicly, opponents of the ERA have found pretexts in the language of the amendment itself, with scare talk about the institutionalization of public toilets in common to both sexes, homosexual marriages, and the military draft for women, all scaremongering images which they evoked as representative of the Women's movement itself, and as the logical outcome of passage of the ERA. Now we confront the third reason for the ERA's failure, in the view of feminist analysts: the negative image that many women have of feminists, stereotyped as ruthlessly ambitious career women with hearts of steel under their elegant business suits, or else as bare-breasted, bisexual flaming revolutionaries. Trying to understand the crushing defeat suffered by the ERA in New York, Lindsy Van Gelder interviewed four women whose interests and opinions coincided with the spirit of the ERA, but who nonetheless had voted against it in a referendum simply because they had wanted to censure the Women's movement for the image it gave of itself, and had refused to give the movement their vote of confidence. 9

Here we reencounter the same old problem of credibility, which has always undermined feminist efforts. The problem is all the more serious in that it creates opposition to feminism in certain categories of women themselves, particularly housewives and low-income wage earners. While some opposition comes from groups that defend their special interests by pretending to believe that the concept of a politically organized women's rights movement is fundamentally unsound and unnecessary, housewives and low-income women are sincere in rejecting the ERA out of fear for their own security. Feminists engaged in reform face a double challenge: on the one hand, to convince women that their action is worthwhile and that the stereotypes are false; on the other hand, to expose the intrigues of power and money interests hiding behind the skirts of Phyllis Schlafly and her troops.

To meet this challenge, feminists recognized early the need to come out of isolation and form alliances. They saw that well-chosen allies could bring much-needed credibility to their image; this would signify the creation of a united front, as opponents had done in the National Stop ERA Movement. For this reason, as soon as the anti-ERA backlash effect began to appear, a policy of coalition emerged among feminists, beginning in about 1975, of which the first fruit was the US National Women's Agenda. A broad coalition for the ERA was created in the following year: ER-America, which, from its founding, brought together more than a hundred diverse organizations, including women's clubs, religious groups, labor unions, and civic bodies, all denouncing the sexual discrimination that afflicted American women and proclaiming the legitimacy of the amendment through which they were seeking their place in the Constitution. This coalition, which opened a new era in feminist militancy, did not come about solely through the will of feminists; it seems to have resulted from a growing awareness among all sorts of liberal organizations of the real implications of opposition to the ERA, thus confirming what feminists had been alleging about the true identity of the special interest groups opposing it. In fact, it began to appear more and more evident that the extreme Right was using the ERA as a political "litmus test," as a victory on this issue could be the prelude to other conservative offensives against, for example, arms reduction, consumer protection, and labor union demands. According to the Women's Political Times, key liberal leaders held an important strategy meeting in Washington from 17 to 19 April 1978 to devise common ways of countering the new upsurge of strength on the extreme Right. 10 They decided to establish a permanent regional structure to facilitate communication with each other. But even more important, it seems to me, was the dialogue opened in the late 1970s between feminists and labor union leaders, ending more than a century of mutual suspicion. New relationships of reciprocity developed: in exchange for labor union support for the ERA, the NWPC committed itself to support labor and social legislation such as the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act and the Labor Law Reform Bill. I think it is important to mention this agreement, since it rested on a basis of equality and mutual respect. By this I mean that there was no trace of paternalism in this labor union support, and this fact, expressing united struggle for a common cause, is the great advance achieved by the new feminism of the 1960s and 1970s over the protofeminism of the postwar years.

This cooperation with others seems to us to have opened a new era for militant feminism in more than one way. It has not only brought feminism out of isolation, but also drawn it out of a defensive posture. Too often, in fact, feminists have been content to spend their time denying the half-truths spread by Phyllis Schlafly about public toilets, homosexual marriages, and the draft. Regarding public toilets common to both sexes, for example, feminists have recalled that the Supreme Court has already recognized a constitutional right to personal privacy in intimate matters in the 1965 case Griswold v. Connecticut. The legalization of homosexual marriages would not be discriminatory if it applied to both sexes. On the draft, feminists have proposed that both men and women should be exempt if they have children under eighteen years of age. But in the new era of cooperation, starting in the late 1970s, feminists began a positive approach to demonstrate the benefits of the Equal Rights Amendment to those most frightened by it: housewives. In the case of divorce, they began emphasizing, the elimination of inequality before the law would mean that housewives would be guaranteed the right to compensation for services rendered, instead of uncertain and humiliating alimony payments. Widows whose husbands had died without leaving a will would automatically be entitled to receive their husbands' pensions, instead of having to fight a costly legal battle to do so. The ERA would eliminate an existing tax inequality, in which the estates of widows but not widowers were subject to inheritance taxes. Every housewife would have the same access to credit as her husband, which was not yet the case, in spite of the Equal Opportunity Credit Act.

This return to the offensive was marked by renewed vigor in NOW, 100,000 members strong after gaining new adherents at the Houston conference. The oldest organization in new feminism started off on a new footing in February 1978, with a solemn proclamation of a state of emergency for the Equal Rights Amendment, excluding any possibility of failure. "We have passed the point of no return," 11 they said, in announcing a new, two-level strategy: state and federal. At the state level, they would mount a campaign in every state that had not yet ratified the ERA. At the federal level, they would lobby Congress to obtain an extension of the deadline for ratification, originally set at 30 March 1979.

The boldest scheme devised by NOW was a boycott of the states whose legislatures had voted against ratification. All liberal organizations were urged not to hold any meetings or conventions in the fifteen recalcitrant states. 12 The boycott results were encouraging for feminists, since 380 organizations of all types heard the appeal. The NOW initiative cost many cities dearly, hitting where it hurt. Miami Beach lost $9 million following the cancellation of convention reservations by the American Library Association, the National Organization of Religious Women, and the National Education Association. Chicago lost $15 million in similar circumstances. The attorney general of the state of Missouri, estimating the lost business to Kansas City and Saint Louis at $18 million, filed a suit against NOW for violation of the antitrust laws. Similar legal action was brought by the state of Nevada and by a travel agency in New Orleans. Recalling that the antitrust laws were aimed at business activities in restraint of trade, NOW retorted that a boycott was not a business activity, and that in any case, independent organizations were free to opt for or against the boycott. Further, NOW filed a countersuit for defamation, claiming $20 million from each of the accusing states. An initial success was gained when a federal district court in Missouri recognized that a boycott is a legitimate form of political expression.

The National Organization for Women out-shone itself with another initiative: the demand for extension of the original seven-year deadline for ratification of the ERA. Credit is due to NOW for the legal research regarding the constitutionality of the extension measure. Investigations revealed that no clause in the Constitution imposes a time limit for ratification; this practice began only with the Eighteenth Amendment. They also argued that although a time limit was mentioned in the preamble to the ERA, there was none in the text of the amendment itself; furthermore, since this time limit had been set by Congress, then Congress had the authority to modify it. Having done its homework, the feminist lobby threw all its weight into the battle and carried off a new success, since the extension of the deadline was voted in by a comfortable majority of 233 to 189 in the House of Representatives, and by 60 to 39 in the Senate. As recalled by the countdown kept by the National NOW Times, a new date was set for sexual equality: 30 June 1982.

This proved to be a vain effort, alas, because under fire from the New Right, the new deadline expired without the Equal Rights Amendment being ratified by any other state. With regard to the Constitution, the new feminist militants had suffered the same setback as the post-World War II ERA activists; that is, although they were uncontestably better organized and better supported, with a majority in numerous public opinion polls, they were still far from escaping from the trap of combat by proxy. In July 1982, immediately after expiration of the deadline, the Equal Rights Amendment was introduced anew to Congress, but American women would have to await the pleasure of the chairmen of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees for the ERA to be inscribed again on the legislative calendar. A vote did take place in the House of Representatives in November 1983, but the amendment failed, six votes short of the required two-thirds majority, with the Democrats dividing 225-38 in favor and the Republicans opposing it 109-53. 13

VOLUNTARY INTERRUPTION OF PREGNANCY

On 22 January 1973, in the case of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court, ruling for the first time on the issue of abortion, rendered a decision in favor of its legality in the United States. This historic decision immediately aroused an army of dissenters. The forces opposing a woman's right to choose the voluntary interruption of pregnancy have been, by and large, the same as those fighting the Equal Rights Amendment. On each anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling, in contrast to the symbolic funeral rites feminists used to hold for women who had died from the butchery of illegal backstreet abortions, now the antichoice forces, calling themselves partisans of the "right to life," began organizing emotional demonstrations in front of the Capitol Building and elsewhere. Thousands of children from Catholic and fundamentalist Protestant schools, let out of lessons for the occasion, were paraded, waving red roses symbolizing the children who will never be born. The Catholic church is believed to have invested huge sums annually in the campaign to overturn the Supreme Court decision, and there has also been a faction of resistance in the medical professions. Opposition has been focused in the National Right-to-Life Committee, established in the 1970s. The most fanatical foes of abortion have frequently had recourse to violence against family planning centers and feminist clinics. A more insidious and more dangerous strategy, from the feminist point of view, has been the attempt to outlaw abortion entirely through a constitutional amendment. In spring 1977, only four years after Roe v. Wade, the Women's Political Times announced that seventy members of Congress had already offered such constitutional amendments. Feminist ranks were worried, recognizing that there was a serious risk of returning to the days of dangerous illegal abortions that existed before 1973; in 1977, with those days still fresh in mind, the journalist Roberta Brandes Gratz summarized the case in a thought-provoking article entitled "Never Again! Never Again?" She cited Koryne Horbal, a member of the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), who reproached feminists for being too soft and yielding on this question: "women's groups have not made it clear to liberal Congressmen and state legislators that abortion is a non-negotiable issue." 14

It was essential to communicate to liberal male politicians that they could not dodge an uncomfortable situation by giving their support to women on other controversial issues in exchange for defection on the thornier question of abortion.

In early 1983, after Senator Jesse Helms had tried in vain to push through a constitutional amendment asserting that human life begins at conception, his colleague Orrin Hatch attempted to open debate on another amendment that would give state legislatures or Congress the right to outlaw abortion. In 1983, and again in 1986, the Supreme Court reaffirmed the right of American women to voluntary interruption of pregnancy, but opposition only increased. Just before the end of President Reagan's second term, his administration filled a friend-of-the court brief with the Supreme Court, asking it to overturn its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. The Court, fortified by conservative members named by President Reagan, agreed to review the case of Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, in what many viewed as the most serious challenge to the legality of abortion since 1973. The case came before the Supreme Court in April 1989, and to show their support for Roe v. Wade, feminists rallied in one of the largest political demonstrations ever held in Washington, rivaling others that have marked historic turning points, such as the 1963 march for civil rights. Working together through the coordination of the Fund for the Feminist Majority under President Ellie Smeal, feminists drew an estimated 300,000 women from all over the United States, in contrast to only a few hundred antichoice advocates who marched in opposition. "It's a turning point," said Ellie Smeal. "It's a totally new ball game. It's given us the confidence that we are the majority."

The Supreme Court's decision, in July 1989, considerably reduced American women's abortion rights, confirming several essential clauses of a restrictive Missouri law. By five votes to four, the Court held constitutional the provision forbidding public funding for the voluntary interruption of pregnancy. Therefore, the decision left the states free not to finance abortions. Also, contrary to the 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade, the July 1989 decision allowed tests on the viability of the foetus at twenty weeks after conception. In addition, the Court under Chief Justice Rehnquist judged constitutional the preamble to the Missouri law which declared that "life begins at conception." Admittedly, the justices said that this declaration did not necessarily have concrete applications on the right to abortion; nevertheless, they let stand Missouri's definition of conception as the moment of fertilization. Finally, the Court reversed itself on one of the fundamental bases of its 1973 ruling, which gave women an absolute right to abortion during the first trimester (three months) of pregnancy without state intervention in their privacy; henceforth, following Webster, the states can intervene from the first trimester.

Consequently, the abortion debate now will be focused at the state level. Instead of a uniform law for the whole country, each state will have its own abortion laws. American women who have the means to pay for an abortion will travel to the so-called liberal states, but the new restrictions will dramatically strike poor women, as well as the youngest and those least informed. Pro-choice advocates fear a return to risky illegal abortions.

In the three months following the Webster decision, the Supreme Court agreed to review other abortion-related cases: Ohio and Minnesota laws involving the constitutionality of parental-notification rules for minors, and an Illinois statute requiring abortions to be performed in strictly licensed clinics. The Pennsylvania legislature was about to pass new severely restrictive legislation that appeared destined to be challenged in the Supreme Court, and other collisions seemed likely.

The decision in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services galvanized American public opinion and political attention. It not only gave a jolt to the Women's movement, but seemed to arouse pro-choice advocates far beyond the ranks of already convinced feminists. In a story headed, "Can Pro-Choicers Prevail?," Time magazine reported on 14 August 1989 that since the Court had agreed to review the case, NOW and NARAL had each gained 50,000 new members. Three months after the decision, when President George Bush vetoed legislation that would have provided federal funding of abortions for women who were the victims of rape or incest, the House only failed by a narrow margin to override the veto. The president's stance, which was seen as allowing abortion rights to women of means and denying them to all others, was widely criticized by members of his own party as politically damaging. Representative Bill Green, Republican, of New York, said, "Mr. Bush may have stumbled on the one issue that could cost him the election in 1992."

The Feminist Struggle and Women at Work

In keeping with Resolution 10 of the Houston platform, and in keeping with the importance assigned by egalitarian feminists to women's rights in the workplace and their systematic attacks on sexual discrimination, numerous initiatives have aimed at combating sexually discriminatory practices and at improving women's lot in employment. The observer could even conclude that the fierce fighting for the Equal Rights Amendment is primarily motivated by the desire to obtain equality for women in hiring, salaries and job responsibilities. This is the basis on which all the previously mentioned professional associations operate, considering that women are not "stealing men's jobs," but that an enormous majority of them are working out of economic necessity. In 1981, they represented 43 percent of the total national active labor force (including full-time and part-time work), and of these, roughly 45 percent were single, widowed, separated, or divorced, while about 25 percent were married to men earning less than $10,000 per year. In 1988, the figure for working women in the national active labor force had risen to 44.8 percent, and among young women, it was much higher. The Labor Department estimated two-thirds of married women aged 20 to 34 were working, and that by the end of the century, women would represent roughly half the American labor force. According to the feminist philosophy of survival, work, for a great many women, is a necessity, the only way to escape social determinism.

LEGAL ACTION

The preferred form of legal action has been to file a court suit pleading for application of existing legislation, specifically, the legislation known as Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It must be said that the author of the sexual clause of this act had considerably underestimated its importance. Feminists and women plaintiffs influenced by feminism have, in fact, invoked Title VII not only regarding injustices in hiring, salary, or promotion, but also for any matter concerned with sexual harassment. Numerous feminist advice centers 15 were set up in the 1970s to provide information about the legal procedures to follow in such cases. Numerous such suits have been filed and won under Title VII; in one of the first examples, Diane Williams, an employee at the Department of Justice, received $16,000 in back pay for having been fired after refusing to give in to the sexual advances of her boss.

Feminist militancy in the workplace has favored court action, and particularly, class action suits. As a new embodiment of "sisterhood," this form of protest appears above all as the collective response of women to their common oppression. It was born, in the most spontaneous way, among women in journalism. On 16 March 1970, forty-six women employed by Newsweek filed a suit with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) claiming that the magazine was practicing sexual discrimination by restricting them to tasks of research and compilation; Newsweek at that time had only one female editor for fifty-one male editors, twelve female reporters for sixty-four male reporters and thirty-four female researchers for only one male researcher. An agreement was signed, on the symbolic date of 26 August 1970, stating a declaration of good intentions on the part of the employer and establishing a women's committee charged with seeing that the management carried out its promises. Two months after the Newsweek initiative, 147 women employees of Time Incorporated undertook similar action, for the same reasons. The accord reached in the Time suit stipulated that all jobs in the company should be henceforth open to all qualified persons, regardless of sex, and that compliance would be supervised by the Human Rights Division of the State of New York.

The class action suit for sexual discrimination took on a new dimension when filed by a group whose common interests were outside the job field. It became a collective summons to a class of officials issued by an organized class of feminists. This was the interesting procedure followed by the Women's Equity Action League (WEAL) regarding discrimination in higher education.

Before it is possible to enter battle in the name of the law, there has to be a law covering the issue; in this case, the law concerned private or public institutions of higher education receiving federal funds. Now, although Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act included sexual discrimination, this title does not mention education. However, Title VI of the same act applies to all institutions receiving federal funds, therefore including teaching institutions, but does not include the clause on sexual discrimination. Thus, a gap existed in the law as it stood, and it needed to be remedied. WEAL did research to dig up an appropriate precedent, and found executive order 11246 of 24 September 1965, amended by executive order 11375 of 13 October 1967, which forbade sexual discrimination in federal employment and applied to all contractors and subcontractors with the federal government.

On 31 January 1970, WEAL filed its first class action suit, summoning the federal administration to apply this executive order to all university establishments bound by contracts with the federal government. Several hundred suits were filed by the same and other organizations within the Women's movement against institutions of higher learning, the first target being the University of Maryland. Feminist pressure was also exercised on Congress, through Edith Green, Democratic congresswoman from Oregon, who in February 1970 submitted four bills aimed at eliminating all sexual discrimination in teaching institutions. Under pressure from two directions, in the euphoric year of 1972, which also saw the passage by Congress of the Equal Rights Amendment, the Ninety-Second Congress adopted Title IX of the Amendments to the Federal Education Act stipulating that:

No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any educational program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance. 16

Now it was a matter of getting the law enforced. This was the second grand offensive of WEAL, launched when the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare published some alarming statistics: HEW revealed, in fact, that of 3,472 university-level institutions, nearly two-thirds had either not returned the proper forms certifying their conformance with the antidiscriminatory legislation, or had falsified their declarations. In spite of this, no institution had been penalized. WEAL's response was immediate and dramatic. The group filed suit against the secretary of health, education, and welfare for administrative negligence in the matter of sexual discrimination. The suit was granted a favorable outcome by the courts, which ordered further investigations in seventeen states. A settlement was reached in 1978 between the parties, in which the secretary undertook to investigate respect for civil rights in schools and universities, and to recruit 898 staff members, to be assigned to an HEW subagency, the Office of Civil Rights; by this recruitment, HEW was to make up for its delay in examining 3,000 discrimination complaints that had been lying unattended, and to do so by 30 September 1979.

These figures belied a new myth circulating in the 1970s on university campuses alleging reverse sexual discrimination; rumors were heard of women being hired and promoted just because they were women. In 1978, representation of women on the faculties of America's ten most prestigious universities was stagnating at 15 percent, after having declined between 1971 and 1974, and overall, only 8 percent of these women had reached the peak of the academic pyramid. However, by 1981, according to data presented by Catharine Stimpson at a colloquium in Toulouse, France, 17 35 percent of all U.S. college and university teachers were women.

Another major initiative undertaken by WEAL in this second offensive concerned sexual discrimination in the retirement schemes that applied in most universities. Until 1978, in fact, it was customary in the United States for women to pay higher retirement contributions than men for an equal or lower pension, on the theory that women live longer than men. However, 84 percent of men and women have equal longevity. In other words, all women were penalized because a minority of them live longer. This was the basis of a class action suit filed by WEAL against more than 2,000 university establishments whose retirement funds were administered by the Teacher's Insurance and Annuity Association. In July 1983, the Supreme Court affirmed the lower court's 1978 decision which ended the regime of higher retirement contributions for women, proclaiming the principle of equal retirement pensions for equal contributions. However, this decision had no retroactive effect.

FROM FEMINIST LAW STUDENT TO FEMINIST LAWYER

Feminists' interest in legal action has been shown by a massive influx of women enrolling in law schools. In 1970, for example, women represented only 10 percent of first-year law students; in 1980, they made up a quarter of the beginning enrollment. By 1989, 40 percent of the law students in the United States were women. Pursuing law studies has been seen as a political act in the cause of women's rights, and figured among the militant activities listed by one of my radical feminist correspondents. As early as 1973, Judith Hole and Ellen Levine reported the words of a woman jurist who said that every law school in the country was harboring a group of militant feminists. If anyone wonders about the political motivation that might drive an increasing number of young women toward this sector of the university, it seems obvious that their choice is the result of a primary commitment to the feminist movement and their awareness that women need to know how to use the laws or reform them for their own benefit. In any case, the Women's Liberation movement has always needed lawyers.

The first action by feminist law students consisted of transforming women' rights issues into a new branch of legal studies. Their objective was to gain acceptance in the law schools of an emerging academic discipline, to be called women's rights law. Their argument was that numerous sexist laws remained on the books in many states, and that lawsuits for sexual discrimination were on the increase; these factors provided substantial material for debate and for fascinating research. Furthermore, it was important that graduating classes of women lawyers should be trained in these areas to prevent this lucrative market being entirely taken over by men. The mission of eradicating sexism from the patriarchal legal system could only be incumbent upon women of goodwill.

The first success in this matter was the appearance of specific courses on women and the law, such as the one taught by the feminist jurist Diane Schulder at the University of Pennsylvania, beginning in 1969. The following year, similar courses were started at Yale, Georgetown, and George Washington University, focusing on sexism in state laws and analyzing Supreme court decisions concerning the status of women. The year 1971 saw the birth of the first periodical aimed at jurists specializing in women's rights law: the Women's Rights Law Reporter.

Actions by women law students had early echoes in the legal professions. The Law Women's Caucus of the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School filed a suit with the EEOC in February 1970 against the university's placement office, which offered its services to notoriously sexist law firms. Under pressure from the EEOC, the law school promised to ostracize any firm guilty of sexual discrimination. Similar decisions were taken by the law schools of the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Michigan.

At the professional level, feminist lawyers naturally took up the relay. Here again, they resorted to class action suits. In March 1971, the Legal Task Force of the Professional Women's Caucus filed a class suit against all law schools receiving federal funds, for sexual discrimination in the recruitment of law students. The action was based on statistics published by the Committee on Women in Legal Education formed by the Association of American Law Schools, indicating that between 1966 and 1970, the number of women law students had only increased by an average of 3 percent, and in the same period, a third of the law schools had seen their percentage of women students decline.

Following the same reasoning that inspired women to study law, feminist lawyers have put their skills at the service of the cause of women's rights. Nonprofit groups and associations were formed. Human Rights for Women, for example, was born in 1968. This tax-exempt foundation, created with a generous donation from Alice Paul, one of the leading suffragists, specialized in the documentation or even financing of sexual discrimination lawsuits. Landmark suits aided by this foundation include the 1969 cases of Bowe et al. v. Colgate Palmolive and Mengelhock v. State of California. 18 In the same spirit, but on a larger scale, radical feminists of the Chicago Women's Liberation Union established a legal clinic where, every Wednesday night, legal advisers came to give counseling to women wishing to pursue legal action to defend their rights.

By 1989, women lawyers made up 20 percent of their profession and were boldly challenging the status quo. From 30 March to 2 April 1989, over 1,300 women attended the Twentieth Women and the Law Conference held in Oakland, California, on the theme "In the Courtroom and in the Community: Twenty Years of Feminist Struggle." There were more than a hundred workshops, covering a broad range of issues in criminal law, education, economic empowerment, employment, feminist jurisprudence, family law, housing, health, immigration, international law, sex, violence, and women in prison. The workshop called Unpacking Violence against Women focused on a feminist theoretical basis for activism against violence against women; its closing speaker was Catharine A. MacKinnon, one of the leading feminist scholars of jurisprudence, best-known for pioneering the theoretical work behind establishing sexual harassment as a form of sex discrimination and for drafting an antipornography ordinance with Andrea Dworkin.

FROM SUPPORT GROUP TO UNION?

Feminist legal action has also been undertaken by office workers, and this is interesting from another point of view: it shows the emergence of permanent workers' defense structures in an employment sector that is overwhelmingly female (80.1 percent of office workers are women). By 1984, a grid of mutual-interest groups covering this enormous force of working women was well established. In the feminist surge of the 1970s, some twenty or more such associations were organized, usually at the city level. The most well known have been Union WAGE in Berkeley, Women Organized for Employment (WOE) in San Francisco, Women Employed (WE) in Chicago, Women Office Workers (WOW) in New York, and 9 to 5 in Boston. The financial resources of these groups have come from dues paid by the members, grants given by various nonprofit organizations, conferences, lectures, and other initiatives. On the morning of 16 July 1977, when I met members of the group 9 to 5, they were busily engaged in a book sale, selling such feminist works as Jean Tepperman's Not Servants, Not Machines: Office Workers Speak Out, at the foot of Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge.

For the day of the national secretaries' strike in 1974, Women Employed and 9 to 5 jointly published a Secretary's Bill of Rights, which first proclaimed the human dignity of secretaries, and went on to address the social legislation covering them. As a member of 9 to 5 told us, clerical workers were asking not only for their rights on the job, but also wanted the consideration of being treated as human beings. To achieve this goal, different groups have pursued two types of strategy. One consists of putting pressure on government agencies to enforce the law; thus, the group 9 to 5 filed lawsuits against banks, insurance companies, and publishing firms in Boston, in order that the official order for "affirmative action" should not be just vain words. The second strategy consists of organizing workers at the workplace. In this case, the aim is to make them aware of the political dimension of their position as workers in relation to management, and to train them in activist techniques enabling them to use their power, organize meetings, and manage protest activities.

Although these groups have won some legal battles against an insurance company here or there, their successes remain fragmentary. According to a pamphlet published in 1979 by the Women's Work Project, 19 the condition of office workers had even deteriorated in the previous twenty or thirty years, particularly in the matter of salaries. A woman office worker who, in 1956, received 72 percent of the salary of her male colleagues, only received 60 percent of a man's salary in 1975. Inevitably the question arose, as asked by Jean Tepperman in 1976 and repeated by Wendy Stevens in 1979: 20 don't we need a union of women office workers? The idea quickly spread among those concerned. The group 9 to 5, which formerly had viewed the idea unfavorably, now began to think that women were ready to try this. In fact, thanks to the activities of the organization mentioned above, many women office workers have acquired experience in activism and public speaking, enabling them to play a role at the highest levels of labor unions, and perhaps to amend existing unions so that feminism is not entirely absorbed by unionism. It seems certain that only a national organization, bringing together women office workers in a united front, would permit these new talents to have sufficient impact to make a real change in the working conditions for women in this employment sector and to protect their jobs. A new menace is cited by the Women's Work Project pamphlet, that is, the accelerated pace of office automation, which they claim is being used by big banking corporations as a convenient way of ridding themselves of the growing demands of their employees.

In the employment sector, as in the civil rights field, a policy of unity is needed. We have seen the first fruits of the struggle, and we can say that this experimentation with a strategy of coalition is the most significant evolution in feminism in recent years. This new orientation recalls that followed by nineteenth-century feminism in its earliest phase, when the cause of women was linked with that of the black slaves in a common struggle for rights. Do twentieth-century feminists run the risk of being the big losers in this policy of coalition, as their sisters were in 1865? I think a negative answer can be given to this question, since the political contexts appear to me to be quite different. In the 1860s, the black question was the crucial issue, and the women's question had been raised, in some ways, as a side issue. In contrast, if we consider the virulence of the antifeminist backlash in the 1980s, it appears that the women's question, even if it does not make the headlines every day, has been perceived as the primordial issue today in the field of civil rights. Nevertheless, this assessment does not imply a relaxation of vigilance.

"Houston: A Reaffirmation for NWPC," editorial, Women's Political Times 2, no. 4 (Winter 1977): 2.
Elinor Langer, "Why Big Business Is Trying to Defeat the ERA: The Economic Implications of Equality," Ms. 4, no. 1 (May 1976): 106.
Jo Freeman, "Women at the 1988 Democratic Convention," Off Our Backs (October 1988): 5.
"Mr. President, Thank You, But," editorial, Women's Political Times 2, no. 1 (Winter 1977): 2.
Yet, the requirement for equal division by sex does not apply to superdelegates (members of Congress and governors) whose presence "still tips the balance in favor of males. The 1984 Democratic party convention had 50 more men than women delegates, and in 1988, there were over a hundred more men." Off Our Backs (October 1988): 4.
Women United to Defend Existing Rights.
Langer, "Why Big Business," 102.
"ERA Down the Wire," Women's Political Times, 2, no. 2 (Spring 1977): 2.
Lindsy Van Gelder, "The 400,000 Voter Misunderstanding," Ms. 4, no. 9 (March 1976): 67.

The participants were Gloria Steinem for Ms. ; Mildred Jeffrey for the NWPC; Ellie Smeal for NOW; Ben Albert and Victor Kramber for the AFL-CIO; Carl Wagner for the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees; Jim Farner for the Coalition of American Public Employees; the Democratic senator from New Hampshire, Thomas J. McIntyre; Russ Hemenway for the National Committee for an Effective Congress; Joyce Hamlin for the United Methodist church; Carol Costin for Network, and Wes McCuun, a researcher who had specialized for sixteen years in studying right-wing political activities.

National Organization for Women, "Declaration of a State of Emergency," March 1978.
The NOW boycott was aimed at Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah, and Virginia.
Berry, Why ERA Failed, 106.
Cited by Roberta Brandes Gratz in "Never Again! Never Again?" Ms. 6, no. 1 (July 1977): 54.
Among these were the Alliance against Sexual Coercion, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Working Women United Institute, in New York.
U.S. Department of Labor, Handbook on Women Workers, Bulletin 297 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975), 300.
"Femmes, féminisme et recherches," colloquium held in Toulouse, France, 17, 18, and 19 December 1982.
These two cases concerned so-called protective legislation, claiming that such laws actually imposed a handicap on women by their provisions forbidding women to lift certain weights and to work overtime.
The Women's Work Project, Women Organizing the Office (Washington, D.C.: Women in Distribution, 1979).
Tepperman, Not Servants, Not Machines, 92. Wendy Stevens, "Women Organizing the Office," Off Our Backs 9, no. 4 (April 1979): 10.

Cite this page as follows:

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National Organization For Women (N.O.W.) Statement Of Purpose (Essay Date 1966)

SOURCE: National Organization for Women (N.O.W.) Statement of Purpose. 1966. In the following statement of purpose, the founding members of N.O.W. outline their goals, emphasizing that the organization will be the voice of women seeking equality in employment, education, politics, and under the law.

We, men and women, who hereby constitute ourselves as the National Organization for Women, believe that the time has come for a new movement toward true equality for all women in America, and toward a fully equal partnership of the sexes, as part of the world-wide revolution of human rights now taking place within and beyond our national borders.

The purpose of NOW is to take action to bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society now, exercising all the privileges and responsibilities thereof in truly equal partnership with men.

We believe the time has come to move beyond the abstract argument, discussion and symposia over the status and special nature of women which has raged in America in recent years; the time has come to confront, with concrete action, the conditions that now prevent women from enjoying the equality of opportunity and freedom of which is their right, as individual Americans, and as human beings.

NOW is dedicated to the proposition that women, first and foremost, are human beings, who, like all other people in our society, must have the chance to develop their fullest human potential. We believe that women can achieve such equality only by accepting to the full the challenges and responsibilities they share with all other people in our society, as part of the decision-making mainstream of American political, economic and social life.

We organize to initiate or support action, nationally, or in any part of this nation, by individuals or organizations, to break through the silken curtain of prejudice and discrimination against women in government, industry, the professions, the churches, the political parties, the judiciary, the labor unions, in education, science, medicine, law, religion and every other field of importance in American society. Enormous changes taking place in our society make it both possible and urgently necessary to advance the unfinished revolution of women toward true equality, now. With a life span lengthened to nearly 75 years it is no longer either necessary or possible for women to devote the greater part of their lives to child-rearing; yet childbearing and rearing which continues to be a most important part of most women's lives—still is used to justify barring women from equal professional and economic participation and advance.

Today's technology has reduced most of the productive chores which women once performed in the home and in mass-production industries based upon routine unskilled labor. This same technology has virtually eliminated the quality of muscular strength as a criterion for filling most jobs, while intensifying American industry's need for creative intelligence. In view of this new industrial revolution created by automation in the mid-twentieth century, women can and must participate in old and new fields of society in full equality—or become permanent outsiders.

Despite all the talk about the status of American women in recent years, the actual position of women in the United States has declined, and is declining, to an alarming degree throughout the 1950's and '60s. Although 46.4% of all American women between the ages of 18 and 65 now work outside the home, the overwhelming majority—75%—are in routine clerical, sales, or factory jobs, or they are household workers, cleaning women, hospital attendants. About two-thirds of Negro women workers are in the lowest paid service occupations. Working women are becoming increasingly—not less—concentrated on the bottom of the job ladder. As a consequence full-time women workers today earn on the average only 60% of what men earn, and that wage gap has been increasing over the past twenty-five years in every major industry group. In 1964, of all women with a yearly income, 89% earned under $5,000 a year; half of all full-time year round women workers earned less than $3,690; only 1.4% of full-time year round women workers had an annual income of $10,000 or more.

Further, with higher education increasingly essential in today's society, too few women are entering and finishing college or going on to graduate or professional school. Today, women earn only one in three of the B.A.'s and M.A.'s granted, and one in ten of the Ph.D.'s.

In all the professions considered of importance to society, and in the executive ranks of industry and government, women are losing ground. Where they are present it is only a token handful. Women comprise less than 1% of federal judges; less than 4% of all lawyers; 7% of doctors. Yet women represent 51% of the U.S. population. And, increasingly men are replacing women in the top positions in secondary and elementary schools, in social work, and in libraries—once thought to be women's fields,

Official pronouncements of the advance in the status of women hide not only the reality of this dangerous decline, but the fact that nothing is being done to stop it. The excellent reports of the President's Commission on the Status of Women and of the State Commissions have not been fully implemented. Such Commissions have power only to advise. They have no power to enforce their recommendations; nor have they the freedom to organize American women and men to press for action on them. The reports of these commissions have, however created a basis upon which it is now possible to build.

Discrimination in employment on the basis of sex is now prohibited by federal law, in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But although nearly one-third of the cases brought before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission during the first year dealt with sex discrimination and the proportion is increasing dramatically, the Commission has not made clear its intention to enforce the law with the same seriousness on behalf of women as of other victims of discrimination. Many of these cases were Negro women, who are the victims of the double discrimination of race and sex. Until now, too few women's organizations and official spokesmen have been willing to speak out against these dangers facing women. Too many women have been restrained by the fear of being called "feminist."

There is no civil rights movement to speak for women, as there has been for Negroes and other victims of discrimination. The National Organization for Women must therefore begin to speak.

We believe that the power of American law, and the protection guaranteed by the U. S. Constitution to the civil rights of all individuals, must be effectively applied and enforced to isolate and remove patterns of sex discrimination, to ensure equality of opportunity in employment and education, and equality of civil and political rights and responsibilities on behalf of women, as well as for Negroes and other deprived groups.

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Introduction

The feminist movement in the United States and abroad was a social and political movement that sought to establish equality for women. The movement transformed the lives of many individual women and exerted a profound effect upon American society throughout the twentieth century. During the first two decades of the century, women's groups in the United States worked together to win women's suffrage, culminating in the ratification of a constitutional amendment in 1920 that guaranteed women the right the vote. During the later twentieth century, women's groups would again band together, this time to formulate and advocate for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Though this proposed constitutional amendment ultimately failed to gain approval in the late 1970s, it became a rallying point for diverse women's groups and drew national attention to the feminist cause.

The period between 1917 and the early 1960s was marked by two world wars and a subsequent economic boom that brought many American women into the workplace, initially to provide labor during the war, and then to help achieve and maintain a new higher standard of living enjoyed by many middle-class families. However, as women joined the workforce they became increasingly aware of their unequal economic and social status. Women who were homemakers, many with college educations, began to articulate their lack of personal fulfillment—what Betty Friedan in her enormously influential The Feminine Mystique (1963) called "the problem that has no name."

Other events in the United States, notably the civil rights movement, contributed to the rise of the feminist movement. During the early 1960s, the civil rights movement gathered momentum, aided by new anti-racist legislation, and reached a major goal in 1964 with the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Many feminists interpreted the ban on racial discrimination, established by the Civil Rights Act, to apply to gender discrimination as well. The student movement was also at its height in the 1960s, leading many younger citizens to question traditional social values and to protest against American military involvement in Vietnam. Feminist groups followed the example set by these movements, adopting the techniques of consciousness raising, protests, demonstrations, and political lobbying in order to further their own agenda.

The founding of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966 marked the formation of an official group to represent and campaign for women's concerns. Leaders such as Friedan, Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisholm, and Gloria Steinem pressured politicians to become aware of women's concerns and to work on legislation that would improve the quality of women's lives. At the same time, many other organizations emerged to deal with feminist causes, including the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, National Displaced Homemakers, the battered women's movement, the Women's Equity Action League, Women Organized for Employment, and Women Office Workers. In the early 1970s feminist leaders also established a detailed program of proposed political and legal reforms, and in 1975 the National Women's Agenda was presented to President Gerald Ford, all state governors, and all members of Congress. In 1977, feminists organized a National Women's Conference in Houston, where they drafted an action plan that included twenty-six resolutions; the plan was subsequently distributed to government officials to remind them of their responsibility to female constituents. NOW and the newly organized National Women's Political Caucus worked to influence politicians and legislators while continuing their effort to keep women's issues prominent in the media.

During the 1980s, American society was colored by an increasingly conservative political climate and the feminist movement experienced a backlash within their ranks and from anti-feminist detractors. Feminism had always been criticized for being a predominantly white, upperclass movement and for its failure to adequately understand and represent the concerns of poor, African-American, and Hispanic women. The movement had already splintered in the 1970s along the lines of liberal feminists, who focused on the rights of women as individuals; radical feminists, who aligned themselves with revolutionary groups, viewing women as a disenfranchised class of citizens; and lesbians, who had been very much a part of the early feminist movement, but now found more in common with the gay liberation movement. Legislative gains achieved in the 1970s—notably Congress's passing of the ERA amendment and key judicial decisions, chief among them Roe v. Wade, which guaranteed women's reproductive rights—were under attack by conservative and religious antiabortion coalitions and an organized anti-ERA effort led by Phyllis Schlafly. Some state legislatures backtracked under pressure, overturning or diluting court decisions made in the previous decade. President Ronald Reagan also made his opposition to the ERA public. Due to a combination of political and social factors, the amendment failed to pass in the individual states. In addition, some women who had subscribed to the tenets of the feminist movement now voiced their displeasure at being negatively labeled anti-male and expressed regret at the loss of personal security that traditional women's roles offer. Their concerns echoed in the neoconservative writings of authors such as Naomi Wolf, Susan Faludi, and Camille Paglia.

Nevertheless, feminists pressed on, maintaining pressure on legislators to address women's issues such as reproductive rights, pay equity, affirmative action, sexual harassment, and the handling of rape victims in the courts. In retrospect, the early 1960s has been termed the "first wave" of the feminist movement, and the activists of the 1970s and 1980s have been called the "second wave." In the 1990s there emerged a "third wave" of feminists, still concerned with many of the same problems as their predecessors, but now wishing to work from within the political and legal establishments rather than criticizing them from the outside. This mostly younger generation of feminists would also stress the need to broaden the scope of feminism, emphasizing global networking, human rights, worldwide economic justice, and issues pertaining to race, gender, and class.

"Feminism in Literature - Introduction." Feminism in Literature, edited by Jessica Bomarito, Jeffrey W. Hunter, Vol. 4. Gale Cengage, 2005, 17 Aug. 2024 <https://www.enotes.com/topics/feminism/critical-essays/feminist-movement-20th-century#critical-essays-feminist-movement-20th-century-introduction-2>

Myra Marx Ferree And Beth B. Hess (Essay Date 1994)

SOURCE: Ferree, Myra Marx, and Beth B. Hess. "Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: Defending Gains, 1983-92." In Controversy and Coalition: The New Feminist Movement across Three Decades of Change, rev. ed., pp. 159-93. New York: Twayne, 1994. In the following essay, Ferree and Hess explore key developments affecting the women's movement between 1983 and 1992, noting changes in strategy used to preserve gains in the areas of reproductive rights, employment law, and political life.

With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the national political agenda shifted markedly toward the Right. In the following decade, under both Presidents Reagan and Bush, many fronts on which feminist gains had been realized in the 1970s came under direct attack. Outspoken anti-feminists were appointed to the judiciary and placed in charge of civil rights enforcement; social programs benefiting poor women were cut or abandoned; and reproductive choice was openly opposed. For the New Feminist Movement, the major challenges of the 1980s included maintaining public approval for positions that a popular president and the federal government no longer supported; resisting efforts to reframe feminist concerns in hostile language; and defending feminist organizations and their members from direct, sometimes violent, attack.

In this chapter, we argue that the hostile climate in which the New Feminist Movement existed in this period led to major changes in organization, strategy, and emphasis. We call this decade one of "defensive consolidation" because much of the movement's efforts were directed at defending feminist perspectives and programs, and because such efforts required more extensive consolidation among feminist organizations regardless of their specific form of feminist perspective (radical, socialist, liberal, or career) or organizational strategy (educational/political, direct action/self-help, or cultural/entrepreneurial). Much of this consolidation occurred along substantive lines. That is, whereas in previous decades one could more easily speak of "the" women's movement, there now appeared to be many specific movements—the battered women's movement, the reproductive rights movement, the antirape movement, the pay equity movement, to name just a few—and these specialized movements drew on the organizational strengths and individual skills of feminists in a variety of social locations to effect progress on specific issues.

For example, the battered women's movement came to include the following: openly feminist public officials and legislators working on this issue; managers, employees, board members, and volunteers at community-based shelters; people who turned out for demonstrations or wrote checks or letters of support for programs; community activists and educators; supportive law enforcement personnel and lawyers. The variety of their efforts meant that laws were passed, implemented, and monitored for effectiveness; programs were funded and staffed; public consciousness was raised. Thus, the movement that consolidated around a specific issue—ending woman battering—engaged an enormous variety of feminist activists at all levels from grassroots to federal with strategies that ranged from institutional to confrontational.

Because this was already the third decade of the active mobilization of the New Feminist Movement, it is appropriate to speak of it as a mature movement. Maturity does not imply that the movement has ceased to grow or develop, but rather that many of the early organizations were now institutionalized, that is, they had developed regular patterns of interaction with individuals and groups in their environment. In contrast to previous decades, the movement's energies were at this time less directed to founding new groups (organizational proliferation) than to accomplishing unfinished goals. Many activists had a base of experience in a variety of feminist organizations on which they could draw for both good ideas and bad examples. Some of the organizational problems facing the movement in this decade included recruiting new generations of activists into existing organizations and passing on the lessons learned in the 1960s and 1970s.

In the first section of this chapter, we examine three specific struggles waged by feminist organizations in this period of defensive consolidation: reproductive rights, sexual violence, and economic justice. These issues dominated the political agenda of the 1980s, and each issue posed both serious threats and new opportunities for mobilization. The second section looks at how changes in the political environment affected recruitment among young women, and how the defensive demands of the period shaped the organizations and strategies of the movement.

Old Problems, New Issues

Gains made in previous decades combined with the resistance to change by the New Right and the federal government placed feminists in the position of having to defend what they thought they had already won. In many cases, this led to a broadening and deepening of alliances, but it also made feminism more of a reactive movement—that is, one that responded to threats rather than setting its own agenda for the future (proactive). These threats came in a variety of forms. Each of the three issues considered in this section posed different types of dangers in equally varied arenas. The battle over reproductive rights has been waged largely in the courts and on the streets; the struggle over sexual violence has been carried out largely in the media; and the conflict over economic priorities has been played out primarily in state and federal legislatures.

REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS

In the Courts

As we saw in chapter 6, by the early 1980s, the abortion issue had been radically transformed by the mobilization of anti-choice constituencies at both the grassroots and the national level, supported by the White House and many friendly state governments of both parties. The initiative now passed to those seeking to limit severely or totally ban abortion, placing reproductive rights activists on the defensive. Feminists could no longer rely on a protective Supreme Court, as justices supporting Roe v. Wade were replaced by justices selected precisely for their antiabortion views. By the late 1980s, a majority of the Court was ready to undermine the premises of Roe, if not overturn it completely. Three major decisions between 1989 and 1991 eroded women's right to reproductive choice and spurred reactive mobilization among feminists.

In Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989), the Court left standing a Missouri statute that barred public hospitals and employees from performing abortions, required physicians to test for fetal viability, and stated that human life "begins at conception." In effect, the Court invited other states to enact ever more restrictive legislation. Many states, mostly in the South, but also Pennsylvania, Utah, and the Territory of Guam, responded immediately with laws that raised obstacles for women and health-care providers, including the mandate of a twenty-four-or forty-eight-hour waiting period after the woman was informed about fetal development and the requirements that a minor secure permission from one—or even both—parents and that a married woman inform her husband.

The first of these increasingly restrictive state statutes reached the Supreme Court in the case of Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, decided in July 1992. A bare majority of justices upheld the basic right of a woman to control her reproductive life but nonetheless left standing virtually all of the Pennsylvania law. The Court also enunciated a new standard by which to judge the constitutionality of similar statutes: whether the restrictions constitute an "undue burden" on the woman. The practical outcome will be a wide disparity among the states in the availability of legal abortion, depending in part on how effectively feminists mobilize in each state to resist these laws in the future.

The Reagan and Bush administrations also issued regulations that subverted the intent of laws they were charged with carrying out. One such rule barred workers in family planning clinics receiving federal funds from even mentioning abortion as a possible option for their clients. In Rust v. Sullivan (1991), the Supreme Court upheld this regulation, declaring that the government had no obligation to "support" speech of which it disapproved. Despite the decision's implications for free speech in all areas of public life, its practical effect was limited, since this regulation was rescinded in early 1993 by newly elected President Clinton. Clinton also reversed policies that banned abortion in military hospitals, denied Medicaid funding for abortions for poor women, and barred approval of the abortifacient drug RU486, although Congress has the power to restore such barriers.

Clinton's first appointment to the Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, reflected a commitment to reproductive rights that may guide lower-level judicial appointments as well. But because it will take many appointments to reverse the conservative tilt of the federal judiciary, pro-choice advocates have shifted their attention back to Congress in order to seek protection of reproductive rights. In 1991, a Freedom of Choice Act was introduced by 32 Senators and 132 Representatives but had made only halting progress toward enactment by early 1994. NOW and some feminist legislators withdrew their support from the bill when limitations on abortion funding were added, since this would mean fewer reproductive rights for poor women than for the middle class.

On the Streets

Antiabortion forces have not depended solely on the courts or the federal administration to achieve their goals. Demonstrations and protests at hospitals, clinics, and physicians' offices escalated throughout the 1980s, so effectively harassing providers that most hospitals and doctors no longer perform the procedure. By the end of the 1980s, only 10 percent of all abortions were performed in hospitals, compared to almost half in 1974. This was originally considered a positive trend by feminists who favored the more client-centered and less expensive treatment offered in free-standing clinics. However, as the practice of abortion became isolated from the medical mainstream and localized in the hands of a few providers in separated facilities, antiabortionists were able to concentrate their attacks on these small and relatively unprotected sites (Beam and Paul 1992). At the same time, medical schools and residency programs stopped training students in the techniques of safe abortion. As a consequence, in the United States today, abortion services are not available in 80 percent of counties, especially in the Rocky Mountain states and in the South (Henshaw 1991; Lewin 1992).

The aggressive confrontational mode of the antiabortion movement began in 1984 with the first "Action for Life" training conferences, which evolved in 1987 into an organization called Operation Rescue (OR), under the leadership of Randall Terry and Joseph Scheidler. Operation Rescue employs coercion and intimidation to close clinics, harass health-care personnel, and deter women from seeking abortions, as vividly illustrated by its 1988 "siege" of family planning facilities in Atlanta, Georgia, during the Democratic National Convention.

A typical OR performance includes obstructing clinic entrances with a human chain of protesters (often locked to doors and to each other), laying down (or telling their children to lay down) in front of cars, aggressively confronting clinic clients and personnel with threats and moral condemnation, and resisting arrest by going limp and refusing to give their names. Despite obvious differences between some of these tactics and the nonviolent protests of the Civil Rights movement, antiabortion protesters have successfully framed their actions as borrowed from this tradition. Other protesters may follow clients or providers to their homes, threaten their families, make harassing phone calls at all hours, and throw bricks through their windows.

In the five years between 1987 and 1992, there were over five hundred blockades at hundreds of clinics around the country. Other, more violent actions over the decade included 390 cases of criminal vandalism, dozens of burglaries, physical assaults on providers and patients, and hundreds of fires, bombs, and noxious gas attacks (National Abortion Federation 1992). Physicians who provide abortion in their private practice have also been harassed at their homes as well as at their offices. Even before the 1993 murder of Dr. David Gunn, one of the few physicians serving family planning clinics in Florida, fewer and fewer doctors were willing to perform the procedure. As anti-choice violence escalated, so did the cost of insurance and security, forcing some clinics out of business and other providers to decide that this was too risky and unpleasant a way to practice medicine (Hyde 1994; Simonds 1994). The result is that the availability of legal, safe abortion has been substantially curtailed. By 1991, only 7 percent of rural counties had even one abortion provider (Beam and Paul 1992).

The successes of the anti-choice mobilization activated all sectors of the women's movement to defend clinics and their clients. An alliance was also forged between feminists and the family planning network, despite the latter's initial concerns about their public image and tax status (Staggenborg 1991). The National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL) and Planned Parenthood are now strongly allied with NOW and the women's policy network, and feminist organizations at all levels have placed the defense of reproductive rights at the top of their agenda, diverting valuable resources from proactive fights on other issues.

At the local level, feminists have responded creatively and energetically to Operation Rescue by training crisis intervention teams to defend clinics and to provide protective escorts for clients. These countertactics have proven successful in turning back OR assaults in many cities, but once the immediate crisis is over and the national media have left the scene, lower-level harassment continues day after day, week after week (Simonds 1994). Involvement in ongoing clinic defense have thus become an important form of feminist activism. New defensive organizations have sprung to life, such as Students Organizing Students, founded after the Webster decision and already counting 150 campus chapters in 1991 (Kamen 1991).

In the twenty years since Roe, regardless of national administration, public opinion has steadily favored the pro-choice position (see chapter 4). Such support is not without its nuances and ambiguities. While endorsing a general right to choose, many Americans make distinctions among the reasons women have for terminating a pregnancy. Although 80 to 95 percent favor the right to a legal abortion in cases of rape, incest, fetal deformity, or threat to the mother's life or health, only about half support legal abortions for reasons such as being poor, unmarried, or not wishing to have another child. However, 43 percent feel that a woman should have the right to choose under any circumstance, compared to under 20 percent who would deny abortion in all cases. Polls also indicate that most Americans do not support the obstruction of family planning clinics, nor do they wish to see Roe v. Wade overturned (Schmittroth 1991). In fact, pro-choice organizations received a record number of contributions in the months immediately following the Webster decision, and membership in NARAL doubled (to 400,000).

At the same time that most Americans support woman's right to legal abortion, many also express strong personal reservations. In her re-analysis of national survey data, Scott (1989) found women are more likely than men to express moral reservations but equally likely to endorse the legal right. While individuals may be ambivalent, the public debate has become polarized. Feminist scholars' efforts to hear women's voices and represent their complex decision-making processes (e.g., Ginsburg 1989; Gilligan 1982) are drowned out by the anger and violence of the confrontation. Thus the simple need to defend choice rather than a proactive and inclusive vision of reproductive rights (e.g., Petchesky 1984; Rothman 1989) has dominated women's movement politics in this decade.

SEXUAL VIOLENCE

While the struggle over reproductive rights has often been physical, the battle between feminists and the New Right over sexual violence has been a war of words. Both sides are actively engaged in contesting the media's framing of the issue. One significant achievement of feminist organizations in the 1970s was the building of a substantial consensus in the United States that women ought to be able to walk the streets in safety and to feel secure in their homes and workplaces. Over the past decade, feminists have offered new labels, arguments, and strategies addressing various behaviors on the continuum of sexual violence: workplace harassment, physical abuse in the home, rape, and incest. At the same time, the antifeminist backlash has attempted to trivialize these issues with claims that date rape is a myth and that women are "whining" about outcomes that they have either invited or imagined (e.g., Roiphe 1993). Debates over whether women or men are to blame for the undeniable prevalence of sexual violence have intensified, and the feminist attempt to build a consensus that would hold men accountable for their actions now seems in danger of slipping away.

Sexual Harassment

This term covers a wide range of behaviors that were viewed as the inevitable result of "natural sexual attraction" until the late 1970s. Even though "sex discrimination" as a broad category was outlawed by the Civil Rights Act of 1963, it took almost two decades for sexual harassment to be reframed as an actionable form of unlawful discrimination.

The first cases claiming that workplace demands for sexual favors constituted sex discrimination were filed by African-American women in the late 1970s (MacKinnon 1987, 60-65). In 1980, the EEOC ruled that harassment on the basis of sex was a violation of the Civil Rights Act. Among the actions so defined were unwelcome sexual advances and requests for sexual favors; other verbal and physical conduct when submission is either explicitly or implicitly made a condition of employment or the basis of employment decisions; conduct that interferes with an individual's work performance and creates an intimidating, hostile, or offensive working environment (Seals, Jenkins and Manale 1992). In 1986, the Supreme Court affirmed the illegality of sexual harassment in Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson.

Although the language of the statute is gender neutral, the great majority of the victims are women for several reasons: women are still perceived as legitimate targets for male attention and aggression; harassment is part of the "normal" working conditions of many sex-typed jobs such as waitressing and nursing; male co-workers can use sexual harassment to defend their turf from women trying to enter male sex-typed jobs; men are more likely than women to be in supervisory positions with the power to harass subordinates (Martin 1989).

Most feminist attention has been directed toward raising awareness of the issue in the courts and among victims. The well-publicized confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas as Justice of the Supreme Court in 1991 greatly raised consciousness on the issue, but the hearings also revealed the obstacles to bringing a successful sexual harassment suit. Anita Hill, a law professor who had worked for Thomas both at the Education Department and when he directed the EEOC, charged that he had created a hostile environment and engaged in unwelcome sexual conversations. Her claims were ridiculed and her character and sanity attacked. According to public opinion polls, the hearings initially left women as well as men more convinced by Thomas's denial than by Hill's testimony. However, as the television images faded, opinion dramatically reversed, with a majority in 1992 believing Hill (Gallup October 1991 and December 1992). In effect, the hearings were a national consciousness-raising session on sexual harassment, demonstrating how sexist assumptions affect a woman's credibility and how she is treated by authorities, as well as the personal costs and political significance of speaking out (Morrison 1992).

Anita Hill was blamed for not reporting the behavior of her boss at the time it happened (when it was not clear the courts would treat it as illegal), but her response was more typical than not. A survey of federal government employees found that 42 percent of the women (but only 14 percent of the men) said they had been sexually harassed, yet only 5 percent took any kind of formal action (Tangri, Burt, and Johnson 1982). Similarly, a national poll in 1991 found that four out of ten women had experienced unwanted sexual advances at their workplace, but only 4 percent reported the incident (Kolbert 1991). Use of legal remedies is inhibited by cumbersome reporting procedures as well as a lack of clear-cut penalties (Seal Jenkins, and Manale 1992), a situation that feminists are attempting to remedy through their unions and state legislatures. At the urging of the women's policy network in Washington, the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1991 included explicit penalties for sexual harassment, but they were relatively mild compared to penalties for other infractions.

Feminist organizing on college campuses in the 1980s has focused on sexual harassment, with the goals of raising consciousness among actual and potential victims and changing administrative codes and penalties. One study of college women found that 30 percent had experienced sexual harassment from at least one male instructor during their undergraduate years (Dziech and Weiner 1984). Peer harassment in college is also common, ranging from acts such as loudly "rating" the attractiveness of women passers-by to physical attacks (Paludi and Barickman 1991). Because the courts have held that the absence of a specific antiharassment policy implicitly condones such behavior, institutions of higher learning are attempting to define standards of inappropriate conduct. For example, in 1993, after much controversy, the University of Virginia instituted a policy forbidding instructors to have any sexual contact with students under their supervision.

The general public and school authorities often view sexual harassment and assault as somehow caused by the woman or girl. "Boys will be boys" and "she must have asked for it" are still common responses (American Association of University Women 1992), as was evident in reactions to well-publicized sexual attacks on school-mates by young men in New York, New Jersey, and California in the early 1990s. Given the pressures not to report such incidents, most feminists believe that these practices are far more widespread than the few highly visible cases suggest—that is, that these are not the extreme or unusual events that the public and press have assumed, but everyday reality for young women.

In another well-publicized case, the 1991 convention of an organization of U.S. Navy fliers known as the Tailhook Association, several hundred officers assaulted more than eighty women. Although previous conventions were characterized by similar levels of sexual violence, this one came to public notice when one of the women, a naval officer herself, reported the incident to her superiors who in turn began an investigation. By this time, thanks to years of feminist organizing in the military, investigative procedures and penalties were in place that made it possible for the officer to seek redress; still, top Navy personnel attempted to hush up the scandal and excuse the perpetrators.

While there can be little doubt that the well-publicized Hill-Thomas hearings and the Tailhook Association orgy raised public awareness of the pervasiveness of the problem, they also stimulated backlash. Antifeminists claim that statutes and policies against sexual harassment violate freedom of speech; that what women perceive as sexual advances or a hostile environment are merely men doing "what comes naturally," and if women are offended by it, they should stay out of the places where it occurs; and that men are now so afraid of being falsely accused that their rights are being violated. Yet the feminist definition of sexual harassment seems to be holding up against this attempt to reframe the issue.

In the Democratic primary elections of 1992, unexpected victories were won by half a dozen candidates whose campaign was largely based on reaction to the Hill-Thomas hearings, and several of these candidates went on to win national office. Sixty-two percent of the public agrees that if more women had been in the Senate, the Hill-Thomas hearings would have been conducted very differently. As MacKinnon concludes, "if the question is whether a law designed from women's standpoint and administered through this legal system can do anything for women—which always seems to me a good question—this experience (with sexual harassment cases) so far gives a qualified and limited yes" (1993, 146).

Domestic Violence

The women's movement of the 1970s defined violence against children and wives (and partners in unmarried unions) as battering, a form of illegitimate and illegal abuse, and provided alternatives such as shelters for women attempting to flee such attacks. Prior to that point, domestic violence had been largely veiled by the curtain of privacy drawn around the nuclear family. Breaking through this shield of secrecy was a difficult task, and it is still far from complete. Many Americans continue to support a man's right to coerce obedience or sexual compliance from his wife, and because women are expected to keep the peace within the home, wives are often blamed (and blame themselves) when men erupt in anger. Although gender-neutral language has become customary in speaking about the problem, much of the violence is clearly predicated on gender-specific expectations of authority and submission.

This has not prevented an ongoing debate over the prevalence and gender distribution of violent acts in the home. The most commonly used estimates of the frequency of assault come from the National Family Violence Surveys of 1975 and 1985 and suggest that 16 percent of all couples (married or not) experience at least one episode of violence a year. These data are widely criticized, however, because they indicate that men are as likely as women to be assaulted, information that antifeminists have seized upon to minimize the extent of wife-beating as a social problem. Feminists point out that even if both strike out, it is the wife who is more likely to be seriously injured, and she is typically responding defensively to a history of spousal violence (Brush 1990; Kurz 1989; Yllo and Bograd 1988). Department of Justice data show that women are three times as likely as men to be violently assaulted by someone with whom they are intimate (Harlow 1991), and that between 22 and 35 percent of women treated in hospital emergency rooms are victims of ongoing abuse (National Coalition against Domestic Violence 1991).

In the 1980s, feminist organizations began to devote more attention to the problems of women who actively defend themselves against further assaults. Not fitting the stereotype of the passive and innocent victim, such women often end up in prison for their attempted self-defense. One television docudrama, "The Burning Bed," did much to raise consciousness of this issue. Focusing on the actual case of a long-term battering victim who finally killed her husband while he slept, the dramatization may have helped the general public to grasp a point that was being raised by feminist legal scholars: under a "reasonable woman" standard of self-defense, women in constant fear of their lives are not acting with excessive force when they strike back, even against a disarmed or sleeping man (Smith 1993). Not all juries have accepted this defense, but the feminist reframing of the issue has persuaded several governors to commute the sentences of women who killed their batterers. Although there is evidence that the presence of resources for battered women—shelters, hotlines, legal aid—reduces the likelihood of killing an abusive partner (Browne and Williams 1993), such resources are neither universally available nor sufficient to stop the abuse. The numerous cases in which ex-husbands or ex-boyfriends have killed former wives or girlfriends after years of stalking and harassing them, often when protection orders issued by the courts barred them from contacting the victim, indicate the depth of the problem.

In sum, despite adopting the less political language of "domestic violence" in the 1980s, feminists have continued to frame issues of battering in ways that make men's responsibility for these assaults understood. Although women are still far from secure from assault by family members, feminist organizations have developed consciousness of the problem and of a woman's right to self-defense when society fails to protect her.

Rape and Sexual Abuse

Against the force of custom and renewed efforts by antifeminists to define sexual assault as a harmless game, feminists have continued to frame sexual assault, even between intimates and family members, as a crime. Victim blaming assumed new dimensions in the 1980s, as attention has shifted from assaults by strangers in dark alleys (the stereotypical but much less common case) to attacks by acquaintances, friends, and even fathers. The issues of incest and date rape that have become prominent in the 1980s evoked a conservative response aimed at discrediting the victims by suggesting that adult survivors of incest are victims of "false memory syndrome," and that women who are raped in dating situations are "asking for it" (Estrich 1993).

In all rape trials, including those with celebrity defendants such as William Kennedy Smith or Mike Tyson, the jury's verdict still largely depends on whether the victim is successfully presented as a naive innocent or as a sexually experienced woman, as well as how threatening the alleged perpetrator looks to the jurors. Press coverage plays on these themes, and there are additional biases based on the race of both victim and defendant. The media sensationalize the rare instances when a white woman is raped by a nonwhite man, giving support to the popular myth of the minority rapist and obscuring the reality that most women are raped by men of their own race and class. Conversely, the media's tendency to ignore rapes, even serial rape-murders, of women of color creates the illusion that these women are not victims (Benedict 1992; Hall 1983).

The press often stereotypes rapists in terms of class, race, and ethnicity instead of focusing on the gender violence of the crime. In the 1980s, several well-publicized rape cases made this particularly evident. Coverage of a 1983 gang rape in New Bedford, Massachusetts, (dramatized in the movie, The Accused ), denigrating the Portuguese-American rapists on the basis on their ethnicity, succeeded in mobilizing their ethnic community to defend the men (and blame the Portuguese-American victim). Similarly, the institutionalized racism of the mainstream press in the Central Park Jogger case led to their portraying the African-American teenagers as wild animals and blaming the perpetrators' brutality on their family structure, social class, and the ghetto culture, while ignoring the similarities to cases of gang rape by white men and boys. The African-American press responded by redefining the boys as innocents being lynched (Chancer 1987; Benedict 1992). In both cases, race and ethnicity diverted the media from covering the basic issue of sexual violence.

Press treatment of victims continues to discourage women from reporting rapes. In the 1980s, the policy of not printing the name of rape victims (unless another paper has done so first) came into question, with some feminists arguing that anonymity perpetuated the idea that rape was shameful and others claiming that it merely acknowledged the fact that the coverage was often demeaning and shaming. Silence about rape continues to create uncertainty about its prevalence. In 1991, the Department of Health and Human Services funded a broad-based survey of American women in which respondents were asked about both attempted and completed rapes in the past year and at any time in their lives. Extrapolating to all American women, their estimate is that 680,000 women were victims of forcible rape each year, over 12 percent had been sexually assaulted at some time, and that 60 percent of sexual assaults occur in childhood (National Victim Center 1992).

Other data confirm the frequency of sexual assault in American families. For example, a survey of sixth-through twelfth-graders in a middle-class Los Angeles school district found that nearly 20 percent of the girls had experienced an unwanted sexual encounter, almost all involving an older relative or family friend (Erikson and Rapkin 1991). Antifeminists cast doubt on the credibility of children's accounts but also refuse to believe adult survivors, returning to Freud's claim that such numbers must represent fantasy and false memory rather than real experiences.

The most extensive debate has been generated by feminist attention to acquaintance rape in general and date rape on campus in particular. As more young women define sexual encounters that included force or threats as being rape, antifeminists blame the women's movement for having changed the rules of the game—for having imposed a "politically correct" sexuality that takes the "natural" excitement and risk out of dating (Paglia 1990; Gibbs 1991; Roiphe 1993). Camille Paglia, an academic favored by conservative intellectuals, has used the media effectively to propound her view that men do indeed suffer blue balls and only a naive or stupid woman would allow herself to be raped. Women college students are apparently not persuaded; many have organized in their collective defense (from using bathroom graffiti to identify potential rapists to holding demonstrations demanding harsher penalties than the college administration had imposed). Along with improved lighting and locks, educational programs for male students about what "no" means are being provided on many campuses, usually through the college's women's center or committee on the status of women. The infrastructure of feminist organization created on many campuses in the 1970s is responding vigorously to the challenge of date rape in the 1980s.

Patricia Smith (1993), a noted legal scholar, concludes that in all three crimes of sexual violence—harassment, battering, and rape—great social change and legal progress for women has been seen, but that the pervasiveness of these abusive practices attests to the continuing sexism of society. Police and prosecutors, judges and juries, reflect the attitudes of the general public and continue to minimize the harms done to women. Changes in the law achieved in this decade are only a small part of a broader social challenge to norms legitimating male violence and male domination that will surely take many decades to accomplish.

ECONOMIC JUSTICE

The Republican administrations of the 1980s cut back social services and reduced the real income of welfare recipients and low-wage workers while providing massive tax cuts and transfer payments for businesses and wealthy Americans on the theory that the benefits of elite investment would "trickle down" to create prosperity for all. Vast military expenditures created both a short-term economic boom and a quadrupling of the federal debt but failed to trickle down to women, then as now on the bottom of the economic ladder. Instead, the gap between rich and poor widened, and many women's basic economic survival was placed at risk (Amott 1993). Conflict between feminists and the New Right on this issue played out primarily in the legislative arena, where social policy is set, and where the recession brought on by the national economic policy in the 1980s greatly reduced revenues available for social programs.

Affirmative Action

Despite the gains made by women professionals and college graduates in the 1970s in entering high-prestige male-dominated occupations (see chapter 1), almost half of the female labor force, especially women of color, remains concentrated in the low-paying service sector. Comparing the median incomes of year-round full-time workers in 1991, women earned 74¢ for every dollar earned by a man (up from 60¢ in 1979), but a good proportion of the decline in the size of the wage gap was due to a fall in men's wages rather than a rise in women's incomes. Studies continue to indicate that sex and race discrimination play a major role in income inequality (Baron and Newman 1990; England 1992).

Such discrimination had been the target of civil rights legislation and executive action in the 1960s, which sought to redress the effects of decades of preferential hiring of white males. Executive Order 11375, issued in 1967 under President Lyndon Johnson, required that companies receiving federal contracts take positive steps ("affirmative action") to recruit and train women and minority men, to set goals and timetables for compliance, and to demonstrate that they were making good-faith efforts to meet these objectives. Affirmative action policy does not require setting quotas for hiring, nor does it mandate preferential treatment of unqualified or less qualified candidates. That most Americans are misinformed about these points is due in part to media carelessness and in part to an intentional effort by conservative politicians to win votes from working-class white men by playing on their anxieties about unemployment and job competition.

The media failed to distinguish "affirmative action" from "affirmative relief," which is a court judgment that finds that a particular employer has actively discriminated and orders a remedy in the form of accelerated hiring or promotion of the affected category of workers. In carrying out affirmative relief, a judge may set a quota and timetable to remedy a past pattern of illegal actions, just as back-pay awards are made to offset the effects of salary discrimination. Between media misrepresentation and conscious efforts by conservative groups and politicians to depict all affirmative action as "reverse discrimination," the continuation of patterns of discrimination against women and minority men has not been seriously challenged for over a decade.

Throughout the 1980s, not only did the Justice Department withdraw from even minimal enforcement of equal opportunity statutes, but it argued successfully before the Supreme Court that more of the burden of proof should fall on the victims of discrimination. Evidence of a pattern of disadvantage was no longer enough to shift to employers the burden to provide proof of a nondiscriminatory cause for the pattern; plaintiffs had to show evidence of "malicious intent." Such evidence of a frame of mind is extremely difficult to find, especially since most employers today know better than to put their discriminatory thoughts into writing.

In addition, in the Grove City case, the Court ruled that higher education institutions receiving federal funding could discriminate in programs other than the specific one being funded; for example, the chemistry department was free to indulge in discrimination if only the financial aid office got federal money. Presidents Reagan and Bush personally campaigned against affirmative action, referring to employment targets as "quotas" and remedies for past discrimination as "reverse discrimination" against whites, and suggesting it was difficult to find more than a few "qualified" white women or persons of color.

In response to these attacks, the women's policy network joined with other civil rights groups to press for an act of Congress reaffirming the original intent and interpretation of the 1963 Civil Rights Act. After civil rights and feminist organizations spent several years energetically lobbying for it, the Civil Rights Restoration Act passed Congress, only to be vetoed by President Bush. Although Bush eventually signed a much diluted version of the law in 1991, the final version was so weak on remedies for gender discrimination that many women's organizations withdrew their support for it.

At this writing the stance of the Clinton administration is still unclear, but twelve years of failure to enforce equal opportunity policies already jeopardizes the labor force gains women made in previous decades. Discrimination cases are harder to win, and more costly to bring. Regulatory mechanisms have been dismantled, and incentives for true affirmative action are virtually nonexistent. Although the backlash movement would like to blame feminists for women's economic struggles, feminists are committed to convincing the general public that the remedy for their problems in the workplace is more equality, not less.

Pay Equity/Comparable Worth

Because of sex segregation, women and men rarely hold the same jobs, and the work historically done by women is paid much less on average than that performed by men. The concept of pay equity, or comparable worth, is based on the principle that people who do jobs that (1) require a similar level of skill and effort, (2) take place under similar working conditions, and (3) involve a similar level of responsibility should receive similar paychecks. The 1980s saw major battles, primarily in the public (government) sector, to reevaluate all jobs and set wage scales based not on the historic gender of the occupation but on its comparable worth to the employer (Steinberg 1987; Acker 1989). By the end of the decade, many state governments had made adjustments in their wage-setting policies, and a number of local governments were engaged in conducting comparable worth studies or had already implemented some pay equity proposals. The outcome was typically a compromise among unions, employing agencies, feminist lobbies, and state legislatures that stopped well short of full equity but nonetheless established the principle of cross-gender comparison and improved wages for employees in female-dominated jobs (Acker 1989; Evans and Nelson 1989). By mobilizing union women in particular, the pay equity movement highlighted the relation between gender and class and raised feminist consciousness among working-class women (Blum 1991). Although elite women have been important sponsors of comparable-worth legislation, their interests lead them to try to limit the cost of settlements, to advocate technocratic rather than democratic decision processes, and to defend managerial control over wage-setting (Acker 1989; Blum 1991).

Not only has the pay equity issue enhanced the potential for working-class feminism that the career feminism of earlier decades slighted, but it has encouraged cross-class alliances among feminists and others concerned with economic justice. For example, the National Committee on Pay Equity (NCPE), a lobbying and information clearinghouse, is a coalition of religious, labor, civil rights, legal, professional, and women's organizations in the United States and Canada. Other new groups include the Women's Economic Agenda Project in California, the Women's Agenda in Pennsylvania, and the Women's Lobbyist Fund in Montana. These organizations held their first national conference in 1987. With Clinton's election in 1992, one Washington lobbyist noted that "the faxes are flying" among women's groups that are trying to formulate a national agenda on economic justice for women, with pay equity as a crucial element.

The backlash movement has attacked comparable worth in the same ringing tones it applied to the ERA and reproductive rights; Clarence Thomas, while still head of the EEOC, called it "the looniest idea since loony tunes." But these denunciations do not appear to have found much resonance among the general public, where strong majorities favor some sort of pay equity measures (National Committee on Pay Equity 1992).

Family Policies and Poverty

Beginning in the late 1970s, feminists concerned with economic justice directed attention to the fact that the majority of Americans living in poverty were women and children, and this phenomenon came to be termed "the feminization of poverty" (Pearce 1978). They highlighted several causes of women's impoverishment, such as divorce, low wages, and declining opportunities for blue-collar jobs.

Studies in this decade showed how often divorce drove even middle-class women to welfare for a few years, and how the lack of alimony and minimal levels of child support left single mothers penniless (Weitzman 1985; Sugarman and Hill 1990). Judges had been quick to turn the feminist claim that women should be economically independent into a myth that women actually were financially self-sufficient and so required only the most modest levels of transitional support.

Feminist responses included organizing displaced homemakers—midlife women divorced after a long period of full-time homemaking and child rearing. The National Displaced Homemaker Network coordinated efforts by similar networks on the state level to direct funds for job training to centers for displaced homemakers (e.g., twelve such centers were operating in 1992 in Connecticut alone). To date, very little federal support has been forthcoming, although some states have imposed a fee on marriage licenses to pay the costs of programs for battered women and displaced homemakers, a formal recognition of the risks women face in conventional marriage.

Another response to the poverty of women and children was to seek more energetic enforcement of court-ordered child-support payments from absent fathers. However, the means that state legislatures have used to implement such programs have often led to invasion of the privacy of divorced or unmarried women and to defining women in terms of economic dependence on some man. These policies also do very little to raise the standard of living of most single mothers. In some states welfare benefits are cut by the amount collected from absent fathers. Feminist opinion is increasingly divided on the merits of even lobbying state legislatures to experiment with such programs.

But many women are poor even if they are not divorced or out of the labor force, and this is particularly true for women of color. Many women have critiqued the "feminization of poverty" concept, arguing that women of color had always been poor, and that neither marriage nor a job was a reliable route out of poverty. Men of color also have low wages and high unemployment, and the jobs available to women of color themselves often pay such low wages that even year-round full-time work (itself hard to find) is inadequate to bring a family out of poverty. In 1992, a full-time job at just above the minimum wage provided an annual pretax income of less than $10,000. Feminists have thus joined a wider coalition arguing for a higher minimum wage, an earned income tax credit, universal health insurance, and an expanded Headstart program for preschoolers as practical steps to bring many women out of poverty and to reduce its effects on their children (Bergman 1986).

Conclusions

The framing of economic justice as a feminist issue grew throughout the 1980s. The need to defend reproductive rights is, however, a competing concern, and the drive for gender equality in the workplace is also increasingly presented as a "family issue" rather than one of feminism (Spalter-Roth and Schreiber 1994). Most feminist organizations see poverty as a women's issue, and many activists have targeted women's poverty as their primary focus in legislative lobbying (Boles 1991). Although those career feminists who had a narrow vision of economic opportunity were able uncritically to applaud gains made by a small number of professional and managerial women, most feminists found much to criticize in the limited opportunities and growing poverty of a large segment of the female population. The national administration in the 1980s was so apparently indifferent to the needs of real families and real children, while trumpeting support for "family values" and "unborn children," that many feminists made defeating these politicians a major goal. The change of administration in 1993 was thus most welcome, but the achievement of actual changes in policy remains a challenge for the coming decade.

Political Strategies and Dilemmas

Although feminist organizations were put on the defensive by the backlash movement, issues such as reproductive rights, equal opportunity, violence against women, and the welfare of the family increasingly came to be the main lines of political and cultural conflict (Freeman 1993). Both the high salience of feminist issues and the reactive position of feminist organizations played a major role in shaping the nature of the women's movement in this decade.

In this section, we look at how the "culture war" over feminism has shaped public perceptions of the movement and particularly the orientations and activism of young women. We see it especially manifest in what we call "the myth of the post-feminist generation." We then turn to an analysis of the defensive transformations of organizations and the continuation of proactive strategies throughout this decade.

THE MYTH OF THE POSTFEMINIST GENERATION

As we saw in chapter 4, about 30-40 percent of all Americans now define themselves as "feminist," a historically impressive percentage. Nonetheless, critics have rushed to proclaim (yet again) the "death" of feminism and the advent of a "postfeminist generation" (e.g., Bolotin 1982). This new generation is described as (1) disillusioned with what they perceive to be the feminist promise of "having it all"—a fulfilling career, a happy marriage, and accomplished children—and (2) worried that to be labeled "feminist" is also to be seen as "unfeminine." In the late 1980s, news magazines and advertisers hailed the dawn of a postfeminist era characterized by a return to conventional patterns of marriage and domesticity. This conclusion was based largely on anecdotal evidence and wishful thinking; the public opinion data reviewed in chapter 4 show instead a continuing trend toward more feminist opinions and higher levels of self-identification with feminism. Susan Faludi argues that this presentation of feminism as passé or dangerous was a part of a media backlash (1991), but there are a number of additional reasons why the image of feminism was changing in this decade.

One change is the baseline for comparison: in the late 1960s and early 1970s, journalists assumed feminists were wild-eyed fanatics with whom few if any women would identify; whereas in the late 1980s and early 1990s, many media pundits seemed puzzled that not all women were feminists. The label "feminist" was still felt to be somewhat risky, implying a person who was angry and "shrill," but the disavowal of feminism also seemed dangerously behind the times, suggesting a lack of awareness of discrimination and/or a repudiation of equality as a goal (Kamen 1991). Somehow, the ideal seemed to shift to being "feminist" (in the sense of being enlightened about and emancipated from past forms of subordination) but not "a feminist" (in the sense of being angry about continuing inequality). As Stacey (1989) documents, many of the assumptions of feminism have passed into the common wisdom; the life that even conventional young women expect to live today is not that of their mothers or foremothers.

A second change is in the visibility of criticism of the movement by academic women, both feminist and not. The media were quick to publicize economist Sylvia Hewlett's (1986) charges that the New Feminist Movement was to blame for the failure of American institutions to correct the conditions that disadvantage and impoverish single mothers. More recently, the media has celebrated the deeply misogynist views of art historian Camille Paglia (1990). Paglia, who has been warmly welcomed into the conservative establishment and funded by its foundations, claims that male domination, including sexual assault, is natural, necessary, and secretly desired by women. Also, blaming women and the feminist movement for women's failure to achieve full equality has become commonplace among journalists.

SUSAN FALUDI (1959-)

The backlash is at once sophisticated and banal, deceptively 'progressive' and proudly backward. It deploys both the 'new' findings of 'scientific research' and the dime-store moralism of yester-year; it turns into media sound bites both the glib pronouncements of pop-psych trend-watchers and the frenzied rhetoric of New Right preachers. The backlash has succeeded in framing virtually the whole issue of women's rights in its own language. Just as Reaganism shifted political discourse far to the right and demonized liberalism, so the backlash convinced the public that women's 'liberation' was the true contemporary American scourge—the source of an endless laundry list of personal, social, and economic problems.

Faludi, Susan. "Introduction: Blame it on Feminism." In Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, 1991. Reprint, p. xviii. New York: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1992.

Susan Faludi was hailed as the leader of a new generation of feminists with the release of her debut book, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (1991), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for general nonfiction. In 1991 she won both the Pulitzer Prize and a John Hancock Award for Excellence in Business and Financial Journalism for "The Reckoning," an exposé about the 1986 leveraged buyout of Safeway Stores, which appeared on the front page of the Wall Street Journal on May 16, 1990. Faludi's best-seller, Backlash, grew out of a sensational 1986 Newsweek cover story about the bleak prospects for single, professional women in America. Faludi maintains that the Newsweek article is just one of many insidious media creations that prey upon the fears and insecurities of liberated women, and argues that the gains toward equality earned by the women's movement in the 1960s and 1970s were systematically eroded in the 1980s. She singles out the regressive influence of advertising, the film industry, politicians, academics, the religious right, the men's movement, the news media, and conservative "pro-family" organizations whose resistance to social change has undermined women's independence. Faludi concludes that the gains made by the women's movement are fragile and easily lost; however, through a unified and concerted effort, and armed with a healthy skepticism toward the media, the rights won can be preserved and extended.

As Faludi (1991) also documents, motion pictures and television programs began to portray unmarried women with professional careers as homicidally dangerous while celebrating what the media claimed was a "trend" toward well-paid professional women throwing over their careers for full-time motherhood. Although individuals can always be found to exemplify a purported "phenomenon," there is no statistical evidence for such a general tendency. Biased and uncritical reporting of the supposedly low probability of marriage for unmarried women in their thirties or the high level of infertility of women who defer childbearing, and of a myriad of other dangers of careerism undoubtedly affected how younger women thought about their future.

Such a negative view of feminism in the media was, of course, nothing new: solemn proclamations of the editors' wishful thinking that the movement was dead date back to 1971 ( Ms. "No Comment" 1982). But if young women were actually rejecting feminism, where did all the enrollments in women's studies courses come from? One conservative response was to label the trend toward more inclusive curricula on college campuses as a conspiracy of "political correctness," in which faculty pressured or mandated enrollment in "intellectually shallow" courses (Bloom 1987; D'Souza 1991). It was evident to these critics that there could be no intellectual merit in courses focusing on women, ethnic minorities, or others whose works had been traditionally excluded from the conventional curriculum.

Ironically, it was the newcomers, such as women's studies programs, who were declared to be intolerant, ideological storm troopers, imposing their perspective on the university's "impartial" and "apolitical" decisions about who and what should be studied. The backlash refrain was to label women's studies and ethnic studies programs "victim studies," mocking the oppression and exclusion these groups had endured. These intellectual attacks spilled over into an increasingly intolerant and nasty mood on campuses toward people of color, feminists, lesbians, and gays. Physical attacks and campus hate crimes increased.

In this climate, it hardly seems surprising that many college women are hesitant to express their feminist views in class or in peer groups (Schneider 1988; Kamen 1991). However, attitude change among college women and men has also gone less deep than many feminists expected. College women continue to expect their husbands to earn more than they do (even while saying they believe in equal pay for women and men); they still expect to compromise only their own careers in order to raise children (even while they endorse shared child rearing in principle); and they expect to be supported by a man's income for some portion of their life (even though they assert the value of economic independence for women) (Machung 1989).

Some observers see parallels between the resistance to feminism in the early part of this century and the claim that young women are less feminist today, and argue that the women's movement is once again "in abeyance" (Taylor and Whittier 1993). Although feminism was expressed in a strong and well-organized social movement in the 1920s, its organizational strength withered in the following decades. Few young women born in the 1920s or 1930s were exposed to feminism as a coherent or comprehensive perspective. Observers soon noted that the average age of women identified as feminists was relatively high and rising. Feminism was perceived as something "old-fashioned" and feminists as out of touch with modern "emancipated" women and the new realities of expanding opportunities and more egalitarian marriages.

This pattern led Alice Rossi (1982) to suggest that feminist accomplishments are achieved in a repeating, two-phase multigeneration process. The first generation, chafing at the limitations clearly imposed on them as women, struggles for structural change. The modest changes they achieve are part of the social environment of women of the second generation, who are able to explore opportunities and experience freedoms that are still new and perceived as remarkable progress. The third generation then takes such accomplishments for granted but again experiences the limits and restrictions that remain and, chafing against these boundaries, becomes another first generation mobilizing for change.

Rossi argues that changes on the structural level are not sufficient for lasting progress; only when changes are assimilated into women's everyday life can the need for further changes be known. Her argument is based both on the historical record and on the theoretical premise that feminist demands arise from women's daily experiences and that without such resonance, feminist claims will fail to awake a supportive response. When change is rapid, however, "generations" could be very short.

From a different perspective, Gloria Steinem (1983) argues that the apparent conservatism of some young women ten years ago was a reflection of their stage in the life course. Unlike men, for whom youth can be the period of radical experimentation ultimately tempered by the responsibilities of work and family, women are more likely to be radicalized by age. It is misleading to extrapolate a universal pattern from the male model, because it is women's direct experience of marriage, motherhood, employment, divorce, and aging itself that underscore the difficulties of being female and transform conventional women into feminists. The status of women—and their rewards for accepting the male-defined criteria of value—may be highest when they are young. As Carolyn Heilbrun (1988) has also argued, women may only realize their radical disagreement with the status quo as they discover themselves living a life for which they never had models and no longer seek others' approval. The women who seemed conservative a decade ago may have already been radicalized by the events of their lives.

Does this add up to an authentic "postfeminism" in the current generation? Although anti-feminist opinions are more evident in the media, the attitudes of young women remain just as feminist as their mothers' views (see chapter 4). Moreover, the increasing numbers of young women in established feminist organizations, as well as a proliferation of new organizations focused on mobilizing the younger generation of feminists, suggest that the complacency of the late 1970s has already been replaced by an urgency and anxiety to defend gains already won. Many established feminist groups have "young feminist" networks (e.g., NOW's Young Feminist Conference and the Center for Women's Policy Studies' Feminist Futures Project). Some of the organizations founded by and for this younger generation have contributed to the revival of grassroots, confrontational feminist politics in the later part of this decade (Kamen 1991). Other young feminists are seeking academic degrees that will enable them to pursue a career in feminist law or community work or education, as seen in the continuing expansion of women's studies-inspired graduate programs in fields as diverse as public policy and theology. Young feminist professionals in Washington have organized their own Women's Information Network (WIN) for both career networking and political support (Kamen 1991). Women's studies is also a means by which activists can pass on the organizational lessons they have learned from their past decades of experience to the women—regardless of their ages—who have not shared that history.

GLORIA STEINEM (1934-)

In my first days of activism, I thought I would do this ("this" being feminism) for a few years and then return to my real life (what my "real life" might be, I did not know). Partly, that was a naïve belief that injustice only had to be pointed out in order to be cured. Partly, it was a simple lack of courage. But like so many others now and in movements past, I've learned that this is not just something we care about for a year or two or three. We are in it for life—and for our lives. Not even the spiral of history is needed to show the distance traveled. We have only to look back at the less complete people we ourselves used to be. Steinem, Gloria. "Far from the Opposite Shore." In Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, pp. 361-62. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983.

Gloria Steinem is known as one of the most vocal and influential leaders in the American feminist movement. Born in Toledo, Ohio, Steinem earned scholarships and fellowships to several universities, and spent her graduate school years in India, where she became socially and politically active in fighting injustice. She returned to the United States in the 1960s, worked as a freelance reporter, and helped found Ms. in 1972, the first national magazine operated by women for the advancement of women's causes. Some of Steinem's works are collected in Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (1983), an anthology that ranges from her early, notorious "I Was a Playboy Bunny" exposé, to the later, more feminist theory-based articles she contributed to Ms., including the comical yet incisive "If Men Could Menstruate." Although some critics and activists have faulted Steinem for representing only the more pleasant, non-threatening elements of the feminist perspective in her writing, she has received popular and critical acclaim for her evocative, entertaining prose style, investigative reporting abilities, for working to raise both women's consciousness and their self-esteem, and for making feminist issues both accessible and familiar to the public.

A major challenge facing the feminist movement in the 1990s is moving from the reactive stance of the 1980s to a more proactive vision of the future. If that vision is to find resonance, it will need to incorporate the concerns of women born after the New Feminist Movement had already mobilized and made its mark. Rather than "postfeminists," this cohort could be appropriately called "second-generation feminists." Some call themselves the "Third Wave" (Manegold 1992). Their lives are not as restricted as their mothers', but they face an abundance of challenges and obstacles to achieving political and social equality and self-determination. The perspectives and issues of the second-generation feminists who become activists will play a major role in shaping the agenda and priorities of feminism in the coming years; the hard-won lessons of inclusiveness and diversity are part of the legacy on which they will have to build (Pfister 1993).

DEFENSIVE ADAPTATIONS AND ORGANIZATIONAL MATURITY

The reactive, defensive stance feminists adopted in the 1980s also had organizational consequences for the movement. First, the hostile political climate encouraged the development of broad coalitions, since allies were necessary to prevent erosion of significant employment and reproductive rights. Second, when all were under attack, differences among varieties of feminism became far less significant and similarities more important, so that ideological conflicts declined sharply. Because the New Right was trying to make feminism an unspeakable " F -word," variations in feminist identity became less defining of individuals or organizations than ever before (Heilbrun 1988). Indeed, varieties of visions for the future are primarily important for proactive movements; when feminist priorities are centered on defending gains already won, such visions are increasingly irrelevant. As Hyde (1994) points out, ideology does play a part in defensive movements by suggesting a preferred strategy and providing a network of past allies to mobilize against attacks; in the struggle to survive, some feminist organizations she studied became more conservative and professional, and others became more embedded in broad political resistance movements.

But to a greater extent than ever before, in the early 1990s there was a single feminist community, characterized by strategic cooperation of direct action/self-help, political/educational, and cultural/entrepreneural groups in activist networks organized to target specific issues such as women's health, battering, or reproductive rights (Boles 1991). The proliferation of feminist organizations in the 1970s reached a stage in the 1980s in which institutionalization and long-term survival rather than growth dominated the agenda, a stage of movement maturity. Part of the price of this necessary institutionalization was specialization—that is, the increasing autonomy of "submovements" with specialized concerns such as the battered women's movement, the antirape movement, the pro-choice movement, or the women's health movement (Tierney 1982; Matthews 1994; Morgen 1994; Staggenborg 1991).

In fact, these different "submovements" had by the 1980s established unique sets of relationships—whether hostile, supportive, or mixed—with the funding agencies, foundations, and local communities with which they routinely dealt. They also competed for the scarce resources available from the government, and for the time, energy and commitment of individual feminists. Over the 1980s, involvement with specialized sub-movements became increasingly important in defining the identity of feminist organizations and activists. Gelb (1989) shows how the American form of politics (weak parties and a strong lobbying system) encouraged this development; whereas Boles (1991) argues that the emergence of broad coalitions at local, state, and federal levels also reflects the principle of federalism embodied in the American system. Much policymaking important to women is not centralized but requires coordinated efforts at all levels to be effective.

We further argue that the hostility toward feminism expressed by the national administration in the 1980s encouraged an organizational shift toward state-level, coalition politics. As we saw in the previous chapter, the original focus of feminist organizations was on grassroots direct action and women's community building at the local level, or on bureaucratic organizations lobbying for political gains on the national level. In the 1970s, the long, bruising struggle over the ERA gave birth to a third level of organization—namely, in the individual states, since the amendment needed ratification by state legislatures (Mathews and DeHart 1990; Berry 1986). As the federal climate became increasingly chilly in the 1980s, feminists turned more of their attention to the state legislatures to defend gains and pursue goals other than the ERA.

By 1989, feminists in forty states had created ongoing and diversified coalitions to address women's issues; one of the first such networks, the Wisconsin Women's Network (founded in 1979) is supported by sixty-seven dues-paying member organizations and over a thousand individual members and has two paid staffers and over a dozen policy task forces (Boles 1991, 46). In several states, such coalitions produced policies and laws that expanded women's rights well beyond the national baseline, although in others, feminists simply struggled to resist increasingly punitive and restrictive laws. The variation between states in feminist strategies and successes is a topic that requires further research.

Within each submovement, state-level coalitions connected direct action service providers with each other and with politicians, administrators, and educators concerned with each specific issue (Boles 1991). Because states are relatively small, their emergent women's policy networks depended heavily on the local direct action groups and feminist cultural community, as well as on formally organized political groups (Taylor and Whittier 1993). By 1990, there were over two hundred local-level commissions on the status of women, which Boles describes as "quite similar to the small groups of the radical branch of the women's movement, but with a difference: much of their activity now is undertaken in cooperation with governmental bureaucracies" (1991, 47). Thus, boundaries also blurred between self-help groups, political organizations, and individual entrepreneurs and professionals.

At the same time, it became increasingly clear that feminist commitment was not for a brief battle, but for a lifetime of struggle. Change would not come easily or soon. Mature feminist organizations were faced with the challenge of making sustaining a career in feminism possible, both emotionally and financially (Daniels 1991; Whittier 1994; Remington 1990). In the face of an increasingly angry and violent countermovement, abetted by the inaction of federal and many local authorities, problems of emotional burnout were heightened (Simonds 1994). Great financial strains were created by the federal government's efforts to take funding away from women's health centers (Hyde 1994). Individual activists needed not only adequate income but also interpersonal support and opportunities for personal growth in their work—requirements that not all feminist organizations could meet (Morgen 1994; Remington 1990). Nonetheless, the women's community forged by cultural/entrepreneurial groups in the previous decades had become strong enough to sustain the commitment of those engaged in direct action/self-help and political/educational activities in the 1980s (Taylor and Rupp 1993). Lesbian feminists have always played a major role in maintaining this community, and their efforts were increasingly central to many feminist organizations (Whittier 1994).

PROACTIVE FEMINIST MOBILIZATIONS

The wide reach and increasingly integrated structure of mature feminist submovements defensively addressing issues high on the public agenda should not conceal feminist mobilization in other areas. Although when under attack from the Right, organizations' success could often be measured by sheer survival, the New Feminist Movement also developed strategies for change. Some of the feminist initiatives that bore fruit in the 1980s and early 1990s were the result of decades of earlier mobilization; others represented a return to styles of feminist activism that were more characteristic of earlier decades. We look here at three types of proactive feminist politics: unobtrusive mobilization within institutions, electoral politics, and the new grassroots direct action groups that formed in this decade.

Unobtrusive Mobilization

As examples of what she calls unobtrusive mobilization within institutions, Mary Katzenstein (1990) examines the development of feminist consciousness, organization, and strategy in two improbable contexts: the U.S. military and the Roman Catholic Church. Although both institutions are large, bureaucratic, strongly hierarchical and male-dominated, they nonetheless experienced substantial internal feminist activism that indelibly changed their structure and practices. Such unobtrusive mobilizations occurred in other institutions as well; we also look briefly at the judiciary and academia.

In the case of the military, the introduction of the All Volunteer Force (AVF) in 1973, with its competitive wages and career opportunities, brought an influx of female recruits. In the first few years, the expansion in women's numbers and rights was dramatic: the percentage of women serving in the armed forces tripled between 1972 and 1976; ROTC and the service academies were opened to women; mandatory dismissal for pregnancy was ended; and dependents' benefits were extended to their families. By 1980 the backlash began to be felt, as military leaders announced a need to "pause" in recruitment efforts and reassess the role of women (Stiehm 1989). Although women increased from 2 percent of the military in 1972 to 11 percent in 1992, this increase represented less than the increase projected in the 1970s. The coordinating body for women's affairs, the Defense Advisory Commission on Women in the Service (DACOWITS), began to exert pressure on the separate services to remove obstacles to women's rising through the ranks, most particularly the rules barring them from direct combat. The gains made, as evidenced by the greater visibility of women in the Panama and Desert Storm campaigns, further convinced the public that women can and do serve with distinction in all roles opened to them. Lobbying by women overturned the congressional prohibition on women in combat, and in 1993 the Clinton administration shifted the burden of proof to the military to demonstrate why a particular job should be closed to women and dropped most restrictions on women in aerial and naval combat roles.

DACOWITS has also focused on developing enforceable procedures for responding to cases of sexual harassment; when the Navy's own procedures were not followed, the assaults at the Tail-hook convention became a public scandal. The integration of women in military roles also opened up a broader discussion of military values, sexuality, and gender stereotyping. "Witchhunts" directed against women—accusing them of being lesbians and threatening them with dishonorable discharges—had often been used to punish women for counterstereotypical behavior or for refusing men's sexual advances. Such accusations increasingly invoked an active defense from women's organizations such as WEAL and raised consciousness about the damaging effects of anti-homosexuality policies on both men and women in the military, fostering a wider debate on sexuality and the double standard (Stiehm 1989).

In the Roman Catholic Church, women's extremely limited access to formal positions of leadership encouraged Catholic feminists to concentrate on changing the way women think about hierarchy and status (Katzenstein 1994). For some, the answer lies in "woman-church," small nonhierarchical groups of women reclaiming the church as a house-based community of believers (Ruether 1986; Farrell 1991). The long-term decline in the number of men in holy orders opened up some ceremonial and administrative church roles to women at the parish level, but the more profound change has come as both nuns and laywomen have rethought conventional answers to why the church is so male-dominated. Debates over inclusive language have led feminists to discuss more inclusive practices and to speak out strongly on issues of social justice. In some cases, this outspokenness has led to a visible split with the male hierarchy, which often places a higher priority on antiabortion activities than on ministering to the poor (Katzenstein 1994).

In the judiciary, change is evident as over half the states have at least one female justice on their highest court, and in Minnesota women constitute a majority on the state supreme court. Both as individuals and as members of the caucus of women on state court benches, these judges have spurred nearly every state to conduct a serious review of practices in the courtroom and in the law that constitute gender bias. Training programs have been set up in many states to help male judges become more aware of ways in which they may be discriminating against lawyers who appear before them, plaintiffs and defendants in the cases they hear, jurors they empanel, and staff they employ (Gender Bias Task Force Reports from Connecticut, New Jersey, Maryland, and New York are good examples). Moreover, law schools have gone beyond merely admitting more women to recognizing the importance of feminist issues in the law. Between 1986 and 1992, the number of law school courses focusing on women has grown from 30 to 145, and nine law schools (including Harvard, Yale, and Chicago) publish journals devoted to feminist jurisprudence ( About Women on Campus 1993, 9).

In academia, there is probably no discipline, from accounting to zoology, that has not been affected by unobtrusive mobilization over the past two decades. It is projected that by 1995, 40 percent of all doctorates will be awarded to women, compared to 14 percent in 1970 (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1993, 172). With the increased representation of women in all fields of study, feminist caucuses and task forces in many disciplines have actively directed attention to gaps in knowledge, the gendered nature of course content, and the chilly classroom climate for future generations of scholars.

Feminist caucuses and task forces are also concerned with the status of women within the profession as a whole. Although in 1992 women constituted 27 percent of America's higher education faculty, they remain clustered disproportionately in lower ranks, less prestigious institutions, and in stereotypically feminine fields. Furthermore, the research topics pursued by feminist scholars are not typically those that receive the highest rewards in their discipline, where the "canon" of worth is still monopolized by a predominantly upper-middle-class, heterosexual white male elite. This can be seen in publishing patterns in sociology, for example, where female scholars and gender issues remain marginalized, though less so than in the past (Grant and Ward 1991; Ferree and Hall 1990).

The feminist struggle within academia, therefore, is not just over jobs and promotions, though these basic needs have been difficult enough to attain. The financial costs and personal difficulties of bringing a sex discrimination suit, the veil of secrecy around much academic decision-making, the falsification of records, and the lack of administrative accountability have often made pursuit of job equity an exercise in futility (Theodore 1986; Pleck 1990). But the challenges to women in academia also include gaining greater control over standards of evaluation of scholarship, input into decisions about curricula and requirements, and better conditions for professional development for both faculty and students.

In conclusion, we can see that there has been a mobilization of feminist pressure groups and caucuses within a variety of institutions. The focus of such groups has not been restricted to achieving the personal advancement of their members alone, as some observers of career feminist initiatives in the early 1970s would have predicted. In many diverse institutional contexts, feminist mobilization has also challenged the standards and practices of parent organizations in fundamental ways.

Electoral Politics

The 1980s backlash mobilized a feminist response at both national and state levels, which included an increase in the number of women running for political office. The heightening of gender consciousness in the general public and the salience of specific issues such as sexual harassment and reproductive choice also increased the chances of electoral success among women candidates in the early 1990s. Funding, traditionally a problem for women candidates, grew substantially when the Hill-Thomas hearings starkly illustrated the overwhelming control of men in congressional committees. Organizations raising money for pro-choice women candidates in 1992 reported record donations. EMILY's List, founded in 1985 to support pro-choice Democratic women, was a major contributor to some campaigns. By 1993, women constituted 20 percent of all state legislators, 11 percent of the members of the U.S. House of Representatives, and 7 percent of the Senate—still not impressive numbers, but a substantial increase from 1971, when women constituted a mere 5 percent of state legislators and fewer than 3 percent of members of Congress.

The 1980s saw the emergence and spread of a gender gap in voting behavior; women were significantly more supportive of Democratic candidates than were men. Beginning in the presidential election of 1980s, in which women were 6-9 percent less likely to vote for Ronald Reagan, the gap grew throughout the decade, reflecting women's negative experiences with Reaganera policies. Thus in 1988, most men saw their fortunes as improving (52 percent), while most women did not (56 percent reported that their lives were getting worse or staying the same). Reagan's appointments were also more male-dominated than the previous administration's: whereas 15 percent of President Carter's appointments to the federal bench were women, the proportion of women among Reagan's appointments fell by half, to 8 percent. Top policymaking appointments show a similar pattern: 18 percent were women under Carter, 12 percent under Reagan, and a slightly lower percentage under Bush (Tillet and Krafchek 1991). The early appointments by President Clinton show a sharp reversal: There are highly visible women in top posts in the Departments of Justice, Commerce, and Environmental Protection, as well as Health and Human Services.

The increasing importance of women in politics reflects in part their growing strength as voters. Before the reemergence of feminism, women had voted at a significantly lower rate than men, but by 1980 women matched and then exceeded the turnout of their male peers. Because adult women outnumber men, women voters hold the key to electoral success: In the 1992 election, women accounted for 54 percent of all voters. Women's priorities on average differ from those of men; women are more interested in heath, education, welfare, and the link between work and family, and they are less concerned than men about national defense, taxes, and foreign affairs. The voting strength of women as a constituency surely played a role in the passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, for example, which Clinton signed after two years of Bush vetoes. The lobbying for this law was led by the Council of Presidents, a coordinating body for the heads of forty-nine different Washington-based women's organizations, first founded in 1985. Passing this law is thus a significant long-term proactive victory for the movement.

The 1992 election also tripled the number of women in the Senate. Women's share of the House rose to forty-seven seats, a tiny percentage, but nearly twice the share held in 1990. At state and local levels women also ran well, capturing twenty-one major state offices and increasing their representation in state legislatures from 18 to 23 percent in just one year. Many of these candidates had shaped their campaigns to highlight issues raised by the New Feminist Movement; several anti-choice referenda were also defeated at the state level.

Not only has a crucial corner been turned, so that the presence of a woman candidate is no longer a novelty in itself, but the increasing visibility of women as a voting constituency has brought salience to some previously ignored issues. Although not all women elected to office are feminists, and not all politicians will support a more woman-centered agenda, there are now certain key prerequisites in place for feminist political influence to grow over the next decade. The parental leave bill enacted in 1993 was only the first item on the Council of Presidents' Women's Agenda, which includes issues such as child-care, health care, pay equity and reproductive rights.

Grassroots Direct-Action

In addition to electoral victories and mobilization within institutions, the New Feminist Movement also made gains in the 1980s at the local level, producing new forms of direct action at the grass roots that often engaged young activists. To an extent that surprised the media pundits who are so eager to declare the death of feminism, radical direct action groups actually increased in this decade. The Women's Action Coalition (WAC), formed in January 1992 in New York City, was soon followed by similar groups in Minneapolis, Houston, Toronto, Los Angeles, and other cities. As one member put it, "Anita Hill was our founding member.… [T]he catalyst in large part was seeing an all-white-male Senate Judiciary Committee grilling a black man and a black woman. There was this feeling of 'I'm going to take it to the streets. I'm angry'" (Saltpeter, cited in Hoban 1992). A "Guide to Direct Action Groups," published in Harper's Bazaar, brought an avalanche of letters from women throughout the country who were looking for a way to express their outrage over the Hill-Thomas hearings and anxious to found local chapters (Sheppard 1992).

Composed primarily of women in their twenties and early thirties, WAC has turned media attention to issues as diverse as nonpayment of child support in the United States and the widespread rape of Muslim women in Bosnia. WAC tactics include street theater, demonstrations, and other public protests reminiscent of the zap actions of the 1960s. New York's WAC has its own Drum Corps for marches, and a snappy logo—an eye, with the slogan "WAC is watching. We will take action." In the words of one activist, "We are oppressed but we are not going to be victimized" (Murray, in Hoban 1992). WAC has targeted family law courts for protests on Mother's Day, challenged Operation Rescue in front of abortion clinics, marched in front of court-houses where rape cases are being tried, demonstrated in front of museums that do not show women artists, and held regular vigils in front of the United Nations to protest the systematic use of rape as a terrorist tactic in the former Yugoslavia (Hoban 1992; Manegold 1992).

Although WAC is the most visible sign of the "new" grassroots energy of feminism, it is not the only one. WHAM, the Women's Health Action Mobilization was formed in 1989, taking its inspiration for street protests from the demonstrations staged by the radical AIDS protest group ACT-UP. Within a year, WHAM had a mailing list of three thousand names and held dozens of local meetings on issues from herbal medicine to abortion rights. Most of the members are under age thirty, and many are willing to risk arrest for their cause (Manegold 1992). Guerrilla Girls, founded in New York in 1985, calls itself "the conscience of the art world" and uses anonymous hit-and-run tactics to highlight sexist practices in museums, advertising, and media in general. Their posters, stickers, and street theater (in which they don gorilla masks and leather jackets) are aimed at art shows that virtually exclude women artists (Withers 1988). Direct actions, such as Take Back the Night marches, which were first held in San Francisco in 1978, spread to working-class communities such as Waukegan, Illinois, where four hundred people turned out for the 1990 march organized by their local coordinating council against sexual assault (Kamen 1991, 299). Such marches are virtually institutionalized on many campuses.

Other local direct actions may not be coordinated by an ongoing group but spring from the desire to protest specific actions dramatically. For example, Taylor and Whittier (1992b) report on a group of feminists in Ohio who sent pig testicles through the mail to a judge who had said that a four-year-old rape victim was "a promiscuous young lady." Other dramatic forms of public protest are also invented. For example, in Arizona, after charges of acquaintance rape against a basketball player were dropped, women protesters were arrested for outlining their bodies on the sidewalk in chalk with the slogan "rape is not a sport" ( About Women on Campus 1993).

Third Wave is a new organization of "twenty-something" African-American and white feminists that has attempted to bridge the gap between spontaneous local protest actions, ongoing direct action groups, and more conventional forms of political action. Drawing on the language of the Civil Rights movement, Third Wave sponsored "Freedom Summer '92," a voter registration drive for pro-choice young people (Manegold 1992). Similar goals characterize the Fund for a Feminist Majority (FFM), founded by former NOW President Eleanor Smeal, and attracting a less age-specific membership. FFM provided an alternative to NOW when NOW's own leadership seemed to be abandoning the electoral arena in the mid-1980s. Both Third Wave and FFM—and increasingly, NOW—are committed to combining the "insider" strategies of lobbying and voting with the "outsider" tactics of taking to the streets.

In this chapter we have examined the issues and organizational changes that characterized feminist activism in the period of defensive consolidation. During the openly hostile administrations of Presidents Reagan and Bush, the feminist agenda was dominated by struggles to preserve reproductive choice, to combat sexual violence, and to protect poor women from some of the worst economic consequences of "trickle-down" economics. Despite a sense of shared adversity and some limited successes in broad coalition building, the major thrust of this period was specialization, that is, organizing around specific issues. Feminists of very different perspectives and organizational affiliations were able to unite around particular policy concerns, raising funds and activating networks toward this goal, creating a vast web of submovements. In some ways, opposition strengthened the movement, creating a need for state organization and shattering some young women's complacency about gains already won. But constant defense took a toll as well, both in individual burnout and organizational collapse.

Unobtrusive mobilizations within many institutions changed organizational practices and challenged conventional thinking on many issues. Increased victories in electoral politics in the 1990s and a rebirth of direct action tactics at the grass roots provided the foundation for further mobilization in the coming decade. The new burst of energy and activism from second-generation feminists suggests that they are already defining their own agenda for the future of feminism. In the final chapter, we survey the accomplishments and unfinished agenda of the past three decades.

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"Feminism in Literature - Myra Marx Ferree And Beth B. Hess (Essay Date 1994)." Feminism in Literature, edited by Jessica Bomarito, Jeffrey W. Hunter, Vol. 4. Gale Cengage, 2005, 17 Aug. 2024 <https://www.enotes.com/topics/feminism/critical-essays/feminist-movement-20th-century#critical-essays-feminist-movement-20th-century-overviews-myra-marx-ferree-beth-b-hess-essay-date-1994>

Alice Echols (Essay Date 1997)

SOURCE: Echols, Alice. "Nothing Distant about It: Women's Liberation and Sixties Radicalism." In Women Transforming Politics: An Alternative Reader, edited by Cathy J. Cohen, Kathleen B. Jones, and Joan C. Tronto, pp. 456-76. New York: New York University Press, 1997. In the following essay, Echols points out how the ideology and methodology of 1960s political radicals, especially their linking of the personal and the political, directly supported and served as a model for the women's liberation movement.

On 7 September 1968 the sixties came to the Miss America Pageant when one hundred women's liberationists descended on Atlantic City to protest the pageant's promotion of physical attractiveness and charm as the primary measures of women's worth. Carrying signs that declared, "Miss America Is a Big Falsie," "Miss America Sells It," and "Up against the Wall, Miss America," they formed a picket line on the boardwalk, sang anti-Miss America songs in three-part harmony, and performed guerrilla theater. The activists crowned a live sheep Miss America and paraded it on the boardwalk to parody the way the contestants, and, by extension, all women, "are appraised and judged like animals at a county fair." They tried to convince women in the crowd that the tyranny of beauty was but one of the many ways that women's bodies were colonized. By announcing beforehand that they would not speak to male reporters (or to any man for that matter), they challenged the sexual division of labor that consigned women reporters to the "soft" stories and male reporters to the "hard" news stories. Newspaper editors who wanted to cover the protest were thus forced to pull their female reporters from the society pages to do so. 1

The protesters set up a "Freedom Trash Can" and filled it with various "instruments of torture"—high-heeled shoes, bras, girdles, hair curlers, false eyelashes, typing books, and representative copies of Cosmopolitan, Playboy, and Ladies' Home Journal. They had wanted to burn the contents of the Freedom Trash Can but were prevented from doing so by a city ordinance that prohibited bonfires on the boardwalk. However, word had been leaked to the press that the protest would include a symbolic bra-burning, and, as a consequence, reporters were everywhere. 2 Although they burned no bras that day on the boardwalk, the image of the bra-burning, militant feminist remains part of our popular mythology about the women's liberation movement.

The activists also managed to make their presence felt inside the auditorium during that night's live broadcast of the pageant. Pageant officials must have known that they were in for a long night when early in the evening one protester sprayed Toni Home Permanent Spray (one of the pageant's sponsors) at the mayor's booth. She was charged with disorderly conduct and "emanating a noxious odor," an irony that women's liberationists understandably savored. The more spectacular action occurred later that night. As the outgoing Miss America read her farewell speech, four women unfurled a banner that read, "Women's Liberation," and all sixteen protesters shouted "Freedom for Women," and "No More Miss America" before security guards could eject them. The television audience heard the commotion and could see it register on Miss America's face as she stumbled through the remainder of her speech. But the program's producer prevented the cameramen from covering the cause of Miss America's consternation. 3 The television audience did not remain in the dark for long, because Monday's newspapers described the protest in some detail. As the first major demonstration of the fledgling women's liberation movement, it had been designed to make a big splash, and after Monday morning no one could doubt that it had.

In its wit, passion, and irreverence, not to mention its expansive formulation of politics (to include the politics of beauty, no less!), the Miss America protest resembled other sixties demonstrations. Just as women's liberationists used a sheep to make a statement about conventional femininity, so had the Yippies a week earlier lampooned the political process by nominating a pig, Pegasus, for the presidency at the Democratic National Convention. 4 Although Atlantic City witnessed none of the violence that had occurred in Chicago, the protest generated plenty of hostility among the six hundred or so onlookers who gathered on the boardwalk. Judging from their response, this new thing, "women's liberation," was about as popular as the antiwar movement. The protesters were jeered, harassed, and called "commies" and "man-haters." One man suggested that it "would be a lot more useful" if the protesters threw themselves, and not their bras, girdles, and makeup, into the trash can. 5

Nothing—not even the verbal abuse they encountered on the boardwalk—could diminish the euphoria women's liberationists felt as they started to mobilize around their own, rather than other people's, oppression. Ann Snitow speaks for many when she recalls that in contrast to her involvement in the larger, male-dominated protest Movement, 6 where she had felt sort of "blank and peripheral," women's liberation was like "an ecstasy of discussion." Precisely because it was about one's own life, "there was," she claims, "nothing distant about it." 7 Robin Morgan has contended that the Miss America protest "announced our existence to the world." 8 That is only a slight exaggeration, for as a consequence of the protest, women's liberation achieved the status of a movement both to its participants and to the media; as such, the Miss America demonstration represents an important moment in the history of the sixties. 9

Although the women's liberation movement began to take shape only toward the end of the decade, it was a paradigmatically sixties movement. It is not just that many early women's liberation activists had prior involvements in other sixties movements, although that was certainly true, as has been ably documented by Sara Evans. 10 And it is not just that, of all the sixties movements, the women's liberation movement alone carried on and extended into the 1970s that decade's political radicalism and rethinking of fundamental social organization, although that is true as well. Rather, it is also that the larger, male-dominated protest Movement, despite its considerable sexism, provided much of the intellectual foundation and cultural orientation for the women's liberation movement. Indeed, many of the broad themes of the women's liberation movement—especially its concern with revitalizing the democratic process and reformulating "politics" to include the personal—were refined and recast versions of ideas and approaches already present in the New Left and the black freedom movement.

Moreover, like other sixties radicals, women's liberationists were responding at least in part to particular features of the postwar landscape. For instance, both the New Left and the women's liberation movement can be understood as part of a gendered generational revolt against the ultra-domesticity of that aberrant decade, the 1950s. The white radicals who participated in these movements were in flight from the nuclear family and the domesticated versions of masculinity and femininity that prevailed in postwar America. Sixties radicals, white and black, were also responding to the hegemonic position of liberalism and its promotion of government expansion both at home and abroad—the welfare/warfare state. Although sixties radicals came to define themselves in opposition to liberalism, their relation to liberalism was nonetheless complicated and ambivalent. They saw in big government not only a way of achieving greater economic and social justice, but also the possibility of an increasingly well managed society and an ever more remote government.

In this chapter I will attempt to evaluate some of the more important features of sixties radicalism by focusing on the specific example of the women's liberation movement. I am motivated by the problematic ways "the sixties" has come to be scripted in our culture. If conservative "slash and burn" accounts of the period indict sixties radicals for everything from crime and drug use to single motherhood, they at least heap guilt fairly equally on antiwar, black civil rights, and feminist activists alike. By contrast, progressive reconstructions, while considerably more positive in their assessments of the period, tend to present the sixties as if women were almost completely outside the world of radical politics. Although my accounting of the sixties is in some respects critical, I nonetheless believe that there was much in sixties radicalism that was original and hopeful, including its challenge to established authority and expertise, its commitment to refashioning democracy and "politics," and its interrogation of such naturalized categories as gender and race.

Women's discontent with their place in America in the sixties was, of course, produced by a broad range of causes. Crucial in reigniting feminist consciousness in the sixties was the unprecedented number of women (especially married white women) being drawn into the paid labor force, as the service sector of the economy expanded and rising consumer aspirations fueled the desire of many families for a second income. 11 As Alice Kessler-Harris has pointed out, "homes and cars, refrigerators and washing machines, telephones and multiple televisions required higher incomes." So did providing a college education for one's children. These new patterns of consumption were made possible in large part through the emergence of the two-income family as wives increasingly "sought to aid their husbands in the quest for the good life." By 1960, 30.5 percent of all wives worked for wages. 12 Women's growing participation in the labor force also reflected larger structural shifts in the U.S. economy. Sara Evans has argued that the "reestablishment of labor force segregation following World War II ironically reserved for women a large proportion of the new jobs created in the fifties due to the fact that the fastest growing sector of the economy was no longer industry but services." 13 Women's increasing labor force participation was facilitated as well by the growing number of women graduating from college and by the introduction of the birth control pill in 1960.

Despite the fact that women's "place" was increasingly in the paid workforce (or perhaps because of it), ideas about women's proper role in American society were quite conventional throughout the 1950s and the early 1960s, held there by a resurgent ideology of domesticity—what Betty Friedan called the "feminine mystique." But, as Jane De Hart-Mathews has observed, "the bad fit was there: the unfairness of unequal pay for the same work, the low value placed on jobs women performed, the double burden of housework and wage work." 14 By the mid-1960s at least some American women felt that the contradiction between the realities of paid work and higher education on the one hand and the still pervasive ideology of domesticity on the other had become irreconcilable.

Without the presence of other oppositional movements, however, the women's liberation movement may not have developed at all as an organized force for social change. It certainly would have developed along vastly different lines. The climate of protest encouraged women, even those not directly involved in the black movement and the New Left, to question conventional gender arrangements. Moreover, many of the women who helped form the women's liberation movement had been involved as well in the male-dominated Movement. If the larger Movement was typically indifferent, or worse, hostile to women's liberation, it was nonetheless through their experiences in that Movement that the young and predominantly white and middle-class women who initially formed the women's liberation movement became politicized. The relationship between women's liberation and the larger Movement was at its core paradoxical. If the Movement was a site of sexism, it also provided white women a space in which they could develop political skills and self-confidence, a space in which they could violate the injunction against female self-assertion. 15 Most important, it gave them no small part of the intellectual ammunition—the language and the ideas—with which to fight their own oppression.

Sixties radicals struggled to reformulate politics and power. Their struggle confounded many who lived through the sixties as well as those trying to make sense of the period some thirty years later. One of the most striking characteristics of sixties radicals was their ever-expanding opposition to liberalism. Radicals' theoretical disavowal of liberalism developed gradually and in large part in response to liberals' specific defaults—their failure to repudiate the segregationists at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, their lack of vigor in pressing for greater federal intervention in support of civil rights workers, and their readiness (with few exceptions) to support President Lyndon B. Johnson's escalation of the Vietnam War. But initially some radicals had argued that the Movement should acknowledge that liberalism was not monolithic but contained two discernible strands—"corporate" and "humanist" liberalism. For instance, in 1965 Carl Oglesby, an early leader of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), contrasted corporate liberals, whose identification with the system made them "illiberal liberals," with humanist liberals, who he hoped might yet see that "it is this movement with which their own best hopes are most in tune." 16

By 1967 radicals were no longer making the distinction between humanist and corporate liberals that they once had. This represented an important political shift for early new leftists in particular who once had felt an affinity of sorts with liberalism. 17 Black radicals were the first to decisively reject liberalism, and their move had an enormous impact on white radicals. With the ascendancy of black power many black militants maintained that liberalism was intrinsically paternalistic, and that black liberation required that the struggle be free of white involvement. This was elaborated by white radicals, who soon developed the argument that authentic radicalism involved organizing around one's own oppression rather than becoming involved, as a "liberal" would, in someone else's struggle for freedom. For instance, in 1967 Gregory Calvert, another SDS leader, argued that the "student movement has to develop an image of its own revolution … instead of believing that you're a revolutionary because you're related to Fidel's struggle, Stokely's struggle, always someone else's struggle." 18 Black radicals were also the first to conclude that nothing short of revolution—certainly not Johnson's Great Society programs and a few pieces of civil rights legislation—could undo racism. As leftist journalist Andrew Kopkind remembered it, the rhetoric of revolution proved impossible for white new leftists to resist. "With black revolution raging in America and world revolution directed against America, it was hardly possible for white radicals to think themselves anything less than revolutionaries." 19

Radicals' repudiation of liberalism also grew out of their fear that liberalism could "co-opt" and thereby contain dissent. Thus, in 1965 when President Johnson concluded a nationally televised speech on civil rights by proclaiming, "And we shall overcome," radicals saw in this nothing more than a calculated move to appropriate Movement rhetoric in order to blunt protest. By contrast, more established civil rights leaders reportedly cheered the president on, believing that his declaration constituted a significant "affirmation of the movement." 20 Liberalism, then, was seen as both compromised and compromising. In this, young radicals were influenced by Herbert Marcuse, who emphasized the system's ability to reproduce itself through its recuperation of dissent. 21

BETTY FRIEDAN (1921-)

Born in Peoria, Illinois, Friedan graduated summa cum laude from Smith College in 1942. Faced with the necessity of sacrificing marriage and motherhood in pursuit of an academic career, she turned down the research fellowship she was offered, began working as a reporter in New York City, and was married in 1947. Fired from her job after requesting a second maternity leave, Friedan became a freelance writer for women's magazines. She interviewed housewives about their lives, and this research formed the basis of The Feminine Mystique (1963). In this bestselling work, Friedan argued that "feminine mystique," the belief that women gained fulfillment only from marriage and motherhood, is responsible for the boredom, fatigue, and dissatisfaction that has pervaded the lives of many American women. The Feminine Mystique has been credited with revitalizing interest in the women's movement. In 1966 Friedan cofounded the National Organization for Women (NOW) and served as its president until 1970. Under her guidance, NOW lobbied for the legalization of abortion, the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, and the equal treatment of women in the work-place. Friedan, however, came into frequent conflict with radical feminists over the issue of lesbianism as a political stance, which she opposed on the grounds that it alienated mainstream women and men sympathetic to the movement. Political infighting between Friedan and such prominent activists as Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug disrupted the 1973 National Women's Political Caucus, and Friedan later indirectly accused them of manipulating the balloting to prevent the participation of her supporters. Friedan discussed this controversy and chronicled her early involvement with the women's movement in It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women's Movement (1976). In The Second Stage (1981), Friedan discussed the emergence of the Superwoman myth—the image of the woman who effortlessly juggles her career, marriage, and children—, or as Friedan dubbed it, the "feminist mystique." Friedan warned that the Superwoman image, as unrealistic as the perfect housewife image from the 1960s, could have lasting negative effects on the women's movement.

Just as radicals' critique of materialism developed in the context of relative economic abundance, so did their critique of liberalism develop at a time of liberalism's greatest political strength. The idea that conservativism might supplant liberalism at some point in the near future was simply unimaginable to them. (To be fair, this view was not entirely unreasonable given Johnson's trouncing of Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election.)

This was just one of many things that distinguished new leftists from old leftists, who, having lived through McCarthyism, were far more concerned about the possibility of a conservative resurgence. For if sixties radicals grew worlds apart from liberals, they often found themselves in conflict with old leftists as well. In general, new leftists rejected the economism and virulent anticommunism of the non-communist Old Left. In contrast to old leftists, whose target was "class-based economic oppression," new leftists (at least before 1969, when some new leftists did embrace dogmatic versions of Marxism) focused on "how late capitalist society creates mechanisms of psychological and cultural domination over everyone. " 22 For young radicals the problem went beyond capitalism and included not only the alienation engendered by mass society, but also other systems of hierarchy based on race, gender, and age. Indeed, they were often more influenced by existentialists like Camus or social critics like C. Wright Mills and Herbert Marcuse, both of whom doubted the working class's potential for radical action, than by Marx or Lenin. For instance, SDS president Paul Potter contended that it would be "through the experience of the middle class and the anesthetic of bureaucracy and mass society that the vision and program of participatory democracy will come." 23 This rejection of what Mills dubbed the "labor metaphysic" had everything to do with the different circumstances radicals confronted in the sixties. As Arthur Miller observed, "The radical of the thirties came out of a system that had stopped and the important job was to organize new production relations which would start it up again. The sixties radical opened his eyes to a system pouring its junk over everybody, or nearly everybody, and the problem was to stop just that, to escape being overwhelmed by a mindless, goalless flood which marooned each individual on his little island of commodities." 24

If sixties radicals initially rejected orthodox and economistic versions of Marxism, many did (especially over time) appropriate, expand, and recast Marxist categories in an effort to understand the experiences of oppressed and marginalized groups. Thus exponents of what was termed "new working-class theory" claimed that people with technical, clerical, and professional jobs should be seen as constituting a new sector of the working class, better educated than the traditional working class, but working class nonetheless. According to this view, students were not members of the privileged middle class, but rather "trainees" for the new working class. And many women's liberationists (even radical feminists who rejected Marxist theorizing about women's condition) often tried to use Marxist methodology to understand women's oppression. For example, Shulamith Firestone argued that just as the elimination of "economic classes" would require the revolt of the proletariat and their seizure of the means of production, so would the elimination of "sexual classes" require women's revolt and their "seizure of control of reproduction." 25

If young radicals often assumed an arrogant stance toward those remnants of the Old Left that survived the 1950s, they were by the late 1960s unambiguously contemptuous of liberals. Women's liberationists shared new leftists' and black radicals' rejection of liberalism, and, as a consequence, they often went to great lengths to distinguish themselves from the liberal feminists of the National Organization for Women (NOW). (In fact, their disillusionment with liberalism was more thorough during the early stages of their movement building than had been the case for either new leftists or civil rights activists because they had lived through the earlier betrayals around the Vietnam War and civil rights. Moreover, male radicals' frequent denunciations of women's liberation as "bourgeois" encouraged women's liberationists to distance themselves from NOW.) NOW had been formed in 1966 to push the federal government to enforce the provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act outlawing sex discrimination—a paradigmatic liberal agenda focused on public access and the prohibition of employment discrimination. To women's liberation activists, NOW's integrationist, accessoriented approach ignored the racial and class inequities that were the very foundation of the "mainstream" that NOW was dedicated to integrating. In the introduction to the 1970 bestseller Sisterhood Is Powerful, Robin Morgan declared that "NOW is essentially an organization that wants reforms [in the] second-class citizenship of women—and this is where it differs drastically from the rest of the Women's Liberation Movement." 26 In The Dialectic of Sex, Shulamith Firestone described NOW's political stance as "untenable even in terms of immediate political gains" and deemed it "more a leftover of the old feminism rather than a model of the new." 27 Radical feminist Ti-Grace Atkinson went even further, characterizing many in NOW as only wanting "women to have the same opportunity to be oppressors, too." 28

Women's liberationists also took issue with liberal feminists' formulation of women's problem as their exclusion from the public sphere. Younger activists argued instead that women's exclusion from public life was inextricable from their subordination in the family and would persist until this larger issue was addressed. For instance, Firestone claimed that the solution to women's oppression was not inclusion in the mainstream, but rather the eradication of the biological family, which was the "tapeworm of exploitation." 29

Of course, younger activists' alienation from NOW was often more than matched by NOW members' disaffection from them. Many liberal feminists were appalled (at least initially) by women's liberationists' politicization of personal life. NOW founder Betty Friedan frequently railed against women's liberationists for waging a "bedroom war" that diverted women from the real struggle of integrating the public sphere. 30

Women's liberationists believed that they had embarked on a much more ambitious project—the virtual remaking of the world—and that theirs was the real struggle. 31 Nothing short of radically transforming society was sufficient to deal with what they were discovering: that gender inequality was embedded in everyday life. In 1970 Shulamith Firestone observed that "sex-class is so deep as to be invisible." 32 The pervasiveness of gender inequality and gender's status as a naturalized category demonstrated to women's liberationists the inadequacy of NOW's legislative and judicial remedies and the necessity of thoroughgoing social transformation. Thus, whereas liberal feminists talked of ending sex discrimination, women's liberationists called for nothing less than the destruction of capitalism and patriarchy. As defined by feminists, patriarchy, in contrast to sex discrimination, defied reform. For example, Adrienne Rich contended, "Patriarchy is the power of the fathers: a familialsocial, ideological, political system in which men—by force, direct pressure, or through ritual, tradition, law and language, customs, etiquette, education, and the division of labor, determine what part women shall or shall not play, and in which the female is subsumed under the male." 33

Women's liberationists typically indicted capitalism as well. Ellen Willis, for instance, maintained that "the American system consists of two interdependent but distinct parts—the capitalist state, and the patriarchal family." Willis argued that capitalism succeeded in exploiting women as cheap labor and consumers "primarily by taking advantage of women's subordinate position in the family and our historical domination by man." 34

Central to the revisionary project of the women's liberation movement was the desire to render gender meaningless, to explode it as a significant category. In the movement's view, both masculinity and femininity represented not timeless essences, but rather "patriarchal" constructs. (Of course, even as the movement sought to de-construct gender, it was, paradoxically, as many have noted, trying to mobilize women precisely on the basis of their gender.) 35 This explains in part the significance abortion rights held for women's liberationists, who believed that until abortion was descriminalized, biology would remain women's destiny, thus foreclosing the possibility of women's self-determination." 36

Indeed, the women's liberation movement made women's bodies the site of political contestation. The "colonized" status of women's bodies became the focus of much movement activism. The discourse of colonization originated in Third World national liberation movements but, in an act of First World appropriation, was taken up by black radicals who claimed that African Americans constituted an "internal colony" in the United States. Radical women trying to persuade the larger Movement of the legitimacy of their cause soon followed suit by deploying the discourse to expose women's subordinate position in relation to men. This appropriation represented an important move and one characteristic of radicalism in the late 1960s, that is, the borrowing of conceptual frameworks and discourses from other movements to comprehend the situation of oppressed groups in the United States—with mixed results at best. In fact, women's liberationists challenged not only tyrannical beauty standards, but also violence against women, women's sexual alienation, the compulsory character of heterosexuality and its organization around male pleasure (inscribed in the privileging of the vaginal over clitoral orgasm), the health hazards associated with the birth control pill, the definition of contraception as women's responsibility, and, of course, women's lack of reproductive control. They also challenged the sexual division of labor in the home, employment discrimination, and the absence of quality child care facilities. Finally, women's liberationists recognized the power of language to shape culture.

The totalism of their vision would have been difficult to translate into a concrete reform package, even had they been interested in doing so. But electoral politics and the legislative and judicial reforms that engaged the energies of liberal feminists did little to animate most women's liberationists. Like other sixties radicals, they were instead taken with the idea of developing forms that would prefigure the utopian community of the imagined future. 37 Anxious to avoid the "manipulated consent" that they believed characterized American politics, sixties radicals struggled to develop alternatives to hierarchy and centralized decision making. 38 They spoke often of creating "participatory democracy" in an effort to maximize individual participation and equalize power. Their attempts to build a "democracy of individual participation" often confounded outsiders, who found Movement meetings exhausting and tedious affairs. 39 But to those radicals who craved political engagement, "freedom" was, as one radical group enthused, "an endless meeting." 40 According to Gregory Calvert, participatory democracy appealed to the "deep anti-authoritarianism of the new generation in addition to offering them the immediate concretization of the values of openness, honesty, and community in human relationships." 41 Women's liberationists, still smarting from their firsthand discovery that the larger Movement's much-stated commitment to egalitarianism did not apply equally to all, often took extraordinary measures to try to ensure egalitarianism. They employed a variety of measures in an effort to equalize power, including consensus decision making, rotating chairs, and the sharing of both creative and routine movement work.

Fundamental to this "prefigurative politics," as sociologist Wini Breines terms it, was the commitment to develop counterinstitutions that would anticipate the desired society of the future. 42 Staughton Lynd, director of the Mississippi Freedom Schools and a prominent new leftist, likened sixties radicals to the Wobblies (labor radicals of the early twentieth century) in their commitment to building "the new society within the shell of the old." 43 According to two early SDSers, "What we are working for is far more than changes in the structure of society and its institutions or the people who are now making the decisions.…The stress should rather be on wrenching people out of the system both physically and spiritually." 44

Radicals believed that alternative institutions would not only satisfy needs unmet by the present system, but also, perhaps, by dramatizing the failures of the system, radicalize those not served by it but currently outside the Movement. Tom Hayden proposed that radicals "build our own free institutions—community organizations, newspapers, coffeehouses—at points of strain within the system where human needs are denied. These institutions become centers of identity, points of contact, building blocks of a new society from which we confront the system more intensely." 45

Among the earliest and best known of such efforts were the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and the accompanying Freedom Schools formed during Freedom Summer of 1964. In the aftermath of that summer's Democratic National Convention, Bob Moses [Parris] of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) even suggested that the Movement abandon its efforts to integrate the Democratic Party and try instead to establish its own state government in Mississippi. And as early as 1966 SNCC's Atlanta Project called on blacks to "form our own institutions, credit unions, co-ops, political parties." 46 This came to be the preferred strategy as the sixties progressed and disillusionment with traditional politics grew. Rather than working from within the system, new leftists and black radicals instead formed alternative political parties, media, schools, universities, and assemblies of oppressed and unrepresented people.

Women's liberationists elaborated on this idea, creating an amazing panoply of counterinstitutions. In the years before the 1973 Supreme Court decision decriminalizing abortion, feminists established abortion referral services in most cities of any size. Women's liberationists in Chicago even operated an underground abortion clinic, "Jane," where they performed about one hundred abortions each week. 47 By the mid-1970s most big cities had a low-cost feminist health clinic, a rape crisis center, and a feminist bookstore. In Detroit, after "a long struggle to translate feminism into federalese," two women succeeded in convincing the National Credit Union Administration that feminism was a legitimate "field" from which to draw credit union members. Within three years of its founding in 1973, the Detroit credit union could claim assets of almost one million dollars. Feminists in other cities soon followed suit. Women's liberation activists in Washington, D.C., formed Olivia Records, the first women's record company, which by 1978 was supporting a paid staff of fourteen and producing four records a year. 48 By the mid-1970s there existed in most cities of any size a politicized feminist counterculture, or a "women's community."

The popularity of alternative institutions was that at least in part they seemed to hold out the promise of political effectiveness without cooptation. Writing in 1969, Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones), a black nationalist and accomplished poet, maintained, "But you must have the cultural revolution.…We cannot fight a war, an actual physical war with the forces of evil just because we are angry. We can begin to build. We must build black institutions … all based on a value system that is beneficial to black people." 49

Jennifer Woodul, one of the founders of Olivia Records, argued that ventures like Olivia represented a move toward gaining "economic power" for women. "We feel it's useless to advocate more and more 'political action' if some of it doesn't result in the permanent material improvement of the lives of women." 50 Robin Morgan termed feminist counterinstitutions "concrete moves toward self-determination and power." 51 The situation, it turned out, was much more complicated. Women involved in nonprofit feminist institutions such as rape crisis centers and shelters for battered women found that their need for state or private funding sometimes militated against adherence to feminist principles.

Feminist businesses, by contrast, discovered that while they were rarely the objects of cooptation, the problem of recuperation remained. In many cases the founders of these institutions became the victims of their own success, as mainstream presses, recording companies, credit unions, and banks encroached on a market they had originally discovered and tapped. 52 For instance, by the end of the 1970s Olivia was forced to reduce its staff almost by half and to scuttle its collective structure. 53 Today k. d. lang, Tracy Chapman, Michelle Shocked, and Sinead O'Connor are among those androgynous women singers enjoying great commercial success, but on major labels. Although Olivia helped lay the groundwork for their achievements, it finds its records, as Arlene Stein has observed, "languishing in the 'women's music' section in the rear [of the record store] if they're there at all." 54

The move toward building counterinstitutions was part of a larger strategy to develop new societies "within the shell of the old," but this shift sometimes had unintended consequences. While feminist counterinstitutions were originally conceived as part of a culture of resistance, over time they often became more absorbed in sustaining themselves than in confronting male supremacy, especially as their services were duplicated by mainstream businesses. In the early years of the women's liberation movement this alternative feminist culture did provide the sort of "free space" women needed to confront sexism. But as it was further elaborated in the mid-1970s, it ironically often came to promote insularity instead—becoming, as Adrienne Rich has observed, "a place of emigration, an end in itself," where patriarchy was evaded rather than confronted. 55 In practice, feminist communities were small, self-contained subcultures that proved hard to penetrate, especially to newcomers unaccustomed to their norms and conventions. The shift in favor of alternative communities may have sometimes impeded efforts at outreach for the women's liberationists, new leftists, and black radicals who attempted it.

On a related issue, the larger protest Movement's great pessimism about reform—the tendency to interpret every success a defeat resulting in the Movement's further recuperation (what Robin Morgan called "futilitarianism")—may have encouraged a too-global rejection of reform among sixties radicals. For instance, some women's liberation groups actually opposed the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) when NOW revived it. In September 1970 a New York-based group, The Feminists, denounced the ERA and advised feminists against "squandering invaluable time and energy on it." 56 A delegation of Washington, D.C., women's liberationists invited to appear before the senate subcommittee considering the ERA testified, "We are aware that the system will try to appease us with their [ sic ] paper offerings. We will not be appeased. Our demands can only be met by a total transformation of society which you cannot legislate, you cannot co-opt, you cannot control. " 57 In The Dialectic of Sex, Firestone went so far as to dismiss child care centers as attempts to "buy women off" because they "ease the immediate pressure without asking why the pressure is on women. " 58

Similarly, many SDS leaders opposed the National Conference for New Politics (NCNP), an abortive attempt to form a national progressive organization oriented around electoral politics and to launch an antiwar presidential ticket headed by Martin Luther King, Jr., and Benjamin Spock. Immediately following NCNP's first and only convention, in 1967, the SDS paper New Left Notes published two front-page articles criticizing NCNP organizers. One writer contended that "people who recognize the political process as perverted will not seek change through the institutions that process has created." 59 The failure of sixties radicals to distinguish between reform and reformism meant that while they defined the issues, they often did little to develop policy initiatives around those issues. 60 Moreover, the preoccupation of women's liberationists with questions of internal democracy (fueled in part by their desire to succeed where the men had failed) sometimes had the effect of focusing attention away from the larger struggle in an effort to create the perfect movement. As feminist activist Frances Chapman points out, women's liberation was "like a generator that got things going, cut out and left it to the larger reform engine which made a lot of mistakes." 61 In eschewing traditional politics rather than entering them skeptically, women's liberationists, like other sixties radicals, may have lost an opportunity to foster critical debate in the larger arena.

SHIRLEY CHISOLM (1924-)

In 1968 Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisolm became, in her words, "the first American citizen to be elected to Congress in spite of the double drawbacks of being female and having skin darkened by melanin." She also became the first African American woman to seek the presidential nomination of a major political party in 1972. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Chisolm spent most of her childhood living with her grandparents in Barbados. She returned to New York to complete high school, and earned a bachelor's degree in 1946 and a master's degree in 1952. Chisolm worked as an early childhood educator, and went on to serve as a child care center director and education consultant to the New York City Bureau of Child Welfare before being elected to the New York State Assembly in 1964. During her career as an assembly-woman (1964-1968) and later as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives (1968-1983), Chisolm was a vocal proponent of funding for child care services, equal rights for women, labor and minimum wage reform, educational issues, ending poverty, and advancing civil rights. In one of her first addresses to the U.S. House of Representatives, on May 21, 1969, Chisolm introduced the Equal Rights Amendment, and declared: "As a black person, I am no stranger to race prejudice. But the truth is that in the political world I have been far oftener discriminated against because I am a woman than because I am black." In 1984 Chisolm was elected the first chairperson of the National Political Congress of Black Women; she now holds the title Chair Emeritus.

Chisolm, Shirley. In Unbought and Unbossed, p. xi. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970.

Chisolm, Shirley. In "Address to the United States House of Representatives: Washington, DC: May 21, 1969." Congressional Record, Extension of Remarks, E4165-6. Women's Liberation Movement: An On-line Archival Collection, Special Collections Library, Duke University, http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/wlm/equal/ (30 March 2004).

If young radicals eschewed the world of conventional politics, they nonetheless had a profound impact on it, especially by redefining what is understood as "political." Although the women's liberation movement popularized the slogan "the personal is political," the idea that there is a political dimension to personal life was first embraced by early SDSers who had encountered it in the writings of C. Wright Mills. 62 Rebelling against a social order whose public and private spheres were highly differentiated, new leftists called for a reintegration of the personal with the political. They reconceptualized apparently personal problems—specifically their alienation from a campus cultural milieu characterized by sororities and fraternities, husband and wife hunting, sports, and careerism, and the powerlessness they felt as college students without a voice in campus governance or curriculum—as political problems. Thus SDS's founding Port Huron Statement of 1962 suggested that for an American New Left to succeed, it would have to "give form to … feelings of helplessness and indifference, so that people may see the political, social, and economic sources of their private troubles and organize to change society." 63 Theirs was a far more expansive formulation of politics than what prevailed in the Old Left, even among the more renegade remnants that had survived into the early sixties. 64 Power was conceptualized as relational and by no means reducible to electoral politics.

By expanding political discourse to include personal relations, new leftists unintentionally paved the way for women's liberationists to develop critiques of the family, marriage, and the construction of sexuality. (Of course, nonfeminist critiques of the family and sexual repressiveness were hardly in short supply in the 1950s and 1960s, as evidenced by Rebel without a Cause, Catcher in the Rye, and Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd, to mention but a few.) Women's liberationists developed an understanding of power's capillarylike nature, which in some respects anticipated those being formulated by Michel Foucault and other poststructuralists. 65 Power was conceptualized as occupying multiple sites and as lodging everywhere, even in those private places assumed to be the most removed from or impervious to politics—the home and, more particularly, the bedroom.

The belief of sixties radicals that the personal is political also suggested to them its converse—that the political is personal. Young radicals typically felt it was not enough to sign leaflets or participate in a march if one returned to the safety and comfort of a middle-class existence. Politics was supposed to unsettle life and its routines, even more, to transform life. For radicals the challenge was to discover, underneath all the layers of social conditioning, the "real" self unburdened by social expectations and conventions. Thus, SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael advanced the slogan, "Every Negro is a potential black man." 66 Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt argued that among the "most exciting things to come out of the women's movement so far is a new daring … to tear down old structures and assumptions and let real thought and feeling flow." 67 Life would not be comfortable, but who wanted comfort in the midst of so much deadening complacency? For a great many radicals, the individual became a site of political activism in the sixties. In the black freedom movement the task was very much to discover the black inside the Negro, and in the women's liberation movement it was to unlearn niceness, to challenge the taboo against female self-assertion. 68

Sixties radicalism proved compelling to many precisely because it promised to transform life. Politics was not about the subordination of self to some larger political cause; instead, it was the path to self-fulfillment. This ultimately was the power of sixties radicalism. As Stanley Aronowitz notes, sixties radicalism was in large measure about "infus[ing] life with a secular spiritual and moral content" and "fill[ing] the quotidian with personal meaning and purpose." 69 But "the personal is political" was one of those ideas whose rhetorical power seemed to sometimes work against or undermine its explication. It could encourage a solipsistic preoccupation with self-transformation. As new leftist Richard Flacks presciently observed in 1965, this kind of politics could lead to "a search for personally satisfying modes of life while abandoning the possibility of helping others to change theirs." 70 Thus the idea that "politics is how you live your life, not who you vote for," as Yippie leader Jerry Rubin put it, could and did lead to a subordination of politics to lifestyle. 71 If the idea led some to confuse personal liberation with political struggle, it led others to embrace an asceticism that sacrificed personal needs and desires to political imperatives. Some women's liberation activists followed this course, interpreting the idea that the personal is political to mean that one's personal life should conform to some abstract standard of political correctness. At first this tendency was mitigated by the founders' insistence that there were no personal solutions, only collective solutions, to women's oppression. Over time, however, one's self-presentation, marital status, and sexual preference frequently came to determine one's standing or ranking in the movement. The most notorious example of this involved the New York radical group The Feminists, who established a quota to limit the number of married women in the group. 72 Policies such as these prompted Barbara Ehrenreich to question "a feminism which talks about universal sisterhood, but is horrified by women who wear spiked heels or call their friends 'girls.'" 73 At the same time, what was personally satisfying was sometimes upheld as politically correct. In the end, both the women's liberation movement and the larger protest Movement suffered, as the idea that the personal is political was often interpreted in such a way as to make questions of lifestyle absolutely central.

The social movements of the sixties signaled the beginning of what has come to be known as "identity politics," the idea that politics is rooted in identity. 74 Although some New Left groups by the late 1960s did come to endorse an orthodox Marxism whereby class was privileged, class was not the pivotal category for these new social movements. 75 (Even those New Left groups that reverted to the "labor metaphysic" lacked meaningful working-class participation.) Rather, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, and youth were the salient categories for most sixties activists. In the women's liberation movement, what was termed "consciousness-raising" was the tool used to develop women's group identity.

As women's liberationists started to organize a movement, they confronted American women who identified unambiguously as women, but who typically had little of what Nancy Cott would call "we-ness," or "some level of identification with 'the group called women.'" 76 Moreover, both the pervasiveness of gender inequality and the cultural understanding of gender as a natural rather than a social construct made it difficult to cultivate a critical consciousness about gender even among women. To engender this sense of sisterhood or "we-ness," women's liberationists developed consciousness-raising, a practice involving "the political reinterpretation of personal life." 77 According to its principal architects, its purpose was to "awaken the latent consciousness that … all women have about our oppression." In talking about their personal experiences, it was argued, women would come to understand that what they had believed were personal problems were, in fact, "social problems that must become social issues and fought together rather than with personal solutions." 78

Reportedly, New York women's liberationist Kathie Sarachild was the person who coined the term consciousness-raising. However, the technique originated in other social movements. As Sarachild wrote in 1973, those who promoted consciousness-raising "were applying to women and to ourselves as women's liberation organizers the practice a number of us had learned in the civil rights movement in the South in the early 1960's." 79 There they had seen that the sharing of personal problems, grievances, and aspirations—"telling it like it is"—could be a radicalizing experience. Moreover, for some women's liberationists consciousness-raising was a way to avoid the tendency of some members of the movement to try to fit women within existing (and often Marxist) theoretical paradigms. By circumventing the "experts" on women and going to women themselves, they would be able to not only construct a theory of women's oppression but formulate strategy as well. Thus women's liberationists struggled to find the commonalities in women's experiences in order to formulate generalizations about women's oppression.

Consciousness-raising was enormously successful in exposing the insidiousness of sexism and in engendering a sense of identity and solidarity among the largely white, middle-class women who participated in "c-r" groups. By the early 1970s even NOW, whose founder Betty Friedan had initially derided consciousness-raising as so much "navel-gazing," began sponsoring c-r groups. 80 But the effort to transcend the particular was both the strength and the weakness of consciousness-raising. If it encouraged women to locate the common denominators in their lives, it inhibited discussion of women's considerable differences. Despite the particularities of white, middle-class women's experiences, theirs became the basis for feminist theorizing about women's oppression. In a more general sense the identity politics informing consciousness-raising tended to privilege experience in certain problematic ways. It was too often assumed that there existed a kind of core experience, initially articulated as "women's experience." Black and white radicals (the latter in relation to youth) made a similar move as well. When Stokely Carmichael called on blacks to develop an "ideology which speaks to our blackness," he, like other black nationalists, suggested that there was somehow an essential and authentic "blackness."

With the assertion of difference within the women's movement in the 1980s, the notion that women constitute a unitary category has been problematized. As a consequence, women's experiences have become ever more discretely defined, as in "the black female experience," "the Jewish female experience," or "the Chicana lesbian experience." But, as Audre Lorde has argued, there remains a way in which, even with greater and greater specificity, the particular is never fully captured. 81 Instead, despite the pluralization of the subject within feminism, identities are often still imagined as monolithic. Finally, the very premise of identity politics—that identity is the basis of politics—has sometimes shut down possibilities for communication, as identities are seen as necessarily either conferring or foreclosing critical consciousness. Kobena Mercer, a British film critic, has criticized the rhetorical strategies of "authenticity and authentication" that tend to characterize identity politics. He has observed, "if I preface a point by saying something like, 'as a black gay man, I feel marginalized by your discourse,' it makes a valid point but in such a way that preempts critical dialogue because such a response could be inferred as a criticism not of what I say but of what or who I am. The problem is replicated in the familiar cop-out clause, 'as a middle-class, white, heterosexual male, what can I say?'" 82

The problem is that the mere assertion of identity becomes in a very real sense irrefutable. Identity is presented as not only stable and fixed, but also insurmountable. While identity politics gives the oppressed the moral authority to speak (perhaps a dubious ground from which to speak), it can, ironically, absolve those belonging to dominant groups from having to engage in a critical dialogue. In some sense, then, identity politics can unintentionally reinforce Other-ness. Finally, as the antifeminist backlash and the emergence of the New Right should demonstrate, there is nothing inherently progressive about identity. It can be, and has been, mobilized for reactionary as well as for radical purposes. 83 For example, the participation of so many women in the antiabortion movement reveals just how problematic the reduction of politics to identity can be.

Accounts of sixties radicalism usually cite its role in bringing about the dismantling of Jim Crow and disfranchisement, the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam, and greater gender equality. However, equally important, if less frequently noted, was its challenge to politics as usual. Sixties radicals succeeded both in reformulating politics, even mainstream politics, to include personal life, and in challenging the notion that elites alone have the wisdom and expertise to control the political process. For a moment, people who by virtue of their color, age, and gender were far from the sites of formal power became politically engaged, became agents of change.

Given the internal contradictions and shortcomings of sixties radicalism, the repressiveness of the federal government in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and changing economic conditions in the United States, it is not surprising that the movements built by radicals in the sixties either no longer exist or do so only in attenuated form. Activists in the women's liberation movement, however, helped bring about a fundamental realignment of gender roles in this country through outrageous protests, tough-minded polemics, and an "ecstasy of discussion." Indeed, those of us who came of age in the days before the resurgence of feminism know that the world today, while hardly a feminist utopia, is nonetheless a far different, and in many respects a far fairer, world than what we confronted in 1967.

See Carol Hanisch, "A Critique of the Miss America Protest," in Notes from the Second Year: Women's Liberation, ed. Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt (New York: Radical Feminism, 1970), 87; and Judith Duffet, "Atlantic City Is a Town with Class—They Raise Your Morals While They Judge Your Ass," Voice of the Women's Liberation Movement 1, no. 3 (October 1968). The protesters also criticized the pageant's narrow formulation of beauty, especially its racist equation of beauty with whiteness. They emphasized that in its forty-seven-year history, the pageant had never crowned a black woman Miss America. That weekend the first Black Miss America Pageant was held in Atlantic City.
See Lindsy Van Gelder, "Bra Burners Plan Protest," New York Post, 4 September 1968, which appeared three days before the protest. The New York Times article by Charlotte Curtis quoted Robin Morgan as having said about the mayor of Atlantic City, "He was worried about our burning things. He said the board-walk had already been burned out once this year. We told him we wouldn't do anything dangerous—just a symbolic bra-burning." Curtis, "Miss America Pageant Is Picketed by 100 Women," New York Times, 8 September 1968.
See Jack Gould's column in the New York Times, 9 September 1968.
The Yippies were a small group of leftists who, in contrast to most of the Left, had enthusiastically embraced the growing counterculture. For a fascinating account of the 1968 convention, see David Farber, Chicago '68 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
Curtis, "Miss America Pageant."
For the sake of convenience, I will use the term Movement to describe the overlapping protest movements of the sixties—the black freedom movement, the student movement, the antiwar movement, and the more selfconsciously political New Left. I will refer to the women's liberation movement as the movement ; here I use the lower case simply to avoid confusion.
Snitow, interview by author, New York, 14 June 1984. Here one can get a sense of the disjuncture in experiences between white and black women; presumably, black women had not felt the same sense of distance about their civil rights activism.
Robin Morgan, Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist (New York: Random House, 1978), 62.
Yet virtually all the recently published books on the sixties either slight or ignore the protest. This omission is emblematic of a larger problem, the failure of authors to integrate women's liberation into their reconstruction of that period. Indeed, most of these books have replicated the position of women in the larger, male-dominated protest Movement—that is, the women's liberation movement is relegated to the margins of the narrative. Such marginalization has been exacerbated as well by the many feminist recollections of the sixties that demonize the Movement and present women's liberation as its antithesis. Sixties books that textually subordinate the women's liberation movement include James Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987); Tom Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1988); Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1987); and Nancy Zaroulis and Gerald Sullivan, Who Spoke Up? American Protest against the War in Vietnam (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984). A notable exception is Stewart Burns, Social Movements of the 1960's: Searching for Democracy (Boston: Twayne, 1990).
Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
Sara Evans has argued that in their attempt to combine work inside and outside the family, educated, middle-class, married white women of the 1950s were following the path pioneered by black women. See Evans, Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America (New York: Free Press, 1989), 253-54. As Jacqueline Jones and others have demonstrated, black women have a "long history of combining paid labor with domestic obligations." According to Jones, in 1950 one-third of all married black women were in the labor force, compared to one-quarter of all married women in the general population. One study cited by Jones "concluded that black mothers of school-aged children were more likely to work than their white counterparts, though part-time positions in the declining field of domestic service inhibited growth in their rates of labor force participation." Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 269.
Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 302.
Evans, Born for Liberty, 252.
Jane De Hart-Mathews, "The New Feminism and the Dynamics of Social Change," in Women's America: Refocusing the Past, 2d ed., ed. Linda Kerber and Jane De Hart-Mathews (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 445.
I think that this was an experience specific to white women. The problem of diffidence seems to have been, if not unique to white women, then especially acute for them. This is not to say that issues of gender were unimportant to black women activists in the sixties, but that gender seemed less primary and pressing an issue than race. However, much more research is needed in this area. It could be that the black women's noninvolvement in women's liberation had as much, if not more, to do with the movement's racism than any prioritizing of race.
Carl Oglesby, "Trapped in a System," reprinted as "Liberalism and the Corporate State," in The New Radicals: A Report with Documents, ed. Paul Jacobs and Saul Landau (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 266. For a useful discussion of the New Left's relationship to liberalism, see Gitlin, The Sixties, 127-92.
See Howard Brick, "Inventing Post-Industrial Society: Liberal and Radical Social Theory in the 1960's" (paper delivered at the 1990 American Studies Association Conference). In September 1963 the electoral politics faction of SDS had even succeeded in getting the group to adopt the slogan "Part of the Way with LBJ." Johnson's official campaign slogan was "All the Way with LBJ." See Gitlin, The Sixties, 180.
Gregory Calvert, interview, Movement 3, no. 2 (1967): 6.
Andrew Kopkind, "Looking Backward: The Sixties and the Movement," Ramparts 11, no. 8 (February 1973): 32.
That evening seven million people watched Johnson's speech to Congress announcing voting rights legislation. According to C. T. Vivian, "a tear ran down" Martin Luther King's cheek as Johnson finished his speech. Juan Williams, Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-65 (New York: Penguin, 1988), 278.
Elinor Langer discusses the ways Marcuse's notion of repressive tolerance was used by the Movement. See her wonderful essay, "Notes for Next Time," Working Papers for a New Society 1, no. 3 (fall 1973): 48-83.
Ellen Kay Trimberger, "Women in the Old and New Left: The Evolution of a Politics of Personal Life," Feminist Studies 5, no. 3 (fall 1979): 442.
Potter quoted from Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets, 196.
Miller quoted from Gitlin, The Sixties, 9. Although the broad outlines of Miller's argument are correct, some recent scholarship on 1930s radicalism suggests that it was considerably more varied and less narrowly economistic than has been previously acknowledged. For example, recent books by Paula Rabinowitz and Robin Kelley demonstrate that some radicals in this period understood the salience of such categories as gender and race. See Paula Rabinowitz, Labor and Desire: Women's Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Robin Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990).
Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, rev. ed. (New York: Bantam Books, 1971), 10-11.
Robin Morgan, in Sisterhood Is Powerful, ed. Morgan (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), xxii.
Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, 33. For a very useful history of women's rights activism (as opposed to women's liberation) in the postwar years, see Cynthia Harrison, On Account of Sex: The Politics of Women's Issues, 1945-68 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
Ti-Grace Atkinson, Amazon Odyssey (New York: Link Books, 1974), 10. In contrast to other founders of early radical feminist groups, Atkinson came to radicalism through her involvement in the New York City chapter of NOW, admittedly the most radical of all NOW chapters. Atkinson made this remark in October 1968 after having failed badly in her attempt to radically democratize the New York chapter of NOW. Upon losing the vote she immediately resigned her position as the chapter's president and went on to establish The Feminists, a radical feminist group.
Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, 12.
Betty Friedan, It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women's Movement (New York: Random House, 1976), 153. Friedan was antagonistic to radical feminism from the beginning and rarely missed an opportunity to denounce the man-hating and sex warfare that she claimed it advocated. Her declamations against "sexual politics" began at least as early as January1969.
Due to limitations of space and the focus of this chapter, I do not discuss the many differences among women's liberationists, most crucially, the conflicts between "radical feminists" and "politicos" over the relationship between the women's liberation movement and the larger Movement and the role of capitalism in maintaining women's oppression. This is taken up at length in Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-75 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, 1. It is the opening line of her book.
Adrienne Rich quoted from Hester Eisenstein, Contemporary Feminist Thought (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983), 5.
Ellen Willis, "Sequel: Letter to a Critic," in Notes from the Second Year, ed. Firestone and Koedt, 57.
See Ann Snitow, "Gender Diary," Dissent, spring 1989, 205-24; Carole Vance, "Social Construction Theory: Problems in the History of Sexuality," in Homosexuality, Which Homosexuality? ed. Anja van Kooten Niekark and Theo van der Maer (Amsterdam: An Dekken/Schorer, 1989).
Ellen Willis discusses the centrality of abortion to the women's liberation movement in the foreword to Daring to Be Bad. For the young, mostly white middle-class women who were attracted to women's liberation, the issue was forced reproduction. But for women of color, the issue was as often forced sterilization, and women's liberationists would tackle that issue as well.
Stanley Aronowitz, "When the New Left Was New," in The Sixties without Apology, ed. Sohnya Sayres, Anders Stephanson, Stanley Aronowitz, and Fredric Jameson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 32.
C. Wright Mills quoted from Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets, 86.
The phrase is from SDS's founding statement, "The Port Huron Statement," which is reprinted in full as an appendix to Miller's book, Democracy Is in the Streets, 333. For instance, Irving Howe, an influential member of the Old Left who attended a couple of SDS meetings, called them "interminable and structureless sessions." Howe, "The Decade That Failed," New York Times Magazine, 19 September 1982, 78.
The statement appeared in a pamphlet produced by the Economic Research and Action Project of SDS. Miller quotes it in Democracy Is in the Streets, 215.
Gregory Calvert, "Participatory Democracy, Collective Leadership, and Political Responsibility," New Left Notes, 2, no. 45 (18 December 1967): 1.
See Breines's summary of prefigurative politics in Community and Organization in the New Left, 1962-68 (New York: Praeger, 1982), 1-8.
Staughton Lynd, "The Movement: A New Beginning," Liberation 14, no. 2 (May 1969).
Pat Hansen and Ken McEldowney, "A Statement of Values," New Left Notes, 1, no. 42 (November 1966): 5.
Tom Hayden, "Democracy Is … in the Streets," Rat 1, no. 15 (23 August-5 September 1968): 5.
The Atlanta Project's position paper has been reprinted as "SNCC Speaks for Itself," in The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious Decade, ed. Judith Clavir Albert and Stewart Albert (New York: Praeger, 1984), 122. However, the title assigned it by the Alberts is misleading because at the time it was written in the spring of 1966, it did not reflect majority opinion in SNCC.
Rosalind Petchesky, Abortion and Woman's Choice: The State, Sexuality, and Reproductive Freedom (New York: Longman Press, 1984), 128.
Michelle Kort, "Sisterhood Is Profitable," Mother Jones, July 1983, 44.
Amiri Imanu Baraka, "A Black Value System," Black Scholar, November 1969.
Jennifer Woodul, "What's This about Feminist Businesses?" off our backs 6, no. 4 (June 1976): 24-26.
Robin Morgan, "Rights of Passage," Ms., September 1975, 99.
For a fascinating case study of this as it relates to women's music, see Arlene Stein, "Androgyny Goes Pop," Out/Look 3, no. 3 (spring 1991): 26-33.
Kort, "Sisterhood Is Profitable," 44.
Stein, "Androgyny Goes Pop," 30.
Adrienne Rich, "Living the Revolution," Women's Review of Books 3, no. 12 (September 1986): 1, 3-4.
Quoted from Jane Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 266.
"Women's Liberation Testimony," off our backs 1, no. 5 (May 1970): 7.
Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, 206.
Steve Halliwell, "Personal Liberation and Social Change," New Left Notes, 2, no. 30 (4 September 1967): 1; see also Rennie Davis and Staughton Lynd, "On NCNP," New Left Notes 2, no. 30. (4 September 1967): 1.
See Charlotte Bunch, "The Reform Tool Kit," Quest 1, no. 1 (summer 1974).
Frances Chapman, interview by author, New York, 30 May 1984. Here Chapman was speaking of the radical feminist wing of the women's liberation movement, but it applies as well to women's liberation activists.
For more on the prefigurative, personal politics of the sixties, see Breines, Community and Organization in the New Left ; Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets ; and Aronowitz, "When the New Left Was New."
Quoted from Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets, 374.
Although individual social critics such as C. Wright Mills influenced the thinking of new leftists, the non-communist Left of the 1950s and early 1960s remained economistic and anticommunist. Indeed, the fact that the board of the League for Industrial Democracy—the parent organization of SDS in SDS's early years—ignored the values section of the Port Huron Statement suggests the disjuncture between old and new leftists. For another view stressing the continuities between the Old and the New Left, see Maurice Isserman, If I Had a Hammer … The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left (New York: Basic Books, 1987).
See Judith Newton, "Historicisms New and Old: 'Charles Dickens' Meets Marxism, Feminism, and West Coast Foucault," Feminist Studies 16, no. 3 (fall 1990): 464. In their assumption that power has a source and that it emanates from patriarchy, women's liberationists part company with Foucauldian approaches that reject large-scale paradigms of domination.
Carmichael quoted from Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960's (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 282.
Firestone and Koedt, "Editorial," in Notes from the Second Year, ed. Firestone and Koedt.
However, the reclamation of blackness was often articulated in a sexist fashion, as in Stokely Carmichael's 1968 declaration, "Every Negro is a potential black man." See Carmichael, "A Declaration of War," in The New Left: A Documentary History, ed. Teodori Massimo (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), 277.
Aronowitz, "When the New Left Was New," 18.
Richard Flacks, "Some Problems, Issues, Proposals," in The New Radicals, ed. Jacobs and Landau, 168. This was a working paper intended for the June 1965 convention of SDS.
Excerpts from Jerry Rubin's book, Do It, appeared in Rat 2, no. 26 (26 January-9 February 1970).
"The Feminists: A Political Organization to Annihilate Sex Roles," in Notes from the Second Year, ed. Firestone and Koedt, 117.
Ehrenreich quoted from Carol Ann Douglas, "Second Sex 30 Years Later," off our backs 9, no. 11 (December 1979): 26.
The term identity politics was, I think, first used by black and Chicana feminists. See Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989), 99.
Jeffrey Weeks locates the origins of identity politics in the post-1968 political flux. He argues that "identity politics can be seen as part of the unfinished business of the 1960's, challenging traditionalist hierarchies of power and the old, all-encompassing social and political identities associated, for example, with class and occupation." Perhaps Weeks situates this in the post-1968 period, because class held greater significance for many British new leftists than it did for their American counterparts. Weeks, "Sexuality and (Post) Modernity" (unpublished paper).
Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 5.
Amy Kesselman, interview by author, New York, 2 May 1984.
"The New York Consciousness Awakening Women's Liberation Group" (handout from the Lake Villa Conference, November 1968).
Kathie Sarachild, "Consciousness-Raising: A Radical Weapon," in Feminist Revolution, ed. Redstockings (New Paltz, NY: Redstockings, 1975), 132.
Betty Friedan, It Changed My Life (New York: Norton, 1985), 101.
Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1982), 226.
Lorraine Kenney, "Traveling Theory: The Cultural Politics of Race and Representation: An Interview with Kobena Mercer," Afterimage, September 1990, 9.
Mercer makes this point as well in Kenney, "Traveling Theory," 9.

"Feminism in Literature - Alice Echols (Essay Date 1997)." Feminism in Literature, edited by Jessica Bomarito, Jeffrey W. Hunter, Vol. 4. Gale Cengage, 2005, 17 Aug. 2024 <https://www.enotes.com/topics/feminism/critical-essays/feminist-movement-20th-century#critical-essays-feminist-movement-20th-century-overviews-alice-echols-essay-date-1997>

Wendy Kaminer (Essay Date 1993)

SOURCE: Kaminer, Wendy. "Feminism's Identity Crisis." In Public Women, Public Words: A Documentary History of American Feminism, edited by Dawn Keetley and John Pettegrew, pp. 458-67. Madison, Wis.: Madison House, 1997. In the following essay, first published in 1993, Kaminer charts the evolution of feminist ideas through popular culture and the media in the 1990s, noting a persistent ambivalence toward the role of women in society.

My favorite political moment of the 1960s was a Black Panther rally in a quadrangle of Smith College on a luxuriant spring day. Ramboesque in berets and ammunition belts, several young black males exhorted hundreds of young white females to contribute money to Bobby Seale's defense fund. I stood at the back of the crowd watching yarn ties on blonde pony-tails bobbing up and down while the daughters of CEOs nodded in agreement with the Panthers' attack on the ruling class.

It was all so girlish—or boyish, depending on your point of view. Whatever revolution was fomenting posed no apparent threat to gender roles. Still, women who were not particularly sensitive to chauvinism in the counterculture or the typical fraternity planned to attend graduate or professional school and pursue careers that would have been practically unthinkable for them ten years earlier. Feminism was altering their lives as much as draft avoidance was altering the lives of their male counterparts.

Today, three decades of feminism and one Year of the Woman later, a majority of American women agree that feminism has altered their lives for the better. In general, polls conducted over the past three years indicate strong majority support for feminist ideals. But the same polls suggest that a majority of women hesitate to associate themselves with the movement. As Karlyn Keene, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, has observed, more than three quarters of American women support efforts to "strengthen and change women's status in society," yet only a minority, a third at most, identify themselves as feminists.

Many feminists take comfort in these polls, inferring substantial public support for economic and political equality, and dismissing women's wariness of the feminist label as a mere image problem (attributed to unfair media portrayals of feminists as a strident minority of frustrated women). But the polls may also adumbrate unarticulated ambivalence about feminist ideals, particularly with respect to private life. If widespread support for some measure of equality reflects the way women see, or wish to see, society, their unwillingness to identify with feminism reflects the way they see themselves, or wish to be seen by others.

To the extent that it challenges discrimination and the political exclusion of women, feminism is relatively easy for many women to embrace. It appeals to fundamental notions of fairness; it suggests that social structures must change but that individuals, particularly women, may remain the same. For many women, feminism is simply a matter of mommy-tracking, making sure that institutions accommodate women's familial roles, which are presumed to be essentially immutable. But to the extent that feminism questions those roles and the underlying assumptions about sexuality, it requires profound individual change as well, posing an unsettling challenge that well-adjusted people instinctively avoid. Why question norms of sex and character to which you've more or less successfully adapted?

Of course, the social and individual changes demanded by feminism are not exactly divisible. Of course, the expansion of women's professional roles and political power affects women's personality development. Still, many people manage to separate who they are in the workplace from who they are in bed, which is why feminism generates so much cognitive dissonance. As it addresses and internalizes this dissonance and women's anxiety about the label "feminism," as it embarks on a "third wave," the feminist movement today may suffer less from a mere image problem than from a major identity crisis.

It's difficult, of course, to generalize about how millions of American women imagine feminism and what role it plays in their lives. All one can say with certitude is that different women define and relate to feminism differently. The rest—much of this essay—is speculation, informed by conversations with editors of women's magazines (among the most reliable speculators about what women want), polling data, and ten years of experience studying feminist issues.

Resistance to the Label

Robin Morgan, the editor in chief of Ms., and Ellen Levine, the editor in chief of Redbook, two veterans of women's magazines and feminism, offer different views of feminism's appeal, each of which seem true, in the context of their different constituencies. Morgan sees a resurgent feminist movement and points to the formation of new feminist groups on campus and intensified grass-roots activity by women addressing a range of issues, from domestic violence to economic revitalization. Ellen Levine, however, believes that for the middle-class family women who read Redbook (the average reader is a thirty-nine-year-old wage-earning mother), feminism is "a non-issue." She says, "They don't think about it; they don't talk about it." They may not even be familiar with the feminist term of art "glass ceiling," which feminists believe has passed into the vernacular. And they seem not to be particularly interested in politics. The surest way not to sell Redbook is to put a woman politician on the cover: the January, 1993, issue of Good Housekeeping, with Hillary Clinton on the cover, did poorly at the newsstands, according to Levine.

Editors at more upscale magazines— Mirabella, Harper's Bazaar, and Glamour —are more upbeat about their readers' interest in feminism, or at least their identification with feminist perspectives. Gay Bryant, Mirabella 's editor in chief, says, "We assume our readers are feminists with a small 'f.' We think of them as strong, independent, smart women; we think of them as pro-woman, although not all of them would define themselves as feminists politically." Betsy Carter, the executive editor of Harper's Bazaar, suggests that feminism has been assimilated into the culture of the magazine: "Feminism is a word that has been so absorbed in our consciousness that I don't isolate it. Asking me if I believe in feminism is like asking me if I believe in integration." Carter says, however, that women tend to be interested in the same stories that interest men: "Except for subjects like fly-fishing, it's hard to label something a man's story or a woman's story." In fact, she adds, "it seems almost obsolete to talk about women's magazines." Carter, a former editor at Esquire, recalls that Esquire 's readership was 40 percent female, which indicated to her that "women weren't getting what they needed from the women's magazines."

Ruth Whitney, the editor in chief of Glamour, might disagree. She points out that Glamour runs monthly editorials with a decidedly "feminist" voice that infuses the magazine. Glamour readers may or may not call themselves feminists, she says, but "I would call Glamour a mainstream feminist magazine, in its editorials, features, fashions, and consumerism." Glamour is also a pro-choice magazine; as Whitney stresses, it has long published pro-choice articles—more than any other mainstream women's magazine, according to her. And it is a magazine for which women seem to constitute the norm: "We use the pronoun 'she' when referring to a doctor, lawyer, whomever, and that does not go unnoticed by our readers."

Some women will dispute one underlying implication of Betsy Carter's remarks—that feminism involves assimilation, the merger of male and female spheres of interest. Some will dispute any claims to feminism by any magazine that features fashion. But whether Ms. readers would call Harper's Bazaar, Mirabella, and Glamour feminist magazines, or magazines with feminist perspectives, their readers apparently do, if Betsy Carter, Gay Bryant, and Ruth Whitney know their audiences.

Perhaps the confident feminist self-image of these up-scale magazines, as distinct from the cautious exploration of women's issues in the middle-class Redbook, confirms a canard about feminism—that it is the province of upper-income urban professional women. But Ms. is neither up-scale nor fashionable, and it's much too earnest to be sophisticated. Feminism—or, at least, support for feminist ideals—is not simply a matter of class, or even race.

Susan McHenry, a senior editor at Working Woman and the former executive editor of Emerge, a new magazine for middle-class African-Americans, senses in African-American women readers "universal embrace of women's rights and the notion that the women's movement has been helpful." Embrace of the women's movement, however, is equivocal. "If you start talking about the women's movement, you hear a lot about what we believe and what white women believe."

For many black women, devoting time and energy to feminist causes or feminist groups may simply not be a priority. Black women "feel both racism and sexism," McHenry believes, but they consider the fight for racial justice their primary responsibility and assume that white women will pay primary attention to gender issues. Leslie Adamson, the executive secretary to the president of Radcliffe College, offers a different explanation. She doesn't, in fact, "feel" sexism and racism equally: "Sex discrimination makes me indignant. Racial discrimination makes me enraged." Adamson is sympathetic to feminism and says that she has always "had a feminist mind." Still, she does not feel particularly oppressed as a woman. "I can remember only two instances of sex discrimination in my life," she says. "Once when I was in the sixth grade and wanted to take shop and they made me take home economics; once when I visited my husband's relatives in Trinidad and they wouldn't let me talk about politics. Racism has always affected me on a regular basis." Cynthia Bell, the communications director for Greater Southeast Healthcare System in Washington, D.C., offers a similar observation: "It wasn't until I graduated from college that I encountered sexual discrimination. I remember racial discrimination from the time I remember being myself."

Black women who share feminist ideals but associate feminism with white women sometimes prefer to talk about "womanism," a term endorsed by such diverse characters as Alice Walker (who is credited with coining it) and William Safire. Susan McHenry prefers to avoid using the term "women's movement" and talks instead about "women moving." She identifies with women "who are getting things done, regardless of what they call themselves." But unease with the term "feminism" has been a persistent concern in the feminist movement, whether the unease is attributed to racial divisions or to residual resistance to feminist ideals. It is, in fact, a complicated historical phenomenon that reflects feminism's successes as well as its failures.

"The Less Tainted Half"

That feminism has the power to expand women's aspirations and improve their lives without enlisting them as card-carrying feminists is a tribute to its strength as a social movement. Feminism is not dependent on ideological purity (indeed, it has always been a mixture of conflicting ideologies) or any formal organizational structure. In the nineteenth century feminism drew upon countless unaffiliated voluntary associations of women devoted to social reform or self-improvement. Late-twentieth-century feminism has similarly drawn upon consciousness-raising groups, professional associations, community-action groups, and the increased work-force participation of middle-class women, wrought partly by economic forces and a revolution in birth control. Throughout its 150-year history feminism has insinuated itself into the culture as women have sought to improve their status and increase their participation in the world outside the home. If women are moving in a generally feminist direction—toward greater rights and a fairer apportionment of social responsibilities—does it matter what they call themselves?

In the nineteenth century many, maybe most, women who took part in the feminist movement saw themselves as paragons of femininity. The great historic irony of feminism is that the supposed feminine virtues that justified keeping women at home—sexual purity, compassion, and a talent for nurturance—eventually justified their release from the home as well. Women were "the less tainted half of the race," Frances Willard, the president of the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union, declared, and thus were the moral guardians of society.

But in the long run, identifying feminism with femininity offered women limited liberation. The feminine weaknesses that were presumed to accompany feminine virtues justified the two-tier labor force that kept women out of executive positions and political office and out of arduous, high-paying manual-labor jobs (although women were never considered too weak to scrub floors). By using femininity as their passport to the public sphere, women came to be typecast in traditional feminine roles that they are still playing and arguing about today. Are women naturally better suited to parenting than men? Are men naturally better suited to waging war? Are women naturally more cooperative and compassionate, more emotive and less analytic, than men?

A great many American women (and men) still seem to answer these questions in the affirmative, as evidenced by public resistance to drafting women and the private reluctance of women to assign, and men to assume, equal responsibility for child care. Feminism, however, is popularly deemed to represent an opposing belief that men and women are equally capable of raising children and equally capable of waging war. Thus feminism represents, in the popular view, a rejection of femininity.

Feminists have long fought for day-care and family-leave programs, but they still tend to be blamed for the work-family conundrums. Thirty-nine percent of women recently surveyed by Red-book said that feminism had made it "harder" for women to balance work and family life. Thirty-two percent said that feminism made "no difference" to women's balancing act. This may reflect a failure of feminists to make child care an absolutely clear priority. It may also reflect the association of feminism with upper-income women like Zoë Baird, who can solve their child-care problems with relative ease. But, as Zoë Baird discovered, Americans are still ambivalent about women's roles within and outside the home.

Feminism and the careerism it entails are commonly regarded as a zero-sum game not just for women and men but for women and children as well, Ellen Levine believes: wage-earning mothers still tend to feel guilty about not being with their children and to worry that "the more women get ahead professionally, the more children will fall back." Their guilt does not seem to be assuaged by any number of studies showing that the children of wage-earning mothers fare as well as the children of full-time homemakers, Levine adds. It seems to dissipate only as children grow up and prosper.

Feminists who dismiss these worries as backlash risk trivializing the inevitable stresses confronting wage-earning mothers (even those with decent day care). Feminists who respond to these worries by suggesting that husbands should be more like wives and mothers are likely to be considered blind or hostile to presumptively natural sex differences that are still believed to underlie traditional gender roles.

To the extent that it advocates a revolution in gender roles, feminism also comes as a reproach to women who lived out the tradition, especially those who lived it out unhappily. Robin Morgan says, "A woman who's been unhappily married for forty years and complains constantly to her friends, saying 'I've got to get out of this,' might stand up on a talk show and say feminism is destroying the family."

The Wages of Equality

Ambivalence about equality sometimes seems to plague the feminist movement almost as much today as it did ten years ago, when it defeated the Equal Rights Amendment. Worth noting is that in the legal arena feminism has met with less success than the civil-rights movement. The power of the civil-rights movement in the 1960s was the power to demonstrate the gap between American ideals of racial equality and the American reality for African-Americans. We've never had the same professed belief in sexual equality: federal equal-employment law has always treated racial discrimination more severely than sex discrimination, and so has the Supreme Court. The Court has not extended to women the same constitutional protection it has extended to racial minorities, because a majority of justices have never rejected the notion that some degree of sex discrimination is only natural.

The widespread belief in equality demonstrated by polls is a belief in equality up to a point—the point where women are drafted and men change diapers. After thirty years of the contemporary women's movement, equal-rights feminism is still considered essentially abnormal. Ellen Levine notes that middle-class family women sometimes associate feminism with lesbianism, which has yet to gain middle-class respectability. Homophobia is not entirely respectable either, however, so it may not be expressed directly in polls or conversations; but it has always been a subtext of popular resistance to feminism. Feminists have alternately been accused of hating men and of wanting to be just like them.

There's some evidence that the fear of feminism as a threat to female sexuality may be lessening: 77 percent of women recently surveyed by Redbook answered "yes" to the question "Can a woman be both feminine and a feminist?" But they were answering a question in the abstract. When women talk about why they don't identify with feminists, they often talk about not wanting to lose their femininity. To the extent that an underlying belief in feminine virtues limits women to feminine roles, as it did a hundred years ago, this rejection of the feminist label is a rejection of full equality. In the long run, it matters what women call themselves.

Or does it? Ironically, many self-proclaimed feminists today express some of the same ambivalence about changing gender roles as the "I'm not a feminist, but …" women ("… but I believe in equal opportunity or family leave or reproductive choice"). The popular image of feminism as a more or less unified quest for androgynous equality, promoted by the feminists' nemesis Camille Paglia, is at least ten years out of date.

The Comforts of Gilliganism

Central to the dominant strain of feminism today is the belief, articulated by the psychologist Carol Gilligan, that women share a different voice and different moral sensibilities. Gilligan's work—notably In a Different Voice (1982)—has been effectively attacked by other feminist scholars, but criticisms of it have not been widely disseminated, and it has passed with ease into the vernacular. In a modern-day version of Victorian True Womanhood, feminists and also some anti-feminists pay tribute to women's superior nurturing and relational skills and their "general ethic of caring." Sometimes feminists add parenthetically that differences between men and women may well be attributable to culture, not nature. But the qualification is moot. Believers in gender difference tend not to focus on changing the cultural environment to free men and women from stereotypes, as equal-rights feminists did twenty years ago; instead they celebrate the feminine virtues.

It was probably inevitable that the female solidarity at the base of the feminist movement would foster female chauvinism. All men are jerks, I might agree on occasion, over a bottle of wine. But that's an attitude, not an analysis, and only a small minority of separatist feminists turn it into an ideology. Gilliganism addresses the anxiety that is provoked by that attitude—the anxiety about compromising their sexuality which many feminists share with nonfeminists.

Much as they dislike admitting it, feminists generally harbor or have harbored categorical anger toward men. Some would say that such anger is simply an initial stage in the development of a feminist consciousness, but it is also an organizing tool and a fact of life for many women who believe they live in a sexist world. And whether or not it is laced with anger, feminism demands fundamental changes in relations between the sexes and the willingness of feminists to feel like unnatural women and be treated as such. For heterosexual women, feminism can come at a cost. Carol Gilligan's work valorizing women's separate emotional sphere helped make it possible for feminists to be angry at men and challenge their hegemony without feeling un-womanly. Nancy Rosenblum, a professor of political science at Brown University, says that Gilliganism resolved the conflict for women between feminism and femininity by "de-eroticizing it." Different-voice ideology locates female sexuality in maternity, as did Victorian visions of the angel in the house. In its simplest form, the idealization of motherhood reduces popular feminism to the notion that women are nicer than men.

Women are also widely presumed to be less warlike than men. "Women bring love; that's our role," one woman explained at a feminist rally against the GulfWar which I attended; it seemed less like a rally than a revival meeting. Women shared their need "to connect" and "do relational work." They recalled Jane Addams, the women's peace movement between the two world wars, and the Ban the Bomb marches of thirty years ago. They suggested that pacifism was as natural to women as childbirth, and were barely disconcerted by the presence of women soldiers in the Gulf. Military women were likely to be considered self-hating or male-identified or the hapless victims of a racist, classist economy, not self-determined women with minds and voices all their own. The war was generally regarded as an allegory of male supremacy; the patriarch Bush was the moral equivalent of the patriarch Saddam Hussein. If only men would listen to women, peace, like a chador, would enfold us.

In part, the trouble with True Womanhood is its tendency to substitute sentimentality for thought. Constance Buchanan, an associate dean of the Harvard Divinity School, observes that feminists who believe women will exercise authority differently often haven't done the hard work of figuring out how they will exercise authority at all. "Many feminists have an almost magical vision of institutional change," Buchanan says. "They've focused on gaining access but haven't considered the scale and complexity of modern institutions, which will not necessarily change simply by virtue of their presence."

Feminists who claim that women will "make a difference" do, in fact, often argue their case simply by pointing to the occasional female manager who works by consensus, paying little attention to hierarchy and much attention to her employees' feelings—assuming that such women more accurately represent their sex than women who favor unilateral decision-making and tend not to nurture employees. In other words, different-voice feminists often assume their conclusions: the many women whose characters and behavior contradict traditional models of gender difference (Margaret Thatcher is the most frequently cited example) are invariably dismissed as male-identified.…

Feminism Succumbs to Femininity

The feminist drive for equal rights was supposed to have been revitalized last year, and it's true that women were politically activated and made significant political gains. It's clear that women are moving, but in what direction? What is the women's movement all about?

Vying for power today are poststructural feminists (dominant in academia in recent years), political feminists (office-holders and lobbyists), different-voice feminists, separatist feminists (a small minority), pacifist feminists, lesbian feminists, careerist feminists, liberal feminists (who tend also to be political feminists), anti-porn feminists, eco-feminists, and womanists. These are not, of course, mutually exclusive categories, and this is hardly an exhaustive list. New Age feminists and goddess workshoppers widen the array of alternative truths. And the newest category of feminism, personal-development feminism, led nominally by Gloria Steinem, puts a popular feminist spin on deadeningly familiar messages about recovering from addiction and abuse, liberating one's inner child, and restoring one's self-esteem.

The marriage of feminism and the phenomenally popular recovery movement is arguably the most disturbing (and potentially influential) development in the feminist movement today. It's based partly on a shared concern about child abuse, nominally a left-wing analogue to right-wing anxiety about the family. There's an emerging alliance of anti-pornography and anti-violence feminists with therapists who diagnose and treat child abuse, including "ritual abuse" and "Satanism" (often said to be linked to pornography). Feminism is at risk of being implicated in the unsavory business of hypnotizing suspected victims of abuse to help them "retrieve" their buried childhood memories. Gloria Steinem has blithely praised the important work of therapists in this field without even a nod to the potential for, well, abuse when unhappy, suggestible people who are angry at their parents are exposed to suggestive hypnotic techniques designed to uncover their histories of victimization.

But the involvement of some feminists in the memory-retrieval industry is only one manifestation of a broader ideological threat posed to feminism by the recovery movement. Recovery, with its absurdly broad definitions of addiction and abuse, encourages people to feel fragile and helpless. Parental insensitivity is classed as child abuse, along with parental violence, because all suffering is said to be equal (meaning entirely subjective); but that's appropriate only if all people are so terribly weak that a cross word inevitably has the destructive force of a blow. Put very simply, women need a feminist movement that makes them feel strong.

Enlisting people in a struggle for liberation without exaggerating the ways in which they're oppressed is a challenge for any civil-rights movement. It's a particularly daunting one for feminists, who are still arguing among themselves about whether women are oppressed more by nature or by culture. For some feminists, strengthening women is a matter of alerting them to their natural vulnerabilities.

There has always been a strain of feminism that presents women as frail and naturally victimized. As it was a hundred years ago, feminist victimism is today most clearly expressed in sexuality debates—about pornography, prostitution, rape, and sexual harassment. Today sexual violence is a unifying focal point for women who do and women who do not call themselves feminists: 84 percent of women surveyed by Redbook considered "fighting violence against women" to be "very important." (Eighty-two percent rated workplace equality and 54 percent rated abortion rights as very important.) Given this pervasive, overriding concern about violence and our persistent failure to address it effectively, victimism is likely to become an important organizing tool for feminism in the 1990s.

Feminist discussions of sexual offenses often share with the recovery movement the notion that, again, there are no objective measures of suffering: all suffering is said to be equal, in the apparent belief that all women are weak. Wage-earning women testify to being "disabled" by sexist remarks in the workplace. College women testify to the trauma of being fondled by their dates. The term "date rape," like the term "addiction," no longer has much literal, objective meaning. It tends to be used figuratively, as a metaphor signifying that all heterosexual encounters are inherently abusive of women. The belief that in a male-dominated culture that has "normalized" rape, "yes" can never really mean "yes" has been popularized by the anti-pornography feminists Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon. (Dworkin devoted an entire book to the contention that intercourse is essentially a euphemism for rape.) But only five years ago Dworkin and MacKinnon were leaders of a feminist fringe. Today, owning partly to the excesses of multiculturalism and the exaltation of victimization, they're leaders in the feminist mainstream.

Why is feminism helping to make women feel so vulnerable? Why do some young women on Ivy League campuses, among the most privileged people on the globe, feel oppressed? Why does feminist victimology seem so much more pervasive among middle- and upper-class whites than among lower-income women, and girls, of color? Questions like these need to be aired by feminists. But in some feminism circles it is heresy to suggest that there are degrees of suffering and oppression, which need to be kept in perspective. It is heresy to suggest that being raped by your date may not be as traumatic or terrifying as being raped by a stranger who breaks into your bedroom in the middle of the night. It is heresy to suggest that a woman who has to listen to her colleagues tell stupid sexist jokes has a lesser grievance than a woman who is physically accosted by her supervisor. It is heresy, in general, to question the testimony of self-proclaimed victims of date rape or harassment, as it is heresy in a twelve-step group to question claims of abuse. All claims of suffering are sacred and presumed to be absolutely true. It is a primary article of faith among many feminists that women don't lie about rape, ever; they lack the dishonesty gene. Some may call this feminism, but it looks more like femininity to me.

Blind faith in women's pervasive victimization also looks a little like religion. "Contemporary feminism is a new kind of religion," Camille Paglia complains, overstating her case with panache. But if her metaphor begs to be qualified, it offers a nugget of truth. Feminists choose among competing denominations with varying degrees of passion, and belief; what is gospel to one feminist is a working hypothesis to another. Still, like every other ideology and "ism"—from feudalism to capitalism to communism to Freudianism—feminism is for some a revelation. Insights into the dynamics of sexual violence are turned into a metaphysic. Like people in recovery who see addiction lurking in all our desires, innumerable feminists see men's oppression of women in all our personal and social relations. Sometimes the pristine earnestness of this theology is unrelenting. Feminism lacks a sense of black humor.

Of course, the emerging orthodoxy about victimization does not infect all or even most feminist sexuality debates. Of course, many feminists harbor heretical thoughts about lesser forms of sexual misconduct. But few want to be vilified for trivializing sexual violence and collaborating in the abuse of women.

The Enemy Within

The example of Camille Paglia is instructive. She is generally considered by feminists to be practically pro-rape, because she has offered this advice to young women: don't get drunk at fraternity parties, don't accompany boys to their rooms, realize that sexual freedom entails sexual risks, and take some responsibility for your behavior. As Paglia says, this might once have been called common sense (it's what some of our mothers told us); today it's called blaming the victim.

Paglia is right: it ought to be possible to condemn date rape without glorifying the notion that women are helpless to avoid it. But not everyone can risk dissent. A prominent feminist journalist who expressed misgivings to me about the iconization of Anita Hill chooses not to be identified. Yet Anita Hill is a questionable candidate for feminist sainthood, because she was, after all, working for Clarence Thomas voluntarily, apparently assisting him in what feminists and other civil-rights activists have condemned as the deliberate nonenforcement of federal equal-employment laws. Was she too helpless to know better? Feminists are not supposed to ask.

It is, however, not simply undue caution or peer pressure that squelches dissent among feminists. Many are genuinely ambivalent about choosing sides in sexuality debates. It is facile, in the context of the AIDS epidemic, to dismiss concern about date rape as "hysteria." And it takes hubris (not an unmitigated fault) to suggest that some claims of victimization are exaggerated, when many are true. The victimization of women as a class by discriminatory laws and customs, and a collective failure to take sexual violence seriously, are historical reality. Even today women are being assaulted and killed by their husbands and boyfriends with terrifying regularity. When some feminists overdramatize minor acts of sexual misconduct or dogmatically insist that we must always believe the woman, it is sometimes hard to blame them, given the historical presumption that women lie about rape routinely, that wife abuse is a marital squabble, that date rape and marital rape are not real rape, and that sexual harassment is cute.

Feminists need critics like Paglia who are not afraid to be injudicious. Paglia's critiques of feminism are, however, flawed by her limited knowledge of feminist theory. She doesn't even realize what she has in common with feminists she disdains—notably Carol Gilligan and the attorney and anti-pornography activist Catharine MacKinnon. Both Paglia and MacKinnon suggest that sexual relations are inextricably bound up with power relations; both promote a vison of male sexuality as naturally violent and cruel. But while Paglia celebrates sexual danger, MacKinnon wants to legislate even the thought of it away. Both Paglia and Gilligan offer idealized notions of femininity. But Gilligan celebrates gender stereotypes while Paglia celebrates sex archetypes. Paglia also offers a refreshingly tough, erotic vison of female sexuality to counteract the pious maternalism of In a Different Voice.

To the extent that there's a debate between Paglia and the feminist movement, it's not a particularly thoughtful one, partly because it's occurring at second hand, in the media. There are thoughtful feminist debates being conducted in academia, but they're not widely heard. Paglia is highly critical of feminist academics who don't publish in the mainstream; but people have a right to choose their venues, and besides, access to the mainstream press is not easily won. Still, their relative isolation is a problem for feminist scholars who want to influence public policy. To reach a general audience they have to depend on journalists to draw upon and sometimes appropriate their work.

In the end feminism, like other social movements, is dependent on the vagaries of the marketplace. It's not that women perceive feminism just the way Time and Newsweek present it to them. They have direct access only to the kind and quantity of feminist speech deemed marketable. Today the concept of a feminist movement is considered to have commercial viability once again. The challenge now is to make public debates about feminist issues as informed as they are intense.

"Feminism in Literature - Wendy Kaminer (Essay Date 1993)." Feminism in Literature, edited by Jessica Bomarito, Jeffrey W. Hunter, Vol. 4. Gale Cengage, 2005, 17 Aug. 2024 <https://www.enotes.com/topics/feminism/critical-essays/feminist-movement-20th-century#critical-essays-feminist-movement-20th-century-feminist-legal-battles-wendy-kaminer-essay-date-1993>

Toni Morrison (Essay Date 1971)

SOURCE: Morrison, Toni. "What the Black Woman Thinks about Women's Lib." In Public Women, Public Words: A Documentary History of American Feminism, edited by Dawn Keetley and John Pettegrew, pp. 71-7. Madison, Wis.: Madison House, 1997. In the following essay, originally published in 1971, Morrison suggests that black women's low participation in the predominantly white women's liberation movement reflects black women's distrust of white people in general, but at the same time acknowledges that this attitude is slowly beginning to change.

They were always there. Whenever you wanted to do something simple, natural and inoffensive. Like drink water, sit down, go to the bathroom or buy a bus ticket to Charlotte, N.C. Those classifying signs that told you who you were, what to do. More than those abrupt and discourteous signs one gets used to in this country—the door that says "Push," the towel dispenser that says "Press," the traffic light that says "No"—these signs were not just arrogant, they were malevolent: "White Only," "Colored Only," or perhaps just "Colored," permanently carved into the granite over a drinking fountain. But there was one set of signs that was not malevolent; it was, in fact, rather reassuring in its accuracy and fine distinctions: the pair that said "White Ladies" and "Colored Women."

The difference between white and black females seemed to me an eminently satisfactory one. White females were ladies, said the sign maker, worthy of respect. And the quality that made ladyhood worthy? Softness, helplessness and modesty—which I interpreted as a willingness to let others do their labor and their thinking. Colored females, on the other hand, were women —unworthy of respect because they were tough, capable, independent and immodest. Now, it appears, there is a consensus that those anonymous sign makers were right all along, for there is no such thing as Ladies' Liberation. Even the word "lady" is anathema to feminists. They insist upon the "woman" label as a declaration of their rejection of all that softness, helplessness and modesty, for they see them as characteristics which served only to secure their bondage to men.

Significant as that shift in semantics is, obvious as its relationship to the black-woman concept is, it has not been followed by any immediate comradery between black and white women, nor has it precipitated any rush of black women into the various chapters of NOW. It is the Weltanschauung of black women that is responsible for their apparent indifference to Women's Lib, and in order to discover the nature of this view of oneself in the world, one must look very closely at the black woman herself—a difficult, inevitably doomed proposition, for if anything is true of black women, it is how consistently they have (deliberately, I suspect) defied classification.

It may not even be possible to look at those militant young girls with lids lowered in dreams of guns, those middle-class socialites with 150 pairs of shoes, those wispy girl junkies who have always been older than water, those beautiful Muslim women with their bound hair and flawless skin, those television personalities who think chic is virtue and happiness a good coiffure, those sly old women in the country with their ancient love of Jesus—and still talk about The Black Woman. It is a dangerous misconception, for it encourages lump thinking. And we are so accustomed to that in our laboratories that it seems only natural to confront all human situations, direct all human discourse, in the same way. Those who adhere to the scientific method and draw general conclusions from "representative" sampling are chagrined by the suggestion that there is any other way to arrive at truth, for they like their truth in tidy sentences that begin with "all."

In the initial confrontation with a stranger, it is never "Who are you?" but "Take me to your leader." And it is this mode of thought which has made black-white relationships in this country so hopeless. There is a horror of dealing with people one by one, each as he appears. There is safety and manageability in dealing with the leader—no matter how large or diverse the leader's constituency may be. Such generalizing may be all right for plant analysis, superb for locating carcinogens in mice, and it used to be all right as a method for dealing with schools and politics. But no one would deny that it is rapidly losing effectiveness in both those areas—precisely because it involves classifying human beings and anticipating their behavior. So it is with some trepidation that anyone should undertake to generalize about still another group. Yet something in that order is legitimate, not only because unity among minorities is a political necessity, but because, at some point, one wants to get on with the differences.

What do black women feel about Women's Lib? Distrust. It is white, therefore, suspect. In spite of the fact that liberating movements in the black world have been catalysts for white feminism, too many movements and organizations have made deliberate overtures to enroll blacks and have ended up by rolling them. They don't want to be used again to help somebody gain power—a power that is carefully kept out of their hands. They look at white women and see them as the enemy—for they know that racism is not confined to white men, and that there are more white women than men in this country, and that 53 percent of the population sustained an eloquent silence during times of greatest stress. The faces of those white women hovering behind that black girl at the Little Rock school in 1957 do not soon leave the retina of the mind.

When she was interviewed by Nikki Giovanni last May in Essence magazine, Ida Lewis, the former editor-in-chief of Essence, was asked why black women were not more involved in Women's Lib, and she replied: "The Women's Liberation Movement is basically a family quarrel between white women and white men. And on general principles, it's not good to get involved in family disputes. Outsiders always get shafted when the dust settles. On the other hand, I must support some of the goals [equal pay, child-care centers, etc.].…But if we speak of a liberation movement, as a black woman I view my role from a black perspective—the role of black women is to continue the struggle in concert with black men for the liberation and self-determination of blacks. White power was not created to protect and preserve us as women. Nor can we view ourselves as simply American women. We are black women, and as such we must deal effectively in the black community."

To which Miss Giovanni sighed: "Well, I'm glad you didn't come out of that Women's Lib or black-man bag as if they were the alternatives." …

Miss Lewis: "Suppose the Lib movement succeeds. It will follow, since white power is the order of the day, that white women will be the first hired, which will still leave black men and women outside." …

It is an interesting exchange, Miss Lewis expressing suspicion and identifying closely with black men, Miss Giovanni suggesting that the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

But there is not only the question of color, there is the question of the color of experience. Black women are not convinced that Women's Lib serves their best interest or that it can cope with the uniqueness of their experience, which is itself an alienating factor. The early image of Women's Lib was of an élitist organization made up of upper-middle-class women with the concerns of that class (the percentage of women in professional fields, etc.) and not paying much attention to the problems of most black women, which are not in getting into the labor force but in being upgraded in it, not in getting into medical school but in getting adult education, not in how to exercise freedom from the "head of the house" but in how to be head of the household.

Black women are different from white women because they view themselves differently and lead a different kind of life. Describing this difference is the objective of several black women writers and scholars. But even without this newly surfacing analysis, we can gain some understanding of the black woman's world by examining archetypes. The archetypes created by women about themselves are rare, and even those few that do exist may be the result of a female mind completely controlled by male-type thinking. No matter. The most unflattering stereotypes that male minds have concocted about black women contain, under the stupidity and the hostility, the sweet smell of truth.

Look, for example, at Geraldine and Sapphire—Geraldine, that campy character in Flip Wilson's comic repertory, and Sapphire, the wife of Kingfish in the Amos and Andy radio and TV series. Unlike Nefertiti, an archetype that black women have appropriated for themselves, Geraldine and Sapphire are the comic creations of men. Nefertiti, the romantic black queen with the enviable neck, is particularly appealing to young black women, mainly because she existed (and there are few admirable heroines in our culture), was a great beauty and is remote enough to be worshiped. There is a lot of talk about Sojourner Truth, the freed slave who preached emancipation and women's rights, but there is a desperate love for Nefertiti, simply because she was so pretty.

I suppose at bottom we are all beautiful queens, but for the moment it is perhaps just as well to remain useful women. One wonders if Nefertiti could have lasted 10 minutes in a welfare office, in a Mississippi gas station, at a Parent Association meeting or on the church congregation's Stewardess Board No. 2. And since black women have to endure, that romanticism seems a needless cul de sac, an opiate that appears to make life livable if not serene but eventually must separate us from reality. I maintain that black women are already O.K. O.K. with our short necks, O.K. with our callused hands. O.K. with our tired feet and paper bags on the Long Island Rail Road. O.K. O.K. O.K.

As for Geraldine, her particular horror lies in her essential accuracy. Like any stereotype she is a gross distortion of reality and as such highly offensive to many black women and endearing to many whites. A single set of characteristics provokes both hatred and affection. Geraldine is defensive, cunning, sexy, egocentric and transvestite. But that's not all she is. A shift in semantics and we find the accuracy: for defensive read survivalist; for cunning read clever; for sexy read a natural unembarrassed acceptance of her sexuality; for egocentric read keen awareness of individuality; for transvestite (man in woman's dress) read a masculine strength beneath the accouterments of glamour.

Geraldine is offensive to many blacks precisely because the virtues of black women are construed in her portrait as vices. The strengths are portrayed as weaknesses—hilarious weaknesses. Yet one senses even in the laughter some awe and respect. Interestingly enough, Geraldine is absolutely faithful to one man, Killer, whom one day we may also see as caricature.

Sapphire, a name of opprobrium black men use for the nagging black wife, is also important, for in that marriage, disastrous as it was, Sapphire worked, fussed, worked and fussed, but (and this is crucial) Kingfish did whatever he pleased. Whatever. Whether he was free or irresponsible, anarchist or victim depends on your point of view. Contrary to the black-woman-as-emasculator theory, we see, even in these unflattering caricatures, the very opposite of a henpecked husband and emasculating wife—a wife who never did, and never could, manipulate her man. Which brings us to the third reason for the suspicion black women have of Women's Lib: the serious one of the relationship between black women and black men.

There are strong similarities in the way black and white men treat women, and strong similarities in the way women of both races react. But the relationship is different in a very special way.

For years in this country there was no one for black men to vent their rage on except for black women. And for years black women accepted that rage—even regarded that acceptance as their unpleasant duty. But in doing so, they frequently kicked back, and they seem never to have become the "true slave" that white women see in their own history. True, the black woman did the housework, the drudgery; true, she reared the children, often alone, but she did all of that while occupying a place on the job market, a place her mate could not get or which his pride would not let him accept. And she had nothing to fall back on: not maleness, not whiteness, not ladyhood, not anything. And out of the profound desolation of her reality she may very well have invented herself.

If she was a sexual object in the eyes of the men, that was their doing. Sex was one of her dimensions. It had to be just one, for life required many other things of her, and it is difficult to be regarded solely as a sex object when the burden of field and fire is on your shoulders. She could cultivate her sexuality but dared not be obsessed by it. Other people may have been obsessed by it, but the circumstances of her life did not permit her to dwell on it or survive by means of its exploitation.

So she combined being a responsible person with being a female—and as a person she felt free to confront not only the world at large (the rent man, the doctor and the rest of the marketplace) but her man as well. She fought him and nagged him—but know that you don't fight what you don't respect. (If you don't respect your man, you manipulate him, the way some parents treat children and the way white women treat their men—if they can get away with it or if they do not acquiesce entirely.) And even so, the black man was calling most of the shots—in the home or out of it. The black woman's "bad" relationships with him were often the result of his inability to deal with a competent and complete personality and her refusal to be anything less than that. The saving of the relationship lay in her unwillingness to feel free when her man was not free.

In a way black women have known something of the freedom white women are now beginning to crave. But oddly, freedom is only sweet when it is won. When it is forced, it is called responsibility. The black woman's needs shrank to the level of her responsibility; her man's expanded in proportion to the obstacles that prevented him from assuming his. White women, on the other hand, have had too little responsibility, white men too much. It's a wonder the sexes of either race even speak to each other.

As if that were not enough, there is also the growing rage of black women over unions of black men and white women. At one time, such unions were rare enough to be amusing or tolerated. The white woman moved with the black man into a black neighborhood, and everybody tried to deal with it. Chances are the white woman who married a black man liked it that way, for she had already made some statement about her relationship with her own race by marrying him. So there were no frictions. If a white woman had a child out of wedlock by a black man, the child was deposited with the black community, or grouped with the black orphans, which is certainly one of the reasons why lists of black foundling children are so long. (Another reason is the willingness of black women to have their children instead of aborting and to keep them, whatever the inconvenience.)

But now, with all the declarations of independence, one of the black man's ways of defining it is to broaden his spectrum of female choices, and one consequence of his new pride is the increased attraction white women feel for him. Clearly there are more and more of these unions, for there is clearly more anger about it (talking black and sleeping white is a cliché) among black women. The explanations for this anger are frequently the easy ones: there are too few eligible men, for wars continue to shoot them up; the black woman who complains is one who would be eliminated from a contest with any good-looking woman—the complaint simply reveals her inadequacy to get a man; it is a simple case of tribal sour grapes with a dash of politics thrown in.

But no one seems to have examined this anger in the light of what black women understand about themselves. These easy explanations are obviously male. They overlook the fact that the hostility comes from both popular beauties and happily married black women. There is something else in this anger, and I think it lies in the fact that black women have always considered themselves superior to white women. Not racially superior, just superior in terms of their ability to function healthily in the world.

Black women have been able to envy white women (their looks, their easy life, the attention they seem to get from their men); they could fear them (for the economic control they have had over black women's lives) and even love them (as mammies and domestic workers can); but black women have found it impossible to respect white women. I mean they never had what black men have had for white men—a feeling of awe at their accomplishments. Black women have no abiding admiration of white women as competent, complete people. Whether vying with them for the few professional slots available to women in general, or moving their dirt from one place to another, they regarded them as willful children, pretty children, mean children, ugly children, but never as real adults capable of handling the real problems of the world.

White women were ignorant of the facts of life—perhaps by choice, perhaps with the assistance of men, but ignorant anyway. They were totally dependent on marriage or male support (emotionally or economically). They confronted their sexuality with furtiveness, complete abandon or repression. Those who could afford it, gave over the management of the house and the rearing of children to others. (It is a source of amusement even now to black women to listen to feminists talk of liberation while somebody's nice black grandmother shoulders the daily responsibility of child rearing and floor mopping and the liberated one comes home to examine the housekeeping, correct it, and be entertained by the children. If Women's Lib needs those grandmothers to thrive, it has a serious flaw.) The one great disservice black women are guilty of (albeit not by choice) is that they are the means by which white women can escape the responsibilities of womanhood and remain children all the way to the grave.

It is this view of themselves and of white women that makes the preference of a black man for a white woman quite a crawful. The black women regard his choice as an inferior one. Over and over again one hears one question from them: "But why, when they marry white women, do they pick the raggletail ones, the silly, the giddy, the stupid, the flat nobodies of the race? Why no real women?" The answer, of course, is obvious. What would such a man who preferred white women do with a real woman? And would a white woman who is looking for black exotica ever be a complete woman?

Obviously there are black and white couples who love each other as people, and marry each other that way. (I can think of two such.) But there is so often a note of apology (if the woman is black) or bravado (if the man is) in such unions, which would hardly be necessary if the union was something other than a political effort to integrate one's emotions and therefore, symbolically, the world. And if all the black partner has to be is black and exotic, why not?

This feeling of superiority contributes to the reluctance of black women to embrace Women's Lib. That and the very important fact that black men are formidably opposed to their involvement in it—and for the most part the women understand their fears. In The Amsterdam News, an editor, while deploring the conditions of black political organizations, warns his readers of the consequences: "White politicians have already organized. And their organizers are even attempting to co-opt Black women into their organizational structure, which may well place Black women against Black men, that is, if the struggle for women's liberation is viewed by Black women as being above the struggle for Black liberation."

The consensus among blacks is that their first liberation has not been realized; unspoken is the conviction of black men that any more aggressiveness and "freedom" for black women would be intolerable, not to say counterevolutionary.

There is also a contention among some black women that Women's Lib is nothing more than an attempt on the part of whites to become black without the responsibilities of being black. Certainly some of the demands of liberationists seem to rack up as our thing: common-law marriage (shacking); children out of wedlock, which is even fashionable now if you are a member of the Jet Set (if you are poor and black it is still a crime); families without men; right to work; sexual freedom, and an assumption that a woman is equal to a man.

Now we have come full circle: the morality of the welfare mother has become the avant-garde morality of the land. There is a good deal of irony in all of this. About a year ago in the Village Voice there was a very interesting exchange of letters. Cecil Brown was explaining to a young black woman the "reasons" for the black man's interest in white girls: a good deal about image, psychic needs and what not. The young girl answered in a rather poignant way to this effect: yes, she said, I suppose, again, we black women have to wait, wait for the brother to get himself together—be enduring, understanding, and, yes, she thought they could do it again … but, in the meantime, what do we tell the children?

This woman who spoke so gently in those letters of the fate of the children may soon discover that the waiting period is over. The softness, the "she knows how to treat me" (meaning she knows how to be a cooperative slave) that black men may be looking for in white women is fading from view. If Women's Lib is about breaking the habit of genuflection, if it is about controlling one's own destiny, is about female independence in economic, personal and political ways, if it is indeed about working hard to become a person, knowing that one has to work hard at becoming anything, Man or Woman —and it succeeds—then we may have a nation of white Geraldines and white Sapphires, and what on earth is Kingfish gonna do then?

The winds are changing, and when they blow, new things move. The liberation movement has moved from shrieks to shape. It is focusing itself, becoming a hard-headed power base, as the National Women's Political Caucus in Washington attested last month. Representative Shirley Chisholm was radiant: "Collectively we've come together, not as a Women's Lib group, but as a women's political movement." Fannie Lou Hamer, the Mississippi civil-rights leader, was there. Beulah Sanders, chairman of New York's Citywide Coordinating Committee of Welfare Groups, was there. They see, perhaps, something real: women talking about human rights rather than sexual rights—something other than a family quarrel, and the air is shivery with possibilities.

"Feminism in Literature - Toni Morrison (Essay Date 1971)." Feminism in Literature, edited by Jessica Bomarito, Jeffrey W. Hunter, Vol. 4. Gale Cengage, 2005, 17 Aug. 2024 <https://www.enotes.com/topics/feminism/critical-essays/feminist-movement-20th-century#critical-essays-feminist-movement-20th-century-primary-sources-toni-morrison-essay-date-1971>

Representative Works

Bella Abzug

Bella! Ms. Abzug Goes to Washington (nonfiction) 1972

Paula Gunn Allen

The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Tradition (essays) 1986

Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa

This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color [editors] (anthology) 1981

Ti-Grace Atkinson

Amazon Odyssey (nonfiction) 1974

Boston Women's Health Book Collective

Our Bodies, Ourselves (nonfiction) 1973

Susan Brownmiller

Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (nonfiction) 1975

In Our Time: A Memoir of a Revolution (autobiography) 1999

Shirley Chisholm

Unbought and Unbossed (autobiography) 1970

Andrea Dworkin

Pornography: Men Possessing Women (nonfiction) 1981

Susan Faludi

Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women (nonfiction) 1991

Betty Friedan

The Feminine Mystique (nonfiction) 1963

It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women's Movement (nonfiction) 1976

The Second Stage (nonfiction) 1981

Carol Gilligan

In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (nonfiction) 1982

Germaine Greer

The Female Eunuch (nonfiction) 1970

Lucy Lippard

The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Essays on Feminist Art (criticism) 1995

Catharine A. MacKinnon

Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (nonfiction) 1987

Kate Millett

Sexual Politics (nonfiction) 1970

Robin Morgan

off our backs [founder, with others] (periodical) 1970-

Sisterhood Is Powerful [editor] (anthology) 1970

Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Gloria Steinem, and Robin Morgan

Ms. [founders, with others] (periodical) 1972-

Camille Paglia

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (criticism) 1990

Gloria Steinem

Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (essays) 1983

Modern American Women: A Documentary History [editor] (anthology) 1969; revised edition, 2002

The Beauty Myth (nonfiction) 1990

Fire with Fire (nonfiction) 1993

"Feminism in Literature - Representative Works." Feminism in Literature, edited by Jessica Bomarito, Jeffrey W. Hunter, Vol. 4. Gale Cengage, 2005, 17 Aug. 2024 <https://www.enotes.com/topics/feminism/critical-essays/feminist-movement-20th-century#critical-essays-feminist-movement-20th-century-representative-works-2>

Roe V. Wade (Legal Decision Date 1973)

SOURCE: Roe v. Wade, 1973. In the following excerpt from the landmark legal decision regarding Roe v. Wade, the United States Supreme Court upholds women's unconditional right to have an abortion—a right that had been denied them since the late 1800s.

The principal thrust of appellant's attack on the Texas statutes is that they improperly invade a right, said to be possessed by the pregnant woman, to choose to terminate her pregnancy. Appellant would discover this right in the concept of personal "liberty" embodied in the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause; or in personal, marital, familial, and sexual privacy said to be protected by the Bill of Rights …; or among those rights reserved to the people by the Ninth Amendment.… Before addressing this claim, we feel it desirable briefly to survey, in several aspects, the history of abortion, for such insight as that history may afford us, and then to examine the state purposes and interests behind the criminal abortion laws.

It perhaps is not generally appreciated that the restrictive criminal abortion laws in effect in a majority of States today are of relatively recent vintage. Those laws, generally proscribing abortion or its attempt at any time during pregnancy except when necessary to preserve the pregnant woman's life, are not of ancient or even of common-law origin. Instead, they derive from statutory changes effected, for the most part, in the latter half of the 19th century.…

[At] the time of the adoption of our Constitution, and throughout the major portion of the 19th century, abortion was viewed with less disfavor than under most American statutes currently in effect. Phrasing it another way, a woman enjoyed a substantially broader right to terminate a pregnancy than she does in most States today. At least with respect to the early stage of pregnancy.…

Three reasons have been advanced to explain historically the enactment of criminal abortion laws in the 19th century and to justify their continued existence.

It has been argued occasionally that these laws were the product of a Victorian social concern to discourage illicit sexual conduct. Texas, however, does not advance this justification in the present case, and it appears that no court or commentator has taken the argument seriously. The appellants and amici contend, moreover, that this is not a proper state purpose at all and suggest that, if it were, the Texas statutes are overbroad in protecting it since the law fails to distinguish between married and unwed mothers.

A second reason is concerned with abortion as a medical procedure. When most criminal abortion laws were first enacted, the procedure was a hazardous one for the woman. This was particularly true prior to the development of antisepsis. Antiseptic techniques, of course, were based on discoveries by [British surgeon Joseph] Lister, [French microbiologist Louis] Pasteur, and others first announced in 1867, but were not generally accepted and employed until about the turn of the century. Abortion mortality was high.… Thus, it has been argued that a State's real concern in enacting a criminal abortion law was to protect the pregnant woman, that is, to restrain her from submitting to a procedure that placed her life in serious jeopardy.

GERMAINE GREER (1939-)

A controversial feminist critic and scholar, Germaine Greer emerged as a maverick spokesperson for the women's movement with the publication of The Female Eunuch (1970). This international best seller, distinguished for its frank, iconoclastic discussion of female anatomy, sexuality, and irreverence toward mainstream feminist views, established Greer as a compelling public intellectual and celebrity. In The Female Eunuch, Greer rails against the social and psychological oppression of women in modern society, encouraging women to reclaim their independence and vitality, or "woman energy" by eschewing monogamy, heterosexual marriage, and traditional child-rearing. Greer advocates open relationships, sexual freedom, and communal parenting as an antidote to female passivity, repressed desire, and debilitating dependence on men for security and the false promises of romantic love. In subsequent books, such as Sex and Destiny (1984), The Change (1991), and The Whole Woman (1999), Greer similarly combines scholarly analysis, personal observation, and high rhetoric to provide thought-provoking commentaries on the social status of women in contemporary society. Greer was born near Melbourne, Australia, in 1939. She earned a B.A. from the University of Melbourne in 1959, an M.A. at the University of Sydney in 1961, and in 1964 won a Commonwealth scholarship to study at Newnham College, Cambridge University, in England, where she earned a Ph.D. in 1967. Greer subsequently taught English at the University of Warwick in England from 1967 to 1973, during which time she was involved in the theater, appeared on television shows, and contributed a column to the London Sunday Times. Greer also entered the circles of rock stars and the British counterculture during the late 1960s, contributed to the underground magazine Oz, and cofounded Suck, a radical pornographic magazine in whose pages nude photographs of Greer once appeared.

Modern medical techniques have altered this situation. Appellants and various amici refer to medical data indicating that abortion in early pregnancy, that is, prior to the end of the first trimester, although not without its risk, is now relatively safe. Mortality rates for women undergoing early abortions, where the procedure is legal, appear to be as low as or lower than the rates for normal childbirth. Consequently, any interest of the State in protecting the woman from an inherently hazardous procedure, except when it would be equally dangerous for her to forgo it, has largely disappeared. Of course, important state interests in the areas of health and medical standards do remain. The State has a legitimate interest in seeing to it that abortion, like any other medical procedure, is performed under circumstances that insure maximum safety for the patient.… Moreover, the risk to the woman increases as her pregnancy continues. Thus, the State retains a definite interest in protecting the woman's own health and safety when an abortion is proposed at a late stage of pregnancy.

The third reason is the State's interest—some phrase it in terms of duty—in protecting prenatal life. Some of the argument for this justification rests on the theory that a new human life is present from the moment of conception. The State's interest and general obligation to protect life then extends, it is argued, to prenatal life. Only when the life of the pregnant mother herself is at stake, balanced against the life she carries within her, should the interest of the embryo or fetus not prevail. Logically, of course, a legitimate state interest in this area need not stand or fall on acceptance of the belief that life begins at conception or at some other point prior to live birth. In assessing the State's interest, recognition may be given to the less rigid claim that as long as at least potential life is involved, the State may assert interests beyond the protection of the pregnant woman alone.

Parties challenging state abortion laws have sharply disputed in some courts the contention that a purpose of these laws, when enacted, was to protect prenatal life. Pointing to the absence of legislative history to support the contention, they claim that most state laws were designed solely to protect the woman. Because medical advances have lessened this concern, at least with respect to abortion in early pregnancy, they argue that with respect to such abortions the law can no longer be justified by any state interest. There is some scholarly support for this view of original purpose.…

It is with these interests, and the weight to be attached to them, that this case is concerned.

The Constitution does not explicitly mention any right of privacy. In a line of decisions, however,…the Court has recognized that a right of personal privacy, or a guarantee of certain areas or zones of privacy, does exist under the Constitution.…

This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment's concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or … in the Ninth Amendment's reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.… We, therefore, conclude that the right of personal privacy includes the abortion decision, but that this right is not unqualified and must be considered against important state interests in regulation.…

The appellee and certain amici argue that the fetus is a "person" within the language and meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. In support of this, they outline at length and in detail the well-known facts of fetal development.…The Constitution does not define "person" in so many words.…But in nearly all … instances, the use of the word is such that it has application only postnatally. None indicates, with any assurance, that it has any possible prenatal application.… In short, the unborn have never been recognized in the law as persons in the whole sense.

In view of all this, we do not agree that, by adopting one theory of life, Texas may override the rights of the pregnant woman that are at stake. We repeat, however, that the State does have an important and legitimate interest in preserving and protecting the health of the pregnant woman … and that it has still another important and legitimate interest in protecting the potentiality of human life. These interests are separate and distinct. Each grows in substantiality as the woman approaches term and, at a point during pregnancy, each becomes "compelling."

With respect to the State's important and legitimate interest in the health of the mother, the "compelling" point, in the light of present medical knowledge, is at approximately the end of the first trimester. This is so because of the now-established medical fact … that until the end of the first trimester mortality in abortion may be less than mortality in normal childbirth.… It follows that, from and after this point, a State may regulate the abortion procedure to the extent that the regulation reasonably relates to the preservation and protection of maternal health.… This means, on the other hand, that for the period of pregnancy prior to this "compelling" point, the attending physician, in consultation with his patient, is free to determine, without regulation by the State, that, in his medical judgment, the patient's pregnancy should be terminated.…

With respect to the State's important and legitimate interest in potential life, the "compelling" point is at viability. This is so because the fetus then presumably has the capability of meaningful life outside the mother's womb. State regulation protective of fetal life after viability thus has both logical and biological justifications. If the State is interested in protecting fetal life after viability, it may go so far as to proscribe abortion during that period, except when it is necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother.…

Our conclusion … means, of course, that the Texas abortion statutes, as a unit, must fall. (Justice Blackmun, delivering the opinion of the United States Supreme Court as documented in Supreme Court Reporter, Volume 93)

"Feminism in Literature - Roe V. Wade (Legal Decision Date 1973)." Feminism in Literature, edited by Jessica Bomarito, Jeffrey W. Hunter, Vol. 4. Gale Cengage, 2005, 17 Aug. 2024 <https://www.enotes.com/topics/feminism/critical-essays/feminist-movement-20th-century#critical-essays-feminist-movement-20th-century-primary-sources-roe-v-wade-legal-decision-date-1973>

Charlotte Bunch (Essay Date 2001)

SOURCE: Bunch, Charlotte. "Women's Human Rights: The Challenges of Global Feminism and Diversity." In Feminist Locations: Global and Local, Theory and Practice, edited by Marianne DeKoven, pp. 129-46. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001. In the following essay, Bunch discusses some aspects of global feminism, including networking among organizations in various countries, the struggle for human rights, and the notion of equality in relation to diversity.

I want to start with a story from the first African Women's Leadership Institute that I attended in Uganda (February 1997) because it illustrates issues I want to discuss and conveys the sense of possibility that I feel about what I call global feminism. While the term global feminism is problematic, it still has resonance for many as a way of describing the growth of feminism(s) around the world over the past two decades. The African Women's Leadership Institute was organized by four young women from different countries in Africa who had attended the global leadership institutes sponsored by the Center for Women's Global Leadership each year and who have been active in the Global Campaign for Women's Human Rights.

They brought twenty-five women, ages twenty-five to forty, from eighteen countries in Africa for three weeks of intensive training in a program that was explicitly dealing with feminism and leadership for the twenty-first century. The fact that over three hundred women applied to spend three weeks there speaks volumes about both the growth of feminism in the region and the seriousness of women's commitments to it. The participants were diverse in terms of country, ethnic identity, and class. Some worked in the public sector in politics and government; many came from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and grass-roots women's projects; and a few worked in private corporations or in universities. Their backgrounds were diverse as were their issues of primary concern. Yet as so often happens in events like this, there was also a commonality in the stories that they told about the discrimination and violence that they faced as women that brought them together in spite of their differences.

In one of the opening lectures, Patricia Mc-Fadden, a feminist theorist from Swaziland, wove together the themes of feminism in Africa with analysis of colonialism and the ways in which Western patriarchy had imposed itself on the continent. At the same time, she talked about how this should not blind women to the indigenous forms of patriarchy that they also had to confront. She ended her analysis of the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality in Africa with a participatory exercise in which she asked women to list on the board names that feminists get called in their country. A multitude of words spewed forth from bra burners to unfeminine to promiscuous to frigid to lesbian to Western/white-identified to women who can't get a man to women who want to be a man to women who are ugly to women who read too much (and "lose contact with their roots") to the "know-alls" and even "Beijing Women," referring to the Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995. Even though these names were expressed in various local languages often reflecting particular cultural concepts, the same accusations that women have experienced in other parts of the world kept appearing on the list. It reminded me that one of the universalities of the feminist struggle is the commonality of our opposition.

McFadden also asked participants to say why they do or don't call themselves feminists. Many replied that before they came to the institute, they didn't or weren't sure whether to call themselves a feminist for various reasons. But many added that after this lecture they would do so because now they understood that was who they were and how the term had been used against women. It was a transforming process that I have seen happen in different ways and arenas around the world. Yet it is still powerful to see how demystifying this word and understanding the way in which it has been used against women enables many to recognize its political nature and reinforces their ability to stand up to those who put women down.

Women's Global Networking

The struggle to reclaim and broaden feminism is central to working for women's human rights. Someone once asked if we say "women's human rights" because it's easier for people to accept than feminism. The intention of this movement has not been to avoid the word feminism, but rather to take feminist analysis into the arena of human rights and use it to make women's claims more indisputable by defining them as human rights. By applying feminist concepts and gender analysis to human rights theory and practice, we seek to transform a major body of work and its related institutions that have enormous influence, both practically and theoretically, in the world, and make them more inclusive of women's lives and experiences. Looking at human rights from a gender-conscious point of view has already begun to challenge the limited parameters of what was previously defined as human rights and opened new avenues of government accountability to women.

The growth of women's movements around the world since the 1970s and the United Nations Decade for Women (1975-1985) with its world conferences on women provided the context and background for the movement for women's human rights to emerge in the 1990s. The four UN world conferences on women held from 1975 to 1995 became places where women at the regional and global levels got to know one another and to exchange information, ideas, and strategies. While there have been many other women's international events where such exchange took place as well, the UN conferences played a particularly important role because they provided resources for and a legitimacy to what women were doing that was critical to many women's ability to participate. This global feminist discussion has often been rocky with important contentious debates, but it also has enabled networks and groups of women to see where they share common goals and can build linkages across differences. The irony is that the United Nations certainly never intended to facilitate global feminist networking, but it has helped to create the conditions and sometimes the context from which many women have developed a greater understanding of one another and found ways to work together.

When I speak of the "global" in global feminism, I do not see it in opposition to the "local." This is one of those false dualisms that we must transcend. The greatest strength of women's movements in every region of the world, including the United States, is in the wide diversity of particularized local activity that women do. Most of what feminism has achieved in the last three decades has been through fairly small, specific, local organizations or projects of a million different sorts. These are often competing and debating with one another how to describe various women's experiences and what changes women should seek. In this process, women have developed their own analyses of the reality of women in their particular setting and built strategies responsive to their own specific struggles. It is the richness of this very particularized and local experience that makes it possible to imagine global networking that is reflective of women's diversity. Through the process of development by each specific group of women of their own priority issues and identities the feminist discourse has remained vital and evolved over time. This attention to diversity should also provide the basis for creating more inclusive strategies and visions for the future. These diverse, local, and particularized women's movements are the ground upon which any global activity must build and where it must always return to check out its viability.

Nevertheless, over the past decade, many women have come to feel that working in thousands of small separate projects is not enough. The changes feminists seek demand addressing global forces that are affecting so much of local life today. More women are understanding that their particularized concerns and projects cannot be viewed in isolation from this larger context. For example, the global economy is transforming the conditions of women's work both in the paid economy and at home; organizing in this sector must take this into account. Feminist analysis of the global economy is growing as women examine how their lives are affected by trends like the privatization policies that go by many different names: structural adjustment in the third world, the downsizing of employees and services in the United States, and ending the service sector and job guarantees in Eastern Europe.

Global culture and media also have significant impacts on women's lives and on our efforts to organize. To take an example from that list of things that feminists in Africa get called, one stereotype that has been created by the media and spread through global culture is feminists as "bra burners." Even though, as Patricia McFadden pointed out, the bra was a Western invention with no roots in African culture, nonetheless, feminists there get accused of being Western because they're "bra burners." Some of the women at the African Institute asked, "Where did this term come from?" In the ensuing discussion it was noted that media-created stereotypes spread rapidly from continent to continent. Further, even men who otherwise oppose each other politically will often eagerly use the same media-generated concepts when it comes to what's wrong with feminists.

One of the most damaging and persistent stereotypes used by men everywhere and reinforced by the media is to say that feminism is only Western (white) and middle class (bourgeois). Many feminist leaders and groups have certainly made mistakes and taken actions that reflected these biases, and this must be continuously challenged as we work to create concepts and strategies that are inclusive of women's diversity. However, the continual litany that this is what feminism is and who defines it is a profound insult to the millions of diverse women worldwide, including in the United States, whose ideas and lives have given shape to feminism not only in the past few decades but also over centuries. There have been vibrant feminist movements in many countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America at various points during this century and certainly since the 1970s. Yet, the media systematically neglects reporting on them and usually focuses only on the terrible problems women there face—if it notices them at all. Thus, the feminisms and movements of women in the rest of the world remain unknown to most. Similarly, there is not one Western feminism but rather quite a diverse range of feminisms expressed by different groups of women living in Western countries. Yet most of these faces of feminism are rarely if ever acknowledged in the media. Thus, even to speak of global feminism requires reclaiming the term feminism and recognizing how distortions of it have been systematically used to exacerbate differences among women.

Perhaps the greatest challenge feminists face locally is that at the same time a global phenomenon is on the rise of different kinds of fundamentalisms and backlash, both religious and secular. Religious fundamentalism—whether Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, or Buddhist—and secular fundamentalism like nationalism in the former Yugoslavia, all force women to identify with the particular narrow identity of their group and to disavow "the other." Most of these fundamentalisms also demand that women be the carriers of the cultural purity of their particular group. When women are identified with culture—as reproducers and bearers of tradition—their freedom is usually circumscribed by the male leaders of their group, and they are often also used as the front line against feminism. The ability of competing fundamentalisms to unite as a global force against feminists was made clear at the Women's Conference in Beijing when right-wing Republican U.S. congressmen were in agreement with the Vatican, the Islamic mullahs, and the secular Chinese Communist government in their opposition to the inclusion of gender, sexuality, and reproductive rights in the Platform for Action.

Growing recognition of the global forces affecting women's lives has fueled women's efforts at global networking during the 1990s—including within the women's human rights movement. And this is where the UN world conferences have come to play a key role. Prior to the World Conference on Women in Nairobi in 1985, most of what went on in the name of global feminism or international women's work was information sharing or solidarity work supporting another group's needs. But the global networking that has emerged in the nineties goes beyond solidarity—though that continues to be important—to a more integrated understanding of the connection between what's happening in one country and another. Thus, not only do women care about what's happening to other women in Afghanistan or Rwanda, but also we understand that the advance of fundamentalism anywhere has implications for its growth in other countries and the instability and violence of armed conflicts spill over many borders. Feminists of course still need to act out of solidarity but also to understand that events in diverse parts of the world affect each other. Global networks that have the capacity to respond with a greater international effort can thus strengthen local work.

Understanding the need for more global connections among women gained considerable ground at the time of the third UN World Conference on Women in Nairobi. In 1975, at the first UN World Conference on Women in Mexico City, the debates were generally divided along the lines of the three prevailing UN blocs and the slogan for the UN Decade symbolized this: "Equality, Development, and Peace." These terms reflected what was understood as central to the "woman question" in each of the three blocs. Thus, Equality was seen primarily as a feminist issue coming from Western industrialized countries; Peace was included at the request of the Eastern Socialist bloc; and Development was perceived as key to the improvement of women's lives in third-world countries. At the end of the decade conference in Nairobi by contrast, many women had rejected this division into separate areas and were calling for an understanding of the intersection of these issues. The seeds of several future global networks were sown in Nairobi. One of the groups leading in this effort was DAWN—Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era—a group of women from the South who worked together to produce a book for Nairobi that was a feminist analysis of development and international capitalism and their impact on women. To respond to the challenges posed by the global economy, they called for strategies that crossed North and South lines, with leadership from Southern feminists. They saw no hope of achieving the kind of changes women sought nationally without building alliances that moved both South-South and North-South. Alliances like these played a key role in beginning to shift the discussion of development in the international community to take greater account of women and gender analysis.

The UN world conferences in the 1990s became the occasion for many of these nascent networks to emerge in a more public arena. Women were already sharing strategies and information around development, health, the environment, violence, et cetera. What the world conferences provided was an opportunity to make more visible women's experiences and to showcase feminist/gender-aware perspectives on major global issues. Throughout the eighties many women had been involved in significant efforts to redefine development, and witnessed how the United Nations and some other development agencies began to reflect some of women's concerns in what came to be called human development, a concept that went beyond the prevailing economic development theories. Similar work to redefine society's major paradigms became the focus of women's global networking around the UN world conferences: The Earth Summit on the Environment in Rio in 1992; the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in 1993; the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994; the World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen in 1995; the World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995; the Habitat World Conference on Human Settlement in Istanbul in 1996; and the World Food Summit in Rome in 1997.

Feminist analysis and practice moved into these global public spaces as women brought work done on issues concerning violence, reproductive rights, pay equity, women's political participation, et cetera, to the agendas of the world conferences. The women demonstrated what a gender analysis means in terms of global public policy. While there were of course many differences and debates among women about what should be done at the conferences and how to define a gendered approach, these were generally political differences, not ones based primarily on identity and geography. Women found themselves agreeing with some of the women from different countries and as often disagreeing with some of the women from their own identity groups. While women drew on the insights gained in identity politics, they also recognized the need to move beyond that in order to create a global political force.

These global networks are still emerging, but their experience points to the possibility of organizing that builds on the specificity that women have developed around particular identities and takes account of diversity but also creates a broader political analysis from that place. This is an effort to take the best of identity politics and its grounding in the particulars of differences according to race, class, sexuality, nationality, and other factors and move from that knowledge toward a common political analysis of the larger forces at work. It assumes that diverse experiences can help build broader strategies and more effective next steps. An example of how this works can be seen in the women's human rights movement that has grown out of this impetus for global feminist networking.

The international movement for women's human rights crystallized around the second United Nations World Conference on Human Rights held in Vienna in 1993. It emerged in response to numerous concerns and reflected women's collaborative efforts in diverse contexts. In particular, many women in different regions believed that the issues they were organizing against—especially various forms of gender-based violence such as battery, rape, female genital mutilation, female infanticide, or trafficking—were human rights crises that were not being taken seriously as human rights violations. Thus, despite the many differences among the women organizing for the Vienna conference, women were able to articulate, develop, and act upon a common agenda that took as its focal point the issue of gender-based violence against women.

One of the major expressions of this movement at the international level has been the Global Campaign for Women's Human Rights—a loose coalition of groups and individuals worldwide formed in preparation for the Vienna conference. Several organizations and regional networks worked together to launch the Global Campaign, and they used networking as a primary mode of mobilizing women. This coalition pursued a number of diverse strategies and advanced various issues under the broad umbrella of demanding that women be put on the agenda in Vienna and that violence against women be recognized as a human rights violation. Having gained recognition of women's rights as human rights in Vienna, the Global Campaign then coordinated a series of actions that included workshops, strategic planning meetings, human rights caucuses, and hearings on women's human rights at the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, the World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen, and the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing.

Since these conferences, one of the ongoing tasks of the Global Campaign for Women's Human Rights has been pushing for implementation of the various UN world conference commitments to women. Activists have coordinated efforts globally to lobby the various human rights mechanisms of the UN to fulfill their commitment to the full integration of gender concerns and awareness into their work. Similarly, much effort has gone into working with regional and national bodies, both governmental and nongovernmental, for the full incorporation of gender consciousness and women's human rights into their agendas. In 1998, the Global Campaign utilized this same method of networking in putting forth several broad themes under the slogan Celebrate and Demand Women's Human Rights. This effort sought to bring women's perspectives into commemorations of the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the global level and to encourage diverse but coordinated expressions of this theme locally.

Another ongoing initiative of the women's human rights movement that embodies this approach is the "16 Days of Activism against Gender Violence," an international campaign which links November 25 (International Day against Violence against Women) to December 10 (International Human Rights Day). The 16 Days Campaign aims to provide a global umbrella for local activities that promote public awareness about gender-based violence as a human rights concern and that seek specific commitments to women's human rights at all levels. Groups participating in the campaign select their own particularized objectives and determine their own local activities, but all are done with a sense of being part of this larger global focus.

The driving force of these campaigns has been commitment to action-oriented networking and to building linkages among women across multiple boundaries including class, race, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation, both within local and national-level communities and across geopolitical divides. In these activities, the women's human rights movement has utilized human rights approaches to strengthen local mobilization efforts and to advance local objectives, while at the same time linking them to a larger international movement with broad common goals. It has thus incorporated a wide range of particularized women's issues into an overall international framework for action and change.

Why Human Rights?

One of the first questions that the women's human rights movement has had to address is why feminists should use the human rights concepts and framework for our concerns at all? The limitations in the origins of modern human rights practice are real: it's Western, it's male, it's individualistic, its emphasis has been on political and not economic rights. However, looking beyond its origins to the particular movements for change in the twentieth century that have taken up this concept, we see that the idea that all people have fundamental human rights has become one of the most powerful concepts that disenfranchised groups have used to legitimize their struggles. In the anticolonial independence movements in Asia and Africa, in struggles against dictatorships in Latin America, in movements for the rights of the indigenous, in the African American movement in the United States, human rights language has given voice to claims to be included in the human community as equal citizens. As each group that has been excluded from mainstream power and political discourse stakes their claim to human rights, the term and the practice that derives from it has also been revitalized and expanded in its meaning—taking it further from those limited origins and closer to the ideal of universal human rights for all. The whole body of human rights literature as well as the UN treaties and mechanisms to enforce them established in the last fifty years has had to change and grow as each group has laid out its claims.

Women are following this historical precedent in demanding full recognition of our humanity and posing challenges that are already beginning to transform human rights concepts and practice to be more responsive to women's lives. Human rights language creates a space in which different accounts of women's lives and new ways of demanding change can be developed. Women from many different countries have used it to articulate diverse demands in relation to a broad array of issues. Human rights also provide over-arching principles to frame visions of justice for women without dictating the precise content of those visions. As an ethical concept, human rights speak to values and principles that are not tied to any one religion and can be useful to feminists in answering conservative or fundamentalist attacks.

Human rights is a powerful term that transforms the discussion from being about something that is a good idea to that which ought to be the birthright of every person. Thus it provides a powerful vocabulary for naming gender-based violations and impediments to the exercise of women's full equality and citizenship that legitimizes the demand that these be taken seriously. For many women, it has been empowering to realize that abuses they endure or have endured such as rape, battery, forced marriage, or bodily mutilations are recognized as violations of their humanity. Further, by interpreting abuses of women as human rights violations, women gain greater access to the large body of international and regional human rights treaties, covenants, and agreements that make up international human rights law and practice.

Human rights is as close as we have in the world today to an agreement about what is crucial to human dignity. It is at the center of debates over what every person should have the right to and what no person or state should be able to violate. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by all the governments in the United Nations in 1948 remains the core document for human rights deliberations. It defines human rights as universal, inalienable, and indivisible. All of these defining characteristics are important for women.

The idea of human rights as inalienable means that no one can voluntarily abdicate her/his human rights since those are rights which we have by virtue of being human. This also means that no person or group can deprive another individual of her/his human rights. Thus, for example, debts incurred by migrant workers or by women caught up in sex-trafficking can never justify indentured servitude (slavery), or the deprivation of food, of freedom of movement, or of compensation. Human rights cannot be sold, ransomed, or forfeited for any reason. In theory, then, these are not rights which a country gives or can take away from anyone since they inhere in each person. Further, if governments do deprive citizens of these rights or fail to protect them, they are in violation of their obligation as a state to promote and protect their citizens' rights.

The universality of human rights means that human rights should apply to every single person equally, for everyone is equal in simply being human. While such an interpretation of universality may seem simple, this egalitarian premise has a radical edge that makes it one of the most challenged issues in human rights. By invoking the universality of human rights, women have demanded the incorporation of women- and gender aware perspectives into all of the ideas and institutions that are already committed to the promotion and protection of human rights. Further, universality challenges the contention that the human rights of women (or any group) can be limited by religious or culturally specific definitions of their role.

It is important to note that the concept of universality in human rights does not mean that everyone is or should be the same, but rather that all are equal in their rights by virtue of their humanity. Further, it demands that these rights not be culturally circumscribed and denied to any one group of humans. Of course interpretations of human rights are not static but represent what the prevailing forces in the human community decide are the fundamentals of what is acceptable for the treatment of people. The question then is, who decides what are these agreed-upon human rights? Women are demanding both an end to the double standard of who has human rights and, perhaps even more important, the right to be engaged in their ongoing definition and interpretation. In cultures where there is debate about whether the concept of human rights is being imposed from the outside, women have argued that the concept of universality means that they have the right to be part of those deciding how to interpret human rights principles in their context and that their interpretation must apply equally to men and women.

The indivisibility of human rights means that none of the rights that are considered to be fundamental is supposed to be seen as more important than any of the others and that they are interrelated. Moreover, since human rights encompass civil, political, social, economic, and cultural facets of human existence, the indivisibility premise highlights that the ability of people to live their lives in dignity and to exercise their human rights fully depends on the recognition that these aspects are interdependent. The fact that human rights are indivisible is important for women, since their civil and political rights historically have been compromised by their economic status, by social and cultural limitations placed on their activities, and by the ever-present threat of violence that often constitutes an insurmountable obstacle to women's participation in public and political life.

Indivisibility also challenges the historic Western bias in favor of civil and political rights over social and economic rights. Many people in the United States don't even realize that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights includes social and economic rights. However, many groups throughout the world have spent a great deal of time working on how to demand and realize rights to things like development, housing, and employment. Women's human rights activists have rejected a human rights hierarchy which places either political and civil rights or socioeconomic rights as primary. Instead, women have charged that political stability cannot be realized unless women's social and economic rights are also addressed; that sustainable development is impossible without the simultaneous respect for, and incorporation into the policy process of women's cultural and social roles in the daily reproduction of life; and that social equity cannot be generated without economic justice and women's participation in all levels of political decision making.

While indivisibility has not yet been realized in human rights practice, it reinforces what feminists have called intersectionality or the interrelatedness of factors like race, class, age, gender, and sexuality. A person's rights or experience of violation cannot often be divided out according to one of these factors alone, for how one experiences each of these is affected by the others. The everyday reality of this principle was reiterated in most of the testimonies presented in the hearings and tribunals organized by the Global Campaign for Women's Human Rights at the UN world conferences. As women told the story of how they were violated in one area of their lives such as domestic violence, it was evident how this was exacerbated by other factors such as race or their lack of economic or political rights in other areas. Further, indivisibility of human rights reminds us that human rights are not for some while others can be left on the margins. As long as the rights of some are denied—whether on the basis of race, gender, culture, sexual orientation, or other factors—the human rights of all are undermined.

These basic concepts reflect the ideals of human rights while the considerable body of human rights standards, treaties and mechanisms that have evolved over the past fifty years are intended to translate those ideals into reality. These are particularly useful to establishing governmental accountability for protecting and promoting the human rights of women. While governments may not fulfill these obligations, most claim to care about human rights and are sensitive to both internal and external pressure to live up to the treaties they have signed. These have sometimes provided the basis for legal challenges to national law. For example, a woman in Botswana sued her government for the right to give her children her own nationality under the terms of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). She won her suit on the grounds that this was sex discrimination that violated CEDAW, which her country had ratified. Since a number of countries do not allow women to pass on their nationality to their children, who must take that of the father, her victory had implications beyond Botswana.

In the effort to bring the issue of rape and forced pregnancy in war and conflict onto the international human rights agenda, women have successfully utilized human rights arenas such as the Vienna World Conference on Human Rights and mechanisms such as the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. The United Nations is currently engaged in setting up an international criminal court, which can have a significant impact on how such crimes against women are pursued in the future. They are debating the terms of the court: what will be the definition of war crimes? Will rape, sexual slavery, forced pregnancy, and other violations of women be war crimes and under what conditions? Will crimes against women outside of warfare be included in the jurisdiction of an international criminal court? Will individuals be able to bring crimes before the international court, or will it only be governments who can do so? The decisions made now will determine what kind of access women will have to this international justice system in the future. Women's human rights activists from all regions of the world have operated for several years as an ongoing international group called the Women's Caucus for Gender Justice in the International Criminal Court to inject a gender perspective and to influence such decisions from the inception of the court rather than having to add gender later on, as women must do in so many of the existing human rights bodies.

There are a number of other treaties, standards, and mechanisms that the United Nations and regional organizations have developed for realizing human rights which women are now seeking to address from a gender-conscious perspective. But for people in the United States, we face a particular problem because our government claims to be a big defender of human rights internationally yet has refused to ratify many human rights treaties. It has refused to do so precisely because it is afraid that people in this country will use them to address abuses of human rights within the United States. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, for example, is much more progressive than anything in the U.S. Constitution, even than the ERA, which was defeated. There are a number of provisions in the Convention on the Rights of the Child as well that cover human rights in the family that have been useful to women elsewhere, but the U.S. Government is the only industrialized country that has ratified neither of these treaties. The United States has also refused to ratify the Covenant on Social, Economic, and Cultural Rights, because it might become the basis for challenging economic policies here. Indeed, some welfare rights organizations are now doing just that—utilizing human rights principles and covenants to challenge U.S. welfare policy.

One of the most important future potential uses of human rights is to be the basis for establishing standards by which international financial institutions and multinational corporations can be held accountable for the impact of their policies. In the trend toward privatization in recent years, many governments find themselves relatively helpless in the face of violations by multinational corporations or in relation to the World Trade Organization. The question is, do we as a human community believe there should be checks on these transnational forces? Some people are beginning to look at whether the human rights system can be utilized to establish standards of what is expected from the private sector in the world today. Women's human rights advocates must be present from the beginning of this important exploration or once more, gender-aware perspectives on the responsibilities of global economic forces and the rights of women workers may be left out.

Another demonstration of the power of talking about women's rights as human rights could be seen at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing as women articulated the various issues of the agenda as questions of the human right to education, to political participation, to health care, to a life free of violence, et cetera. Many governments became nervous and began to talk about how the conference must not "create any new rights." However, the expanding interpretation of human rights principles from the perspective of previously excluded groups like women always brings with it the articulation of "new"—that is, not previously recognized—rights. The clearest example of this for women has been the rapid acceptance in the nineties of violence against women as a violation of human rights; the greatest resistance to this expansion has been the reluctance of many to recognize sexual rights as human rights. Further, it was clear in Beijing that many governments recognized that women's increasing use of human rights language implied a greater demand for government accountability to the promises that were being made. Identifying these issues as human rights does not automatically provide ways of holding governments accountable, but it does open wider the doors of the human rights system for women to take steps toward more effective measures for such accountability.

The success and extent of women's human rights networking globally is all the more significant in light of critiques that suggest that the effort to find a common articulation of women's concerns or a common basis for women's organizing is seriously flawed. Some argue that to do so is to universalize the category of woman and to impose a limited agenda on all women on the basis of the experience of some women—usually white, middle class, and living in the north. Given the ways in which geography, ethnicity, race, culture, sexuality, class, and tradition shape what it means to be a woman and the specificities of local and national politics, it is important not to conceive of women or the women's movement as singular and coherent entities. Nevertheless, the experience of the women's human rights movement suggests that a global feminism driven by international feminist networking is also possible. Such networking does not require homogeneity of experience or perspective, or even ongoing consensus across a range of issues. Rather it can be built around acknowledging diversity while also finding common moments at the intersection of diverse paths.

Even as women have worked to recognize, admit, and incorporate diverse perspectives in their thinking and work, they have also struggled to create alliances and to work together in solidarity across differences in the face of conservative and fundamentalist backlashes against feminism occurring in many parts of both the North and the South. Through an understanding of the exercise of power as global and interconnected (that is, universally experienced, though different in its effects) universal human rights can be seen as a system of accountability required by the way power is exercised. In this way, the idea of universal human rights serves as a regulative principle which informs the articulation of women's local demands and strengthens their resistance to abuses of power.

When local women's groups use human rights thinking and practice, especially in the context of international networking, they actively demonstrate the complementary links between universal ideals and local struggles for justice. The Global Campaigns for Women's Human Rights can be seen as one example of the kind of mobilization that is necessary to translate international human rights standards into local social and political practice. Although it is difficult to find a common framework through which to analyze women's lives and organize for change without falling into the trap of false universalization, the international movement for women's human rights has consciously strived to challenge the idea that we must choose between universality and particularity. The movement began with the central operating principle that its concepts and activities should be developed through a process of networking with women who work and organize at the local, national, and international levels in all regions of the world. Similar types of networking have been taken up as a method of organizing by tens of thousands of women from all over the world, and they have successfully linked together women from diverse backgrounds to work on common projects.

The experiences that women gained in networking nationally, regionally, and internationally around the UN world conferences have provided the basis of trust for many to now seek to work on common and diverse projects in collaboration and solidarity on a regular basis. As this work gets translated into local and global expressions, the ability of women's networking to provide a model for affirming the universality of human rights while respecting the diversity of our particular experiences will grow. This can then lead us to take more effective action on behalf of all human rights in a time when the need for common action globally based on ethical principles is greatly needed.

This essay is based on "Women's Rights Are Human Rights: Discourses of Universality and Particularlity," a presentation given as part of the Thinking about Women Series at the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers University in 1997.

I would like to acknowledge in particular the collaboration of Samantha Frost and Niamh Reillv in the development of some of these ideas for an earlier essay.

"Feminism in Literature - Charlotte Bunch (Essay Date 2001)." Feminism in Literature, edited by Jessica Bomarito, Jeffrey W. Hunter, Vol. 4. Gale Cengage, 2005, 17 Aug. 2024 <https://www.enotes.com/topics/feminism/critical-essays/feminist-movement-20th-century#critical-essays-feminist-movement-20th-century-overviews-charlotte-bunch-essay-date-2001>

Kate Millett (Essay Date 1998)

SOURCE: Millett, Kate. “How Many Lives Are Here….” In The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women’s Liberation, edited by Rachel DuPlessis and Ann Snitow, pp. 493-95. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1998. In the following essay, Millett recounts the urgency, excitement, and liberating sense of purpose and solidarity experienced by women involved in the feminist movement during the 1960s.

How many lives are here, since for every woman who tells her story in feminism in this ground-breaking collection, there are a thousand others, ten thousand others. For these “representative lives” are only one sampling of a great historical wave. It came at us full tide and from all sides and swept our lives into action, sudden meaning, a transforming vitality, a consuming energy that is still unspent.

History broke over a generation of women who were changed utterly and in the process changed their own times, a change still going on around the world, change still hardly reckoned yet, a chain reaction that will set still others in motion. And it begins with such small steps: a pamphlet, an evening between friends, a challenge at a meeting, then a demonstration, then a network of consciousness-raising groups. It begins with an atmosphere arising out of the great example of the struggle for black civil rights and with the passage of a civil rights law that, virtually by accident, empowered women as well, and thus opened a path. It also began because of a disastrous and unpopular war and resistance to that war by a left whose male chauvinism became insupportable. Yet another path opened. And there was always the example of our foremothers once we could see our way back to them and see ourselves as another wave of the longest revolution. Women came together from different political directions and backgrounds, formal and informal groupings, in neighborhoods or places of study. They explored and agreed, disputed and disagreed, analyzed and synthesized, proclaimed and pronounced and denounced and roughed out a style and an agenda of goals we are still hotly pursuing.

Women’s Liberation became an explosion. The women in this collection were on the front line of this movement and felt its first energy, that explosive moment. Feminism became enormous and took on issue after issue: wages led to law and then to health; sexual self-definition led to abortion and then to lesbian rights; the image of women led to advertising and textbooks or toys and war. As you read, you can see a historical phenomenon like this begin with afternoons among “a gang of four” friends positing an autonomous left feminism in Naomi Weisstein’s Chicago apartment, which would lead to the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, which sprouted a school and women’s studies, a speakers bureau and child care and even a rock band whose triumphs and failures seem a metaphor for the times.

“Every day someone else became a lesbian,” Amy Kesselman muses, remembering this time of discovery and change. Out of whirls of activity and experiment came genuine service and solid achievement. The stories here are stories of risk taking: Anselma Dell’Olio’s vital immigrant past and her brave forays into feminist theater, Barbara Epstein’s thoughtful ambivalence in the face of communism. There was fun in the Lavender Menace “zap,” impudence and daring and humor. There was daring in the Chicago “Jane” project that performed eleven thousand abortions before legalization. There is pain in Roxanne Dunbar’s stories of rape, even in a rapist’s conviction in court: suspended sentence and a two hundred dollar fine. There is another pain in Weisstein’s and in Jo Freeman’s and other accounts of “trashing,” doctrinaire attacks on women by other women, and there is a fine courage in Dell’Olio’s denunciation of it as “Divisiveness and Self-Destruction.”

There is movement building here, the nervy excitement of meetings and organizations, the march of groups in cities: Bread and Roses, Radical Women, WITCH, Redstockings, the Sisterhood of Black Single Mothers and the Woman’s Survival Space, women’s peace camps, the Herstory Archives. A woman’s law movement came into being, a woman’s health movement. The romance of politics was always an inner struggle, as Vivian Gornick reminds us, a battle with the self for discipline and strength, or for class or racial or ethnic identity, as Priscilla Long and Meredith Tax, Barbara Omolade, Michele Wallace, Lourdes Benería, and Shirley Geok-lin Lim demonstrate. Or for autonomy within marriage or recognition for relationship, as Alix Kates Shulman and Joan Nestle work it out from different poles of origin. The turmoil of the very self in transformation while it tries to transform the culture around it. It has not changed enough, nor have we. The divisions of class and race beset us still. This being America, the role of black feminism must become pivotal, crucial, the linchpin securing the wheel itself, if U.S. feminism would be liberatory to feminism worldwide. And though we come together across class, class divides us still. As it was meant to do, and means to do still in an increasingly ruthless capitalism, the so-called “global economy” presenting itself as iron necessity. The stakes get bigger, tougher.

“What I’d like to convey”—Rosalyn Baxandall fills in the essential—“what I think has been neglected in the books and articles about the women’s liberation movement—is the joy we felt. We were, we believed, poised on the trembling edge of a transformation…. There was a yeastiness in the air that made us cocky and strong. Sure there were splits and backbiting among us, but there was also fun and great times. For me the women’s liberation movement was love at first sight.”

Really, after all, this is a love story: love for ideas that had come alive in political action and possibility, love for a vision of freedom and for the camaraderie that brought that liberation into being. We called it sisterhood. It was euphoric and over the top, excessive and insufficient all at once. There were terrible shortcomings in how this movement faced differences in race and class, which are slowly being redeemed. There were downs and depressions, times when support fell through and community failed: Jo Freeman and Carol Hanisch give powerful and moving testimony here. There is an emptiness afterwards and a slightly elegiac tone at the end of a great many of these pieces.

PHY,LLIS SCHLAFLY (1924-)

Dubbed the “Gloria Steinem of the Right,” Phyllis Schlafly represented conservative American women in the 1970s who feared and rejected the women’s liberation movement. Born in St. Louis in 1924, Schlafly was educated at Washington University and Radcliffe College, worked briefly as a congressional aide, and married a wealthy Illinois lawyer in 1949. Although a self-described housewife and mother of six, she ran for Congress three times, wrote and published several books on conservative issues, worked as a radio commentator, and was editor of the Phyllis Schlafly Newsletter. By organizing and operating the Stop ERA lobby as well as the Eagle Forum, she aroused enough opposition to prevent ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. Schlafly’s campaign, and her testimony against the amendment in more than thirty state legislatures, helped convince voters and legislators the ERA was a threat to American values, the family, and traditional sex roles. After the defeat of the ERA, Schlafly’s Eagle Forum waged a national campaign against the women’s liberation movement, whose leaders Schlafly asserted were fanatics, leading American women on a misguided quest to resolve their personal problems and identity crises through legal and political reform. In The Power of the Positive Woman (1977), The Power of the Christian Woman (1981), and most recently Feminist Fantasies (2003), Schlafly denounces feminism, and encourages women to find creative, intellectual, and spiritual fulfillment in marriage and motherhood, dedication to God, and by embracing the differences between the sexes. Schlafly’s first book, A Choice Not an Echo (1964), championing Senator Barry M. Goldwater for the Republican presidential nomination, sold over 3 million copies and helped Goldwater to secure his party’s nomination. With a retired military man, Admiral Chester Ward, Schlafly coauthored several books on the subjects of national defense policy and nuclear strategy, including The Gravediggers (1964), Strike from Space (1965), The Betrayers (1968), and Kissinger on the Couch (1975).

The social transformation that has come about since, the gradual unfolding and extension of feminism into every corner of our lives and into so many societies worldwide, had its kernel as well as its parallel in accounts like these, lives like these. And it goes on. The “click” of recognition and resolve will continue among other women now, younger, or distant, or yet to come.

"Feminism in Literature - Kate Millett (Essay Date 1998)." Feminism in Literature, edited by Jessica Bomarito, Jeffrey W. Hunter, Vol. 4. Gale Cengage, 2005, 17 Aug. 2024 <https://www.enotes.com/topics/feminism/critical-essays/feminist-movement-20th-century#critical-essays-feminist-movement-20th-century-primary-sources-kate-millett-essay-date-1998>

Third-Wave Feminism

SOURCE: Hogeland, Lisa Maria. "Against Generational Thinking, or, Some Things That 'Third Wave' Feminism Isn't." Women's Studies in Communication 24, no. 1 (spring 2001): 107-21. In the following essay, Hogeland explores disagreements between older feminists and third-wave feminists, asserting that their differences are political, not generational.

In the 1980s and 1990s, feminists began to worry about "the next generation" of feminism. In 1983, Ms. Magazine published a "Special Issue on Young Feminists," and the first of the several books and anthologies asserting a "third wave" of U.S. feminism uniquely the province of young women appeared in 1991 (Kamen, 1991; Wolf, 1993; Findlen, 1995; Walker, 1995; Heywood & Drake, 1997; Baumgardner & Richards 2000). In this essay, I offer two stories about my own history with generational rhetoric in order to illuminate some of the ways that it can be inflammatory and divisive. More importantly, as I will argue, the rhetoric of generational differences in feminism works to mask real political differences—fundamental differences in our visions of feminism's tasks and accomplishments. Given the uneven successes of the movement, the unevenness of change in women's lives and circumstances, the unevenness of change in institutions, such fundamental differences are inevitable. Feminists are differently situated in relation to what feminist movement has (and has not) accomplished, and generation is perhaps the least powerful explanatory factor for our different situations.

I want to locate these different visions of feminism not in relation to generation, then, or in relation to the naïve vision of the history of feminist movement that names young women's feminism a distinct and separate "wave," but rather in relation to the most important and undertheorized issue in contemporary feminism: the relationship between consciousness and social change. I trace three understandings of that relationship in early second wave feminism, locating them in feminist work on the practice of consciousness raising (CR). I then explore the distinct political meanings of CR in each of these understandings: CR as recruitment device for a mass movement, CR as personal transformation, and CR as a mid-point between theory and action. Each of these points to a distinct vision of feminist movement, and these contrasting visions are the real political differences in feminism.

Each of the three kinds of feminism I identify has been claimed as the province of a particular feminist "generation." Mass-movement feminism has been claimed both as a specific hunger on the part of young(er) women, and as a kind of feminist orthodoxy against which young(er) women rebel. Personal-transformation feminism has been claimed both as the particular vantage point of old(er) feminists, and as a struggle specific to a later generation of feminists. Theory-building/zap-action feminism has been claimed for grrrl/girl feminism, though such a claim obscures its stylistic similarity (at least) to such second-wave activities as the 1968 Miss America Pageant demonstration and Redstockings' disruptions of the New York abortion hearings in 1969. There is, I argue, nothing specifically generational about any of these feminisms; they are political stances with particular histories in the movement. They may be differently nuanced for women of various age groups, historical experiences, and geographical or institutional locations—but these differences in nuance do not add up to generational difference, not least because the nuances themselves are so uneven. The effect of using claims of generational difference to stand in for political difference is to reify ageism in the movement—on both sides of a putative generational divide. Here, then, are some things that "third wave" feminism isn't.

Generational Stories, Political Theories

Both of my stories about generational rhetoric in feminism involve Ms. Magazine. In April 1983, during my first year of graduate school, Ms. (not then at its best as a feminist magazine) published a "Special Issue on Young Feminists." The women interviewed and discussed were largely my age, early twenties, and nearly all were in college or graduate school. 1 The general tone of the issue was how much feminism had accomplished to make the writers' lives better and freer, and how much they felt able to take for granted some kinds of feminist gains.

My life did not feel to me so settled, and reading these accounts of "my" generation of feminists infuriated me. I was particularly outraged by one young woman's account of her relationship with her woman Chaucer professor at Yale, far too cozily for my tastes describing how feminism had made it possible for "us" to study such Dead White Men as Chaucer (Wolf, 1983). My knee jerked: I had only a few years before been thrown out of the office of my Chaucer professor at Stanford, because I suggested to him that his telling rape jokes in lecture did not help me to learn about the Wife of Bath. Feminists of "my" generation were done with this kind of struggle, the writer seemed to me to be asserting, and I most assuredly was not done. In any case, I wrote—and Ms. printed—a very cranky letter insisting that "we" were not done with the issues of an earlier generation. Interestingly, the young woman happily reading Dead White Men was Naomi Wolf.

In 1994, I published an essay called "Fear of Feminism" in the new Ms., describing some of the reasons I saw that young women did not identify themselves as feminists (Hogeland, 1994). I wrote about the difficulties of being a radical in a conservative political climate, the institutional opposition to feminist movement, and the burden for young women in particular of our culture's overreliance on romance as an arena for the self. I thought I had implied—and I had certainly meant to imply—that young women today who do identify as feminists and do feminist work, do so under very difficult conditions, conditions in some ways more difficult than for women of "my" generation.

The letter-writers to Ms. read the essay quite differently. They were insulted by my arguing that feminism for them was tricky and dangerous, just as I had been insulted more than a decade earlier by the magazine's suggestion that feminism was easy for women my age. More importantly, the letter writers felt that I was criticizing them for not being "feminist enough" by comparison to "my" generation—and, implicitly, that I was using a certain kind of age privilege to denigrate their experience. Some of the writers clearly thought I was old enough to have been a pioneering second-waver, overstating both our age difference and my age-related feminist authority. 2 A similar misidentification occurred in Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards's response to a 2000 review of their "third wave" book, Manifesta, in The Nation ; "I am their cultural contemporary," rather than "an unreconstructed second waver," Michelle Jensen insists in reply (Jensen, 2001, p. 2).

What these stories suggest—aside from my nice personal lesson about karma—is that generational thinking pushes emotional buttons, the more so for young and younger women, who are too often described and too infrequently given voice in accounts of "their" generation (a failing to which I confess: "Fear of Feminism" is about young women, but does not give them voice). Generational thinking is always unspeakably generalizing: one reason we react so vehemently to accounts of "our" generation is that changes in feminist ideas, and the social, political, and institutional impact of feminism itself have been so uneven. No account can be sufficiently inclusive, and to feel ourselves excluded from or marginalized within "our" generation causes pain. 3

More importantly, the unevenness of whatever changes we might identify in feminism or in its effects suggests that generational thinking may not be at all useful in accounting for real political differences in feminism. These differences are more usefully accounted for by getting to the heart of them—and the heart of these differences is, I believe, in the different ways we see the relationship between consciousness and change, between individuals and social movements. We have in feminism radically different understandings of how change happens, of what constitutes social change, and thus of the goals and purposes of feminism itself. But these differences are not generational: they are political and theoretical, and they have roots in second-wave theories and practices of consciousness raising (CR).

To trace out these understandings, I will lay out an abbreviated and rather schematic account of the history of CR in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In the early years of Women's Liberation, the place, purpose, and function of CR was hotly contested. There are three different conceptions of CR that stand in for three different kinds of politics:

CR as recruitment strategy: in which CR is a point of entry into a politics based on a mass movement;
CR as personal transformation: in which personal life is a critical site for social change;
CR as theory-building: in which CR helps a particular group of women focus on a specific problem they will address, turning from theory to activism based on implementing the insights gained from CR.

NAOMI WOLF (1962-)

A provocative author and commentator on women's issues, Naomi Wolf emerged as one of the most powerful new voices of American feminism during the early 1990s. Though often at odds with the beliefs and issues that structured the nascent feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Wolf has developed pointed criticisms regarding the culturally dominant notions of beauty, power, sexuality, and motherhood, which she feels continue to prevent women from gaining full equality with men at all levels of society. Wolf offers extended considerations of each of these themes in several best-selling books, including The Beauty Myth (1990), Fire with Fire (1993), Promiscuities (1997), and Misconceptions (2001). Born in San Francisco, California, Wolf grew up in the city's Haight-Ashbury district, the center of the social and sexual revolutions of the 1960s and early 1970s. She graduated from Yale University in 1984, received a Rhodes scholarship, and pursued graduate studies at New College, Oxford University. Her first book, The Beauty Myth, is based on research she initially conducted for her dissertation at Oxford. Following the popular success of this work, Wolf left Oxford and returned to the United States, continuing to research and write about feminist issues. The Beauty Myth examines the use of traditional ideas about beauty as a political weapon against women's claims for equality. Tracing ideas of feminine beauty throughout the centuries, Wolf argues that obsessive and unrealistic expectations of beauty help men defend their power by encouraging women to destroy themselves physically, draining their psychological and emotional energy and thereby slowly eroding the initial gains of feminism. Wolf encourages women to seek other images of female beauty in places such as women's films, novels, and art, and suggests that younger women draw upon the work of second-wave feminists to form an intergenerational alliance to advocate for alternative notions of beauty that are more faithful to the needs of feminine desires and the female body.

In an early, complex theorization of CR, Kathie Sarachild included all of these processes: the CR group was to assemble and interrogate women's experience, to train its members to start other groups, to unlearn strategies of submission to patriarchy, and to shift its focus at the close of CR to a specific political activity. 4 In The Politics of Women's Liberation, Jo Freeman argued that CR groups were logical places from which to publish feminist material, to found feminist institutions such as rape crisis centers, and to begin study groups (Freeman, 1975, pp. 118-19). As the decade wore on, and especially as CR was taken up as a practice by thousands of women who came into Women's Liberation with no previous experience in radical politics, a different kind of CR practice emerged. Anita Shreve describes the practice of her group, "The rules were simple: Each woman could speak for as long as she liked. When she was finished, no one could comment or criticize" (Shreve, 1989, p. 21; see also pp. 44-46). 5 This version of CR, called "soft" CR by Claudia Dreifus and others, turned the interrogation of women's experience into the simple affirmation of it (Williams, 1975). "Soft" CR was the version forwarded by the guides to CR put out by Los Angeles NOW in 1974 (Ann, 1974; Gosier, Gardel, and Alrich, 1974), and by Ms. in 1975 (Redstockings, 1975; Willis, 1978). Over the course of the 1970s, CR became less theoretical as a practice and less directly connected to Movement recruitment, and the three different understandings of the practice became increasingly separable.

Each of these visions of CR accompanies a specific theory of social change, as I argue below. I use the vague term "accompanies" quite deliberately, because chicken-and-egging the question of whether one's theory of social change derives from or constructs one's vision of CR is, for me, a non-issue; how we see CR and how we understand social change are mutually constitutive.

CR as Recruitment Strategy

Mass-movement feminism has conventionally been understood as liberal feminism, but its politics are more complicated than a simple liberal/radical divide can address. Mass-movement feminism is a politics of numbers, of media pressure, of persuasion and rhetoric. The strategy of organizing massive numbers of women (and perhaps men) need not assume that institutions are democratic, but only that they are responsive to pressure, especially the pressure of numbers. Mass actions can serve as recruitment events and as radicalizing experiences for women who participate in them; alternatively, they may simply be fun. Most feminists of whatever persuasion have participated in such actions as a strategy at some time, but not all feminists believe such actions to be the centerpiece of feminist political work.

There is in fact considerable debate in contemporary feminism about the importance and efficacy of mass-action, mass-movement politics, just as there was in the 1970s. In a 1976 article in off our backs, for example, Brooke Williams and Hannah Darby critiqued the rhetoric of recruitment that justified the emergence of feminist-oriented businesses; such businesses recruited women into the movement for what purpose? they asked, because in their thinking, simply increasing the number of women who identified with the Movement without attending to real political education and specific political goals and analyses was an insufficient, even misguided, strategy.

More recently, we can see the call for a mass-movement feminism in works such as Naomi Wolf's Fire with Fire, which argues that feminists should eliminate their focus on divisive issues like abortion, the better to mobilize a majoritarian mass movement. "A feminism worthy of its name," Wolf argues, "will fit every woman, and every man who cares about women, comfortably"; rather than "a specific agenda," she suggests, feminism should constitute itself as "a conviction of female worth" so that the movement need not be "of the minority, by the minority" (Wolf, 1993, pp. 132, 126). As Bonnie J. Dow points out in critiquing Wolf's position, "Some aspects of feminist ideology—antiracism, antihomophobia, commitment to economic justice for women of all classes—are perceived by many women as against their interests. Such women may be very committed to improving their own lives, but that does not make them feminists" (Dow, 1996, pp. 216-17; see also pp. 212-13). Individual women's self-interest may not be identical with feminist politics, as Dow suggests, and it is not entirely clear what a mass movement "for women" might mean without a more focused political agenda.

Another way of seeing this debate over the efficacy of mass-movement oriented feminism, and one that returns us to its relationship to CR, is to see it in terms of ways that feminists understand mass-media coverage of feminist issues. In Fire with Fire, Wolf argues that "the balance of power around gender changed, possibly forever" because of the Thomas - Hill hearings; women watched the white guys in ties on the Judiciary Committee "not get it," and went into the 1992 elections looking for "retaliation" (Wolf, 1993, pp. 5-6). Of course, if we are willing to accept the election of Bill Clinton as a crucial political achievement of feminist movement, then Wolf's account of the "genderquake" might be accurate (though let's not forget that Thomas was confirmed; that Clinton was, at best, a mixed bag for feminists; and that George W. Bush promises to appoint more justices just like Thomas).

As Dow and I have argued elsewhere, media coverage of feminist issues such as sexual harassment and domestic violence does not constitute CR. Instead, media coverage promotes a certain level of basic awareness of feminist issues—and may, as in the case of the Thomas - Hill hearings, motivate large numbers of women to move toward feminist organizations—but it may also do so without attending directly to feminist analyses. Such media coverage means, we argue, "that surprising numbers of women know the nuclear family can be a dangerous place for women, that the second shift is unfair to women, that beauty standards are oppressive to women, that divorce is the fast track to poverty for women, and that U.S. society does nothing to facilitate women's combining waged work with childrearing" (Dow and Hogeland, 1997, p. 13). But media coverage of feminist issues rarely addresses the politics of such knowledge, presenting instead a view of the world as a dangerous place for individual women to negotiate individually—or with the right partner. Knowledge may not always equal power, just as putting large numbers of bodies in one place may not always equal change.

CR as Personal Transformation

The politics of personal transformation depends ultimately on a model of social change as a slow, even generational, process, based on a kind of "ripple effect": personal changes affect individuals, who in turn affect other individuals. At some point (somehow), there will be a critical mass of small changes, that will lead to (or will constitute) large-scale social change. In many instances, such a personal-transformation approach to feminism has tended to be anti-materialist (feminist therapy, feminist spirituality), though we can see more materialist versions of it in "consumer feminisms"—in consumer boycotts most notably, where individual acts of (non)consumption add up to large-scale political action. The danger, of course, of such a comparison lies in the ways that consumer boycotts can turn over into consuming feminism-as-lifestyle. That is, "consumer feminism" too easily creates a temptation to substitute buying stuff for political action. How we spend our money is certainly about politics (politically conditioned, like self-esteem—what we might think of as para-political), and can be an important political strategy, especially in the forms of targeted non-consumption and targeted small-business support. But the tendency to see all spending decisions as political is too easily cooptable by advertisers and others into the belief that "lifestyle" decisions are politics (Radner, 1994; S. J. Douglas, 1994; and Goldman, Heath, & Smith, 1991).

The view that politics are based in personal transformations is often theorized sequentially: personal change precedes political change; change yourself first, and then change the world. At base, such a theory of social change is sentimental—think of Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Concluding Remarks" to Uncle Tom's Cabin, where she suggests that her readers have two important powers for change: "There is one thing that every individual can do,—they can see to it they feel right " and "you can pray!" (Stowe, 1852, pp. 624-25, emphases original). Jane Tompkins's important chapter on Uncle Tom's Cabin in her Sensational Designs (1985) establishes ways this model of social change has historically been associated with women. In many respects, the critical-mass theory of social change is simply a more modern version of earlier understandings of women's influence, replacing the civic morality women were supposed to inculcate in husbands and sons with a kind of civic feminism. If such nineteenth-century notions of women's influence constituted a kind of domestic feminism, we might understand the parallel late-twentieth-century notions as feminism domesticated.

To be fair, though, the problem of belief is central here: if you believe in Stowe's vision of social-change-through-prayer (which is to say, if you believe in a deity Who, when sufficiently entreated, will intervene in systems of domination), then prayer (or its equivalent practices) is the logical political response to your theory of how the world works. If you don't believe in social change ex machina or in the deus behind it, this vision of how change happens is likely to be the more frustrating because its religious underpinnings can be so difficult to tease out.

CR as personal transformation necessarily prioritizes those aspects of patriarchy that are attributable to men's sexism (and women's internalized sexism), rather than to the structures of institutions. An unfortunate by-product of this understanding of social change, and one we can see writ large in the US political landscape, is that it establishes hypocrisy as a worse fault than inaction. If we must purge ourselves of sexism before we can combat it in the social or political arenas, then action can always be postponed until we ourselves are somehow liberated—as if individual liberation were possible inside oppressive social structures. As Naomi Wolf put in Fire with Fire, "Feminism means freedom, and freedom must exist inside our own heads before it can exist anywhere else" (1993, p. 120). In practice, this vision entails CR that leads to more CR, based on a notion of human perfectibility (which is, of course, unattainable), and ultimately on notions of political "purity" (a religious, not a political concept). Because of the hypocrisy question, this vision of social change also mires us in lifestyle litmus tests (how can you be a feminist if you eat meat? wear make-up?), and a notion of feminism-as-identity, rather than feminism as practice. Let me be clear: I do believe that personal transformations are politically relevant, just as they are politically (and historically) conditioned. But the personal is political was meant to argue that politics construct our lives at home, as a way of breaking the public/private barrier in our theorizing—it was never meant to argue that our lives at home were our politics. (see Dow, 1996, pp. 209-212).

Implicitly or explicitly, personal transformation theories of social change tend to rely on metaphors of organic-changes-over-time, which makes them particularly amenable to generational rhetoric. Both old(er) and young(er) feminists have laid claim to personal transformation as their uniquely available mode—old(er) feminists have claimed it as a specific reward for having lived through feminist political struggle, and young(er) feminists have claimed it as their specific legacy from previous generations of struggle. 6 There is nothing generational about the politics of personal transformation: it's an understanding of how social change works that dates back to the first wave of US feminism, a consistent thread in feminist movement today, and a political stance within the movement.

CR as Theory-Building

The politics of theory-building sets out CR as a practice that enables feminists to find a specific target for feminist activity, a specific point of intervention into that amorphous thing called patriarchy. It is not "freedom" the group discovers or creates in the CR process, but some shared and particular oppression. In this model, the CR group uses its experience of CR to move toward a strategy for resistance, an agenda for action, and possibly toward the creation of a feminist institution.

These CR-based interventions need not be on the scale of the 1970 Women's Strike for Equality March on 5th Avenue, nor the 1992 abortion rights march on Washington. They tend, instead, to be either small-group theatrics or institutionally-oriented. The 1968 Miss America Pageant demonstration and the 1969 Redstockings disruption of the New York abortion hearings exemplify the former tendency ("No More Miss America!" 1970, pp. 586-88; Echols, 1989, pp. 140-43), as do the organizing strategies of Lesbian Avengers (Schulman, 1994). CR groups based in universities exemplify the latter tendency, as they have sometimes moved to found or support Women's Studies programs, to encourage the hiring of women faculty members, to combat sexism in its various forms on campus, and to engage in coalition work with other groups.

Theory-building CR in the 1970s is perhaps best exemplified by the Combahee River Collective, whose 1977 "A Black Feminist Statement" has played an important role in making the intersections of race, class, and sexuality, as well as gender, central to feminist analyses. The Collective describes some of the insights generated from its CR practices, and draws links between these insights, the group's political engagements, and its politico-theoretical stances on issues such as separatism. The Collective's manifesto, one of the most important contributions to feminist theory in the latter part of the decade, charts the group's movement through a broad range of activities: it operated as a study group, did CR, held retreats, met with other groups, and was, in 1977, on the verge of compiling a collection of Black feminist writing.

Theory-building CR is the basis for some kinds of feminist service-provision, and for the creation of feminist-alternative institutions. Feminist service-provision—rape-crisis centers, battered women's shelters, and the like—was designed not only to respond to women's needs in ways patriarchal institutions could (or would) not, but also to provide homes for feminist political analyses of these issues. 7 As these institutions became "professionalized"—often in concert with their receiving funding from local, state, or federal governments—a different kind of struggle and a different kind of analysis emerged. As is also the case in Women's Studies programs, for instance, feminist service-provision organizations struggle with questions of the extent to which their analyses and, indeed, their missions, can be compromised by their relationships to funding sources, certification processes, institutional locations, and so forth. Both the founding of these institutions and their continuation depend on feminist theorizing about strategies for intervening in patriarchy.

Accounts of CR in contemporary feminism that ignore its theory-building component work to disconnect CR from its foundational importance to many important feminist practices. Theory-building is by no means a specific practice of the early second wave, as anyone who reads young(er) women's zines can testify. Setting theory as the mid-point between personal experience and political action is not generational or generation-specific; it is, rather, a specific understanding of social change and a specific political stance in the movement.

One of the claims some young(er) feminists make to generational specificity is in the style of post-punk, DIY (Do It Yourself), youth-culture grounded rock music, zines, and political activity (see, e.g., Klein, 1997). The in-your-face activist style of Riot Grrrls and other young(er) feminists is, however, neither unique nor specific to a younger generation of feminists; it bears, in fact, quite marked similarities to some early second-wave activities. But young(er) feminists too often simply don't know much about the zap-actions, the mimeographed flyers, the materiality of early second-wave protest. Too, we can see a stylistic similarity in the rhetorical and discursive strategies of (some of) the essays collected in Barbara Findlen's Listen Up and in Sisterhood Is Powerful ; think of the struggle for intimacy between writer and reader, the studied informality, the sense of urgency—these are not generationally different.

My point here is not that young(er) feminists have nothing new to say—quite the contrary, in fact—but rather that notions of generational rupture or divides work effectively to prevent us from seeing the powerful persistence of political beliefs, of specific women's issues, and of strategies for change. And, of course, if we cannot see what persists, neither can we see what is new. Young(er) and old(er) feminists have much to say to each other about their specific historical locations, about the effects of ageism on their efforts, about how women's experiences in patriarchy differ because of age. But the false belief that political differences are generational differences make these and other crucial conversations impossible.

That we can see young(er) and old(er) feminists claiming each of my three analyses of how social change works as specifically available to their generation evidences something important about contemporary feminist movement. First, the construction of putative generational divide is easier than confronting real political difference, real disagreements about the goals of feminist movement, real divides among different ways we see the world. Second, it is easier to construct these differences as generational because of the persistence of ageism, and, more benignly, simple age-stratification, in and outside of feminist movement. Our friendship networks are rarely integrated by age, and too often form the core of our sense of feminist identity and practice; our issues rarely assemble us in truly multi-generational movement or organizations. Our sense of "our" generation is too often too simply our friendship network, our institutional location, our geographic situation, our own lives and the lives of a few other folks significant to us.

This age stratification is further overdetermined by ways that the history of second-wave feminism is little taught and poorly understood, even in Women's Studies. It's become a truism that the second wave was racist, for instance, no matter that such a blanket argument writes out of our history the enormous and important contributions of women of color in the 1970s. A more nuanced view must account for both what women of color did in the decade and for the necessary critiques of movement racism (King, 1994, p. 13). Likewise, it's become a truism that second-wave feminism enshrined middle-class women's experience as universal, which allows us to ignore the stunning numbers of working-class women enmeshed in educational upward mobility who were central to feminist movement in the decade (see Rosen, 1995, pp. 325-26). The absolutism of both these views reinforces young(er) feminists' sense of themselves and their politics as distinct from earlier feminist movement, and from old(er) feminists as well; to explore continuities would be to admit to racism and classism, and, in some sense, the refusal of such continuities may serve to work for white feminists as a kind of inoculation against confronting the persistence of these forces. 8

If our daily lives, our political practices, and our sense of history all work to reconfirm our too-easy sense of generational divide, it is perhaps the less surprising that feminists manage not to engage in serious and sustained debates about political differences. Attributing our differences to generation rather than to politics sets us firmly into psychologized thinking, and into versions of mother/daughter relations—somehow, we are never sisters who might have things to teach each other across our differences and despite our rivalries. We neither agree to disagree nor do we disagree; instead, we agree to evade. We foreclose the real conversations feminists must have about politics, conversations that could help us clarify our positions, conversations that could help us work more effectively both together and separately.

The interviews included two men, the sons of Alix Kates Shulman and Audre Lorde, and two non-student activists (Van Gelder, 1983); the four essayists included a woman who described her college experience and two who identify themselves in their author notes by their educational affiliations. The notable exception in the issue is the article by a working-class woman, Deborah Branscum, whose essay concludes by calling for feminists to organize in and transform the labor movement. In the context of essays and mini-interviews by students at and graduates of institutions such as Yale, Vassar, Smith, and University of California at Santa Barbara, Branscum's essay on union organizing is clearly intended to remind us that not all young women are as privileged as these; because it is the sole exception, I'm not sure that it succeeded in doing so.
One letter writer responded: "please understand that my generation is incredibly thankful for your courage, and recognizes that we would never be where we are without you" (Kaplan, 1995, p. 8). I don't think so: my pioneering second wave feminist activity was in 1971, when I circulated a petition at my elementary school to force the dress code to include trousers for girls. It wasn't exactly Redstockings. Naomi Wolf and I are roughly the same age, and certainly the same "generation" in any demographic reckoning, yet at this moment in Ms., I was clearly being identified as a second-waver, and Wolf (whose spending-money-as-feminism strategies were invoked by Kaplan) was as clearly being identified as a third-waver.
Clearly, the category "generation" has enormous affective power, even when its explanatory power is limited. This power derives in no small part from the relentless "generationalizing" strategies of mass media and advertising, which identify us by generation (and generation-as-style looms large here) in order to construct us as consumers.
See the abbreviated version of her outline as Robin Morgan (1970, pp. xxvi-xxviii) describes it for a sense of the broad range of activities a CR group was supposed to undertake. Sarachild's outline is remarkable precisely for its inclusiveness and tough-mindedness: in the group as she outlines it, individual narratives are crossquestioned, resistances confronted, feminist theory studied and written, organizers trained, and CR actions planned. Sarachild's version is, I suggest, CR in its ideal state, rather than CR as it was most often practiced.
Shreve's book, Women Together, Women Alone: The Legacy of the Consciousness-Raising Movement describes CR as specifically important to white, middle-class, suburban women who never otherwise joined the Movement: the CR that emphasized personal transformation and de-emphasized social change was particularly well-suited for such women. Shreve's analysis, though, is highly colored by her sense that CR was a phenomenon separable from the women's movement, indeed, a parallel movement unto itself.
By the late 1970s, this position was being asserted in Ms., as Susan Dworkin's (1978) and Lynne Sharon Schwartz's (1978, p. 41) reviews of Some Do and Burning Questions (respectively) asserted what they saw as the movement's shift to "a quieter, more individualized search for fulfillment" in contrast to the novels' more activist-oriented visions of feminism. At the other end of the generational spectrum, one might pick up the special issue of Lighthouse, the Radcliffe women's magazine, devoted to "Feminism—A Personal Perspective" (many thanks to Cally Waite for sending it to me). The writers in Lighthouse describe their particular brand of feminism, "personal feminism," as "characterized by individuals in all parts of the world who are slowly incorporating equality into their particular world views" (Crapo, 1996, p. 4). Such a "personal feminism," moreover, is specifically designed to help people see "more readily" that "feminism [is] a movement which is productive rather than threatening" (Funk, 1996, p. 22). Both "generations" of writers are holding out for a kind of feminism that is non-confrontational and non-ideological—a thoroughly depoliticized feminism, in effect.
Carol Ann Douglas (in Douglas, E. B., and Dejanikus, 1976, p. 23) argues that "providing support for [women in difficulties] is a political message" that there are alternatives to patriarchy. This is an argument that has largely disappeared from U.S. feminism, as feminist service provision has become so thoroughly professionalized; indeed, Baumgardner and Richards (2000, p. 296) make quite the opposite argument in their very smart discussion of volunteering vs. activism, arguing that feminist women volunteers "often execute work the government should be funding" in the guise of political activism.
Patricia Hill Collins suggested the term "inoculation" to me in a somewhat different context. For old(er) white feminists, the inoculative gesture may take the form of "I used to be a racist but now I know better" apologia; see DuCille (1994, pp. 612-17), for a brilliant critique of this gesture.

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Jensen, M. (2001, 22 Jan.). Jensen replies. The Nation, 2.

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King, K. (1994). Theory in its feminist travels: Conversations in U.S. women's movements. Bloomington: Indiana U.

Klein, M. (1997). Duality and redefinition: Young feminism and the alternative music community. L. Heywood and J. Drake, Eds., Third wave agenda: Being feminist, doing feminism (pp. 207-225). Minneapolis, U Minnesota.

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Rosen, R. (1995). The female generation gap: Daughters of the fifties and the origins of contemporary American feminism. L. K. Kerber, A. Kessler-Harris, and K. K. Sklar, Eds., U.S. history as women's history: New feminist essays (pp. 313-34). Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina.

Schulman, S. (1994). My American history: Lesbian and gay life during the Reagan/Bush years. New York, Routledge.

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Schwartz, L. S. (1978, March). How foolish I was, how mellow I've become, rev. of Burning Questions by A. K. Shulman. Ms., 40-41.

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Acknowledgments

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Acocella, Joan. From Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism. University of Nebraska Press, 2000. Copyright © 2000, by Joan Acocella. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Aimone, Joseph. From "Millay's Big Book, or the Feminist Formalist as Modern," in Unmanning Modernism: Gendered Re-Readings. Edited by Elizabeth Jane Harrison and Shirley Peterson. University of Tennessee Press, 1997. Copyright © 1997 by The University of Tennessee Press. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The University of Tennessee Press.—Allende, Isabel. From "Writing as an Act of Hope," in Paths of Resistance: The Art and Craft of the Political Novel. Edited by William Zinsser. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. Copyright © 1989 Isabel Allende. Reproduced by permission of the author.—Angelou, Maya. From And Still I Rise. Random House, 1978. Copyright © 1978 by Maya Angelou. Reproduced by permission of Random House, Inc. and Time Warner Books UK.—Arenal, Electa. From "The Convent as Catalyst for Autonomy: Two Hispanic Nuns of the Seventeenth Century," in Women in Hispanic Literature. Edited by Beth Kurti Miller. University of California Press, 1983. Copyright © 1983 by The Regents of the University of California. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and the author.—Arndt, Walter. From "Introduction: I The Akhmatova Phenomenon and II Rendering the Whole Poem," in Anna Akhmatova: Selected Poems. Edited and translated by Walter Arndt. Ardis, 1976. Reproduced by permission.—Atwood, Margaret. From Second Words. Anansi Press Limited, 1982. Copyright © 1982, by O. W. Toad Limited. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the author.—Baker, Deborah Lesko. From "Memory, Love, and Inaccessibility in Hiroshima mon amour, " in Marguerite Duras Lives On. Edited by Janine Ricouart. University Press of America, 1998. Copyright © 1998 University Press of America, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Barlow, Judith E. From "Into the Foxhole: Feminism, Realism, and Lillian Hellman," in Realism and the American Dramatic Tradition. Edited by William W. Demastes. University of Alabama Press, 1996. Copyright © 1996, The University of Alabama Press. Reproduced by permission.—Barratt, Alexandra. From Women's Writing in Middle English. Edited by Alexandra Barratt. Longman Group UK Limited, 1992. Copyright © Longman Group UK Limited 1992. Reproduced by permission.—Barrett Browning, Elizabeth. From "A Letter to Mary Russell Mitford, September 18, 1846," in Women of Letters: Selected Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Mary Russell Mitford. Edited by Meredith B. Raymond and Mary Rose Sullivan. Twayne Publishers, 1987. Reproduced by permission of The Gale Group.—Barrett Browning, Elizabeth. From "Glimpses into My Own Life and Literary Character," in The Brownings' Correspondence, Vol. 1. Edited by Phillip Kelley and Ronald Hudson. Wedgestone Press, 1984. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Eton College.—Bassard, Katherine Clay. From Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender, and Community in Early African American Women's Writing. Princeton University Press, 1999. Copyright © 1999 by Katherine Clay Bassard. Reproduced by permission of Princeton University Press.—Beauvoir, Simone de. From "The Independent Woman," in The Second Sex. Translated by H. M. Parshley. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1952. Copyright © 1952, renewed 1980 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., a division of Random House, Inc. and The Random House Group.—Behrendt, Stephen. From "Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and the Woman Writer's Fate," in Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices. Edited by Paula R. Feldman and Theresa M. Kelley. University Press of New England, 1995. Copyright © 1995 by University Press of New England. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Bell, Barbara Currier and Carol Ohmann. From "Virginia Woolf's Criticism: A Polemical Preface," in Feminist Literary Criticism: Explorations in Theory. Edited by Josephine Donovan. The University Press of Kentucky, 1989. Copyright © 1975, 1989 by The University Press of Kentucky. Reproduced by permission of The University Press of Kentucky.—Berry, Mary Frances. From Why ERA Failed: Politics, Women's Rights, and the Amending Process of the Constitution. Indiana University Press, 1986. Copyright © 1986 by Mary Frances Berry. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Birgitta of Sweden. From Life and Selected Revelations. Edited with a preface by Marguerite Tjader Harris, translation and notes by Albert Ryle Kezel, introduction by Tore Nyberg from The Classics of Western Spirituality. Paulist Press, 1990. Copyright © 1990 by the Order of St. Birgitte, Rome. Translation, notes and Foreword copyright © 1990 by Albert Ryle Kezel, New York/Mahwah, NJ. Reproduced by permission of Paulist Press. www.paulistpress.com.—Blundell, Sue. From Women in Ancient Greece. British Museum Press, 1995. Copyright © 1995 Sue Blundell. Reproduced by permission of the author.—Bogan, Louise. From The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923-1968. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., 1968. Copyright © 1968 by Louise Bogan. Copyright renewed 1996 by Ruth Limmer. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.—Booth, Alison. From "Not All Men Are Selfish and Cruel," in Greatness Engendered: George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. Cornell University Press, 1992. Copyright © 1992 by Cornell University Press. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press.—Brammer, Leila R. From Excluded from Suffrage History: Matilda Joslyn Gage, Nineteenth-Century American Feminist. Greenwood Press, 2000. Copyright © by Leila R. Brammer. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., Westport, CT.—Britzolakis, Christina. From Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning. Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1999. Copyright © 1999 by Christina Britzolakis. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.—Broe, Mary Lynn. From "Bohemia Bumps into Calvin: The Deception of Passivity in Lillian Hellman's Drama," in Critical Essays on Lillian Hellman. Edited by Mark W. Estrin. G. K. Hall, 1989. Copyright © 1989 by Mark W. Estrin. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Gale Group.—Brontë, Charlotte. From "Caroline Vernon," in Legends of Angria: Compiled from The Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë. Edited by Fannie E. Ratchford. Yale University Press, 1933. Copyright © 1933 by Yale University Press. Renewed 1961 by Fannit Ratchford. Reproduced by permission.—Brooks, Gwendolyn. From Blacks. The David Company, 1987. Copyright © 1945, 1949, 1953, 1960, 1963, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1975, 1981, 1986 by Gwendolyn Brooks Blakely. All rights reserved. Reproduced by consent of Brooks Permissions.—Brown-Grant, Rosalind. From "Christine de Pizan: Feminist Linguist Avant la Lettre?," in Christine de Pizan 2000: Studies on Christine de Pizan in Honour of Angus J. Kennedy. Edited by John Campbell and Nadia Margolis. Rodopi, 2000. Copyright © Editions Rodopi B. Reproduced by permission.—Brownmiller, Susan. From In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution. The Dial Press, 1999. Copyright © 1999, by Susan Brownmiller. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Dial Press/Dell Publishing, a division of Random House, Inc.—Brügmann, Margret. From "Between the Lines: On the Essayistic Experiments of Hélène Cixous in 'The Laugh of the Medusa'," translated by Debbi Long in The Politics of the Essay: Feminist Perspectives. Edited by Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres and Elizabeth Mittman. Indiana University Press, 1993. Copyright © 1993 by Indiana University Press. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Bunch, Charlotte. From "Women's Human Rights: The Challenges of Global Feminism and Diversity," in Feminist Locations: Global and Local, Theory and Practice. Edited by Marianne DeKoven. Rutgers University Press, 2001. Copyright © 2001 by Rutgers, the State University. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Burke, Sally. From American Feminist Playwrights: A Critical History. Twayne, 1996. Copyright © 1996 by Twayne Publishers. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Gale Group.—Butler-Evans, Elliott. From Race, Gender, and Desire: Narrative Strategies in the Works of Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker. Temple University Press, 1989. Copyright © 1989, by Temple University. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Byerman, Keith. From "Gender and Justice: Alice Walker and the Sexual Politics of Civil Rights," in The World is Our Home: Society and Culture in Contemporary Southern Writing. Edited by Jeffrey J. Folks and Nancy Summers Folks. The University Press of Kentucky, 2000. Copyright © 2000 by The University Press of Kentucky. Reproduced by permission.—Callaghan, Dympna C. From "The Ideology of Romantic Love," in The Weyward Sisters: Shakespeare and Feminist Politics. Edited by Dympna C. Callaghan, Lorraine Helms, and Jyotsna Singh. Blackwell Publishers, 1994. Copyright © Dympna C. Callaghan, Lorraine Helms and Jyotsna Singh 1994. Reproduced by permission of Blackwell Publishers.—Carmody, Denise Lardner. From Biblical Woman: Contemporary Reflections on Scriptural Texts. Crossroad Publishing Company, 1988. Copyright © 1988 by Denise Lardner Carmody. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the author.—Castro, Ginette. From American Feminism: A Contemporary History. Translated by Elizabeth Loverde-Bagwell. New York University Press, 1990. Copyright © Presses de la Foundation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, Paris, 1990. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation and in the UK by Pollinger Limited and the proprietor.—Chadwick, Whitney. From Women, Art, and Society. Thames and Hudson, 1990. Copyright © 1990 Thames and Hudson Ltd, London. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Chafe, William H. From "World War II as a Pivotal Experience for American Women," in Women and War: The Changing Status of American Women from the 1930s to the 1940s. Edited by Maria Diedrich and Dorothea Fischer-Horning. Berg, 1990. Copyright © 1990, by Maria Diedrich and Dorothea Fischer-Hornung. All rights reserved Reproduced by permission.—Chesler, Ellen. From Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America. Anchor Books, 1992. Copyright © 1992 by Ellen Chesler. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of International Creative Management, Inc.—Cholmeley, Katherine. From Margery Kempe, Genius and Mystic. Longmans, Green and Co., 1947. Reproduced by permission.—Christian, Barbara T. From an introduction to "Everyday Use": Alice Walker. Edited by Barbara T. Christian. Rutgers University Press, 1994. Copyright © 1994 by Rutgers, The State University. Reproduced by permission of Rutgers, The State University.—Christine de Pizan. From The Writings of Christine de Pizan. Translated by Charity Cannon Willard. Persea Books, 1994. Copyright © 1994 by Persea Books, Inc. Reproduced by permission.—Cixous, Hélène. From "The Laugh of the Medusa," in New French Feminisms: An Anthology. Edited by Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. Essay translated by Keith and Paula Cohen. Signs, 1975. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of University of Chicago Press and the author.—Conley, Verana Andermatt. From Hélène Cixous: Writing the Feminine. University of Nebraska Press, 1984. Copyright © 1984 by University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Coole, Diana H. From Women in Political Theory: From Ancient Misogyny to Contemporary Feminism. Wheatsheaf Books Ltd, 1988. Copyright © Diana Coole, 1988. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the author.—Cooper, Michaela Bruckner. From "Textual Wandering and Anxiety in Margaret Fuller's Summer on the Lakes, " in Margaret Fuller's Cultural Critique: Her Age and Legacy. Edited by Fritz Fleischmann. Peter Lang, 2000. Copyright © 2000 Peter Lang Publishing. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Cott, Nancy. From "Historical Perspectives: The Equal Rights Amendment Conflict in 1920s," in Conflicts in Feminism. Edited by Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller. Routledge, 1990. Copyright © 1990 by Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Routledge/Taylor & Francis Books and the author.—Cotton, Nancy. From "Women Playwrights in England," in Readings in Renaissance Women's Drama: Criticism, History, and Performance 1594-1998. Edited by S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynee-Davies. Bucknell University Press 1981. Reproduced by permission of Associated University Presses and the author.—Coultrap-McQuin, Susan. From Doing Literary Business: American Women Writers in the Nineteenth Century. The University of North Carolina Press, 1990. Copyright © 1990 Susan Coultrap-McQuin. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the University of North Carolina Press.—Daly, Brenda. From Lavish Self-Divisions: The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates. University Press of Mississippi, 1996. Copyright © 1996 by the University Press of Mississippi. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Davis, Cynthia J. "What 'Speaks in Us': Margaret Fuller, Woman's Rights, and Human Nature," in Margaret Fuller's Cultural Critique: Her Age and Legacy. Edited by Fritz Fleischmann. Peter Lang, 2000. Copyright © 2000 Peter Lang Publishing. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—de Gouges, Olympe. From "The Rights of Women," in Women in Revolutionary Paris 1789-1795: Selected Documents. Edited and translated by Daline Gay Levy, Harriet Branson Applewhite, and Mary Durham Johnson. University of Illinois, 1979. Reproduced by permission.—Depla, Annette. From "Women in Ancient Egyptian Wisdom Literature," in Women in Ancient Societies: An Illusion of the Night. Edited by Léonie J. Archer, Susan Fischler, and Maria Wyke. Macmillan Press Ltd, 1994. Copyright © The Macmillan Press Ltd 1994. Reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan and Routledge/Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.—Deutsch, Sarah Jane. From "From Ballots to Breadlines: 1920-1940," in No Small Courage: A History of Women in the United States. Edited by Nancy F. Cott. Oxford University Press, 2000. Copyright © 2000, by Sarah Jane Deutsch. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Oxford University Press.—Dever, Carolyn. From "Obstructive Behavior: Dykes in the Mainstream of Feminist Theory," in Cross-Purposes: Lesbians, Feminists, and the Limits of Alliance. Indiana University Press, 1997. Copyright © 1997, by Indiana University Press. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Donawerth, Jane. From "Women's Poetry and the Tudor-Stuart System of Gift Exchange," in Women, Writing, and the Reproduction of Culture in Tudor and Stuart Britain. Edited by Mary E. Burke, Jane Donawerth, Linda L. Dove, and Karen Nelson. Syracuse University Press, 2002. Reproduced by permission.—Doolittle, Hilda. From HERmione. New Directions Publishing, 1981. Copyright © 1981 by the Estate of Hilda Doolittle. Reproduced by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.—Douglas, Ann. From The Feminization of American Culture. Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1988. Copyright © 1977 by Ann Douglas. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.—Driver, Dorothy. From "Reconstructing the Past, Shaping the Future: Bessie Head and the Question of Feminism in a New South Africa," in Black Women's Writings. Edited by Gina Wisker. St. Martin's Press, 1993. Copyright © 1993, by Editorial Board, Lumière (Co-operative) Press Ltd. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan.—DuBois, Ellen Carol. From Remembering Seneca Falls: Honoring the Women Who Paved the Way: An Essay. Reproduced by permission of the author.—DuBois, Ellen Carol. From "Taking the Law Into Our Own Hands: Bradwell, Minor and Suffrage Militance in the 1870s," in One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement. Edited by Marjorie Spruill Wheeler. NewSage Press, 1995. Copyright © 1995 by NewSage Press and Educational Film Company. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—DuBois, Ellen Carol. From the introduction to Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of An Independent Women's Movement in America. Cornell University Press, 1978. Copyright © 1978 by Cornell University. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Cornell University Press.—DuBois, Ellen Carol. From "The Limitations of Sisterhood: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Division of the American Suffrage Movement, 1875-1902" in Women and the Structure of Society. Duke University Press, 1984. Copyright © 1984 by Duke University Press, Durham, NC. All rights reserved. Used by permission.—DuBois, Ellen Carol. From Woman Suffrage and Women's Rights. New York University Press, 1998. Copyright © 1998 by New York University. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and the author.—DuBois, Ellen Carol. From "Woman Suffrage Around the World: Three Phases of Suffragist Internationalism," in Suffrage and Beyond: International Feminist Perspectives. Edited by Caroline Daley and Melanie Nolan. Auckland University Press, 1994. Copyright © by Auckland University Press 1994. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and the author.—Ducrest, Stéphanie-Félicité. From "The Influence of Women on French Literature," in Women Critics: 1660-1820: An Anthology. Indiana University Press, 1995. Copyright © 1995 by Indiana University Press. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Dworkin, Andrea. From Letters from a War Zone: Writings 1976-1989. E. P. Dutton, 1988. Copyright © 1988 by Andrea Dworkin. Reproduced by permission of Elaine Markson Literary Agency.—Echols, Alice. From The Sixties: From Memory to History. Edited by David R. Farber. University of North Carolina Press, 1994. Copyright © 1994 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the Publisher.—Ehrenreich, Barbara and Deirdre English. From For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women. Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1978. Copyright © 1978 by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House.—Elbert, Sarah. From A Hunger for Home: Louisa May Alcott and Little Women. Temple University Press, 1984. Copyright © 1984 by Temple University. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the author.—Emecheta, Buchi. From "Feminism with a Small 'f'!," in Criticism and Ideology: Second African Writers' Conference. Edited by Kirsten Holst Petersen. Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1988. Copyright © 1988 by Scandinavian Institute of African Studies. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Nordic Africa Institute.—Ensler, Eve. From The Vagina Monologues: The V-Day Edition. Villard, 2001. Copyright © 1998, 2001 by Eve Ensler. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Villard Books, a division of Random House, Inc.—Enstad, Nan. From Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. Columbia University Press, 1999. Copyright © 1999 Columbia University Press, New York. All rights reserved. Republished with permission of the Columbia University Press, 61 W. 62nd St., New York, NY 10023.—Ezell, Margaret J. M. From "Women and Writing," in A Companion to Early Modern Women's Writing. Edited by Anita Pacheco. Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2002. Copyright © 2002 by Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Reproduced by permission of Blackwell Publishers.—Fallaize, Elizabeth. From "Resisting Romance: Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed and the Romance Script," in Contemporary French Fiction by Women: Feminist Perspectives. Edited by Margaret Atack and Phil Powrie. Manchester University Press, 1990. Reproduced by permission of the author.—Feng, Pin-chia. From The Female Bildungsroman by Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston: A Postmodern Reading. Peter Lang, 1998. Copyright © 1988 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Ferree, Myra Marx and Beth B. Hess. From Controversy and Coalition: The New Feminist Movement across Three Decades of Change. Twayne Publishers, 1994. Copyright © 1994 by Twayne Publishers. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Gale Group.—Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. From an interview with Maxine Hong Kingston, in Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston. Edited by Paul Skenazy and Tera Martin. University Press of Mississippi, 1998. Copyright © 1998 by University Press of Mississippi. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the author.—Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. From "Reading Gilman in the Twenty-First Century," in The Mixed Legacy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Edited by Catherine J. Golden and Joanna Schneider Zangrando. University of Delaware Press, 2000. Copyright © 2000 by Associated University Press. Reproduced by permission.—Fleischmann, Fritz. From "Margaret Fuller, the Eternal Feminine, and the 'Liberties of the Republic'," in Women's Studies and Literature. Edited by Fritz Fleischmann and Deborah Lucas Schneider. Palm & Enke, 1987. Reproduced by permission.—Foster, M. Marie Booth. From "Voice, Mind, Self: Mother-Daughter Relationships in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God's Wife ," in Women of Color: Mother-Daughter Relationships in 20th-Century Literature. Edited by Elizabeth Brown-Guillory. University of Texas Press, 1996. Copyright © 1996 by the University of Texas Press. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Fowler, Robert Booth. From Carrie Catt: Feminist Politician. Northeastern University Press, 1986. Copyright © 1986 by R. B. Fowler. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Fraiman, Susan. From "The Humiliation of Elizabeth Bennett," in Refiguring the Father: New Feminist Readings of Patriarchy. Edited by Patricia Yaeger and Beth Kowaleski-Wallace. Southern Illinois University Press, 1989. Copyright © 1989 by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Francis, Emma. From "Is Emily Brontë a Woman?: Femininity, Feminism, and the Paranoid Critical Subject," in Subjectivity and Literature from the Romantics to the Present Day. Edited by Philip Shaw and Peter Stockwell. Pinter, 1991. Copyright © Emma Francis. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the author.—Freedman, Estelle B. and Erna Olafson Hellerstein. From an introduction to Victorian Women: A Documentary Account of Women's Lives in Nineteenth-Century England, France, and the United States. Edited by Erna Olafson Hellerstein, Leslie Parker Hume, and Karen M. Offen. Stanford University Press, 1981. Copyright © 1981 by the Board of Trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University. Reproduced with permission of Stanford University Press, www.sup.org .—Frenk, Susan. From "The Wandering Text: Situating the Narratives of Isabel Allende," in Latin American Women's Writing: Feminist Readings in Theory and Crisis. Edited by Anny Brooksbank Jones and Catherine Davies. Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1996. Copyright © 1996 by Anny Brooksbank Jones and Catherine Davies. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.—From Victorian Women: A Documentary Account of Women's Lives in Nineteenth-Century England, France, and the United States. Edited by Erna Olafson Hellerstein, Leslie Parker Hume, and Karen M. Offen. Stanford University Press, 1981. Copyright © 1981 by the Board of Trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University. Reproduced with permission of Stanford University Press, www.sup.org .—Galvin, Mary E. From Queer Poetics: Five Modernist Women Writers. Praeger, 1999. Copyright © 1999 by Mary E. Galvin. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Garner, Shirley Nelson. From "Constructing the Mother: Contemporary Psychoanalytic Theorists and Women Autobiographers," in Narrating Mother: Theorizing Maternal Subjectivities. Edited by Brenda O. Daly and Maureen T. Reddy. University of Tennessee Press, 1991. Copyright © 1991 by The University of Tennessee Press. Reproduced by permission of the publisher.—Ghymn, Esther Mikyung. From an introduction to Images of Asian American Women by Asian American Women Writers. Peter Lang, 1995. Copyright © 1995, by Esther Mikyung Ghymn. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Gilbert, Sandra M. and Gubar, Susan. From "Charred Skirts and Deathmask: World War II and the Blitz on Women," in No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Volume 3: Letters from the Front. Yale University Press, 1994. Copyright © 1994, by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. From "The Battle of the Sexes: The Men's Case," in No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Volume 1: The War of the Words. Yale University Press, 1988. Copyright © 1988, by Yale University Press, All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. From "The Second Coming of Aphrodite: Kate Chopin's Fantasy of Desire," in No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. Yale University Press, 1989. Copyright © 1989 by Yale University. Copyright © 1984 by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Gilbert, Susan M., and Susan Gubar. From The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Yale University Press, 1979. Copyright © 1979 by Yale University. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Gleadle, Kathryn. From an introduction to The Early Feminists: Radical Unitarians and the Emergence of The Women's Rights Movement, 1831-51. Macmillan Press Ltd., 1995. Copyright © Kathryn Gleadle 1995. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Palgrave Macmillan.—Golden, Catherine. From "One Hundred Years of Reading 'The Yellow Wallpaper'," in The Captive Imagination: A Casebook on "The Yellow Wallpaper." Edited by Catherine Golden. The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1992. Copyright © 1992 by Catherine Golden. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Gorsky, Susan Rubinow. From Femininity to Feminism: Women and Literature in the Nineteenth Century. Twayne Publishers, 1992. Copyright © 1992 by Twayne Publishers. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Gale Group.—Greer, Germaine. From The Madwoman's Underclothes: Essays and Occasional Writings. The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986. Copyright © 1970, 1986, by Germaine Greer. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Grewal, Gurleen. From Circles of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle: The Novels of Toni Morrison. Louisiana State University Press, 1998. Copyright © 1998 by Louisiana State University Press. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Griffin, Alice and Geraldine Thorsten. From Understanding Lillian Hellman. University of South Carolina Press, 1999. Copyright © 1999 University of South Carolina. Reproduced by permission.—Griffin, Susan E. From "Resistance and Reinvention in Sandra Cisneros' Woman Hollering Creek, " in Ethnicity and the American Short Story. Edited by Julie Brown. Garland Publishing, Inc., 1997. Copyright © 1997 by Julie Brown. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and the author.—Grogan, Susan K. From an introduction to French Socialism and Sexual Difference: Women and the New Society, 1803-44. St. Martin's Press, 1992. Copyright © Susan K. Grogan 1992. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan.—Grössinger, Christa. From Picturing Women in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art. Manchester University Press, 1997. Copyright © Christa Grössinger 1997. Reproduced by permission.—Grubbs, Judith Evans. From Women and the Law in the Roman Empire: A Sourcebook on Marriage, Divorce and Widowhood. Routledge, 2002. Reproduced by permission of the publisher.—Grundy, Isobel. From "(Re)discovering Women's Texts," in Women and Literature in Britain 1700-1800. Edited by Vivien Jones. Cambridge University Press, 2000. Copyright © 2000 by Cambridge University Press. Reproduced by permission of Cambridge University Press.—Gubar, Susan. From "Feminist Misogyny: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Paradox of 'It Takes One to Know One'," in Feminism Beside Itself. Edited by Diane Elam and Robyn Wiegman. Routledge, 1995. Copyright © 1995 by Routledge. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Routledge/Taylor & Francis and the author.—Gubar, Susan. From "Sapphistries," in Re-reading Sappho: Reception and Transmission. Edited by Ellen Greene. University of California Press, 1996. Copyright © 1996 by The Regents of The University of California. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and the author.—Gunther-Canada, Wendy. From Rebel Writer: Mary Wollstonecraft and Enlightenment Politics. Northern Illinois University Press, 2001. Copyright © 2001 by Northern Illinois University Press. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Hagen, Lyman B. From Heart of a Woman, Mind of a Writer, and Soul of a Poet: A Critical Analysis of the Writings of Maya Angelou. University Press of America, 1997. Copyright © 1997 by University Press of America. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Hallett, Judith From "The Role of Women in Roman Elegy: Counter-Cultural Feminism," in Women in the Ancient World: The Arethusa Papers. Edited by John Peradotto and J. Sullivan. State University of New York Press, 1984. Reproduced by permission of the State University of New York Press.—Hansberry, Lorraine. From A Raisin in the Sun. Modern Library, 1995. Copyright © 1958, 1986 by Robert Nemiroff, as an unpublished work. Copyright © 1959, 1966, 1984, 1987, 1988 by Robert Nemiroff. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Random House, Inc., Jewell Gresham-Nemiroff and Methuen Publishing Ltd.—Harris, Susan K. From "'But is it any good?' Evaluating Nineteenth-Century American Women's Fiction," in The (Other) American Traditions: Nineteenth-Century Women Writers. Edited by Joyce W. Warren. Rutgers University Press, 1993. Copyright © 1993 by Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the author.—Head, Bessie. From "Despite Broken Bondage, Botswana Women Are Still Unloved," in A Woman Alone: Autobiographical Writings. Selected and edited by Craig MacKenzie. Heinemann, 1990. Copyright © 1990, by The Estate of Bessie Head. Reproduced by permission of Johnson & Alcock.—Head, Bessie. From "The Woman from America," in A Woman Alone: Autobiographical Writings. Selected and edited by Craig MacKenzie. Heinemann, 1990. Copyright © 1990, by The Estate of Bessie Head. Reproduced by permission of Johnson & Alcock.—Hellerstein, Erna, Leslie Parker Hume and Karen M. Offen from an introduction to Victorian Women: A Documentary Account of Women's Lives in Nineteenth-Century England, France, and the United States. Edited by Erna Olafson Hellerstein, Leslie Parker Hume, and Karen M. Offen. Stanford University Press, 1981. Copyright © 1981 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Reproduced with permission of Stanford University Press, www.sup.org .—Henderson, Bruce. From Images of the Self as Female: The Achievement of Women Artists in Re-envisioning Feminine Identity. Edited by Kathryn N. Benzel and Lauren Pringle De La Vars. The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992. Copyright © 1992 by Kathryn N. 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From "From Classical to Imperial: Changing Visions of Turkey in the Eighteenth Century," in Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit. Edited by Steve Clark. Zed Books, 1999. Copyright © Katherine S. H. Turner. Reproduced by permission.—Van Dyke, Annette. From "Of Vision Quests and Spirit Guardians: Female Power in the Novels of Louise Erdrich," in The Chippewa Landscape of Louise Erdrich. Edited by Allan Chavkin. The University of Alabama Press, 1999. Copyright © 1999, by The University of Alabama Press. Copyright © 1999. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Waelti-Waters, Jennifer and Steven C. Hause. From an introduction to Feminisms of the Belle Époque: A Historical and Literary Anthology. Edited by Jennifer Waelti-Waters and Steven C. Hause. University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Copyright © The University of Nebraska Press, 1994. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Wagner-Martin, Linda. From "Panoramic, Unpredictable, and Human: Joyce Carol Oates' Recent Novels," in Traditions, Voices, and Dreams: The American Novel since the 1960s. Edited by Melvin J. Friedman and Ben Siegel. University of Delaware Press, 1995. Copyright © 1995 by Associated University Presses, Inc. Reproduced by permission.—Wagner-Martin, Linda. From Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life. St. Martin's Press, 1999. Copyright © 1999 by Linda Wagner-Martin. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Palgrave Macmillan.—Walker, Alice. From Revolutionary Petunias & Other Poems. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971. Copyright © 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973, renewed 1998 by Alice Walker. All right reserved. Reproduced by permission of Harcourt Inc. In the British Commonwealth by David Higham Associates.—Watts, Linda S. From Rapture Untold: Gender, Mysticism, and the 'Moment of Recognition' in Works by Gertrude Stein. Peter Lang, 1996. Copyright © 1996 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Weatherford, Doris. From A History of the American Suffragist Movement. ABC-CLIO, 1998. Copyright © 1998 by The Moschovitis Group, Inc. Reproduced by permission of Moschovitis Group, Inc.—Weeton, Nellie. From "The Trials of an English Governess: Nelly Weeton Stock," originally published in Miss Weeton: Journal of a Governess. Edited by Edward Hall. Oxford University Press (London), H. Milford, 1936-39. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.—Weston, Ruth D. From "Who Touches This Touches a Woman," in Critical Essays on Alice Walker. Edited by Ikenna Dieke. Greenwood Press 1999. Reproduced by permission of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., Westport, CT.—Wheeler, Marjorie Spruill. From an introduction to One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement. Edited by Marjorie Spruill Wheeler. NewSage Press, 1995. Copyright © 1995 by NewSage Press and Educational Film Company. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Willard, Charity Cannon. From Christine de Pizan: Her Life and Works. Persea Books, 1984. Copyright © 1984 by Charity Cannon Willard. Reproduced by permission.—Willis, Sharon A. From "Staging Sexual Difference: Reading, Recitation, and Repetition in Duras' Malady of Death, " in Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights. Edited by Enoch Brater. Oxford University Press, 1989. Copyright © 1989 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.—Winter, Kate H. From Marietta Holley: Life with "Josiah Allen's Wife." Syracuse University Press, 1984. Copyright © 1984 by Syracuse University Press. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Woolf, Virginia. From "George Eliot," in The Common Reader, Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1925, L. & V. Woolf, 1925. Copyright 1925 by Harcourt Brace & Company. Renewed 1953 by Leonard Woolf. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Brace & Company and The Society of Authors.—Wynne-Davies, Marion. From an introduction to Women Poets of the Renaissance. Edited by Marion Wynne-Davies. Routledge, 1999. Reprint. Copyright © 1998 by J. M. Dent. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Routledge/Taylor & Francis and the author—Yalom, Marilyn. From "Toward a History of Female Adolescence: The Contribution of George Sand," in George Sand: Collected Essays. Edited by Janis Glasgow. The Whitson Publishing Company, 1985. Reproduced by permission of the author.—Yu Xuanji. From "Joining Somebody's Mourning and Three Beautiful Sisters, Orphaned Young," in The Clouds Float North: The Complete Poems of Yu Xuanji. Translated by David Young and Jiann I. Lin. Wesleyan University Press, 1998. Copyright © 1998 by David Young and Jiann I. Lin. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.

Photographs and Illustrations in Feminism in Literature were received from the following sources:

16th century men and women wearing fashionable clothing, ca. 1565 engraving. Hulton/Archive.—A lay sister preparing medicine as shown on the cover of The Book of Margery Kempe, photograph. MS. Royal 15 D 1, British Library, London.—Akhmatova, Anna, photograph. Archive Photos, Inc./Express Newspaper.—Alcott, Louisa May, drawing. The Granger Collection, New York.—Alcott, Louisa May, photograph. Archive Photos, Inc.—Allen, Joan, Joanne Camp, Anne Lange, and Cynthia Nixon, in a scene from the play "The Heidi Chronicles," photograph. Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.—Allende, Isabelle, photograph. Getty Images.—An estimated 5,000 people march outside the Minnesota Capitol Building in protest to the January 22, 1973 Supreme Court ruling on abortion as a result of the "Roe vs. Wade" case, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos.—Angelou, Maya, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos.—Anthony, Susan B., Frances Willard, and other members of the International Council of Women, photograph. Copyright © Corbis.—Atwood, Margaret, photograph by Jerry Bauer. Copyright © Jerry Bauer.—Autographed manuscript of Phillis Weatley's poem "To the University of Cambridge." The Granger Collection, New York.—Beller, Kathleen as Kate in the 1980 film version of Margaret Atwood's novel, Surfacing, photograph. Kobal Collection/Surfacing Film.—Blackshear, Thomas, illustrator. From a cover of The Bluest Eye, written by Toni Morrison. Plume, 1994. Reproduced by permission of Plume, a division of Penguin USA.—Broadside published by the National American Woman Suffrage Association, featuring "Why Women Want to Vote." The Library of Congress.—Brontë, Anne, Emily and Charlotte, painting by Patrick Branwell Brontë, located at the National Portrait Gallery, 1939, photograph. Copyright © Corbis-Bettmann.—Brontë, Charlotte, painting. Archive Photos.—Brooks, Gwendolyn, holding a copy of The World of Gwendolyn Brooks, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos.—Brown, John Mason (right) talking to National Book Award winners Marianne Moore, James Jones, and Rachel Carson, in New York City, NY, 1952, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos.—Brown, Rita Mae, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos.—Browning, Elizabeth Barret, 1848, illustration. Copyright © Corbis-Bettmann.—Burney, Fanny, engraving. Archive Photos, Inc.—Carter, Angela, photograph by Jerry Bauer. Copyright © Jerry Bauer.—Cather, Willa, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos.—Catherine the Great, illustration. Copyright © Archivo Iconografico, S.A./Corbis.—Catt, Carrie Chapman, photograph. The Library of Congress.—Cavendish, Margaret Lucas, engraving. Mary Evans Picture Library.—Child, Lydia Maria, photograph. The Library of Congress.—Childress, Alice, photograph by Jerry Bauer. Copyright © Jerry Bauer.—Chin, Tsai and Tamlyn Tomita in the 1993 film production of Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club. Buena Vista/Hollywood/The Kobal Collection.—Chopin, Kate, photograph. The Library of Congress.—Cisneros, Sandra, 1991, photograph by Dana Tynan. AP/Wide World Photos.—Cixous, Hélène, photograph. Copyright © Bassouls Sophie/Corbis Sygma.—Class on a field trip to Library of Congress, photograph by Frances Benjamin Johnston. Copyright © Corbis.—Cleopatra VII, illustration. The Library of Congress.—Cyanotype by Frances Benjamin Johnson, ca. 1899, of girls and a teacher in a high school cooking class, photograph. Copyright © Corbis.—de la Cruz, Juana Inez, painting. Copyright © Philadelphia Museum of Art/Corbis-Bettmann.—de Pizan, Christine, writing in her study, photograph. MS. Harley 4431, f.4R. British Library, London.—Dickinson, Emily, photograph of a painting. The Library of Congress.—Doolittle, Hilda, 1949, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos.—Duras, Marguerite, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos.—Dworkin, Andrea, 1986, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos.—Edgeworth, Maria, engraving. The Library of Congress.—Eliot, George, photograph. Copyright © The Bettman Archive.—Emecheta, Buchi, photograph by Jerry Bauer. Copyright © Jerry Bauer.—Emily Dickinson Homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts, photograph. Copyright © James Marshall/Corbis.—Erdrich, Louise, photograph by Eric Miller. AP/Wide World Photos.—French, Marilyn, photograph by Jerry Bauer. Copyright © Jerry Bauer.—Friedan, Betty, president of the National Organization for Women, and other feminists march in New York City, photograph. Copyright © JP Laffont/Sygma/Corbis.—Friedan, Betty, with Yoko Ono, photograph. Copyright © Bettmann/Corbis.—Frontpiece and title page from Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, written by Phillis Wheatley. Copyright © The Pierpont Morgan Library/Art Resource, NY.—Fuller, Margaret, painting by John Plumbe. The Library of Congress.—Gandhi, Indira, photograph. Copyright © Corbis-Bettmann.—Garrison, William Lloyd, (bottom right), with the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, photograph. National Portrait Gallery.—Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, cover photograph. Copyright © Corbis.—Gilman, Charlotte P., photograph. Copyright © Corbis-Bettmann.—Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, illustration. Copyright © Corbis-Bettmann.—Hansberry, Lorraine, photograph by David Attie. AP/Wide World Photos.—Head, Bessie, photograph. Reproduced by the kind permission of the Estate of Bessie Head.—"Head of Medusa," marble sculpture by Gianlorenzo Bernini. Copyright © Araldo de Luca/Corbis.—Hellman, Lillian, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos.—Hurston, Zora Neale looking at "American Stuff," at the New York Times book fair, photograph. The Library of Congress.—Hurston, Zora Neale, photograph by Carl Van Vechten. The Carl Van Vechten Trust.—Hypatia, conte crayon drawing. Copyright © Corbis-Bettmann.—Illustration depicting a woman's body being the subject of political and social conflict, photograph. Barbara Kruger/Mary Boone Gallery.—Jolie, Angelina (right), and unidentified person, in the film Fox-fire, photograph by Jane O'Neal. The Kobal Collection/O'Neal, Jane.—Karloff, Boris, in movie Frankenstein ; 1935, photograph. The Kobal Collection.—Kingston, Maxine Hong, photograph by Jerry Bauer. Copyright © Jerry Bauer.—"La Temptation," depicting Adam and Eve in the Garden of Paradise. The Library of Congress.—Lessing, Doris, photograph by Jerry Bauer. Copyright © Jerry Bauer.—Luce, Clare Booth, portrait. Copyright © UPI/Bettmann Archive.—Manuscript page from The Book of Ladies, by Christine de Pizan. Bibliotheque Nationale de France.—Manuscript page of Vieyra Impugnado, written by Sor Margarita Ignacia and translated to Spanish by Inigo Rosende. Madrid: Antonio Sanz, 1731. The Special Collections Library, University of Michigan.—Martineau, Harriet, engraving. The Library of Congress.—Migrant mother with child huddled on either shoulder, Nipomo, California, 1936, photograph by Dorothea Lange. The Library of Congress.—Millay, Edna St. Vincent, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos.—Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, engraving. Archive Photos, Inc.—Moore, Marianne, photograph by Jerry Bauer. Copyright © Jerry Bauer.—Morrison, Toni, 1993, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos.—Murasaki, Lady, looking out from the veranda of a monastery, illustration from Tale of Genji. Copyright © Asian Art Archaeology, Inc./Corbis.—National League of Women Voters' Headquarters, photograph. Copyright © Corbis-Bettmann.—National Women's Suffrage Association (NWSA), during a political convention in Chicago, Illinois, photograph. Copyright © Bettmann/Corbis.—Naylor, Gloria, photograph. Marion Ettlinger/AP/Wide World Photos.—Oates, Joyce Carol, 1991, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos.—October 15, 1913 publication of the early feminist periodical, The New Freewoman, photograph. McFarlin Library, Department of Special Collections, The University of Tulsa.—Paul, Alice (second from right), standing with five other suffragettes, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos.—Pfeiffer, Michelle, and Daniel Day-Lewis, in the film The Age of Innocence, 1993, photograph by Phillip Caruso. The Kobal Collection.—Plath, Sylvia, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos.—Poster advertising Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, "The Greatest Book of the Age," photograph. Copyright © Bettmann/Corbis.—Rich, Adrienne, holding certificate of poetry award, Chicago, Illinois, 1986, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos.—Rossetti, Christina, 1863, photograph by Lewis Carroll. Copyright © UPI/Bettmann.—Russell, Rosalind and Joan Crawford in the 1939 movie The Women, written by Clare Boothe Luce, photograph. MGM/The Kobal Collection.—Salem Witch Trial, lithograph by George H. Walker. Copyright © Bettmann/Corbis.—Sand, George, illustration. Copyright © Leonard de Selva/Corbis.—Sand, George, photograph. The Library of Congress.—Sanger, Margaret, Miss Clara Louise Rowe, and Mrs. Anne Kennedy, arranging the first American Birth Control Conference, photograph. Copyright © Underwood and Underwood/Corbis.—Sappho, bronze sculpture. The Library of Congress.—Sappho, illustration. The Library of Congress.—Sappho performing outdoors, illustration. The Library of Congress.—"Sara in a Green Bonnet," painting by Mary Cassatt, c. 1901. National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, U.S.A.—Scene from the film Mill on the Floss, by George Eliot, engraving. Hulton Archive/Getty Images.—Segwick, Catherine Maria, slide. Archive Photos, Inc.—Sexton, Anne, photograph. Copyright © Bettmann/Corbis.—Sexton, Anne, with her daughters Joy and Linda, photograph. Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.—Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, painting by Samuel John Stump. Copyright © Corbis-Bettmann.—Stael, Madame de, color lithograph. Archive Photos, Inc.—Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, illustration. Copyright © Bettmann/Corbis.—Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos.—Stein, Gertrude (left), arriving in New York aboard the S. S. Champlain with her secretary and companion Alice B. Toklas, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos.—Stein, Gertrude, photograph by Carl Van Vechten. The Estate of Carl Van Vechten.—Steinem, Gloria, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos.—Stowe, Harriet Beecher, photograph. Copyright © Bettmann/Corbis.—Suffrage parade in New York, New York, October 15, 1915, photograph. The Library of Congress.—Supporters of the Equal Rights Amendment carry a banner down Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos.—Sur la Falaise aux Petites Dalles, 1873. Painting by Berthe Morisot. Copyright © Francis G. Mayer/Corbis.—Tan, Amy, 1993, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos.— Time, cover of Kate Millett, from August 31, 1970. Time Life Pictures/Stringer/Getty Images.—Title page of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects, written by Mary Wollstonecraft. William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan.—Title page of Adam Bede, written by George Eliot. Edinburgh & London: Blackwood, 1859, Volume 1, New York: Harper, 1859. The Graduate Library, University of Michigan.—Title page from De L'influence des Passions sur le Bonheur des Individus et des Nations, (A Treatise on the Influence of the Passions upon the Happiness of Individuals and of Nations), written by Stael de Holstein, photograph. The Special Collections Library, University of Michigan.—Title page from Evelina, written by Fanny Burney, photograph. The Special Collections Library, University of Michigan.—Title page from Mansfield Park, written by Jane Austen. The Special Collections Library, University of Michigan.—Title page of Mary, A Fiction, written by Mary Wollstonecraft.—Title page from Youth and the Bright Medusa, written by Willa Cather. New York, Alfred A Knopf. The Special Collections Library, University of Michigan.—Title page of A New-England Tale, written by Catharine Maria Sedgewick. New York: E. Bliss and E. White, 1822. The Special Collections Library, University of Michigan.—Title page of Aurora Leigh, written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. New York, Boston: C. S. Francis and Co., 1857. The Special Collections Library, University of Michigan.—Title page of Mrs. Dalloway, written by Virginia Woolf. London: Hogarth Press, 1925. The Special Collections Library, University of Michigan.—Title page of The Dial: A Magazine for Literature, Philosophy, and Religion. Boston. Weeks, Jordan and Company (etc.); London, Wiley and Putnam (etc.). Volume 1. The Special Collections Library, University of Michigan.—Title page of The House of Mirth, written by Edith Wharton. New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1905. The Special Collections Library, University of Michigan.—Title page of The Little Review, March 1916. The Purdy/Kresge Library, Wayne State University.—Title page of Woman in the Nineteenth Century, written by Sarah Margaret Fuller. New York, Greeley and McElrath. 1845. The Special Collections Library, University of Michigan.—Title page of Wuthering Heights, written by Emily Brontë. New York: Harper and Brothers. 1848. The Special Collections Library, University of Michigan.—Truth, Sojourner, photograph. Archive Photos, Inc.—Tubman, Harriet, photograph. The Library of Congress.—Victoria, Queen of England, illustration. The Library of Congress.—Walker, Alice, 1989, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos.—Welles, Orson, as Edward Rochester, with Joan Fontaine as Jane Eyre, in the film Jane Eyre, photograph. The Kobal Collection.—Wharton, Edith, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos.—Wheatley, Phillis, photograph. Copyright © The Bettman Archive.—Winfrey, Oprah, as Celie and Danny Glover as Albert with baby in scene from the film The Color Purple, written by Alice Walker, directed by Steven Spielberg, photograph. The Kobal Collection.—Women in French Revolution, invade assembly, demanding death penalty for members of the aristocracy, Woodcut. Copyright © Bettmann/Corbis.—Women workers in a shoe factory in Lynn, Massachusetts, photograph. Copyright © Corbis.—Woodhull, Victoria, reading statement before House Committee, drawing. The Library of Congress.—Woolf, Virginia, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos.—Woolson, Constance Fenimore, engraving. Archive Photos.

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United States Suffrage Movement in the 19th Century

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feminism summary

feminism , Social movement that seeks equal rights for women. Widespread concern for women’s rights dates from the Enlightenment ; one of the first important expressions of the movement was Mary Wollstonecraft ’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). The 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, convened by Elizabeth Cady Stanton , Lucretia Mott, and others, called for full legal equality with men, including full educational opportunity and equal compensation; thereafter the woman suffrage movement began to gather momentum. It faced particularly stiff resistance in the United Kingdom and the United States, where women gained the right to vote in 1918 and 1920, respectively. By mid-century a second wave of feminism emerged to address the limited nature of women’s participation in the workplace and prevailing notions that tended to confine women to the home. A third wave of feminism arose in the late 20th century and was notable for challenging middle-class white feminists and for broadening feminism’s goals to encompass equal rights for all people regardless of race, creed, economic or educational status, physical appearance or ability, or sexual preference. See also Equal Rights Amendment; women’s liberation movement .

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Gun Violence—A Black Feminist Issue: An Excerpt From Roxane Gay’s New Essay, ‘Stand Your Ground’

“in some ways, feminism and gun ownership seem like a good fit. … but guns can be as disempowering as they are empowering.”.

Bold and personal, Roxane Gay unpacks gun culture and gun ownership in America from a Black feminist perspective in her latest work, “Stand Your Ground.” The essay is the capstone to Roxane Gay &, a curated series of ebooks and audiobooks that lift up other voices , available exclusively on subscription hub Everand.

In “Stand Your Ground,” Gay writes about power, agency and gun ownership: “I own a gun, but I have more questions than answers,” as she acknowledges the complexity of these issues through Audre Lorde’s famous quote: “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.”

The following is an excerpt from “Stand Your Ground: A Black Feminist Reckoning with America’s Gun Problem” copyright © 2024 by Roxane Gay, used by permission from Everand Originals and available exclusively through Everand .

Too many politicians made no efforts to codify [the right to abortion] federally. They assumed they were standing firmly on solid ground when such was not the case.

I’m a Black feminist, a bad feminist, a woman who believes a more equitable present and future are possible.

I’m not an optimist, but I have seen the change we are capable of when people work together and persist. I have also seen what we lose when we take the ground upon which we stand for granted or we don’t stand our ground firmly enough.

In 2022, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4, in Dobbs v. Jackson , that the Constitution does not endow people with a right to abortion. Many Americans were shocked because the right to abortion was the law of the land for nearly 50 years. An entire generation grew up understanding that they could make choices for their bodies without legislative intervention, though in more conservative states, that right was always contingent. And then, in an arbitrary legal decision, a judicial body took that right away from millions of people with uteruses. It happened because too many Americans assumed that the right to abortion was unimpeachable. Too many politicians made no efforts to codify that right federally. They assumed they were standing firmly on solid ground when such was not the case.

It is appalling that women and people with uteruses have lost such a fundamental right to bodily autonomy. And it is not lost on me that women in many states have more rights as gun owners than they do as women. The power to take a life is more constitutionally and culturally valuable than a woman’s right to live freely. I do not know how to reconcile this reality with my feminism.

I have no fondness for guns. They are, in most hands, incredibly destructive. Every year, the number of mass shootings increases. With each new atrocity, the details are more horrifying.

A concert in Vegas. An elementary school in Connecticut. An elementary school in Texas. Staggering numbers of young children, dead before they know what it means to live. A parade in a Chicago suburb. A synagogue. A grocery store. A gay nightclub. A church. Another church. So many high schools. Shopping malls. Movie theaters.

With each successive tragedy, the details become more lurid, haunting, devastating, grim. And with each passing year, it feels more dangerous to spend time in public places, wondering if you are on the precipice of becoming a statistic.

It has not always been this way. It shouldn’t be this way. It does not need to be this way.

The power to take a life is more constitutionally and culturally valuable than a woman’s right to live freely. I do not know how to reconcile this reality with my feminism.

There is no single reason for mass shootings, though there are a few common denominators. The vast majority of mass shooters are men. Nearly 60 percent of mass shooters have a history of domestic violence. It feels like we cannot understand or predict mass shootings, that we cannot unravel the tangled threads of violence on a massive scale, but that isn’t necessarily true. And even if these crimes were unpreventable (they aren’t), we could certainly make it far more difficult for mass shooters to have access to the weapons that make their paths of destruction possible.

In some ways, feminism and gun ownership seem like a good fit.

A lot of feminist rhetoric centers on empowerment— creating opportunities and conditions that allow women to use their power, be treated with respect, have bodily autonomy, live on their own terms. A lot of gun rhetoric is also centered around empowerment—guns as a means of taking back power after trauma or claiming power in the name of self-defense or embracing the power of keeping our families safe.

But feminists must also grapple with the reality that however empowering guns may be, they are used against women at alarming rates—whether women are being threatened, injured or killed by a gun. The statistics are even more dire for Black, Latina and other women of color. Guns can be as disempowering as they are empowering.

Throughout the trial, and the many months leading up to the trial, Megan Thee Stallion was defamed and discredited for standing her ground and demanding justice.

On a July evening in 2020, rapper Megan Thee Stallion was in Los Angeles, sitting in a car with rapper Tory Lanez outside a party. There was some kind of disagreement that ended with Lanez shooting at Megan Thee Stallion’s feet multiple times, and taunting her, after she got out of the vehicle. Her injuries required surgery and a lengthy recovery.

Hours after the shooting, Lanez left a meandering voicemail for Kelsey Harris, Stallion’s former friend. In the message, he said, “I was just so fucking drunk, nigga, I just didn’t even understand what the fuck was going on, bruh. […] Regardless, that’s not going to make anything right and that’s not going to make my actions right.” Though he didn’t explicitly admit he shot Stallion, the implication of and the regret for his actions were there.

Two years later, Lanez was found guilty of assault with a firearm, illegal possession of a firearm, and negligent discharge—and sentenced to 10 years in prison. But the damage was done. Throughout the trial, and the many months leading up to the trial, Megan Thee Stallion was defamed and discredited for standing her ground and demanding justice. The severity of her injuries and the aftermath of the crime were doubted and dismissed. Hip-hop journalists, radio hosts and bloggers spread lies and misinformation and came up with all kinds of conspiracy theories to believe anything but the truth—that a Black woman was harmed and deserved justice. Rapper 50 Cent, in social media posts, doubted Stallion’s story, though later apologized. In “Circo Loco,” Canadian rapper Drake said, “This bitch lie ‘bout getting shots, but she still a stallion.” Eminem also had bars for Stallion when, in “Houdini,” he said, “If I was to ask for Megan Thee Stallion, if she would collab with me, would I really have a shot at a feat?”

These incidents bring Malcolm X’s prophetic words into stark relief: “The most disrespected person in America is the black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the black woman. The most neglected person in America is the black woman.” Culturally sanctioned misogynoir clarifies why addressing gun violence is not just a criminal justice issue—it is very much a Black feminist issue.

Women Rap Back: ‘It’s My Dance and It’s My Body’

The Abolitionist Aesthetics of Patrisse Cullors, Co-Founder of Black Lives Matter

Kamala Harris and the Legacy of Black Women’s Leadership

U.S. democracy is at a dangerous inflection point—from the demise of abortion rights, to a lack of pay equity and parental leave, to skyrocketing maternal mortality, and attacks on trans health. Left unchecked, these crises will lead to wider gaps in political participation and representation. For 50 years, Ms . has been forging feminist journalism—reporting, rebelling and truth-telling from the front-lines, championing the Equal Rights Amendment, and centering the stories of those most impacted. With all that’s at stake for equality, we are redoubling our commitment for the next 50 years. In turn, we need your help, Support Ms . today with a donation—any amount that is meaningful to you . For as little as $5 each month , you’ll receive the print magazine along with our e-newsletters, action alerts, and invitations to Ms . Studios events and podcasts . We are grateful for your loyalty and ferocity .

About Roxane Gay

You may also like:, colorado one of eight states voting to expand abortion access in november: ‘we’re going to be a model for the rest of the country’, jd vance puts an extremist marriage agenda on the ballot.

Feminism Essay examples

Feminism Feminism is the belief that women should have economic political and social equality with men. This term also refers to a political movement that works to gain equality within a male and female relationship. In a male and female relationship both the roles of the male and female should be equal. Equal in many ways ten one: they should trust each other, share responsibilities, listen to one another, respect each other, and of course love one another equally. This type of relationship is not found now a days because of the many traditions which imply that women are inferior to men. They also imply that women should stay home all day watching soap operas, taking care of the children, and making the food for their tired husbands …show more content…

“Nagging wives” have always been a problem with husbands. The thought of marriage frightens many people because of the “nagging wife” this has been passed on from generation to generation. The many stories told by the very own family members of the husband and the wife arguing all day long. Marriage, today, is not considered in many times a happy thing, some people think that there is nothing to look forward, in most cases because men think that women will change on them and start “nagging” at everything. Many times in life men do not think that women can do the same things that they can; whether it’s picking up boxes or being president. There will always be that “macho man” thought of the man being stronger than the woman. In many jobs women might do the exact same thing that men do except men are getting paid more than women even if it is an insignificant amount, it happens in many places and even though many people disapprove of it there are still jobs like that out there. And there are still employers who think that a woman should not be in the work force if so home. Many feminist have been working to solve this problem and there are still people who are working to solve and change many more of these problems, and even though in some places it doesn’t seem like it, feminism and feminists

Motherhood By Amber Kinser Chapter Summaries

4.) The term feminism means the support of women rights to have equality of both male and females and the social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men. I agree that women should have equal opportunities to men. I think equality is a positive thing for society. We should all be respected and treated equal regardless if you're male of female. Feminism is a positive thing in my opinion.

Psy/270 Week 4 Feminism Research Paper

Feminism -” is the belief in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes.” It's a belief that man and woman have the same equal rights. I believe some people in a religious group againt feminist because they don't believe that a woman is over to a man. Like in a church don't allow woman to preach in a service. But in some degree, both man and woman are one when it comes to marriage relationship in raising kids or getting a job. Both have the equality to provide the needs of the family. This generation a woman almost can do the work of a man. For example: Truck driver, Nurses, Doctors, Business person,

Feminism, By William Lloyd Garrison

Feminism has become an ugly word. Some say it does not even live up to its definition anymore. However, the definition remains unchanged in the pages of history. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary’s definition of Feminism reads, “The theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes.” If one digs deep into this definition, beyond the surface of society’s view on feminism today, one can see that feminism would benefit both sexes. The true ideals of feminism break down gender roles, thus benefitting men, women and future generations.

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Feminism, according to Merriam-Webster (2016) is defined as "the advocacy of women's rights on the grounds of political, social, and economic equality to men." Though this is the definition of the term,

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The textbook definition of feminism is “a doctrine that advocates equal rights for women” (WordNet, 2010). While this is correct, there is much more to it than that.

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"White feminism" is not inclusive because it discriminates against minority groups. "White Feminism" is feminism that only represents white cisgender (people that identify with the sex that was assigned to them at birth) women. This is a fairly new term I've seen that’s surfaced the internet. It’s the mainstream third wave form of feminism that’s been particularly popular on social media in more recent years. Many white celebrities have endorsed this form of feminism and have integrated into their public image. Such as Taylor Swift and Lena Dunham. The first organized feminist movement recorded was Seneca Falls lead by Alice Walker. Seneca Falls focused on abolishing slavery, and women's suffrage. However, its main concern

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In American history women were not given as many rights as men were. They were treated unfairly because of their gender. Throughout American history there were American women who took a stand and fought for women’s rights. Who were some American women right’s activists in American History that stood up for themselves and other women in throughout America?

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Many studies have been taking and there has been evidence that gender role expectations within a marriage can affect couples. The first way is that these typical expectations can serve as goals or a structure that a couple can shape or guide their marriage towards being. The other way is that they can cause a “counterfactual” occurrence in which partners compare what has happened in their relationship to what could have happened. As time has gone on studies show that the majority of males believe that spouses should share the breadwinning, that men should take on a bigger share of housework and that a wife’s job does not interfere with her ability to be a mother. This provides for a modern shifting of gender roles within a marriage. The shift in gender roles that is most common is the sharing of power within a marriage.

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Feminism has been defined as the advocacy of social equality for men and women, in opposition to patriarchy and sexism.

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What is feminism? According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary the standard definition defines feminism as “the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes.” I believe the word feminism means a woman who is capable of doing the exact things a man can do. Both men and women are equal regardless the gender. There are many misconceptions when it comes to the word feminism such as, women having hatred towards men, women thinking they're above men, or only women can be feminist, and the gender stereotype. On the other hand, feminism is gender equality, acknowledging that any kind of violence is unacceptable regardless the gender, and realizing that women and men are not the same and recognizing that gender and sex are

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For the record, feminism by definition is: ‘the belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities.’ It is the theory of the political, economic and social equality of the sexes. (Watson 1)

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Feminism is a body of social theory and political movement primarily based on and motivated by the experiences of women. While generally providing a critique of social relations, many proponents of feminism also focus on analyzing gender inequality and the promotion of women's rights, interests, and issues.

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Established with Adam and Eve, still surviving, marriage is the oldest institution known. Often the climax of most romantic movies and stories, whether it may be ‘Pride and Prejudice’ or ‘Dil Wale Dulhaniya Ley Jaein Gey’, marriage has a universal appeal. It continues to be the most intimate social network, providing the strongest and most frequent opportunity for social and emotional support. Though, over the years, marriage appears to be tarnished with high divorce rates, discontentment and infidelity, it is still a principal source of happiness in the lives of respective partners. Although marriage is perceived as a deeply flawed institution serving more the needs of the society than those of the individuals, nevertheless, marriage is

Feminism And Gender Equality And Equity Based On Gender

Feminism is the belief that people of all different backgrounds should be treated justly and fairly. Feminists believe that all people deserve equal pay to those in the same job. Otherwise put, “Feminism is an interdisciplinary approach to issues of equality and equity based on gender, gender expression, gender identity, sex, and sexuality as understood through social theories and political activism.” (EKU “What is Feminism?”) Such as, if a man in the same job doing the same things as a woman in that same job, they should be treated as equals. They should both earn the same amount of money for the job that they do. However, the wage gap is pushing this away from well-working women. If a man earns one dollar, a woman today earns just seventy-nine cents. This is unacceptable in many ways. Women are no different from men. They both can be hardworking and loyal employees. Sexism in the workplace is pushing single mothers and women back farther to being able to support themselves and support their families.

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Feminism is a belief that women and men should be treated as equals in world and men

How to cite ChatGPT

Use discount code STYLEBLOG15 for 15% off APA Style print products with free shipping in the United States.

We, the APA Style team, are not robots. We can all pass a CAPTCHA test , and we know our roles in a Turing test . And, like so many nonrobot human beings this year, we’ve spent a fair amount of time reading, learning, and thinking about issues related to large language models, artificial intelligence (AI), AI-generated text, and specifically ChatGPT . We’ve also been gathering opinions and feedback about the use and citation of ChatGPT. Thank you to everyone who has contributed and shared ideas, opinions, research, and feedback.

In this post, I discuss situations where students and researchers use ChatGPT to create text and to facilitate their research, not to write the full text of their paper or manuscript. We know instructors have differing opinions about how or even whether students should use ChatGPT, and we’ll be continuing to collect feedback about instructor and student questions. As always, defer to instructor guidelines when writing student papers. For more about guidelines and policies about student and author use of ChatGPT, see the last section of this post.

Quoting or reproducing the text created by ChatGPT in your paper

If you’ve used ChatGPT or other AI tools in your research, describe how you used the tool in your Method section or in a comparable section of your paper. For literature reviews or other types of essays or response or reaction papers, you might describe how you used the tool in your introduction. In your text, provide the prompt you used and then any portion of the relevant text that was generated in response.

Unfortunately, the results of a ChatGPT “chat” are not retrievable by other readers, and although nonretrievable data or quotations in APA Style papers are usually cited as personal communications , with ChatGPT-generated text there is no person communicating. Quoting ChatGPT’s text from a chat session is therefore more like sharing an algorithm’s output; thus, credit the author of the algorithm with a reference list entry and the corresponding in-text citation.

When prompted with “Is the left brain right brain divide real or a metaphor?” the ChatGPT-generated text indicated that although the two brain hemispheres are somewhat specialized, “the notation that people can be characterized as ‘left-brained’ or ‘right-brained’ is considered to be an oversimplification and a popular myth” (OpenAI, 2023).

OpenAI. (2023). ChatGPT (Mar 14 version) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com/chat

You may also put the full text of long responses from ChatGPT in an appendix of your paper or in online supplemental materials, so readers have access to the exact text that was generated. It is particularly important to document the exact text created because ChatGPT will generate a unique response in each chat session, even if given the same prompt. If you create appendices or supplemental materials, remember that each should be called out at least once in the body of your APA Style paper.

When given a follow-up prompt of “What is a more accurate representation?” the ChatGPT-generated text indicated that “different brain regions work together to support various cognitive processes” and “the functional specialization of different regions can change in response to experience and environmental factors” (OpenAI, 2023; see Appendix A for the full transcript).

Creating a reference to ChatGPT or other AI models and software

The in-text citations and references above are adapted from the reference template for software in Section 10.10 of the Publication Manual (American Psychological Association, 2020, Chapter 10). Although here we focus on ChatGPT, because these guidelines are based on the software template, they can be adapted to note the use of other large language models (e.g., Bard), algorithms, and similar software.

The reference and in-text citations for ChatGPT are formatted as follows:

Parenthetical citation: (OpenAI, 2023)
Narrative citation: OpenAI (2023)

Let’s break that reference down and look at the four elements (author, date, title, and source):

Author: The author of the model is OpenAI.

Date: The date is the year of the version you used. Following the template in Section 10.10, you need to include only the year, not the exact date. The version number provides the specific date information a reader might need.

Title: The name of the model is “ChatGPT,” so that serves as the title and is italicized in your reference, as shown in the template. Although OpenAI labels unique iterations (i.e., ChatGPT-3, ChatGPT-4), they are using “ChatGPT” as the general name of the model, with updates identified with version numbers.

The version number is included after the title in parentheses. The format for the version number in ChatGPT references includes the date because that is how OpenAI is labeling the versions. Different large language models or software might use different version numbering; use the version number in the format the author or publisher provides, which may be a numbering system (e.g., Version 2.0) or other methods.

Bracketed text is used in references for additional descriptions when they are needed to help a reader understand what’s being cited. References for a number of common sources, such as journal articles and books, do not include bracketed descriptions, but things outside of the typical peer-reviewed system often do. In the case of a reference for ChatGPT, provide the descriptor “Large language model” in square brackets. OpenAI describes ChatGPT-4 as a “large multimodal model,” so that description may be provided instead if you are using ChatGPT-4. Later versions and software or models from other companies may need different descriptions, based on how the publishers describe the model. The goal of the bracketed text is to briefly describe the kind of model to your reader.

Source: When the publisher name and the author name are the same, do not repeat the publisher name in the source element of the reference, and move directly to the URL. This is the case for ChatGPT. The URL for ChatGPT is https://chat.openai.com/chat . For other models or products for which you may create a reference, use the URL that links as directly as possible to the source (i.e., the page where you can access the model, not the publisher’s homepage).

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How to cite ChatGPT
We, the APA Style team, are not robots. We can all pass a CAPTCHA test, and we know our roles in a Turing test.And, like so many nonrobot human beings this year, we've spent a fair amount of time reading, learning, and thinking about issues related to large language models, artificial intelligence (AI), AI-generated text, and specifically ChatGPT.

Essay on Feminism

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5 Essays About Feminism

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