When was the feminist movement

The staggering changes for women that have come about over those seven generations in family life, in religion, in government, in employment, in education — these changes did not just happen spontaneously. Women themselves made these changes happen, very deliberately. Women have not been the passive recipients of miraculous changes in laws and human nature.

Seven generations of women have come together to affect these changes in the most democratic ways: through meetings, petition drives, lobbying, public speaking, and nonviolent resistance.

They have worked very deliberately to create a better world, and they have succeeded hugely. On that sweltering summer day in upstate New York, a young housewife and mother, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was invited to tea with four women friends. Surely the new republic would benefit from having its women play more active roles throughout society.

This was definitely not the first small group of women to have such a conversation, but it was the first to plan and carry out a specific, large-scale program. Today we are living the legacy of this afternoon conversation among women friends.

Within two days of their afternoon tea together, this small group had picked a date for their convention, found a suitable location, and placed a small announcement in the Seneca County Courier. They saw their mission as helping the republic keep its promise of better, more egalitarian lives for its citizens. In this Declaration of Sentiments, Stanton carefully enumerated areas of life where women were treated unjustly.

To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world. Strong words… Large grievances… And remember: This was just seventy years after the Revolutionary War. But this Declaration of Sentiments spelled out what was the status quo for European-American women in America, while it was even worse for enslaved Black women. That summer, change was in the air and Elizabeth Cady Stanton was full of hope that the future could and would be brighter for women.

That women should be allowed to vote in elections was almost inconceivable to many. Even the heartfelt pleas of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a refined and educated woman of the time, did not move the assembly.

Not until Frederick Douglass, the noted Black abolitionist and rich orator, started to speak, did the uproar subside. Woman, like the slave, he argued, had the right to liberty. We shall employ agents, circulate tracts, petition the State and national Legislatures, and endeavor to enlist the pulpit and the press in our behalf.

We hope this Convention will be followed by a series of Conventions, embracing every part of the country. In ridicule, the entire text of the Declaration of Sentiments was often published, with the names of the signers frequently included. Just as ridicule today often has a squelching effect on new ideas, this attack in the press caused many people from the Convention to rethink their positions. Many of the women who had attended the convention were so embarrassed by the publicity that they actually withdrew their signatures from the Declaration.

But most stood firm. Some drew such large crowds that people actually had to be turned away for lack of sufficient meeting space! Elizabeth Cady Stanton and women like Susan B.

Anthony, Lucy Stone, and Sojourner Truth traveled the country lecturing and organizing for the next forty years. Eventually, winning the right to vote emerged as the central issue, since the vote would provide the means to achieve the other reforms.

All told, the campaign for woman suffrage met such staunch opposition that it took 72 years for the women and their male supporters to be successful. As you might imagine, any year campaign includes thousands of political strategists, capable organizers, administrators, activists and lobbyists.

Among these women are several activists whose names and and accomplishments should become as familiar to Americans as those of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. In , as the suffrage victory drew near, the National American Woman Suffrage Association reconfigured itself into the League of Women Voters to ensure that women would take their hard-won vote seriously and use it wisely.

Remarks by Susan B. Anthony at her trial for illegal voting There were prominent feminist thinkers before Friedan who would come to be associated with the second wave — most importantly Simone de Beauvoir, whose Second Sex came out in France in and in the US in — but The Feminine Mystique was a phenomenon. It sold 3 million copies in three years.

Women were right to be unhappy; they were being ripped off. Instead, it was revolutionary in its reach. It made its way into the hands of housewives, who gave it to their friends, who passed it along through a whole chain of well-educated middle-class white women with beautiful homes and families.

And it gave them permission to be angry. And once those 3 million readers realized that they were angry, feminism once again had cultural momentum behind it. It had a unifying goal, too: not just political equality, which the first-wavers had fought for, but social equality.

The phrase cannot be traced back to any individual woman but was popularized by Carol Hanisch. Wade guaranteed women reproductive freedom. The second wave worked on getting women the right to hold credit cards under their own names and to apply for mortgages. It worked to outlaw marital rape, to raise awareness about domestic violence and build shelters for women fleeing rape and domestic violence. It worked to name and legislate against sexual harassment in the workplace.

The second wave cared about racism too, but it could be clumsy in working with people of color. Earning the right to work outside the home was not a major concern for black women, many of whom had to work outside the home anyway.

In response, some black feminists decamped from feminism to create womanism. Even with its limited scope, second-wave feminism at its height was plenty radical enough to scare people — hence the myth of the bra burners. Despite the popular story, there was no mass burning of bras among second-wave feminists.

But women did gather together in to protest the Miss America pageant and its demeaning, patriarchal treatment of women. That the Miss America protest has long lingered in the popular imagination as a bra-burning, and that bra-burning has become a metonym for postwar American feminism, says a lot about the backlash to the second wave that would soon ensue.

In the s, the comfortable conservatism of the Reagan era managed to successfully position second-wave feminists as humorless, hairy-legged shrews who cared only about petty bullshit like bras instead of real problems, probably to distract themselves from the loneliness of their lives, since no man would ever want a shudder feminist.

Another young woman chimed in, agreeing. That image of feminists as angry and man-hating and lonely would become canonical as the second wave began to lose its momentum, and it continues to haunt the way we talk about feminism today.

It would also become foundational to the way the third wave would position itself as it emerged. The Second Sex , Simone de Beauvoir The Feminine Mystique , B e tty Fried a n MacKinnon Gilbert and Susan Gubar 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.

But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. The 19th Amendment to the U. It took activists and reformers nearly years to win that right, and the campaign was not easy: Disagreements over strategy threatened to cripple the movement more Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton Women gained the right to vote in with the passage of the 19 Amendment.

On Election Day in , millions of American women exercised this right for the first time. These are just a few of the remarkable accomplishments by She came from a privileged background and decided early in life to fight for equal rights for women. Stanton worked closely with Susan B. Jeannette Rankin was a Montana politician who made history in as the first woman ever elected to the United States Congress.

Returning to the question the Elle Magazine columnist asked about the third wave and the success or failure of its goals. It is hard to talk about the aims of the third wave because a characteristic of that wave is the rejection of communal, standardized objectives. Third wave women and men are concerned about equal rights, but tend to think the genders have achieved parity or that society is well on its way to delivering it to them.

This wave supports equal rights, but does not have a term like feminism to articulate that notion. But the times are changing, and a fourth wave is in the air. Well, perhaps that is the way to view the fourth wave of feminism. The aims of the second feminist movement were never cemented to the extent that they could survive the complacency of third wavers.

The fourth wave of feminism is emerging because mostly young women and men realize that the third wave is either overly optimistic or hampered by blinders. Feminism is now moving from the academy and back into the realm of public discourse. Yet the word is winning the day. Feminism no longer just refers to the struggles of women; it is a clarion call for gender equity.

The emerging fourth wavers are not just reincarnations of their second wave grandmothers; they bring to the discussion important perspectives taught by third wave feminism. The beauty of the fourth wave is that there is a place in it for all —together. The academic and theoretical apparatus is extensive and well-honed in the academy, ready to support a new broad-based activism in the home, in the workplace, in the sphere of social media, and in the streets.

At this point we are still not sure how feminism will mutate. Will the fourth wave fully materialize and in what direction? There have always been many feminisms in the movement, not just one ideology, and there have always been tensions, points and counter-points.

The political, social and intellectual feminist movements have always been chaotic, multivalenced, and disconcerting; and let's hope they continue to be so; it's a sign that they are thriving. This story first appeared in the Fall issue of Pacific magazine.