The Beginnings of the Feminist Movement and First Wave Feminism

What led to the commencement of the feminist movement? I should state categorically that the history of feminism is quite notably skewed (of course a lot of history is, which is why i will clarify different perspectives while offering a critical analysis of history); but the history of feminism notably benefits from a presumption of correctness and necessity throughout history. It is narrated to problematise men, and curate a justification for the existence of feminism. But, nevertheless, we will look at some of the positions held.
First, feminism is generally the belief in social, economic, and political equality of the sexes. Although largely originating in the West, feminism is manifested worldwide and is represented by various institutions committed to activity on behalf of women’s rights and interests. Throughout most of Western history, women were limited to the domestic sphere, while public life was reserved for men. In mediaeval Europe, women were denied the right to own property, to study, or to participate in public life. At the end of the 19th century in France, they were still compelled to cover their heads in public, and, in parts of Germany, a husband still had the right to sell his wife.
Even as late as the early 20th century, women could neither vote nor hold elective office in Europe and in most of the United States (where several territories and states granted women’s suffrage long before the federal government did so). Women were prevented from conducting business without a male representative, be it father, brother, husband, legal agent, or even son. Married women could not exercise control over their own children without the permission of their husbands. Moreover, women had little or no access to education and were barred from most professions. In some parts of the world, such restrictions on women continue today. See also egalitarianism.
When looking at the history of feminism, it can actually be traced to even the ancient world. There is scant evidence of early organised protest against such circumscribed status. In the 3rd century BC, Roman women filled the Capitoline Hill and blocked every entrance to the Forum when consul Marcus Porcius Cato resisted attempts to repeal laws limiting women’s use of expensive goods. “If they are victorious now, what will they not attempt?” Cato cried. “As soon as they begin to be your equals, they will have become your superiors.”
That rebellion, however, is said to be the exception. For most of recorded history, only isolated voices spoke out against the inferior status of women, presaging the arguments to come. In late 14th- and early 15th-century France, the first feminist philosopher, Christine de Pisan, challenged prevailing attitudes toward women with a bold call for female education.
Then later in the century emerged the writings of Laura Cereta, a 15th-century Venetian woman who published a body of work titled ‘Epistolae familiares (1488); “Personal Letters” (which has been translated as ‘Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist’), and these were a volume of letters dealing with a collection of women’s complaints, from denial of education and marital oppression to the frivolity of women’s attire.
Well, the defence of women had become a literary subgenre by the end of the 16th century, when in 1600; ‘The Worth of Women’, which was a feminist broadside by another Venetian author, Moderata Fonte, was published posthumously. Defenders of the status quo painted women as superficial and inherently immoral, while the emerging feminists produced long lists of women of courage and accomplishment and proclaimed that women would be the intellectual equals of men if they were given equal access to education. But, Fonte proceeded in particular to make the argument that women are superior to men. And this is where feminism began to move away from raising awareness about injustices and abuses that women suffered, to a weapon against the social fabric, where the patriarchal system is largely and often incorrectly problematised.
Then, the so-called “debate about women” did not reach England until the late 16th century, when pamphleteers and polemicists joined battle over the true nature of womanhood. After a series of satiric pieces mocking women were published, the first feminist pamphleteer in England, writing as Jane Anger, responded with Jane Anger, Her Protection for Women (1589). This volley of opinion continued for more than a century, until another English author, Mary Astell, issued a more reasoned rejoinder in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694, 1697). The two-volume work suggested that women inclined neither toward marriage nor a religious vocation; and that they should set up secular convents where they might live, study, and teach. And honestly, it mostly went downhill from here, especially because this ideology would then influence the second wave of feminism.
But, before the second wave, there was a notable development that has largely been associated with the first wave of feminism. In essence, the debates and discussions we’ve referenced that took place around the status and rights of women culminated i what was called the ‘Suffrage Movement’; and in the US, it was seen with the first women’s rights convention, held in July 1848 in the small town of Seneca Falls, New York. It was a spur-of-the-moment idea that sprang up during a social gathering of Lucretia Mott, a Quaker preacher and veteran social activist, Martha Wright (Mott’s sister), Mary Ann McClintock, Jane Hunt, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the wife of an abolitionist and the only non-Quaker in the group. The convention was planned with five days’ notice, publicised only by a small unsigned advertisement in a local newspaper.
Stanton drew up the “Declaration of Sentiments” that guided the Seneca Falls Convention. Using the Declaration of Independence as her guide to proclaim that “all men and women [had been] created equal,” she drafted 11 resolutions, including the most radical demand—the right to the vote. With Frederick Douglass, a former slave, arguing eloquently on their behalf, all 11 resolutions passed, and Mott even won approval of a final declaration “for the overthrowing of the monopoly of the pulpit, and for the securing to woman equal participation with men in the various trades, professions and commerce.”
And yet, by emphasising education and political rights that were the privileges of the upper classes, the embryonic feminist movement had little connection with ordinary women cleaning houses in Liverpool or picking cotton in Georgia. The single nonwhite woman’s voice heard at this time—that of Sojourner Truth, a former slave—symbolised the distance between the ordinary and the distance between white women and black women. This gap persisted as a gaping irony in the accomplishments of the suffrage movement and first wave of feminism. This is to say that while the first wave is credited with the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution granting women the right to vote in 1920 by stipulating that the right to vote could not be denied because of sex; and even with winning a complete victory in Britain when the Equal Franchise Act of 1928 allowed all adult women over 21 to vote, this development occurred exclusively for white women, despite the presence of black women in the suffrage movement.
THE SECOND WAVE OF FEMINISM, AND THE IMPOSITION OF A FEMALE IDENTITY
This brings us to the second question regarding how did the second wave of feminism impose a new and detrimental female identity? The women’s movement of the 1960s and ’70s, the so-called “second wave” of feminism, represented a seemingly abrupt break with the tranquil suburban life pictured in American popular culture. Yet the roots of the new rebellion were buried in the frustrations of college-educated mothers whose discontent impelled their daughters in a new direction. If first-wave feminists were inspired by the abolition movement, their great-granddaughters were swept into feminism by the civil rights movement, the attendant discussion of principles such as equality and justice, and inspiration from the protests against the Vietnam War.
Meanwhile, women’s concerns were on Pres. John F. Kennedy’s agenda even before this public discussion began. In 1961 he created the President’s Commission on the Status of Women and appointed Eleanor Roosevelt to lead it. Its report, issued in 1963, firmly supported the nuclear family and preparing women for motherhood. But it also documented a national pattern of employment discrimination, unequal pay, legal inequality, and meagre support services for working women that needed to be corrected through legislative guarantees of equal pay for equal work, equal job opportunities, and expanded child-care services. The Equal Pay Act of 1963 offered the first guarantee, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was amended to bar employers from discriminating on the basis of sex.
But, if you’re wondering how women in the workplace came into the conversation to begin with, well this is a portion of feminist history that feminists do not give much detail about. And let me state categorically that it had nothing to do with the liberation of women, and a lot to do with disrupting the family unit. This is not to say that women cannot and should not work; in fact, it is celebrated when all people discover their pre-ordained purpose and contribute good to the world. Rather, it is to say that feminism was weaponised by diabolical organisations to disrupt the family as part of a broader plan to disrupt society. In particular, speaking in 2007, the late Aaron Russo—a former friend of Nick Rockefeller—recounts being told how women’s liberation was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, in order to get women in the workplace, break up the family unit, and indoctrinate children from an early age.
In any case, some deemed these measures insufficient. Their critiques were that these measures were still being implemented in a country where classified advertisements still segregated job openings by sex, where state laws restricted women’s access to contraception, and where incidences of rape and domestic violence remained undisclosed. Then, in the late 1960s, the notion of a women’s rights movement took root at the same time as the civil rights movement, and women of all ages and circumstances were swept up in debates about gender, discrimination, and the nature of equality.
But, here is where the second movement gets even more tricky and prescriptive in what it advocates. On the one hand, mainstream groups such as the National Organization for Women (NOW) launched a campaign for legal equity, while ad hoc groups staged sit-ins and marches for any number of reasons—from assailing college curricula that lacked female authors to promoting the use of the word Ms. as a neutral form of address—that is, one that did not refer to marital status. Health collectives and rape crisis centres were established. Children’s books were rewritten to obviate sexual stereotypes. And women’s studies departments were founded at colleges and universities.
THE THIRD AND FOURTH WAVE: INTERSECTIONALITY AND TRANSGENDERISM
This brings us to the final question regarding what critiques have emerged from the third and fourth wave of feminism, and their associations with intersectionality and transgenderism? The third wave of feminism emerged in the mid-1990s. It was led by so-called Generation Xers who, born in the 1960s and ’70s in the developed world, came of age in a media-saturated and culturally and economically diverse milieu. Although they benefited significantly from the legal rights and protections that had been obtained by first- and second-wave feminists, they also critiqued the positions and what they felt was unfinished work of second-wave feminism. Notable from the third wave is the idea of intersectionality playing out.
Intersectionality is, in social theory, the interaction and cumulative effects of multiple forms of discrimination affecting the daily lives of individuals, particularly women of colour, and the idea is credited to Kimberlé Crenshaw. The term also refers more broadly to an intellectual framework for understanding how various aspects of individual identity—including race, gender, social class, and sexuality—interact to create unique experiences of privilege or oppression. Intersectionality, had the unfortunate effect of providing structured language for what would become a victim economy where proving that a person is oppressed on multiple fronts becomes a currency of sorts, that further grants a person legitimacy to speak up or the status of an activist.
On the other hand, and unlike the first wave, second-wave feminism provoked extensive theoretical discussion about the origins of women’s oppression, the nature of gender, and the role of the family. Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics made the best-seller list in 1970, and in it she broadened the term politics to include all “power-structured relationships” and posited that the personal was actually political. Shulamith Firestone, a founder of the New York Radical Feminists, published The Dialectic of Sex in the same year, insisting that love disadvantaged women by creating intimate shackles between them and the men they loved—men who were also their oppressors. One year later, Germaine Greer, an Australian living in London, published The Female Eunuch, in which she argued that the sexual repression of women cuts them off from the creative energy they need to be independent and self-fulfilled; which as you would have observed, is among the influences of the hypersexualised culture today that ironically objectifies women in the guise of empowerment. But, like I said earlier on, things mostly went downhill in the second wave of feminism. And perhaps one of the moments reflective of this in history is when Germaine Greer, in defending Kaye Millett’s work, argued that women can problematise men without making a clear case for why men are a problem in society.
Then, although debated by some, many claim that a fourth wave of feminism began about 2012, with a focus on sexual harassment, body shaming, and rape culture, among other issues. A key component was the use of social media to highlight and address these concerns. Notable in this wave was the Me Too movement, which was launched in 2006 in the United States to assist survivors of sexual violence, especially females of colour. The campaign gained widespread attention beginning in 2017, after it was revealed that film mogul Harvey Weinstein had for years sexually harassed and assaulted women in the industry with impunity. Victims of sexual harassment or assault around the world—and of all ethnicities—began sharing their experiences on social media, using the hashtag #MeToo. The movement grew over the coming months to bring condemnation to dozens of powerful men in politics, business, entertainment, and the news media.
The problem with the #MeToo or #BelieveWomen movements, is tha although they seemingly were based on a noble cause of exposing sexual abuse, they were, however, premised on the assumption that women do not lie, and thus should always be given the presumption of correctness when they accuse a man of sexual assault. This is disturbing and indicative of a problem with essentialism, where the character of women was standardised to an extreme assumption of correctness; so much so that for the longest time, being accused of sexual assault or abuse by a woman was equally as bad in ramification ans being found guilty! And so, once again, feminists fail to contribute to a just and equitable society, and only create one where a benefited class enjoys said benefits at the expense of the other – much like we saw with the first wave of feminism. In addition, some of these ideas have come at the expense of traditional values like being a mother who takes care of their children (possibly even while working), and the women who embrace these ideas; while trying to emasculate men.
The contributions of feminism worsened with the stance most feminists took on transgenderism. First, the doctrine of intersectionality coerced biological women to see trans-women (who are biological men) as the more oppressed class in comparison to biological women. But, then secondly, because feminists largely argued that the differences between men and women were mere constructs since the first wave of feminism, it became difficult for them to refute the possibility of biological men becoming women (and vice versa). As a result, on the heels of feminism, the transgender movement gained traction. And so, in comical irony, the work feminists put in to gain an advantage is now not an exclusive benefit they enjoy because men who claim to be women or even non-binary are often given similar entitlements.
All of this is to say that the modern manifestations of the civil rights movement, to all of feminism – a lot of the movements that are credited with contributing significant developments in society need to be carefully evaluated, especially because the likes of BlackLivesMatter and feminism end up harming the people they claim to serve. Furthermore, these movements do not have a monopoly on social justice; it is possible to oppose racism and not support BlackLivesMatter, and it is also possible to believe in the equal moral concern of women (as opposed to a weirdly defined equality between men and women) without being a feminist.
Written by Lindokuhle Mabaso