Feminism refers to the belief in the social, economic, and political equality of the sexes - a perspective whose origins were uniquely a product of Western thought. Many organizations have emerged in recent decades claiming to work on behalf of such equality, and are generally identified as feminist groups. This section of DiscoverTheNetworks explores the worldviews, goals, and strategies of the leaders of these organizations, and how they have evolved over time.
Throughout most of world history, women's lives everywhere were tightly circumscribed, characterized by a much narrower range of choices and privileges than were the lives of men. Women were confined largely to the domestic sphere, while public life was exclusively the domain of men. In the philosophical advances of the Enlightenment, the 17th- and 18th-century Western intellectual movement that celebrated the power of reason and, by extension, mankind's ability to change the status quo for the better, the first seeds of what would eventually become modern feminism were sown.
Enlightenment philosophers initially ignored these gender-related inequities and focused exclusively on issues of social class and caste. Female intellectuals of the Enlightenment such as the playwright Olympe de Gouges sought to bring public attention to the plight of women. In 1791 de Gouges published Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne (Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the [Female] Citizen), which boldly asserted that women ought to be regarded as men's equals in terms of intellect, talents, and overall competence. A year later the Englishwoman Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, the seminal English-language feminist tract claiming that women deserved to be given the same opportunities as men in the realms of education, work, and politics.
The 19th-century movement to abolish slavery encouraged feminists. Along with their counterparts in Europe, "suffragettes" worked to include women's rights in the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which forbade disfranchisement on the basis of race. But not until 1920 would women be granted the right to vote in the United States.
Once the goal of suffrage had been achieved, the feminist movement fell into a protracted lull both in Europe and the United States, splintering into various factions focused on such things as education, maternal and infant health care, voter registration drives, and protective labor legislation for women. Then the Great Depression and World War II largely put a temporary halt to feminist activism all over the world.
Just as the first feminists had been inspired by the abolition movement, the women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the so-called "second wave" of feminism, was heavily influenced by the revolutionary spirit of the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement. Feminist activists demonstrated for everything from the removal of sex stereotypes from children's books, to the creation of Women's Studies departments at colleges and universities.
Legislatively, the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which was amended to ban employment discrimination on the basis of sex) represented early victories for the modern feminist movement, whose genesis can be traced to the 1963 publication of onetime Communist activist Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique. An instant best-seller, the book asserted that American women lived in "a comfortable concentration camp" and were victimized not only by many forms of discrimination, but also by the socially transmitted message that they could find a sense of identity and fulfillment solely by living vicariously through their husbands and children. In October 1966 Friedan co-founded the National Organization for Women (NOW), which grew into the largest organization of feminist activists in America.
The feminist movement Friedan helped create in the 1960s and 70s—although she would later announce public qualms about its growing obsession with lesbianism in the 1980s and 90s—characterizes American society as racist, sexist, patriarchal, and irredeemably discriminatory against women and minorities. If the problem is clear, so is the solution: to entirely reshape society and restructure its social and economic institutions - from the family to the workplace to the school to the marketplace.
As it developed, radical feminism embraced affirmative action, or race- and gender-based preferences and quotas, in employment and education. It espoused such measures as the right to taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand; federally financed and regulated daycare; "comparable worth" laws that codify government wage fixing; and federally mandated Parental Leave (forcing employers to skew worker benefits in favor of women). The common thread running through each of these measures is a preference for expanded government control over America's economy and society at large.
By the 1990s, the radical feminist movement of thirty years earlier had begun to founder. Formerly powerful centers of opinion such as the magazine Ms. lost readership. Female college students dismissed older feminists as inflexible and passé and ridiculed their anti-male rhetoric. Meanwhile, other forms of feminism emerged to challenge the intellectual monopoly of the radical feminist establishment, notably women who considered themselves "equity feminists" as opposed to "gender feminists." While pushing hard for initiatives that would guarantee women equal access to business and educational opportunities, these "equity feminists" also supported women who chose to stay home and raise children, ridiculed the vulgar Marxism of their more radical sisters, and (noting the advances in biological research) rejected the notion that there were no essential differences between males and females.
