Feminist Movements Research Paper

1. Defining Feminism

The term feminism originated as the French word feminisme at the end of the nineteenth century and then spread to other languages and parts of the world (Offen 1988). It referred in general to women’s emancipation but quickly developed multiple and even conflicting meanings. In the international women’s movement in the years before World War I, the term feminism had come to connote, quite specifically, support for legal equality and equal opportunity in the labor market for women and men, particularly opposition to special—what was known as ‘protective’— labor legislation for women (Wikander 1992). Since then a raft of definitions and associations have developed, along with a multitude of qualifying adjectives preceding the word feminism. For some scholars, a feminist movement must specifically embrace that identity, while for others, any activism by women can qualify as part of a feminist movement. The former position means that there can be no feminist movements before the late nineteenth century, while the latter can claim such actions as food riots as feminist. Lerner (1993) locates the origins of the creation of feminist consciousness in medieval Europe, defining feminist consciousness as:

the awareness of women that they belong to a subordinate group; that they have suffered wrongs as a group; that their condition of subordination is not natural, but is societally determined; that they must join with other women to remedy these wrongs; and finally, that they must and can provide an alternate vision of societal organization in which women as well as men will enjoy autonomy and self-determination.

Cott (1989) comes down on the opposite side of the question, arguing that ‘not even all activities undertaken by women who claim to have ‘‘women’s interests’’ or ‘‘women’s needs’’ at heart’ are feminist. She proposes, instead, that we distinguish feminist consciousness from ‘female consciousness,’ that stems from women’s shared sense of obligation to preserve and nurture life, and ‘communal consciousness,’ a sense of solidarity between women and men of any class, ethnic, racial, or other group.

One way scholars have attempted to deal with the complexity of feminism is by distinguishing among different varieties.

2. Categorizing Feminist Movements

The most influential scheme for categorizing feminism and feminist movements has been Offen’s (1988) distinction between individualist and relational feminism. Arguing that the anomalous Anglo-American brand of individualist feminism that emphasizes human rights and personal autonomy has been taken as the yardstick to determine what was and was not feminist, Offen asserts that relational feminism, which advocates equity for women in their traditional familial roles as wives and mothers, has been more characteristic throughout time and in different locations. Critics have questioned whether relational feminism is really feminist.

Other schemes for categorizing feminist movements in the past include ‘social feminism’ and ‘hard-core feminism’ (Cott 1989) or ‘social feminism’ and ‘equity feminism’ (Black 1989). These pairs essentially mirror Offen’s distinction. At bottom, the basic divide in these categories is between those who emphasize the sameness of women and men (individualist, hard-core, and equity feminism) and those who emphasize difference (relational and social, as well as ‘domestic,’ ‘maternal,’ and ‘cultural’ feminism). This ideological distinction has its counterpart in the goals of movements, some of which work to win identical treatment for women and men and some of which advocate different treatment as the right route to equality. In fact, there is no neat fit between an ideological tendency to sameness and the goal of identical treatment, since some feminists have believed that women and men should have identical rights precisely so that women can bring their different (and better) qualities into public life.

For more contemporary movements, scholars have distinguished among liberal, socialist, and radical feminism. Liberal feminism seeks equality for women within the existing social structure, holding that women lack power because as a group they are denied equal opportunity to compete and succeed in the male- dominated economic and political arenas. Thus, liberal feminist movements advocate equal access and equal opportunity. Socialist feminism identifies both class and gender as equally important in creating inequality and calls for a transformation of both capitalism and patriarchy. Radical feminism, in contrast, sees women as a ‘sex class and views gender as the primary foundation for the unequal distribution of rewards and privileges. Radical feminist movements, which arose in the industrialized West in the late 1960s and 1970s, like socialist feminist movements seek more than access to existing privileges. Radical feminists call for a fundamental transformation of society based on the superiority of the ‘female values’ of caring, nurturing, egalitarianism, pacifism, and cooperation.

The categories of feminism have proliferated as research on different kinds of feminist activism has expanded. Scholars have identified Nazi feminists, Islamic feminists, lesbian feminists, and imperial feminists, to name just a few. Increasingly the plural, feminisms,’ is used to capture the diversity of these varieties of feminism. From a social movement perspective, Rupp and Taylor (1999) have proposed to shift focus away from the ideology of feminist movements to the collective identities that are created and sustained within movements. Such identities exist at three levels: organizational, movement, and solidary. Women develop a sense of themselves as members of discrete organizations, as part of a movement, and, at the broadest level, as women. By exploring the construction of these overlapping identities within specific contexts, it is possible to see how women with very different understandings and strategies and goals might all claim the label ‘feminist.’

3. The Origins Of Feminist Movements

Social movement scholars point out that everywhere and at every time, women have had sufficient grievances to stimulate the rise of feminist movements. Yet collective activity on the part of women aimed at improving their own status in society has blossomed primarily during times of generalized social upheaval. In addition, scholars have identified structural conditions that underlie the emergence of feminist protest, at least in the West: changes in patterns of female labor force participation, increased access to education, and shifts in fertility rates and reproductive roles. Chafetz and Dworkin (1986) argue that industrialization and urbanization play a critical role in the emergence of women’s movements. In industrializing and urbanizing societies, a large middle class develops, women gain access to education, married women enter the labor force in larger numbers, and the resulting role expansion and conflict results in the development of gender-based and ultimately feminist consciousness. The levels of industrialization and urbanization, the size of the middle class, the extent of women’s access to education, and the numbers of married women in the labor force, in combination with the attitude of governments to women’s demands, will determine the size of women’s movements and whether they qualify as feminist. Despite Chafetz’s and Dworkin’s attention to movements throughout the globe, their model privileges the western pattern of movement emergence. Feminist movements, scholars have argued, have emerged in other parts of the world in conjunction with nationalist movements, not industrialization and urbanization (Jayawardena 1986).

Although the conditions that lead to the emergence of feminist movements may vary in different parts of the world, there do seem to be broad commonalities in the ways such movements originate and develop. A first stage often begins with the writings of elite women (and men) and demands for greater access to education. In Egypt, e.g., educated, elite women in urban harems began to call for educational opportunity in the context of Islamic modernism at the end of the nineteenth century (Badran 1995). In Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Brazil, Mexico, and Cuba, women schoolteachers took the lead in the late nineteenth century in calling for expanded education for women (Miller 1991). Chinese women, many educated in Japan, began in the early twentieth century to relate China’s weakness to the lack of education for women (Beahan 1975). Typically, women who have gained some educational advantage begin to spread their ideas, often through their own publications. Throughout the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America, women’s journals played a central role in introducing feminist ideas.

A next stage was often the formation of organizations devoted to various kinds of social reform. In the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, these included radical projects such as abolitionist groups as well as more societally acceptable activities such as literary societies and church groups. In many cases, demands that originally sprang from women’s interest in other causes—that women be allowed to speak in public or participate in the political process in order to bring about some change in society—eventually came to be voiced as a basic human right. During the national revolution of 1919–22, Egyptian feminists who had earlier formed philanthropic groups worked actively to free Egypt from British domination but experienced disappointment when they found themselves deprived of the vote in the new Egyptian state. This was when the word feminist (in French) first came into use, claimed by the Egyptian Feminist Union, founded in 1923 (Badran 1995). The move from participation in nationalist or anti-imperialist movements to demands for basic political rights and for social freedoms was a common one throughout the colonized and dependent countries.

As feminist movements developed in different places, they often split along ideological, political, religious, or other lines. In countries such as Germany, e.g., the bourgeois women’s movement and socialist women’s movement had little to do with each other. In England, and to a lesser extent in the United States, the major divide was between moderate and militant groups. The French women’s movement splintered along political lines into Republican, Catholic, and socialist organizations. Because feminism as an ideology and movement emerged earlier in the United States and Europe, feminist movements in the rest of the world often give rise to charges of imperialist influence. Despite feminism’s origins as an indigenous movement in Egypt, the fact that the upper and middle-class urban women who claimed the label tended to wear western dress and speak French associated feminism with foreign and imperialist forces (Badran 1995). Korean New Women in the 1920s made use of Japanese, British, and Swedish feminist discourses for their own purposes in developing a critique of traditional Korean marriage and sexuality, giving rise to the notion that they were simply dupes of the West (Kwon 1998).

4. The Two-Wave Model Of Feminist Movements

Most scholarship on the development of women’s movements conceptualizes two waves of activism, the first in the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century and the second since the 1960s. Evans (1977) explores a variety of feminist movements in Europe, the United States, and Australasia during the first wave, charting the shifting aims of the movements from economic and educational to moral and then political. Evans concludes that the feminist movements of the first wave declined along with the liberalism with which they were so closely associated by the early twentieth century. But there is more continuity in the existence of women’s movements than this model suggests. In fact, movements grew outside the Euroamerican arena precisely when scholars think of the decline of feminism in the aftermath of World War I. It may still be useful to think of two peaks or waves of feminist activism, as long as we remember that not all movements followed the same trajectory and that feminist movements did not die out between the two waves (Rupp and Taylor 1987). Nevertheless, it is clear that feminist movements burst forth with renewed vigor in the 1960s and 1970s in association with civil rights, student and left-wing movements, and movements of national liberation. Often divided on questions of ideology, strategy, goals, and membership, these late twentieth-century movements mobilized around a broad range of issues, from reproductive rights to sexual and economic exploitation to violence against women. Feminist movements both conceptualized women as sharing basic experiences of oppression, asserting that ‘sisterhood is global,’ and increasingly came to emphasize differences among women on the basis of race, class, ethnicity, nation, and so on. This was true both within national feminist movements and even more so on the international stage.

In the United States, scholars identify two wings of the second-wave women’s movement: the women’s rights branch, consisting of older professional women organized in bureaucratic national groups working for change within the existing system, and the women’s liberation branch, made up of younger women associated with the civil rights and New Left movements who organized small collective groups on the local level and worked for a radical transformation of society (Freeman 1975; Ferree and Hess 1994). The women’s rights branch, dominated by the National Organization for Women, founded in 1966, originally worked for legal and public policy reform, while the women’s liberation groups pioneered consciousness raising as a strategy for change and engaged in dramatic ‘zap’ actions to protest such things as the institution of marriage and beauty pageants and the stock market. Yet over time the distinctions between the two wings dissipated.

The political contexts of different countries in the late twentieth century have been critical in shaping feminist movements and in facilitating or constraining success in moving toward feminist goals. In Western Europe and the United States, feminist movements have had the most success in policymaking where the Left is either very strong, as in Sweden, or very weak, as in the United States (Katzenstein and Mueller 1987). Likewise, in India, the women’s movement in Calcutta, which is dominated by the communist party and has a strong left culture, functions more as a political party, while the movement in Bombay, where there is more political competition, takes on more autonomous forms of organizing, including the formation of groups receptive to Western ideas (Ray 1999).

5. International Feminist Movements

Since the 1970s, regional and international organizing among women has blossomed, although the origins of international women’s organizations date back to the closing decades of the nineteenth century. In fact, women from the long-established international groups played a vital role in bringing the issue of women’s equality to the founding conferences of the United Nations in the aftermath of World War II (Rupp 1997). It was the United Nations-sponsored International Women’s Year in 1975, the Decade for Women conferences in 1975, 1980, and 1985, and the Beijing conference of 1995, with their attendant meetings of non-governmental organizations, that nurtured global feminist dialogue (Miles 1996). Although the official conferences and the affiliated forums have proven extremely contentious, struggling over questions of politics, religion, sexuality, and social custom, they have grappled with such basic issues as women’s worldwide economic disadvantage, women’s lack of reproductive freedom, and different forms of violence against women. Despite variations in feminist movements around the world, international conferences have diffused feminist ideology and practice throughout the globe.

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