Waves of Feminism - - First Wave Feminism: Emerged in the mid 19th century and concentrated
on the campaign for the vote and equal legal rights. In the UK it ended with the extension of the vote to
women in 1918 and full suffrage in 1928.
- Second Wave Feminism: Held to have started in the 1960s...
Feminism QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
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Waves of Feminism - ✔✔✔- First Wave Feminism: Emerged in the mid 19th century and concentrated
on the campaign for the vote and equal legal rights. In the UK it ended with the extension of the vote to
women in 1918 and full suffrage in 1928.
- Second Wave Feminism: Held to have started in the 1960s. It focused on the personal, psychological
and social aspects of women's oppression ad aimed for liberation rather than reform.
- Third Wave Feminism: Has moved feminism away from the aims of educated middle class women
towards the aspirations of women from minorities. It has tended to emphasise the diversity of women's
identities and aspirations.
Key Individuals First Wave Feminism: Simone de Beauvoir - ✔✔✔She formulated three principles:
1) Man 'is the subject, he is the absolute: she is the other'. Beauvoir argued that by virtue of being
female, female deviate from the norm. The consequence is that women constantly experience conflict
between their humanity and femininity.
2) Freedom is used in order to assess women's situation. Her status of Other is unjust and oppressive as
women are a free consciousness. When women consent to their own oppression and help to oppress
other women, they are to be blamed.
3) Finally, there is insight that some are not born but made, that every society has constructed a vast
material, cultural and ideological apparatus dedicated to the fabrication of femininity. To Beauvoir
'femininity' is a sense of normative or patriarchal femininity. A 'feminine' women is one that accepts her
position of Other.
Key Individuals First Wave Feminism: Betty Friedan - ✔✔✔- Believes that if women escaped the
confines of traditional notions of femininity, they could then truly enjoy being women.
Friedan attacked the cultural myths hat sustained domesticity, highlighting the sense of frustration and
despair that afflicted suburban American women confined to the roles of housewife and mother.
- In The Second Stage (1983), she nevertheless warned that the quest for 'personhood' should not
encourage women to deny the importance of children, the home and the family.
, Key Individuals First Wave Feminism: Mary Wollstonecraft - ✔✔✔- A British social theorist,
Wollstonecraft was a pioneer feminist thinker, drawn into radical politics by the French Revolution.
- Her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) stressed the equal rights of women, especially in
education, on the basis of the notion of 'personhood'.
- Wollstonecraft's work drew on an Enlightenment liberal belief in reason, but developed a more
complex analysis of women as the objects and subjects of desire; it also presented the domestic sphere
as a model of community and social order.
Second Wave Feminism - ✔✔✔- Second wave feminism developed in political democracies.
- It developed from a perception that legal rights did not necessarily bring a change in attitudes.
- Second wave feminism examined the basic relationship between men and women and found them
wanting.
- They asserted that the personal was political and to achieve liberation, patriarchy had to challenged
and undone at every level.
- Books such as Kate Millet's Sexual Politics (1970) and Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch (1970),
were enormously influential in defining this type of feminism.
Key Individuals Second Wave Feminism: Kate Millett - ✔✔✔- A US feminist writer, political activist and
artist, Millett developed a comprehensive critique of patriarchy in Western society and culture that has
a profound effect on radical feminism.
- In Sexual Politics (1970), Millett analysed the work of male writers, from D H Lawrence to Normal
Mailer, highlighting their use of sex to degrade and undermine women.
- In her view, such literature reflects deeply patriarchal attitudes that pervade culture and society at
large, providing evidence that patriarchy is a historical and social constant.
Key Individuals Second Wave Feminism: Germaine Greer - ✔✔✔- An Australian waiter, academic and
journalist, Greer's The Female Eunuch (1970) helped to stimulate radical feminist theorising.
- Its principle theme, the extent to which male domination is upheld by a systematic process of sexual
repression, was accompanied by a call for women to re-engage with their libido, there faculty of desire
and their sexuality.
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