Feminism

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Feminism

• First Wave
• Second Wave
• Third Wave
• Multi-Racial

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What is Feminism?

• Women demanding their full rights as human
  beings.
• Challenging conceptions of men as a group, and
  women as a group.
• Rebellion against power structures that keep
  women subordinate
• Can men be feminists?

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First Wave Feminism (1860s-1950s)

• Primary focus equality of opportunity in the
  public realm (men and women should be treated in
  the same way)
• Key Concerns
• The right to vote
• Access to education
• Entrance to the professions
• Higher pay and safer working conditions

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• The key concerns of First Wave Feminists
  included
• Education, employment, the marriage laws, and the
  plight of intelligent middle-class single women.
• They were not primarily concerned with the
  problems of working-class women, First Wave
  Feminists largely responded to specific
  injustices they had themselves experienced.

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The Achievements of First Wave Feminism

• Their major achievements were
• The opening of higher education for women
• Reform of the girls' secondary-school system,
  including participation national examinations
• The widening of access to the professions,
  especially medicine
• Married women's property rights, recognized in
  the Married Women's Property Act of 1870
• Some improvement in divorced and separated
  women's child custody rights.
• Suffrage

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What Were the Experiences These Women Reacted
Against?

• The Cult of True Womanhood- Victorian Ideal
  (1837-1901)
• The attributes of True Womanhood, by which a
  woman judged herself and was judged by her
  husband, her neighbors, and her society could be
  divided into four cardinal virtues - piety,
  purity, submissiveness, and domesticity.

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No Time For Politics
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Understanding Womens Position

• Men and women are made for each other, but their
  mutual dependence is not equal. We could survive
  without them better than they could without us.
  They are dependent on our feelings, on the price
  we put on their merits, on the value we set on
  their attractions and on their virtues. Thus
  womans entire education should be planned in
  relation to men. To please men, to be useful to
  them, to win their love and respect, to raise
  them as children, to care for them as adults,
  counsel and console them, make their lives sweet
  and pleasant. Rousseau, in Emile, 1762

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Virtue in Popular Culture

• A popular and often reprinted story by Fanny
  Forester told the sad tale of "Lucy Dutton." Lucy
  "with the seal of innocence upon her heart, and a
  rose-leaf upon her cheek," came out of her
  vine-covered cottage and ran into a city slicker.
  "And Lucy was beautiful and trusting, and
  thoughtless... Needs the story be told-
  Nay....Lucy was a child - consider how young, how
  very untaught - oh! Her innocence was no match
  for the sophistry of a gay, city youth! Spring
  came and shame was stamped upon the cottage at
  the foot of the hill."
• The baby died Lucy went mad at the funeral and
  finally died herself...

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The Lady and the Maid
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A Virtuous Woman

• If, however, a woman managed to withstand mans
  assaults on her virtue, she demonstrated her
  superiority and power over him.
• Working class and women of color are
  automatically excluded from such definitions.

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Exhortations to Women

• Put strongly by Mrs. Sandford "A really sensible
  woman feels her dependence. She does what she
  can, but she is conscious of her inferiority, and
  therefore grateful for support...."
• "True feminine genius," said Grace Greenwood, "is
  ever timid, doubtful, and clingingly dependent a
  perpetual childhood...". Thus, "if your husband
  is abusive, never retort.
• A Young Womans Guide to the Harmonious
  Development of a Christian Character suggested
  that females should "become as little children"
  and avoid "a controversial spirit..." Without
  comment or criticism the writer affirms that "to
  suffer and be silent under suffering seems to be
  the great command a woman has to obey..."

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The Machinations of Power

• In the nineteenth century, any form of social
  change was tantamount to an attack on womans
  virtue.
• For example, dress reform
• In an issue of The Ladies Wreath a young lady is
  represented in dialogue with her "Professor." The
  girl expresses admiration for the bloomer costume
  - it gives freedom of motion, is healthful, and
  attractive. The Professor sets her straight.
  Trousers, he explains, are "only one of the many
  manifestations of that wild spirit of socialism
  and agrarian radicalism which is at present so
  rife in our land..."

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Dress Reform and the New Woman
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Natural Differences

• First wave feminism did not challenge ideologies
  of natural difference, but instead attempted to
  co-opt them. Womens differences were valorized
  and used to create a separate sphere in which
  women were experts, and this expertise was used
  as a reason to include women in public life
  (Lerner, 1994 Tong, 1989).

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The Example of Womens Sports

• Separate and not equal.
• Separate venues
• Women are different, they need their own sport
  that suits womens natural differences.
• Less competitive
• Women should not play sports in front of men-
  exploitation is inevitable.
• Working class and women of color were exempt from
  idealized images of womanhood.
• Sports and Social Mobility
• Sports as a Means of Assimilation
• The Role of Fitness

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Second Wave Feminism- 1960s- Mid 1980s

• The term 'Second Wave' was coined by Marsha Lear,
  and refers to the increase in feminist activity
  which occurred in America, Britain, and Europe
  from the late sixties onwards.
• In America, second wave feminism rose out of the
  Civil Rights and anti-war movements in which
  women, disillusioned with their second-class
  status even in the activist environment of
  student politics, began to band together to
  contend against discrimination.

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Second Wave Feminism- 1960s- Mid 1980s

• Primary focus the need for radical change to
  society (rather than simply winning access to
  it) equality of condition (women and men should
  be treated equally while recognizing their
  differences)
• Demonstrating that the personal is the political
  (for example, domestic violence is a social
  issue, not a private matter)
• Identifying and undermining systemic barriers for
  women (for example, the chilly climate in
  education)
• Revealing and transforming discourses which are
  explicitly or subtly gendered (for example,
  medical research)

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• The tactics employed by Second Wave Feminists
  varied from highly-published activism, such as
  the protest against the Miss America beauty
  contest in 1968, to the establishment of small
  consciousness-raising groups. However, it was
  obvious early on that the movement was not a
  unified one, with differences emerging between
  black feminism, lesbian feminism, liberal
  feminism, and social feminism.

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Natural Difference?

• Difference Feminists
• Equal Rights Feminists

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Difference Feminists

• Some second wave feminists emulated the
  strategies of first wave feminism by seeking to
  define a space for women through difference.
• Physical Essentialism is replaced with Cultural
  Essentialism- Second wave feminists often seek
  a unifying experience to create a universal
  category of woman and to explain womens
  universal oppression. Experiences of female
  subordination, mothering, and womens experience
  in the sexual order are common postulates of
  forms of universal experience.

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Critiques of Difference Feminism

• Working class women and women of color often take
  issue with the idea that there can be a single
  unifying womens experience given the
  intersection of other axes of power like race,
  class, and sexual orientation.
• Additional critiques focus on the fact that while
  there has been much discussion of reproductive
  rights and womens sexuality, assuming a common
  experience has been a tool of oppression
• Others worry about the dangers of positing gender
  difference, and argue that even when based on
  culture, a re-conceptualization of mens and
  womens differences does little to change the
  actual status or experiences of women.

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Equal Opportunity Feminism

• Aimed to equalize opportunity in order to
  eradicate inequities and differences. Examples
  of the latter include discussion of pay
  inequities, reproductive rights, and gender
  inequities in the division of household labor.

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Critique

• Equalizing opportunity by gender does not erase
  inequalities on other axis of oppression.

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Is it a Debate?

• While many have conceptualized current debates
  among feminists as between those who favor the
  valorization of difference and those who favor
  struggles for equal rights, some feminists
  critique the validity of such a framing because
  it necessitates a dichotomous view and debate
  over issues which may not be in opposition to
  each other .

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Natural Difference?

• Gender is socially constructed.
• The Sex-Gender Divide
• Butler- Gender always already informs discourse
  about sex.

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Radical Feminism

• There are many different groups that claim the
  label radical feminism. For this class it is a
  second wave movement that focuses on issues of
  the body.
• These problems are approached differently by
  radical feminist scholars. Initially, radical
  feminist theory had focused on issues of the body
  and sexual oppression of women
• The pornography wars codify some of the problems
  of early radical feminism. Are womens bodies
  always already oppressed in a patriarchal
  culture? Can there be cultural representations
  which are empowering as well as constraining for
  women?

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Sport in the Second Wave

• Women should have equal opportunities and
  equitable quality of experience.
• Title IX
• Changing physical practices means changing bodies
  limits and possibilities.

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The Third Wave (Mid 1980s-Today)

• Primary focus the globalization of feminism
• Examining the ways in which woman is multiply
  constitutedgender, race, nation, class
• Embracing diversity and differences in
  perspectives among women
• The local is global, and the global is local
• Exploring new expressions of feminism,
  particularly by young women not to be equated
  with post-feminism (rejects feminism, but
  supports womens movement)
• Focusing on coalition with others

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Building On, Not Tearing Down

• Third wave feminists are building on the
  contributions of the Second Wave.
• These women get to fight different battles
  because of the success of the Second Wave.
• The Third Wave strives to combat inequalities
  that women face as a result of their age, gender,
  race, sexual orientation, economic status,
  physical ability, or level of education.

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What is Not the Third Wave

• Pretty Power- empowerment through the
  manipulation of consumerist ideologies is not
  third wave feminism.

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Third Wave Contradictions

• Because intersections of class, race, sexuality
  and cultural politics all affect personal
  experience, providing equality of opportunity by
  gender is often undermined, incomplete, or fails
  to address the nature of the opportunities or
  available experiences. Understanding that
  contradictory, competing and paradoxical visions
  and ideologies always inform the movement is
  paramount.
• These contradictions must be politicized as part
  of an ongoing struggle to improve quality of life
  and experience.

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Third Wave Agenda

• Understanding how power affects everyday lived
  experience.
• Incorporating intersections of identity is
  central to the third wave feminist project. The
  goal is to develop modes of thinking that can
  come to terms with multiple and constantly
  shifting bases of oppression, including the
  multiplicity of the factors which make up
  identity.
• Facilitate coalitional politics based on
  understandings that take into account the ways in
  which we are oppressed and we oppress, sometimes
  simultaneously
• Explores the role of cultural production in
  experience, therefore theorizing cultural
  production as action. These actions can be
  simultaneously reproductive, resistant and
  contradictory within this sphere.

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Third Wave Feminism and Sport

• Womens sport simultaneously challenges,
  reproduces and renegotiates the boundaries of
  gender.
• Marketing womens sport-
• Marketablility and femininity- the female
  athletes conundrum

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Multi-Racial Feminism

• Recognizes that a matrix of domination (Collins)
  shapes experiences of women at different social
  locations in very different ways.

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Judy Chicago- Dinner Party

• This is a work of art, triangular in
  configuration, 48 feet on each side, which
  employs numerous media, (including ceramics,
  china-painting, and needlework) to honor women's
  achievements. An immense open table covered with
  fine white cloths is set with 39 place settings,
  thirteen on a side, each commemorating a goddess
  or historic personage important woman.

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Guerrilla Girls
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