Feminist movement
First-wave feminism was oriented around the station of middle- or upper-class white women and involved suffrage and political equality, education, right to property, organizational leadership, and marital freedoms.
Author Mary Wollstonecraft wrote of the lesser sex in her 1792 novels A Vindication of the Rights of Woman & A Vindication of the Rights of Men, "..for, like the flowers which are planted in too rich a soil, strength and usefulness are sacrificed to beauty; and the flaunting leaves, after having pleased a fastidious eye, fade, disregarded on the stalk, long before the season when they ought to have arrived at maturity.
[11] General topics of feminist coalition politics include lack of legal rights, poverty, medical vulnerability, and labor.
The armed crowd then marched to the Palace of Versailles to draw King Louis XVI's attention to the high prices and food shortages.
[7] She went on to write about the Law of Nature and the desire for women to present more as themselves, and demand respect and equality from their male counterparts, "...men endeavor to sink us still lower, merely to render us alluring objects for a moment; and women, intoxicated by the adoration which men, under the influence of their senses, pay them, do not see, to obtain a durable interest in their hearts, or to become the friends of the fellow-creatures who find amusement in their society"(Wollstonecraft 2008, p. 10).
[22] Feminist thought began to take a more substantial shape during the Enlightenment with such thinkers as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Marquis de Condorcet championing women's education.
The first suffragette parade, which was also the first civil rights march on Washington, was coordinated by Alice Paul and the National American Suffrage Association.
Contributors to The Women's Liberation Movement include Simone de Beauvoir, Christiane Rochefort, Christine Delphy and Anne Tristan.
The defining moment in the 1960s was a demonstration held to protest against the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City on 7 September 1968, termed the "cattle parade".
Harriet Kimble Wrye PhD, ABPP, FIPA wrote of her research on the psychoanalytic perspectives of being a feminist in the twentieth century, "So many of us look back, and recognizing the pressures under which we struggled, wonder how we did what we did and at what price.
[35] Anita Hill, who was a law professor at the time accused Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of persistent sexual harassment.
Though the case was dismissed, it encouraged other women to speak out on their own experiences which led to Congress passing the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which gave legal action against workplace sexual harassment.
[36] The United Nations Human Development Report 2004 estimated that when both paid employment and unpaid household tasks are accounted for, on average women work more than men.
However, men did up to 19 minutes more work per day than women in five out of the eighteen OECD countries surveyed: Canada, Denmark, Hungary, Israel, and The Netherlands.
The foot-binding costume had long been established in China which was an act to display the beauty and social status of women by binding their feet into an extremely small shoe with good decorations and ornaments.
[43] Liang Qichao proposed the abolishment of this act due to concern the health of female being a supportive wives and caring mothers.
He also proposed to reduce the number of female dependents in family and encouraged women to receive the rights of education and enter the workforce to be economic independent from men and finally help the nation to reach higher wealth and prosperity.
[42] Key female feminists in China in the 19th to 20th century included Lin Zongsu, He Zhen, Chen Xiefen and Qiu Jin.
The female feminists in early China focused more on the methods or ways that women should behave and liberate themselves to achieve equal and deserved rights and independence.
He Zhen expressed her opinion that women's liberation was not correlated to the interest of the nation and she analysed three reasons behind the male feminists included: following the Western trend, to alleviate their financial burdens and high quality of reproduction.
[47][48] Feminist writer Cathy Young responds to Hochschild's assertions by arguing that, in some cases, women may prevent the equal participation of men in housework and parenting.
[49] Economists Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst calculate that the amount of time spent on housework by women since the 1960s has dropped considerably.
Jeremy Greenwood, Ananth Seshadri and Mehmet Yorukoglu argue that the introduction of modern appliances into the home has allowed women to enter the work force.
[51][52] Feminist criticisms of men's contributions to child care and domestic labor in the Western middle class are typically centered around the idea that it is unfair for women to be expected to perform more than half of a household's domestic work and child care when both members of the relationship perform an equal share of work outside the home.
Several studies provide statistical evidence that the financial income of married men does not affect their rate of attending to household duties.
[53][54] In Dubious Conceptions, Kristin Luker discusses the effect of feminism on teenage girls' choices to bear children, both in and out of wedlock.
In some of these groups, some women are gradually obtaining positions of power that were formerly only held by men, and their perspectives are now sought out in developing new statements of belief.
While there is no standard set of beliefs among Christian feminists, most agree that God does not discriminate on the basis of biologically determined characteristics such as sex.
However, the Christian feminist movement chose to concentrate on the language of religion because they viewed the historic gendering of God as male as a result of the pervasive influence of patriarchy.
According to Judith Plaskow, who has focused on feminism in Reform Judaism, the main issues for early Jewish feminists in these movements were the exclusion from the all-male prayer group or minyan, the exemption from positive time-bound mitzvot, and women's inability to function as witnesses and to initiate divorce.
