Feminism
[21] The word "féminisme" ("feminism") first appeared in France in 1871 in a medicine thesis about men suffering from tuberculosis and having developed, according to the author Ferdinand-Valère Faneau de la Cour, feminine traits.
[37] Additionally, some have argued for the existence of a fourth wave,[38] starting around 2012, which has used social media to combat sexual harassment, violence against women and rape culture; it is best known for the Me Too movement.
"[48] In the US, notable leaders of this movement included Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony, who each campaigned for the abolition of slavery before championing women's right to vote.
[49] They were also influenced by earlier American feminist thought leaders Judith Sargent Murray, John Neal, Sarah Moore Grimké, and Margaret Fuller.
In May 1947, following the November 1946 elections, the sociologist Robert Verdier minimized the "gender gap", stating in Le Populaire that women had not voted in a consistent way, dividing themselves, as men, according to social classes.
[60] In 1956, President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt initiated "state feminism", which outlawed discrimination based on gender and granted women's suffrage, but also blocked political activism by feminist leaders.
Third-wave feminism is traced to the emergence of the riot grrrl feminist punk subculture in Olympia, Washington, in the early 1990s,[86][87] and to Anita Hill's televised testimony in 1991—to an all-male, all-white Senate Judiciary Committee—that Clarence Thomas, nominated for the Supreme Court of the United States, had sexually harassed her.
[96] Since the 1980s, standpoint feminists have argued that the feminist movement should address global issues (such as rape, incest, and prostitution) and culturally specific issues (such as female genital mutilation in some parts of Africa and Arab societies, as well as glass ceiling practices that impede women's advancement in developed economies) in order to understand how gender inequality interacts with racism, homophobia, classism and colonization in a "matrix of domination".
[101] Fourth-wave feminism is "defined by technology", according to Kira Cochrane, and is characterized particularly by the use of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and blogs such as Feministing to challenge misogyny and further gender equality.
The term was first used to describe a backlash against second-wave feminism, but it is now a label for a wide range of theories that take critical approaches to previous feminist discourses and includes challenges to the second wave's ideas.
[10] Rosemary Hennessy and Chrys Ingraham say that materialist forms of feminism grew out of Western Marxist thought and have inspired a number of different (but overlapping) movements, all of which are involved in a critique of capitalism and are focused on ideology's relationship to women.
[97] This trend accelerated in the 1960s with the civil rights movement in the United States and the end of Western European colonialism in Africa, the Caribbean, parts of Latin America, and Southeast Asia.
[144] In the late 20th century various feminists began to argue that gender roles are socially constructed,[145][146] and that it is impossible to generalize women's experiences across cultures and histories.
[187] In this view, banning the sex industry effectively strips women of their right to work and earn money on their own terms, treating them as children who cannot make decisions for themselves.
Some radical feminists argue that all cultures are, in one way or another, dominated by ideologies that deny women's right to sexual expression, because men under a patriarchy define sex on their own terms.
[215] Feminist artist Judy Chicago, who created The Dinner Party, a set of vulva-themed ceramic plates in the 1970s, said in 2009 to ARTnews, "There is still an institutional lag and an insistence on a male Eurocentric narrative.
"[216] A feminist approach to the visual arts has most recently developed through cyberfeminism and the posthuman turn, giving voice to the ways "contemporary female artists are dealing with gender, social media and the notion of embodiment".
In Western feminist literary scholarship, Studies like Dale Spender's Mothers of the Novel (1986) and Jane Spencer's The Rise of the Woman Novelist (1986) were ground-breaking in their insistence that women have always been writing.
[224] Notable texts of this kind are Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Joanna Russ' The Female Man (1970), Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979) and Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale (1985).
For example, Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was extremely influential, as it represented the specific racism and sexism experienced by black women growing up in the United States.
[236] Through the 1980s and 1990s, this trend continued as musicologists like Susan McClary, Marcia Citron and Ruth Solie began to consider the cultural reasons for the marginalizing of women from the received body of work.
[260] Feminists in Ireland in the early 20th century included the revolutionary Irish Republican, suffragette and socialist Constance Markievicz who in 1918 was the first woman elected to the British House of Commons.
This demand was particularly championed by special Fascist women's auxiliary groups such as the fasci femminilli and only partly realized in 1925, under pressure from dictator Benito Mussolini's more conservative coalition partners.
[266] However, Hitler and Mussolini declared themselves as opposed to feminism,[266] and after the rise of Nazism in Germany in 1933, there was a rapid dissolution of the political rights and economic opportunities that feminists had fought for during the pre-war period and to some extent during the 1920s.
[275]: 186–98 Neoliberalism has failed to address significant problems such as the devaluation of feminized labour, the structural privileging of men and masculinity, and the politicization of women's subordination in the family and the workplace.
[274]: 180 Social constructs about feminized labour have played a big part in this, for instance, employers often perpetuate ideas about women as 'secondary income earners to justify their lower rates of pay and not deserving of training or promotion.
[285] Feminist jurisprudence signifies a reaction to the philosophical approach of modern legal scholars, who typically see the law as a process for interpreting and perpetuating a society's universal, gender-neutral ideals.
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.
[330][331] Writers such as Camille Paglia, Christina Hoff Sommers, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, and Daphne Patai oppose some forms of feminism, though they identify as feminists.
[336][337] Humanism played a significant role in protofeminism during the Renaissance period in such that humanists made educated women popular figures despite the challenge of the patriarchal organization of society.
