Feminism

Feminism. Throughout recorded history, some women have protested their exclusion from full participation in their society's educational, economic, social, cultural, sexual and/or political life. But most have not described themselves as feminists or professed a belief in feminism. The historian Gerda Lerner has addressed this problem by defining feminist consciousness rather than feminism.

From “Feminist Consciousness” to Feminism

. “Feminist consciousness” is especially useful for embracing all those women who, over the centuries, have struggled against patriarchal constraints, but have not acted or written as participants in a larger women's movement. In The Creation of Feminist Consciousness (1993), Lerner defined feminist consciousness as women's awareness “that they belong to a subordinate group; that they have suffered wrongs as a group; that their condition of subordination is not natural, but 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”. Even with this broad definition, most women—including those who have protested women's condition—have not identified themselves as feminists.

The actual word “feminism,” or feminisme, was coined by the French reformer Charles Fourier (1772–1837) in his Théorie des quatres mouvements et des destinées généralises, written sometime between 1808 and 1837. According to historian Karen Offen, Alexandre Dumas the Younger first used the word feministe, pejoratively, in 1872. In 1882, Hubertine Auclert, a French advocate of woman suffrage, began to employ the term and even used it in a letter to the American suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. By the early 1890s, the words had entered common political discourse in Europe; in the London Daily News (1894); and appeared in Latin America, most notably in Argentina. About 1910, it appeared in the United States.

Most nineteenth‐century American suffragists did not refer to themselves as “feminists” or espouse an ideology called “feminism”. Rather, they saw themselves as advocates of women's rights or as suffragists. In 1910, a group of young women in New York City formed a club they called Heterodoxy. In The Grounding of Modern Feminism (1987), historian Nancy Cott describes their commitment to personal emancipation, unconventional behavior, and self‐fulfillment. Although they supported suffrage and other formal rights, they emphasized the individual psychological and social emancipation of women and prefigured the many young women of the 1920s, who similarly sought emancipation in personal realization rather than in any ideology or movement.

Shifting Views of Feminism, 1920–1970

. After the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920, some women in Alice Paul's National Woman's Party called themselves feminists. Many of these women were independently wealthy and/or hostile to other progressive reforms. Some were stridently anti‐Semitic or racist as well. By contrast, Progressive women of the Old Left, civil rights movement, and labor unions, who joined the fight against fascism or organized unskilled workers during the Depression of the 1930s, subsumed feminist issues under the Marxist phrase “The Woman Question”. To them, the word “feminist” conjured up an image of a conservative, wealthy woman who voted Republican, rather than supporting the New Deal, the Communist or Socialist parties, or radical labor unions. During World War II, these same women continued to debate many issues subsumed under “The Woman Question” rubric, but without identifying themselves as feminists or espousing an ideology called feminism.

After the war, the very word “feminist” came to denote an unpatriotic woman who dared challenge the Cold War effort to contain communism. Since women were expected to stay home and fight the Cold War as consumers for their families, feminists, like working women, emerged as major villains at the height of the anticommunist hysteria. During the 1960s, women's rights activists did not commonly use the word “feminism”. Many of the women who founded the National Organization for Women (1966) and who fought legal discrimination against women had deep roots in the progressive politics of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Furthermore, “feminism” still brought to mind images of bourgeois women unconcerned with issues of race, social class, or poverty.

To the younger women who created the highly publicized women's liberation movement in the late 1960s, the word feminism also seemed too tame. Having emerged from the civil rights or New Left movements, they viewed themselves as radicals who were unconcerned with bourgeois feminist issues. The press dubbed all these young activists “Women's Libbers,” a term of disparagement that trivialized the movement and which activists consciously avoided.

Feminism since 1970

. By the 1970s, as the various branches of the women's movement began to fragment and merge, and new populations of American women embraced the women's movement and activists began to refer themselves as “feminists”—sometimes qualified as liberal, radical, socialist, or lesbian. To these activists, the term now expressed their determination to seek emancipation by challenging economic, political, sexual, cultural, and social traditions. In The Politics of Women's Liberation (1975), the political scientist Jo Freeman compared the difference between a “traditional” and “feminist” view of society. Feminists, she argued, recognize the changing, artificial, and highly arbitrary ways that men and women are permitted or denied access to the educational, political, and economic institutions of their society. Traditionalists, by comparison, view the organization of gender in society as normal and natural.

Some feminists emphasized women's rights and demanded equality with men. Others argued that society needed to change to accommodate women and their capacity to bear children, rather than trying to squeeze women's experiences into a male life cycle. From this perspective came the feminist creation of “family‐friendly” work policies that could embrace women both as workers and as mothers.

As women of various minority groups analyzed their own subordinate position within their communities, some resisted the word “feminism,” viewing it as a “family quarrel” among white, middle‐class women. In 1983, the African‐American writer Alice Walker coined the term “womanism” to express the needs and aspirations of women of color. The word “womanist,” she explained, grew out of a black folk expression that mothers often used with their daughters. “You acting womanish,” a mother would say, meaning that the youngster was engaging in outrageous, audacious, or willful behavior. Minority women, many of whom had never been schooled in learned helplessness, Walker felt, could better express their desire for equality and freedom with this term. Not all minority women agreed, but the phrase did gain some currency.

With the conservative backlash of the 1970s and beyond, the phrase “I'm not a feminist, but” became almost mandatory for women political candidates and other women entering the public arena, distancing them from media‐generated stereotypes of man‐hating superwomen, even as they worked for feminist goals.

By the 1980s and 1990s, many different populations of women—old, young, trade unionists, displaced homemakers— had reinvented feminism to address the specific realities of their lives. Four United Nations’ World Women's Conferences convened in 1975 (Mexico City), 1980 (Copenhagen), 1985 (Nairobi), and 1995 (Beijing), further broadened the term, so that “feminism” no longer belonged to American women or indeed to any particular society. The Platform for Action adopted by the Beijing conference urged all nations to view all social, political, economic, cultural, and military policies “through the eyes of women”. This meant thinking about development, population control, human rights, and other global issues as if women mattered. In Africa, for example, fuel and water and the ritual mutilation of the body became feminist issues. In other areas, feminist concerns included dowry deaths, domestic violence, child labor, and the traffic in sexual slaves.

With the spread of feminist perspectives to many nations, often referred to as “global feminism,” these transnational feminist networks promoted the improvement of women's lives in countless ways. Though activists debated many issues, they all tended to emphasize that equality for women required an end to violence and poverty, and access to education. That, in the end, constituted the broadest and most inclusive description of feminism as the twenty‐first century began.
See also Antebellum Era; Anticommunism; Conservatism; Consumer Culture; Domestic Labor; Feminine Mystique, The; Fuller, Margaret; Gillman, Charlotte Perkins; Labor Movements; National American Woman Suffrage Association; New Deal Era, The; Prostitution and Antiprostitution; Radicalism; Socialism; Stone, Lucy; Twenties, The; Woman Suffrage Movement; Women in the Labor Force; Women's Rights Movement; Women's Trade Union League.

Bibliography

bell hooks , Ain't I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism, 1983.
Alice Walker , In Search of Our Mothers’ Garden, 1983.
Nancy Cott , The Grounding Of Modern Feminism, 1987.
Karen Offen , Defining Feminism: A Comparative Historical Approach, Signs 14 (autumn 1988): 119–57.
Karen Offen , On the French Origin of the Word Feminism and Feminist, Feminist Studies 8.2 (Fall 1988): 45–61.
Linda Kauffman , American Feminist Thought at Century's End, 1993.
Gerda Lerner , The Creation of Feminist Consciousness, 1993.
Joan Scott , Feminism and History, 1996.
Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, eds., Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Crticism, 2d ed., 1997.
Ruth Rosen , The World Split Open: How The Modern Women's Movement Changed America, 2000.

Ruth Rosen