Feminism

Feminism, reform movement aiming at the social, educational, and political equality of women with men, which arose during the late 18th century. The first great document of feminism was the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), by the English author Mary Wollstonecraft. American women, including Abigail Adams and Mercy Otis Warren, were just as early in agitating that the Constitution specifically state the rights of women. Later prominent leaders in America included Emma Willard, who wrote a Plan for Improving Female Education (1819); Margaret Fuller, who wrote Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845); and Harriet Farley, who edited the Lowell Offering. As an early result of feminist agitation, Oberlin College was the first institution of higher learning to grant degrees to women (1837). After the convention led by Elizabeth Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and others (1848), the movement became a predominantly political one for woman suffrage. With suffrage gained by the 19th Amendment (1920), further work for women's rights moved spasmodically and, on the whole, slowly. It finally became dynamic in the 1960s with the creation of the National Organization for Women (NOW) as a leader of the cause of feminism, thereafter called Women's Liberation. A major thrust was toward passage of an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution, although it failed, but that was only part of a large movement for social changes rather than mere political action as women worked for full equality in every way, socially, legally, educationally, commercially, and sexually. Outstanding expositions of the so‐called Women's Lib include The Feminine Mystique (1963) by Betty Friedan and Sexual Politics (1970) by Kate Millett, but there are many other champions of the cause and journals for it, like Ms., founded in 1971 by Gloria Steinem and others. Aspects of the feminist dynamic have become more evident in diverse ways by women writers of very various sorts, ranging, for example, over the warm‐hearted autobiographies of Maya Angelou, the sociopolitical essays and fiction of Renata Adler, the personal poetic statements of Anne Sexton, and the frank expressions of sexuality and individual independence of Erica Jong.