Feminismness

Will Satcher
Mrs. Bosch
AP English 12
10 December, 2008
Feminism is the idea in the right of women to have social, political, and economic equivalence with men. It was a journey that involved numerous movements, speculations, and values concerned with the issues of gender differences and promotions for women’s civil liberties and interests. The history of feminism are separated into three sections. The first wave was during the nineteenth and continued to the early twentieth centuries, the second was during the 1960s and 1970s, and the third continues from the 1990s to present-day. Feminist conjectures surfaced from these movements, and are evident in a range of disciplines such as feminist history and feminist literature. Feminist advocates have promoted women's legal liberties (rights of contract, property rights, voting rights, etc.), rights to self-integrity and autonomy, abortion and reproductive rights, protection from household violence, for workplace rights (including maternity leave and equal pay), and in opposition to any additional forms of prejudice.
Throughout a great deal of its history, most feminist engagements and premises had leaders, usually middle-class Caucasian women from Western Europe and North America. However, since Sojourner Truth’s speech to American feminists in 1851, women of other races had (and have) anticipated other feminist movements and ideals. This development hastened in the 60s with the Civil Rights movement in the United States and the fail of European colonialism in Africa, the Caribbean, sections of Latin America, and Southeast Asia. Since then, women in former European colonies and the Third World have proposed "Post-colonial" and "Third World" feminisms. Some “Postcolonial feminists,” such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty, disapprove of Western feminism for being ethnocentric. Black feminists, such as Angela Davis and Alice Walker, also share this view.
Since the 1980s, “Standpoint feminists” have contended that feminism should observe how women's understanding of unfairness relates to that of racism, homophobia, classism, and colonization. In the late 1980s and 1990s, postmodern feminists disputed that gender roles are socially conceived, and that it is out of the question to simply spread a single doctrine of what and how a woman is meant to be across customs and ages. Feminists and scholars have divided the movement's history into three "waves". The first wave is commonly known as the women's suffrage movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, predominantly concerning the woman’s right to vote. The second wave refers to the ideas and events linked with the women's liberation movement beginning in the 1960s, which drove for legal and social equality for women. The third wave refers to the continuance and affects of the perceived failures of second-wave feminism commencing in the 1990s.
Socialist feminism links the repression of women to Marxist ideas about manipulation and labor. Socialist feminists view women as being subdued as a result of their unfair standing in both the workplace and society. Prostitution, domestic labor, childcare, and matrimony are all seen as ways in which women are exploited by a patriarchal structure that undervalues women and the significant efforts on their part. Socialist feminists see the need to work collectively with not only men, but all ethnicities and cultures, as they see the subjugation of women as a piece of a bigger pattern that affects each person concerned with the capitalist system.
Marx believed that when class oppression was defeated, gender oppression would disappear with it. In the ideas of many socialist feminists, however, this observation of gender oppression as a sub-category of class oppression is naïve and a large amount of the efforts of socialist feminists is concentrated on separating gender dealings from class dealings. Some contributors to socialist feminism have condemned these conventional Marxist ideals for being essentially voiceless on gender oppression except to consider it alongside broader class oppression. Other socialist feminists point to the typical Marxist writings “of Frederick Engels and August Bebel as a powerful explanation for the relationship between gender mistreatment and class exploitation.”











Work Cited
Gilligan, Carol. “In a Different Voice: Women's Conception of the Self and of Morality.” Educational Resources Information Center. 1977. December 10, 2008. < _nfpb="true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0="EJ174986&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0="no&accno="EJ174986">

West, Candace; Zimmerman, Don H. “Doing Gender.” Sage Journals Online. June, 1987. December 10, 2008.