“Okoloma looked at me and said, ‘You know, you’re a feminist.’ It was not a compliment. I could tell from his tone – the same tone with which a person would say, ‘You’re a supporter of terrorism,” said Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her Ted Talk and then later, essay, We should all be Feminists (Adichie, 2014).
It was a speech that I came to realise was much more prevalent in the world than just in Africa, where the Nigerian born author talks about. Although Adichie shares the negative comparison of being a feminist as to being a terrorist in a humorous approach in her Ted Talk (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: We should all be feminists | TED Talk, 2012), the written script got me thinking about how the battle for equality between the sexes and for women’s rights is so widely interpreted by so many different people.
Feminism has been an ongoing discussion for years gone by and a problem with understanding it may well be the fact that the viewpoints and beliefs of it have changed over time, creating ‘waves’ of feminism. Many have come to view the ‘wave’ terminology as being a metaphor used to describe the three, or potentially four, era’s which important movements came out of, however, we must remember that these waves of feminism were based more around goals and ideals rather than any time frame (Sheber, 2017).
There is conversation on the first realms of feminism coming from a range of women, varying from ancient Greece with Sappho (d. c. 570 BC), the first female poet, to medieval times with Hildegard of Bingen (d. 1179) the saint, composer and writer (The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1998; Talking About: Why Sappho Might Be the World’s First Feminist — Truths + Edits, 2018) to more recent a time with Jane Austen (d.1817), the English novelist. However, these women were considered to be the founding foremothers, as they focused on changing history to include women narratives and promoting the potential of the female sex, rather than the founders of movements and fighting for equal rights (Rampton, 2008; Weber, 2019).
The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the turn of the first wave of feminism in Britain and the rest of the world. The objective was to open up opportunities for women in education, employment, and politics but concentrated mostly on suffrage (Block, 2010). The women who supported it, the ‘suffragists’, practised peaceful protests over what they felt was important, political citizenship, although topics such as equal pay, property rights within marriage, control over fertility, domestic violence and the right to divorce were also introduced. The women in the United States of America began this first wave of feminism in 1848 with the Seneca Falls Convention, which eventually led to women gaining the right to vote in 1920 (Seneca Falls Convention – HISTORY, 2017).
In its early stages, feminism was highly interlinked with other social movements going on at the same time, which in a way could be seen as a stepping stone towards their fight for equality and freedom for women. The one movement was the temperance charge. This came about in the early 1800’s to limit drinking in the United States due to men ‘damaging the home through their consumption of alcohol’. It was said that drinking also encouraged the men to squander their money away and commit violence (Weber, 2019) and women at the time were extremely drawn to the movement as it was seen to be an end to a phenomenon that affected women’s quality of life (Rampton, 2008). Another extremely important movement, was the Abolitionist movement. It fell around the same time as the first wave and both the movements worked towards social reform and liberation from oppression (Anand, 2018).
A few years later in the United Kingdom, women formed their own improved version of the ‘suffragists’ and became famously known as the ‘suffragettes’. The Women’s Social and Political Union was founded by Emmeline Pankhurst in 1903 with their slogan being, ‘Deeds Not Words’. The group made sure it used extreme methods to make sure their voices were heard and was sometimes thought of as ‘radical and militant’ (Weber, 2019), as these women stopped at nothing to be heard and would smash windows, confront police and officials, chain themselves to the buildings and forego hunger strikes during the times they were imprisoned (Biography.com website, 2014). The women were granted limited suffrage in 1918 and were eventually given the full right to vote in 1928.
The second wave of feminism appeared around the 1960’s towards the late 1980’s. This wave came after the end of World War II where women’s focus shifted from political liberation and moved towards the economic and personal, including reproductive rights and violence against women and evoked a sense of ‘sisterhood’ (Pankhurst, 2018).
Many of the thoughts which accounted for this wave in both the United States and Britain were influenced by the fact that fundamental change had not followed on after the right to vote. Another large factor in the US was the reach of Betty Friedan’s 1963 best-selling book, The Feminine Mystique. This book criticised the fact that women could only find true satisfaction through childbearing and homemaking and claimed that women were victims in the homes and being deprived of their own lives (Binard and Florence, 2017). Friedan’s book had a unifying goal which brought women together, the concept that they were not only after political equality, like the first wavers had fought for, but after a social equality too. They adopted the phrase by Carol Hanisch, “The Personal is Political” and moved to change society’s view on women (Grady, 2018).
A revolutionary mark for this second wave was in 1968 at the Miss America pageant. Feminists gathered together to protest against the demeaning and belittling attitude towards women. As part of the protest, the women ceremoniously threw away objects that they felt defined women into a rubbish bin on the sidewalk. These included mops, brooms, cosmetics, playboy magazines and a few bras. Hence why ‘bra burning’ is often affiliated with this wave, despite there being no actual burning. It was a media generated idea which has long lived on in a negative regard to the word feminist, but as has the second wave in general with many referring to feminists of that time as man-hating, angry, lesbian and lonely (Grady, 2018).
The wave concentrated to rid society of sexism and was seen to create a new attitude throughout all of the population, men included, on the role of women in day to day life and how their sexuality should not be portrayed as decorative, nor domestic. Many notable developments came about throughout this period, some of those which include the introduction of the Contraceptive Pill (1961) and the passing of the Sex Discrimination Act (1975) in the UK and The Equal Pay Act (1963) and the right to educational equality in the US.
Despite this wave being increasingly radical, seeking sisterhood and solidarity, it did not, however, account for all women (Rampton, 2008). This historical wave was said to include race, but did not include the non-white, lower class women. It is only sometimes referred to, as Chela Sandoval refers to it, as being “hegemonic feminism” (Thompson, 2002), but it was a large contributing factor to the onset of the third wave.
In the mid 1990’s women began the third wave of feminism almost as a revolt of the failures of their mothers during the second wave, questioning the rise of women in all classes. It is shown that this third wave proved to be more academically thought out and deemed to challenge the ideologies which came out of the second wave. The women argued that the experiences of the upper middle-class women had been over-emphasized, and that class, race, ethnicity, religion, gender and nationality were all significant factors to be taken into consideration when discussing feminism. Intersectionality became of huge importance for this wave and they explored the importance of how much more complicated, for example, it was to be a black women, versus being a white woman (Ohio Humanities, 2018).
The third wave feminists were also more aware of gender constructs and how society created these gender specific roles and were therefore more open to other identities outside of cisgender and began to drop the idea of sisterhood and include queer and trans individuals, promoting feminism defined by the individual (Sheber, 2017). This wave of women seemed to be less rigid and judgemental than the women of the second wave, which was often seen as antimale, antisex and antifemininity. They managed to take back the sexual image they had lost to the second wave and played with femininity and identity while claiming sexuality and sexual pleasure for themselves rather than as a male oppression as it was seen before (Snyder, 2008). Make-up, push up bras and heels were embraced, bringing forth the idea that intellect and femininity could work together.
The women created a powerful and domineering stand to the topic of feminism all while continuing the efforts of the second wave movement, however, the wave metaphor had proved to have its limitations. The third wave had no specific movement and did not describe themselves as being a group with common grievances. The women (and men) of that era accepted that they were supporting equal rights for all but did not want the term feminism to define them (Rampton, 2008). Postfeminist ideas were construed from this era, whereby many, if not all, of the goals of feminism had been ‘complete’ and any further repetitions of it were believed unnecessary.
These postfeminist ideas came about due to a lack of support for feminism. It was becoming decreasingly popular all while an ‘anti-feminist’ response was increasing and having gained the right to vote, being given reproductive rights and achieving places of power in different fields meant that their successes no longer needed the feminist movement and that they were now more concerned about individual equal rights. Another ethos, that of Hall and Rodriguez, calls postfeminism the ‘no, but’ conception. This was an ambivalence between feminism and postfeminism whereby women did not want to be referred to as feminists, but still stood up for the feminist ideologies such as equal pay. The term ‘postfeminist’ became a slightly negative connotation by feminist critics and was sometimes used as an accusation against the unsatisfactory works of ‘feminist’ scholars who would often be seen as hostile and enemies of men (Gill, 2007; The CanLit Guides Editorial Team, 2013).
The whole concept it still in a slightly grey space and quite contradictory and accusatory, while it is sometimes regarded as a media phenomenon or as a backlash against feminism, at other times, it is seen to be a radical new way that young females were engaging in activism and feminist theories. Hall and Rodriguez discuss that the postfeminism era is alive due to the media but a comprehensive definition for it, does not exist. Some articles say that feminism is dead, and some conclude that it’s having an identity crisis (Hall and Rodriguez, 2003).
Nevertheless, we can state that feminism is indeed live and well, as a fourth wave is currently underway and driving itself forward in the global wave fuelled by social media. It is loosely pegged to have begun around 2009 and 2010 and is seen to be emerging due to many women and (some) men realising that the third wave and in turn, postfeminism, is extremely optimistic and somewhat hampered by blindness. The fourth wave’s most prominent feature is its use of social media and the internet. It has created a space where a ‘call out’ culture is involved, not just for academics, but individuals from all walks of life (Sheber, 2017).
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