First-wave feminism
First-wave feminism was a period of feminist activity and thought that occurred during the 19th and early 20th century throughout the Western world. It focused on legal issues, primarily on securing women's right to vote. The term is often used synonymously with the kind of feminism espoused by the liberal women's rights movement with roots in the first wave, with organizations such as the International Alliance of Women and its affiliates. This feminist movement still focuses on equality from a mainly legal perspective.[1]
The term first-wave feminism itself was coined by journalist Martha Lear in a New York Times Magazine article in March 1968, "The Second Feminist Wave: What do these women want?"[2][3][4] First- wave feminism is characterized as focusing on the fight for women's political power, as opposed to de facto unofficial inequalities. The wave metaphor is well established, including in academic literature, but has been criticized for creating a narrow view of women's liberation that erases the lineage of activism and focuses on specific visible actors.[5] The term "first-wave" and, more broadly, the wave model have been questioned when referencing women's movements in non Western contexts because the periodization and the development of the terminology were entirely based on the happenings of western feminism and thus cannot be applied to non western events in an exact manner. However, women participating in political activism for gender equity modeled their plans on western feminists demands for legal rights. This is connected to the western first-wave and occurred in the late 19th century and continued into the 1930s in connection to the anti-colonial nationalist movement.
Global terminologies[edit]
The issues of inclusion that began during the first-wave of the feminist movement in the United States and persisted throughout subsequent waves of feminism are the topic of much discussion on an academic level. Some scholars find the wave model of western feminism to be troubling because it condenses a long history of activism into distinct categories that characterize generations of activists instead of acknowledging a complex, interconnected, and intersectional history of women's rights. This is thought to diminish the struggles and achievements of many people as well as worsen the separations between marginalized feminists.[6] The points of contention that persist in modern discussions of Western and global feminism began with the inequity that hallmarked first-wave feminism. The way in which the west has been oriented as an authority in global feminist discussions has been criticized by feminists in the United States such as bell hooks for replicating colonial hierarchies of discussion, possession of knowledge and centering gender as the foundation of equality.[7] The idea of decolonizing feminism is a response to the political and intellectual position of power western feminism holds. By acknowledging that there are multiple feminisms around the world the narrow scope and lack of consideration for intersectional identities that has persisted since first-wave feminism in the west is responded to. The existence of multiple feminisms and forms of activism is a result of the first-wave of feminism being shaped by a history of colonialism and imperialism.[8]
Education[edit]
Education amongst young Swiss women was very important during the suffrage movements. Educating young women in society on the importance of self-identity, and going to school was very important to the public and for women to realize what their full potential was. The Swiss suffrage movements believed it was important for young women to know that there was more to their life than just bearing children, which was a very universal thought and action during the suffrage movements in the 1960s and 70s. In a 2015 evaluation from Lord David Willetts, he had discovered and stated that in 2013 the percentage of undergraduate students in the UK were 54 percent females and 46 percent were male undergrads. Whereas in the 1960s only 25 percent of full-time students in the United Kingdom were females. The increase of females going to school and contributing in the educational system can be linked to the women's suffrage movements that aimed to encourage women to enroll in school for higher education.[15] This right and political affair eventually came after the right for women to vote in political elections which was granted in 1971. In the 1960s in the United Kingdom, women were usually the minority and a rarity when it came to the higher education system.
Country[edit]
Argentina[edit]
During the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth century, women in Argentina organized and consolidated one of the most complex feminist movements of the western world. Closely associated with the labor movement, they were socialists, anarchists, libertarians, emancipatorians, educationists and Catholics. In May 1910 they organized together the First International Feminist Congress. Well known European, Latin, and North American workers, intellectuals, thinkers and professionals like Marie Curie, Emilia Pardo Bazán, Ellen Key, Maria Montessori and many others presented and discussed their ideas research work and studies on themes of gender, political and civil right, divorce, economy, education, health and culture.
Australia[edit]
In 1882, Rose Scott, a women's rights activist, began to hold weekly salon meetings in her Sydney home left to her by her late mother. Through these meetings, she became well known amongst politicians, judges, philanthropists, writers and poets. In 1889, she helped to found the Women's Literary Society, which later grew into the Womanhood Suffrage League in 1891. Leading politicians hosted by Scott included Bernhard Wise, William Holman, William Morris Hughes and Thomas Bavin, who met and discussed the drafting of the bill that eventually became the Early Closing Act of 1899.[16]
Canada[edit]
Canada's first-wave of feminism became apparent in the late 19th century into the early 20th. The build up of women's movements started as consciously raising awareness, then turned into study groups, and resulted into taking action by forming committees. The premise of the movement began around education issues. The particular reason education is targeted as a high priority is because it can target younger generations and modify their gender-based opinions.[17] In 1865 the superintendent of an Ontario public school, Egerton Ryerson, was one of the first to point out the exclusion of females from the education system. As more females attended school throughout the years, they surpassed the male graduation rate. In 1880 British Columbia, 51% high school graduates were female. These percentages continued to increase right through to 1950.[17] Other reasons for the first feminist movement involved women's suffrage, and labour and health rights; thus, feminists narrowed their campaigns to focus on gaining legal and political equity.[18] Canada took action in the International Council of Women and has a specific section called the National Council of Women in Canada, with its president, Lady Aberdeen. Women started to look outside of groups such as garden and music clubs, and dive into reforms furthering better education and suffrage. It was behind the idea that the women would be more powerful if they joined to create a united voice.[19]
China[edit]
In the 1880s and 1890s, both male and female Chinese reformist intellectuals, concerned with the development of China to a modern country, raised feminist issues and gender equality in public debate; schools for girls were founded, a feminist press emerged, and the Foot Emancipation Society and Tian Zu Hui, promoting the abolition of foot binding.[20]
Many changes in women's lives took place during the Republic of China (1912–1949). In 1912 the Women's Suffrage Alliance, an umbrella organization of many local women's organizations, was founded to work for the inclusion of women's equal rights and suffrage in the constitution of the new republic after the abolition of the monarchy, and while the effort was not successful, it signified an important period of feminism activism.[21]
A generation of educated and professional new women emerged after the inclusion of girls in the state school system and after women students were accted at the University of Beijing in 1920, and in the 1931 Civil Code, women were given equal inheritance rights, banned forced marriage and gave women the right to control their own money and initiate divorce.[22]
No nationally unified women's movement could organize until China was unified under the Kuomintang Government in Nanjing in 1928; women's suffrage was finally included in the new Constitution of 1936, although the constitution was not implemented until 1947.[23]
Denmark[edit]
The first women's movement was led by the Dansk Kvindesamfund ("Danish Women's Society"), founded in 1871. Line Luplau was one of the most notable woman in this era. Tagea Brandt was also part of this movement, and in her honor was established the Tagea Brandt Rejselegat or Travel Scholarship for women. The Dansk Kvindesamfund's efforts as a leading group of women for women led to the existence of the revised Danish constitution of 1915, giving women the right to vote and the provision of equal opportunity laws during the 1920s, which influenced the present-day legislative measures to grant women access to education, work, marital rights and other obligations.[24]
Criticism[edit]
Problems of conflicting interests, of the always-permeable dichotomies of hegemony and resistance, of internal contradictions and inadequacies within the notions of the "human," "rights," "freedom," and "liberalism," shaped 19th- and early 20th-century feminist ideology and praxis and continue to resonate in debates over gender, "race," class, and sexuality today. For Kyla Schuller in The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century, "biopower is feminism's enabling condition ... movements for gender equality have materialized amid a field of power in which, at least since Malthus, the interdependence of reproduction and economics forms the primary field of the political."[230] Schuller argues that "[the] evolutionary notion of the distinct sexes of male and female, understood as specialized divergences in physiology, anatomy, and mental function that only the most civilized had achieved, was itself a racial hierarchy ... the very idea of sex as a biological and political subjectivity is a product of the biopolitical logics unfolding hand in hand with the sciences of species change."[230] Schuller quotes Canadian philosopher Michelle Murphy in Seizing the Means of Reproduction: Entanglements of Feminism, Health, and Technoscience: "Historicizing feminisms as a biopolitics that has taken 'sex,' and its subsidiary, 'reproduction,' as central concerns requires that we understand feminisms in all their variety and contradiction as animated within - and not escaping from - dominant configurations of governance and technoscience."[230] From this perspective, 19th- and early 20th-century feminisms reproduced the very social hierarchies they had the potential to struggle against, exemplifying the claim of Michel Foucault in his The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction that "resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power."[231]
First-wave feminism offered no intersectional perspective. Gender was not thought of as a social construction, nor was the roles that each gender plays thought of as sexist.[232] This time period also focused on biological differences, and that only the way to be considered a woman was through biology or sex.[233] It did not consider and fight for women of color, or women of lower socioeconomic status.[234] It also reinforced and made colonization stronger, as well increasing the eroticization of women from different nations.[234] First-wave theorists also leave out all of the activism women of color contributed. Activists like Maria Stewart, and Frances E. W. Harper are hardly mentioned with any credit for the abolitionist or suffrage movements during this time period.[235][236] First wave feminism is male centric meaning it was made in the form of the way men see women.[234] Another issue with First-Wave feminism is that the white, middle-class women were able to decide what is a woman problem and what is not.[237] First-wave lacked the sexual freedom women aspired to have but could not have while men could.[238] It is also said that many of the white fundamental First Wave feminists were in alliance with women of color but stayed silent when they figured they could reach progression for middle class, white women.[239]