Second-wave feminism
Second-wave feminism was a period of feminist activity that began in the early 1960s and lasted roughly two decades, ending with the feminist sex wars in the early 1980s[1] and being replaced by third-wave feminism in the early 1990s.[2] It occurred throughout the Western world and aimed to increase women's equality by building on the feminist gains of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Second-wave feminism built on first-wave feminism and broadened the scope of debate to include a wider range of issues: sexuality, family, domesticity, the workplace, reproductive rights, de facto inequalities, and official legal inequalities.[3] It was a movement focused on critiquing patriarchal or male-dominated institutions and cultural practices throughout society.[4] Second-wave feminism also brought attention to issues of domestic violence and marital rape, created rape crisis centers and women's shelters, and brought about changes in custody law and divorce law. Feminist-owned bookstores, credit unions, and restaurants were among the key meeting spaces and economic engines of the movement.[5]
Because white feminists' voices have dominated the narrative from the early days of the movement, typical narratives of second-wave feminism focus on the sexism encountered by white middle- and upper-class women, with the absence of black and other women of color and the experience of working-class women. Although women of color wrote and founded feminist political activist groups throughout the movement, especially in the 1970s.[6] At the same time some narratives present a perspective that focuses on events in the United States to the exclusion of the experiences of other countries.
The second wave ignored women's differences. Although they were all women grappling with the issue of sexism in a patriarchal society, feminism in some tropical countries is still very underdeveloped due to the different experiences of sexism encountered by women of different regional races.[7] Writers like Audre Lorde think critically and try to homogenize "sisterhood" while ignoring all factors of one's identity such as race, sexuality, age, and class.[8] The term "intersectionality" was not coined until 1989 by Kimberlé Crenshaw at the end of the second wave. At the same time, many scholars believe that the beginning of third wave feminism was due to the problems of the second wave, rather than just another movement.[7]
Businesses[edit]
Feminist activists have established a range of feminist businesses, including women's bookstores, feminist credit unions, feminist presses, feminist mail-order catalogs, feminist restaurants, and feminist record labels. These businesses flourished as part of the second and third waves of feminism in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.[85][86]
In West Berlin sixteen projects emerged within three years (1974–76)[87] all without state funding (except the women's shelter). Many of those new concepts the social economy picked up later, some are still run autonomously today.[88][89]
Social changes[edit]
Use of birth control[edit]
Finding a need to talk about the advantage of the Food and Drug Administration passing their approval for the use of birth control in 1960, liberal feminists took action in creating panels and workshops with the goal to promote conscious raising among sexually active women. These workshops also brought attention to issues such as venereal diseases and safe abortion.[122] Radical feminists also joined this push to raise awareness among sexually active women. While supporting the "Free Love Movement" of the late 1960s and early 1970s, young women on college campuses distributed pamphlets on birth control, sexual diseases, abortion, and cohabitation.[123]
While white women were concerned with obtaining birth control for all, women of color were at risk of sterilization because of these same medical and social advances: "Native American, African American, and Latina groups documented and publicized sterilization abuses in their communities in the 1960s and 70s, showing that women had been sterilized without their knowledge or consent... In the 1970s, a group of women... founded the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse (CESA) to stop this racist population control policy begun by the federal government in the 1940s – a policy that had resulted in the sterilization of over one-third of all women of child-bearing age in Puerto Rico."[124] The use of forced sterilization disproportionately affected women of color and women from lower socioeconomic statuses. Sterilization was often done under the ideology of eugenics. Thirty states within the United States authorized legal sterilizations under eugenic sciences.[125]
Domestic violence and sexual harassment[edit]
The second-wave feminist movement also took a strong stance against physical violence and sexual assault in both the home and the workplace. In 1968, NOW successfully lobbied the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to pass an amendment to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prevented discrimination based on sex in the workplace.[126] This attention to women's rights in the workplace also prompted the EEOC to add sexual harassment to its "Guidelines on Discrimination", therefore giving women the right to report their bosses and coworkers for acts of sexual assault.
Domestic violence, such as battery and rape, were rampant in post-war America. Married women were often abused by their husbands, and as late as 1975 domestic battery and rape were both socially acceptable and legal as women were seen to be the possessions of their husbands.[127] Because of activists in the second-wave feminist movement, and the local law enforcement agencies that they worked with, by 1982 three hundred shelters and forty-eight state coalitions had been established to provide protection and services for women who had been abused by male figures in their lives.[128]
Sex and Sexuality[edit]
During the time of the second wave, with fighting against the stereotype that women are supposed to be passive and submissive, this topic extended to women's pleasure regarding sex, emotion, and intimacy. In anatomy textbooks and works by authors including neurologist Sigmund Freud before the 1950s, women's bodies in regards to sexuality and sexual intercourse were left out of the public eye and were instead centered around male pleasure. Through works like Anne Koedt's "The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm" written in 1970, people could begin to break down the societal norm for male pleasure with a focus on the vaginal orgasm in heterosexual relationships.[55]
In 1978, author Audre Lorde also discussed this in her book "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power". Lorde believes that the erotic is something that has been suppressed in women in order to keep them from feeling to their full potential in hopes of keeping them subservient. It is labeled as irrational and trivial so that women do not understand its full potential for power. Pornography to Lorde suppresses genuine emotion as it is only about the simulation of the senses.[129]
The magazine "Cosmopolitan" also decided to rebrand their company as a women's magazine in 1965 coinciding with the second wave feminist movement. The editor in chief, Helen Gurley Brown, dedicated the magazine to focus on the modern, working, and independent woman so that they can find independence in themselves and embrace their sexuality.[130] The articles are however criticized by many for its unrealistic portrayal of women and how ultimately, the woman curated by the magazine end up playing into men's fantasies about what a woman should be. It is another form of control and rules for women to abide by.[131] This kind of criticism was especially touched on by Naomi Wolf's "The Beauty Myth" in 1990.[132]
With emotion and the ability to be able to feel to the fullest extent for women, that comes with the idea of separate space. The need to find women-only space so that feminists can organize and work towards liberation. In advocating for these spaces, many accused them of being "radical - separatists" and/or "lesbians". Homophobia was also, and still is, very prevalent and while the intersectional experiences were not completely researched until years later, homophobia and sexism were always interconnected. With the gay liberation movement and the second wave, people were afraid of the questions that both movements addressed that would change the foundation of a heterosexual, oppressive patriarchy.[133] Lorde speaks of this fear in her work "Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference" (1980) where she writes about how lesbians challenge the patriarchy and heteronormative society by creating a fear of a society that is no longer dependent on men.[134]
Criticism[edit]
Some black and/or working class and poor women felt alienated by the main planks of the second-wave feminist movement, which largely advocated women's right to work outside the home and expansion of reproductive rights. Women of color and poor white women in the U.S. had been working outside of the home in blue-collar and service jobs for generations. Additionally, Angela Davis wrote that while Afro-American women and white women were subjected to multiple unwilled pregnancies and had to clandestinely abort, Afro-American women were also suffering from compulsory sterilization programs that were not widely included in dialogue about reproductive justice.
Beginning in the late 20th century, numerous feminist scholars such as Audre Lorde[148] and Winona LaDuke[149] critiqued the second wave in the United States as reducing feminist activity into a homogenized and whitewashed chronology of feminist history that ignores the voices and contributions of many women of color, working-class women, and LGBT women.[150][151]
The second-wave feminist movement in the United States has been criticized for failing to acknowledge the struggles of women of color, and their voices were often silenced or ignored by white feminists.[152][150] It has been suggested that the dominant historical narratives of the feminist movement focuses on white, East Coast, and predominantly middle-class women and women's consciousness-raising groups, excluding the experiences and contributions of lesbians, women of color, and working-class and lower-class women.[1] Chela Sandoval called the dominant narratives of the women's liberation movement "hegemonic feminism" because it essentializes the feminist historiography to an exclusive population of women, which assumes that all women experience the same oppressions as the white, East Coast, and predominantly middle-class women.[153] Multiracial feminist theory also confronts the second-wave feminist movement's focus on white middle-class women by arguing that it neglected the interplay between racism and misogyny.[154] This restricting view purportedly ignored the oppressions women face determined by their race, class, and sexuality, and gave rise to women-of-color feminisms that separated from the women's liberation movement, such as Black feminism, Africana womanism, and the Hijas de Cuauhtémoc that emerged at California State University, Long Beach, which was founded by Anna Nieto-Gómez, due to the Chicano Movement's sexism.[155][156][157] Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term "intersectionality" in 1989 in response to the white, middle-class views that dominated second-wave feminism. Intersectionality describes the way systems of oppression (i.e. sexism, racism) have multiplicative, not additive, effects, on those who are multiply marginalized. It has become a core tenet of third-wave feminism.[158]
Many feminist scholars see the generational division of the second wave as problematic.[159] Second wavers are typically essentialized as the Baby Boomer generation, when in actuality many feminist leaders of the second wave were born before World War II ended. This generational essentialism homogenizes the group that belongs to the wave and asserts that every person part of a certain demographic generation shared the same ideologies, because ideological differences were considered to be generational differences.[160]
Feminist scholars, particularly those from the late 20th and early 21st centuries to the present day, have revisited diverse writings,[1] oral histories, artwork, and artifacts of women of color, working-class women, and lesbians during the early 1960s to the early 1980s to decenter what they view as the dominant historical narratives of the second wave of the women's liberation movement, allowing the scope of the historical understanding of feminist consciousness to expand and transform. By recovering histories that they believe have been erased and overlooked, these scholars purport to establish what Maylei Blackwell termed "retrofitted memory".[161] Blackwell describes this as a form of "countermemory" that creates a transformative and fluid "alternative archive" and space for women's feminist consciousness within "hegemonic narratives".[161] For Blackwell, looking within the gaps and crevices of the second wave allows fragments of historical knowledge and memory to be discovered, and new historical feminist subjects as well as new perspectives about the past to emerge, forcing existing dominant histories that claim to represent a universal experience to be decentered and refocused.[162]
