Feminism

A Brief History of Feminism

Feminism is sometimes depicted chronologically in terms of so-called waves. These waves (periods of time) designate certain political eras of the feminist movement that were concerned with particularly pressing issues at the time. It should be emphasized, however, that feminist agendas are marked by both continuity and change. The end of a wave does not imply that the issues raised within it ceased to be of interest or significance for the next generation of feminist activists and scholars.

First wave feminism roughly spans from 1809, when women in Connecticut were allowed to execute wills, to 1928, when all women in the UK were given the right to vote equally to men.

Simone de Beauvoir maintained that in the fifteenth century, Christine de Pizan was the first woman who wrote in defence of her sex. This is merely one example of women engaging in women's rights centuries before the first wave emerged as an explicit movement with a clearly defined goal. There was no first wave without its significant precursors in all parts of the world. There is a synchronicity in time and a likeness in themes between Persia, now Iran, and the USA. The Conference at Badasht, Persia, and the Seneca Falls Convention, held in the USA in the summer of 1848, addressed similar issues, such as the advancement of women to social positions, economic independence and marital equality. Women at both events met with considerable protest and resistance, and women at both events received support from men who were advocates for women's legal rights equal to men's.

The early Western feminist movement would be almost unthinkable without Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), which she wrote in response to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's influential Émile, Or on Education, in which Rousseau expressed the essentialism of his time based on the commonly held view of girls' and women's subservience to men as a God-given, natural order. It is said that Wollstonecraft's ideas largely contributed to the first British suffragettes' thinking. Central to the first so-called wave that emerged in the late 1700s or early to mid-1800s, depending on what historical account is drawn upon, was women's right to vote, and in the time just before and during the First World War, women from many different countries, some at war with each other, convened to advocate for world peace. Jane Addams, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931, was one of the leading figures in that movement. As chairwoman of the Woman's Peace Party, she was also elected president of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in 1915. In that capacity, she attended the International Women's Conference in The Hague, the Netherlands, where it was decided that she head their commission for solutions to end the First World War.

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