Gender and Communication

Waves of Feminism

Gender and communication influenced and was influenced by three waves of feminism. In the late 1800s, alongside the anti-slavery campaign, feminists (mostly women), labeled as suffragettes, advocated for the right to vote. This time period is known as first-wave feminism. One of the noteworthy events in this wave occurred in 1848 at Seneca Falls, New York, where the first women’s rights convention was held. There, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton presented the “Declaration of Sentiments,” modeled after the Declaration of Independence, which argued that men and women should be treated equally. In 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution passed, guaranteeing women’s right to vote and hold elected office. After the amendment passed, the first wave women’s rights movement faded.

World War II required men to leave their jobs to go into combat, and women took their places in the workforce. Rosie the Riveter was an icon at the time that demonstrated women’s strength to work outside the home. After the war ended and men came home, women relinquished the jobs to the men and returned to housework and child rearing. Not all women were happy with the return to home, however. Despite newly invented appliances and clever advertising that made housework seem like fun, many women were bored. Betty Friedan, in her 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, talked about a “problem with no name,” accounting stories about women voicing their discontent in consciousness raising groups and going to doctors with severe cases of depression.

Friedan’s book helped generate the second wave of feminism, also known as the women’s liberation movement. Similar to the first wave of feminism that worked with the anti-slavery movement, the second wave was associated with the anti-Vietnam War and civil rights movements of the 1960s. Second-wave feminists advocated for equality between men and women, specifically the right to hold jobs outside the home, access to birth control and women’s health care, and greater attention to race inequality.

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