Feminist Beginning Notes

The emergence of an organized feminist movement was a third major echo of the Atlantic revolutions, challenging the long-standing patriarchy that characterized preindustrial civilizations, particularly in Europe and North America during the century following the French Revolution.

Origins and Early Influence

  1. Enlightenment Roots

    • Enlightenment thinkers occasionally challenged women's inferiority; for example, the French writer Condorcet called for "the complete destruction of those prejudices that have established an inequality of rights between the sexes."

    • The French Revolution's ideals of liberty and equality spurred initial demands, though unsuccessful, for women's inclusion.

    • Mary Wollstonecraft published Vindication of the Rights of Woman in England in 1792, questioning: "Who made man the exclusive judge, if woman partake with him of the gift of reason?"

  2. Organization and Transatlantic Movement

    • Middle-class women, gaining educational opportunities and some respite from household duties in industrializing societies, became active in social movements like temperance, abolitionism, missionary work, and pacifism.

    • This led to a burgeoning feminist consciousness viewing women as individuals with rights equal to men.

    • The first organized expression took place at the Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, where Elizabeth Cady Stanton drafted a statement declaring, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal."

    • Feminism rapidly became a transatlantic movement.

Focus on Suffrage and Mass Mobilization

  1. Major Concerns and Radicalism

    • Major concerns included access to schools, universities, and professions.

    • Radical feminists refused to take their husbands' surnames (Elizabeth Cady Stanton published a Women's Bible) or advocated for unconventional female dress (like wearing trousers).

  2. The Suffrage Movement (1870s onwards)

    • Feminist movements focused primarily on securing the right to vote (suffrage), attracting ordinary middle-class housewives and working-class mothers.

    • By 1914, the movement was substantial (e.g., 2 million members in the National American Woman Suffrage Association).

    • Tactics ranged from peaceful protest to violence, exemplified by the British Women's Social and Political Union (vandalism, railway bombings) and the fatal protest of activist Emily Davison in 1913.

Accomplishments and Debates

  1. Societal Gains (pre-1914)

    • Upper- and middle-class women gained entrance to universities, leading to rising literacy rates.

    • In the U.S., states legislated women's control over their own property and wages. Divorce laws were liberalized in some regions.

    • The nursing profession was professionalized by Florence Nightingale, and Jane Addams established social work as a female-dominated profession.

  2. Political Progress

    • New Zealand was the first country to grant suffrage to all adult women (1893), followed by Finland (1906).

    • Widespread voting rights in major industrialized nations were generally achieved after World War I (e.g., U.S. in 1920, France in 1945).

  3. Philosophical Splits and Opposition

    • The movement sparked unprecedented public discussion, including cultural critiques (like Henrik Ibsen's play A Doll's House, 1879) and debates on taboo sexual issues.

    • Feminists split between those basing claims on the modern idea of human equality ("Whatever is right for a man is right for a woman") and those advocating maternal feminism (basing political rights on the distinctive role of women as mothers).

    • The movement faced bitter opposition from experts who claimed that education and life outside the home would cause serious reproductive damage.

Global Spread

A concern for women's rights spread beyond the West, albeit slower and less widely:

  • Brazil (overtly feminist newspaper, 1852) and Mexico (independent school for girls, 1869).

  • Japan saw modernist calls for reform after 1868, but the state quickly forbade women from participating in political organizations.

  • In Russia, the most radical activists aligned with socialist or anarchist groups.

  • In the Islamic world and China, modernists supported female education and status as crucial for national development and independence.

  • Huda Sharawi, founder of Egypt's first feminist organization, famously discarded her veil in 1923.