History of Feminisms in the US - S6 

feminism : 

  • political & social movement 

  • but : equality between the sexes

  • interrogates notions of republic, democracy, citizenship  at the crossroads of gender, ethnicity and race


TERMINOLOGY : 

  • Suffragism : the belief that the right to vote should be extended  to women

  • Women’s rights : the rights of women to be treated equally to men in all areas of society:

  • Protofeminists/Prefeminists: a concept that anticipates modern feminism in eras when the feminist concept as such was still unknown. 

  • Feminist-abolitionists : a branch of feminism that calls for the elimination of the prison industrial complex

  • Feminism(s)


3 waves of feminism (traditional metaphor) : 

  • 1st wave (19th - early 20th)

    • centered on suffrage ++ 

  • 2nd wave (1960s/1970s)

    • denunciation of patriarchal structures 

  • 3rd wave (since late 20th)

    • multifaced 

    • elusive (compliqué) 

    • intersectional ? 


This metaphor is questioned since the early 2000s because : 

  • masks the continuity between the periods and the diversity within each period

  • the 1st wave did not end with the 19th amendment (The right of citizens of the US to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the US or by any State on account of sex)


Commemorating and questioning the 19th amendment and why is it not true to say that the 19th amendment did not give ALL Amercian women the right to vote ? 

  • the amendment does not positively grant the vote > forbids discrimination on the basis of sex 

  • many states had already given women the vote by 1920 

  • after 1920, many african american women and colored women were disfranchised 


Until recently the history of feminism was much focused on white middle class women


INTERSECTIONALITY : describe how race, class, gender and other individual characteristics “intersect” with one another and overlap. 

Women’s History : 


Impact of 2nd wave faminism on history writing : 

  • end women’s invisibility in history 

  • rewriting and “rerighting” women’s history


Historiography 


traditional history : 

  • focus on : 

    • leaders 

    • conflicts, wars, treaties, politics and diplomacy 

  • history made up by (and for) the elite 


New social history 

  • focus on : 

    • “ordinary people” 

    • daily life 

    • social and cultural processes 

    • history “from the bottom up”


Second feminist wave : 

SEX VS GENDER 


sex : biological characteristic defining 2 main categories (male of female) and most other living things are divided on the basis of their reproductive functions 


gender : social construction of the sexes ascribing to males and female a number of behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits (masuline and feminine)


Gender studies : 

  • GS departments multiplied in US universities in the 1980’s

  • Since 1990s > include the study of non white and non middle class women


Gender is only one category of analysis !! 

-> it must always be conceived in its interactions with other categories

-> and within the specific historical and cultural contexts that produce those categories 

-> concept of INTERSECTIONALITY (the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage.)


  • other categories : 

    • race; ethnicity; class; health; sexuality; age… 


From women in history to women’s history 


Gerda Lerner (1920-2013) 

  • “placing women in history” 1975

  • compensation history

  • contribution history

  • women’s history

  • universal history


Gerda Lerner, “US women’s history, past present, future” 2004


“We have merely edged our way in from the margin to the center; we have not yet seized the space where we rightfully belong. What we have done has been empowering to women and has, in general, enriched historical knowledge. But until we fill in most of the blank spaces and until we redefine the paradigm by which we order past events so as to find the true relationships between women and men as agents in history, we will not have succeeded”. 


Angel in the house 

The image of the angel was constructed against the Jezebel stereotype 

(= portrays Black women as sexually promiscuous. The stereotype leads to a societal belief that Black women need various forms of social control including restricted access to reproductive care. Historically, the stereotype helped to justify a wide range of abuses against Black bodies including rape and lynching. The stereotype lives on in modern form in hip hop caricatures of Black women as the “hoe” or “golddigger.”)


Domestication the sexual body : 


  • Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology by Nancy Cott

    • sexual deviance 

      • Masturbation “solitary-vice”, “self-abuse”

      • hysteria 


“”treatment”” : 

  • clitoridectomy (surgical removal, reduction, or partial removal of the clitoris.)

  • ovariectomy (the surgical removal of an ovary or ovaries)

  • hysterectomy (the surgical removal of the uterus and cervix)


  • Distrust of women who “stepped out of their sphere 


Declining fertility 


  • 1800 : 7 children on average 

  • 1900 : 3,5 children on average 

 

why ? 

  • different perception of the child 

  • contraception 

  • abortion 

    • quickening (the moment in pregnancy when the pregnant woman starts to feel the fetus's movement in the uterus.)

    • comstock law (1873) = Comstock Act, federal statute passed by the U.S. Congress in 1873 as an “Act of the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use.”

    • “domestice feminism” (Daniel Smith) Domestic feminism claimed that women should have more autonomy within the family. It did not go further since women were prohibited from any form of participation in public life.


Womanhood as disease : 

“ Many a young life is battered and forever crippled in the breakers of puberty; if it crosses these unharmed and is not dashed to pieces on the rock of childbirth, it may still ground on the ever-recurring shadows of menstruation, and lastly, upon the final bar of the menopause…” 



Female hysteria : 

  • was once a common medical diagnosis for women

  • Even though it was categorized as a disease, hysteria's symptoms were synonymous with normal functioning female sexuality

  • In the context of hysteria, every symptom and negative thought was linked to sex


fashion evolution (1794-1880s) 

???? 



CONCLUSION : 

  • sexual ideology constructed a woman’s sphere and a male’s sphere

  • Contradictions : 

    • Essentialist discourse on female frailty contradicts economic reality 

    • Extolled female spirituality but identified women with their sexual organs

    • Glorified  female sexual purity but fashion produced eroticism

    • Worships mother’s instinct but floods mothers with prescriptions  



THE ANGEL OUT OF THE HOUSE 


  • 2nd Great awakening

  • Age of reforms

  • creation of a perfect society to accelerate Christ’s second coming on earth



Religious and moral organizations : 

Christ’s servants 

  • missionary actions

  • religious education

  • charity 


moral reform : fight against sexual license and alcohol


Drunkard’s home : the man in the house frequently gets drunk and aggressive against his family members 


“Demon rum” = denunciation of a Massachusetts liquor producer


Abolitionism : 

  • Slavery a national sin 

  • See William Lloyd Garrison (1831 issue of the liberator)

    • Garrison's view of the Constitution of the United States as a proslavery document alienated him from political activity, and from those abolitionist colleagues who saw office acquisition and legislation as a valuable route to the emancipation of slaves. Garrison refused to vote while the government sanctioned slavery

  • Black and white women participated 

    • black women abolitionists :

      • Frances Ellen Harper

      • Harriet Tubman (former slave

      • Sojourner Truth (former slave) (Ain’t I a Woman)

    • White women abolitionists : 

      • Sarah Grimke (Letter on the equality of the sexes and the condition of woman in 1838)

      • Harriet Beecher Stowe (best-selling anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin)



BIRTH OF THE WOMAN’S RIGHTS MOVEMENT : Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton


  • Seneca Falls Convention (1848) = 1st women's right convention

  • Declaration of Sentiments and Resolution : 

    • written by Elizabeth Candy Stanton

    • she modeled it on the declaration of independence 


  • Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions put forth the inalienable rights of woman and denounced man as a tyrant: 

    • No liberty and independence in marriage

    • no access to the professions

    • to positions in the clergy

    • no access to the vote


Profile of the average women’s rights supporter : 

  • New England origins

  • Middle class

  • Educated

  • Quakers (people who belong to the Religious Society of Friends, a historically Protestant Christian set of denominations)

  • Unitarians (a member of a Christian Church that does not believe in the Trinity)


Working class women were underrepresented 

  • Charlotte Woodward : only working woman who signed the Declaration of Sentiments 

  • She lived to see the 19th amendment in 1920



1ST WAVE (1848-1861)

  • variety of voices and institutional flexibility : 

    • annual convention (entre 1850 and 1861) to discuss variety of issues such as : 

      • married women’s property rights 

      • divorce 

      • wages (salaire)

      • women’s health and education

      • vote 


Antoinette Brown Blackwell : 1st ordained woman minister

Elizabeth Blackwell : 1st woman doctor


Feminist men : 

  • William Lloyd Garrison

  • Frederick douglass

  • william henry channing

  • thomas wentworth Higginson


Lucy Stone : 

“Has a woman a right to herself? T’is very little to me to have the right to vote, to own property, etc, if I may not keep my body, and its uses, in my absolute right. Not a wife in a thousand can do that.”


Health reform : 

Bloomers : divided women's garments for the lower body. They were developed in the 19th century as a healthful and comfortable alternative to the heavy, constricting dresses worn by American women.

VS corsets 


Promoting women’s health 

  • Sound food (avoiding red meat)

  • fresh air and exercise

  • Alternative medicine : 

    • homeopathy ; bathing ; healthy diets 

  • Water cure movement 



Anti feminism and anti suffrage : 

  • sexism

  • promothers of the cult of domesticity (Catharine Beecher ; Sarah Hale)

    • a system of cultural beliefs governing gender roles of upper- and middle-class Americans in the 19th century. According to the Cult of Domesticity, the True Woman should have four main virtues: purity, piety, submissiveness, and domesticity.


SPLIT IN THE MOVEMENT : From division to reunification (1865-1890)


Split in the women's right movement in the wake of the civil war 

  • 14th amendment (1868) includes the word “male”

“But when the right to vote at any election…., is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, …the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State”

  • Former abolitionists and Republicans shift their support to black suffrage over women’s suffrage


Post civil war issues : 

  • 1866 : Formation of the american equal right association

  • former allies get divided over the war amendments 


Ideological split : 

  • one part of the women’s right advocates sides with the republicans and former abolitionists 

  • a more radical faction sides with the democrats and puts women’s suffrage over black suffrage 


Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Susan Brownell Anthony develop racist views to promote female suffrage : 

"While the dominant party has with one hand lifted up two million black men and crowned them with the honor and dignity of citizenship, with the other it has dethroned fifteen million white women—their own mothers and sisters, their own wives and daughters—and cast them under the heel of the lowest orders of manhood” (1868)


Controversy over the 15th amendment (1870)

  • Section 1 : The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

  • Section 2 : The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation


1869 : 

  • American Woman Suffrage Association 

    • moderate 

    • Lucy Stone ; julia ward howe

    • state approach 

    • The woman journal 

    • President : Henry Ward Beecher 


  • National Woman Suffrage Association 

    • More radical and open to a wider range of issues

    • S B Anthony & E C Stanton

    • National approach  

    • The revolution

(the AWSA) …seeks to limit the range of discussion to woman suffrage…The provisions of its constitution …are so impartial that it can never be perverted to advocate or assail side issues… ».


Georges Francis Train : 

  • democrat 

  • copperhead (a faction of the Democratic Party in the Union who opposed the American Civil War and wanted an immediate peace settlement with the Confederates.)

  • anti black suffrage 

  • supported the woman suffrage movement to block black political rights 

  • financed The Revolution 


Former abolitionists Stanton and Anthony stopped relations with Train: 

  • Stanton : « All there is about Train is that he has made it possible for us to establish a paper. If the devil himself had come up and said ladies I will help you establish a paper I should have said Amen ! ».



THE “NEW DEPARTURE”

  • new constitutional strategy and radical militancy 

  • emerged in the wake of the 14th amendment and 15th amendments 

  • The NWSA proposed a broad and inclusive interpretation of those amendments, claiming that they already enfranchised women because 

    • The first section of the 14th amendment recognized the right to vote for women because they were included in the category of citizens of the US and of a state. 

    • refusing the vote to women would violate the equal protection of the law clause. 


Radical feminists : 

  • Victoria Woodhull 

  • supporter of free love

  • First woman to run in the 1872 presidential elections 

  • Woodhull memorial 


Trials : USA vs. Susan Bronwell Anthony (1873) and Minor v Happersett (1875) 

  • As Congress eventually refused the request of V. Woodhull -> S.B. Anthony and the NWSA decided to « take the vote » in the 1872 presidential elections. In November 1872, S.B. Anthony and 14 women from Rochester, NY, convinced the ballot inspectors and voted. 

  • When Anthony was eventually condemned to pay a 100 $ fine, she exclaimed: « I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty….resistance to tyranny is obedience to God » 



Minor v. Happersett in 1875

  • in this case the Supreme Court ruled that the fathers of the constitution had not intended to give the vote to all citizens : 

    • "it cannot for a moment be doubted that if it had been intended to make all citizens of the United States voters, the framers of the Constitution would not have left it to implication. So important a change in the condition of citizenship as it actually existed, if intended, would have been expressly declared ».



The Beecher Tilton trials : The Beecher-Tilton scandal is an example of a nineteenth-century sexual scandal that did not involve murder. The scandal demonstrates, however, the sort of life- and reputation-destroying events that not a few murders have been committed to avoid.



FEMINISM AND SUFFRAGE IN THE PROGRESSIVE ERA (1890-1920) 


  1. Suffrage gains wider support 

Suffrage race and class issues : Was feminism simply a white middle-class movement ? 

Feminism and the suffrage crusade 


Gains : 

  • marriage laws reformed following the new york marriage women’s property act of 1860

  • property, custody, wages 

  • some pioneers, first women doctors, lawyers, ministers 

  • some territories and states gave women the vote 


The progressive era 

  • fast industrialization 

  • urbanization 

  • mass immigration

  • trade unionism (syndicalisme) 


Rise of the new woman = a feminist ideal that emerged in the late 19th century and had a profound influence well into the 20th century. 


“The New woman had an enhanced sense of self, gender, and mission. Vigorous and energetic, she was likely to be involved in institutions, beyond the family—in college, club, settlement, or profession…;decidedly middle-class, if not upper-class, she was usually a town or city dweller, the wife or daughter of a business or professional man, and better educated than average. Perhaps she was even a college graduate, a possibility that increased year by year. She was more likely to be single than any other group of women at any time in American history…if unmarried she might be employed outside the home, most likely in a profession dominated by young women such as teaching or library work. If she never married she might maintain her own home with another woman…if she married, she usually gave up salaried work and devoted herself to household and family.” N Woloch, Woman and the American Experience 269



Rise of the women’s networks 

  • associations, organizations, groups, clubs…

  • rise of the women’s club movement


“By the turn of the century, the new woman had become a social housekeeper, an active participant in civic affairs” - Woloch


Jane Addams

  • Hull House (Chicago) = Hull House opened as a kindergarten but soon expanded to include a day nursery and an infancy care center. Eventually its educational facilities provided secondary and college-level extension classes as well as evening classes on civil rights and civic duties. 


Frances Willard : president of woman’s christian temperance union 

= It was among the first organizations of women devoted to social reform with a program that "linked the religious and the secular through concerted and far-reaching reform strategies based on applied Christianity."

-> Carry Nation = anti liquor activist in the West 


The support of the WCTU : 

  • gave strength and responsibility to the movement

BUT 

  • Contributed to the exclusion of colored women



Racial discrimination 

  • in 1895, Susan B. Anthony asked Frederick Douglass not to attend the NAWSA convention : his presence would deter southern women from the cause 

  • in 1903, at the NAWSA convention in New Orleans 

    • Susan B Anthony ; Alice Stone Blackwell ; Carrie Chapman Catt ; Anna Howard Shaw 

    • signed a statement “states had the right to develop their own woman suffrage position” = they can caution white supremacy 

    • in 1913 : Alice Paul > asked the colored woman to march separately at the end of the parade that was organized in front of the White House 



  1. Suffrage race and class issues : Was feminism simply a white middle-class movement ? 


Black women organize separately : 

  • 1896 : the national association of colored women was created (president = mary church)

  • The association included suffrage in its platform because the vote was considered indispensable to achieve the mission of racial uplift that many black women felt was theirs. 

(phyllis Wheatley clubs (women's clubs created by African Americans starting in the late 1800s.) - club of buffalo 


How black leaders reacted to exclusion ? 

  • at the 1904 NAWSA convention : Mary Church Terrel said : “My sisters of the dominant race, stand up not only for the oppressed sex but also for the oppressed race!”


Second generation leaders (Harriot Stanton Blatch)


  • Women’s trade union league = an alliance between middle/upper-class women and working class woman that sought to improve working conditions and support women’s rights

  • The equality league of self supporting women : 

    • Harriot Stanton Blatch (funder)

    • 1907

    • an alliance between career women and factory or garment shop workers. 


The 1910s

« that was the only decade in which woman suffrage commanded a mass movement, in which working-class women, black women, women on the radical left, the young, and the upper class joined in force ; rich and poor, socialist and capitalist, occasionally even black and white could be seen taking the same platform » - Nancy Cott


3 Feminism and the suffrage crusade 

in the 1910s The real goal was a complete social revolution : freedom for all forms of women’s active expression, elimination of all structural and psychological handicaps to women’s economic independence, an end to the double standard of sexual morality, release from constraining sexual stereotypes and opportunity to shine in every civic and professional capacity »


Left-wing feminists : 

  • “heterodoxy” = strong rejection of the orthodox beliefs attached to woman as a self sacrificial dependent, submissive being 


Margaret Sanger and birth control : 

  • Arrested in 1914

  • fled to europe 

  • came back to the US and opened an experimental clinic in New York with her sister 

  • arrested in 1916

  • her case drew public support and sympathy among educated and working class women

  • By the 1920s birth control leagues were set up. 



RADICALIZATION, SCHISM IN THE SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT AND PASSAGE OF THE 19TH AMENDMENT 


radicalization/militancy : 

  • Emmeline Pankhurst (founder of women’s social political union and suffragette) 

  • Alice Paul (american activist inspired by british methods)



The Anthony Amendment : 

  • Jeannette Rankin = first woman to be elected at the US house of representatives 

  • introduced the amendment in january 1918

  • voted by the house in 1918

  • voted by the senate in june 1919

Opposition to suffrage : 

  • National association opposed to woman suffrage was formed in NYC in 1911 

  • led by josephine dodge

  • many of the antis were upper class women but most of them were deeply involved in women’s public activism and social reform 

  • but they thought that they would be “better citizens without the ballot”


19TH AMENDMENT ADOPTED : 

  • AUGUST 26, 1920 

→ the right of citizens of the US to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the US or by any state on account of sex. 



SECOND AND THIRD WAVES  


The roaring twenties = the 1920s decade in music and fashion, as it happened in Western society and Western culture. It was a period of economic prosperity with a distinctive cultural edge in the United States and Europe


women : 

  • flappers 

  • athletic women 

  • women in the labor force 


1950s and the age of plenty 

  • a period when people accumulate goods and cultivate goodness 

  • suburbs (banlieus)

  • car production x4 between 1946 and 1955

  • proportion of homeowners increased by 50% between 1945 and 1960

  • 90% of the US households had at least one TV set by 1960

  • baby boom 



2nd feminist wave 

  • Betty Friedan “The feminine mystique” - 1963 

  • "The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning [that is, a longing] that women suffered in the middle of the 20th century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries … she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question — 'Is this all?"


NOW (National organization for women)

  • founded by betty friedan 

  • in 1966

  • influenced by context of civil war movement  



1968 : miss america contest 

  • radical feminists 


Denunciation of patriarchy 

  • consciousness raising groups “the personal is political”

  • issue of rape, abortion, domination, sexuality

  • political lesbianism


Effects of the feminist movement : 

  • 1973 : Roe vs Wade a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that legalizes abortion 

  • an equal rights amendment was approved by congress in 1972 →  a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would, if added, explicitly prohibit sex discrimination (not ratified)

  • rise of women’s and gender and gay studies in the US universities 


1980s : 

  • feminist backlash (réaction) in the 1980s (rise of the new right = New Right appeared during the 1964 presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater to designate the emergence, in response to American style liberalism, of a more combative, anti-egalitarian, and uninhibited right.)

  • negative stereotypes of feminists “bra burning, hairy-legged, amazon, castrating, militant, communist, marxist, lesbians…”

  • feminist seen as outmoded or powerless


early 1990s : 

  • liberal and radical : aims both to reform society and alter its foundations 



3rd wave feminism 

  • 1990s 

  • ongoing 

  • liberal and radical and paradoxical 

  • Rebecca Walker “I'm not a post feminism feminist. I am the third wave”

  • younger brand of feminism 

  • girlie feminism : reappropriation of things considered female : nail polish, make up, dolls

  • « The third wave consists of us who have developed our sense of identity in a world shaped by technology, global capitalism, multiple models of sexuality, declining economic vitality » Rory Dicker

  • inclusive ideology 


1980s : 

  • black feminism 

  • womanism (alice walker)