Feminism

Feminism originally was an expression used by suffragettes to obtain the right for women to vote in the mid 1800s and early 1900s in the United States and the United Kingdom. By the 1970s, however, liberals had changed the meaning to represent people who favored identical roles or quotas for women in the military and in society as a whole.

Specifically, a modern feminist tends to:

• believe that there are no meaningful differences between men and women
• Oppose outdated and chavisuatic practices once regarded as 'charming'.
• view traditional marriage where the man controls everything as unacceptably patriarchal
• Broaden topics and activies in their lives, instead of restricting themselves to tradionatly 'femimine' roles
• support affirmative action for women
• prefer that women have a choice to wear pants rather than dresses and skirts
• seek women be treated equally in combat in the military just like men, and coed submarines be established
• Support the choice of keeping ones orginal last name when marrying

History

Roots of the movement in the United States and the United Kingdom include the Women's Suffrage movement of the mid 1800s and early 1900's and the Women's Liberation (or "Second Wave Feminist") movement of the 1960's and 1970's.

The Equal Rights Amendment, which proponents claimed would address the inadequacies of the Fourteenth Amendment concerning women and citizenship, was proposed in the US in 1923. The amendment passed Congress in 1972 but was ultimately defeated, falling just three states short of the required three-quarters majority on June 30, 1982. Some conservatives, particularly Phyllis Schlafly, wrongly and xenophobically, felt that its passage would entail several consequences, including making girls subject to the military draft, which could help in a time of national war, require taxpayer-funded abortion, a choice every women should have, the end of single-sex schools and classes, which was never in any threat, requiring the issuance of homosexual marriage licenses, something that is of vital need if the holiness of marriage is to be kept, and the revocation of laws that prevent women from working in several industries, such as factory or mining work.

The feminist movement in the West evolved in the 1980s with the rise of so-called Post-Feminism (also called "Third-Wave" feminism), which stresses that women have many rights that go unrecognized, often by women themselves, in everyday life, and in the American legal structure. Most members of the feminist movement support reproductive rights currently guaranteed by American law, including the legal right to abortion.

Robin Morgan

• "In my own life, I don't have intercourse. That is my choice."

• "Men use the night to erase us.

• "The annihilation of a woman's personality, individuality, will, character, is prerequisite to male dominance.

Marilyn French

• "As long as some men use physical force to subjugate females, all men need not. The knowledge that some men do suffices to threaten all women. He can beat or kill the woman he claims to love; he can rape women ... he can sexually molest his daughters ... THE VAST MAJORITY OF MEN IN THE WORLD DO ONE OR MORE OF THE ABOVE" - The War Against Women, p. 182 (her emphasis)

• "The media treat male assaults on women like rape, beating, and murder of wives and female lovers, or male incest with children, as individual aberrations ... obscuring the fact that all male violence toward women is part of a concerted campaign" - The War Against Women, p. 21

Other

• "Rape is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which a men keep a women in a state of fear" - Susan Brownmiller; Authoress of Against Our Will p.6

• "I would have girls regard themselves not as adjectives but as nouns." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton, "Our Girls"

• "I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute."

See also

• Anti-Feminism
• Feminism and housewives
• Feminist style
• Gender equality
• Gender police
• Feminists for Life
• Feminism and reason
• Feminist hypocrisy
• Battered woman syndrome

External Links

• The Feminist eZine Archive of articles about Feminist History.
• Gloria Steinem and the CIA, The New York Times, February 21, 1967.
• Inside the CIA with Gloria Steinem, Nancy Borman, The Village Voice.
• Why Can't a Woman Be More Like a Man?, Christina Hoff Sommers, The American March/April 2008.