Understanding the
Feminist Movement
(Intro to Women’s Studies)
Feminism is a perspective that views gender as one of the most important foundations of structure and organization in our social world. It argues that because of gender, women have lower status and value than men, more limited access to resources, and less freedom and opportunity to make choices, which is about less power. Gender inequality is not nature. It is taught to us, and rooted in the social construction of human experience, which means that it should be possible to change the structure of our social worlds.
The civil-rights and social-justice struggles of Feminism have had a long journey towards safety and equality. It’s still evolving. There are been three successive waves of Feminism in our modern world—
1st wave- 1830's- 1920 ‘s suffrage— the movements for the vote and also for emancipation.
2nd wave- the mid 60's-late 80’s with the anti-war and Civil Rights struggles. Movements for equal pay, sexuality, birth control, freedom from sexual abuse and other forms of violence against women, and the end of legal sex discrimination.
3rd/4th wave-1990-s— today—Intersectionality of race and queer struggles, movements for globalization and post-colonial struggles, sex positivity, deconstructing gender norms, transgender politics, eco-feminism, class and racial justice. As with most political movements, the main issues were prefaced by the movements that preceded it.
The Awakening of Critical Consciousness — The task of feminist scholarship is to forward the search for truth, and in so doing, to develop a body of knowledge about gender that will inform public policy and change our reality. It can be a painful awakening, but knowing the worst frees us to hope and strive for the best.
Political consciousness and social justice must be learned through experience— your own and that of others’.
Naïve Consciousness- is an understanding or awareness, that is still only rooted in your personal experience. (Nobody I know is a sexual abuser)
Critical Consciousness- is having an analysis of systems of power that allows for and exposes social and political contradictions. (But there are so many women who’ve reported being sexually abused, the world must be populated with a variety of abusers)
Contradictions- statements of opposition—the difference between what a person, or a system, says and does. (workplaces say they don’t tolerate sexual abuse) Identifying contradictions in your own experience and that of others is imperative in activism, (but they do, for a variety of reasons) and becoming part of the process of changing the world.
A raised consciousness means understanding self and others in relationship, and the inevitable results of interaction. (While I don’t know of anybody who’s a sexual abuser, I support the reporting of the masses of women who have been abused.) The outcome is society working together through the creation of new norms, new roles, policies and procedures. (sexual abuse reports are fully documented, investigated, and prosecuted) We call this social change.
A social movement is a collective effort by a large group of people to solve a set of problems they think they share. (women who’ve been sexually abused and their allies) Often incited by a precipitating event that sparks a special awareness or new consciousness on the part of a relatively small group of people, who in turn organize and attempt to mobilize others they think should share this consciousness. (The Me-Too Movement)
Social movements don’t generally start from scratch, but develop from and build on existing networks and organizations. Mobilization is even more important than attempting to influence the powerful. Much time must be devoted to consciousness raising at this stage. As a movement grows, its actions adjust to changes, such as reactions or backlashes from outsiders and to changes in historical circumstances. It’s about moving away from oppression and towards awareness of one’s situation. From being an object to being a subject.
Object- being acted on by the will of another. Passive.
Subject- having the self-determination and the autonomy to act on your awareness. Active.
The personal became political when standards of beauty, family life, work, and relations with men were no longer private matters or social custom, but issues of national importance. Younger women have run from the word "Feminist" without quite knowing why, or what the word has stood for. Most women are so busy surviving, they’re barely acquainted with the movement that has shaped our lives. Younger women are portrayed as being more concerned with dating than with changing the world, more obsessed with celebrity gossip and hotness than liberation or social change. We see a mounting generation gap, where yesterday's flaming radicals and today's hip-girl bloggers barely recognize each other as fellow travelers in the fight for social equality and personal satisfaction—this obscures the larger war.
Feminism isn't dead. It's never been over, or frozen in static finale. Conflict has always been feminism's life blood. Tension, and contradictions are so important to the work of liberation. The deep tension between change-as-internal and change-as-institutional rages on. This patriarchal culture loves a zero-sum game, and a dirty catfight. The media puts feminism in one corner and anti-feminism in the other, but true feminism is in the middle of the cats, where the girls are.
Without a movement behind them, the reasons why women 'Can't have it all' — a fulfilling career, a committed relationship, kids-—seems again "merely personal". It's not personal. It’s a world-wide cultural pandemic of propaganda that drives us towards super-human, unachievable goals. It's a common cultural failure to see the shared themes and patterns in women's personal struggles as connected to larger, structural issues. Across race, across class, across geography. Instead of asking what's wrong with the system, younger women ask, "What's wrong with ME?"
Catherine MacKinnon, radical feminist lawyer says, ‘In the law, under existing conditions, where sex is a difference, and underneath that difference is human commonality/sameness, how to work towards true equality and liberation?’ How to get women access to all that we’ve been historically excluded from under patriarchy, while valuing everything we are, or have developed through our struggles? We’re as good as you. Just get out of the way. This is so obvious in the institutions of employment, education, athletics, the military, health care, and so many others
Most jobs require that the person who is qualified for them will be someone who is not the primary caretaker of a pre-school child. Can you imagine 5,000 years of elevating half the population and denigrating the other half, and producing a population in which everyone is equal?
The sexes are NOT socially equal. To see gender inequalities from the standpoint of the subordination of women is feminist. Maleness provides an original entitlement. Affirmative action is a mere blip to all that. The pedestal is rare to actually benefit from, in the real world of action, other than that door-opening ritual and similar purely symbolic habits. We don’t need you to open the door for us. We need you to help us break down institutional doors, the barriers that keep us from meaningful equality. Women’s material desperation, rape, battery, pornography, and denial of her reproductive control creates a political and systematic relegation of an entire group of people to a condition of inferiority which is attributed to their nature.
One very controversial piece of our culture is pornography. Porn is the social status in which we can be used and abused and trivialized and humiliated and bought and sold and passed around and patted on the head and put in place and told to smile so we look like we’re enjoying it is not sexual equality. The word Pornography, comes to us from the Greek, porne, which is the lowest class of sexual slaves. Female sexual slavery is present in all situations where women or girls cannot change the immediate conditions of their existence. Women can make more money as sex workers than as teachers or waitresses. Our options are so limited in patriarchy, yet we’re told that we have all this sexual power over men. While in truth, sexual terrorism is maintained by a system of sex-role socialization that encourages men to be terrorists in the name of masculinity, and encourages women to be victims in the name of femininity.
Politics were slowly taken out of Feminism, which made it all more acceptable as now women can become 'feminists' without fundamentally challenging or changing themselves or the culture. Many privileged women 'do' feminism, as fashion or podcasts, or simply enjoying the benefits these movements have brought, but they don't embrace feminism. They enjoy a heady mix of postmodern womanist texts, queer culture, post-colonial discourse, direct action, Buddhism, and sex positivity, without challenging institutions of oppression that punish women. Global hyper-capitalism, greed, utter disregard for the earth, violence against women...either you believe that the system that ensures 50% of the world's resources for 6% of the population by any and all means is leading us to annihilation through one cancer death at a time, one rape and one species extinction at a time and the man-made tragedy of global warming, or you don't .
Feminism is not over. The struggle for female safety and the movement towards women’s equality won’t end until we are safe in this world, and equal. Where do we go from here? This is a new chapter in the history of the Feminist Movement.
Questions for Intro to Women’s Studies —
For women—How have women developed survival skills under patriarchy? How have you?
For men, what do you imagine 'survival skills' to mean? Reflect on your observations of male/female power structures that you have personally grown up with.
back to list