111 years ago, in January 1909, the world’s first women’s auto race took place. The route of the race was from Philadelphia to New York and back. On the occasion of this landmark event, we decided to recall the major milestones in the development of feminism and women’s struggle for the right to be seen and heard – not just in the kitchen.
Annelise Orleck, professor of history at Dartmouth College, when discussing feminism, insists: historically, attitudes toward people have been influenced not only by their personal virtues and flaws, but also by their biological sex, and thus by the gender norms that exist at a particular point in time. This was (and still is) reflected in unequal wages, access to resources and political power, violence, and more.
When talking about the history of feminism, it is important to remember that it included many different currents, several waves of ideological development, and different kinds of social and political movements that often overlapped. Black and white women, poor and rich, workers and students, lesbian and ecofeminist movements, and even Ku Klux Klan and skinhead women.
Given the number of different preconditions, it is hard to pinpoint a single date that can be considered the birthdate of feminism. But we can talk about the historical epoch when the movement in this direction began: we are talking about the period of the collapse of feudal society. It was then that women began to be hired and were able to earn their own living.
Where it all began
In 1519, philosopher Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa wrote his quite feminist work On the Greatness and Supremacy of the Female Sex. In the XVII-XVIII centuries in Britain are published books by Aphra Ben and Mary Astell (considered the first women’s rights activists in England), Mary Walstonecraft (“Women’s Rights Defender”, 1792) and other works proclaiming the need for women’s equality. Prominent male thinkers were also among the authors.
For example, the Frenchman Poulain de la Barre wrote that the unequal position of women is the result of the supremacy of brute male power, not “a prescription of nature” (essay “On the Equality of the Two Sexes”). Voltaire pointed out the injustice of “women’s lot. Montesquieu noted that women must participate in public life, and Helvetius argued that women’s civic unenlightenment “is only the consequence of her incomplete and faulty upbringing.
If the beginning of the 18th century was marked by a retreat from the idea of equality and popularization of the cult of women’s “weakness” (which is still expressed in the widespread stereotype of the “weaker sex”), by the middle of the century women from Europe began to actively participate in public life, gained economic independence, tried to get involved in politics, defending the right to a civil life, education, etc. However, it is important to note here that such activism was carried out by privileged women from secular society.
In France, shortly before the Great Revolution of 1789, the first magazine on women’s struggle for equality began to be published, and women’s revolutionary clubs sprang up. However, the Constitution adopted in 1791 denied women the right to vote. In the same year, the activist Olympia de Gouges presented to the National Assembly the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen, demanding full social and political equality for women. At the same time, the first women’s organization “Society of Women Revolutionary Republicans” appears. However, already in 1793 its activity was banned, and Olympe de Gouges was executed. By the way, she is famous for the phrase: “If a woman is worthy to go to the scaffold, then she is worthy to enter parliament”.
The turning point of the 19th century
If we go back in time to the 1830s, when the United States was shaken by social unrest, the first seeds of feminism were found there. American feminism grew out of several movements, one of which was the factory workers’ rights movement, which advocated increased living wages not only for working men but also for women, as well as safe working conditions and shorter working hours in Massachusetts and other New England cities.
The first American feminist is referred to by many as Abigail Smith Adams, author of the famous quote: “We will not submit to laws we did not participate in passing and to a government that does not represent our interests.” Several femme activists have also appeared in the abolitionist movement, in spite of claims that it is “unnatural” and “unladylike” to speak from the podium. So Angelina and Sarah Grimke not only had to defend the ideas of liberation, but also had to engage in polemics with “their own,” saying that women had the right to speak out on an equal footing with men. They were joined by women who had been freed from slavery.
The most important historical event, considered by many to be the official birthday of the organized women’s movement, was the drafting and adoption of the “Declaration of Sentiments,” or, as it is often called, the “Declaration of the Rights of Women,” at a convention held in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848 under the slogan “All women and men are created equal.”
Emmeline Pankhurst, an Englishwoman, was one of the founders of suffragism. In 1868, she founded an organization in defense of the social and political rights of women. Within a year Pankhurst had attracted more than five thousand supporters. After members of sympathetic organizations began to be arrested, one form of women’s protest became hunger strikes. And this drew attention to the brutality of the legislation. As a result, in 1894, thanks to the activists, the English Parliament passed a series of laws aimed at improving the situation of women, securing for them also the right to vote, but only in local elections.
Simultaneously with Great Britain in 1869 in the United States two similar organizations were created which in 1890 united into the National American Association “For Women’s Suffrage”. Thanks to it, women were allowed to vote, but the corresponding law in America was adopted only in 1920, and in Great Britain married women received the right to participate in parliamentary elections only in 1918 and in 1928 in its full volume.
Incidentally, the first women in the world to receive the right to vote were wealthy New Zealanders in 1893. Gradually the others followed: Australia in 1902, Finland in 1906, Norway in 1913, Denmark and Iceland in 1915, Russia in 1917…
Our time
After the Second World War the struggle for actual realization of the rights which were earlier prescribed in the legislation of different countries becomes one of the main tasks of women’s movement. In 1945, for the first time at the international level, the UN Charter spelled out the equality of men and women as a fundamental human right. In 1979, the UN adopted the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. In parallel, the “second wave” of feminism is gaining momentum, and the movement is becoming more and more widespread.
Now, feminists’ demands extend not only to the right to vote, but also to the opportunity to enter into power themselves. One of the originators and theorists of the “second wave” is Simone de Beauvoir. The first scholarly studies and works critical of patriarchy and women’s issues appear. Patriarchal patterns in culture, politics, family and sexual relations are criticized. It was on the crest of the “second wave” that the slogan, “The personal is political,” appeared.
Since then, women have become elected heads of state and government in increasing numbers. The first to head a government was Sirimavo Bandaranaike in Sri Lanka in 1960. The first woman president was Isabel Perón (Argentina) in 1974. The first woman to lead a country through elections was in 1980 (Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, Iceland). In Muslim countries, Benazir Bhutto (Pakistan, 1988) led the government for the first time.
Also since the 1970s there has been a major revision of the role and position of women in art. This is due to a crisis of confidence in the male-dominated culture of modernism. Feminist art today is one of the full-fledged directions of contemporary art.
In the 1990s, the “third wave” of feminism emerged in the West. Demands related to the problems of violence, access to contraception and reproductive rights were being made. To these are added the discourse of privilege and the unification of various feminist movements.
In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, new strands of feminism emerge, such as individualist feminism, cyberfeminism, ecofeminism, and so on. With the development of social networks, media activism is becoming a trend – there are many blogs devoted to feminism and women’s rights, both in general and more narrowly focused. The prerequisites for a “fourth wave” of feminism are rapidly forming, based on the notion of horizontal connections and a complete rejection of hierarchy as one of the “whales” of patriarchal society. “Any contribution is important,” say activists, whether it is a street action, a post on social media, or an academic paper.