Women's Movement

I

Introduction

Women's Movement, campaign to obtain political, social, and economic equality between women and men. Among the equal rights campaigned for are control of personal property, equality of opportunity in education and employment, equal suffrage (that is, the right to vote), and equality of sexual freedom. The women's rights movement, also known as feminism and women's liberation, first discernibly arose in Europe in the late 18th century. Although by 1970 most women throughout the world had gained many rights according to law, in fact complete political, economic, and social equality with men remains to be achieved.

The women's movement is made up of a diversity of elements, and is non-hierarchical in structure. It does not adhere to any particular set of formal principles, but one of overall assertion does prevail: the idea that all women share a common oppression, which is not experienced by men, and of which men generally are the political, social, emotional, and economic beneficiaries.

With the re-emergence of Western feminism in the 1960s, the emphasis of the movement was very much on the fact of the personal being political, that is, that women's individual experiences of subordination were not isolated incidents rooted in particular personality differences, but were each an expression of a common political oppression. There was also, early on, a concern for the importance of sisterhood, but this notion has been accused of lacking coherence and integrity in the event of persistent racial and class prejudice within the movement. In fact, the differences between women, as well as their areas of common ground, have themselves become topics for feminist academic research in recent years.

The movement falls broadly into three strands: exploration of solidarity and consciousness-raising, which facilitates the assessment of political and social position; campaigning on public issues, such as abortion, equal pay, childcare, and domestic violence; and the academic discipline of women's studies, which attempts to provide a theoretical analysis of the movement.

II

Traditional Status

Some scholars argue that the discovery throughout Europe and the Near East of stone figures of female goddesses dating from the Palaeolithic period might imply that early societies were originally goddess-worshipping, matriarchal civilizations. Male dominance, however, was pre-eminent from the time of the earliest written historical records, probably as a result of men's realization of their role in conception as well as the development of hunting and warfare as prestigious activities. The belief that women were naturally “weaker” and “inferior” to men was also sanctioned by god-centred religions. In the Bible, for instance, God placed Eve under Adam's authority, and St Paul urged Christian wives to be obedient to their husbands. Similarly, according to traditional Hindu custom, a virtuous woman is considered to be one who worships her husband (pathivratha) and derives great power from her virtue to protect her husband and herself.

Therefore, in most traditional societies, women were generally at a disadvantage. Their education was limited to learning domestic skills, and they had no access to positions of power. Marriage was almost a necessity as a means of support or protection, and pressure was usually constant to produce children, especially male heirs. A married woman generally took her husband's status and lived with his family, with little recourse in cases of ill treatment or non-support. Under Roman law, which influenced later European and American law, husband and wife were regarded as one, with the woman the “possession” of the man. As such, a woman had no legal control over her person, her own land and money, or her children. According to a double standard of morality, respectable women had to be chaste but respectable men did not. In the Middle Ages, under feudal law, land was usually passed on through the male line. Land carried with it political power, and, because feudalism had effectively disinherited women, it helped bring about their subordination to men.

Some exceptions to women's dependence on men did exist, however. In ancient Babylonia and Egypt women had property rights, and in medieval Europe they could join craft guilds. Some women had religious authority—for example, as Siberian shamans and Roman priestesses. Occasionally, women had political authority, such as Egyptian and Byzantine queens, heads of medieval nunneries, and Iroquois women, who appointed men to clan councils. A few highly cultivated women flourished in the ancient civilizations of Rome, China, and in medieval and Renaissance Europe.

III

Beginnings of Change

The Age of Enlightenment, with its egalitarian political emphasis, and the Industrial Revolution, which brought about enormous economic and social changes, provided a favourable climate for the rise of feminism, along with other reform movements in the late 18th and the 19th centuries. In France during the French Revolution, women's republican clubs pleaded that the goals of liberty, equality, and fraternity (as in the Revolution ideal “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité”) should apply to all, regardless of sex. But the subsequent adoption of the Code Napoléon, based on Roman law, obliterated any immediate realization of such hopes on the Continent. In England, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the first major feminist work, which demanded equality in an unflinchingly revolutionary tone.

During the Industrial Revolution, the transformation of handicrafts, which women had always carried out at home without pay, into machine-powered mass production, meant that lower-class women could become wage earners in the new factories. This was the beginning of their independence, although factory conditions were hazardous and their pay, lower than men's, was legally controlled by their husbands. At the same time middle- and upper-class women were expected to stay at home as idle, decorative symbols of their husbands' economic success. The only other option for respectable women of any class was to work as governesses, schoolmistresses, clerks, shop assistants, or servants.

On the Continent, feminist groups appeared sporadically but lacked strength. The Roman Catholic Church opposed feminism on the grounds that it would destroy the patriarchal family. Agrarian countries held to equally traditional ideas, and in industrial societies feminist demands tended to be absorbed by the socialist movement.

In largely Protestant, rapidly industrializing Britain and the United States, feminism was more successful. Its leaders were primarily educated, reform-minded women of the middle class. In 1848 more than 100 people held the first women's rights convention, at Seneca Falls, New York. Led by the abolitionist (opponent of slavery) Lucretia Mott and the feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the feminists demanded equal rights, including the vote and an end to double standards. British feminists first convened in 1855 behind the limited goal of property rights. The publication of The Subjection of Women (1869) by the British philosopher John Stuart Mill (partly influenced by discussions with his wife, Harriet Taylor Mill) focused public attention on the British feminist cause.

Colleges were founded for women, such as Mount Holyoke College (1837) in the United States and Girton (1869) at Cambridge University in Britain, although the right of admission to male-dominated universities took longer. Married women's property acts, passed in England in 1870 and at various times in the United States, gave women control over their own property. Later, provisions were made for divorce, maintenance payments, and child support. Meanwhile, labour legislation improved hours and wages for women. The suffragette movement, which held sway from about 1860 to around 1930, brought together women from a diversity of social and educational backgrounds in the context of winning the vote. Suffrage came to be a primary goal of British and American feminists, encountering substantial resistance, despite massive and sometimes violent campaigns. In 1893 New Zealand had been the first country to give women the vote. The right to vote was won by women elsewhere only after World War I, when, in the United States, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States was approved by Congress in 1919 (becoming law in 1920), partly in recognition of women's war contributions as paid and volunteer workers. In Britain women over the age of 30 were entitled to vote in 1918, with the age being brought down to 21 in 1928. Female suffrage had been won in the former Soviet Union in 1917; and was won in Germany, Poland, Austria, and Sweden in 1919. Later, women won the vote in France (1944), Italy (1945), China (1947), and India (1949). In Switzerland, women were unable to vote on national issues until 1971, and voting on regional issues was restricted in some cantons of the country until 1990. Women are today still denied the vote in Kuwait, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia (where all suffrage is restricted).

IV

Twentieth-Century Developments

After wars and revolutions in Russia (1917) and China (1949), new Communist governments discouraged the patriarchal family system and supported sexual equality, including birth control. In the Soviet Union, however, the majority of working women held low-paid jobs and were minimally represented in party and government councils. Birth-control techniques were primitive, day-care centres were few, and mothers working outside the home were largely responsible for keeping house and tending children too. China more fully preserved its revolutionary ideals, but some job discrimination against women nevertheless existed. Socialist governments in Sweden in the 1930s established wide-ranging programmes of equal rights for women, which included extensive child-care arrangements.

In Britain and the United States progress was slower. The number of women in paid work increased substantially after the two world wars, but they generally had low-paid, female-dominated occupations, such as teaching and clerical work. Advocates of birth control agitated for decades before women's right to family planning was recognized. An Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, to remove at one stroke legal, economic, and social restrictions on women, was introduced into Congress in 1923 but made no headway until 1972 when it was passed and sent to the states for ratification.

In the 1960s, however, changing demographic, economic, and social patterns encouraged a resurgence of feminism. Lower infant mortality rates, soaring adult life expectancy, and the availability of the contraceptive pill (after 1960) gave women greater freedom from child-care responsibilities. These developments, combined with inflation—which meant that many families needed two incomes—and a rising divorce rate, propelled more women into the job market. In the late 1980s they made up more than 40 per cent of the workforce in England, France, Germany, and the United States.

The women's movement questioned social institutions and moral values, basing many of its arguments on scientific studies suggesting that most supposed differences between men and women result not from biology but from culture. Many women objected that language itself, by reflecting traditional male dominance in its word forms, perpetuates the problem. Some women experimented with new kinds of female-male relations, including the sharing of domestic roles. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, active feminists organized women's rights groups, and much attention was given to consciousness-raising (a process of probing and discussion) to help make women more aware of their common disadvantages. They were inspired by key texts such as The Second Sex (1949; trans. 1953) by Simone de Beauvoir, The Feminine Mystique (1963) by Betty Friedan, Sexual Politics (1969) by Kate Millett, The Female Eunuch (1970) by Germaine Greer, Of Women Born (1976) by Adrienne Rich, Gyn/Ecology (1979) by Mary Daly.

Private and governmental efforts converged in November 1977, when the largest convention of women ever held in the United States met in Houston, Texas, under American government sponsorship. It ratified the feminist report drawn up by the presidential commission, which was intended to serve as an official guide to governmental action.

The objectives of the women's movement included equal pay for equal work, state support for childcare, recognition of lesbian rights, continued legalization of abortion, and the focus of serious attention on the problems of rape, domestic violence, and discrimination against older women and women from minority groups. In recent years particular attention has been paid to the areas of reproductive rights (especially given the wealth of research into reproductive technology techniques and the implications of such practices) and sexual harassment, chiefly in the workplace.

The women's rights movement has made many gains in its history. In more than 90 per cent of nations, women can vote and hold public office. Aided by the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (1946), women in many countries have gained legal rights and fuller access to education and the professions. However, the advent of industrialization in non-Western nations destroyed some traditional economic arrangements that favoured women and made underpaid factory labour the only work available to them, while the recent resurgence of religious fundamentalism (for example, in the Islamic world) has sometimes brought about the re-emergence of oppressive practices towards women. Women's rights movements in the developing world have aimed to improve the social status of women by campaigning against divisive legal and social codes such as purdah (seclusion of women) in Arab and Islamic societies, and the dowry system in India, and by opposing female genital mutilation (circumcision). In Africa, more than two-thirds of the continent's food is produced by women, and steps are being taken to help women gain greater control over agricultural technology. In 1975 the United Nations launched a Decade for Women programme, and major conferences were held in 1975, 1980, and 1985, and again in 1995. The 1995 conference, held in Beijing, China, centred on human-rights issues relating specifically to women. See also Sexism.

In the 1990s, the women's movement has been examining the possibility that Western society is demonstrating a so-called post-feminist backlash against legal and social gains made by women. Texts such as The Beauty Myth (1990) by Naomi Wolf and Backlash (1992) by Susan Faludi have concentrated on how gains previously made as a result of the feminist movement are now being eroded. This is thought to be exemplified by recent opposition, especially in the United States, to, for example, abortion.