HISTORY OF FEMINISM

This encompasses and entails the story of all feminist movement as well as that of female
thinkers. All over the world at different times, culture and country, feminists have had
different causes and goals. Introducing the history of feminism, most western feminists have
said that all movements that are aimed towards obtaining womens rights should be
considered as feminist movements, other historians believe that feminism as a term should
only be limited to modern feminist movement and use the word pro to feminist to describe
earlier movement.
This history of feminist movement can be traced back into antiquity. Plato in his Republic
was seen advocating for the abolition of the family and socio structures determined by sex
giving his view that women should also be trained to rule and not only to be in the kitchen.
Fredrick Engels (1896) also laid the care foundation for feminism and proclaimed marriage
as a dreary mutation of slavery and urged that it should be abolished and that rearing of
children should be the responsibility of the public. This was probably proclaimed in the
favour of the female folk to release them from the marginalization and subordination which
he feels marriage has subjected them to.
Maggie Humm and Rebecca Walrer has divided the history of feminism of feminism into
three waves. The first wave which is from 1848-1920 emerged out of an environment of
urban industralisation and liberal socialist political atmosphere. It refers mainly to womens
suffrage movements concerned with womens right to vote. It was the first concerted
movement that worked for the reform of womens social and legal inequalities in the 19th
century. First wave of feminism involved a wide range of women such as Frances Willard,
Matilda Josly Gage and Virginia Woolf and their key concerns were education, employment,
marriage law and the plight of middle class single women.
The second wave of Feminism (1960-1990s) was carried by Marshal leah and it marked an
increase in feminist activities. This ware was concerned with others issues such as equality
and ending of discrimination against women while the third ware of the history of feminism
began in the easy 1990s as a response to initiatives and movements created by the second
wave. Most of its ideology was based on a post-structuralist interpretation of gender and
sexuality.

Feminist theory in Africa was built on a solid tradition of female inclusion in a wide variety
of social rules in African culture. African women today believe in feminism and Albertina
Sisyly symbolized this new way of activism by joining the womens walkout at the ANC
Party Conference in Durban in 1992 (womens history month: feminism and Act, March
2007).
The emergence of African feminism signals womens desire to play a role in determining the
direction of development. It is highly political and it is not an outgrowth of western feminism
but a response to African social and political development.
Mary African women are aware that they have bore the brunt of the recent crisis such as high
child-mortality rates, lowered female-literacy rate, exclusion from modern, technical and
scientific fields and their continues confinement to agricultural work and are ready to correct
those disparities and forge new relationship between the state and the society. They also seek
to redefine their roles in a way that would allow them to embark on new, culturally attained
activism.
Though men generally dominated the traditional African societies, it is worthy of note that
women have also led wars of resistance as seen in Nigeria in the Aba womens riot of 1929 in
Nigeria and efforts made by Madam Olufunmilayo Ransome-Kuti in 1978 when she
mobilized women to send the Egba king on exile and bring peace to Egba land.
African women today have taken a leadership role in the setting of new economic and
political agendas, they have pushed for additional support for the girl child education,
training for women in industrial fields, sciences and have also demanded for greater gender
sensitivity in government and private sectors hiring policies. Women have led national
dialogues about womens living rights, they are stepping up their campaign against
exploitation, marginalization especially in West and East Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia and
South Africa and have also raised their voices against practices such as early marriage,
female genital mutilation, various forms of medical neglects and other practices. This African
feminists today have created a greater awareness of the corrections between gender and state
political economy and have generated a new model of what feminism is all about.