WOMEN'S LIBERATION: TOWARDS GENDER EQUALITY

Ouida: she is the one who uses the term: New woman. To encourage and give a name to those
women to decide to go against the gender roles of the society. By the end of the 19 th century,
women were already called for change. There were simple changes in mobility. They would
rebel against and they drive in bike, cars… All these came up with this new woman.

1. Ouida
 Smoking
 Riding bicycles
 Using bold language
 Taking the omnibus or train unescorted
 Wanted their own careers
 Liberation from male suppression
 Proper laws against marital violence

People would be talking about this change in magazines, female clubs, in fictional books,
novels. This idea of emancipation was talked about in the society. The emancipation and the
rights they have wanted to be changed.

Working class women have an important role due to the industrialization.

The figure of the new women, how they appeared, the ideas they have, this came about as a
result of the changes that happened in the society (the print media, the educational modal)

Suffrage movements have different levels. (radical, conservative…) which involves different
political ideas. Suffragists and suffragettes,

Around 1895, nearly everybody became a new woman. Suddenly, by the end of the 19 th century,
when queen Edward come to the throne, everything change. Nearly, all these decades of
straggle continue during this time.

2. Modern Times in Edwardian Era

Education

1890s:

- Universal elementary schooling

- Private schools for girls
- Wide-ranging readership
Samuel Hynes: "The ‘middle class [was] the great self-recording class, the class that kept
diaries and journals and considers that the preservation of one’s daily life is an appropriate
and interesting activity for an individual’."

1918---> the first women’s suffrage bill: the vote to women over thirty.

3. Death of Queen Victoria

‘a new phase of our history’

King Edward: modern times

- Culturally revolutionary
- Socially reformative
- Sexually relaxed: a change in the image of 'the fallen woman'
- A rethinking of gendered norms

The new women called from a new position in the society, gender roles changed as well.

4. The war and its effect on masculinity

- Domestic poverty and unrest

- Women: beckoning and threatening figures
- “Crisis in masculinity”

It’s the century of the FWW. Most interesting is the discourse of masculinity, what a solder
represent. Women were considered threatening figures in masculinity. There was a fear about
the new woman, they have fear about women taking the role of men in society.

5. Women’s suffrage

Countries that had gained suffrage previously

- New Zealand in 1893

- Australia in 1902

National Society for Women’s Suffrage (founded in 1867)

Women’s Liberal Federation (from 1881)

National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS 1897)

Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), the more militant ‘suffragettes’ (1903): lobby
peacefully for the franchise violence or battle of the books?

Many people think that the suffragettes were radical, violent, but this occurs sporadically.
 6. Three Guineas – Virginia Woolf

Many critics talk about how she was not feminist enough, all this criticism comes maybe by her
own autobiographical writing.

“as a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the
whole world” (Virginia Woolf)

- “women of all nations, unite!”

- “woman has no country”
- “ woman must have every country”

All these ideas were prevalent at the time Virginia Woolf was writing.

Three Guineas was considered a sequel of A Room of One’s One. In Three Guineas, she is
responding a letter of how could we stop the war.

Epistolary writing.

7. Women’s Liberation Movement

• Start of the movement: 1970

Two major events of that year:

- BWLM conference in Oxford

- Miss World beauty competition
- The larger context:
o Movements in the 1960s in Britain, Europe and the United States (Student
Revolution, Sexual Revolution,Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND),
Civil Rights Movement, Hippie Movement, GayRights).

Oxford: from February to March, there are not enough sits for people because many people join
the conference.

Miss World Beauty competition in London. This brought attention about what the movement
was about, and what was rejected by the movement.

It started a bit earlier in the US, and there were many different in the different movements.

8. The Feminine Mystique

1963---> Betty Friedan’s best seller. A book that talks about how women have to behave.

- Influence on second-wave feminism in the US and Britain

- Condemnation of the consumer society
 - Myth of the fulfilled housewife and mother

"The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive. There
is no way for these women to break out of their comfortable concentration camps except by
finally putting forth an effort – that human effort which reaches beyond biology, beyond the
narrow walls of home, to help shape the future."

In 1966---> National Organization of Women (NOW) and generally the AWLM inspired British
feminists

- "Consciousness-raising"
- "The personal is political"

40 years after gaining the right to vote, equality between the sexes was still far away

Little changed since the 1920s

- Underrepresented in Parliament
- Restriction od certain professions
- Unequal pay
- A quarter of male students in universities
- Patriarchal cultural attitudes
- No access Wimpy bars (“ancestor”of MacDonald’s) for unaccompanied women after 11
- No mortgage if not backed by a man
- Natural gender roles: child rearing---> women at home. bread winning---> mwn outside
- Yes, women earned money BUT pin money
9. Technological progress reduced the burden of household chores a redefinition of
the conceptions of femininity and masculinity
10. Control over their fertility

"‘Sex’ is a word that refers to the biological differences between male and female: the visible
difference in genitalia, the related difference in procreative function. ‘Gender’ however is a
matter of culture: it refers to the social classification into ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’."

Ann Oakley, Sex, Gender and Society (1972)

*important to the development of feminism and gender studies ever since*

Little by little the ideas of masculinity explores a little change.

Virginia Woolf connected inequality, employment, education with war.