Feminist Movement

And/or

Feminist Criticism

Semester V: Women’s Writing

[All the pictures are taken from Internet]
 Waves of Feminism

 First Wave Feminism- 19th and Early 20th Century

 Second Wave Feminism- 1960s and 1970s and 80s

 Third Wave Feminism- Early 1990s

 Fourth Wave Feminism- 21st Century, from around 2010/2012

and still continuing

What are the “Waves” of Feminism?

 The term “waves” are used to have a chronological

understanding of the history of feminist movement.

 The so-called waves are not strictly

compartmentalised segments, but flows swiftly into
one another.
 First Wave Feminism
 Votes for Women
 An extended period of feminist activity during
the nineteenth century and early twentieth
century in the United

Kingdom and the United

States
  Equal contract and property

rights for women

 Opposing ownership of married

women by their husbands.

 The term first wave was coined retrospectively
after the term second-wave feminism began to
be used to describe a newer feminist movement
that focused as much on fighting social and
cultural inequalities as political inequalities.
Second Wave Feminism
 “The personal is political”-

Carol Hanisch

 Radical Feminism

 Against equality and

discrimination,

for sexuality and reproductive

rights.

 The second wave was increasingly theoretical.

 Sex and gender were differentiated—the former

being biological, and the later a social construct

that varies culture-to-culture and over time.

Third Wave Feminism
  A response to perceived failures of the second wave

and to the backlash against second-wave initiatives.

 Argues that the second-wave over-emphasized

experiences of upper middle-class white women.

 The third-wave sees women’s lives as intersectional,

demonstrating how race, ethnicity, class, religion,

gender, and nationality are all significant factors when

discussing feminism.

 Concept of “male previlege”

 From prospectmagazine.co.uk

Fourth Wave Feminism

 Still emerging and developing.

 Internet and social media

 Feminism is now moving from the academy and back

into the realm of public discourse.

 Includes traditionally marginalised sections of society.

 Sexual abuse, rape, violence against women, unequal

pay, slut-shaming, pressure on women to conform to a

single and unrealistic body-type and the realization

that gains in female representation in politics and

business.

 #Metoo Movement
  Mary Wolstonecraft’s - A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)

- Maria: Or the Wrongs of Woman

Pioneers of the different Feminist
First Wave (unfinished)

 Virgina Woolf’s A Room of Ones Own (1929) and other fictional

and non-fictional writings
Waves

 Kate Millet’s The Sexual Politics (1969)

 Juliet Mitchell’s The Subjection of Women (1970)

Second Wave

 Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970)

 bell hooks’s Feminist Theory: from Margin to Center (1984)

  Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies That Matter (1993)

 Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth (1990)

Pioneers of the different Feminist

 Rebecca Walker’s To be Real: Telling the Truth and changing the Face of

Feminism (1996)

 Nira Yuval-Davis’s Gender and Nation (1997)

Third Wave

 Natasha Walter’s The New Feminism (1998)

Waves

 Rebacca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me (2014)

 Everyday Sexism (2014), online project launched by Laura Bates

 Kira Cochrane’s The Rise of the Fourth Wave Feminism (2013)

Fourth Wave

 Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls (2013)- fiction

 The last and most important
question.

What is Feminism?
Start thinking, and we will begin from here in our
next class!!