How long has feminism been around

It sold 3 million copies in three years. Women were right to be unhappy; they were being ripped off. Instead, it was revolutionary in its reach.

It made its way into the hands of housewives, who gave it to their friends, who passed it along through a whole chain of well-educated middle-class white women with beautiful homes and families. And it gave them permission to be angry. And once those 3 million readers realized that they were angry, feminism once again had cultural momentum behind it. It had a unifying goal, too: not just political equality, which the first-wavers had fought for, but social equality.

The phrase cannot be traced back to any individual woman but was popularized by Carol Hanisch. Wade guaranteed women reproductive freedom. The second wave worked on getting women the right to hold credit cards under their own names and to apply for mortgages. It worked to outlaw marital rape, to raise awareness about domestic violence and build shelters for women fleeing rape and domestic violence. It worked to name and legislate against sexual harassment in the workplace.

The second wave cared about racism too, but it could be clumsy in working with people of color. Earning the right to work outside the home was not a major concern for black women, many of whom had to work outside the home anyway.

In response, some black feminists decamped from feminism to create womanism. Even with its limited scope, second-wave feminism at its height was plenty radical enough to scare people — hence the myth of the bra burners.

Despite the popular story, there was no mass burning of bras among second-wave feminists. But women did gather together in to protest the Miss America pageant and its demeaning, patriarchal treatment of women. That the Miss America protest has long lingered in the popular imagination as a bra-burning, and that bra-burning has become a metonym for postwar American feminism, says a lot about the backlash to the second wave that would soon ensue.

In the s, the comfortable conservatism of the Reagan era managed to successfully position second-wave feminists as humorless, hairy-legged shrews who cared only about petty bullshit like bras instead of real problems, probably to distract themselves from the loneliness of their lives, since no man would ever want a shudder feminist. Another young woman chimed in, agreeing.

That image of feminists as angry and man-hating and lonely would become canonical as the second wave began to lose its momentum, and it continues to haunt the way we talk about feminism today. It would also become foundational to the way the third wave would position itself as it emerged. The Second Sex , Simone de Beauvoir The Feminine Mystique , B e tty Fried a n MacKinnon Gilbert and Susan Gubar Black Women and Feminism , bell hooks Sister Outsider , Audre Lorde But generally, the beginning of the third wave is pegged to two things: the Anita Hill case in , and the emergence of the riot grrrl groups in the music scene of the early s.

Around women and men came together from across the country to discuss the status of women in the United States. Together, they wrote the Declaration of Sentiments , which opened with these words:. We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Sound familiar? The document protested laws that denied women access to property rights, labor rights, or education, and it famously called for women to be given the right to vote i.

Many leaders of the movement were also abolitionists , including Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth. The Woman Suffrage Parade of was the first and most significant march for the cause. This early spirit of protest continued in the form of the Silent Sentinels, who picketed silently in front of the White House six days a week between — In , Susan B.

Anthony was arrested for trying to vote. During her trial, she argued that as a citizen of the United States, she had a constitutionally protected right to vote.

With the rise of fourth wave feminism, the concepts of privilege and intersectionality have gained widespread traction amongst younger feminists. It is a framework that must be applied to all situations women face, a framework that recognizes all the aspects of identity that enrich women's lives and experiences and that compound and complicate the various oppressions and marginalizations women face. It means that women cannot separate out numerous injustices because women experience them intersectionally.

Intersectionality helps us to understand that while all women are subject to the wage gap, some women are affected even more harshly due to their race. Another instance where intersectionality applies is cases of LGBTQ murders - people of color and transgendered people are more likely to be victims than cisgender people.

These are just two examples of why intersectionality matters. To truly bring about change that is meaningful for all, everyone's voice needs to be at the table. Georgetown Law Library Guides U.

The fight for women's suffrage started in the nineteenth century, but it took until the beginning of the twentieth century before women's suffrage was officially introduced in The Netherlands. Feminism Feminism is a word that comes from French. It is derived from the Latin word line 'femina', which means 'woman'. In the late nineteenth century, feminism became an officially used term. Read more.