Feminism: Overview

Introduction

Feminism is defined as the belief in social, political, and economic equality between men and women. In practice and in history, feminist social movements and academic theories have defined the relationship between men and women in general and the liberation of women in particular.

Feminist movements have attempted to influence politics and social policies through research, education, activism, and legislation. The modern feminist movement addresses issues such as women’s rights in the workplace; reproductive rights (including abortion and birth control); sexual harassment, discrimination, and abuse; and gender stereotypes.

In the United States, there are differing opinions regarding the state of the feminist movement. Some critics believe that modern feminists have become increasingly radical and that societal changes have reduced the need for an active feminist movement. Feminists and their supporters have argued that significant inequalities still remained between the sexes; however, feminist ideals have become more commonly accepted in mainstream American culture.

In other cultures, women are not permitted to take part in the political process and receive little protection under the law. Some believe that the greatest challenge for feminists is to address institutionalized sexism, discrimination, misogyny, and stereotypes regarding gender roles in other parts of the world.

Understanding the Discussion

Discrimination: Behavior either for or against a person or thing based on a group, class, or category to which that person or thing belongs.

Feminism: Belief in the political, social, and economic equality of the sexes.

Intersectionality: The view that gender is only one socially constructed hierarchy and is enmeshed with others such as race, class, and sexual orientation.

Misogyny: Hatred or distrust of women.

New social movement: A social movement that arose from the conflicts in the postindustrial revolution society and economy.

Sexism: Behavior based on traditional stereotypes regarding sexual roles, or discrimination based on a person’s gender.

Social movement: A deliberate voluntary effort to organize individuals to act in concert to achieve group influence to make or block changes.

Suffrage: The right to vote in political elections and on social issues.

History

Throughout history, women have joined together in male-dominated societies to gain political and social influence. One of the earliest documented women’s movements originated in the Roman Republic (500–20 BCE). In medieval Europe and Asia, women were considered subordinate to men; however, because those governments were based on royalty, women could ascend to leadership by becoming an empress or queen. In addition, because of rigid social structures, women from elite families were dominant over men of lower social classes.

Colonial Americans rejected the idea of royalty and therefore abolished the possibility of women attaining political leadership through familial ascendancy. Women in the American colonies were considered subordinate to men and were expected to concentrate on child-rearing and domestic duties.

During the eighteenth century, women’s movements originated in France and England. In 1790, Judith Sargent Murray wrote in her essay “On the Equality of the Sexes” about the need to educate women if they were ever to fulfill their duties as citizens in the new American republic. In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, one of the first examples of feminist literature. Like Murray, Wollstonecraft’s central concern involved education for women; she understood that women could never fully participate in society without first being exposed to the great ideas of the day. Though early women’s movements inspired future generations of feminists, significant political changes did not occur until the nineteenth century.

During the drafting of the United States Constitution, feminists such as Abigail Adams lobbied to have women’s rights included in the document. The movement ultimately failed, but the unifying purpose helped the growth of feminism.

In 1848, a convention of women and some male allies was held at Seneca Falls, New York, headed by Elizabeth Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. The meeting resulted in a Declaration of Women’s Rights, a document that called for equal rights in areas including voting privileges, legal protection, and equal employment and wages.

During the early twentieth century, the feminist movement began to focus on women’s suffrage. Several territories and states, including Wyoming and New Jersey, granted voting rights to women before a constitutional amendment was in place. The amendment for women’s suffrage was proposed in every session of Congress beginning in 1878, before the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1919.

For many years after the amendment’s passage, the suffrage movement was reflected in activities of the League of Women Voters. In its early years, the league helped ensure that the newly franchised women understood the process of voting and, later, helped all voters gain access to neutral information about the critical issues in the election cycle.

Following the success of the suffrage movement, feminism declined in the United States but remained a powerful lobby. Although millions of women from low-income and marginalized backgrounds had worked outside the home to bring in money—as housecleaners, nannies, shopkeepers, factory workers, and teachers—over the centuries, women entered the workplace in record numbers during World War II to fill the labor shortage left by men at the front. This introduced the issue of economic equality. After 1945, when soldiers returned, they took up their previous jobs and women were effectively forced to return home to raise families. Feminists made some gains during the 1940s and '50s, including the establishment of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women in 1946.

The so-called second wave of the American feminist movement grew during the 1960s and '70s, as a reaction to inequalities in employment and educational opportunities, pay rates, reproductive rights, and government representation. In particular, Betty Friedan’s groundbreaking 1963 book The Feminine Mystique ignited a new wave of feminism and led to the creation of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966. The feminist movement of the 1960s is often referred to as the women’s liberation movement, during which theorists and political activists urged women to take an active role in politics and economics. The 1960s feminist movement is an example of a new social movement. New social movements, in contrast to traditional social movements, refer to social movements that arise from the conflicts in postindustrial revolution society and economy. New social movements, such as the feminist movement, the civil rights movements, and the environmental movement, engage in social and political protest as a means of creating large-scale global change.

During the 1960s, several states passed laws regarding workplace and educational discrimination and reproductive rights. Congress also dealt with the issues of affirmative action for women and of sexual harassment. Another truly significant advance for women was passage of Title IX. This law requires a degree of equity in funding for educational opportunities for boys and girls and had a significant impact on athletics.

In 1966, in Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court first articulated a privacy right for women in their reproductive life, striking down a law that kept married women from gaining access to birth control. In 1973, the Supreme Court’s decision in the case of Roe v. Wade gave women across the US the right to undergo abortion, which was seen as a major victory for the feminist movement. The privacy right implied in the US Constitution was expanded to include the right to abortion during the first two trimesters of pregnancy.

The Equal Rights Amendment, first conceived of in the 1920s, was also proposed in Congress in the early 1970s. The ERA called for absolute legal equality and would have made any discriminatory laws unconstitutional. Opponents of the ERA argued that the amendment would remove some laws that are in place to protect women and would require women to register with the Selective Service in case of a military draft. The ERA was passed by Congress but was not ratified by the minimum number of state governments before the stated expiration date.

Despite the failure of the ERA, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 achieved some of the same goals regarding antidiscrimination laws. For instance, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of sex, race, color, religion, or national origin. In addition, the Equal Pay Act of 1963 prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in wage compensation for similar work under similar conditions.

During the 1980s and 1990s, feminist activism became less common, while academic feminism, also referred to as women’s studies or gender studies, grew into a significant discipline involving political science, philosophy, psychology, and ethics. The number of women involved in US politics grew significantly during the 1990s; the presidential administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush set records in terms of the number of women appointed to federal office. One area of feminist policy change in the late twentieth century was in the fight against domestic violence and spousal rape. Federal laws addressing domestic violence first passed in the early-to-mid 1990s, for example. Late-twentieth-century feminism was also characterized by “girl power,” or the view that girls and women could do anything they desired. It was also a period in which younger feminists embraced aspects of traditional femininity as a choice, which at times put them in conflict with second-wave feminists.

In the early twenty-first century, the American feminist movement sought to increase representation of women in politics and to remove obstacles preventing women from achieving higher office and leading corporations. It was concerned with combating misogyny and prejudices regarding the suitability of women for leadership. Congressional races in 2012, for instance, yielded momentous wins for the women-in-government movement, with a record twenty women elected to US Senate seats, including Wisconsin Democrat Tammy Baldwin, the nation’s first out lesbian senator.

The 2016 presidential campaign marked a historic milestone in US women's political leadership, with former secretary of state Hillary Clinton becoming the first woman to be nominated by a major political party. The campaign championed such “women's issues” as equal pay for equal work, three months' paid family leave, child-care assistance, and universal preschool. Yet Clinton enjoyed only qualified support even from self-identified feminists, many of whom saw her as concerned primarily with White, middle-class women already advantaged by their race and social class. Nevertheless, the campaign of Republican nominee Donald Trump appealed far more to White male voters, while Clinton polled better among women of all races. Some observers noted that the 2016 presidential election appeared to be a contest between feminists on one hand and antifeminists on the other. During the 2018 midterm elections, women ran for and were elected to a record-setting number of state and federal offices, winning 127 seats in Congress and nine governorships; two years later, women's federal representation climbed higher to a historic 134 congressional seats, or 27 percent. Although no woman became the nominee of a major party that year, the 2020 election cycle did see a half-dozen women campaign for the Democratic nomination and Kamala Harris become the country's first female vice president. Despite such increases in political participation, many saw the continued need for feminism, as women's representation remained far below parity.

In addition to political representation, modern feminists are engaged in the global state of feminism. Groups in the United States and Europe formed a lobby asking for Western governments to exert political influence on nations that do not grant political or social equality to women. Additionally, independent feminist movements have emerged in a number of countries around the world to address political, social, and legal marginalization. For instance, in the early 2010s women in Saudi Arabia risked imprisonment and lashings to publicly defy bans on driving, and in India, public outrage mounted throughout the decade over the high rate of rape and sexual assault against women and perpetrators' relative impunity in society and in the legal system. Yet some American feminists have argued that the movement should not focus on influencing the governments and cultures of other nations until women have achieved domestic goals, including the abolition of discrimination and sexism.

The perceived misogyny of President Donald Trump—who had boasted of molesting women and was later found liable for a 1996 rape—spurred protests such as the Women's March in January 2017. The late 2010s also saw popular movements on social media, #MeToo and #TimesUp, exposing the ongoing prevalence of sexual harassment and abuse. It quickly spurred debate among feminists over societal transformation versus individual empowerment and responsibility.

Feminism Today

Although the feminist label had lost its appeal for many by the late 2010s and early 2020s, its core issues remained sources of debate and controversy. So-called liberal, or corporate, feminism—with its focus on individual achievement, particularly within the paid workforce—waned by the late 2010s but appeared to resurge in the mid-2020s. At the same time, there was a backlash against feminism, with laws restricting abortion and reproductive rights in the wake of the Supreme Court's Roe reversal in 2022. Many among the younger generations had come to believe the man-hating feminist stereotype (which a 2023 Psychology of Women Quarterly study disproved) and consequently distanced themselves from the term, even if they promoted gender equality. Generation Z men in particular became reluctant to identify as feminist, in contrast with millennial men.

Some critics believe the feminist movement has limited the choices available to women and damaged family stability by discouraging women from making childcare their primary goal. In addition, some have condemned feminists for supporting what opponents consider morally questionable legislation, especially regarding abortion and reproductive rights. Still others have criticized mainstream feminism for being overly concerned with the issues facing cisgender White middle- and upper-class women and having ignored or undervalued the problems of lower-income women and women of color.

Similarly, transgender issues at the fore of public debate exposed divisions within feminism: according to a 2023 Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) survey, a minority of American feminists fear that protections for trans women pose a threat to those for cisgender women (a position dubbed “trans-exclusionary radical feminism,” or TERF) while the majority see trans women's issues as part of or aligned with feminism's goals. Many younger feminists were advocates not only for diverse sexualities and genders, but also for sex positivity and body inclusivity.

The 2024 presidential election, in which Harris became the Democratic Party's nominee late that year following incumbent president Joe Biden's withdrawal from contention, also brought discussions of the state of feminism to the fore once more. Some analysts noted that while Harris campaigned on feminist issues such as childcare and reproductive rights, she did not emphasize her identity as a woman to the extent that Clinton had; for some, this was, in part, indicative of mixed views of the feminist movement. Harris's ultimate loss to Trump stoked debate about the outcome's potential implications for women's progress and feminism, as Trump's run had again been marked by accusations of sexism and even misogyny, including when his running mate, J. D. Vance, stood by comments he had made about many leading female Democrats being "childless cat ladies." While many factors were cited as to the cause of Harris's loss despite her qualifications, some argued that it represented a growing backlash against women's rights and progress.

These essays and any opinions, information, or representations contained therein are the creation of the particular author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of EBSCO Information Services.

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