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Feminism and related concerns Waves of feminism
by PIA Admin - Monday, 13 October 2014, 12:51 PM
 

Dear learners

I met with one of you last week and she had queries about the waves of feminism and the theories, which she was finding complicated and confusing. I have therefore posted a simpler explanation on the waves of feminism for your perusal and understanding. There are two other notes on the different theories of feminism and the three approaches to development keeping in view the gender element. 

Please check the attachment and revert for clarifications or a discussion on the same.

Please fee free to have a discussion on the same.

Warm regards

Martha

 

What Is Feminism?

 

Feminism is the idea that women should have rights equal to men’s in political, social, sexual, intellectual and economic spheres. It comprises a diverse collection of social theories, political movements and moral philosophies, largely motivated by or concerning the experience of women. Feminism concerns itself with issues of gender difference (a distinction of biological and/or physiological characteristics typically associated with either the males or the females of a species) that advocate equality for women’s rights and interests (Lerner, 1993).

 

It broadly covers a series of campaigns for reforms on issues such as reproductive rights, domestic violence, maternity leave, equal pay, women's suffrage, sexual harassment, and sexual violence, all of which fall under the label of feminism. The movement's priorities, meaning and connotation vary among nations and communities and it might differ according to the requirements of class caste, background, educational level, consciousness etc. The feminist movement's agenda includes acting as a counter to the putatively patriarchal strands in the dominant culture.

 

Waves of Feminism

 

Some feminist scholars have divided the movement’s history into three ‘waves’. However, the concept of waves in studied in the context of western feminism. It is not used to describe feminism in Indian context.

 

First Wave Feminism (Late 19th and early 20th century)

                       

The first wave refers to women’s suffrage movements in the 19th and the early 20th centuries (mainly concerned with women’s right to vote), although it originally focused on the promotion of equal contract and property rights for women and opposition to chattel marriage and the ownership of married women by their husbands.

 

The Seneca Falls Convention began a social movement by which women final won the Right to Vote in 1920.

 

Second-Wave Feminism: 1960s/1970s

 

The second wave refers to a period of feminist activity that began in the early 1960s and lasted through to the late 1980s. Some scholars suggest it was a continuation of the earlier phase of feminism that involved the suffragettes of the UK and the USA, but whereas the first wave focused on rights such as suffrage, the second wave was largely concerned with other issues of equality, such as ending discrimination.

 

The slogan ‘personal is political’ became identified with second-wave feminists, who saw women’s cultural and political inequalities as inextricably linked. They encouraged women to understand aspects of their personal lives as deeply politicised and a reflection of sexist power structures, sexism being the belief that one gender or sex is inferior or less valuable than the other.

 

Third- wave Feminism: (1980’-2000)

 

Feminism’s third wave began in the early 1990s, arising as a response to the backlash against the second wave. The Third Wave grew out of an enormous cultural shift. By the late 1980s, a cohort of women and men who’d been raised with the gains, theories, flaws, and backlash of the feminist movement were beginning to come of age. Whether or not these individual men and women were raised by self-described feminists—or called themselves feminists—they were living feminist lives: Females were playing sports and running marathons, taking charge of their sex lives, being educated in greater numbers than men, running for office, and working outside the home.

 

Third wave feminism seeks to challenge what it deems is the second wave’s essentialist definition of femininity (for every specific kind of entity there is a set of characteristics, all of which any entity of that kind must possess), which, in its view, emphasises the experiences of upper-middle class white women.

 

The third wave often critiqued second-wave feminism for its lack of attention to the differences among women that arise from race, ethnicity, class, nationality and religion, and emphasised ‘identity’ as a site of gender struggle. The third wave, with its origins in the mid-1980s, sought to negotiate a space within feminist thought for the consideration of race-related subjectivities.

 

The Fourth Wave (Approximately 2008–Onward)

By the time Obama and Hillary were facing off in the Democratic primaries, a critical mass of younger feminists began expressing themselves. They were tech-savvy and gender-sophisticated. Perhaps most significant, though, their experience of the online universe was that it was just a part of life, not something that landed in their world like an alien spaceship when they were twenty or fifty.

Much like the Third Wave lived out the theories of the Second Wave (with sometimes surprising results), the Fourth Wave enacted the concepts that Third Wave feminists had put forth.

Many commentators argue that the internet itself has enabled a shift from ‘third-wave’ to ‘fourth-wave’ feminism. What is certain is that the internet has created a ‘call-out’ culture, in which sexism or misogyny can be ‘called out’ and challenged. This culture is indicative of the continuing influence of the third wave, with its focus on micro-politics and challenging sexism and misogyny insofar as they appear in everyday rhetoric, advertising, film, television and literature, the media, and so on. The existence of a feminist ‘fourth wave’ has been challenged by those who maintain that increased usage of the internet is not enough to delineate a new era. But it is increasingly clear that the internet has facilitated the creation of a global community of feminists who use the internet both for discussion and activism.

 
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