A Short History of U.S. Feminisms

First Wave

1830s Abolitionist Women (1868 14th amendment)

Maternalism

Voluntary motherhood

1920 Women's suffrage

Second Wave

Radical feminisms

• Naming/critiquing patriarchy, male supremacy. New York Feminist Women (NYFW) at Miss America pageant
• Rejecting women's dependence on men; sexual double-standard
• Politicizing family (sexuality)
• “Personal is political”
• Consciousness-Raising (CR) groups
• Images - Chicago CWLU 1972
• Redstockings, NYFW, Cell 16, Feminists, NY Rad Feminists

Cultural feminisms – 70s

• Re-valuing women’s experience.
• Affirmation of things feminine
• Create counterculture of women’s spaces: bookstores, coffeeshops, etc.
• Restore women of history
• Religion, spirituality. Peace activism
• Critiqued as essentialist? More personal than political.

Liberal feminisms

• Make women’s rights the same as men’s through legal, political reform.
• Reform existing political system to include women, bring about its true ideals.
• Powerful, systemic change. Betty Friedan, Feminine Mystique. Gloria Steinem, National Organization of Women (NOW) created to monitor EEOC (1969)
• Inhospitability to women of color, lesbians, socialists

Socialist feminisms

• Long history... oldest women's groups
• Economic status central means of women’s oppression.
• Focus on labor organizing across class, race, gender lines. Work with poor women, immigrant women
• Attention to survival issues: healthcare,work, reproductive rights

Women of color feminisms

• Multipronged approach making race, class, gender equally central (sometimes sexuality).
• Raising issues of poverty, discrimination, racism. Combahee Collective,
• Torn between critiquing both sexism of men of color and racism of white feminists. Concurrent work in nationalist movements, feminist groups.
• Only groups to raise issues of social welfare, bilingualism, reproductive abuse. Ana Nieto Gomez, Angela Davis.

Lesbian feminisms

• Focus on gender & sexuality. Acknowledge, include lesbians/gays/bisexuals (and later transgender)
• Name, analyze heterosexuality as dominant norm
• "Woman-identified-woman.”
• Usually/often participants in other feminisms—but rejected if they “came out." Rita Mae Brown

Global feminisms/transnational feminisms

• Insists we cannot study U.S. in a vacuum
• Incorporates analysis of colonial history and nationalism in women’s concerns;
• Critiques ethnocentricity of Western feminist thought; a global view of women’s concerns

Third Wave Feminisms

90s and beyond – Young women growing up after Civil Rights Act/Immigration Act/Title IX, taking for granted rights their mothers didn’t, not necessarily identifying with Second Wave. Creating something new from their own new privileges, as well as experiences of inequality.

Ecofeminisms

Postcolonial feminisms