The Three Waves of Feminism Movements
Kinds of the
Waves
1st Wave
th
2nd Wave
th
Time of the
Waves
Late of 17 century
Early of the 19 century
Members of the
Waves
Mary Wollstonecraft
Virginia Wolf
Gloria Steinem
Betty Friedan
The Aims
Mary Wollstonecraft applied an
Enlightenment account of human
nature and Enlightenment
principles of justice and equality to
gender divisions.”
to award women the vote and
to allow them access to
divorce and to the highereducation system, and hence
to the professional workforce.”
3rd Wave
in the late sixties which
emerged as the women’s
liberation movement.
* The most significant
wave of feminism
****
It attached three new
elements to the old
demands for more
participation by women in
the economy, the
workforce, the education
system and the formal
political system.”
1- “A critique of
representation: women
were demeaned by being
represented, especially in
the commercialized public
sphere, as primarily sexual
objects for the male
gaze.”
2- “Consciousness raising
meant learning about the
history of female
subordination, acquiring
basic skills of ideology
critique and
understanding how
history and women’s
image today affected you
personally.”
3- “A rethinking of the
public/private division.
Women are restricted to
the private realm.”
The Reasons of
the Waves
1-“Working-class women who
worked for wages, and who
acquired the status and power of
breadwinners, were under
sustained attack from social
managers and theorists. Men and
women were seen to be
in competition for wages.”
2-“The home was often
maintained as such by male
violence.”
3-“No women were permitted to
vote.”
4-“They were prevented from
joining (certain) professions.”
5-They were prevented from going
to university. However, “bourgeois
women were educated in
‘accomplishments’ (singing, pianoplaying, drawing, sewing, flowerarranging, maybe a little French
and Italian) designed to increase
their appeal as spouses. Few had
any classical or scientific
education.”
•
Culture and society are seen to
be divided between men and
women, in such a way that
men restrict women’s
possibilities.”
The Effect of the
Waves
.The movement of social
reformation: “Which dated back to
the late seventeenth century, and
which attempted first to restrict
public drunkenness, prostitution
and gambling, and second, to
improve hygiene and individuals’
sense of civil participation and
responsibility.”
.“The argument was that ordered
domestic environments, each
under the subordinated control of
a wife and mother, were the most
effective seedbeds for a reformed
society.”
“Feminism fell apart at
least in part because it
split into various (parts). It
was split between the
objectives of older
feminism- the attainment
of equality between men
and women, which
concentrated primarily on
questions of social and
political access and
participation
-(And) on the other
(hand), the impulsions of
new identity politics by
which women asserted
their difference from men,
and which focused on
culture expression and
private self-fashioning.”