Par 6.1

1. Par 6.1 Feminism’s Aftermath: Gender Today

2. Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan: Founders of American feminism (part of the 2nd wave of feminism) • Feminism as a movement emerged in the late sixties and early seventies and for so many women seemed to change everything. • “In the west women are not subordinated and discriminated against to the degree that they once were.” • “The once widely accepted notion that a ‘woman’s place is in the home’ has been relegated to the political fringes. • Most nations have legalized abortion • Provided maternity leave • Creation of child care laws and regulations • Young women feeling as empowered as young men • Equal participants in the education system and most work places • Contribution to the cultural heritage • Gender is now a core category for social and cultural analysis”

3. “On the other hand, positions of real authority are still dominated by men who monopolize the most senior positions in most institutions.” • “In the home the gender division of labor continues, for instance, • Women still cook more meals for men in households where both work. • Women continue to bear the brunt of child rearing. • In sports, women have taken giant strides but men still crowd them out as a commercial attraction. • In show business, women’s careers are shorter and if they are young they are under continual pressure to present themselves in hyper-sexualized styles.” • “Feminism as a movement has all but withered.” • “The tension between feminism’s accomplishments and its current public neglect if often covertly expressed in popular culture.” In movies such as Pretty Woman and Erin Brockovich. • “Feminism brought new stresses to bear, particularly on middle-class women among whom its impact has been greatest; namely, the demand that they have careers.” • “Women are having babies later, and increasingly not at all, not because that is their choice but because to do otherwise would be to invite real, everyday life pressure.”

4. Feminism’s Past • Traditional pre-industrial societies are routinely thought of as ‘patriarchal’, that is as dominated by men” • “During the early years of the Industrial Revolution and inspired by the French Revolution, Mary Wollstonecraft applied an Enlightenment account of human nature and Enlightenment principles of justice and equality to gender divisions.” • This is the First wave of feminism thought as a reaction to the following: • “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.” • “The home was often maintained as such by male violence.” • “No women were permitted to vote.” • “They were prevented from joining (certain) professions.” • They were prevented from going to university. However, “bourgeois women were educated in ‘accomplishments’ (singing, piano-playing, drawing, sewing, flower-arranging, maybe a little French and Italian) designed to increase their appeal as spouses. Few had any classical or scientific education.”

5. This was due to 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.” • The Second wave of feminism started “in the late nineteenth century, (where efforts were renewed) to award women the vote and to allow them access to divorce and to the higher-education system, and hence to the professional workforce.” • Started with Virginia Wolf’s book A Room of One’s Own (1927). • “Culture and society are seen to be divided between men and women, in such a way that men restrict women’s possibilities.” • The third and the most significant wave of feminism was in the late sixties which emerged as the women’s liberation movement.

6. “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.” • “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, • (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.” Public intimacy: “In which the intimate private life is made publicly accessible for political purposes. This means not only that the private life of politicians is exposed and at stake in their public careers, but that political issues are increasingly centered on intimate familial relations.”

7. “The question now is: What does feminism want? Feminism’s early forms had clear visions: equality of rights and opportunities; an end to the dominance of the male gaze; the unfolding of a woman’s culture on its own terms. The rights and opportunities agenda is being met.” • “’Women’ is too large a grouping to be analytically useful, and this becomes more obvious as globalization proceeds. Women of different races, places and classes live under different conditions; and it is impossible to generalize across these.” • “Feminism led to the entry of hundreds of thousands of women into the university sector from the seventies onwards. As a result of this transformation of the academy, a new discipline, that of women’s studies, was slowly established.” • “Women’s liberation has been primarily a first-world movement, feminism does have a global reach as women’s issues are firmly on the agenda of many international NGOs, human rights agencies and so on .” • “But since the nineties, perhaps partly because of feminism’s loss of steam and the backlash against it, women’s studies has been mainly transformed into gender studies.”