Generally, feminism means the advocacy of women’s rights to full citizenship–that is, political, economic, and social equality with men. Feminism encompasses some widely differing views, however, including those advocating female separatism. Modern feminism, which was born with the great democratic revolutions of the 18th century (American and French), differed from its precursors in applying the democratic implications of “the rights of man and the citizen” to women as a group.
Abigail Adams asked her husband, John, to “remember the ladies” in framing the Constitution; Mary Wollstonecraft, inspired by the French Revolution, wrote the premier feminist treatise, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792). Beginning with the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, American women schooled in reform struggles began a serious fight for the rights of women to control their persons, property, and earnings and for the right to vote (see suffrage, women’s). Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Declaration of Rights and Sentiments established a blueprint.
American women would not gain the vote until 1920, but throughout the remainder of the 19th century many feminist goals were gradually realized, especially the rights of married women to control their own property (New York State, 1848 and 1860; South Carolina, 1868; and so on). Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries the women’s movement primarily reflected white middle-class values and never satisfactorily answered the ex-slave Sojourner Truth’s challenge: “Ain’t I a woman? ” The goals of black and working-class women remained inseparable from their racial and class oppression.
The goals of middle-class women centered on obtaining the opportunities available to the men of their own class, such as education or reforming society as a whole. Thus some women sought to improve the position of women through temperance (see temperance movement; WCTU), social reform, and protective legislation for working women. After women won the vote, the women’s movement waned, and the first Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), introduced by Alice Paul in 1923, failed to pass. The women’s movement did not reemerge until the 1960s, when the example of the civil rights movement and the dissatisfactions of college-educated women converged.
Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) called national attention to women’s plight. The founding (1965) of the National Organization for Women provided a focus for the struggle for women’s rights. In 1973 the ERA was reintroduced. Since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, women have won the right to abortion and some guarantees for equal opportunity and pay in employment. During the 1980s, however, the ERA was defeated, the right to abortion came under attack, and growing numbers of women were finding the ad hoc employment measures inadequate to guarantee equality.
The decline in alimony and child support, combined with the rising divorce rate, made women’s rights to economic equality pressing. As Friedan’s The Second Stage (1981) suggested, many feminists were also interested in building a new kind of family life. Despite differences, most feminists seek equal economic rights; support reproductive rights, including the right to abortion; criticize traditional definitions of gender roles; and favor raising children of both genders for similar public achievements and domestic responsibilities.
Many wish to reform language so that it does not equate man with humanity. Many also campaign vigorously against violence against women (wife battering, rape) and against the denigration of women in the media. As individuals, women have participated in essentially all of the activities performed in human societies. As a group, however, women have been identified with particular roles ascribed to them by their societies. These roles have commonly been presented as naturally linked to women’s physiology–childbearing and infant care.
Even in societies where women have been given broader responsibilities and power, men have normally dominated formal political life. The emergence of classes, states, and major religions has universally strengthened male dominance, and the rise of capitalism has furthered this tendency. Preliterate Cultures In both hunting and foraging and early settled agricultural societies, women contribute directly and indispensably to subsistence, frequently controlling or collecting the essentials for survival.
No known societies have entrusted any technological activities specifically to women. Although such female activities as food preparation and cooking approximate technology, men monopolize hunting, butchering, and the processing of hard materials. Kinship provides the basic social organization in preliterate societies; work is allocated according to gender and generation. Some 19th-century scholars, notably Johann Jakob Bachofen, believed that the matriarchal family was the foundation of human society. More recent work has discredited this myth of matriarchy.
Many preliterate societies, however, were matrilineal (descent was traced through the family of the mother) or matrilocal (newly married couples resided with and worked for the family of the mother). Among the Iroquois, who offer the best-known case of female power, women’s influential roles were based on female control of the group’s economic organization. As a rule, in societies in which hunting predominated, there was greater sexual segregation in work and childrearing, greater emphasis on competition, and a masculine cast to creation myths and cosmology (see creation accounts).
Whereas in more settled societies, which relied marginally or not at all on hunting, there was greater sexual integration, less competitiveness, and a feminine cast to creation myths and cosmology. Western Cultures By c. 3000 BC, in Sumer, the first of the Bronze Age patriarchal civilizations of Mesopotamia, recognizable class divisions and royal dynasties had appeared, consolidating women’s exclusion from politics. According to class position, women continued to exercise varied roles and to enjoy some legal protection for property.
Symbolically, the early role of priestesses was transformed into the roles of concubines and prostitutes in the god’s harem. The legal code of the Old Babylonian king Hammurabi (r. c. 1792-1750 BC) carried the patriarchal tendencies of Sumer to their logical severity, which included draconian punishments for women who dared to challenge the most sacred family tie–male dominance. The Minoan society of Crete, which also took shape about 3000 BC, contrasted sharply with Sumer by perpetuating women’s preponderant influence in religion and social life and granting them equal political authority with men.
Minoan women, belonging to a trading rather than a warrior society, drew strength both from their membership in corporate kinship groups and from their institutionalized ties with other women (see Aegean civilization). The classical myths of origin, memorably recorded and shaped by Hesiod during the 8th century BC, set forth a complex anthropomorphic cosmology in which women figure prominently as disruptive forces, such as Pandora and Aphrodite, or as asexual virgins, such as Athena and Artemis. Hesiod explicitly depicted the progress of civilization as the triumph of male power and principles of justice over the reproductive forces of women.
His interpretation was reinforced by subsequent authors, especially Aeschylus in the Oresteia and Sophocles in Antigone. In keeping with its cultural hostility toward women, classical Greek civilization (5th-3d century BC) severely curtailed women’s political participation. This trend reflected the transition from an aristocratic to a more egalitarian commercial society with a growing dependence on slave labor. Classical Athens firmly relegated women, with slaves and children, to the household, or oikos, which male citizens dominated and represented in the polity.
The married woman nonetheless earned dignity and respect from her management of the oikos. The more authoritarian Spartans, who also displayed deep misogyny (hatred of women) and radically segregated women and men, allowed women defined public roles. The fear of and hostility toward women that permeated Greek culture was institutionalized in law and indirectly expressed in men’s idealization and love of other men, particularly young boys. Sappho, the outstanding female writer, was an exiled lesbian poet who lived and worked with other women.
Although different in its social foundations, traditional Judaic society also restricted women’s social role and encouraged sexual segregation. Judaism probably also reflected a historic revolt against a prehistoric female-centered cosmology. By historic times, Jewish monotheism was clearly founded upon the worship of a male creator and lawgiver. The Roman state, with its principle of patriapotestas (“right of the father”), granted women even fewer rights than had the Greek states, but it probably permitted them greater personal freedom.
Although the patriapotestas granted the father extensive rights, including that of life and death, over his wife, Roman culture never expressed deep hostility toward female sexuality, nor a sharp polarity between the sexes. Christianity emerged in part as a reaction to the perceived laxity of late Hellenistic morals, Roman imperialism, and the internal crisis of Jewish society. Although women figured prominently among early converts and proselytizers, the architects of Christian orthodoxy, most notably Saint Paul, mistrusted sexuality in general and women in particular.
Increasingly, Christianity stressed both Eve’s responsibility for the fall of the human race from divine grace and Mary’s virginity. Women were denied official religious roles until, eventually, a place was made for them in the religious orders. The Germanic tribes that overran the Roman Empire seem to have regarded women largely as property to be exchanged by men. The Roman historian Tacitus, however, emphasized Germanic women’s roles as seers and prophets, and subsequent Christian chroniclers praised women’s efforts to convert their men.
Although nuns and abbesses worked devotedly to extend the influence of the church, their lay sisters remained strictly subordinate to husband and family. By the 9th century, women’s legal position had improved as a result of complex social change. Women’s ability to inherit property strengthened their position within the family and influenced society at large. The Carolingian rulers reinforced the church’s policy of the indissolubility of marriage, thus protecting women against repudiation for childlessness. Property and marital security enabled women to play more active roles in the early Middle Ages.
From the 11th century on, however, women’s freedoms were steadily restricted, first by the church, and later by lay society. The rise of monarchies strengthened male control of families and increased male opportunities in the public sphere. The rise of courtly love, which simultaneously idealized women as objects of male devotion and drew them from religious devotion to romantic love of men, provided cultural compensation for declining female independence. The Renaissance did not reverse the general erosion of women’s position that resulted from the growing importance of commerce and centralized states.
The individualistic, secular culture that might have invited female as well as male participation self-consciously defined itself as the male mind triumphing over (female) nature. Renaissance thought still portrayed women as dangerous and disorderly. Urban institutions followed the Athenian pattern of associating men with politics and women with the household. The Reformation, which recognized the importance of women’s participation in their own salvation, glorified marriage, and benefited from female support, nonetheless repudiated the implications of sexual equality.
As early as the 15th century, a few women, notably Christine de Pisan (1364-1431), had sought to win respect for female intellectuals, but without success. Typically, female initiative was channeled into religious vocation, social promotion through marriage, or family interests. Some upper-class women enjoyed unusual opportunities because of their family: queens, such as Elizabeth I, female regents, princesses of the blood, and noblewomen. Peasant and lower-class women worked with and for their families in agriculture, crafts, and households.
Custom normally favored their inheritance rights, but formal institutions favored male dominance. The Puritan Revolution of 17th-century England promoted a close identification of women with domestic life that gained broad acceptance throughout the 18th century. While the American and French Revolutions yielded mixed benefits for women, both restricted citizenship to men. The Napoleonic Code approximated the Roman patriapotestas in its subjugation of married women to their husbands. The individualism of Enlightenment thought, however, combined with the revolutionary defense of individual rights, sowed the seeds of modern feminism.
Throughout the Western world the gradual development of liberal and democratic institutions encouraged the emergence of a model of womanhood for women of all classes and a dominant doctrine of separate spheres. From the 17th century, the rise of capitalism, followed by industrialization, was accompanied by the disruption of peasant communities and the growth of a wage labor force in which working women participated, although for lower wages than men. The colonialism that preceded and accompanied this process wrenched West African women, like men, into enslavement in the plantations of the Americas.
The progress of industrialization and the organization of labor discriminated against women who, increasingly, accepted the goal of a male wage that could support entire families. During the 19th century, women became more concerned with social reform and improvement of their own position. Many women viewed their growing public activities as “social housekeeping” and argued that their interest in nursing, social work, temperance (see temperance movement), and even the vote (see suffrage, women’s) was in keeping with true womanhood.
A decline in birthrate and infant mortality left more and more women with years unencumbered by childbearing. Women fought for and won gradual improvement in the property rights of married women, divorce, and child custody. By the 20th century they began to claim full citizenship and control over their own reproductive powers. By the time the new feminist wave (see feminism) broke in the 1960s, women had gained individual rights and opportunities undreamed of by their sisters in other ages and other parts of the world.
Male dominance in the household and the public sector still flourished, however. Women had gained many of the uncertainties and responsibilities of individualism without equal access to its benefits. Eastern Cultures The dominant cultures of the Islamic countries, India, China, and Japan rested on sharp social distinctions and on the labor of peasants or tribal masses. Many of the older traditions had favored considerable equality among women and men, and these patterns may have persisted among the lower classes, which depended on the labor of women and viewed marriage as an economic partnership.
Normally, however, official ideologies and ruling elites saw the seclusion of women as essential to social and political order. Women’s only alternative to domestic confinement was to join a religious order or to become a wandering mendicant like Mirabai, the 16th-century Rajput princess. Generally, Islam (established in the 7th century AD) confirmed or strengthened female subordination among the peoples it conquered and, by including women’s status in holy law, or Sharia, made subsequent change difficult.
Allowing polygyny (see polygamy), it restricted the number of wives to four and insisted on equal treatment. Declaring a woman worth half a man with respect to inheritance and testimony, Islam veiled women and isolated them from all men other than their own relatives. Yet Islamic women were entitled to full support for themselves and their children from their husbands. The lives of Indian women were shaped by the caste system, which evolved in the 1st millennium BC. Caste endogamy stressed marriage as the central purpose of a woman’s life.
Marriage policies and a deep mistrust of female sexuality, especially among the Brahmans (priestly class), resulted in prepuberty marriage, suttee, bans on widow remarriage, and a benign neglect of female children who were considered economic liabilities. Hinduism emphasized the dual nature of women: benevolent wives, dangerous mothers. The penetration (13th century) of Islam into northern India introduced the constraints of Sharia and, at least for aristocratic women, purdah, seclusion from public observation. Strict patrilineal values governed the position of women in the Chinese Empire.
Confucianism, originating in the 6th century BC, emphasized the importance of the family to social order and of gender and generational hierarchy within families. Marriage allied families, with the new wife totally subject to her husband and, especially, to his parents. Although there was no polygyny, the husband could take concubines. Upper-class women lived lives of leisure and extreme seclusion. The growth of cities (10th-16th century) was accompanied by an increase in female literacy and by an impression of female immorality.
Systematic confinement and oppression reached its height during the Ch’ing dynasty (1644-1911) with foot-binding, prostitution and concubinage, and social pressure on widows to remain chaste or to commit suicide. In Japan, beginning in the 8th century, the influence of Buddhism, Confucianism, and specific clans steadily restricted the image and political roles of women. By the Heian period (794-1185), women were being secluded and used as pawns in marriage politics. The absence of patrilocality made them more valuable than sons for ambitious clans, such as the Fujiwara, who used their daughters to control emperors.
Excluded from official learning, women writers developed special skills in vernacular literature and produced brilliant works of fiction, such as Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji (11th century). Women reached a high point of rights to inherit and own property during the Kamakura period (1185-1333) but slipped back thereafter. Under Tokugawa feudalism (1600-1867), women were viewed as inferior to men and were subjected to male relatives; they also lost most of their property rights and all political roles. Men practiced polygyny, kept concubines, and could repudiate their wives at will.
The Meiji Civil Code of 1898 perpetuated much of this subordination. Women’s Status Today Since World War II the position of women around the globe has begun to change at an accelerating rate. Women have gained most in politically progressive or economically developed countries, but there is no single explanation for women’s gains, and in no country do women enjoy full political, legal, economic, social, educational, and sexual equality with men. Throughout much of the world, women are gradually emerging from millennia of subordination to men and confinement to the family, but progress is uneven and has even suffered reversals.
In highly developed countries women normally account for 40-50% of the labor force, but in less developed countries with a large subsistence sector, they may constitute less than 20%, and even less than 10% in some orthodox Muslim countries. Most women remain concentrated in low-paying, low- status, “female” jobs, especially primary and secondary school teaching, service jobs, and some clerical and sales jobs. Throughout the world women continue to earn less than men for comparable work and to be systematically excluded from the best-paid and most-prestigious jobs.
With rising male unemployment in recent times, women’s participation in the labor force has even declined in Japan, Italy, Peru, and India. Perhaps as many as 40% of the world’s farmers are women, largely bound to a declining and ever less profitable subsistence economy. Yet 38% of the world’s women are unpartnered: single, widowed, or divorced, they support themselves and often others. Women’s near exclusion from the highest incomes and most dynamic economic sectors is closely related both to their formal political and legal rights and to the persistence of traditional religious, cultural, and family values.
Much of the world is subject to the influence of three traditional legal systems: common law, civil law, and Sharia. Legislation that promotes sexual equality has not eradicated their influence. Only countries that have undergone socialist revolutions have adopted entirely new legal systems. Thus the legal position of women most closely approximates that of men in such socialist or formerly socialist countries as the former USSR, China, and Cuba. American feminists have insisted that piecemeal reform, including suffrage and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, does not provide the same protection as would the comprehensive Equal Rights Amendment.
Although women generally have acquired the vote, they do not exercise political power in proportion to their numbers. A few have attained the highest political office: Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, and a few others. Most, however, attained office because of their membership in ruling political families or elites. Even in socialist countries, in which women are more heavily represented in governing political bodies, they rarely reach such powerful positions as membership in the politburo of the Communist parties.
Women have also failed until recently to gain equal access to higher (especially technical) education. Women’s illiteracy has declined dramatically in the past few decades, but only during the 1970s and 1980s have American women finally constituted 20% of those in professional training–medicine, business, law. In the Third World, where Westerners have shaped educational patterns, it has normally been preferred to educate and train men, not women, for the advanced economic and governmental sectors.
Development and modernization have opened new possibilities and new roles for women around the world but have also undermined women’s traditional resources. In many countries, defenders of traditional family, religious, and cultural values vigorously oppose the liberation of women as one more manifestation of Western domination. While the needs of women in different countries vary, increasing numbers of women are recognizing their need to be full and equal members of society.