Authors: Margaret Walters
Tags: #Social Science, #Feminism & Feminist Theory, #Anthropology, #Cultural, #History, #Social History, #Political Science, #Human Rights
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Margaret Walters
FEMINISM
A Very Short Introduction
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford o x 2 6 d p
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Published in the United States
by Oxford University Press Inc., New York
© Margaret Walters 2005
The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published as a Very Short Introduction 2005
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organizations. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above
You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available
ISBN 0–19–280510–X 978–0–19–280510–2
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Typeset by RefineCatch Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk
Printed in Great Britain by
TJ International Ltd., Padstow, Cornwall
Contents
The religious roots of feminism 6
The beginning of secular feminism 17
The 18th century: Amazons of the pen 26
The early 19th century: reforming women 41
The late 19th century: campaigning women 56
Fighting for the vote: suffragists 68
Fighting for the vote: suffragettes 75
Early 20th-century feminism 86
Second-wave feminism: the late 20th century 97
Feminists across the world 117
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1
Quaker women preaching
8 Emily Davison throws
in the 17th century
12
herself under the
© 2005 TopFoto.co.uk
King’s horse, 1913
82
© 2005 TopFoto.co.uk
2 Margaret Cavendish,
Duchess of Newcastle 22
9 Poster showing a
© 2005 TopFoto.co.uk
suffragette being
3 Mary Wollstonecraft
37
force-fed, 1910
84
© 2005 TopFoto.co.uk
© 2005 TopFoto.co.uk
4 Florence Nightingale
51
10
Margaret Sanger
92
© Mary Evans Picture Library
© Bettmann/Corbis
5 Song-sheet of ‘ The March
of the Women’, 1911
76
11
Simone de Beauvoir 100
© 2005 TopFoto.co.uk
© Photos12.com/Keystone
Pressedienst
6 The Pankhursts lead
parade, 1911
79
12
Betty Friedan
103
© Hulton-Deutsch
© J. P. Laffont/Sygma/Corbis
Collection/Corbis
7 Emmeline Pankhurst
13
Demonstration against
arrested outside
the Miss America beauty
Buckingham Palace,
pageant, Atlantic City,
1914
81
1969
109
© J. P. Laffont/Sygma/Corbis
© 2005 TopFoto.co.uk
14
Women’s Liberation
17
South African women
march through
protest against the
London, 1971
111
death sentence of
© Bettmann/Corbis
Amina Lawal, 2003
126
© Juda Ngwenya/Reuters
15
Women’s Liberation
18
Sundanese Muslim girl
rally, New York, 1970 113
with inked finger,
© Ellen Shumsky/The Image
proof of having voted 128
Works/2005 TopFoto.co.uk
© Chris Stowers/Panos Pictures
19
Protest by a women’s
16
Anti-female circumcision
rights group, Jakarta,
poster, Sudan
124
2000
132
© Sven Torfinn/Panos Pictures
© Darren Whiteside/Reuters
The publisher and the author apologize for any errors or omissions in the above list. If contacted they will be pleased to rectify these at the earliest opportunity.
‘I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is’, the writer Rebecca West remarked, sardonically, in 1913. ‘I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.’ The word was a comparatively new one when she wrote; it had only appeared in English – from the French – in the 1890s. Interestingly, the earliest examples of the word in the Oxford English Dictionary carried negative meanings. In 1895 the
Athenaeum
sneeringly referred to a piece about a woman whose ‘coquetting with the doctrines of feminism’ are traced with real humour. ‘In Germany feminism is openly socialistic’, the
Daily Chronicle
shuddered in 1908, and went on to dismiss out of hand ‘suffragists, suffragettes and all the other phases in the crescendo of feminism’.