First-Wave Communism Vs. Second-Wave Feminism

- “In World War II, the second wave of feminism focused on the workplace, sexuality, family and reproductive rights. During a time when the United States was already trying to restructure itself, it was perceived that women had met their equality goals with the exception of the failure of the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (which has still yet to be passed).”

Women have been active since the beginning of the early 1800’s and struggle until today’s day, to fight for equality. There were two women movement waves. The first wave was focused on the equality of the women by working on voting rights. The second wave from 1963 to 1982 concentrated on social issues. As in “Collective Action for Social Change”, Aaron Schutz and Marie Sandy stated in their book “women were tired of being second class citizens”. The civil rights movement spillover inspired women to create social movements by acting and building organizations focused on the issues that affected the women. The social issues were child care, domestic violence, contraception, and women’s health. One of the major topics that the feminists focused on was domestic violence that still exists in today’s day worldwide.

Women’s rights have evolved over time; beginning with being homemakers and evolving to obtaining professions, acquiring an education, and gaining the right to vote. The movement that created all these revolutionary changes was called the feminist movement. The feminist movement occurred in the twentieth century. Many people are not aware of the purpose of the feminist movement. The movement was political and social and it sought to set up equality for women. Women’s groups in the United States worked together to win women’s suffrage and later to create and support the Equal Rights Amendment. The economic boom between 1917 and the early 1960s brought many American women into the workplace. As women began to join

In July 1848 the Seneca Falls convention, the first women’s rights convention in the United States, is what sparked the Suffrage Movement. During the Seneca Falls convention women talked about the social, civil and religious conditions that women have to deal with. The Suffrage movement is a group of women that decided to come together and fight for the right to vote. This paper will talk about what sparked first wave feminism and the events along the way to get where they are today.

The women’s rights movement was a huge turning point for women because they had succeeded in the altering of their status as a group and changing their lives of countless men and women. Gender, Ideology, and Historical Change: Explaining the Women’s Movement was a great chapter because it explained and analyzed the change and causes of the women’s movement. Elaine Tyler May’s essay, Cold War Ideology and the Rise of Feminism and Women’s Liberation and Sixties Radicalism by Alice Echols both gave important but different opinions and ideas about the women’s movement. Also, the primary sources reflect a number of economic, cultural, political, and demographic influences on the women’s movement. This chapter

Women Are Not Inferior Woman is treated as the weaker gender. Traditionally women are the ones who cook and take care of the family. Men are the ones who go to work. Some men believe that women cannot have careers, play sports, or do hard work as they do.

First-wave feminism was brought on by the newly educated female population. “Women’s experiences under colonization taught them to see themselves as citizens of oppressed nations, and many entered into Nationalist politics on behalf of their beleaguered people.” (123) Women activists took an approach of social housekeepers; it was their duty as nurtures of the nation to be involved in education, social work, public health, poverty, and so on. (126) First-Wave feminists were concerned with gaining access to vote in elections and on other important matters, they were concerned with gaining access to higher education; they were concerned with temperance, since they were not well protected under the law from, drunk, abusive husbands.

The Women’s Rights Movement in the 1960s and the 1970s grew out of the turbulent social disruption that characterized those decades of American history. This movement also known as “second wave feminism”, progressed from the suffrage movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Feminists pursued equality for women by challenging unfair labor practices and discriminatory laws. Many women of all ages, social class, and educational background founded organizations that provided other women with educational material about sex and reproduction, and fought to legalize all forms of birth control. In addition, they provided women with hope to gain their freedom in order to motivate them to fight for their rights.

The first wave of the feminist movement major achievement was securing the right to vote, yet were not able to fully succeed in their campaign for liberty and equality, because of the Great Depression and the Second World War. In the 1940s, women gained increasing employment as men left overseas to fight in the war. After the war women were expected to surrender their jobs to the returning men from the war consequently, trigger for the second wave feminist movement. The men who came back and retook their old jobs from women who were doing the same jobs during the war were given higher salaries, further highlighting inequality in the workforce. World War II showed that women could break out of their gender roles as was required yet, in the 1950s women were still searching for ways to end their domestic servitude and to see an end of socialized images of household chores as “women’s work.” And not to try to achieve the “June Cleaver ideal” that society demanded. Furthermore, wives were stuck in the suburbs without any personal transportation, living in a domestic life that suppress them while their husband went to work interacting in the workforce in the city. The organizations from The Second Wave Feminist Movement were formed to change the way women viewed

Women became more prominent during World War II due to the influx of job demand in the absence of men. Though the first feminist movement focused more on equal rights of women, the second-wave feminist movement “peaked in the 1960s and ’70s and touched on every area of women’s experience—including family, sexuality, and work” (Burkett). Women post war challenged the stereotypes of women in society, after losing their jobs. The second wave feminism will continue throughout the early 80’s. Arguably the most influential movement leading up to Jonestown is the civil rights movement.

Second wave feminism first emerged in the wake of World War II in the late 1940’s. It originated as a response to the post war boom. After World War II, the United States’ economy flourished, the population soared, capitalism emerged more triumphant than ever, and suburbia expanded like never before. The socio-economic state of the U.S. at this time lent itself spectacularly to middle-class familial expansion. During this time there was also a marked and, many would argue, a conscious effort to return to the patriarchal gender roles in place prior to World War II. That is to say, the nuclear family was in its glory days with the man being the undeniable head of house, and the woman his subservient housewife. The social movement toward female domesticity was heavily advocated through media propaganda which depicted the woman as a wife and mother exclusively, in the closed sphere of the home. We have previously seen with the emergence of first wave feminism the rise of feminist agenda that comes out of woman’s subordination at the hand of her husband, and misogynistic government policy and paradigm. It is this same sentiment that triggered the need for another wave of feminism, that is to say, the second wave. (Brownmiller, 36-38.)

The women’s movement began in the nineteenth century when groups of women began to speak out against the feeling of separation, inequality, and limits that seemed to be placed on women because of their sex (Debois 18). By combining two aspects of the past, ante-bellum reform politics and the anti-slavery movement, women were able to gain knowledge of leadership on how to deal with the Women’s Right Movement and with this knowledge led the way to transform women’s social standing (Dubois 23). Similarly, the movement that made the largest impact on American societies of the 1960’s and 1970’s was the Civil Right Movement, which in turn affected the women’s movement (Freeman 513). According to

Traditional and conservative ideologies were the foundation of our country and it would take nearly a century before liberal views would surface. In referencing our course material, the liberal view as it relates to human nature is focused on individual equality, social justice and equal opportunity (Voegler and de Souza 1980). Hence, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, feminism grew out of liberalism. The feminist movements have come in waves, the first wave ending in 1920 when the nineteenth amendment passed and women gained the right to vote. During World War II many women left their traditional roles as homemakers and joined the workforce while America’s men went off to war. It was during this time that a claimsmaker of the gender wage gap emerged, the National War Labor Board “encouraged the labor industry leaders to make adjustments to equalize wage or salary rates paid to females with the rates paid to males for comparable quality and quantity of work on the same or similar operation”(Cho 2013). Since World War II we have seen two waves of feminism, we are currently in our fourth wave. Feminist groups such as the National Organization of Women have been diligent about proliferating claims of gender inequality, especially with regards to

“First wave” of feminism in 1920 advocated women’s suffrage, whereas the “Second wave” targets the societal issues that women in the 21st century are facing. Betty Friedan wrote The Feminists Mystique after World War II exposing female repression and later founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) which ignited the second wave of the feminist movement. Consequently, it became noticeable that women were in multiple wars, as a result branches of feminists were formed (i.e. Liberalist, Marxist, and Socialist). Misogyny’s evolution has its own significant role in the feminist movement, stirring conversations today that affect feminist ideologies. However, in order to fully comprehend what affects second wave feminism along with the tactics utilized by feminists, one must first become acquainted with the many forms.

The first two waves of feminism in America led to a significant change in women’s fashion. The first wave of feminism focused on the fight for women’s suffrage, unlike the second, which was more radical and tackled a larger spectrum of social issues such as abortion