Feminism

This entry contains the following:

I. AFRICAN (SUB-SAHARAN)
Gwendolyn Mikell

II. ASIAN
Shamita Das Dasgupta

III. MIDDLE EASTERN
Valentine M. Moghadam

IV. WESTERN
Sîan Hawthorne

I. AFRICAN (SUB-SAHARAN)

African feminisms must be identified as post-Cold War phenomena, although many precursors and contributing influences coalesced during the mid-1970s and 1980s, and we have witnessed the florescence of African feminist movements in the post-1995 period. These feminisms have acknowledged African cultures and philosophies that celebrated women's participation in separate but complementary gender arenas, as well as subjected the gender bias within traditional culture to the critiques of modern life.

BACKGROUND

The slow evolution of African feminisms relative to American and European feminism is related to the fact that between 1957 and 1967 most Sub-Saharan African countries were emerging from colonialism, and public attention was focused on drawing the parameters of new state political, economic, and legal systems. Women subordinated gender concerns to nationalist concerns during this period. They played complementary roles with men in the movements that brought about independence, and elite women mobilized their organizations and institutions to support the nationalist parties. However, the fact that women did not receive the recognition that was due them and were increasingly marginalized within post-independence politics allowed a critical activist dynamic to emerge in African women's feminist dialogue.

African women tended to reject Western feminism (as well as the use of the term) in the 1960s and early 1970s because they saw it as a hegemonic force focused on individualism and the "politics of the body." In the dialogues that followed, scholars such as Niara Sudarkasa and Kamene Okonjo emphasized the assymetrical but complementary roles of men and women, and Gwendolyn Mikell focused on how the emerging African feminists blended traditional communal and pronatal concerns with the new strategies for survival within a crisis-ridden state. Scholars such as Oyeronki Oyewumi accused European colonizers and missionaries of creating binary male/female categories that distorted the reality of women's blended public and private roles in traditional African cultures. In general, African women resented the early Western focus on clitoridectomy or "genital cutting" as sensationalist and as a hegemonic attempt to control African women's private realms.

Takyiwaa Manuh and Frances Dolphynne described women's primary concern with addressing the serious social and economic challenges they faced in the 1980s and their resulting determination to craft new laws that created greater equality in property ownership, maintenance of children, and justice for wives given the existence of polygynous forms of marriage. However, during the economic decline of African states and the emergence of economic restructuring programs monitored by the international financial institutions, the devastating increases in maternal, infant, and child mortalities and the increase in HIV/AIDS prevalence rates drew attention to women's health status. Organizations such as Women in Nigeria (WIN) devised strategies to educate women about their economic and political rights, producing documents in local languages that increased knowledge accessibility. Not surprisingly, many African women scholars such as Patricia McFadden began to stress the need to interrogate and transform the conditions facing women in Africa through feminist activism.

THE TRAJECTORY OF AFRICAN FEMINISMS

The United Nations Decade of Women (1975–1985) set in motion a chain of local, national, continental, and global conversations that produced more varied concerns, which crystallized into what scholars call African feminism. Filomina Chioma Steady describes how the 1985 Women's Conference in Nairobi provided an opportunity for African women from all walks of life to share in discussions about "forward looking strategies" to address illiteracy and poverty and the responsibilities that women had to press governments to construct and implement national women's policies. However, with the end of the Cold War and the withdrawal of Western countries from much of Africa in the absence of a Soviet threat, the challenges for women altered. Into the political void stepped military governments, rebel groups, and informal armies that exploited the natural resources of Liberia, Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, waged genocidal war in Rwanda and Sudan, and used rape as a tool of war. This violence against women accompanied by the rising HIV/AIDS rates in the 1990s had the effect of clearly focusing African women's feminist mobilization on issues related to the state.

The Fourth Women's Conference in Beijing in 1995 was the major culminating event, after which the language of feminism was widely used across Africa. The African national and NGO delegations that went to Beijing came back with broader ideas about how to implement democratic changes, demand that their countries sign onto CEDAW, provide educational equity for the girl child, and establish goals for the representation of women in politics. African women from different cultural and religious backgrounds, including Muslim, Christian, Traditional, Afro-Asian, Arab, and Swahili, could now discuss aspects of the Beijing platform relating to the family in a way that guaranteed respect for all traditions. In 1994, South Africa, which had moved from apartheid to democratic elections, and Rwanda, which was recovering from genocide, became important sites for feminist discussions. Some of the discussions among women of the African National Congress (ANC) involved women negotiating a percentage of elected and appointed positions in the new government; and this has been replicated in Uganda, Rwanda, and other places. Aili Mari Tripp has emphasized the fact that these local and regional African women's organizations have focused on the elimination of difference and the emergence of a culture of unity within African state politics.

The debate about whether African feminism should be equated with activism or scholarship by and about women was heated at the end of the millennium. The notion of "'women's rights as human rights'" and the focus on eradicating violence against women began to be thoroughly integrated into the activism of African women's organizational networks such as BAOBAB in Nigeria. Women shared ideas and tactics in subregional conferences in Rwanda and Uganda, Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar, South Africa, Ghana, and Mali about how to construct a "Culture of Peace" that empowered women. Out of these discussions came support for the notion that in a post-war environment, women needed to transform national security strategies and insert themselves into state, transstate, and United Nations policy initiatives, such that human security gained importance as a balance to militarized security. They were aware that in situations of economic or political crisis, religion could be a critical arena for either local amelioration or conflict resolution. For example, Ayesha Imam and others helped counter the post-militaristic conflict between religious groups in Nigeria by working on equitable treatment for Muslim women accused of ZINA (sexual) crimes under Islam, and these death sentences were overturned. Women such as Regina Amadi-Njoku and Ndioro N'Diaye have helped push these notions of gender inclusion into the dynamics of the African Union and have helped it systematically integrate women into their emerging peace and conflict resolution mechanisms.

Equally as important has been the intellectual mobilization in the formation of African feminist ideas. Molara Ogundipe-Leslie and others have examined women's portrayal of themselves and their aspirations through literature. Then, through the Gender Institute at the University of Cape Town, women have analyzed their own conditions and proposed new approaches to African feminist understandings. The journal Feminist Africa became the major tool for women's dialogue about these issues. Through its pages one could see African women examining the scholarly arena with the goal of removing disciplinary boundaries that inhibited gender knowledge and recreating it as a site for feminist imagination and greater gender equity. Over a period of five years, Feminist Africa highlighted the work of groups such as the Association of African Women for Research and Development (AAWORD) and the Council for the Development of Social Research in Africa (CODESRIA). The journal explored ways that women's organizations mobilized to transform the African state and thoroughly examined "sexual cultures" (no. 5) and "subaltern sexual-ities" (no. 6). These approaches were considered sufficiently inclusive to encompass new sexual realities, despite the fact that they challenged the binary sexual symbolism of traditional African culture. Rather than occurring in isolation, this feminist intellectual dynamism has also been global, in that African women and American Africanists have shared their ideas and analysis at forums such as the Women's Caucus of the African Studies Association in the United States.

The subtle shift from the pervasive use of the term feminism to the analysis of social conditions related to gender equity is symbolic of the new African perspectives. Certainly, there is a link to traditional predilections to deny a singular focus on women's individualism and urge concern for what is positive for society in general. However, the new focus on gender conditions and experiences is designed to be inclusive and holistic, reflecting the realization that the meanings and contexts of maleness and femaleness have begun to alter in the new global environment. African women pushed for and achieved a new Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa (2005) that, although still not acknowledging women's full sexual rights, was a tribute to their activism. In that sense, African feminists have returned to the issue of the body but on their own terms and within the context of historical and cultural change. The scholarly articles in Feminist Africa (no. 5 and no. 6) point this out and that African women are now challenged to respond to and transcend the historical conditions of the region. The new thinking about gender included consideration of the need for scrutinizing African gender hierarchies, especially to counter stereotypes and achieve greater equity in how sexuality and homosexuality play out within African culture.

Most recently, African feminist activists have begun to ask themselves how to think about these transformations and how African women will function as gender stereotypes fade away in the coming period. The book Africa after Gender? edited by Catherine M. Cole, Takyiwaa Manuh, and Stephan F. Miescher, is symbolic of this new period of feminist intellectual questioning. It examines volatile arenas of gender confrontation, forms of women's activism in public spaces, ritual and performative aspects of gender, and issues of masculinity, misogyny, and seniority. In the final chapter of the book, Helen Mugambi raises this issue: Can there be a post-gender question in African studies at a time when women's everyday lives at the local and state levels are still permeated by the gender hierarchies and battles of a post-colonial era? She answers it by proposing that African feminists reject a linear approach to the gender issue in favor of a circular approach that blends history, present challenges, and desired futures into a dynamic, interactive configuration that is constantly imagining, seeking, and addressing equitable treatment for both women and men.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ABC News. 2003. Death by Stoning: Justice, Punishment, and Human Rights (Video recording). Princeton, NJ: Films for the Humanities and Sciences.

Amadi-Njoku, Regina, and Ndioro Ndiaye. 2002. African Women at the Service of the Union. Geneva: International Labor Organization and International Office for Migration.

Cole, Catherine M.; Takyiwaa Manuh; and Stephan F. Miescher, eds. 2007. Africa after Gender? Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Hassan, Shireen. 2005. "Terms of Engagement: South African Challenges." Feminist Africa no. 4. Available from http://www.feministafrica.org/.

Imam, Ayesha. 2002. Islam and Women's Human Rights. John Humphrey Freedom Award.

Imam, Ayesha; Renee Puttin; and Henry Omole, eds. 1989. Women and the Family in Nigeria. Dakar, Senegal: CODESRIA.

James, Stanlie M., and Abena Busia. 1993. Theorizing Black Feminisms: The Visionary Pragmatism of Black Women. New York: Routledge.

Mama, Amina. 1995. Beyond the Mask: Race, Gender, and Subjectivity. New York: Routledge.

McLaurin, Irma. 2001. Black Feminist Anthropology: Theory, Politics, Praxis, and Poetics. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

McFadden, Patricia. 2005. "Becoming Post-Colonial: African Women Changing the Meaning of Citizenship." Meridians 6 (1): 1-18.

McFadden, Patricia. 1997 "The Challenges and Prospects of the African Women's Movement in the 21st Century." Women in Action, no. 1. HURINet, Available from http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/30/152.html.

Miescher, Stephan. 2005. Making Men in Ghana. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Mikell, Gwendolyn, ed. 1997. African Feminism: The Politics of Survival in Sub-Saharan Africa. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Mikell, Gwendolyn. 2005. "Working From Within: Nigerian Women and Conflict Resolution." Georgetown Journal of International Affairs 6(2): 87-94. (Summer/Fall).

Ogundipe-Leslie, Molara. 1994. Re-Creating Ourselves: African Women and Critical Transformations. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.

Oyewumi, Oyeronke. 2003. African Women and Feminism: Reflecting on the Politics of Sisterhood. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.

Pereira, Charmaine. 2002. "Between Knowing and Imagining: What Space for Feminism in Scholarship on Africa?" Feminist Africa, no. 1. Available from http://www.feministafrica.org/.

Steady, Filomina Chioma, and Remie Toure, eds. 1995. Women and the United Nations. Rochester, NY: Schenkman.

Steady, Filomina Chioma. 1981. The Black Woman Cross-Culturally. Rochester, NY: Schenkman.

Sutherland, Addy, and Aminata Diwa, eds. 2005. Women Writing Africa: West Africa and the Sahel. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.

Tamale, Sylvia. 1999. When Hens Begin to Crow: Gender and Parliamentary Politics in Uganda. Boulder, CO: Westview.

Tripp, Aili Mari. 2005. "Regional Networking as Transnational Feminism: African Experiences." Feminist Africa, no 4. Available from http://www.feministafrica.org/.

                                        Gwendolyn Mikell

II. ASIAN

Europeans and North Americans have often been skeptical of feminism in Asia because of instances of women's oppression there such as domestic violence, dowry, and seclusion. Women's activism has a long history in Asian cultures albeit its distinctiveness from European and North American feminism.

The uniqueness of Asian feminism is based on:

1. The conception of multiple sources of women's subjugation rather than patriarchy only;
2. The recognition of imperialism and colonization as causes of gender oppression;
3. A focus on collectivism instead of individualism;
4. The rejection of the label feminism as a symbol of European and North American ideological domination.

Asian feminist perspectives are also called third-world feminism as it includes race, class or caste, sexuality, imperialism, gender, and the role of state in analyzing gender oppression. In many Asian societies, the common experiences of feudalism, traditions, colonization, and androcentric social and familial hierarchies reduced women to domestic subservience. Consequently, feminist activism historically concentrated on improving women's lots. Feminist movements of the 1970s and 1980s, conversely, stressed women's emancipation and empowerment and their entry into the core of national politics.

Feminism in Asia has traditionally been disparate along class lines, with mainly elite women occupying leadership roles. However, conditions of poverty have drawn feminist theorizing to Marxism, whereas the centers of action and debate are located in nongovernmental organizations (NGO) rather than academia.

EAST ASIA—JAPAN, KOREA, AND CHINA

Rapid industrialization after World War II, U.S. occupation of Japan, and the Korean War (1950–1953) shaped the women's movements in the two countries. Japanese feminists utilized their experiences of organizing for suffrage in the nineteenth century to agitate against the occupation and, later, to demilitarize U.S. bases. Simultaneously, women's groups worked to improve health care, food supplies, and social benefits for families. By the early 1950s Korean and Japanese women increasingly entered labor forces and, in 1956, Japan established its first female trade union. Nevertheless, a clash between pro-work and pro-motherhood forces polarized the fledgling Japanese feminist movement. In the early 1990s women regrouped to force the government to pass laws protecting part-time workers and child-care laws to support working mothers. Since then Japanese women's movements have taken up issues such as prostitution, trafficking, sex tourism, reproductive rights, and violence.

In Korea, workingwomen's conditions remained poor and marginalized, particularly in rural areas. In 1983 Korean women pressured the government to establish a special agency for women's welfare, the Korean Women's Development Institute, and in the early 1990s, they worked to pass laws ensuring labor equality. In both Korea and Japan, women's participation in political processes continues to climb.

Feminism in China can be traced back to the 1800s, when many women resisted marriage to live as independent workers. After the revolution in the 1950s, the communist government introduced laws to initiate gender equality in the marriage and labor structures to mobilize women to join the workforce. Most Chinese women's groups were established under the government's auspices. Nonetheless, the Chinese government's one-child policy to reduce population has encouraged violence against women and sex-selective abortions. With rising consumerism and unemployment in the post-Mao era, women are being sidelined in the labor force while traditional gender roles in the family are being resurrected.

SOUTHEAST ASIA—INDONESIA, MALAYSIA, SINGAPORE, THAILAND, PHILIPPINES, AND VIETNAM

Following globalization and growing affluence in Southeast Asia, a new class of urban, professional, workingwomen is exerting significant influence on the market and politics and has begun to scrutinize traditional gender disparity. But these critiques consciously reject European and North American models and position feminism within local cultures. For example, in Malaysia women's organizations such as Sisters in Islam (established in 1988) are engaged in seeking women's rights within an Islamic framework.

Since the 1980s Southeast Asian feminists have been challenging the working conditions of housemaids and women employed in multinational companies, domestic violence, polygamy, inequality within marriage, and lack of educational opportunities. In the Philippines feminists took leadership in ousting U.S. military bases in 1991. Antiprostitution and antitrafficking campaigns have occupied the center stage of women's activism in Thailand.

Vietnamese women's movements carry the legacies of the two Trung sisters (both died in 43 ce), who led an all female army against Chinese invaders in 40 ce, and of Bui Thi Xuan (d. 1802), a peasant-revolt leader in the eighteenth century. The first women's organization in Vietnam was formed in 1930. Vietnamese women played critical roles and held high-ranking positions in the rebellion against the French in the 1940s, in the war with the United States from 1964 to 1973, and against invasions by Cambodia and China in 1978 and 1979. The communist government has actively forwarded women's rights and endeavored to end patriarchal and feudal control. Women's participation has been vital in national reconstruction after the wars, and the government has passed several laws supporting workingwomen, particularly mothers.

CENTRAL ASIA—UZBEKISTAN, KYRGYZSTAN, AND KAZAKHSTAN

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, central Asian nations became independent and began restructuring their governances and economies. The resultant sociopolitical upheavals placed in jeopardy women's rights guaranteed during the Soviet regime. Even under communism the main culture of the region was Islamic, which is being vigorously reclaimed with various traditions affecting women, such as purdah and segregation, making a comeback.

The Soviet administration viewed feminism as socially divisive, and this attitude is prevalent in the early twenty-first century. The burgeoning women's movements are prioritizing issues of violence, reproductive rights, sexuality, and gender equality but have lost grounds in achieving equitable political representation. To dissociate from the past women's movement under the Soviet administration because of its ties to the Communist Party, contemporary women's movements have de-emphasized participation in political processes. Instead, central Asian women's movements are attempting to find a balance between their identities and roles as Muslims and feminists in society.

SOUTH ASIA—BANGLADESH, INDIA, PAKISTAN, SRI LANKA, AND NEPAL

Feminism in south Asia is inexorably linked to nationalism. Although women have historically played prominent roles in socioeconomics of the region, their organized political participation occurred during anticolonial struggles that led to sovereignty in the late 1940s. After independence several powerful women's NGOs operated in each country, such as Bangladesh Mahila Parishad (established in 1970), the National Federation of Indian Women (established in 1954), the Women's Action Forum in Pakistan (established in 1981), the Women's Foundation of Nepal (established in 1988), and the Voice of Women in Sri Lanka (established in 1978), often working simultaneously against repressive governmental policies and instituting supportive laws.

Although influenced by European and North American thought, south Asian feminist philosophies have been deliberately nested in indigenous cultural contexts. Feminist activism has centered on women's inclusion in political processes, economic advancement, issues of violence, and overall improvement of status. The theoretical bases of south Asian women's movements have generally been broad and have stressed intra- and extranational issues such as political repression, judicial insensitivity, law enforcement tyranny, neocolonialism, and globalization. The movements tend to work concurrently on legislative and nonlegislative solutions and redress. For example, mainly because of women's activism India passed The Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act into law in 2005, whereas the majority of anti-HIV intervention is being led by regional NGOs. The movements are characterized by their nongovernmental and decentralized status as well as diversity in mass base, structure, administration, and focus.

South Asian nations have generated voluminous and varied feminist writings in indigenous languages and English that range from fiction to theory. The first feminist utopist writing in English, Sultana's Dream (1905), is credited to India's Begum Roquia Sakhawat Hossain (1880–1932). Susie Tharu and K. Lalita edited a valuable two-volume collection of women's writings from 600 bce to the 1990s in Women Writing in India (1991–1993). Although operating under harsh political conditions, such as civil war, armed insurrection, governmental corruption, theocratic stranglehold, and crushing poverty, women's movements for social and legal equality in south Asia have been vast, radical, and vibrant.

TRANSNATIONAL FEMINISM

Despite the diverse political situations in each country, feminist organizations in Asia have endeavored to forge regional alliances. Between 1990 and 1992 women's movements in Japan and Korea collaborated on the issue of Japan's exploitation of comfort women during wars. In 1996 Pakistan's Women's Action Forum formally apologized to Bangladeshi women for the Pakistani military's atrocities and rampant rape during the 1971 war that led to the formation of Bangladesh. In the 1990s Naripokkho of Bangladesh (established in 1983) created transnational collaboration among several nations including France, England, Canada, and the United States to facilitate the treatment of girls and women disfigured by acid thrown on them. Asian women's organizations continue to convene conferences and exchange programs to further such collaborative relationships.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Asian Development Bank. 2001. Country Briefing Paper: Women in Bangladesh. Programs Department (West).

Corcoran-Nantes, Yvonne. 2005. Lost Voices: Central Asian Women Confronting Transition. London: Zed Books.

Gelb, Joyce, and Marian Lief Palley, eds. 1994. Women of Japan and Korea: Continuity and Change. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Jayawardena, Kumari. 1986. Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World. London: Zed Books.

Kumar, Radha. 1993. The History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of Movements for Women's Rights and Feminism in India, 1800–1990. London: Routledge.

Robinson, Catherine A. 1999. Tradition and Liberation: The Hindu Tradition in the Indian Women's Movement. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Sen, Krishna, and Maila Stivens, eds. 1998. Gender and Power in Affluent Asia. London: Routledge.

Sisters in Islam. Available from http://www.sistersinislam.org.my/index.htm.

Tharu, Susie, and K. Lalita, eds. 1991–1993. Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present. New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York.

                                      Shamita Das Dasgupta

III. MIDDLE EASTERN

Middle Eastern feminism is a discourse and practice of educated and employed middle-class women, some of whom are active in women's organizations. Using a variety of legal and discursive strategies and calling themselves secular, Muslim, or Islamic, Middle Eastern feminists challenge women's institutionalized second-class citizenship and call for change in women's positions in the family, the polity, and the religious community. Feminists and women's organizations are rebelling non-violently against women's location in the private domain and men's control of the public domain. Their principal demands are (1) egalitarian family laws; (2) criminalization of domestic violence and other forms of violence against women, including "honor killings"; (3) nationality rights for women and their children; and (4) greater access to employment and participation in political decision making. The point of reference for Middle Eastern feminism is the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), but some also use the Qur'an and early Islamic history to make the case for women's participation and rights. "Islamic feminists" call for women's right to ijtihad, or religious interpretation, and the reform of patriarchal Islamic jurisprudence.

HISTORY OF ISLAMIC FEMINISM

Middle Eastern feminism has existed since at least the early twentieth century, often in conjunction with nationalist or other progressive social movements. However, in the latter part of that century feminist activities became more focused on women and gender issues and more organized. That process arose in the context of sociode-mographic changes (urbanization, increased female educational attainment and salaried employment, declining fertility, the predominance of the nuclear family), political developments (the spread of fundamentalism as well as a gradual process of political liberalization in some of the countries in the region), and the global women's rights agenda.

Whereas the period from the 1950s to the 1970s saw women involved almost exclusively in official women's organizations or charitable associations, the period since the third United Nations World Conference on Women in Nairobi in 1985 saw the expansion of many types of women's organizations. State conservatism in some countries forced women's organizations and feminist leaders to assume a more independent stance than they might have taken in previous decades. For example, the preamble of the 1986 report of the Arab Women's Solidarity Association called on women "to unite, to close ranks and become a political and social force able to effect changes in prevailing systems, laws and legislation that will be beneficial for women and for all the people." A recommendation of the political committee was for the "release of general freedoms, particularly the freedoms of expression and organization; for respect of human rights for men and women; for a greater participation by women in political decision-making, and for an equal share with men in the authority exercised both in the state and the family" (cited in Toubia 1988). The first meeting of Arab women's nongovernmental organizations in Amman, Jordan, in November 1994 made similar recommendations.

ISLAMIC WOMEN'S ORGANIZATIONS

Women's organizations include the traditional charitable or service organizations, professional associations, women-in-development (WID) nongovernmental organizations, research centers and women's studies institutes, women's auxiliaries of political parties, and women's rights or feminist organizations. All are contributing to the development of civil society in the region, although the feminist organizations perhaps are doing this most consciously. For example, Moroccan feminist organizations such as l'Union d'action feminin and l'Association démocratique des femmes marocaines launched a campaign in the early 1990s to reform the patriarchal family law, the Moudawana, in the face of state lack of interest and organized Islamist opposition. In the latter part of the 1990s a more conducive political environment enabled a feminist-state alliance that succeeded in legislating a more egalitarian family law in 2003.

The Lebanese League for Women's Rights runs candidates for political office, and the Beirut-based Women's Court launched highly visible campaigns "to resist violence against women" in 1995, 1998, and 2000. North Africa's Collectif 95 Maghreb Egalité was the major organizer of the "Muslim Women's Parliament" at the NGO Forum that preceded the fourth United Nations World Conference on Women in Beijing in September 1995; later it formulated an alternative "egalitarian family code" and promoted women's political participation. North African feminist action also is concerned with the social rights of working-class and poor women. Turkey is home to the Association to Support Women Candidates (Kader), Flying Broom, Women for Women's Human Rights, the Foundation for the Support of Women's Work, and Anakultur (a feminist organization for rural women). Palestine's Legal Aid and Counseling Center lobbies against family violence. The Jerusalem Center for Women promotes women's rights and peaceful solutions to the conflict with Israel. Birzeit University's Institute of Women's Studies seeks to produce new generations of feminist leaders in the Middle East.

Middle Eastern feminism also may be seen in literary and cultural efforts such as the publication of books, journals, and films. Feminist publishing houses include Cairo's Noor (which organized the first Arab Women's Book Fair in 1995), Morocco's Edition le Fennec, and Iran's Roshangaran Press and the Cultural Center of Women, along with journals and magazines such as Morocco's 8 Mars, Iran's Zanan [Women], and Turkey's Partisi. The quarterly feminist journal Al-Raida is published by the Institute for Women's Studies in the Arab World at the Lebanese American University. The Women's Library in Istanbul contains research and documentation on women and gender issues. Skillfully circumventing censorship, Iranian filmmakers, male and female alike, have produced internationally acclaimed films with feminist themes.

Well known in their own countries as well as in international feminist circles, Middle Eastern feminists include Algeria's Khalida Messaoudi and Boutheina Cheriet; Iran's Shahla Lahiji, Noushin Ahmadi-Khorassani, Parvin Ardalan, and Shadi Sadr; Jordan's Haifa Abu Ghazaleh and Rana Husseini; Lebanon's Lamia Shehadeh and the late Laure Moghaizel; Morocco's Latifa Jbabdi, Rabéa Naciri, and Nouzha Skalli; Palestine's Hanan Ashrawi, Zahira Kamal, and Souheir Azzouni; Tunisia's Bochra Bel Haj Hmida, and Esma Ben Hamida; and Turkey's Sirin Tekeli and Pinar Ilkaraccan.

GOALS AND ACHIEVEMENTS

Campaigns for women's rights have succeeded in effecting legal reforms and policy changes. In Iran, as a result of a well-publicized case of a girl's death at the hands of her brother and father, feminist lawyers and activists challenged the automatic granting of child custody to the father in the aftermath of divorce. In 1999 Egyptian feminists secured the reversal of Article 291, which exonerated rapists who married their victims. Egyptian feminists and public health activists also have formed or worked with coalitions against female circumcision. In December 2001 the Jordanian cabinet approved several amendments to the Civil Status Law, raising the legal age for marriage to eighteen for both males and females and granting women legal recourse to divorce. An amendment to the penal code makes perpetrators of honor crimes liable to the death penalty. However, judges are allowed to commute the sentences of the convicted, and the practice continues, with families using underage men as the perpetrators of the violence.

In some countries feminists are contributing to national dialogues and political debates on democracy and human rights, and women's organizations are building coalitions with human rights organizations to expand civil society and citizenship rights. Algerian feminists not only are active in the struggle for modernization of family law and against religious extremism but also have formulated a position on democracy that is based on their experience with the violent Islamist movement of the late 1980s and the 1990s.

OBSTACLES AND CHALLENGES

Feminism in the Middle East continues to confront obstacles and challenges. In addition to the resource constraints of many women's organizations, feminism faces unreliable or patriarchal governments, societal conservatism, the preoccupation of Islamist movements with women's appearance and behavior, and cultural debates about "authenticity" versus westernization. Nevertheless, domestic and global developments have produced women's movements that challenge popular understandings and legal codes regarding the public sphere and the private sphere and that demand more access to the public sphere, full and equal participation in the national community, and full and equal rights in the family. Those gender-based demands not only would extend existing rights to women but also broaden the political agenda and redefine citizenship in the region.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Afary, Janet. 1996. The Iranian Constitutional Revolution, 1906–1911: Grassroots Democracy, Social Democracy, & the Origins of Feminism. New York: Columbia University Press.

Al-Ali, Nadje. 2000. Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East: The Egyptian Women's Movement. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press.

Arat, Yesim. 1994. "Toward a Democratic Society: The Women's Movement in Turkey in the 1980s." Women's Studies International Forum 17(2/3): 241-248.

Journal of Middle East Women's Studies. 2006. Special issue: "Women and the Public Sphere in the Middle East and North Africa," guest editors Valentine M. Moghadam and Fatima Sadiqi. Vol. 2, number 2.

Mernissi, Fatima. 1987. Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Moghadam, Valentine M. 2003. Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the Middle East. 2nd edition. Boulder, CO: L. Rienner.

Toubia, Nahid, ed. 1988. Women of the Arab World: The Coming Challenge. London: Atlantic Highlands.

                                  Valentine M. Moghadam

IV. WESTERN

The term Western feminism is controversial because the appellation Western is ambiguous—does it name a geographical place, a political or ideological hegemony, or a state of cultural, historical, or racial homogeneity? Does it preserve imperialist divisions between the "West" and "the rest," enabling a series of exclusive and exclusionary valuations along axes of superiority/inferiority, civilized/uncivilized, and developed/underdeveloped? Is it the enabling fiction of racially white global dominance in the fields of politics, culture, law, and economics? Are Western and white analogous? Who is included in the category—second- and third-generation immigrant populations with complex forms of national identification, resident nonwhite populations, people of mixed race? What implications are there for its use in a postcolonial context in which the terms Western and Eastern have been rigorously critiqued? And what of the differences between the countries that are conventionally considered to be Western? Yet the term may have some valency insofar as it now necessitates the kinds of qualifications suggested here and thus recalls its specific history. The term feminism is also problematic insofar as it suggests a homogenous political movement through time and space. The history of feminism, however, indicates a multiplicity of feminisms that offer significant differences of emphasis, context, and motivation however much they share the common goal of female emancipation and equality.

Bringing the terms feminism and Western together raises yet another series of difficulties, not least that some feminist approaches have been explicitly opposed to the liberalist frameworks of the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment within which the West was established as the dominant global power. Nonetheless, Western feminism is both created by and resistant to the form of post-Enlightenment individualism that established the autonomous, rational individual as the basis upon which the basic rights of citizenship might be secured. Western feminism, in addressing the unequal status of women, has necessarily aligned itself with the emancipatory discourse of Western liberalism, which has proved to be a powerful tool for feminists seeking to establish gender parity. It has also required, however, acquiescence with the principle of the sameness of individuals, and this has often been at the expense of the specificity of a more plural understanding of women and the differences between them. Further, some feminists believe that Enlightenment individualism inscribes patriarchal values and is thus of limited worth. Consequently, Western feminism invokes a complex history of both complicity and resistance, and if it has any definitional utility it is with regard to embodying and clarifying this tension.

Western feminism also names a specific set of discourses that have historically been promoted as universal. To recognize some forms of feminism as Western, therefore, is to acknowledge the particularity of feminist programs produced within the West and to resist both the imposition of a homogenous narrative of feminist achievements on non-Western contexts as well as the assumption that Western feminist analyses and objectives are shared with non-Western movements. At the more localized level, however, the term is unsatisfactory inasmuch as it obscures the huge regional and political differences between the feminisms that operate in the countries that constitute what is, at least in everyday use, understood to be the West. Moreover, it appropriates those forms of feminism that are critical of the ethnocentrism of Western feminism and may identify as Western but are nonetheless produced in dialogue with Western intellectual and political environments. For the purposes of this entry, therefore, the term Western feminism will refer to those feminist discourses that are inscribed within or conducted with reference to liberalism and that operate within those regions conventionally considered to be Western, namely western Europe, North America, and Australasia.

There are two main approaches to discussing the development of Western feminism and delineating between the various feminisms that constitute it. The first offers a chronological treatment of Western feminism from its emergence in the nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century, while the second offers a system of classification of the main forms of feminist thought and activity within Western feminism.

THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF WESTERN FEMINISM

The historical development of Western feminism is generally discussed in terms of three main "waves," each of which constitutes a stage in the form of feminist activity. The chronology and thematic organization is somewhat loose, however, and each stage overlaps with the others.

First-wave feminism is usually dated from the mid-1850s to the beginning of World War II and was characterized by its liberalist stance insofar as it sought, through political activism, the full citizenship rights of universal suffrage, self-determination, access to higher education, and ownership of property.

Second-wave feminism, often considered synonymous with the women's liberation movement, refers to the reemergence of feminist activity in the aftermath of the World War II until the 1990s. Significant developments in the first half of the twentieth century prepared the ground: Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex (1949), reinvigorating debates regarding the status of women rendered dormant during World Wars I and II; women's suffrage had been achieved in most Western countries; and women's participation in higher education had also undergone a period of rapid expansion.

Like the first wave, the second wave was largely defined by its liberal agenda, but expanded its focus to include a vision of female solidarity; demands for equal pay; interventions in the spheres of reproduction, sexuality, and cultural representation; and the more substantial theorization of patriarchy. Many of the forms of feminism outlined below emerged during the second wave, but as Elizabeth Weed (1989) argues, "for all the varieties within the [feminist] movement … the 'second wave' … was inscribed within the liberal system of individual rights … and the various strains of feminism have had to engage in one way or another with the terms of that inscription. It is in this sense that 'liberal feminism' is the mainstream feminism" (p. xii). Several defining features and concerns of second-wave feminism rapidly emerged. First, all feminists, regardless of their particular approaches, agreed that in societies that divide the sexes into binarized cultural, economic, or political spheres, women are less valued than men. Second, key concepts such as patriarchy, sexism, and misogyny were formulated as ways of theorizing about the purportedly universal oppression of women. Third, autonomous female identities were suggested in which women's bodies and conventionally "feminine" activities were prioritized and represented as positive in contrast to the centuries-old portrayal of femininity as a source of danger, impurity, and evil. Finally, feminists acted on the principle that women could consciously and collectively change their social position and identity whether through advocating for equal employment, reproductive, and sexual rights, or by challenging and resisting male violence against women, pornography, sexual exploitation, unequal domestic arrangements, and all other forms of gender-based discrimination.

Despite broad agreement regarding the assessment of the position of women, considerable disagreements began to emerge among feminists in the 1970s and 1980s. Feminists of color, who confronted both sexual and racial discrimination, and lesbian feminists challenged the movement; both groups argued that second-wave feminism was dominated by white, middle-class, and heterosexual agendas that failed to address the multiple axes of oppression in the intersections between class, race and sexuality. The failure of the leaders of the women's liberation movement to take up the concerns of their fellow feminists resulted in the splintering of the movement. If feminism was losing its identity as a unified political movement, however, it was beginning to make its presence felt in universities as feminists recognized the powerful role of educational institutions in shaping cultural values and meanings and the importance of critiquing their exclusion of women's contributions. Women's studies departments and programs were established in universities starting in the late 1960s, and by the early 1980s the field had been an established discipline for approximately a decade. It was the combination of the critiques of feminism on the grounds of racism and heteronormativity and its increasing academicization that contributed to a decisive shift against the movement's liberalist roots and produced what is now referred to as the third wave.

The emergence of third-wave feminism in the 1990s was the result of an explosion of theoretical perspectives informed by poststructural, postcolonial, and queer theory, each of which problematized the dominant (European) liberal presentation of individualism as homogenous and universal. Because of its roots in liberalism, feminism was by no means exempt from these critiques. Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1991), for example, offered a powerful criticism of the "colonialist move" in some Western feminist scholarship on women in the "Third World," particularly insofar as it appropriated the "production of the 'third world woman' as a singular monolithic subject" (p. 51). She was particularly critical of the presumption in Western feminist scholarship of a conflation between women as historical subjects, and "woman" as a homogenous category of analysis on the basis of presumed shared oppression.

While many of the concerns of the second wave have continued to be important, Western feminist activity in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries marks both a self-reflexive turn and a mature phase in feminist activity as it seeks to address the previously hegemonic assumptions of the second wave. It registers a shift in the common preoccupations that have informed debates between feminists. Most notably, there has been a movement away from the denunciation of gender inequalities toward the poststructural theorization of discursive constructions of gender. In addition, third-wave feminists advocate a sustained examination of hegemonic representations of masculinity and a more nuanced understanding of the often-significant differences between women in the contexts of class, ethnicity, race, sexuality, and economic status.

TYPOLOGIES OF FEMINISMS

Western feminism is generally divided into six main types—liberal, Marxist, socialist, radical, psychoanalytic, and poststructural—each identified on the basis of their central approach (see Tong 1998 for a thorough survey). Before discussing the ways in which these types differ from one another, it is important to note that the various categories regularly overlap and that they all share in common a concern with the causes of the oppression of women and suggest means through which it might be overcome.

Liberal feminism is committed to the full equality of women and men, arguing that this can be achieved through legislation and social reform. It assumes the fundamental sameness of men and women on the basis of the Enlightenment universal individualism and proposes the reformation rather than the dismantling of social systems and institutions that have hitherto discriminated against or excluded women. Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is considered to be the classic expression of the liberal feminist perspective. The liberal feminist tradition was continued during the 1960s and 1970s by feminists such as Betty Friedan, who in 1966 founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) in order to campaign for women's rights.

Marxist feminism disagrees with the liberal analysis of both the causes of women's inequality and the means for overcoming it. Instead, it suggests that the cause is capitalism, in particular the ways in which it promotes private ownership of property and the means of production by a relatively small number of men, in turn producing the class system and ensuring women's social and economic inequality. The solution proposed is the replacement of capitalism with a socialist system with the effect that women would achieve an economically equal status with men. Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970), in which she identified "sex class"—the condition of women as an oppressed class—is an early classic of Marxist feminism. Other well-known Marxist feminists include Michèle Barrett and Christine Delphy.

Radical feminists are critical of both liberal and Marxist perspectives, arguing that the analysis of and solution to women's disempowerment must be more far-reaching than either the liberals or Marxists suggest. Rather than capitalism or institutional sexism, it is patriarchy—understood as a complete and universal social system that places men as hierarchically dominant—that lies at the root of women's oppression, and it must therefore be completely dismantled. For many radical feminists, liberalism and socialism are simply different expressions of patriarchy, and thus to adopt any one of these perspectives is to fail to address the fundamental cause of women's oppression. Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970) is an exemplar of radical feminist analysis in which she examines patriarchy as a socially conditioned belief system that masquerades as the natural order, showing how patriarchal attitudes and systems have penetrated such areas as literature, philosophy, and psychology. Andrea Dworkin, Mary Daly, and Catharine A. MacKinnon are also considered to be influential proponents of radical feminism.

Socialist feminism emerged in response to the Marxist prioritization of the proletariat struggle over that of women. It offers a synthetic analysis of the causes of women's oppression combining elements of the Marxist perspective with the radical feminist view that sexist oppression is endemic in society. Alison M. Jaggar (1983), for example, argues that it is necessary to interrelate the complex forms of women's oppression rather than focusing on a single cause, and she uses the Marxist concept of "alienation" in order to show that within capitalist systems the various roles demanded of women lead to their oppression rather than their full integration within society.

Psychoanalytic feminism attributes the root of women's oppression to the Oedipal crisis suggested by Sigmund Freud, whereby individuals are created as gendered selves as a result of their induction into the world of regulated cultural discourses through the intervening force of their fathers, a movement requiring the negation of the mother. From a feminist perspective psychoanalysis offers a compelling explanation for women's secondary social position within patriarchal societies and indeed for the existence of patriarchy (see Mitchell 1974). Some feminists argue that patriarchy is shown by psychoanalysis to be a product of the male imagination and is therefore open to challenge and transformation (see Mitchell 1974). Others, such as Sherry B. Ortner (1975), Dorothy Dinnerstein (1976), and Nancy Chodorow (1974), argue that if some form of Oedipal crisis is inescapable then its values and meanings can be realigned more positively toward women through dual parenting and women's greater participation in the workforce, leading to those characteristics traditionally associated with weak and dangerous femininity becoming meaningless. Nonetheless, psychoanalysis has tended to validate essentialist and universal gender idealizations, aligning femininity with passivity and negativity and masculinity with agency and normativity. It is thus a dangerous tool for feminists to wield without undertaking critical adjustments to its core propositions, a task that has been undertaken by Juliet Mitchell, Jacqueline Rose, and Elizabeth Grosz.

Each of the feminist approaches discussed above shares a liberal provenance in common. In particular, each provides a unified account of women's oppression and suggests total solutions that mark them out as modernist in orientation. The final school of feminist thought—poststructural feminism—is distinctly at odds with modernist approaches insofar as it refuses to offer a metanarrative of women's oppression but rather suggests that there is no single cause for women's subordination, and that, therefore, there can be no unified approach toward overcoming it. Poststructural feminists are expressly critical of liberalist feminism, suggesting that its efforts to provide unified accounts of women's oppression instantiate phallocentric modes of thought. They also claim that sexual and gender identities are not inherent properties of individuals but are rather constructed through (phallogocentric) language. As such, poststructural feminism derives much of its own account from the intellectual strategies of thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan, and to some extent, therefore, it too can be charged with taking up the discourse of the "fathers." By far the most influential proponent of feminism in this vein is Judith Butler (particularly in her 1990 book, Gender Trouble [2nd edition, 1999]).

Poststructural feminists also argue that the promotion of any feminist project on the basis of the assumed commonality of women's experiences is unfeasible because it ignores differences between women rooted in the intersections of race, class, and sexuality. Here they share much in common with those feminists who identify the ethnocentric bias within much Western feminism, where whiteness is figured as both normative and invisible. Hazel Carby (1982), for example, has argued that Western feminism has not included an awareness of the different nature of black women's experiences and that consequently many of the feminist insights regarding the sources of women's oppression are inadequate. She suggests, however, that a supplemental inclusion of non-white perspectives in feminist work would not solve the problem but rather that "the process of accounting for [black women's] historical and contemporary position does, in itself, challenge the use of some of the central categories and assumptions of recent mainstream feminist thought" (p. 213).

Poststructural feminism in turn has been strongly criticized for overemphasizing differences between women and suggesting that the category "woman" is merely a product of phallocentric discourse and thus an empty signifier. As Naomi Schor (1987) has argued, "Whether or not the 'feminine' is a male construct, a product of a phallocentric culture destined to disappear, in the present order of things we cannot afford not to press its claims even as we dismantle the conceptual systems which support it" (p. 97). Perhaps the defining feature of Western feminism, therefore, is likely to remain for the foreseeable future a productive struggle between the claim for the common identity of women and the respect of difference.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barrett, Michèle. 1980. Women's Oppression Today: Problems in Marxist Feminist Analysis. London: NLB.

Beauvoir, Simon de. 1953. The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley. New York: Knopf. (Orig. pub. 1949.)

Butler, Judith. 1999. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 2nd edition. New York: Routledge.

Carby, Hazel. 1982. "White Women Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood." In The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain, ed. Hazel Carby and Paul Gilroy. London: Hutchinson in association with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham.

Chodorow, Nancy. 1974. "Family Structure and Feminine Personality." In Woman, Culture, and Society, ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Daly, Mary. 1978. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. Boston: Beacon Press.

Delphy, Christine. 1984. Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women's Oppression, trans. and ed. Diana Leonard. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Dinnerstein, Dorothy. 1976. The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise. New York: Harper and Row.

Dworkin, Andrea. 1981. Pornography: Men Possessing Women. New York: Putnam.

Firestone, Shulamith. 1970. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. New York: Morrow.

Friedan, Betty. 1963. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Norton.

Grosz, Elizabeth. 1990. Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction. London: Routledge.

Jaggar, Alison M. 1983. Feminist Politics and Human Nature. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld.

Lorde, Audre. 1981. "An Open Letter to Mary Daly." In This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa. Watertown, MA: Persephone Press.

MacKinnon, Catharine A. 1987. Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Millett, Kate. 1970. Sexual Politics. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

Mitchell, Juliet. 1974. Psychoanalysis and Feminism. New York: Pantheon.

Mitchell, Juliet, and Jacqueline Rose, eds. 1982. Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne. London: Macmillan.

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade; Ann Russo; and Lourdes Torres, eds. 1991. Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Ortner, Sherry B. 1975. "Oedipal Father, Mother's Brother, and the Penis: A Review of Juliet Mitchell's Psychoanalysis and Feminism." Feminism Studies 2(2/3): 167-182.

Rich, Adrienne. 1980. "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5(4): 631-660.

Schor, Naomi. 1987. Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine. New York: Methuen.

Tong, Rosemary Putnam. 1998. Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction. 2nd edition. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Weed, Elizabeth, ed. 1989. Coming to Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics. New York: Routledge.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. 1975. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Carol H. Poston. New York: Norton. (Orig. pub. 1792.)

                                            Sîan Hawthorne

FEMINISM

FEMINISM. Although "feminism" is a nineteenth-century neologism, it is now generally accepted in anglophone historiography as a shorthand label for discourses that criticize misogyny and male dominance, argue for an improvement of the female condition, and demand a public voice for women speaking on behalf of their sex. A large corpus of writings, published all over Europe from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, can be considered "feminist" in this sense.

THE RENAISSANCE QUERELLE DES FEMMES

The first systematic feminist treatise is probably Christine de Pizan's Le livre de la cité des dames (1404–1405; Book of the city of ladies), composed at the French court in response to the misogyny of Jean de Meun's second part of the Roman de la rose (Romance of the rose). Pisan argued that the pervasive misogyny of the classical and Christian canon presented a distorted image of female nature produced by male arrogance and prejudice: "If women had written the books," she wrote in 1399, "they would have done it otherwise." Women's reason and sense of justice were in no way inferior to those of men, she contended. Pizan's City of Ladies, built on "the field of Letters" and consecrated by the Virgin Mary, is an allegory of the female voice in history, which, once raised, will never be silenced.

After the advent of printing, feminism established itself as a prolific genre, part of an interminable series of polemics between the detractors and the defenders of women known as the querelle des femmes, 'quarrel about women'. A few examples will illustrate its most widespread arguments: One of the characters in Baldassare Castiglione's The Courtier (1528) declares that "everything men can understand, women can too," and he cites Plato's inclusion of women in the ruling elite of the politeia against the Aristotelian reasoning of his opponent. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa opens his "On the Nobility and Excellence of the Feminine Sex" (1529) with the thesis that sexual difference is confined to the reproductive organs while God has endowed "both male and female . . . with the same and altogether indifferent form of soul, the woman being endowed with no less excellent faculties of mind, reason, and speech than the man." In "On the Excellence and Dignity of Women" (1525) Galeazzo Flavio Capella accuses men of duplicity: they exclude women from most pursuits and then "prove" that they are unable to participate in them. The French author François Billon asserted in 1555 in Le fort inexpugnable de l'honneur du sexe féminin (The invincible fortress of the honor of the female sex) that male arguments against women usually rely on custom rather than reason, and, like many others before and after him, he likens the oppressive husband to the "tyrant." The theme of "wicked men" could also be discussed in moral terms, as in Marguerite de Navarre's observation (in the Heptaméron, 1559) that men's chief pleasure consisted in dishonoring women and their chief honor in killing other men, both of which went against God's law. The opposition of feminine piety, virtue, and refinement to male profanity, vice, and vulgarity is found in much feminist literature. Another popular genre, found all over Europe from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, is the galleries of illustrious women, proving by historical example that they could equal men in every respect.

In the first half of the seventeenth century, feminist voices were raised in several countries. Lucrezia Marinella's The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Failings of Men (Venice, 1600), Marie de Gournay's Equality of Men and Women (Paris, 1622), and Anna Maria van Schurman's Dissertation on the Aptitude of the Female Understanding for Science and Letters (Leiden, 1641; French transl.: Paris, 1646; English: London, 1659) were the most widely known, but similar arguments were made by Arcangela Tarabotti (Nuremberg, 1651), Johann Herbin (Wittenberg, 1657), María de Zayas (Spain, 1637), Margaret Cavendish (London, 1663), Margaret Fell (London, 1666), and others. The arguments of the querelle were thus widely disseminated. Some of them were already found in Erasmus's writings, and Castiglione, Agrippa, and Van Schurman were translated into several European languages. As the editor of Michel de Montaigne's Essays, Gournay was known all over Europe.

It seems safe to conclude that by the middle of the seventeenth century most literate women and men in western Europe were conversant with at least some of the arguments of the querelle. Its main themes were: (1) the recognition of women's equality with men as immortal souls and rational beings; (2) the assertion that men are like tyrants, wielding an arbitrary and unjust power over women; (3) the argument that the present "nature" of women is the product of a biased education; (4) the demand for access to higher education and the Republic of Letters; (5) the indictment of men's outrageous treatment of women, especially in marriage; (6) the glorification of "strong women," usually by means of galleries of historical examples; and (7) the call for "politeness" and a softening of manners tied to an upgrading of the "feminine virtues," so that (upper-class) women became the agents of a civilizing mission.

ENLIGHTENMENT FEMINISM

After 1660 the above themes persisted, but feminism increasingly interacted with Cartesianism and other innovative currents of thought. The Amazon faded into the background while the learned woman became a more common, but also highly controversial, figure. In France the rise of the female author and the antifeminist backlash, best exemplified by Molière's play Les femmes savantes (1672; The learned women), coincides in time. In Italy a learned woman, Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia, was awarded a doctorate in philosophy (Padua, 1678; probably a European first).

François Poulain de la Barre (On the Equality of the Two Sexes, 1673) reworked existing feminist arguments in a Cartesian framework, drawing on Descartes's methodological maxim of radical doubt, his dualism of body and mind, and his mechanistic biology. "The Soul has no Sex" becomes "The Mind has no Sex," but it is important to note that Poulain also seeks to demonstrate that the male and the female body are generally alike, except for the reproductive organs. Poulain criticizes the contradictory use of the concept of "nature" by the philosophers of natural law. He proposes an entirely nongendered curriculum for the education of both women and men (On the Education of Women, 1674). Apart from feminism and Cartesianism, Poulain's egalitarian social philosophy draws on the philosophy of natural rights, the Jansenist moral critique of rank, the cultural relativism of travelogues, biblical criticism, and the quarrel of the ancients and moderns. The result is an early instance of an Enlightenment social philosophy. Poulain turns feminism into a systematic philosophy and establishes a space for feminism within Enlightenment discourse.

Despite Poulain's strict egalitarianism, the praise of the "feminine virtues" is not absent from his work. This is probably true of the bulk of Enlightenment feminist theory. A good example is Antoinette de Salvan de Saliez, a lady from Albi in southern France, who declared in 1682 that "among civilized people, the equality of the sexes is no longer contested." By "civilized" she meant polite, peaceful, and lettered; she abhorred the aggressive lifestyle of the traditional warrior aristocracy. Salvan's version of the equality of the sexes was predicated on a feminization of elite culture. This type of argument was double-edged: it could be used to carve out a space for women within elite culture, but it was also conducive to a restriction of women to the sphere of morality and manners. We should not forget that, despite all the Enlightenment discourses about equality, universities and scientific academies continued to exclude women.

Cartesian rationalism influenced most late-seventeenth-century and early-eighteenth-century feminists in one way or another. Poulain de la Barre was translated into English (London, 1677), and his arguments, if not his name, are copied and paraphrased over and over again. In England, William Welsh (1691), Mary Astell (1694), Judith Drake (1696), and John Toland (1704) defended the equality of the sexes in Cartesian terms, as well as by an environmentalist psychology they took from Poulain or from John Locke. In France similar arguments were advanced by Gabrielle Suchon (1693), Morvan de Bellegarde (1702), Claude Buffier (1704), and Anne Thérèse de Lambert (1727). "Men," Lambert wrote, "have seized authority over women rather by means of force than by natural right."

In 1687 Christian Thomasius, the main protagonist of the early German Enlightenment, advocated an equal education for men and women. In the 1720s and 1730s, the German poets Christiane Mariane von Ziegler, Anna Helena Volckmann, and Sidonia Hedwig Zäunemann defended female authorship and the equal mental capacity of women: "Der Schöpfer hat uns ja mit gleichen Geist bedacht / Und gleiche Seelen-Kraft und Triebe beygebracht," wrote Zäunemann in 1738 ("For the Creator has endowed us with the same mind / And the same vitality and impulses"). In Spain the equality of the sexes was defended in Benito Feijoo's Teatro crítico de errores comunes (1725; Critical exposition of common prejudices), one of the founding texts of the Spanish Enlightenment. In Italy, Giuseppa Eleonora Barbapiccola stressed the Cartesian theme of the sexless mind in her translation of Descartes's Principles of Philosophy (1722), and in 1723 a Paduan academy, the Ricovrati, organized a debate on the question "if women ought to be admitted to the study of the sciences and the noble arts." In 1732, Laura Bassi obtained a degree in philosophy at Bologna where she taught from 1732 to 1778. At the same university, Maria Gaetana Agnesi held a chair of mathematics. Agnesi was one of the protagonists of a debate on the academic education of women that went on until the 1780s.

Another critical discourse on gender emerged in the ambit of philosophical history. Poulain de la Barre had outlined a hypothetical history of the origins of inequality in which the subjection of women was depicted as a historical result instead of a "natural" condition. However, the combination of travelogues and speculations about the primitive past of the species also resulted in a theory of the progression of European, and especially French, civilization. This was evidenced by the greater liberty enjoyed by women of the eighteenth century compared with both the European past and the Asian present (the latter point was made by Montesquieu as well as Voltaire). It was possible, however, to evaluate the liberty of women in widely divergent ways, ranging from George Louis Leclerc Buffon's assertion that female liberty was "necessary to the refinement [douceur ] of society" and was only found among "the most civilized nations," to the Scot John Millar's fear that commercial society would lead to "dissolute manners," and, ultimately, to "universal prostitution." In both cases, however, the female condition was theorized as historically determined instead of being an immutable fact of nature.

To the eighteenth-century mind, gender had become an "essentially contested concept." Montesquieu had read Poulain de la Barre, and he had one of his personages in the Persian Letters exclaim that male supremacy was not founded in nature. Rousseau voiced egalitarian-feminist opinions in his early essay On Women as well as in his unpublished notes On Education, drafted for Mme Dupin in 1746–1751, but later he embraced the contrary theory that a virtuous republic was unthinkable without the exclusion of women from the public sphere. Toward the end of the century, Marie-Jean Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, Olympe de Gouges, Marie-Madeleine Jodin, and others formulated a full program for the emancipation of women. Similar programmatic feminist writings were published in most parts of Europe, notably by Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel in Prussia, Mary Wollstonecraft in England, and in an anonymous pamphlet in the Dutch Republic, arguing "that women ought to take part in the government of the land." Such bold claims on behalf of women would be inexplicable without the upsurge of Enlightenment feminist thought, of which only a few examples have been adduced above.

DISSEMINATION AND GEOGRAPHY

The new women's history of the past thirty years has unearthed an enormous corpus of previously unknown or forgotten feminist sources. Pending a full quantitative investigation, only tentative conclusions are warranted.

Before 1600, elite women possessing literary and intellectual skills were probably more numerous in Italy than anywhere else. It was also in Italy that women were admitted to several literary academies, and, in a few cases, acquired a university degree. There are also two German examples: Dorothea Erxleben, who became Germany's first woman medical doctor in 1754, and Dorothea Schlözer, who was the first woman to receive a Ph.D. from a German university (Göttingen), in 1787. Renaissance feminism was vigorous in Italy, the German Empire, and France, probably less so in England and the Dutch Republic.

In the course of the seventeenth century, French feminism became the strongest in Europe, exercising a notable European influence, as French supplanted Latin as the main language of international elite sociability. From the late seventeenth century, a steady stream of feminist publications began to come from British presses. In the eighteenth century, feminist arguments were found all over Europe. This is now fairly well documented for France, England, Spain, Italy, the Dutch Republic, and the German lands, and there are examples from Denmark, Sweden, and other nations. One gets the impression that Enlightenment feminism was strongest in France and Britain, but this picture may well be corrected by future research.

The development of feminism over time is not easy to ascertain. To picture it as a linear "rise" would be to simplify a story that is probably better captured by the metaphor of waves and backlashes. The main watershed in the history of early modern feminism is the transition from the Renaissance querelle to the Enlightenment, but even here caution is required, for many Renaissance themes lived on within eighteenth-century feminism. This is especially true of the "feminine virtues," which were in various ways combined with egalitarian, rationalistic arguments.

It remains true, however, that the linkages between feminism and Cartesianism, as well as the frequent use by feminists of the environmentalist social psychology of Poulain, Locke, and others, gave Enlightenment feminism a "philosophical" tone that had been less conspicuous in the literary genre of the querelle. Theological themes were gradually marginalized, while the new "science of man" acquired a greater importance, both for feminists and for their opponents. Finally, the acceptance of the female author, albeit with ups and downs, seems to be a European phenomenon from the early eighteenth century onwards.

At the present time it is not possible to determine whether the quantity of feminist publishing increased over the long run. In the French case there is a distinct peak in the 1630–1680 period, and perhaps another one in the early eighteenth century, but after that the picture is less clear. From the late seventeenth century, the periodical press played an increasingly important role, but again, quantitative investigations are not yet available.

QUESTIONS OF MEANING AND INTERPRETATION

Much of early modern feminism follows definite literary conventions. Eulogies of the "beautiful Sex" by male authors frequently give an impression of frivolity and "literary gallantry." Some historians have pictured the Renaissance querelle as a vain literary game instead of a serious argument for equality and dignity. While it cannot be doubted that some texts lend themselves to such a reading, it is seldom the whole story. The literary games people play tell us what is on their minds. The pro- and anti-woman literature of the querelle bespeaks a deep-seated ambivalence and anxiety about the place of women in society. In the most literal sense it shows that the subjection of women was not "unquestioned." Moreover, many feminist tracts, especially those written by women, are suffused with sincere indignation and despair about women's oppression.

Finally, different feminisms and "feminist moments" should be interpreted in the context of struggles over particular practices, such as literary authorship and taste, elite sociability, female networks, university politics, forms of religious worship, marriage laws and customs, and social and political issues. Many feminist utterances that seem outlandish at first sight only disclose their real meaning and significance when read in their specific context.

The feminism of the early Enlightenment (1650–1700) partook of the philosophical turn of that age. It demonstrated that the status of women is liable to be questioned in a period of transition when the entire intellectual and cultural landscape is shifting. A similar dynamic was visible in the late eighteenth century when feminism developed in tandem with the democratic revolutions.

Seen over the long run of European history, the writings of the early modern feminists present us with a consistent sequence of rejoinders to the mainstream apologies for male supremacy, a countercanon that originated somehere in the Late Middle Ages and has continued ever since. It represents a major feature of European history that has no parallel in the other great civilizations of the world.

See also Cartesianism ; Cornaro Piscopia, Elena Lucrezia ; Enlightenment ; Gender ; Marguerite de Navarre ; Salons ; Sexual Difference, Theories of ; Women .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Akkerman, Tjitske, and Siep Stuurman, eds. Perspectives on Feminist Political Thought in European History: From the Middle Ages to the Present. London and New York, 1998.

Albistur, Maïté, and Daniel Armogathe. Histoire du féminisme français du moyen âge à nos jours. Paris, 1978.

Bock, Gisela, and Margarete Zimmermann, eds. Die europäische Querelle des Femmes: Geschlechterdebatten seit dem 15. Jahrhundert. Stuttgart and Weimar, 1997.

Bolufer Peruga, Mónica. Mujeres e illustración: La construcción de la feminidad en la ilustración española. Valencia, 1998.

Browne, Alice. The Eighteenth Century Feminist Mind. Brighton, U.K., 1987.

Bruneau, Marie Florine. "Learned and Literary Women in Late Imperial China and Early Modern Europe." Late Imperial China 13 (1992): 156–172.

DeJean, Joan. Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France. New York, 1991.

Goldsmith, Elizabeth C., and Dena Goodman, eds. Going Public: Women and Publishing in Early Modern France. Ithaca, N.Y., and London, 1995.

Goodman, Katherine R. Amazons and Apprentices: Women and the German Parnassus in the Early Enlightenment. Rochester, N.Y., and Woodbridge, U.K., 1999.

Harth, Erica. Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime. Ithaca, N.Y., and London, 1992.

Honegger, Claudia. Die Ordnung der Geschlechter: Die Wissenschaften vom Menschen und das Weib, 1750–1850. Frankfurt am Main and New York, 1991.

Jordan, Constance. Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models. Ithaca, N.Y., and London, 1990.

Labalme, Patricia H., ed. Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past. New York and London, 1980.

Lougee, Carolyn C. Le Paradis des Femmes: Women, Salons, and Social Stratification in Seventeenth-Century France. Princeton, 1976.

MacLean, Ian. Woman Triumphant: Feminism in French Literature, 1610–1652. Oxford, 1977.

Odorisio, Ginevra Conti. Donna e Società nel Seicento: Lucrezia Marinella e Arcangela Tarabotti. Rome, 1979.

Offen, Karen. European Feminisms, 1700–1950: A Political History. Stanford, 2000.

Perry, Ruth. The Celebrated Mary Astell: An Early English Feminist. Chicago and London, 1986.

Schiebinger, Londa. The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science. Cambridge, Mass., 1989.

Smith, Hilda L. Reason's Disciples: Seventeenth-Century English Feminists. Urbana, Ill., Chicago, and London, 1982.

Stuurman, Siep. François Poulain de la Barre and the Invention of Modern Equality. Cambridge, Mass., 2003.

Taylor, Barbara. Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination. Cambridge, U.K., 2003.

Siep Stuurman

Feminism

ORIGINS OF FEMINISM

THE FIRST WAVE OF FEMINISM

THE SECOND WAVE OF FEMINISM

THE THIRD WAVE OF FEMINISM

TYPES OF FEMINISM

IMPACT OF FEMINISM

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Feminism refers to social theories, economic ideologies, political movements, and moral philosophies aimed at bringing equality to women. Feminism has been identified with different groups and different issues over the course of its history. The first wave gave rise to liberal feminists, who fought for the right to vote, access to education, and marriage law reforms in the 1800s and early 1900s. The second wave witnessed the emergence of radical feminists, who protested for work and reproductive rights in the 1960s and 1970s. The numerous feminist groups concerned with all forms of oppression (e.g., racism, classism) evolved as the third wave in the 1990s.

ORIGINS OF FEMINISM

The desire for equality predates the existence of the term feminism or the movement it has come to represent. The term feminism comes from the French word féminisme and was popularized by Hubertine Auclert in 1882 when she organized the first women’s suffragist society in France. However, prior to the advent of the word, there were publications that fell within the purview of feminism. One of the first, by the medieval French poet Christine de Pizan, was Livre de la cité des dames (1405; The Book of the City of Ladies, 1999), in which Pizan suggests that women should build their own cities, free of men, so as to avoid men’s violence and oppression. Dealing more specifically with rights, John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1690) argued that all individuals have indelible natural rights to life, liberty, and possessions, which no government can deny.

Locke’s work inspired Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), one of the first feminist manifestos. Wollstonecraft argued that women were human beings who should not be denied the same individual rights as men because of their sex. She advocated that women be viewed as equal to men under the law, with all the same rights and privileges, including the right to education, earnings, and property ownership. The rights of women were further advocated by John Stuart Mill in his treatise The Subjection of Women (1869). Mill contended that women should be granted the same rights and privileges as men under the law. In 1866, during his term as a member of Parliament for Westminster, Mill introduced a motion to enfranchise women on the grounds that taxpayers should have representation. The motion was defeated (196 to 73 votes), but the impetus for women’s suffrage was not. The right to vote and the right to a proper education were two primary concerns that propelled the first of the three waves of the feminist movement.

THE FIRST WAVE OF FEMINISM

The period from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century saw tremendous activity for the women’s movement. Key concerns included improvements in education, employment, and marriage laws. In much of North America and Europe, the right to higher education provided the movement’s initial spark. In other nations, cultural and religious constrictions such as suttee (self-immolation by Hindu widows), purdah (isolation of women, shielding them from public view), child marriage, and foot binding provided the initial focus for reform. In England and the United States in the 1800s (dates vary by state), marital laws were reformed with the passage of married women’s property acts, which enabled wives to own property, enter into contractual agreements, sue, and be sued. However, in many countries it became apparent that the right to vote was instrumental in obtaining other reforms, so voting became the focus of the movement.

In the United States the first women’s rights convention was held in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. In 1869 Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony founded the National Woman Suffrage Association and demanded not just the right to vote but marital reform as well. The exclusion of male members and the request for marital reform, instead of focusing solely on the vote, was frowned upon by some (e.g., Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell), resulting in the creation of the American Women Suffrage Association. However, the two groups merged in 1890. Women in New Zealand were among the first to obtain the right to vote (1893), and other countries quickly followed. For example, women’s suffrage was achieved in Australia in 1902, Finland in 1906, Denmark in 1915, Russia in 1917, Czechoslovakia, England, and Germany in 1918, the Netherlands and Sweden in 1919, and the United States in 1920.

In many countries, after winning the right to vote, women turned their attention to education and employment rights. Upon achieving greater educational and employment access, women entered both of these spheres in record numbers. However, this newfound freedom was quickly tempered by the Great Depression. Although the effects of the Depression were felt at different times in different countries, the 1930s saw immobilization in the feminist movement. During this period, women were discouraged from seeking employment because of the scarcity of jobs. This employment hiatus was quickly reversed with the start of World War II in 1939, as women were encouraged to fill voids in a number of professions previously closed to them (e.g., factory workers, pilots) because so many men were sent to battle. Women proved to be effectual workers, but they were nonetheless displaced by returning soldiers at the war’s end.

The tumultuousness of the war years was followed by a period of relative calm, during which the movement waned. However, having tasted independence, career options, and good pay, women were no longer content to be housewives. The publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe in 1949 (The Second Sex; English trans., 1953) reminded women that there was still much work to be done. This period of tranquility soon ended in the 1960s with the start of the second wave of the feminist movement.

THE SECOND WAVE OF FEMINISM

The term second wave was coined by Martha Lear and refers to the feminist movement that began in the 1960s. The leading issues were demands for employment and reproductive rights. In the United States the second wave rose out of the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements. Even within these “pro-rights” organizations, women were relegated to second-class status. In an effort to gain a voice, two branches of the feminist movement emerged: the women’s liberation movement (WLM) and the National Organization for Women (NOW). The WLM evolved out of the New Left and encompassed more loosely organized radical groups that formed following their exclusion from other New Left politics. They gained great notoriety in 1968, when they demonstrated against the Miss America pageant for its sexist objectification of women. NOW was a more structured, liberal group founded in 1966 by Betty Friedan, Aileen Hernandez, Pauli Murray, and others. Although NOW grew to become more inclusive, in 1968 Ti-Grace Atkinson left it and created her own group, the Feminists, to protest NOW’s hierarchical structure. NOW also lost members because of its pro-choice stance; some conservative women, led by Elizabeth Boyer, left the organization and created the Women’s Equity Action League. In spite of these early setbacks, NOW grew to become the largest women’s organization in the United States and championed the equal rights amendment (ERA) as its primary cause. Despite approval by the U.S. House and Senate, the ERA was not ratified by the requisite thirty-eight states by the 1982 deadline.

This period was marked by a number of historic events, including the 1963 Commission on the Status of Women report that documented discrimination against women in all facets of life. The pervasiveness of discrimination was also the topic of Betty Friedan’s best-selling book The Feminine Mystique (1963). These two documents invigorated the women’s rights movement, and its activities were instrumental in bringing about changes. In 1963 Congress passed the Equal Pay Act, which prohibited unequal pay for equal work. In 1964 Congress passed Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibited employment discrimination on the basis of sex, race, color, religion, and national origin. Ironically, the inclusion of “sex” was actually a last-minute attempt to kill the bill, but it passed anyway. Prohibitions against sexual discrimination were further extended in 1972 with the passage of Title IX of the Education Amendment, which prohibited discrimination in educational settings. In 1973 the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade struck down state laws restricting a women’s right to an abortion, thereby legalizing it in all fifty states.

In addition to employment and reproduction rights, concerns about pornography and sexuality more generally also came to the fore. However, there was little consensus on these issues, and this disagreement culminated in what is termed the feminist sex wars. The sex wars of the 1980s were between antipornography feminists (e.g., Catherine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, and Robin Morgan), who argued that pornography degrades and promotes violence against women, and sex-positive feminists (e.g., Camille Paglia, Ellen Willis, and Gayle Rubin), who opposed limiting sexual expression. This conflict, along with the fact that many feminists felt that other sources of oppression, such as race and class, were being neglected, caused the already multipartite movement to become increasingly fractured, resulting in the birth of third-wave feminism.

THE THIRD WAVE OF FEMINISM

Third-wave feminism evolved out of the disillusionment of many feminists with the overemphasis on the experience of middle-class white women in the mainstream. Feminists of color (e.g., Gloria Anzaldúa, bell hooks, Chela Sandoval, Cherrie Moraga, Audre Lorde, and Maxine Hong Kingston) emphasized the significance of race, class, sexual orientation, and other socially structured forms of bias on women’s lives (Kinser 2004). Critical race theorist and law professor Kimberlé W. Crenshaw introduced the term intersectionalities to highlight the multiplicative effect of these different sites of oppression. Counter to postfeminist contentions that feminism was obsolete as women had gained equality, third-wavers contended that there was still work to be done, specifically related to the “micropolitics” of gender oppression.

The term third-wave feminist was popularized by the 1992 Ms. magazine article titled “Becoming the Third Wave” by Rebecca Walker, who stated: “I am not a post-feminism feminist. I am the third wave” (Walker 1992, p. 40). In her article Walker describes her rage over the outcome of the Clarence Thomas hearings (in which Anita Hill testified that Thomas had sexually harassed her; Thomas was confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, while Hill was repudiated) and her subsequent commitment to feminism. Walker’s article generated a large response from young women, who indicated that they have not given up the cause but are feminists in their own way. That is, they embrace a more pluralistic definition of feminism; they are concerned with the intersectionalities of oppression and the impact of globalism, technology, and other forces, and they operate on a more grassroots level (Kinser 2004). Although both second- and third-wave feminists are still at work, their divergent concerns spawned different groups, including black feminists, critical feminists, and global feminists.

TYPES OF FEMINISM

Although there are many types of feminism, the four most common are liberal, radical, Marxist, and socialist. What differentiates them is the degree to which they accept that the different social structures in power are responsible for oppression. Liberal feminism, considered the most mainstream, accepts that sex differences exist but contends that social, legal, and economic opportunities should be equal for men and women. Liberal feminists are concerned with individual rights and promoting change through legal and legislative means while still operating within the current patriarchal structure.

Radical feminism emerged from the ideals of the New Left and the women’s liberation movement in the late 1960s. Radical feminists argue that men are the oppressors of women and that the patriarchal social structure must be replaced for women to gain equality. The term radical feminism is used to represent many divergent groups, including cultural feminism, lesbian feminism, and revolutionary feminism.

Marxist feminists believe that women’s oppression stems largely from economic stratification brought about by the production methods inherent in capitalism. Accordingly, capitalism must be destroyed in order to emancipate women both as workers and as property within the marital sphere.

Drawing from both radical and Marxist ideologies, socialist feminists argue that both class and sexism are sources of women’s oppression. They advocate the end of capitalist patriarchy to reduce all forms of exploitation, as they are also concerned with oppression resulting from race, age, religion, and the like. In contrast to liberal feminism’s emphasis on individual rights, socialist feminists emphasize the social existence in the broader community.

IMPACT OF FEMINISM

In addition to voting, property, employment, and other rights, the women’s movement has also promoted other changes. For instance, not only do women have the right to vote but a number of countries have had female political leaders, including Chile, Finland, Ireland, Israel, Liberia, and Switzerland. In addition access to education has brought about a large increase in the number of women students, such that women now outnumber men in many nations’ schools. With regard to language, feminism has been influential in advancing the use of nonsexist terms (e.g., humankind in lieu of mankind ). It has also had a tremendous impact on the institution of marriage, in terms not only of whether women marry but also whom they choose to marry (a man or a woman), as well as the distribution of familial labor within the marital union. Moreover following the lead of the nineteenth-century suffragist Lucy Stone, many women now maintain their maiden names after marriage. The movement has also influenced religion, with many liberal denominations now ordaining women. Feminist thinking has also influenced the social sciences. It is no longer acceptable to collect data solely on men and to apply the findings to women, because there are often important gender differences—for example, personality (Chodorow 1978). Further, feminist researchers advocate increased use of qualitative methods in which participants play a greater role in informing the definition and measurement of the phenomenon under study.

SEE ALSO Critical Race Theory; Feminism, Second Wave; Friedan, Betty; Gender Gap; Inequality, Gender; Intersectionality; Marxism; National Organization for Women; Patriarchy; Reproductive Rights; Sexism; Sexual Harassment; Sexuality; Socialism; Steinem, Gloria; Suffrage, Women’s; Womanism; Women; Women and Politics; Women’s Liberation; Women’s Movement; Women’s Studies; Work and Women

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chodorow, Nancy. 1978. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley: University of California Press.

De Beauvoir, Simone. [1949] 1953. The Second Sex. Trans. H. M. Parshley. New York: Knopf.

De Pizan, Christine. [1405] 1999. The Book of the City of Ladies. Trans. Rosalind Brown-Grant. London and New York: Penguin.

Friedan, Betty. 1963. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Dell.

International Museum of Women. 2003. Chronology of Worldwide Woman Suffrage. http://www.imow.org/exhibits/suffrage/chronology_suffrage.pdf.

Kinser, Amber E. 2004. Negotiating Spaces for/through Third-Wave Feminism. National Women’s Studies Association Journal 16 (3): 124–153.

Locke, John. [1690] 1992. Two Treatises of Government. New York: Classics of Liberty Library.

Mill, John Stuart. [1869] 2001. The Subjection of Women, ed. Edward Alexander. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.

President’s Commission on the Status of Women. 1963. Report of the Committee on Education. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Roe v. Wade. 1973. 410 U.S. 113.

Walker, Rebecca. 1992. Becoming the Third Wave. Ms., January–February, 39–41.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. [1792] 1989. Vindication of the Rights of Women. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus.

Worldwide Guide to Women Leadership. 2007. Chronological List of Female Presidents. http://www.guide2womenleaders.com/Presidents-Chronological.htm.

Kim S. Ménard

FEMINISM

As a social and political movement with a long, intermittent history, feminism has repeatedly come into being, generated change, and subsided into oblivion. As an eclectic body of theory, feminism entered the academy in the early 1970s as a part of the women's studies movement, where its contribution to scholarship in the arts, social sciences, and humanities has perhaps been particularly significant. Despite the variety of its political positions, social commitments, and theoretical vantage points, feminism's common concern is with the social pattern, widespread across cultures and history, whereby power and entitlements are distributed asymmetrically to favor men over women. This asymmetry has been given many names, including the subjugation of women, sexism, male dominance, patriarchy, systemic misogyny, phallocracy, and the oppression of women. A number of feminist theorists simply call it gender, and that usage will be adopted here.

The concept of gender rests on the assumption that there are two sexes, male and female. The cultural meanings assigned to those sexes through complex social processes establish a power relation in which masculinity predominates over femininity, and the things associated with masculinity predominate over their feminine counterparts. The term gender refers to this power relation, which operates through society's institutions and practices by conferring the control of resources and the right to social goods on men while relegating women to subordinate positions in service of men's interests and concerns. But because gender always works in a complicated interconnection with other abusive power systems such as race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, class, age, and disability, some women enjoy more power than some men. By the same token, these other power systems produce greater amounts of privilege for some women than for others.

One of the characteristic features of gendered power relations is androcentrism: the (usually unstated) view that man is the point of reference for what is normal for humans. According to the logic of androcentrism, if man is the yardstick or measure for being human, then women, not being men, must be defective humans. Furthermore, because androcentrism presumes that men are the point around which everything else revolves, the feminist insistence that women too are full–fledged human beings is just as much about men as everything else is—it is a threat to masculinity, or an attempt to usurp men's rightful place in the natural order of things.

Racism and discrimination against gays and lesbians employ the same sort of logic: the white race and heterosexuality are the norm for human beings, so anything other than the norm must be defective—not just statistically but morally abnormal. From this it follows that the demand to de–center the dominant group (or, to use another spatial metaphor, to dismantle the hierarchy that puts the dominant group on top) must be seen as a threat to the group—a threat to "the Southern way of life" or to "the family as we know it." Looking at the demand in this way keeps the focus on the dominant group, so that it, rather than unjust treatment of the subgroup, remains the center of attention.

Criticism and Construction

As a political movement, feminism has sought to undermine or overthrow the social mechanisms through which gender operates to oppress women. Because gender identity cannot be understood or even perceived outside its complicated interaction with other abusive power systems, feminists resist those as well. A feminist politics is not only a politics of resistance, however. It is also a politics of construction. It seeks to build a more just society—one that is as good for all kinds of women as it is for all kinds of men. So, for example, "first-wave" U.S. feminists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, and Lucretia Mott worked for the right of women to own property, not to be enslaved, and to vote.

As a field of scholarship, feminism likewise pursues two goals. The first is criticism. Feminists have uncovered and opposed gender bias in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, the arts, and professions such as law and medicine. Sandra Harding, for example, has criticized the view, widely shared by scientists themselves, that science is value–free. She argues that scientific knowledge is produced largely by men who command significant amounts of social prestige, and that the perspective of these men is necessarily colored by assumptions and values arising from the kinds of activities in which they engage. As science leaves this perspective unexamined, it assumes an objectivity that it does not in fact possess.

What Donna Haraway has dubbed the "god trick"—the ideal of a perspectiveless and timeless view from nowhere that purports to secure objectivity—strikes many feminists as both politically suspect and impossible to achieve. Feminist epistemologists such as Lorraine Code and Helen Longino argue that greater objectivity is attained by taking careful and rigorous account of knowers' social locations than by ignoring the effects of power on what kinds of knowledge is legitimated, whose knowledge is considered authoritative, and which knowers are ignored or excluded as a result.

As well as questioning sexist understandings of objectivity, feminists have criticized the gender bias that inheres in other key theoretical concepts and indeed in mainstream theories themselves. But like political feminism, academic feminism does more than criticize—it also constructs. Feminist economists, for example, have not rested content with condemning the masculine bias inherent in the individualism and competition of much economic theory; they have constructed economic models that begin from the fact of human dependency and connection. Feminist historians have not only pointed to the gender gaps created by their profession's focus on military campaigns and other male–dominated activity in the public sphere, but have used women's diaries, letters, and other writings to construct histories of women and of domestic life. Feminist constructions in philosophy include a shift from mainstream epistemology's preoccupation with necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge, to the theoretical importance of the social location of the knower. Equally significant has been the construction of feminist moral theory, particularly the ethics of care and feminist responsibility ethics.

Feminist Epistemology

While on its face there seems to be something paradoxical about feminist criticisms of reason, given that the forms of argumentation on which these criticisms depend are themselves a part of what is under attack, the burgeoning literature on this topic may be understood, not as a repudiation of reason tout court, but as a dissatisfaction with a particular picture of reason. This picture, which underlies much of contemporary nonfeminist ethics as well as other areas of mainstream philosophy, is that of a pure, universal reason, abstracted from historical and social contexts, operating dispassionately and objectively to produce true propositions. Feminists fault this picture as much for what it excludes as for what it portrays.

For one thing, the picture excludes the emotions, rather than acknowledging that feelings such as empathy, resentment, or anger play a useful role in reasoning—especially moral reasoning. The picture in particular excludes what people care about, rather than acknowledging that what they care about can itself be a reason for thinking or acting the way they do. It excludes trust, rather than acknowledging that trust is what keeps one's reasoning from becoming paranoid. And it excludes narrative or figurative modes of reasoning, rather than acknowledging that people often use stories and images to make sense of the world.

One important strategy for feminist epistemologists, then, has been to identify the tension between the explicit content of philosophical arguments, which appears gender–neutral, and the models, metaphors, and imagery underlying these arguments, which covertly favor the experiences and preoccupations of privileged men. A second important strategy has been to question the tradition that divorces reason from other human attributes. Many feminists have emphasized the role of the emotions in rational reflection, while others have emphasized the point that human reasoners are embodied, and that the social constructions surrounding differences in embodiment count among the conditions that make knowledge possible. Still others have emphasized the essentially social nature of human existence, arguing that knowledge is not "in the head" of solitary reasoners, but rather is produced and imparted in communities of knowers, and that abusive power systems operate in these communities to discredit unjustifiably certain kinds of reasoning while authorizing others.

Borrowing from Marxist analysis, in the 1980s feminist standpoint theorists such as Nancy Hartsock and Patricia Hill Collins drew an analogy between women in gendered societies and workers in capitalist societies. They contended that just as the false presuppositions that sustain the ideology of capitalism are most visible from the hard–won perspective of the worker who has participated in consciousness–raising and political engagement, so too the false presuppositions that sustain the ideology of gender are best seen from the standpoint of those who have had to acquire detailed, self–reflective knowledge of the gender system simply in order to be able to function within it. Feminist standpoint theorists are less interested in claiming a single, unified standpoint that is representative of all women, however, than in taking seriously the knowledge that informs women's practices—whether domestic, emotional, intellectual, or professional.

Ethics of Care

One such practice is that of giving care. In the United States, but also in many other societies, women do far more unpaid, hands–on caregiving than men—they change the diapers, wash the dishes, clean the bathrooms, take the dog to the vet, feed and dress the children, take care of sick or disabled family members, and provide long–term care for elderly relatives. Even when married women have full–time jobs, they still almost invariably do the vast majority of the housework, childcare, and elder care. Nearly 75 percent of unpaid elder care is done by women, and after a divorce or in cases where the parents never married, 75 percent of dependent children live with and are cared for by their mothers rather than their fathers—a figure that approaches 100 percent when the children are infants or toddlers. Paid caregivers are mostly women, as well. Almost 96 percent of professional nurses are women, and the percentage of women providing daycare for children is close to 99 percent. In Canada, women do 80 percent of all caregiving, both paid and unpaid.

The Harvard psychologist Carol Gilligan, taking seriously the idea that women's experience of caregiving produces its own kind of moral reasoning, questioned whether the scale of moral maturity developed by her colleague, Lawrence Kohlberg, was as universally applicable as he supposed. At the first stage of Kohlberg's scale, morality is conceived of as a system of punishment and obedience. At Stage Two, it is motivated by personal reward. At Stage Three, it is taken to be a matter of helping and pleasing other people. At Stage Four it is understood as a set of rules for maintaining the social order. Those who reach Stage Five can sum up those social rules in a principle such as "the greatest good for the greatest number," while those at Stage Six are able to think of morality in terms of self–chosen universal principles of justice. Not everyone, claimed Kohlberg, reaches the more advanced stages of moral maturity.

Gilligan, noting that men consistently scored higher on the Kohlberg scale than women, questioned the reliability of the scale rather than accept its implication that women tend to be less morally mature than men. She claimed that many of the girls and women in her own developmental studies simply reasoned about moral matters "in a different voice." Instead of talking about rights and rules, they were using the language of relationships and connection. Rather than reasoning abstractly, their thinking was contextual and concrete. She called this a "care" orientation toward morality, and opposed it to the "justice" orientation displayed at stages Four, Five, and Six on Kohlberg's scale. Gilligan was careful not to say that the "different voice" is the voice of all women across cultures and through time, any more than the voice of justice is the voice of all men. She did, however, argue that gender shapes the experience of men and women differently, and that gendered experience—particularly the experience of living in a society that expects girls and women to perform vast amounts of caring labor—produces "different modes of moral understanding."

Nel Noddings, Virginia Held, Sara Ruddick, Joan Tronto, and Eva Kittay are among the most prominent of the feminist theorists who have used Gilligan's moral psychology to construct an ethics of care. They have examined caregiving for the moral understandings internal to the practice, offering accounts of not only what it is to care well, but also of the social and political framework in which this practice takes place. While care theorists have by no means created a unified account, it is nevertheless possible to identify three characteristic features of the ethics on which most, but not all, care theorists agree:

1. a caring relationship;
2. engagement with another's will; and
3. particularism.

Caring well both requires and is an expression of a caring relationship. The caregiver must care about the person she cares for, not only to keep the caregiving from becoming impersonal, cold, or self–serving, but because caring is a value in itself. To care in this sense is to feel concern for one's charge (Kittay's term for the person receiving the care). But while caring engages the emotions, the word does not refer solely to a cluster of feelings. As Held points out, it is also a moral term. It is a good thing to care about others; a bad thing not to care. Because it is a moral term, it can be used to guide how and when to act on one's feelings, as well as to evaluate specific instances of caregiving.

On the view of a number of care ethicists, the caring relationship requires engagement with another's will—the caregiver must treat her charge not simply as an object of her care, but as someone with wants, intentions, and desires of his own. Noddings calls on caregivers to practice what she calls engrossment, which consists of such close attention to the feelings, needs, ideas, or wants of their charges that the caregivers' own will is displaced. Other care ethicists emphasize the importance of self–knowledge, lest the caregiver confuse her own will with the will of her charge.

Caring well also requires the caregiver to pay attention to the particulars of a caring relationship rather than being guided by abstractly formulated rules or principles. It is by being closely attentive to this particular person, who needs this particular kind of care, in these specific circumstances, rather than by reflecting on general moral precepts, that morally admirable care is given. This is not to say that caregivers ought never to engage in abstract thinking. But the point is to remain within the caring relationship, which requires attention to the person for whom one cares rather than attention to moral abstractions.

A number of feminist ethicists have argued (repeatedly) that each of the three central features of the ethics of care reinforces the stereotype of the self–effacing wife and mother, prescribing courses of action and ways of thinking that are bad for women. In particular, the critics have identified three dangers. First, if the caregiver cares about the person she cares for, her feelings will not permit her to leave her charge's needs unmet, which poses the danger of exploitation. Second, the caregiver might become so engrossed in the needs and wants of her charge that she gives up her own sense of right and wrong, thereby losing her integrity. And third, if the caregiver attends closely to the particular needs and circumstances of her charge, her field of vision cannot accommodate the broader concerns of social justice.

Kittay's solution to the problem of exploitation is to call for financial, economic, and logistical support for caregivers. She argues that if one begins from the fact of human dependency instead of from the assumption that "all men are created equal," then caring for those who need it can be seen as one of the requirements of justice—as can support for those who provide this care. Diemut Bubeck has a different solution. Her idea, modeled on military service, is that men and women alike could spend some period of their lives in a "caring service" whose mission would be to provide respite care for unpaid dependency workers.

As for the problem of integrity, one solution is to build self–care into the ethics of care so that it does not become an ethics of self–erasure. However, if the caregiver's only motive for taking care of herself is that she can then better care for her charge, she stands in danger of losing herself altogether. Cheshire Calhoun's 1995 account of integrity provides a different solution. She argues that integrity is not only the personal virtue of holding fast to the moral values that are central to one's self–conception, but also a social virtue, exercised by reliably standing for one's own best moral judgments to other people. If integrity involves being the kind of person others can depend on, it cannot be threatened by caring well. Indeed, for the caregiver to do what she knows to be wrong would count as defective care, because it would mean that her charge could not rely on her.

In response to the claim that the ethics of care is too focused on the personal and the particular to attend to issues of social justice, Tronto proposes to redraw the boundary that political theorists and others have marked between morality and politics. As caregiving is a practice embedded in social life, she claims, it has to be understood in a political context and not just a moral one. A politics of care that complements the ethics of care would, in Tronto's view, recognize and support the caring labor on which every society depends. Such a politics would shift the goals of social policy from preserving autonomy to fostering interdependence; from promoting interests to meeting needs. It would value citizens even when they cannot fend for themselves.

Responsibility Ethics

The ethics of care is based on a morally crucial relationship between people that has too often been ignored or dismissed by nonfeminist ethicists, but relationships other than those involving care are also morally important, and they too give rise to responsibilities. Nor are relationships the only source of the moral demands made on people. For these reasons, several feminist ethicists have gone beyond care to develop an ethics of responsibility.

Margaret Urban Walker is less interested in the abstract questions that philosophers have traditionally raised about the conditions under which someone is morally responsible (Was he free to act otherwise? Did she form the proper intention?) than in examining how practices of responsibility operate within actual moral communities. People hold one another to their promises, excuse them, demand an explanation, give them a standing ovation, let them stew in their own juice, award them the Nobel Prize, and sentence them to death by lethal injection. In these and other ways responsibility is assigned, accepted, taken, deflected, redirected, and renegotiated.

How one is expected to participate in society's practices of responsibility depends just as much on one's gender, class, age, ethnicity, and race as it does on one's own achievements. Who gets to do what to whom is largely determined by the social power that is distributed according to these demographics, as is the matter of who must account to whom. And just as social position influences whether and to what extent one may take, assign, or avoid responsibility, so too it plays a role in determining who may set or change the rules that govern when, how, and by whom this may be done.

As Walker points out, however, the system is rigged. The social forces that allow some people to take responsibility for the things that are pleasant or rewarding, while imposing on other people the kinds of responsibility that keep them from attaining many of the good things in life, are the same forces that hide the fact that this is going on. Some of these forces naturalize the uneven distribution of responsibility, concealing the coercion that sustains the arrangement by representing it as natural—as when women are said to have a maternal instinct that qualifies them to care for children while men do not. Other forces normalize the unfairness, focusing so much attention on the norms or standards for fulfilling a particular responsibility that the question of why a particular kind of person must assume the responsibility is completely hidden from view. Incessantly barraging women with the norms for looking attractive, for example, is a wonderful way of concealing the unfairness of requiring them to take far more responsibility for their appearance than men.

Practices of responsibility look forward as well as backward. In The Unnatural Lottery, Claudia Card points out that people who have suffered from unfair distributions of responsibility can do more than make backward–looking assignments of blame for past wrongs. A woman who has been raped, for example, can adopt a forward–looking stance that allows her to take responsibility for what happened to her—not in the sense of blaming herself, but in the sense of refusing to be a victim. She can be responsible for rebuilding her life at the same time as she holds her attacker responsible for his deed.

Normally, adults are expected to know the moral rules and to be aware of the standards by which other people judge them. That is part of what it means to be a morally competent person. But in "Responsibility and Reproach," Calhoun observes that morally competent people can lose their competence in abnormal moral contexts, such as the one that feminists take themselves to inhabit. If, for instance, the normal moral context allows men to deflect responsibility for changing their babies' diapers, then even a well–meaning man is unlikely to see the sexism behind his assumption that when he does change a diaper, he is doing something nice rather than doing merely what he ought. As he is behaving irreproachably according to the standards of the moral context he inhabits, it hardly seems fair to blame him. One could, after all, excuse him for the same reason one excuses young children's wrongdoing—that he is not responsible for his attitude because he has not yet learned the moral rules that govern the abnormal moral context feminists occupy. But Calhoun thinks he should be held responsible anyway. When feminists reproach people who engage in sexist behavior, she argues, they teach them that what they are doing is wrong, motivate them to change their behavior, and show them respect rather than treating them like children. This is one way in which feminists can take responsibility (in Card's sense) for sexism.

The ethics of care and responsibility ethics display some common themes. Both reject the idea that persons are essentially self–sufficient and unconnected, insisting instead that selves are always nested in webs of relationship. Both emphasize the differences among people rather than making abstract generalizations about human nature. Both use gender as a central category of analysis. Both use the language of responsibilities rather than rights or duties. And both begin from careful examinations of actual, real–time personal interactions. This on–the–ground quality is highly characteristic of feminist ethics—it is a way of avoiding the mistake of theorizing from too limited a set of examples.

Feminist Bioethics

In Canada and the United States, the bioethics movement and second–wave feminism both began in the late 1960s, but the two discourses had little to say to one another for the better part of two decades. It was not until 1989 that the U.S. journal of feminist philosophy, Hypatia, published two special issues devoted to feminism and medical ethics. The few essays by feminists published up to that time in the premier U.S. journal in bioethics, the Hastings Center Report, dealt solely with ethical issues surrounding women's reproductive systems.

All that has changed. The 1990s saw a steady stream of conferences, monographs, anthologies, and essays in learned journals that examine bioethical issues through a feminist lens. Susan Sherwin's No Longer Patient: Feminist Ethics & Health Care appeared in 1992, as did Feminist Perspectives in Medical Ethics, edited by Helen Bequaert Holmes and Laura M. Purdy. The International Network on Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, begun in 1993 by Holmes and Anne Donchin, has some 300 members worldwide and has sponsored several conferences on feminist bioethics, in conjunction with the International Association of Bioethics. In 1995, the prestigious Kennedy Institute of Ethics devoted its Advanced Bioethics Course to feminist perspectives on bioethics, and the plenary lectures of that course were then published in a special issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal. In 1996, the Journal of Clinical Ethics published special sections in each of its four issues on feminism and bioethics. That same year saw the publication of an anthology edited by Susan M. Wolf, Feminism and Bioethics: Beyond Reproduction. In 1998, the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy devoted an entire issue to the feminist ethic of care. Anne Donchin and Laura M. Purdy's anthology, Embodying Bioethics: Feminist Advances, appeared in 1999. In 2001, the journal Bioethics published an issue devoted to feminist bioethics. Textbooks and readers in bioethics routinely include essays written by feminists.

Feminist bioethics largely consists of criticism directed at practices surrounding the care of women's bodies, and in particular, the parts of women's bodies that mark them as different from men. There has been an ongoing focus on women's reproductive practices, in the form of arguments in defense of abortion, debates about the wisdom of various methods of assisted reproduction, arguments against sustaining postmortem pregnancies, ethical analyses of various sorts of maternal–fetal conflicts, concern about HIV testing of newborns and pregnant women, pleas for better prenatal care for pregnant women, debates about the use and abuse of the birth control implant Norplant, arguments for and against amniocentesis and other genetic testing of fetuses, and discussions about hormone replacement therapy for postmenopausal women. And when feminist bioethicists have moved "beyond reproduction," as Susan M. Wolf puts it, they have tended to criticize practices of healthcare for women—weighing in, for example, on the debates over the medical management of breast cancer, arguing that tying healthcare insurance to employment disadvantages elderly women, or protesting the injustice of a healthcare delivery system that devotes a disproportionate amount of high–tech care, such as arterial angioplasty and organ transplantation, to men. While this criticism can be seen as a political and moral protest against the sexism that permeates the healthcare system, it has been argued that the preoccupation with women's bodies, and especially women's reproductive health, tends to reinforce the androcentric view that men are normal but women, being abnormal, require special accommodations both within healthcare and within bioethics.

Not all of feminist bioethical criticism focuses on women's (reproductive) health. Mary Mahowald has, for example, used standpoint theory to criticize healthcare providers who systematically discount their patients' knowledge about their illness and treatment. Virginia Warren has pointed out that medicine's preoccupation with crisis issues diverts attention from what may be called housekeeping issues, which are perceived as women's work and are on that account not valued. Susan M. Wolf has argued that gendered differences in medical treatment, suicidal behavior, healthcare insurance, and social expectations about self–sacrifice offer a reason to suppose that legalizing physician–assisted suicide would further oppress women. A number of feminists have criticized the cost–cutting measures resulting in shorter hospital stays that unfairly exploit the gendered division of labor within families, where, compared to men, women do vastly disproportionate amounts of caregiving, even if this means that they are restricted to part–time employment or give up their jobs altogether.

Feminist bioethicists' constructions have consisted mainly of reconceptualizing problems in areas of healthcare practice and policy ranging from postmenopausal motherhood to home healthcare, and then offering solutions based on those reconceptualizations. With the major exception of the work of some feminist bioethicists on the ethic of care, however, constructions in theory have been almost nonexistent. Much more could be done both to expand the ethic of care so that it furnishes conceptual tools for social and political analysis, and to use the practice of medicine itself to enrich ethical theory. That so little of this work has been done is not surprising, not only because feminist bioethics is a very young discourse but also because bioethics in general has failed to produce much distinctive theory, contenting itself with the pragmatic strategy of agreeing on middle–level ethical principles where it can, and scavenging from the standing political and moral theories when it must. Feminist bioethicists, however, do not have the luxury of that sort of pragmatism, because it is the business of feminism to be deeply suspicious of the standing political and moral theories, on the grounds that they are shot through with gender bias and so cannot be regarded as trustworthy. Many feminists argue that their task is to construct new theory rather than to refine theories that leave everything exactly as it was.

Why ought feminists theorize about ethical issues arising from biomedical practice? Why, that is, should there be a feminist bioethics at all? One answer is that medicine ought to be of particular concern to feminists because it is one of the hegemonic discourses of our time, commanding enormous amounts of social prestige and authority. Because it is so powerful that no other discourse except, possibly, that of international capitalism competes with it, it interacts with gender at many levels and in many different ways. Feminists continue to criticize that interaction, but they also wish to learn from it. By studying how power, in the guise of gender, circulates through the healthcare system, they contribute to the body of normative theory that might guide this socially valuable institution in the direction of greater justice.

hilde lindemann nelson

SEE ALSO: Abortion; Abuse, Interpersonal: Abuse between Domestic Partners; Adoption; Aging and the Aged: Old Age;Authority in Religious Traditions; Autonomy; Body: Cultural and Religious Perspectives; Care; Children: Rights of Children; Circumcision, Female Circumcision; Coercion; Compassionate Love; Embryo and Fetus; Environmental Ethics: Ecofeminism; Fertility Control; Gender Identity; Maternal-Fetal Relationship; Psychiatry, Abuses of; Reproductive Technologies; Research Policy: Subjects; Sexual Ethics; Sexism; Women as Health Professionals

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INTERNET RESOURCE

International Network on Feminist Approaches to Bioethics. Available from <http://www.fabnet.org>.

FEMINISM.

The terms feminism and feminist, as they are used throughout the world, connote, respectively, movements that have advocated the idea of women's emancipation and the individuals who have supported these movements. Nineteenth-century French political discourse commonly used the term féminisme as a synonym for women's emancipation. Its exact origin remains uncertain, but dictionaries do not record its use in this sense before the 1870s. In the following decade, it was used by the first self-proclaimed feminist, Hubertine Auclert (1848–1914), in her periodical La citoyenne (The woman citizen) and gained currency after a number of "feminist" congresses in the 1890s. Before the turn of the twentieth century, the term appeared first in British, then in Belgian, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Greek, and Russian publications.

SENSE OF THE TERM

In European societies, feminism often acquired various cultural meanings. It connotes a political ideology as well as a social movement. The historian Karen Offen has aptly defined it as "the name given to a comprehensive critical response to the deliberate and systematic subordination of women as a group within a given cultural setting" (p. 20). As a historical phenomenon, feminism can accordingly be defined as an "encompassing program of sociopolitical critique and remediation, with gender issues at its very core" (p. 24). European feminist movements addressed imbalances of power between the sexes, raised issues concerning personal autonomy or individual freedoms, and supported ideas and movements for sociopolitical change, often intersecting with other concerns such as class, race, age, or religion.

FORMS OF FEMINIST POLITICS

Since the eighteenth century, European feminists have debated the distribution of political, social, and economic power between the sexes and have challenged women's subordination to men in the family and in society. The fortunes of European feminism have varied greatly from one society to another, often depending on the possibilities for voicing dissent. Most feminist movements in Europe were transnational in scope and addressed common themes. In the first half of the twentieth century, national politics and population issues figured prominently; in the second half, European feminists continued to fight for women's economic opportunities and equal legal status with men but also turned to new issues, as the "personal" became "political."

In the history of European feminist thought, historians have identified two basic approaches, not necessarily distinct and often intertwined. The so-called relational argument proposes a gender-based but egalitarian organization of society, emphasizes the rights of women in relation to those of men, and insists on women's distinctive contributions to society. The "individualistic" argument sees the individual, irrespective of its sex, as society's basic unit and stresses more abstract concepts of individual human rights as well as the quest for personal independence. Although it is tempting to categorize each European women's movement as either "relational" or "individualistic," the great historical and political heterogeneity of these movements argues against simple categorizations. Not all women's organizations were feminist, some can indeed be seen as antifeminist, yet their activities outside the domestic realm generally contributed to the development of a feminist consciousness.

NATIONAL MOVEMENTS

By the beginning of the twentieth century, national feminist movements had emerged in many western, central, and northern European countries. These movements were largely liberal, Protestant, and middle-class. Their members organized against the subordinate legal status of women and their exclusion from higher education and the professions, for women's suffrage and a variety of social and moral reforms. In Great Britain, Germany, France, Scandinavia, and Italy, feminists became increasingly concerned about the fate of the bourgeois marriage and shared the general anxiety about the falling birthrate in their countries. Working-class women also organized and joined socialist organizations in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Russia. Although some of their leaders proclaimed a "clean separation" from bourgeois feminism, European feminists increasingly crossed class barriers, especially after transnational cooperation came to a temporary halt during World War I and national movements united to support the war effort. The aftermath of the war saw not only the reorganization of Europe's political landscape but also the development of new feminist movements.

Feminists in the successor states to the Austro-Hungarian Empire got off to a shaky start. Newly enfranchised women activists in the new Austria were certainly pleased when the son of Marianne Hainisch, the founder and president of the Bund Österreichischer Frauenvereine (BÖFV; League of Austrian women's associations, founded in 1902) was elected president of the republic. Yet widely divergent views on feminist issues in the two major parties, the Social Democratic and the Conservative, kept them from enacting significant feminist policies. While Social Democratic women, often exhibiting an anti-Catholic bias, addressed the double burden of women workers and protested restrictive laws on abortion and on contraceptive information, the middle-class feminists of the BÖ FV emphasized peace and harmony in postwar Austrian society. They pressed for better educational opportunities and changes in Austrian women's legal and economic situation, and they promoted international peace.

Feminists fared differently in smaller Catholic countries, especially when nationalist issues were also at stake. When the monarchy in Portugal, a rural and Catholic nation, was replaced by a republic in 1910, a small but enthusiastic feminist movement, the Liga Republicana das Mulheres Portuguesas (Republican league of Portuguese women), emerged in Lisbon. Its leaders worked for the economic autonomy of married women, a divorce law, and a number of other legal reforms, but their efforts were hampered by World War I and came to a standstill in 1926, when the authoritarian regime of António Salazar took control. The Portuguese feminists had no choice but to succumb to its Catholic, nationalist, and corporatist principles. After World War II, "unofficial" women's organizations were dissolved and coeducation in the schools was abolished. The constitution of 1966 reestablished the husband's marital authority. Feminist activism reemerged only after the end of the authoritarian regime in 1974.

In the neighboring country of Spain, the program of the Asociación Nacional de Mujeres Españolas (National association of Spanish women), founded by educated urban women in 1918, also called for major changes in civil legislation, women's access to education and the professions, equal opportunity, and equal pay. High illiteracy rates—especially among women—poverty, infant mortality, prostitution, and discriminatory laws provided a broad agenda for both middle-class and socialist feminists. In 1930 the constitution of the Second Republic gave women full political rights and secularized civic life. The republican government soon came under attack from the Right, especially after the disastrous election of 1933, for which the Left blamed women voters. When civil war ensued in 1936, a number of women's organizations emerged on both sides, but feminist issues were rarely at the top of their agenda. Under the regime of the victorious General Francisco Franco (1892–1972), abortion was redefined as a "crime against the state," coeducation ceased, male authority in marriage was restored, and marriage loans (incentive programs offering government grants to newlyweds for the purchase of household goods) were paid along with birth premiums. Yet feminism reemerged in the 1970s and gained momentum after Franco's death.

Irish feminists had to contend with Catholicism and nationalism as well, but the outcome was different from that in Spain, Austria, and Portugal. The proclamation of the Irish Republic in 1916 stipulated equal political rights for both sexes, and militant Irishwomen became activists for independence during the years of undeclared war with England that followed. When Irishwomen were partially enfranchised in 1918, Cumann na mBan, the women's organization associated with the nationalist party Sinn Féin, called upon women voters to support the cause of Irish independence. After Ireland achieved legislative independence in 1921, the constitution of the Irish Free State gave equal rights to both sexes. In the 1920s and 1930s, Irish feminists waged a battle on matters concerning divorce, access to contraceptive information, the age of consent for girls, the legal situation of unmarried mothers, and prostitution. When Ireland finally gained independence in 1937, the new constitution discriminated against women. Irish feminists did not challenge this until the 1970s, and the constitutional clauses on women's status were still in effect in the 1990s.

The development of Scandinavian feminist movements took yet another path. Postwar Swedish society, for example, was still relatively poor and predominantly agricultural; however, high literacy rates, Protestant traditions, and a Social Democratic Party that was more nationalist, more populist, and less Marxist than some of its counterparts in other countries contributed to the formation of a particular brand of "feminism." Nineteenth-century Swedish feminists rejected the term and named their movement kvinnosaken, or "woman's cause," a name that by the 1920s was widely connected with a radical liberal faction that supposedly promoted mostly the interests of single, childless women. Its representatives founded a school for women's civic education at the Fogelstad estate, which contributed a new dimension to European feminism by emphasizing environmental issues, the skills of rural women, and women's special qualities and contributions to society. This Swedish brand of what could be called antimilitarist ecofeminism enjoyed a revival around the turn of the twenty-first century. "Classic" feminist demands such as the abolition of legal, state-regulated prostitution, full legal rights for married women, educational equality, access to the civil service, and motherhood insurance were largely met in the 1920s. With increasing industrialization and modernization of the country, many Swedish feminists became associated with the Social Democratic Party and committed themselves to solving the dilemma of combining employment and motherhood. A number of reforms after the 1936 elections, including the legalization of contraceptives, promoted women's economic independence and created facilities for child care and household support services but also addressed the division of domestic labor and the perpetuation of gender roles. Framed in terms of Sweden's national interest, this program was central for Swedish society beginning in the 1960s and ensured the success of the Social Democrats for many decades.

PHASES OF PROTEST AND POLITICAL NEGOTIATION

Woman suffrage was undoubtedly one of the most prominent causes of feminist movements in Europe. At the beginning of the twentieth century, they could already look back on decades of struggle. The road to full political participation for women varied but was characterized by similar developments: European suffragists often based their demands for inclusion on women's special contribution to society while at the same time raising questions of equal rights and representation. By 1922 twenty-one European countries had passed woman suffrage laws. The vote was won in Finland in 1906 and Norway in 1913; seventeen countries followed between 1915 and 1922; Spain and Portugal joined the ranks in 1931. Yet four European countries denied the vote to half their population until the end of World War II (France until 1944 and Italy until 1945) or even longer (Greece granted woman suffrage in 1952, Switzerland in 1971).

The postwar successes of the European suffrage movements, or so the conventional argument goes, were largely "a reward" for women's participation in the war effort, though woman suffrage was passed in some neutral countries and women in warring countries such as France still stood empty-handed. As in the United States, woman suffrage in Europe was actually the result of a transnational development that originated in the suffragist movements of the nineteenth century and depended on other factors as well, for example, different democratic traditions, the intensity of the class struggle, the extension of male suffrage, or changing coalitions between liberal and conservative or socialist parties.

No European country allowed women to vote before the suffrage had been extended to all males, and even then restrictions applied: in Great Britain, for example, only married women, female heads of households, or women over thirty with university degrees could vote between 1918 and 1928; Belgium introduced suffrage des morts in 1920 for mothers and widows of war casualties; Austria initially excluded prostitutes from voting; and Portugal, which demanded a literacy test for male voters, in 1931 extended the suffrage only to women with "higher education."

Italy passed local woman suffrage for "educated" women as well as for mothers and widows of slain soldiers in 1925, shortly before Benito Mussolini abolished all elections. The discourse and tactics of the feminist movements in France and Switzerland did not differ much from those in the rest of Europe, and the French feminist movement achieved some prominence. Women in these countries counted on being granted the vote after World War I. The necessary referenda in several Swiss Kantone (states), however, produced overwhelmingly negative results until 1971. In France, the cause of the feminists was primarily defeated by anticlerical republican forces, which feared that women would vote against the republic. This argument turned up in other Catholic countries as well, but was of special significance for the Gauche démocratique (democratic Left) in France. Only in 1944 did woman suffrage finally become part of the program of Charles de Gaulle's provisional government.

After World War I, many newly enfranchised European feminists would have sided with Marie Juchacz, who, in the first speech given by a woman elected as a representative to the German parliament, claimed that "political equality has given my sex the possibility to fully develop its powers" (quoted in Offen, p. 252). Thus, equal suffrage rights not only epitomized civil and political equality but was also considered the gateway to women's social rights. European feminists did not merely aspire to participation in the male political sphere but sought to redefine that sphere. Whereas the social rights demanded by men centered on questions of wages, hours, and insurance for disability and old age, the respective feminist discourses concentrated on gender-neutral social insurance, protective laws for women workers, and maternity benefits for all mothers, employed or not (protection des mères in France, Mutterschutz in Germany). The developing European welfare states traveled different roads to insuring the risks of sickness, old age, and unemployment, notably in Great Britain, where insurance systems were largely tax funded and thus comparatively gender neutral, and in Germany, where they were often tied to the male "breadwinner" and thus disadvantaged women. Nevertheless, the "feminization of poverty" remained a problem throughout Europe and the need to remedy it was uncontested within feminist movements.

The question of protective laws for women workers was a different matter. Before 1914, most countries had passed laws prohibiting night work as well as dangerous employment for women workers and limiting their hours. This transnational development was facilitated by the founding of the International Labor Organization (ILO) in 1919. Protective labor legislation for women was highly contested. The debate centered on gender roles, gender relations, and the "welfare" of the family and the nation. Feminists could be found on both sides of the issue. The fight about protective labor legislation was mostly symbolic, however, and had relatively few practical consequences. In most European countries and for the greater part of the twentieth century, women represented only a minority of industrial workers; night work was never prohibited for nurses and the eight-hour day and minimum wage legislation never applied to sweatshops. Laws could be easily abolished, for example, during both world wars and the Soviet civil war, when the number of women workers increased sharply, or could be circumvented by both employers and women workers.

European feminist movements were far more unified when it came to maternity legislation, demanding not only restrictions on employment but also financial support for pregnant women and mothers. Feminists throughout Europe declared motherhood a "social function" of the state and demanded public maternity funds, maternity insurance, paid leave, and cash allowances for mothers and children. They thus continued a debate that had originated in the nineteenth century, when some rudimentary legislation was also enacted. In 1913 Great Britain passed more comprehensive maternity laws; Norway followed suit in 1915, Germany in 1924, France in 1928, and Sweden in 1931. Even though these laws were passed somewhat hesitantly and with minimal benefits, they provided a base for making employment compatible with family responsibilities. Benefits for mothers and children were extended as the European welfare states developed, with France introducing family allowances in 1931, Italy and Germany in 1936, Sweden in 1937, Spain in 1938, Portugal in 1942, and Great Britain and Norway in 1945. Originally a demand of feminists that envisioned a "mother's salary," family allowances now functioned as a kind of financial compensation for families. Generally, the checks were sent to the fathers.

As woman suffrage gradually expanded throughout Europe after World War I, women became more visible in national and, to a more limited extent, international politics. Women activists tried to influence the terms of peace in 1919 and, while their achievements seem limited, the Treaty of Versailles did include certain provisions for equal rights and specified the inclusion of women in the work of the ILO and the League of Nations. Building on the work of the International Council of Women (founded in 1888) and the International Women Suffrage Alliance (founded in 1904), the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom emerged in 1919 to support a broad feminist network, whose members worked for the newly founded international organizations. They promoted laws that would secure the citizenship of women married to foreigners, end state-regulated prostitution and the "trade" in women and children, and defend women's employment at all levels.

Paradoxically, those national feminist movements that had fought so vehemently for woman suffrage did not necessarily profit from it after the war, and vice versa. Suffragists had been somewhat underrepresented in the German women's movement, yet the Reichstag had the highest percentage of women representatives in 1919 (10 percent, followed by Finland with 9 percent and the Netherlands with 7 percent). In contrast, the British Parliament had only one female member in 1919 and fifteen (less than 3 percent) in 1931. Without a common cause, many feminist movements disintegrated into special interest groups. Although adult women outnumbered men in many countries after the massive casualties of the war, coalitions of women voters on behalf of women's supposed common interests did not materialize anywhere in Europe. Plans to found women's parties were either quickly abandoned or resulted in short-lived and unsuccessful experiments, as in Sweden and Austria, for example.

During the decade of the garçonne (boyish girl) and of the flapper, who sported knee-length dresses and the Bubikopf (short-cropped hair), many feminists lamented not only the "loose morals" of a new generation of women but also the lack of interest in feminist issues. Although European women had entered public life at an unprecedented scale, the younger generation did not necessarily seek emancipation as understood by more traditional feminists, nor did they appreciate the role feminist movements had played in opening the opportunities of modern life to them.

Overall, the interwar decades were not characterized by a triumph of democracy but rather by a sense of crisis, as a growing number of countries succumbed to authoritarian or totalitarian regimes, which often meant a strengthening of traditional gender roles. Socialist women in Russia thought their dream had come true when the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, but some of them soon faced exile and even imprisonment for criticizing party leaders. Although the new Soviet government completely refashioned marriage and family law, legalized abortion on demand, and addressed the problem of prostitution—issues firmly rooted in nineteenth-century progressive thought—most of the much-hailed benefits for working women, including transformation of work, child care, the household, and gender roles, were on paper only. The prewar generation of liberal feminists, largely opposed to the Bolsheviks, was effectively silenced and lost the enfranchisement gained under the provisional government. But the fate of feminist movements was sealed as well in the right-wing authoritarian regimes that came to power in Italy in 1922, in Germany and Portugal in 1933, in Greece in 1936, and in Spain in 1938. In Germany, where for a decade the women's movement had been under attack from the Right for being too liberal, too dominated by Jewish women, too international, and too pacifist, the National Socialists declared "women's emancipation from women's emancipation."

Feminist organizations in these countries were outlawed outright or forced to cooperate with the government under a strict set of guidelines. Fascist and military dictatorships were both anticommunist and antifeminist and fiercely supported the reconsolidation of male authority over women. Specifically, they objected to higher education, many forms of paid employment for women, and their political participation, which was confined to the party's mass organizations. While the percentage of female party members was small (4 percent in Portugal, 6 in Germany in 1936, and 8 in Soviet Russia in 1924), with virtually no representation in the higher ranks, every totalitarian party founded special organizations to "meet women's needs" or to "educate" them: the Zhenotdel in the Soviet Union, the Fasci Femminili in Italy, the Nationalsozialistische Frauenschaft in Germany, and the women's Falange in Spain all proclaimed a private role for women but at the same time functioned as important instruments of public mass mobilization.

In the 1920s European feminists had warned against the dangers of totalitarian regimes, which would reduce women to "servants of men" and "childbearing machines." Wherever these regimes came to power, all politically active women were ostracized. In Germany, the lives of Jewish, socialist, and pacifist women were in extreme danger—women could be arrested and sent to concentration camps just like men. Some feminist leaders managed to escape, but life in exile proved depressing and difficult, even if they could rely on international women's networks. Others suffered long years of imprisonment or were murdered in concentration camps. As the Nazis extended their grip over Europe, feminists in democratic countries joined the war effort, not the least because they did not want to share the fate of their German peers. In the words of the British feminist Margery Corbett Ashby, in 1940 "the problem was no longer how to force democracies logically to include women, but how to protect democracy itself" (quoted in Offen, pp. 367–368). Women became involved in the war effort as both perpetrators and victims of its violence. As feminists faced the ruins of half of Europe, campaigns for "peace and bread" often seemed more important than those for equal rights.

EMERGENCE OF NEW MOVEMENTS AFTER 1945

In contrast to the development of feminist movements after 1918, organized feminism barely survived World War II; its aging leadership was dispersed, imprisoned, or had been executed, and large parts of its records were lost or destroyed. The first half of the twentieth century had seen dramatic progress for women, first and foremost equal political rights, increased literacy, better access to schooling at all levels and to the professions, changes in marriage and property laws, increasing equity in the developing welfare states, and even early proposals to restructure the domestic division of labor. The legal status of married women, the question of their employment, and the dilemma of combining employment and family responsibilities still figured prominently on the list of problems, however.

International feminist organizations hailed the United Nations Charter, which declared equal rights in 1945, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, including equal rights for married women and equal pay, in 1948, and the establishment of a UN Commission on the Status of Women. In postwar Europe, many political parties, and the resurgent communist parties in particular, wooed women voters, but female elected officials remained few and far between in most European countries. On both sides of the Iron Curtain, women's "organizations" increasingly replaced feminist movements. After the catastrophe of World War II, women and men throughout Europe, overwhelmed by problems of survival and rebuilding, longed most for a return to "normalcy," often defined in terms of traditional gender roles.

NEW FEMINIST MOVEMENT AFTER 1965

Whereas European feminist movements had developed rather gradually in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the "new" women's movement made a rather sudden appearance on the political stage in the late 1960s. "Second wave feminism" was characterized by highly provocative campaigns and a close-knit international communications network. Taking their name from a New York organization, the Danish Redstockings paid only 80 percent of the price of a bus ticket, arguing that they earned only 80 percent of a man's salary; in France, feminists placed a wreath commemorating the "unknown wife of the unknown soldier" at the Arc de Triomphe and stormed the offices of the fashion magazine Elle; British feminists supported striking women workers and protested against beauty contests; in Germany, women turned against the traditional gender roles practiced in leftist student protest movements and founded self-help institutions such as cooperative child care centers and women's shelters. Feminists in Rome and Milano "took back the night" in protest marches, a movement that spread throughout Europe. Many campaigns were inspired by the "new" feminist movement in the United States, in particular the founding of encounter and self-help groups and the emergence of a lesbian feminist movement. Inspired by what Betty Friedan had termed the "problem without a name," women in Italy and Great Britain started to demand payment for housework, a campaign that extended into Germany, Canada, and the United States. In 1976 the protests of prostitutes against state regulation and police harassment in France, Germany, Italy, and Great Britain and the protests of black feminists in Germany against racism culminated in the International Tribunal on Crimes against Women in Brussels.

The major issue for almost all Western European feminist movements, however, was the controversy about abortion. In the wake of massive campaigns in which French and German feminists admitted they had had abortions, laws were gradually liberalized. Great Britain had already reformed its laws in 1967, and feminists defended the reforms in 1975, the same year French abortion laws were liberalized. In 1974 Italian feminists were thrust into action by a mass trial in Trent, and in 1977 their campaign resulted in a highly controversial law that allowed termination of pregnancies under certain circumstances. A similar law in West Germany legalized first-trimester abortions on ethical, eugenic, medical, and social grounds in 1974. This law became a major issue during the unification process fifteen years later, since abortion had been legalized without any restrictions in East Germany. The feminist discourse about abortion, however, did not limit itself to legal issues but addressed issues of unwanted pregnancy and, ultimately, sexual power relations. While safe abortions on demand had become the epitome of women's liberation for some feminists, others saw them as a last resort and tried to spread information about contraceptive methods instead.

There were some significant exceptions to the "autonomous" European women's movements that defined abortion rights as their central issue: questions of sexuality and male domination were discussed less openly in Ireland; Scandinavian women generally worked closely with the Social Democratic parties in their countries and took the legislative road to articulate and respond to feminist grievances; women activists in Spain and Portugal were first closely tied to authoritarian regimes and later contributed to building democratic nations.

Many "second wave" feminists not only were at odds with the "New Left" but also distanced themselves from the older feminist movements, which they criticized for demanding "only" legislative reforms and "mere" equality with men instead of fundamental social changes. Initially, even the term feminism was discredited (and replaced by women's liberation). It ultimately prevailed, and feminist debates focused increasingly on the relationship of "difference and equality," a debate that continued into the twenty-first century. The debates of the "new" feminists, debates about hierarchies and women's liberation, employment and housework, families and reproductive rights ultimately revealed that neither businesswomen nor factory workers, neither housewives nor mothers were homogenous groups that could be represented as such, but rather individuals claiming the right to make their own decisions.

MULTIPLE FRONTS AT THE END OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

The second half of the twentieth century witnessed the developments many early-twentieth-century feminists had envisioned: women's political representation in Europe rose to unprecedented levels, with Scandinavian countries once more leading the way. In 1999 women made up 43 percent of the parliament in Sweden, 37 percent in Denmark, 34 percent in Finland, 31 percent in the Netherlands, and 30 percent in Germany, but only 9 percent in France and 6 percent in Greece. In Russia, the figure was 6 percent in 1992.

Throughout Europe, the gender gap in higher education narrowed. By the mid-1980s, women made up more than 40 percent of all university students in most countries and more than half in Poland, Hungary, Norway, Portugal, and France. Still, they often clustered in certain fields such as education, language, and literature studies and were underrepresented in some of the fields leading to prestigious (and well-paid) jobs, such as engineering and science. The same was true for women's participation in the labor market: labor conditions improved and wages rose, yet the discrepancy in men's and women's wages remained.

In the early years of the twenty-first century, solving the dilemma of combining wage work with family responsibilities was still widely considered a mother's job. Although some European countries created family policies to help deal with this problem, for example, by contributing to old age insurance for parents who stay at home or by introducing generous paid family leave policies, the percentage of fathers availing themselves of these opportunities remained in the low single digits, even in countries such as Sweden, where these policies had been in effect since 1974. Often, this was a rational choice to secure the family income. While Eastern European countries propagated full-time employment for women, mainly for economic reasons, and developed an extensive system of public day care, Western European women generally saw part-time work as the solution. Yet most European women still worked a double shift, taking over the lion's share of childrearing and unpaid housework. Also, family patterns changed significantly. Birthrates dropped throughout Europe, as did rates of marriage, while divorce rates and the number of children born outside marriage climbed. In spite of a multitude of social programs, the average poverty rate of children in the European Union stood at 20 percent in 1993.

Apart from changes in political representation, employment, and family patterns, the second half of the twentieth century saw a host of legal reforms concerning marriage, divorce, and women's economic opportunities. These reforms occurred on three levels, the national, European, and international, where the ILO and the United Nations continued to work for women's rights. After the decade of the woman was declared in 1975, feminist networks became visible at a number of international conferences, from Mexico City to Beijing. Undoubtedly, the need for feminists to speak about and act on women's rights and women's issues inside and outside Europe did not vanish with the twentieth century.

See alsoGender; Suffrage.

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Anja SchÜler