Final

Lauren Best

5/12/09

WS 1003

Take Home Final

Essay # 2:

“Feminism is the radical notion that women are people too.”

After a long semester of taking Women’s Studies and debating / discussing with many girls, I am still trying to define feminism for myself and for my friends around me. Feminism has become a very gray issue in its Third Wave and has become increasingly harder to define. Feminism has become very subjective and can be defined differently person to person. Taking a Women’s Studies course has definitely re-evaluated the way I think about feminism, but it has strengthened my views on feminism as well. In my own words, feminism is the simple idea that both sexes should be free of oppressive gender stereotypes and roles and be treated as equal human beings despite our obvious differences.

Nancy Friday once said that “Sexuality is the great field of battle between biology and society.” I think that much of the debates on modern feminism are relevant to this quote. I feel like women and men are inherently different due to simple biology, but society has tried to make that gap even bigger through gender roles and conditioning. In this day and age, women are finally becoming closer to being equal to men than ever before. There is still, however, a significant wage gap. Women have made an amazing leap in social and political freedom over the past century.

The First Wave of feminism started the movement less than a Century ago during the early 20^th Century. Women, mainly upper-class, educated ones, marched and fought for their political rights in Washington and all around the world as well. The key goals of the First Wave were far more political than those in the Second and Third Waves of feminism. Women simply wanted the right to vote and speak for themselves politically. Women were not able to do simple things like own property or even drive without their man in some states! The women of the First Wave were quite successful with their cause after many efforts and arrests, for the 19^th Amendment to the Constitution was passed in 1920 giving women their right to vote.

The Second Wave of feminism came much later in the 20^th Century after a lengthy pause during World Wars I & II. Women took their husbands’ jobs while at war during World War II and did all of the work on the home front. Women did the man and the woman’s job while the men were at work. When they came back from war, however, there was a powerful backlash against these women’s newfound freedoms. The 1950s saw the creation of the suburb and the first act of white flight of the middle class to those suburbs. Suddenly women were thrown back into their traditional roles of mother, housewife, and caretaker… as well as baker. The Second Wave of feminism grew out of that national complacency so present in the 1950s. Feminists like Betty Friedan spoke out against being forced into the housewife role in her book The Feminine Mystique. Feminists began to shun make-up and short skirts so they were thought of less as mere sexual objects and more as people too. This was another way for women to try to gain respect within their workplace and be taken more seriously. The Second Wave of feminism really gained its strength and power during the 1960s after watching the success for the African-Americans and the Civil Rights movement. Feminists took cues from what the Blacks did in their fight for their freedom and applied it to their own movement. Many things were beginning to change for women during the Second Wave as well. For the first time in American history, birth control became readily available to young and married women alike. The pill was created in 1963 alleviating, for the first time, the worry of getting pregnant every time a woman had sex. This gave women a newfound sexual liberation. Women could sleep with men they were not married to and there would be no repercussions finally. Another major change came in the later part of the Second Wave, abortion was legalized in 1975 after the trial of Roe vs. Wade. Now women had obtained even more sexual freedoms! Women began to realize that sex was now not just about reproducing, but about enjoying and taking pleasure in. This readily available access to birth control as well as the option of abortion has drastically changed the social and political landscape throughout the 20^th Century.

Now feminism has come to a strange, unfamiliar place in its modern Third Wave. After the end of the Second Wave at the end of the 1970s, feminism began to change greatly. Feminism suffered a political and social backlash during the 1980s and especially during the Reagan administration. After the success and sexual liberation of the Second Wave, America turned to its conservative roots in the 80s and the achievements of the Second Wave began to take a back seat. Women still had all of their sexual freedoms, yet there were new women in the 80s who began resorting back to that complacent ideology so popular in 1950s post-war America. Women began discussing and debating what feminism really is. Despite the fact that Third Wave feminists have more rights and options available than ever before, are we really using them? Feminism has seemed to take kind of a stand-still since the 1980s in America. The movement has lost cohesion due do the subjective nature of feminism in the Third Wave. Feminism has become obscured because it is different for each individual woman and now men, too. Some women can now wear short skirts and wear shirts that say SLUT and that is their way of promoting feminism. Body image has become a major issue in the Third Wave and has actually taken away the focus on political activism within the feminist movement. More women worry about losing 10-15 lbs than fighting for their rights actively in Washington, or much less being aware of their rights. The sexual freedoms gained in the Second Wave were so radical than before that they caused a cultural backlash for the Third Wave. Women are now forced to worry about the way they look more than ever, instead of more important things like politics and social rights. More women in the Third Wave have lost faith in the political system and almost feel alienated by it now.

It is still hard for me to completely define feminism for myself. I imagine that this process will continue for the rest of my life. I will be forced to keep defining and redefining my sexuality as well as my life as a feminist. After taking this course, I definitely consider myself to be a feminist. I have realized how much society has created these harsh, rigid roles for men and women and how much we need to correct these roles. I believe myself to be a feminist because I love women and I think women and men deserve to be treated as complete equal people. Feminism has a long way to go in correcting these oppressive roles on society and especially women, but I think if the movement can come together in the Third Wave, it will be much more successful than by doing so individually.

Works Cited

Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique.

Rowe-Finkbeiner, Kristin. The F Word: Feminism In Jeopardy. Ch. 3 & 4.

In-class discussion and notes.