Women’s Movement Research Paper – Examples

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The women’s movement has often been called one of the most important social movements of the twentieth century. Its most basic goals are to improve women’s social, economic, and political conditions by facilitating personal transformations, introducing new ideas to public discourse, and exerting pressure on policymakers. In addition to voting, it has been a key form of women’s political participation, joined only recently by greater numbers of women in political office. Beyond these basic features, however, there is considerable diversity among specific women’s movements around the world.

First, not all types of political engagement by women would be considered a women’s movement. As Karen Beckwith emphasizes, the term women’s movements refers to any kind of systematic organizing by women, including that of a nonfeminist nature (Beckwith 2000). Women’s movements are thus distinct from women in social movements, who are female participants in social movements that may or may not focus on gender issues. They are also a broader phenomenon that includes but is not equivalent to feminist movements, which engage women—and some men—through a more explicitly gendered lens that seeks to understand and overcome women’s subordination.

Second, women’s movements themselves vary enormously across countries and over time. They appear during different waves of feminism, originate in various kinds of other social movements, espouse a range of different issues of concern, and interact in numerous ways with global and regional trends. In addition, they are situated within a variety of social, economic, and political contexts that shape their emergence, development, and prospects for success. As such, many analysts are skeptical of universalizing claims about women’s mobilization. When studying “the women’s movement,” therefore, they seek to understand the diverse conditions under which women organize as women—rather than with men—to achieve social, economic, and political change.

Waves Of Feminism

Although women’s movements are not synonymous with feminist movements, the two frequently overlap. As a result, one common starting point for analyzing women’s movements is to position them in relation to waves of feminism. Due to important differences in context, the timing and character of these waves vary significantly across countries. In the western world, the “first wave” is generally associated with the mobilization of women’s groups across many countries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The main focus of these movements was to attain basic rights for women, including the right to vote, the right to employment, the right to receive equal pay, and the right to retain their own nationality upon marriage to men of other nationalities. Focused on equality, these campaigns largely sought to gain rights for women that were already guaranteed to men. However, in many cases these movements overlooked crucial issues of race and class, devoting most of their attention to rights for white and upper-class women.

The “second wave” of feminism, often dated in the West to the 1960s and 1970s, embraced a much wider range of theories and issues. Initially inspired by the need to dispel the “feminine mystique,” or the idea that women found their life’s fulfillment in being married and raising children, second-wave groups began to question women’s roles in the private sphere and to point to the social construction of gender roles. Drawing on ideas introduced by writers such as Simone de Beauvoir, they made a distinction between the terms sex and gender, using sex to refer to biological differences between male and female and gender to denote social differences between masculine and feminine. Although sex and gender were related, second-wave feminists emphasized that the relationship was imperfect, as men could be feminine and women could be masculine. Women’s groups developed these ideas in a number of different directions: Some stressed the universality of women’s oppression, some sought to revalue the “feminine,” and still others aimed to break down the distinction between the public and the private through slogans such as “the personal is political.” Despite this diversity, the shared feature of all these efforts was to focus on women as women, rather than as individuals who aspired to a male standard.

The feminist project of defining the terms women and women’s issues, however, was not without controversy. On the one hand, activists disagreed as to the coherence of “women” as a group. Many called attention to race- and class-based exclusions that were implicit in discourse on “universal” female oppression that in fact reflected the experiences of women from dominant racial and class groups. Others noted that accounts of the sexual division of labor, and especially women’s experiences as mothers, tended to assume that all women were heterosexual, thus overlooking—and marginalizing—the experiences of lesbians. On the other hand, feminists prioritized a wide range of women’s issues that implied distinct—and even conflicting—visions of the status quo and prescriptions for change. Whereas some aimed to undermine patriarchy by promoting women’s status in the public sphere, others sought to foster a “women’s culture” by revaluing women’s labor inside the home, raise awareness of women’s experiences through consciousness-raising, and theorize patriarchy by pointing to the power that men exercised over women through violence and coercion.

The “third wave” is a more contested concept, existing in an uneasy relation to the term postfeminism. Both notions are generally taken to refer to ideas that emerged in the West in the 1990s and continue to develop through the present day. This wave is largely characterized by a focus on difference, both between women and men and among women themselves. At the same time, it aims to break down binary categories by emphasizing the fluid and relational aspects of identity and experience. As such, it questions traditional approaches to conceptualizing sex and gender by exploring intersections between race, class, and gender; uncovering the assumptions of heterosexual-ity that underpin analysis of women in relation to men; and probing the possibility that gender may cause sex rather than sex causing gender. In this sense, the third wave incorporates a number of ideas articulated by feminists of color, lesbian feminists, and postmodern feminists. However, because these theories stress the contradictions and multiplicities inherent in definitions of women and women’s issues, they have paradoxical effects on women’s movements: They help build coalitions with other movements for social justice, but also undermine the prospects for mobilizing by women as women for social, economic, and political change.

Origins Of Women’s Movements

Many scholars draw on the wave analogy to identify major shifts in feminist theorizing and their relation to concentrated periods of mobilization by women’s groups. This approach has its critics, however, who point out that women are active politically between waves and are not always inspired initially by feminist concerns. Indeed, despite the widespread belief that women’s movements emerge in cycles as women become more educated and politically informed, evidence from around the world suggests that women’s movements often have their origins in various other kinds of social movements. In these cases, women gain a shared sense of gender oppression through discrimination they experience in the course of their participation in other campaigns for social justice. These include movements for civil rights, revolution, nationalism, independence, and human rights. Similar consciousness-raising also occurs in authoritarian regimes, where the creation of state-led women’s organizations aims to control women’s political activity but sometimes provides an official platform for women’s organizing. Many women’s movements nonetheless hesitate to label themselves “feminist” on the grounds that the term has various negative associations as “bourgeois,” “Western,” “forced emancipation,” and even “man-hating.” Further, few movements succeed at incorporating all women due to differences among women that remain important, including nationality, race, class, religion, region, language, and sexual orientation.

Issues Of Women’s Movements

Given their distinct origins and relations to waves of feminism, women’s movements around the world focus variously on a wide range of issues. These concerns fall into six broad categories: women’s legal rights, violence against women, reproductive choice, sexual freedom, employment opportunities and discrimination, and women’s political participation and representation. Legal rights include such issues as rights in marriage, the right to divorce, and the right to own and inherit property. Violence against women refers to practices such as rape, domestic abuse, female genital cutting, sexual slavery, and sex trafficking. Reproductive choice encompasses access to contraception, the right to abortion, and the right to not be subjected to forced sterilization. Sexual freedom involves the right to express one’s own sexuality and claims for the same privileges conferred on heterosexual couples. Employment opportunities and discrimination include rights to equal pay, access to all jobs, provision of maternity leave, and freedom from sexual harassment. Women’s political participation and representation, finally, comprise the rights to vote, join political parties, participate in civil society, and run for political office. Individual movements rarely cover all these issues, and specific movements address particular issues in a variety of different ways. In addition, some groups mobilize to preserve rather than undermine women’s traditional status as mothers and inside the home.

Global And Regional Women’s Movements

Despite their emergence and development in specific contexts around the world, women’s movements inform and reflect broader global and regional trends. Women’s organizing has always had an international dimension, reaching back more than 100 years to the early suffrage campaigns and activism for world peace. In the last thirty years, however, women’s movement activism has grown exponentially in relation to developments beyond national borders. At the global level, international conferences have placed new issues on national political agendas and facilitated networking among women’s groups around the world, even as they have been marked in some instances by sharp conflicts among women in developed and developing nations. At the regional level, transnational organizing has become increasingly important as a means for spreading new ideas across national borders, fostering policy diffusion and solidarity among politically marginalized groups. Despite their long history, women’s movements are thus constantly being reborn, reinventing themselves, and taking on new forms in order to politicize women’s concerns, however these are identified and defined.

Bibliography

Alvarez, Sonia. 2000. Translating the Global: Effects of Transnational Organizing on Local Feminist Discourses and Practices. Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 1 (1): 29–67.
Basu, Amrita. 1995. The Challenge of Local Feminisms: Women’s Movements in Global Perspective. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Beauvoir, Simone de. 1952. The Second Sex. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Beckwith, Karen. 2000. Beyond Compare? Women’s Movements in Comparative Perspective. European Journal of Political Research 37 (4): 431–468.
Friedan, Betty. 1963. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Dell Publishing.
Rich, Adrienne. 1977. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: Virago.