Feminism

51due网站精选paper代写范文“Feminism”，这篇paper主要讲述的是女权主义。在早期罗马法中描述，妇女儿童永远不如男性。早期的基督教也延续了这些观点，随着时间的流逝，女性们意识到，她们并不比男性差。1789年7月14日，妇女和男性一同战争，攻克了巴士底狱，这次斗争是法国历史中妇女第一次大规模运动，它标志着妇女运动的兴起和妇女的觉悟。

Feminism FEMINIST MOVEMENT FROM ITS ORIGINS TO THE PRESENT IN USA Women traditionally had been regarded as inferior to men physically and intellectually. Both law and theology had ordered their subjection. Women could not possess property in their own names, engage in business, or control the disposal of their children. Historically they have been considered not only intellectually inferior to men but also a major source of temptation and evil. In Greek mythology, for example, it was a woman, Pandora, who opened the forbidden box and brought plagues and unhappiness to mankind. Early Roman law described women as children, forever inferior to men. Early Christian theology perpetuated these views. St. Jerome, a 4th-century Latin father of the Christian church, said: "Woman is the gate of the devil, the path of wickedness, the sting of the serpent, in a word a perilous object." But throughout centuries women began to understand that they were not inferior. 

From this moment they began to seek their equality in the name of Feminism. Feminism is a movement for the political, social, and educational equality of women with men; the movement has occurred mainly in Europe and the United States. It has its roots in the humanism of the 18th century and in the Industrial Revolution. We first see the Feminist Movement in French Revolution with Olympe de Gouges’ writings. In Europe there’re 2 important feminist writers that wrote classics in Feminist Literature. First one is English writer Virginia Woolf with her famous work ‘A Room of One’s Own’. The second writer is French Simone de Beauvoir with her work ‘Le Deuxieme Sexe’. Feminist issues range from access to employment, education, child care, contraception, and abortion, to equality in the workplace, changing family roles, redress for sexual harassment in the workplace, and the need for equal political representation. The history of American feminism - the self-conscious desire to achieve sexual equality - began soon after the Revolution. During the early nineteenth century, women participated in numerous efforts to improve women’s status, defend their interests, and increase their rights. Educators, such as Emma Willard, Mary Lyon, and Catharine Beecher, promoted advanced training for women in female academies and seminaries. They spoke about women’s need for equal education, legal equality, divorce rights and married women’s property rights. Among women in the antebellum North, the "woman question" became a lively issue. 

The first women’s rights movement emerged in part from women’s sense of alliance with one another and their shared discontents. The Grimké sisters became advocates of sexual equality. "The investigation of the rights of the slave has led me to a better understanding of my own," Angelina Grimké declared in 1836 (Ries and Stone) . The first women’s rights meeting, at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, capitalized on women’s antislavery experience and called by Mott and Stanton. One-third of the participants signed a "Declaration of Sentiments," modelled on the Declaration of Independence and drawn up by Stanton. The declaration denounced the "absolute tyranny" of men and presented resolutions demanding equal rights for women in marriage, education, religion, employment, and political life. During the Civil War, women’s rights leaders maintained their antislavery stance. After the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 they made abolition of slavery a Union war goal. They organized the National Women’s Loyal League to support the Union war effort, promote the Thirteenth Amendment, and press for woman suffrage. In 1869, two rival suffrage movements emerged. The New York-based National Woman Suffrage Association NWSA led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, accepted only women and opposed the Fifteenth Amendment. The Boston-based American Woman Suffrage Association AWSA, which included men, supported black suffrage as a step in the right direction. These differing approaches—i.e., whether to seek a federal amendment or to work for state amendments—kept the woman-suffrage movement divided until 1890, when the two societies were united as the National American Woman Suffrage Association and became NAWSA. Later leaders included Anna Howard Shaw and Carrie Chapman Catt. By 1890 only Utah and Wyoming had enfranchised women. Meanwhile a larger "woman movement" developed. Women’s clubs campaigned for higher education, the establishment of women’s colleges, and the promotion of women into the professions. The ranks of women activists increased in the Progressive Era. It combined demands for sexual equality (women deserved the vote) with arguments based on sexual difference (women would bring special qualities to politics). During the progressive years, suffragist rhetoric tilted toward an emphasis on the good that women would do for society if enfranchised. 

During World War I, conflict arose between the nawsa and Alice Paul’s more militant National Woman's party, which waged hunger strikes and picketed the White House. In 1919, Congress at last approved woman suffrage and in August 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified by the states. In the last decade of the suffrage campaign, the word feminism first came into use. To Susan B. Anthony, suffrage had been "the pivotal right, the one that underlies all other rights." (Flexner) Modern feminists envisioned a new type of emancipation embracing political equality, economic independence, liberation from convention, and changed relations between the sexes. Feminists stressed women’s equality with men and differences from men. They advocated both individualism and gender solidarity. With suffrage achieved, the contradictions within feminism led to conflicts among feminists. These conflicts emerged in the 1920s. The nawsa became the League of Women Voters, which sought to educate women about politics and maintained a nonpartisan stance. Disputes erupted between the National Woman''s party, which proposed an Equal Rights Amendment ERA; (1923), and reform-minded activists in the League of Women Voters and other women’s organizations, which opposed it. Feminists of the 1920s might face attacks for trying to dismiss sex differences or, alternately, for dwelling on them and fostering "sex antagonism." The feminist movement reached a low ebb during the 1940s and 1950s. World War II undermined women’s egalitarian goals. During the war, women won attention as workers in defense industries, but in public life women had little impact on policymaking. Mass culture emphasized women’s family roles, disparaged career women, condemned working mothers, and labeled feminism a form of defiance. Yet the 1950s saw some important developments that would contribute to the revival of feminism. One was the rapid expansion of higher education. The rising number of working wives reflected the impact of birth control; women now completed their families at younger ages. It also reflected the postwar growth of the middle class. Among upwardly mobile Americans, the desire to maintain a middle-class lifestyle began to legitimize the two-income family. 

These developments set the stage for a feminist revival in the 1960s. Both the growing numbers of women graduating from college and the availability of the birth-control pill (which accelerated the already noticeable decline in the birthrate) further encouraged women’s entry into the work force. The new feminism emerged from two groups of educated, middle-class, predominantly white women. John F. Kennedy’s establishment of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women PCSW in 1961 and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited employment discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, and national origin, were important catalysts for change. Many women dissatisfied with their lives and in 1963, with the publication of The Feminine Mystique, they found a voice. Betty Friendan,the book’s author, women across the country were deeply troubled by “the problem that has no name.” Most women believed that “all they had to do was devote their lives from earliest girlhood to finding a husband and bearing children.” The problem was that “this mystique of feminine fulfillment” left many wives and mothers feeling “empty” or “incomplite.” Friendan quoted a young mother: “I’ve tried everything women are supposed to do- hobbies, gardening, pickling, canning, and being very social with my neighbors. ... I love the kids and Bob and my home... But I'm’desperate. I begin to feel that I have no personality ... Who am I'” In 1966 The National Organization for Women NOW was founded. Rather than challenging their subordination in domestic life, the feminists of NOW committed themselves to fighting for women’s integration into public life. Women who were married and had children supported NOW. But in 1967 young and single women left NOW and founded Women’s Liberation Movement which was more radical than NOW. They worked for the right of abortion, equality in work place and equality for wages. 

They didn’t want women to be seen as sexual object or as a house maid. In 1977, NOW supported even more controversial issues, including lesbian and gay rights, an issue it had earlier skirted. The era ratification effort tripled NOW’s membership (210,000 members by 1982.) Within a year of NOW’s formation white women involved in the black freedom movement and the New Left began meeting in small groups to discuss sexism within the radical movement. Although they sometimes worked with NOW, these women’s liberationists opposed NOW’s moderate politics. Some women (who were called politicos and later identified themselves as socialist-feminists) argued that the two movements should be closely connected: socialism would achieve women's liberation. Others (who called themselves radical feminists) maintained that the women’s movement should be entirely independent: capitalism was not the sole source of male dominance nor socialism its remedy. This schism often resulted in separate organizations in larger cities. Simone de Beauvoir, maintained that gender exists as a social construct, not a biological fact. They were the first to criticize marriage, the nuclear family, normative heterosexuality, violence against women, and sexist health care. By the early seventies both socialist-feminists and liberal feminists had come to agree with much of their analyses. In the mid-seventies radical feminists became concerned less with confronting male dominance than with building a women’s counterculture where "male" values would be banished and "female" values nourished. American women worked hard in order to have some rights. They faced society’s opposition. Nevertheless, the women’s movement probably accomplished more profound and lasting changes than the other radical movements of the sixties: Most important, the movement has brought about a rethinking of gender that has resulted in far less constricting cultural definitions of maleness and femaleness. They showed women power. They gained rights in the issues range from access to employment, education, child care, contraception, and abortion, to equality in the workplace, changing family roles, redress for sexual harassment in the workplace, and the need for equal political representation. Bibliography: Michel, Andree. Feminizm. Trans. Þirin Tekeli . Ýstanbul: Kadýn Çevresi Yayýnlarý.,1984. Trans. of Le Feminisme. 1979. -C

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