Welcome to The Institute for Feminist Making information available for all women

Nancy Cott makes a distinction between modern feminism and its antecedents, particularly the struggle for suffrage. In the United States she places the turning point in the decades before and after women obtained the vote in 1920 (1910-1930).

She argues that the prior woman movement was primarily about woman as a universal entity, whereas over this 20 year period it transformed itself into one primarily concerned with social differentiation, attentive to individuality and diversity. New issues dealt more with woman's condition as a social construct, gender identity, and relationships within and between genders.

 

Relationships within and between genders

 

Politically this represented a shift from an ideological alignment comfortable with the right, to one more radically associated with dieting measures and in particular

Susan Kingsley Kent says that Freudian patriarchy was responsible for the diminished profile of feminism in the inter-war years, others such as Juliet Mitchell consider this to be overly simplistic since Freudian theory is not wholly incompatible with feminism. 

Some feminist scholarship shifted away from the need to establish the origins of family, and towards analysing the process of patriarchy. In the immediate postwar period, Simone de Beauvoir stood in opposition to an image of "the woman in the home". De Beauvoir provided an existentialist dimension to feminism with the publication of Le Deuxième Sexe  in 1949.

Should feminists back Michele Bachmann?

Whatever you think of her politics, Bachmann's presence in the Republican presidential race is a net positive for women.

In western thought bodies have been historically associated solely with women whereas men have been associated with the mind. The notion of the body (and not the mind) being associated with women has served as a justification to deem women as property, objects, and exchangeable commodities (among men).

For example, women’s bodies have been objectified throughout history through the changing ideologies of fashion, diets, exercise programs, cosmetic surgery, etc. The race and class of women can be a determinate of whether one body will be treated as decoration and protected which is associated with middle or upper-class women’s bodies.

 

On the other hand, handbags, purses & shoes aside, the other body is recognized for its use in labour and exploitation which is generally associated with women’s bodies in the working-class or with women of colour. Second-wave feminist activism has argued for reproductive rights and choice, women’s health (movement), and lesbian rights (movement) which are also associated with debate. ABPCO

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Contemporary UK Feminism -

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