The Construction of Women’s Movement History
My knowledge of women’s movements for the creation of political and/or social changes is pretty limited, and I admit it not without some shame, since I am interested in history and women’s issues, and I feel I should have known by now much more than what I currently know. My sources of knowledge are pretty much the same ones mentioned in our last class meeting- the media, educational system, culture, books, movies and experiences (as well as many other sources).
My historical knowledge of women’s movements is also restricted to mostly (or only?) western or European branches of feminisms, but I know that there are many more historical processes that occurred away from the European-scene or the western-oriented study of women’s social movements.
I have learned through my historical education about the French revolution, and on the fact that there were attempts of women to pass a declaration of women’s rights at that time (the early 1790’s). These attempts failed and most of the women were killed of incarcerated when the terrorist regime of Robespierre took over the newly founded revolutionary state. Jumping almost half a century and half a globe away- the anti-slavery abolitionist movement had quite a few women working in its ranks, including former slaves like Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman (from late 1840’s to 1865).
Since the 1880’s or 1890’s, the suffragist movement in Europe and the U.S. yielded women’s right to vote just after long struggle, that was even violent at times. In World War I and II women served as nurses, but also expanded the range of jobs available for them because of the shortage of men (who had a significant share in the number of those killed and injured in WW I and II). Women functioned in the résistance in France (WW II), as well as other countries, held leadership position among the forest (anti-Nazi) guerilla movements, and participated in the resistance to the Holocaust within the concentration and death camps. The important value of all these activities is that they seal once and for all the notion that women cannot fight, stand torture or kill like men. None of these skills is very valuable in civil society, but it was important to let men know women can experience or do (almost) anything they can experience or do in a similar (or even better) way.
From 1949 when Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was published, the intellectual and socio-political movement that would be called “the second wave” took place in the U.S. and Europe. The movement reached its peak in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s with series of legislative and social victories (including the Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade in 1973). In the late 1970’s a backlash against feminism rose and threatened to erase some of the feminists’ movement’s gains. Another struggle that received some attention but not nearly enough is the struggle against pornography, especially the kind that exploits its victims/“actors”.
In the recent years it seems the struggle for physical, economic and mental safety takes a center stage in the struggle of feminisms in the United States to survive and flourish; but in other places in the world a growing number of women take leadership positions in their communities and their countries, and work to make this world a safer and more sustainable place for everyone, but especially women, children and minority groups that still form the most vulnerable parts in many societies. If the French Segolene Royal would be elected to presidency in France, while Angela Markel is Germany 1st woman chancellor and the U.S. elects Hillary Clinton as the first woman president in the United States maybe we are moving in the right direction to a new world that will be more hospitable to all of its inhabitants- and not only the white males who happened to control it (for now).