No One Home to Answer the Phone

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lily Geismer
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Liberal Politics ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
Economic Climate ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
Women's Equality ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Second Wave

This chapter looks at the growth of suburban feminism as a means to consider the persistence of certain elements of suburban liberal activism and ideology in a changed political and economic climate. The increasing wedding of feminism with suburban politics had key trade-offs for the larger cause of women's equality. The sensibility and organizing strategies of suburban liberal politics were both crucial to the success of several campaigns, especially the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). The pivot also helped the movement further earn the notice and attention of politicians eager to win suburban votes. Yet the relationship hardened the middle-class orientation of second-wave feminism and elevated class-blind and consumerist ideas of choice.

The Not-So-New Southern Sexism

2019 ◽  
pp. 131-157
Author(s):  
Angie Maxwell ◽  
Todd Shields
Keyword(s):  
White Women ◽  
Working Women ◽  
White Men ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Traditional Gender Roles ◽  
White Voters ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
Second Wave ◽  
White Womanhood

The stereotype of southern white womanhood is anything but new, and manipulating it for political gain became a critical part of the Long Southern Strategy. The stereotype strips women of their power, intelligence, and strength, casting them as delicate and in need of constant protection. Antebellum southern white men manufactured that vulnerability to justify the strict laws segregating the races that would protect white women from predatory black men. This notion of southern white womanhood clashed with Second-Wave Feminism and the ultimately failed effort to secure an Equal Rights Amendment. The feminist loss, however, was a major GOP gain, as the Republican establishment realized that traditional gender roles could be the next way to appeal to southern white voters. In due course, the GOP’s messaging tapped into and perpetuated a Modern Sexism, characterized by a distrust of ambitious women, a demonization of feminism, and a growing resentment toward working women.

Organized Labor, National Politics, and Second-Wave Feminism in the United States, 1965–1975

1996 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 143-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis A. Deslippe
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Labor History ◽  
Working Women ◽  
The United States ◽  
Organized Labor ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
Second Wave

Second-wave feminism, scholars argued until recently, was a product of middle-class educated women who rejected inequality masquerading as domestic tranquility in the postwar United States. Women unionists were either invisible in these accounts or dismissed as unimportant to the development of feminism's objectives and strategies. Recent labor history research has called this portrayal of working women into question. Whether considering a single union or broad national patterns of political change, several historians have pointed to unionists' contributions to campaigns for equality. These came in the areas of pay and job discrimination as well as in the effort to pass the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).

scholarly journals Antisocial Feminism? Shulamith Firestone, Monique Wittig and Proto-Queer Theory

Paragraph ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 364-379
Author(s):  
Lisa Downing
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Third Wave ◽  
Monique Wittig ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
The Family ◽  
Feminist Perspectives ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Second Wave

Recent iterations of feminist theory and activism, especially intersectional, ‘third-wave’ feminism, have cast much second-wave feminism as politically unacceptable in failing to centre the experiences of less privileged subjects than the often white, often middle-class names with which the second wave is usually associated. While bearing those critiques in mind, this article argues that some second-wave writers, exemplified by Shulamith Firestone and Monique Wittig, may still offer valuable feminist perspectives if viewed through the anti-normative lens of queer theory. Queer resists the reification of identity categories. It focuses on resistance to hegemonic norms, rather than on group identity. By viewing Wittig's and Firestone's critique of the institutions of the family, reproduction, maternity, and work as proto-queer — and specifically proto-antisocial queer — it argues for a feminism that refuses to shore up identity, that rejects groupthink, and that articulates meaningfully the crucial place of the individual in the collective project of feminism.

1975 The Year of Women

Making Waves ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 33-50
Author(s):  
Diana Holmes ◽  
Imogen Long
Keyword(s):  
United Nations ◽  
Student Movement ◽  
The Political ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
The Status ◽  
Cultural Themes ◽  
Impossible Task ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Second Wave

The relationship between 1970s French radical feminists (the MLF) and Françoise Giroud, the first ‘Minister for Women’ in France, was a difficult one. Second-wave feminism in France was grounded in the contestation of the status quo, in the wake of the 1960s student movement out of which some of the groups emerged. Being part of the political establishment was therefore in itself an anathema to some second-wave feminists, as can be seen, for example, by satirical feminist films mocking Giroud’s role and her interventions. Through the prism of 1975, officially declared ‘International Women’s Year’ by the United Nations, this chapter explores the key campaigning and cultural themes of the MLF and their relationship to Giroud’smore reformist and, arguably, impossible task as Minister for Women.

The Nineteenth Amendment Today

2020 ◽  
pp. 145-154
Author(s):  
Paula A. Monopoli
Keyword(s):  
Gender Inequality ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Fourteenth Amendment ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Legal Scholarship ◽  
Nineteenth Amendment ◽  
Women's Equality

Chapter 8 concludes that the Nineteenth Amendment can be revitalized today, to more fully ensure women’s equality. It reviews new legal scholarship that suggests direct applications of the Nineteenth Amendment to today’s voting rights challenges. And it describes how some scholars suggest that the Nineteenth should be read together with the Fourteenth Amendment, as a normative matter, to provide a more capacious understanding of the Fourteenth, as applied to women’s rights, beyond voting. Given persistent gender inequality, and the uncertain status of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), the chapter concludes that it is worth revisiting the jurisprudential potential of the Nineteenth Amendment, at its centennial.

scholarly journals User Errors: Reason, (Xeno)-Feminism and the Political Insufficiency of Ontology

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 54-68
Author(s):  
Ben Woodard
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
Vexed Question ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Second Wave

This paper revisits elements of second wave feminism—in its psychoanalytic, radical, materialist, Marxist and deconstructionist aspects—the better to understand how it is we might define sexual difference today. The vexed question of sexuation, of what it means to be a woman in particular has today generated great tensions at the theoretical, legal and philosophical level. This paper is an attempt to return to aspects of the second wave—an unfinished project where many enduring feminist concerns were for the first time thoroughly and metaphysically articulated—the better to defend the importance of sexual difference. To this end, the transcendental and parallax dimensions of sexed life will be discussed, alongside a defence of the centrality of the mother to our thinking about the relevance and necessity of preserving the importance of sexual difference, not only for thought but also for political and legal life. Author(s): Ben Woodard  Title (English): User Errors: Reason, (Xeno)-Feminism and the Political Insufficiency of Ontology Journal Reference: Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 17, No. 2-3 (Winter 2020) Publisher: Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities - Skopje Page Range: 54-68 Page Count: 15 Citation (English): Ben Woodard, “User Errors: Reason, (Xeno)-Feminism and the Political Insufficiency of Ontology,” Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 17, No. 2-3 (Winter 2020): 54-68. Author Biography Ben Woodard, Independent Researcher Ben Woodard is an independent scholar living in Germany. His work focuses on the relationship between naturalism and idealism during the long nineteenth century. He is currently preparing a monograph on the relation of naturalism and formalism in the life sciences. His book Schelling’s Naturalism was published in 2019 by Edinburgh University Press.

scholarly journals “Il en faut un peu”: Farm Women and Feminism in Québec and France Since 1945

2006 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-96
Author(s):  
Gail Cuthbert Brandt ◽  
Naomi Black
Keyword(s):  
Rural Women ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Demographic Characteristics ◽  
Farm Women ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
The Social ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
History Of ◽  
Second Wave

Abstract Certain farm women's organizations continue to represent the social feminist tradition of Canadian suffragism and the broader social Catholic feminism still influential elsewhere. Canadian historians have often criticized such groups in contrast with a more aggressive, equal-rights feminism found among urban and rural women in both waves of feminism. We argue that, far from being conservative, groups identified as social feminist serve to integrate farm women into public debates and political action, including feminism. We outline the history of the Cercles de fermières of Québec, founded in 1915, and the French Groupements de vulgarisation-développement agricoles féminins, founded since 1959. A comparison of members with nonmembers in each country and across the group, based on survey data collected in 1989 for 389 cases, suggests that club involvement has counteracted demographic characteristics expected to produce antifeminism. In general, we find less hostility to second-wave feminism than might be expected. Relying mainly on responses to open-ended questions, we argue that, for our subjects, feminism is tempered by distaste for confrontation. Issues supported by the movement for women's liberation are favoured by farm women, but the liberationist style and tactics are eschewed. Those of our respondents identified as feminists express preference for a complementarity modelled on the idealized family.

The Ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment in California

2019 ◽  
Vol 96 (3) ◽  
pp. 2-24
Author(s):  
Doreen J. Mattingly
Keyword(s):  
Democratic Party ◽  
The United States ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Women's Issues ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Labor Laws ◽  
Depth Analysis ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Labor Leaders ◽  
The Relationship

In California, the 1972 campaign to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution pitted amendment supporters against labor leaders trying to protect women-only protective labor laws. The seven-month struggle in California resulted in a vote for ratification and motivated several years of legislative activity on women's issues. Most scholarship about ERA ratification in the United States in the 1970s has examined the reasons why the amendment failed. This article takes a different tack by investigating a state where the ERA was successful. The ERA campaign was a key element in the embrace of women's issues by the California Democratic Party. The article also provides an in-depth analysis of the relationship between labor feminists and equal rights feminists, two groups that were opposed during the ratification campaign but were frequent allies on women's issues before and after 1972.

Making Waves

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Critical Review ◽  
Women's Movement ◽  
Political History ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
The Political ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
Politics And Culture ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Second Wave

French feminisms were central to the theory and culture of Second Wave feminism as an international movement, and 1975 was a key year for the women’s movement in France. Forty years on, this book offers a critical review of the political activism and the cultural creativity of that moment, from the perspective of both preceding and subsequent ‘waves’ of feminism. It explores the importance and the legacies of 1975, and their strengths and limitations as new questions and new conjunctures have come into play. Edited and written by an international collective of feminist scholars, the book represents both a critical re-evaluation of a vital moment in women’s cultural and political history - and a new analysis of the relationship between Second Wave agendas and contemporary feminist politics and culture.

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