Living a Feminist Life

Feminism is a complex system of ideology, theory, and activism to fight and end sexist beliefs and practices, particularly against women. At its most basic, it aims to achieve equality for women in all areas of life: social, political, cultural, and economic. However, it is an umbrella term that only loosely connects many different methods, philosophies, and ideologies about how to achieve these things, what equality would look like, and even how one defines “women.”

Historically-speaking, some cite Mary Wollstonecraft’s foundational book A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) as the beginning of the feminist movement, though the word “feminism” itself was coined in the 1870s in France. The main thrust of Wollstonecraft’s argument was that women should have the right to education. She believed that through education, women could achieve full emancipation. Education has continued to be a rallying cry for many feminist movements throughout history, including current feminist activists like Malala Yousafzai, who fights for girls’ educational rights in Pakistan and other Middle Eastern countries. Her work made her the world’s youngest Nobel Peace Prize recipient in 2014, at the age of 17.

The suffrage movement (“suffrage” meaning the right to vote in representative governments) took place on the largest scale in England and the US. The first women’s rights convention took place in 1848 in New York, where Elizabeth Cade Stanton drafted her “Declaration of Sentiments.” This declaration included the radical call for the right to vote, as well as the final statement that women should have “equal participation with men in the various trades, professions and commerce” (Stanton qtd in Brunell, Laura. “Feminism.” Encyclopedia Britannica Online). While early feminist efforts were largely controlled by, and intended for, white women only, one early activist and thinker of color was Sojourner Truth, a former enslaved person whose famous “Ain’t I a Woman” speech was delivered in 1851 before the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio. Most of her energy was, however, aimed at the abolitionist movement, rather than women’s rights.

The suffrage movement ended when women won the right to vote in England in 1918, and in the US in 1920. However, even before this victory, many radical feminists argued against viewing suffrage as the be-all and end-all of women’s rights. Rather, early radical feminists such as Emma Goldman and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (writer of the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”) argued that true emancipation would only come when women gained complete autonomy of their own bodies and were “freed from the ‘domestic mythology’ of home and family that kept them dependent on men” (Brunell).

“First wave” feminism—the period of fighting for suffrage—ended when women gained the right to vote. “Second wave” feminism began in the period from the 1960s through the 1980s, when a larger number of women began echoing Goldman and Perkins’ ideals of true freedom. The 1963 publication of The Feminine Mystique by Betty Freidan, which argued that women were prisoners within their roles as wife and mother, inspired this shift. The activism of second wave feminism, including the founding of the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971, led to such successes as the Equal Pay Act (1963) and the groundbreaking Supreme Court ruling in Roe v Wade (1973).

In the 1990s, women transitioned to “third wave” feminism, which acknowledged the many victories of the 60s through the 80s, but aimed to tackle many remaining problems, such as sexual harassment, anti-LGBTQ+/queer discrimination, gender essentialism, and racism within the feminist movement. Some of the central activists and thinkers of third wave feminism include Judith Butler and bell hooks, whom Sara Ahmed refers to extensively in her work. These feminists introduced new concepts, such as the idea that gender is a social construct rather than an inherent biological fact, and the importance of intersectionality between various kinds of oppression including sexism, racism, and classism. Sara Ahmed’s work comes from this tradition.