A lot of folks throw about the term “waves” of feminism, which might make you think that the ideology is some kind of magnetic tide that only reaches shore a few times every thirty years. At least, I thought so. Like in The Last Unicorn, ladies only pop out of the ocean once in awhile to yell about things and then sink back off to the ocean-bed where they play chess with Cthulhu and sleep until they’re mad about things. I also assumed that they were linked to major political pushes in the United States that focused on the rights of women. That is, unfortunately, not entirely incorrect, but it isn’t the full picture either. So, here is a non-comprehensive but very basic guide to the feminist waves. Please feel free to fill in any details that I missed, as I sincerely believe the problem of feminism is that it leaves so many stories out in order to fulfill a linear, single narrative. And no movement can really claim that with any honesty.
So this is MY view of these waves and is essentially going to be what I’ve picked up from being in school far too long. PLEASE feel free to add in what you know that I didn’t touch on. I didn’t do nearly enough to discuss LGBTQA here, so if you know, add it. And what I got wrong, tell me.
Proto-Wave alternatively, Wave Zero (Beginning of Time – late 19th Century)
Perhaps you’ve heard the term “proto-feminist”. If you’ve had an early American or early Western (sorry, this is going to be super westernized) civ class, you may have come across women who have had this applied to them. Essentially, they were alive before the first wave but still discussing, writing, or fighting for the rights of women and beginning to question the patriarchal structure before the 20th century. Mostly, you’ll find that the push here was for the education of women, something that comes in and out of fashion. Aristotle, for example, was against the education of women and believed that they should be out of the public discourse. He also had some other wacky ideas that women were slightly better than slaves (but less than men) and only fair skinned women ejaculated. What an interesting thesis, Aristotle. He was reacting to Plato, who was much fonder of women’s education, though Plato himself was very much into segregated roles in terms of the home versus the political sphere. He was, however, all for the breakdown of the heteronormative husband/wife roles, though later feminists aren’t terribly fond of him either.
The first problematic thing you should note, here, is that I start with the Greeks. There is a huge problem in the West that believes that all culture, or a culture worth exploring, begins with the Greeks. It ignores pretty much every other part of the world, and it does to the detriment of us all.
But let’s talk about the women!
Women were relegated, mostly but not always, to feminine spaces. A lot of these were the private, the home, etc. They were not educated as a whole, unless they were of a particular class. This held true for men as well, because there’s no reason that the people tilling the field should be able to read: what purpose does that serve? They’re going to start asking questions and that’s just going to lead those buggers to revolution, that’s what. I believe that one of the reasons the Catholic Church was sooo reticent to give up having everything in Latin was because they didn’t want the folks to understand the message. THEN THEY’LL HAVE QUESTIONS.
Which is actually why King Henry the 8th’s insatiable desire for Anne Boleyn was actually a really great thing, because one of the things we got out of that was the Bible written in a common tongue, so more people had access to it (and it broke the mysticism of the Catholic Church). Yeah, sucks to be her, but her very young life made such an incredible impact on Britain.
ETA from GloucesterIsland, who is correct: Henry VIII’s desire for Anne Boleyn didn’t result in the “Bible written in a common tongue, so more people had access to it (and it broke the mysticism of the Catholic Church).” Henry just used the Protestant Reformation to facilitate a divorce from his first wife. There were already vernacular translations of the Bible in Europe (and in England) long before his time.
So anyway, getting back to it, mostly women are stuck in spaces. But they’re stuck there together, and they have a rich oral, literary culture that they pass down to their children (who happened to be in the spaces with them). Lots of fairy tales actually contain the dreams and anxieties of peasant women, though of course, a bunch of men came around, wrote those down and changed them to be more appealing to the ruling class. So much of that was destroyed.
Some Native American cultures (as much as we know – imperialism and an oral cultures do not leave many artifacts behind, especially when combined) had a far more egalitarian route. The Six Nations (Oneida, Mohawk, Cayuga, Onondaga, the Seneca and Tuscarora) had Gayanashagowa or The Great Law of Peace. While women could not become chiefs within this contexts, the elder Mothers were the ones who chose the men who would lead them. They also had the power to dethrone them, as it were, which is significant when you consider that women in the United States would not get the vote until 1920, and also when you consider that this Great Law was a huge influence on the constitution of the United States.
You had a surprising amount of women writing about their lives, including their sex lives, once colonialism started. Anne Bradstreet, poet, Puritan, first American woman to be published was surprisingly sexually explicit. Phillis Wheatley was the first black woman to be published (and like most black writers of that time, had to have white people vouch for her), and while she doesn’t come down as heavily on slavery as I think people would have liked her to (she writes about being saved from Africa by being brought to the United States, which obviously is not going to go down well, now, but absolutely appealed to her mostly white audience), but she actually did sneak in some jabs. For example, compare her incredibly popular poem On being brought from Africa to America.
‘TWAS mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew,
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
“Their colour is a diabolic die.”
Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain,
May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.
To this one, a eulogy to some white guy whose name I can’t remember:
But how presumptuous shall we hope to find
Divine acceptance with the Almighty mind
While yet o deed ungenerous they disgrace
And hold in bondage Afric: blameless race
Let virtue reign and then accord our prayers
Be victory ours and generous freedom theirs.
SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT.
She died in poverty. Because of course she did. All of the white men who said they loved her work abandoned her. INCLUDING YOU BENJAMIN FRANKLIN.
Mary Wollstoncraft published the Vindication of the Rights of women in 1792. It’s one of those foundational texts that you don’t really have to read but is interesting, nonetheless. The major focus is on education for women, because educating women benefits everyone, especially since they are the ones that are going to have direct contact with children early on. Her contemporary (ish) Judith Sargent Murray pretty much said the same thing, but both of them were stuck on of course men and women aren’t equal-equal, but it benefits men if women have the same opportunities. While it’s easy to shit on them for that, it is actually rhetorically brilliant. Why? Because their audience was men.
I left a shit ton of people out and focused on America. Alas, I am American. But, there is a lot here to explore.
First Wave Feminism (19th-early 20th Century):
The first wave often gets relegated to voting rights and suffragettes, which fine, but it’s not a complete picture. Early on, these women (not as a whole, but enough to make the claim) were also fighting for abolitionist principles. In fact, many of the early feminists of this wave were staunchly in favor of ending slavery, but then they discovered that, wait a minute, men have more rights than we do! Even men of color! Gasp! And so they kind of moved away from what could have been an intersectional approach and focused primarily on the rights of women. Mostly white women, let’s face it.
So fuck most of what gets said about this movement, let’s talks about Ida B. Wells, because I think she actually encapsulates what is great about this wave and also where this wave totally crashed and burned. Ida had many concerns: segregation, the fact that she was paid significantly less than her white contemporaries, rampant lynchings. She also refused to give up her seat on a train, a ton of years before Rosa Parks did, for a white passenger.
Wells was infuriated that so many white women were ignoring the treatment of blacks (some things never change, it seems) especially the cruelty and the violence of the lynch mobs. She wrote extensively about this, most famously in The Red Record, which spoke about white on black violence since Emancipation. It’s eerie, actually, how relevant her arguments are in this to police violence today. Some things…
Point to take from this is that black voices were actually relatively prominent, and incredibly active, during this time. But any history book for the youngin’s is going to show white ladies in their fancy dresses marching up and down the streets with signs. A peaceful protest that ignores the violence that spurned it, and entirely ignores the issues surrounding race.
The other figure I want to mention, who I also think encapsulates this period on the other side, is Victoria Woodhull. She was the first woman to run for president and had a bunch of ideas that we still think about today: pro-divorce, all about free love (entirely smashing the idea that you only love one person and that will never change), voting rights, etc etc.
But it behooves me to mention the failures of feminism, because it colors the movement and should not be ignored. Woodhull was anti-abortion, which isn’t too crazy considering the time period, but she was also pro-eugenics. Now, the eugenics movement was pretty popular in the united states and targeted working class women, disabled women, and women of color specifically. And it is going to remain a talking point until after WW2 (because some feminists are fascists – it is entirely possible, within movements that are so fractured, to maintain this kind of doublethink). It’s an ugly thing to acknowledge, but it should be.
And women won the right to vote during this movement. Yay!
Yes, they marched. Yes, there was propaganda against them. But they were also attacked brutally, strapped down and forced fed. Djuna Barnes wrote about the experience in “How it Felt to be Forcible Fed”. She compares it to a rape in not so many words. Black women who marched for the vote often marched in the back, behind men, because of deeply-rooted segregationist politics.
Oh there was a thing that happened in Ohio but I’ve lived in Ohio and I can only say… ugh, Ohio. Get some decent littering laws.
THE SECOND WAVE (1960-1980) (aka, THE MILITANTS).
So ladies weren’t super cool with just getting the right to vote because hello! Other things were still a problem. Now, we have women starting to thinking about gender as a concept-concept and how it oppresses them. THE PATRIARCHY is a thing. And then they fucking got mad. Yeah, this wave is considered militant, but they had a lot to be pissed off about.
There’s a lot of shitty spiritual crap about this wave that I loathe, like “let’s get back to nature” and “woman are mother earth” which fine if you like that sort of thing, but after I read that women are the “back legs of a fox” from an author I won’t shame by naming I was like, look, lady, I’ve never even seen a fox. Don’t do that to me. The problem with this is that it separates women into the mother, caretaker, blah blah, roll alone, and gives young women the wrong impression that they are somehow more in tune with nature. I can barely keep myself alive but I can grow plants just by singing to them because I have magical girl power and the moon gives me energies because technically I am supposed to bleed every month? Pass.
Anyway, there is probably a reason this all aligns with the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, Watergate and other things that crushed the ideal of the American Dream and Ethos, because the American Dream is damaging as hell and people were starting to realize that.
WE GOT THE PILL WOO.
Reproductive rights is huge, but I am going to go on the assumption that most people know why this was huge. Fun fact, the pill was developed by a Catholic who thought the Church would think this was a good idea. The Church did not. I am sure that dude was forever shamed.
But we’re also concerned with labor rights (borrowing, I think, heavily from the French, who were like “hey, home-care and child-raising is a JOB, asshole, pay me a wage”).
We realized Phyllis Schlafly is the devil, but her nephew (?) makes a good beer. She campaigned tirelessly against the Equal Rights Amendment (which actually had beginnings in 1920) which would have been AWESOME but Phyllis was like “but women? In the military? I OBJECT”. I am glad she has lived to see women fighting alongside men, because fuck you, Phyllis. This would have protected women from being discriminated against on the basis of sex in the constitution. Some states have adopted a measure of its original discourse into their own politics, but having it in the constitution itself would have been a major win. A lot of the leaders here that get to go down in the history texts were white and middle class, and a lot of them were tied to the academy.
One of the Major Feminist Events that happened here was The Porn Wars, The Great Feminist Divide, The Sex Wars, blah blah blah. THIS IS A THING YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT IF YOU ARE INTERESTED ABOUT THE HISTORY OF FEMINISM. Was porn hurting women because it made them the object of the male gaze or was it an expression of choice for the women who were engaging in it, with complete control of their bodies to be shown exactly as they deemed fit? Is sadomasochism hurting women even if they are consensually participating in it? Sex positive feminists stand on the side of prostitution because women are controlling their work, their money, and their pleasure. Sex-negative (or anti-porn) feminists come up with the not-always-true narrative that women are forced into prostitution and human trafficking. To make it easy to understand and reduce it – sex positives argue that women are in control. Sex negatives argue that men are in control. And nobody really won anything.
Additionally, to say more about feminists ugly past, this is where the women-born-women (and spelling women with a y instead of an e) came to be, and remnants of this remain in the movement. It’s more interesting, theoretically, if you hold it up against the ideology of the third wave, which imo is a lot better about wtf is going on with gender and performativity, but the WBW people here are so, so focused on folks being born with a vagina.
More importantly, this wave is focusing strongly on violence against women. Marital rape becomes a crime in the 1970’s (thank god) and people are beginning to create domestic violence shelters. bell hooks (READ HER), who has a Marxist lens, ties race, class and gender together, and I think she is actually the start of intersectional feminism but I’m probably wrong about that. You may know her from her recent sound byte of calling Beyonce a terrorist, but please don’t let that be the only thing you know about her. If you get nothing else from this write-up, read FEMINIST THEORY: FROM MARGIN TO CENTER. It will blow your fucking mind in the best way.
Here’s what you should really take from the second wave: Women realize their status as “other”, in relation to men who are “subjects”. Women, therefore, are “subjects” and subjected to the male gaze, male violence, and male oppression. There is a heavy emphasis on foundational myths (in both the traditional sense, like Persephone, as well as in a cultural way, like “whore/Madonna”) and breaking those apart.
Women’s and Genders studies becomes a thing in the academy. For better or worse.
Betty Freidan’s book, The Feminine Mystique, is credited to starting this wave, but she pretty much only focuses on white women. Which is probably why this wave is characterized as such.
Additionally, Womanism becomes a movement, which is, to also reduce it when it should not be reduced but for the purposes of summarizing: a movement that explores the racial and gender oppression of black women. This is in response to the mainline feminist movement, which has ignored black women’s oppression since pretty much the get-go. Alice Walker’s short story, “Coming Apart”, is where the term is first used. It reaches out to class concerns as well as other non-white communities, and of course is mostly going to be ignored by the academy, which focuses on the white movement entirely. Which is why I don’t know too much about Womanism.
I like this wave because it made so many mistakes. A lot of people said some crazy shit and they really went out on a limb in some cases. It is admirable, if nothing else, but also.. side-eye.
ETA: As Kirov rightfully pointed out I FORGOT ROE V. WADE. Uh, that was kind of a major thing! Abortion! Legal, legal(ish) abortion! Thank you, second wave! This is a landmark and occasionally ugly case that is interesting to read about. My bad.
ETA2: From MarmaladeTeardrops: The pill existed, but not a legal right to use it, either for married women or single women. Those had to be fought fucking separately. By statute, NYC and many municipalities would only file rape charges if there was a witness to corroborate a victim’s story. Women were constitutionally allowed to sit on juries, but courts wouldn’t call them — so much for juries of our peers. No such thing as marital rape or sexual harassment. No job protection for pregnant women. Hard to divorce an abusive husband. No credit cards for women. Finally, there were relatively few open, acknowledged transgender individuals then as compared with today — and much, not all, of the psychiatric literature was hostile to them back in 1960 and 1970.
Third Wave Feminism (the thirdenning) (1990-now?)
INTERSECTIONAL FEMINISM AHOY.
Christ all of my pictures are a bunch of white women protesting.
While the second wave dealt a lot with porn and white middle class women, third wave feminism was far more open to women of all classes and all races, as well as all genders and sexualities. Judith Butler published Gender Trouble and confused everyone. She went on to publish multiple prefaces every time her publisher needed more money and it subsequently became a little easier to understand. Get the newest edition if you can. ALSO DID YOU KNOW THAT WAS HER DISSERTATION? Christ, shame us all.
I’m going on a limb here and this is entirely not necessarily the case, but I always considered this wave to be concerned with how the individual’s identity is multi-faceted. I am white, but I am also a woman, and I am also queer, and I also get heteronormative privilege, and I am also Western, and I am also tattoo’d, and I am also …etc. Fill in the blank as to appropriate. This is INCREDIBLY USEFUL, because it recognizes that women are not merely defined by their gender, but have many facets of their lived experience that shape their identity, their place in the social structure that is imposed on them, and the limitations of those.
But we’re also concerned with Rape Culture. We’re concerned with unequal pay. We’re concerned with reclaiming motherhood as a strength. We’re concerned about our place in the workforce and we’re still concerned with equal pay. That thing you’re concerned about? We’re concerned about it too.
Corporate America fought back and pretty much (sorry, it did) commercialized this. For every Bikini Kill Riot Grrrl band that was saying “fuck you, women only shows”, there was “GIRL POWER” (which was something Bikini Kill was all about until!) encapsulated in the Spice Girls, which while of course I love them, they were pretty much “buy our things”.
LGBTQA rights and concerns present in the second wave, but it comes more to the forefront of this wave, breaking (for better or worse) into the straight consciousness. Essentially, the groundwork was laid within the communities in the second wave, but the third wave seems more interested in making it a political banner.
I actually don’t have much to say about this wave. I assume, perhaps wrongly, that people are kind of familiar with this since we are living it?
Fourth Wave – Digital Wave (Now to ???)
This, I guess, is the third wave in a digital space. Technology and its advancements is continuously a crisis for movements on the left, though that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I think this has actually caused a lot of us to take a step-back.
So anyway, BENEFITS: women who can get online are able to find one another and speak about concerns that are relevant to them. It also gives them the opportunity to learn outside of the classroom, which is still a thing that people do not have access to. Feminism becomes a more friendly word and younger generations aren’t as afraid of it as they used to be.
NEGATIVES: Uh, Jezebel. This is the rise of the lady-magazine, which will tell you it isn’t feminist but then get super pissed off when celebrities don’t consider themselves feminist. XOJane as well, which will tell you the deep dark secrets of lady-life and then cash in on it while giving you a mere fifty bucks for gushing your gut. Feminism is commercialized clicks. There’s something weird when you are so obviously profiting in clicks and cash on someone else’s pain.
But there are some other good things too. Women are moving more into powerful positions tech, as much as there is a backlash. Let it be clear, women have ALWAYS been involved in this shit, and I’m not talking about rare leaders like Ada Lovelace – I mean women have always been on the working floor creating technology that you use, and they are rarely acknowledged for it. The first programmers were underpaid women and now you see underpaid women making your IPhone. But that’s not women in tech, duh, because they’re as invisible as they have always been.
Fifth Wave – THE FINAL BATTLE (???-???)
This is where I make stuff up!
Looking towards the future, this wave is going to be characterized by one of these major events:
A. Mars is colonized
B. KILL ALL MEN
C. Our human bodies are replaced in part or entirely by machine, which might make gender and identity obsolete.
I think C would be the most traumatic for traditional feminism and all left learning ideologies, but it might also be a necessary trauma, and a logical leap after the fourth wave. Donna Haraway is a really good person to read about this. We are all Cyborgs!
Anywho. I hope this was a usefulish guide to the waves of feminism. I left a lot about because this is massively long and I am also incredibly limited in my knowledge. Such is.
