By chronology[edit]
Earliest prehistory and undated[edit]
The controversy surrounding prehistoric or "primal" matriarchy began in reaction to the book by Bachofen, Mother Right: An Investigation of the Religious and Juridical Character of Matriarchy in the Ancient World, in 1861. Several generations of ethnologists were inspired by his pseudo-evolutionary theory of archaic matriarchy. Following him and Jane Ellen Harrison, several generations of scholars, usually arguing from known myths or oral traditions and examination of Neolithic female cult-figures, suggested that many ancient societies might have been matriarchal, or even that there existed a wide-ranging matriarchal society prior to the ancient cultures of which we are aware. According to Uwe Wesel, Bachofen's myth interpretations have proved to be untenable.[90] The concept was further investigated by Lewis Morgan.[91] Many researchers studied the phenomenon of matriarchy afterward, but the basis was laid by the classics of sociology. The notion of a "woman-centered" society was developed by Bachofen, whose three-volume Myth, Religion, and Mother Right (1861) impacted the way classicists such as Harrison, Arthur Evans, Walter Burkert, and James Mellaart[92] looked at the evidence of matriarchal religion in pre-Hellenic societies.[93]According to historian Susan Mann, as of 2000, "few scholars these days find ... [a "notion of a stage of primal matriarchy"] persuasive."[94]
The following excerpts from Lewis Morgan's Ancient Society will explain the use of the terms: "In a work of vast research, Bachofen has collected and discussed the evidence of female authority, mother-right, and of female rule, gynecocracy."[page needed] "Common lands and joint tillage would lead to joint-tenant houses and communism in living; so that gyneocracy seems to require for its creation, descent in the female line. Women thus entrenched in large households, supplied from common stores, in which their own gens so largely predominated in numbers, would produce the phenomena of mother right and gyneocracy, which Bachofen has detected and traced with the aid of fragments of history and of tradition."[page needed]
Kurt Derungs is a non-academic author advocating an "anthropology of landscape" based on allegedly matriarchal traces in toponymy and folklore.[citation needed]
Paleolithic and Neolithic Ages[edit]
Friedrich Engels, in 1884, claimed that, in the earliest stages of human social development, there was group marriage and that therefore paternity was disputable, whereas maternity was not, so that a family could be traced only through the female line, and claimed that this was connected with the dominance of women over men or a Mutterrecht, which notion Engels took from Bachofen, who claimed, based on his interpretations of myths, that myths reflected a memory of a time when women dominated over men.[95] Engels speculated that the domestication of animals increased wealth claimed by men.[citation needed]Engels said that men wanted control over women for use as laborers and because they wanted to pass on their wealth to their children, requiring monogamy.[citation needed] Engels did not explain how this could happen in a matriarchal society, but said that women's status declined until they became mere objects in the exchange trade between men and patriarchy was established,[citation needed] causing the global defeat of the female sex[96] and the rise of individualism,[97] competition, and dedication to achievement.[citation needed] According to Eller, Engels may have been influenced with respect to women's status by August Bebel,[98] according to whom this matriarchy resulted in communism while patriarchy did not.[99]
Austrian writer Bertha Diener, also known as Helen Diner, wrote Mothers and Amazons (1930), which was the first work to focus on women's cultural history. Hers is regarded as a classic of feminist matriarchal study.[100] Her view is that in the past all human societies were matriarchal; then, at some point, most shifted to patriarchal and degenerated. The controversy was reinforced further by the publication of The White Goddess by Robert Graves (1948) and his later analysis of classical Greek mythology and the vestiges of earlier myths that had been rewritten after a profound change in the religion of Greek civilization that occurred within its very early historical times. From the 1950s, Marija Gimbutas developed a theory of an Old European culture in Neolithic Europe which had matriarchal traits, replaced by the patriarchal system of the Proto-Indo-Europeans with the spread of Indo-European languages beginning in the Bronze Age. According to Epstein, anthropologists in the 20th century said that "the goddess worship or matrilocality that evidently existed in many paleolithic societies was not necessarily associated with matriarchy in the sense of women's power over men. Many societies can be found that exhibit those qualities along with female subordination."[101] From the 1970s, these ideas were taken up by popular writers of second-wave feminism and expanded with the speculations of Margaret Murray on witchcraft, by the Goddess movement, and infeminist Wicca, as well as in works by Eisler, Elizabeth Gould Davis, and Merlin Stone.
"A Golden Age of matriarchy" was, according to Epstein, prominently presented by Charlene Spretnak and "encouraged" by Stone and Eisler,[102] but, at least for the Neolithic Age, has been denounced as feminist wishful thinking in The Inevitability of Patriarchy, Why Men Rule, Goddess Unmasked,[103] and The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory and is not emphasized in third-wave feminism. According to Eller, Gimbutas had a large part in constructing a myth of historical matriarchy by examining Eastern European cultures that she asserts, by and large, never really bore any resemblance in character to the alleged universal matriarchy suggested by Gimbutas and Graves. She asserts that in "actually documented primitive societies" of recent (historical) times, paternity is never ignored and that the sacred status of goddesses does not automatically increase female social status, and believes that this affirms that utopian matriarchy is simply an inversion of antifeminism.[citation needed]
The original evidence recognized by Gimbutas, however, of Neolithic societies being more egalitarian than the Bronze Age Indo-European and Semitic patriarchies remains valid.[citation needed] Gimbutas herself has not described these societies as "matriarchal", preferring the term "woman-centered" or "matristic".[citation needed] J.F. del Giorgio insists on a matrifocal, matrilocal, matrilineal Paleolithic society.[104]
Bronze Age[edit]
Also according to Rohrlich, "in the early Sumerian city-states 'matriarchy seems to have left something more than a trace.'"[107]According to Rohrlich, "many scholars are convinced that Crete was a matriarchy, ruled by a queen-priestess"[105] and the "Cretan civilization" was "matriarchal" before "1500 B.C.," when it was overrun and colonized.[106]
One common misconception among historians of the Bronze Age such as Stone and Eisler is the notion that the Semites were matriarchal while the Indo-Europeans practiced a patriarchal system. An example of this view is found in Stone's When God Was a Woman,[page needed] wherein she attempts to make out a case that the worship of Yahweh was an Indo-European invention superimposed on an ancient matriarchal Semitic nation. Evidence from the Amorites and pre-Islamic Arabs, however, indicates that the primitive Semitic family was in fact patriarchal and patrilineal. Meanwhile, the Indo-Europeans were known to have practiced multiple succession systems, and there is much better evidence of matrilineal customs among the Indo-European Celts and Germans than among any ancient Semitic peoples.
Women were running Sparta while the men were often away fighting. Gorgo, Queen of Sparta, responded to a question from a woman in Attica along the lines of, "why Spartan women were the only women in the world who could rule men?" Gorgo replied, "because we are the only women who are mothers of men".
Iron Age to Middle Ages[edit]
Arising in the period ranging from the Iron Age to the Middle Ages, several early northwestern European mythologies from the Irish (e.g., Macha and Scáthach), the Brittonic (e.g., Rhiannon), and the Germanic (e.g., Grendel's mother and Nerthus) contain ambiguous episodes of primal female power which have been interpreted as folk evidence of a real potential for matriarchal attitudes in pre-Christian European Iron Age societies. Often transcribed from a retrospective, patriarchal, Romanised, and Catholic perspective, they hint at an earlier, culturally disturbing, era when female power could have predominated. The first-century–attested historic British figure of Boudicca indicates that Brittonnic society permitted explicit female autocracy or a form of gender equality in a form which contrasted strongly with the patriarchal structure of Mediterranean civilisation.[citation needed]
19th century[edit]
Engels, among others studying historical groups, formed the notion that some contemporary primitive peoples did not grasp the link between sexual intercourse and pregnancy.[citation needed] Research indicated that sexual intercourse occurred from early ages and pregnancy only occurred much later, seemingly unrelated to the sexual activity.[citation needed] He proposed that these cultures had no clear notion of paternity, according to this hypothesis; women produced children mysteriously, without necessary links to the man or men with whom they had sex.[citation needed] When realization of paternity occurred, according to the hypothesis, men acted to claim a power to monopolize women and claim their offspring as possessions and patriarchy began.[citation needed]
20th–21st centuries[edit]
In 1995, in Kenya, according to Emily Wax, Umoja, a village only for women from one tribe with about 36 residents, was established under a "matriarch".[108] Men of the same tribe established a village nearby from which to observe the women's village,[108] the men's leader objecting to the matriarch's questioning the culture[109] and men suing to close the women's village.[109] The village was still operational in 2005 when Wax reported on it.[108]
Spokespersons for various indigenous peoples at the United Nations and elsewhere have highlighted the central role of women in their societies, referring to them as matriarchies, or as matriarchal in character
History and distribution[edit]
Cultural evolution[edit]
According to Alessandra Chiricosta, a view that "the concept of 'matriarchy' ... has its origins in an 'intellectual tradition that sees history in terms of an unilinear evolution from matriarchy linked with worship of the Goddess to patriarchy and, eventually, the worship of a single God' .... Therefore, patriarchy is considered more 'evolved' and 'civilized' than matriarchy."[57]
By region and culture[edit]
Ancient Middle East[edit]
A claim of "matriarchy" in the ancient Near East is found in The Cambridge Ancient History (1975):[58] "the predominance of a supreme goddess is probably a reflection from the practice of matriarchy which at all times characterized Elamite civilization to a greater or lesser degree".[f]
Roman Empire[edit]
Tacitus noted in his Germania that in "the nations of the Sitones.... woman is the ruling sex."[59][g]
Asia[edit]
The Mosuo culture, which is in China near Tibet, is frequently described as matriarchal.[60] The Mosuo themselves often use this description and they believe it increases interest in their culture and thus attracts tourism. The term matrilineal is sometimes used, and, while more accurate, still doesn't reflect the full complexity of their social organization. In fact, it is not easy to categorize Mosuo culture within traditional Western definitions. They have aspects of a matriarchal culture: women are often the head of the house, inheritance is through the female line, and women make business decisions. However, unlike in a true matriarchy, political power tends to be in the hands of males.[61]
Regarding Vietnam, according to William S. Turley, "the role of women in traditional Vietnamese culture was determined [partly] by ... indigenous customs bearing traces of matriarchy",[62] affecting "different social classes"[62] to "varying degrees".[62] According to Peter C. Phan, that "the first three persons leading insurrections against China were women ... suggest[s] ... that ancient Vietnam was a matriarchal society"[63]and "the ancient Vietnamese family system was most likely matriarchal, with women ruling over the clan or tribe"[64] until the Vietnamese "adopt[ed] ... the patriarchal system introduced by the Chinese",[64]although "this patriarchal system ... was not able to dislodge the Vietnamese women from their relatively high position in the family and society, especially among the peasants and the lower classes",[64] with modern "culture and legal codes ... [promoting more] rights and privileges" for women than in Chinese culture.[65] According to Chiricosta, the legend of Au Co is said to be evidence of "the presence of an original 'matriarchy' in North Vietnam and [it] led to the double kinship system, which developed there .... [and which] combined matrilineal and patrilineal patterns of family structure and assigned equal importance to both lines."[66][h][i] Chiricosta said that other scholars relied on "this 'matriarchal' aspect of the myth to differentiate Vietnamese society from the pervasive spread of Chinese Confucian patriarchy"[67][j] and that "resistance to China's colonization of Vietnam ... [combined with] the view that Vietnam was originally a matriarchy ... [led to viewing] women's struggles for liberation from (Chinese) patriarchy as a metaphor for the entire nation's struggle for Vietnamese independence."[68] According to Keith Weller Taylor, "the matriarchal flavor of the time is ... attested by the fact that Trung Trac's mother's tomb and spirit temple have survived, although nothing remains of her father",[69] and the "society of the Trung sisters" was "strongly matrilineal".[70] According to Donald M. Seekins, an indication of "the strength of matriarchal values"[71] was that a woman, Trưng Trắc, with her younger sister Trưng Nhị, raised an army of "over 80,000 soldiers .... [in which] many of her officers were women",[71] with which they defeated the Chinese.[71] According to Seekins, "in [the year] 40, Trung Trac was proclaimed queen, and a capital was built for her"[71] and modern Vietnam considers the Trung sisters to be heroines.[72] According to Karen G. Turner, in the 3rd century C.E., Lady Triệu "seem[ed] ... to personify the matriarchal culture that mitigated Confucianized patriarchal norms .... [although] she is also painted as something of a freak ... with her ... savage, violent streak."[73]
Possible matriarchies in Burma are, according to Jorgen Bisch, the Padaungs[74] and, according to Andrew Marshall, the Kayaw.[75]
According to interviewer Anuj Kumar, Manipur, India, "has a matriarchal society",[76] but this may not be a scholarly assessment.
Western Pacific[edit]
By studying several different tribes of the Western Pacific, ethnographer Bronisław Malinowski, from the London School of Economics, gave confirmations of Lewis Morgan's idea that matriarchy (gyneocracy)[77]was a common feature of primitive societies at early stages,[citation needed] and that female rule needed matrilineality for its existence.[citation needed]
Native Americans[edit]
The Hopi (in what is now the Hopi Reservation in northeastern Arizona), according to Alice Schlegel, had as its "gender ideology ... one of female superiority, and it operated within a social actuality of sexual equality."[78] According to LeBow (based on Schlegel's work), in the Hopi, "gender roles ... are egalitarian .... [and] [n]either sex is inferior."[79][k] LeBow concluded that Hopi women "participate fully in ... political decision-making."[80][l] According to Schlegel, "the Hopi no longer live as they are described here"[81] and "the attitude of female superiority is fading".[81] Schlegel said the Hopi "were and still are matrilinial"[82] and "the household ... was matrilocal".[82] Schlegel explains why there was female superiority as that the Hopi believed in "life as the highest good ... [with] the female principle ... activated in women and in Mother Earth ... as its source"[83] and that the Hopi "were not in a state of continual war with equally matched neighbors"[84] and "had no standing army"[84] so that "the Hopi lacked the spur to masculine superiority"[84]and, within that, as that women were central to institutions of clan and household and predominated "within the economic and social systems (in contrast to male predominance within the political and ceremonial systems)",[84] the Clan Mother, for example, being empowered to overturn land distribution by men if she felt it was unfair,[83] since there was no "countervailing ... strongly centralized, male-centered political structure".[83]
The Iroquois Confederacy or League, combining 5–6 Native American Haudenosaunee nations or tribes before the U.S. became a nation, operated by The Great Binding Law of Peace, a constitution by which women participated in the League's political decision-making, including deciding whether to proceed to war,[85] through what may have been a matriarchy[86] or "'gyneocracy'".[87] According to Doug George-Kanentiio, in this society, mothers exercise central moral and political roles.[88] The dates of this constitution's operation are unknown; the League was formed in approximately 1000–1450, but the constitution was oral until written in about 1880.[89] The League still exists.
George-Kanentiio explains:
In our society, women are the center of all things. Nature, we believe, has given women the ability to create; therefore it is only natural that women be in positions of power to protect this function....We traced our clans through women; a child born into the world assumed the clan membership of its mother. Our young women were expected to be physically strong....The young women received formal instruction in traditional planting....Since the Iroquois were absolutely dependent upon the crops they grew, whoever controlled this vital activity wielded great power within our communities. It was our belief that since women were the givers of life they naturally regulated the feeding of our people....In all countries, real wealth stems from the control of land and its resources. Our Iroquois philosophers knew this as well as we knew natural law. To us it made sense for women to control the land since they were far more sensitive to the rhythms of the Mother Earth. We did not own the land but were custodians of it. Our women decided any and all issues involving territory, including where a community was to be built and how land was to be used....In our political system, we mandated full equality. Our leaders were selected by a caucus of women before the appointments were subject to popular review....Our traditional governments are composed of an equal number of men and women. The men are chiefs and the women clan-mothers....As leaders, the women closely monitor the actions of the men and retain the right to veto any law they deem inappropriate....Our women not only hold the reigns of political and economic power, they also have the right to determine all issues involving the taking of human life. Declarations of war had to be approved by the women, while treaties of peace were subject to their deliberations.[88]
First-wave feminism refers to a period of feminist activity during the 19th and early 20th century throughout the world, particularly in the United Kingdom, Canada, the Netherlands and the United States. It focused on de jure (officially mandated) inequalities, primarily on gaining women's suffrage (the right to vote).
The term first-wave was coined in the 1970s.[by whom?] The women's movement of that time, with its focus on de facto (unofficial) inequalities, acknowledged its predecessors by calling itself second-wave feminism.
Second-wave feminism is a period of feminist activity that first began in the early 1960s in the United States, and eventually spread throughout the Western world. In the United States the movement lasted through the early 1980s.[1] It later became a worldwide movement that was strong in Europe and parts of Asia, such as Turkey[2]and Israel, where it began in the 1980s, and it began at other times in other countries.[3]
Whereas first-wave feminism focused mainly on suffrage and overturning legal obstacles to gender equality (i.e., voting rights, property rights), second-wave feminism broadened the debate to a wide range of issues: sexuality, family, the workplace, reproductive rights, de facto inequalities, and official legal inequalities.[4] At a time when mainstream women were making job gains in the professions, the military, the media, and sports in large part because of second-wave feminist advocacy, second-wave feminism also focused on a battle against violence with proposals for marital rape laws, establishment of rape crisis and battered women's shelters, and changes in custody and divorce law. Its major effort was passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the United States Constitution, in which they were defeated by anti-feminists led by Phyllis Schlafly, who argued as an anti-ERA view that the ERA meant women would be drafted into the military.
Many historians view the second-wave feminist era in America as ending in the early 1980s with the intra-feminism disputes of the Feminist Sex Wars over issues such as sexuality and pornography, which ushered in the era of third-wave feminism in the early 1990s.
The second wave of feminism in North America came as a delayed reaction against the renewed domesticity of women after World War II: the late 1940s post-war boom, which was an era characterized by an unprecedented economic growth, a baby boom, a move to family-oriented suburbs, and the ideal of companionate marriages. This life was clearly illustrated by the media of the time; for example television shows such as Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver idealized domesticity.[10]
Before the second wave there were some important events which laid the groundwork for it. French writer Simone de Beauvoir had in the 1940s examined the notion of women being perceived as "other" in the patriarchal society. She went on to conclude that male-centered ideology was being accepted as a norm and enforced by the ongoing development of myths, and that the fact that women are capable of getting pregnant, lactating, and menstruating is in no way a valid cause or explanation to place them as the "second sex".[11] This book was translated from French to English (with some of its text excised) and published in America in 1953.[12] In 1960 the Food and Drug Administration approved the combined oral contraceptive pill, which was made available in 1961.[13] This made it easier for women to have careers without having to leave due to unexpectedly becoming pregnant. The administration of President Kennedy made women's rights a key issue of the New Frontier, and named women (such as Esther Peterson) to many high-ranking posts in his administration.[14] Kennedy also established a Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt and comprising cabinet officials (including Peterson andAttorney General Robert F. Kennedy), senators, representatives, businesspeople, psychologists, sociologists, professors, activists, and public servants.[15] There were also notable actions by women in wider society, presaging their wider engagement in politics which would come with the second wave. In 1961, 50,000 women in 60 cities, mobilized by Women Strike for Peace, protested above ground testing of nuclear bombs and tainted milk.[16][17]
In 1963 Betty Friedan, influenced by The Second Sex, wrote the bestselling book The Feminine Mystique in which she explicitly objected to the mainstream media image of women, stating that placing women at home limited their possibilities, and wasted talent and potential. The perfect nuclear family image depicted and strongly marketed at the time, she wrote, did not reflect happiness and was rather degrading for women.[18] This book is widely credited with having begun second-wave feminism.[19]
Though it is widely accepted that the movement lasted from the 1960s into the early 1980s, the exact years of the movement are more difficult to pinpoint and are often disputed. The movement is usually believed to have begun in 1963, when "Mother of the Movement" Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, and President John F. Kennedy's Presidential Commission on the Status of Women released its report on gender inequality. The report, which revealed great discrimination against women in American life, along with Friedan's book, which spoke to the discontent of many women (especially housewives), led to the formation of many local, state, and federal government women's groups as well as many independent feminist organizations. Friedan was referencing a "movement" as early as 1964.[20]
The movement grew with legal victories such as the Equal Pay Act of 1963, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Griswold v. Connecticut Supreme Court ruling of 1965. In 1966 Friedan joined other women and men to found the National Organization for Women (NOW); Friedan would be named as the organization's first president.[21]
Despite the early successes NOW achieved under Friedan's leadership, her decision to pressure the Equal Employment Opportunity to use Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to enforce more job opportunities among American women met with fierce opposition within the organization.[21] Siding with arguments among several of the group's African-American members,[21] many of NOW's leaders were convinced that the vast number of male African-Americans who lived below the poverty line were in need of more job opportunities than women within the middle and upper class.[22] Friedan stepped down as president in 1969.[23]
In 1963, freelance journalist Gloria Steinem gained widespread popularity among feminists after a diary she authored while working undercover as a Playboy Bunny waitress at the Playboy Club was published as a two-part feature in the May and June issues of Show.[24] In her diary, Steinem alleged the club was mistreating its waitresses in order to gain male customers and exploited the Playboy Bunnies as symbols of male chauvinism, noting that the club's manual instructed the Bunnies that "there are many pleasing ways they can employ to stimulate the club's liquor volume."[24] By 1968, Steinem had become arguably the most influential figure in the movement and support for legalized abortion and federally funded day-cares had become the two leading objectives for feminists.[25]
Amongst the most significant legal victories of the movement after the formation of NOW were a 1967 Executive Order extending full Affirmative Action rights to women, a 1968 EEOC decision ruling illegal sex-segregated help wanted ads, Title IX and the Women's Educational Equity Act (1972 and 1974, respectively, educational equality), Title X (1970, health and family planning), the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (1974), the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, the illegalization of marital rape (although not illegalized in all states until 1993 [26]), and the legalization of no-fault divorce (although not legalized in all states until 2010[27]). A 1975 law requiring the U.S. Military Academies to admit women, and many Supreme Court cases, perhaps most notably Reed v. Reed of 1971 and Roe v. Wade of 1973. However, the changing of social attitudes towards women is usually considered the greatest success of the women's movement. In January 2013, US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta announced that the longtime ban on women serving in US military combat roles had been lifted.[28] The US Department of Defense plans to integrate women into all combat positions by 2016.[28]
Second-wave feminism also affected other movements, such as the civil rights movement and the student's rights movement, as women sought equality within them. In 1965 Casey Hayden and Mary Kingpublished Sex and Caste: A Kind of Memo, detailing women's inequality within the civil rights organization SNCC.[29]
In June 1967 Jo Freeman attended a “free school’” course on women at the University of Chicago led by Heather Booth [30] and Naomi Weisstein. She invited them to organize a woman’s workshop at the then-forthcoming National Conference of New Politics (NCNP), to be held over Labor Day weekend 1967 in Chicago. At that conference a woman's caucus was formed, and it (led by Freeman and Shulamith Firestone) tried to present its own demands to the plenary session.[31] However, the women were told their resolution was not important enough for a floor discussion, and when through threatening to tie up the convention with procedural motions they succeeded in having their statement tacked to the end of the agenda, it was never discussed.[32] When the National Conference for New Politics Director Willam F. Pepper refused to recognize any of the women waiting to speak and instead called on someone to speak about the American Indian, five women, including Firestone, rushed the podium to demand to know why.[32] But Willam F. Pepper patted Firestone on the head and said, "Move on little girl; we have more important issues to talk about here than women's liberation", or possibly, "Cool down, little girl. We have more important things to talk about than women's problems."[31][32] Freeman and Firestone called a meeting of the women who had been at the “free school” course and the women’s workshop at the conference; this became the first Chicago women’s liberation group. It was known as the Westside group because it met weekly in Freeman’s apartment on Chicago’s west side. After a few months Freeman started a newsletter which she calledVoice of the women’s liberation movement. It circulated all over the country (and in a few foreign countries), giving the new movement of women's liberation its name. Many of the women in the Westside group went on to start other feminist organizations, including the Chicago Women's Liberation Union.
In 1968, an SDS organizer at the University of Washington told a meeting about white college men working with poor white men, and "[h]e noted that sometimes after analyzing societal ills, the men shared leisure time by 'balling a chick together.' He pointed out that such activities did much to enhance the political consciousness of poor white youth. A woman in the audience asked, 'And what did it do for the consciousness of the chick?'" (Hole, Judith, and Ellen Levine, Rebirth of Feminism, 1971, pg. 120).[32] After the meeting, a handful of women formed Seattle's first women's liberation group.[32]
By the early 1980s, it was largely perceived that women had met their goals and succeeded in changing social attitudes towards gender roles, repealing oppressive laws that were based on sex, integrating the "boys' clubs" such as Military academies, the United States armed forces, NASA, single-sex colleges, men's clubs, and the Supreme Court, and illegalizing gender discrimination. However, in 1982 adding theEqual Rights Amendment to the United States Constitution failed, three states short of ratification.
Second-wave feminism was largely successful, with the failure of the ratification of the ERA the only major legislative defeat. Efforts to ratify it have continued, and twenty-one states now have ERAs in their state constitutions. Furthermore, many women's groups are still active and are major political forces. As of 2011, more women earn bachelor's degrees than men,[33] half of the Ivy League presidents are women, the numbers of women in government and traditionally male-dominated fields have dramatically increased, and in 2009 the percentage of women in the American workforce temporarily surpassed that of men.[34] The salary of the average American woman has also increased over time, although as of 2008 it is only 77% of the average man's salary, a phenomenon often referred to as the Gender Pay Gap.[35] Whether this is due to discrimination is very hotly disputed, however economists and sociologists have provided evidence to that effect.[36][37][38]
Second-wave feminism in the U.S. coincided in the early 1980s with the feminist sex wars and was overlapped by third wave feminism in the early 1990s.---------------------------------
Third-wave feminism is a term identified with several diverse strains of feminist activity and study, whose exact boundaries in the historiography of feminism are a subject of debate, but are often marked as beginning in the early 1990s and continuing to the present. The movement arose as a response to the perceived failures of and backlash against initiatives and movements created by second-wave feminism during the 1960s to 1980s, and the realization that women are of "many colors, ethnicities, nationalities, religions and cultural backgrounds".[1] Rebecca Walker, then a 23-year-old, bisexual African-American woman born in Jackson, Mississippi, coined the term "third-wave feminism" in a 1992 essay.
Third-wave feminism began in the early 1990s, arising as a response to perceived failures of the second wave and to address the backlash against initiatives and movements created by the second wave. However, the fundamental rights and programs gained by feminist activists of the second wave - including the creation of domestic-abuse shelters for women and children and the acknowledgment of abuse and rape of women on a public level, access to contraception and other reproductive services (including the legalization of abortion), the creation and enforcement of sexual-harassment policies for women in the workplace, child-care services, equal or greater educational and extracurricular funding for young women, women's studies programs, and much more—have also served as a foundation and a tool for third-wave feminists. Feminist leaders rooted in the second wave like Gloria Anzaldúa, bell hooks, Kerry Ann Kane, Cherríe Moraga, Audre Lorde, Maxine Hong Kingston, Reena Walker and many other feminists of color, sought to negotiate a space within feminist thought for consideration of subjects related to race.[9][19]
In 1981, Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa published the anthology This Bridge Called My Back, which, along with All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies (1982), critiqued second-wave feminism, which focused primarily on the problems and political positions of white women.
The roots of the third wave began, however, in the mid-1980s. Feminist leaders rooted in the second wave called for a new subjectivity in feminist voice. They sought to negotiate prominent space within feminist thought for consideration of race-related subjectivities. This focus on the intersection between race and gender remained prominent through the Hill-Thomas hearings, but was perceived[by whom?] to shift with theFreedom Ride 1992, the first project of the Walker-led Third Wave Direct Action Corporation. This drive to register voters in poor minority communities was surrounded with rhetoric that focused on rallying young women.[20]
In the early 1990s, the Riot grrrl movement began in Olympia, Washington and Washington, D.C.. It sought to give women the power to control their voices and artistic expressions.[21] Its links to social and political issues are where the beginnings of the third-wave feminism can be seen. The music and zine writings produced are strong examples of "cultural politics in action, with strong women giving voice to important social issues though an empowered, female oriented community, many people link the emergence of the third-wave feminism to this time".[21] The movement encouraged and made "adolescent girls' standpoints central", allowing them to express themselves fully.[22]It was grounded in the DIY philosophy of punk values, riot grrrls took an anti-corporate stance of self-sufficiency and self-reliance.[21] Riot grrrl's emphasis on universal female identity and separatism often appears more closely allied with second-wave feminism than with the third wave.[23] Riot grrrl bands often address issues such as rape, domestic abuse, sexuality, and female empowerment. Some bands associated with the movement are: Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, Excuse 17, Jack Off Jill, Free Kitten, Heavens to Betsy,Huggy Bear, Fifth Column and Team Dresch. In addition to a music scene, riot grrrl is also a subculture: zines, the DIY ethic, art, political action, and activism are part of the movement. Riot grrrls hold meetings, start chapters, and support and organize women in music.[24] The term Riot Grrrl uses a "growling" double or triple r, placing it in the wordgirl as an appropriation of the perceived derogatory use of the term.[21]
In 1991, Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas, a man nominated to the United States Supreme Court, of sexual harassment. Thomas denied the accusations and, after extensive debate, the United States Senate voted 52–48 in favor of Thomas.[12][19][25]
In response to this case, Rebecca Walker published an article entitled "Becoming the Third Wave" in which she stated, "I am not a post-feminism feminist. I am the third-wave."[26]
In 1992, the "Year of the Woman" saw four women enter the United States Senate to join the two already there. The following year another woman (Kay Bailey Hutchison) won a special election, bringing the number to seven. The 1990s also saw the first female United States Attorney General and Secretary of State, as well as the second woman on the Supreme Court, and the first US First Lady (Hillary Rodham Clinton) to have an independent political, legal, corporate executive, activist, and public service career. However, theEqual Rights Amendment, which is supported by second- and third-wave feminists, remains a work in progress.
Third-wave feminists have recently utilized the internet and modern technology to enhance their movement, which have allowed for information and organization to reach a larger audience.
The increasing ease of publishing on the Internet meant that e-zines (electronic magazines) and blogs became ubiquitous. Many serious independent writers, not to mention organizations, found that the Internet offered a forum for the exchange of information and the publication of essays and videos that made their point to a potentially huge audience. The Internet radically democratized the content of the feminist movement with respect to participants, aesthetics, and issues[27]