Feminism

Woman with a guitar by Georges Braque, 1913.

Feminism originally was an expression used by suffragettes -who were predominantly pro-life- to obtain the right for women to vote in the early 1900s in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Specifically, modern feminists just want equality. In society today, an woman will still earn less than a man doing the exact same job will. Additionally, victim blaming towards female victims of rape is unbelievably common. In fact, feminism is justified in the bible. Jesus said to treat others as you wish to be treated, and modern feminists strive to do this - all they want are the same rights and privileges afforded to men. Feminism doesn't equate to man hating, and if a feminist hates men, she is not a feminist. Men can be feminists too, it just means that they too believe that women should have equal rights to them. Feminists believe that women should simply have the right to their own bodies as men do, yet the US Congress constantly passes laws to try and control their bodies.

History

Roots of the movement in the United States and the United Kingdom include the Women's Suffrage movement of the early 1900s and the Women's Liberation (or "Second Wave Feminist") movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Second Wave Feminism had its roots from Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir, who both advocated for the abolition of the career of housewife with the false implication that it was comparable to a Nazi concentration camp or a parasite.

The Equal Rights Amendment, which proponents claimed would address the inadequacies of the Fourteenth Amendment concerning women and citizenship, was proposed in the US in 1923. The amendment passed Congress in 1972 but was ultimately defeated, falling just three states short of the required three-quarters majority on June 30, 1982. Some conservatives, particularly Phyllis Schlafly, felt that its passage would entail adverse consequences, including making girls subject to the military draft, requiring taxpayer-funded abortion, the end of single-sex schools and classes, requiring the issuance of homosexual marriage licenses, and the revocation of laws that protect women in dangerous jobs, such as factory or mining work. Indeed, in states that passed their own versions of ERA, several of these results were subsequently ordered by courts.

The feminist movement in the West evolved in the 1980s with the rise of so-called Post-Feminism (also called "Third-Wave" feminism), which stresses that women have many rights that go unrecognized, often by women themselves, in everyday life, and in the American legal structure. Most members of the feminist movement support reproductive rights currently guaranteed by American law, including the legal right to abortion. This stance is opposed by many conservatives.

Leading political commentator Rush Limbaugh to coin the term "Femi-nazis" to refer to extreme feminist activists.

One of the major features of feminism prior to the 1990s was opposition to women being treated as sex objects. However, feminists today support women being sex objects, viewing it as a means of empowerment over the traditional Judeo-Christian family structure and conservative values. Continuing this same promotion of liberalism and anti-Christian values, feminists today treat Islam's cruel treatment of women as a matter of "personal choice".

During the administration of Bill Clinton, feminism made a partial resurgence, although feminist leadership was criticized^{[Who says?]} for largely failing to criticize President Clinton's sexist behavior toward female employees as both Arkansas Governor and U.S. President.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a staunch advocate of civil rights and non-violence activist was in fact a sexist. Whilst his contribution to civil rights was unbelievable and he changed the lives of many African Americans across the world, he ignored the role of many female African Americans who had significant impacts on the civil rights movement, such as Ella Baker, Rosa Parks, and Soujourner Truth.

Larrey Anderson, philosopher, writer and submissions editor for American Thinker, links feminism to Marxism, and concludes, "Feminism by grounding itself in the philosophy of Hegel and Marx, is condemning women to a new servitude: slavery to the state."

Quotations

See Quotations about Feminism

See also

• Anti-Feminism
• Feminism and housewives
• Feminist style
• Gender equality
• Gender police
• Feminists for Life
• Feminism and reason
• Feminist hypocrisy
• Battered woman syndrome
• Communism and feminism
• Feminist myths
• Feminist nitpicking

External Links

• The Feminist eZine Archive of articles about Feminist History.
• Gloria Steinem and the CIA, The New York Times, February 21, 1967.
• Inside the CIA with Gloria Steinem, Nancy Borman, The Village Voice.
• Why Can't a Woman Be More Like a Man?, Christina Hoff Sommers, The American March/April 2008.