European Feminism as a Political Movement

History of Feminism

Histories of feminism usually assume that feminism is a western, post-Enlightenment social movement which has contributed significantly to changes both in the social situation of women and in social perceptions of women. This assumption has frequently made feminism the subject of attacks from women in non-western cultures who have identified the movement as pre-occupied with western issues and unable to understand the gender relations of other societies. Thus it is first and foremost important to recognize the possible ethnocentricity of feminism, while at the same time acknowledging that feminism, in the broadest sense of the protest of women against a subordinate social status, is both global and takes different forms in different cultures. Where feminism stands universally united is on issues of the valid claim of women to education, to a public voice, and to equality with men in law (Ali, 191-212).

The most usually recognized starting point of western feminism is in the eighteenth century and, in particular, the publication, in 1792, of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. This book emerged out of a number of social and intellectual changes in the eighteenth century: the growing assumption of the equal rights of all individuals and what Thomas Laqueur has described as the invention of sex in his Making Sex (1990). From the beginning of the eighteenth century onwards, numerous writers (including Mary Wollstonecraft's husband, William Godwin) articulated what was to become the rallying cry of the French Revolution: “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.” Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97) entirely supported the first two of these propositions but took issue with the idea of “fraternity.” Her argument suggested that no society should allow men to control the public space or to have no knowledge of, or responsibility for, the private, domestic sphere. Thus Wollstonecraft argued not just for the education and public emancipation of women, but also for the domestic education and participation of men (Birrell, 61-76).

Wollstonecraft died the death of thousands of eighteenth-century women when she gave birth to her daughter, Mary Shelley. But her book was recognized both before and after her death, and was influential in what became known as the domestication debates of the early nineteenth century. Although her influence on writers is often implicit rather than explicit, what Wollstonecraft had done was to identify the social making of gender: this made it possible for later writers to suggest (as Simone de Beauvoir was to do in the twentieth century) that women are “made and not born.”

Throughout the nineteenth century, in both Europe and the United States, women (and occasionally men such as John Stuart Mill) questioned the social role of women and argued for their greater participation in the social world and equality of education. Perhaps inevitably, in the nineteenth quite as much as in the twentieth century, feminism and feminist demands were complicated by differences between women. In Britain these differences were generally differences of social class, while in the United States racial and ethnic differences were ...