Okay, so what’s up with feminism? Who are the second and third wave feminists? Wait, are first-wavers all racists now? Wave? Huh? What wave?
So, the “wave” that I keep mentioning here is basically how people began talking about feminism in the 1960s. In a New York Times article by Martha Weinman with the headline “The Second Feminist Wave”, she wrote ‘Proponents call it the Second Feminist Wave, the first having ebbed after the glorious victory of suffrage and disappeared, finally, into the sandbar of Togetherness.’ So gradually, the ‘wave’ metaphor stuck. It became a useful way of linking women’s movement of the 60s and 70s to the women’s movement of the suffragettes. It suggested that the women’s libbers weren’t a bizarre historical aberration, as their detractors sneered, but a new chapter in a grand history of women fighting together for their rights. And now the metaphor is a way of describing and distinguishing between different eras and generations of feminism.
In a way, the metaphor is kind of misleading, it reduces each wave to a stereotype. It suggests that each of them has a single, unified agenda. But let’s continue using ‘wave’ metaphor in this article as it will help us understand the history a little.
The first wave: First political movement dedicated to achieving political equality for women. Period: 1848 to 1920. Here, first-wave feminism doesn’t refer to the first feminist thinkers in history. It refers to the West’s first sustained political movement dedicated to achieving political equality for women- the suffragettes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This movement was basically saying “Oh FYI, women are humans too.” Women like Sojourner Truth, Maria Stewart and Frances E.W Harper were significant forces in the movement, working not just for women’s suffrage but for universal suffrage. But there was an ‘issue’, these women were ‘not white’. The movement was established as a movement specifically for white women. Black women were barred from some demonstrations or forced to walk behind white women in others. Along with voting rights, white women’s rights to education, employment and to own property were the main demands of this movement.
In 1920, Congress passed the 19th Amendment granting women to vote. However, it still remained difficult for black women to vote. After this achievement, the whole movement began to splinter. There was no unified goal with strong cultural momentum behind it. You had individual groups working towards different goals like reproductive freedom, equality in education and employment, voting rights for black Roman etc. Without a unified goal, the first wave came to an end.
The second wave: Hello social equality. Period: 1963 to 1980s. Okay, so we’re now at a period when women realized that political equality isn’t enough. The new unified goal was to have social equality. This wave began with Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which came out in 1963. The Feminine Mystique rails against “the problem that has no name”. She argued about how the world refused to allow women to exercise their creative and intellectual faculties. With 3 million copies sold in three years, The Feminine Mystique became a huge success. The thinking in it was not revolutionary; instead, it was its reach. It was passed along through a whole chain of well-educated middle-class white women with beautiful homes and families. And it gave them permission to be angry. So now we have 3 million angry readers with a unified goal. Feminism once again had cultural momentum behind it.
In this wave, the demands had to do with changing the way society thought about women. It worked on getting women the right to hold credit cards under their own names and to apply for mortgages. It worked to outlaw marital rape, to raise awareness about domestic violence and build shelters for women fleeing rape and domestic violence. It worked on naming and legislating against sexual harassment in the workplace. The movement was against the casual, systematic sexism ingrained into society. Racism was an issue that mattered to this group as well, but the wave was a little clumsy in this department. So, while black women and white women both advocated for reproductive freedom, black women also fought to stop the forced sterilization of people of color and people with disabilities. As this was not the priority of this movement, some black feminists decamped from feminism to create womanism.
The movement won some major victories. The Equal Pay Act of 1963, the right to use birth control, educational equality and women reproductive freedom in 1973 were the achievements of this movement. In the 1980s second-wave feminists were considered humorless, hairy-legged shrews who cared about petty problems instead of the real ones. They were regarded as some lonely women needing some sort of purpose in life. This is why when someone claims to be a feminist, people get an image of some angry, man-hating and lonely woman, having a problem with bras and shallow pockets in their jeans. This issue was the main reason which ended the second wave.
The third wave: Embracing the ‘girliness’. Period: 1991 to ??. The beginning of the third wave is pegged to two things: the Anita Hill case in 1991, and the emergence of the riot grrrl groups in the music scene of the early 1990s. It started with Anita Hill’s testimony in 1991 against sexual harassment which sparked an avalanche of sexual harassment complaints. Early third-wave activism tended to involve fighting against workplace sexual harassment and working to increase the number of women in positions of power. The movement later acknowledged that gender and sex are separate and that gender is performative. This acknowledgment led to the third wave’s embrace of the fight for trans rights as a fundamental part of intersectional feminism.
Riot grrrls were the girl groups that fought against racism, ageism, speciesism, classism, sexism, anti-Semitism and heterosexism. The word ‘girl’ here points to one of the major differences between second- and third-wave feminism. Second wavers preferred women over girls as they weren’t children, and demanded to be treated with dignity.
Along with the word girl, the third-wavers would go on to embrace all kinds of ideas, language and aesthetics that the second wave had worked to reject- makeup, high heels and high-femme girliness. Third-wave feminism has an entirely different way of talking and thinking than the second wave did. It was born out of a belief that the rejection of girliness was in itself misogynistic.
The third wave was a diffuse movement without a central goal, and as such, there’s no major social change that belongs to the third wave. However, #MeToo and Time’s Up momentum is showing no signs of stopping. Is this the new wave?
Fourth wave?
“Maybe the fourth wave is online”, said feminist Jessica Valenti in 2009, and that’s come to be one of the major ideas of fourth-wave feminism. #MeToo is considered to be a movement dominated by third-wave feminism. Still, it actually seems to be centered in a movement that lacks the characteristic diffusion of the third wave.
The fourth wave is queer, sex-positive, trans-inclusive, body-positive, and digitally driven. This wave has begun to hold our culture’s most powerful men accountable for their behavior.
And finally, what’s with the generational war between feminists?
Does it exist?
Well yes, to some extent but not largely. It is perhaps more useful to think of it as a part of what has always been the history of feminism- passionate disagreement between schools of thought, which history will later smooth out into a single overarching ‘wave’ of disclosure.
Rather than devouring their own, feminists should recognize the enormous work that each wave has done for the movement, and get ready to keep doing more work.
Comments