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                        WOMEN'S MOVEMENTS & FEMINIST SITES

                   Women's March 2017

Image Courtesy of Mobili

What we now call feminism has no doubt been part of women's history from the beginning of time. But the modern social movements for the equality of women started around the time of the American and French Revolutions. Women's Movements in the United States have typically been talked about in terms of "waves" of activity. The so-called First Wave feminist movement arose in the mid-1800s. Inspired by and often entangled with the Abolitionist Movement, this first wave of US feminism met its high point at the Seneca Falls, NY convention in July, 1848. That convention created the "Declaration of Sentiments" that put forth a host of proposals including, most controversially at the time, women's right to vote. The movement gained power throughout the following decades, despite internal conflicts around issues of race and class. The culmination of this long first wave of feminist movement organizing was the passage in 1920 of the nineteenth amendment to the US Constitution, guaranteeing women the right to vote for the first time.

The so-called Second Wave of feminist activism arose in the 1960s. This wave had multiple origins and multiple ideologists. A liberal wave of actions worked from an agenda set forth in books like Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique addressed especially to middle-class white women who felt hemmed in by the patriarchal, women-in-the-kitchen ideology of the 1950s. A more radical phase of the movement, often led by women who had learned non-violent protest via involvement in the Black Civil Rights Movement, pushed for transformation that acknowledged  the varying needs of women of color, working class women, and LGBTQI2+ women. The liberal and the radical elements overlapped at times and at other times worked in mutually reinforcing ways that brought about a tremendous number of legal, economic, political, social and cultural improvements in the lives of women over the course of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. 

While third and even fourth waves of women's movements have also been proposed with varying suggested timeframes, there has been no wide agreement on these terms. Each wave has had to struggle for the inclusion of women excluded or underrepresented in earlier waves. All these later developments continue to push the key notion of intersectionality, that issues of sex and gender can never be fully separated from interacting factors of ethnicity/race, class, sexuality, age, ability, and nationality, among others.

While the wave metaphor is useful in grouping certain events, it tends to obscure a longer, ongoing series of transformative ideas and actions. While there have no doubt been higher and lower moments (crests?), the wave metaphor can erroneously suggest something coming to a crashing end. Instead feminist theorist Ednie Garrison argues that women's movement history is perhaps better imagined not as ocean waves, but more like continuous "radio waves" emanating in many directions at once, impacting both known and unknown audiences. 

The most recent, highly public phase of feminist action, including the largest single day of protest in US history, the Women's March of 2017, and the emergence of groups like the #MeToo and #Time's Up, represents another high point but one made possible as always only by continuous organizing in less visible form by hundreds of feminist groups and millions of individuals active today at local, state, national and international levels.

Women's movements have been enhanced by virtually every form of artistic practice. The Art of Protest focuses on poetry and song lyrics as especially pervasive and important forms that often embody the key feminist practice of consciousness raising, the turning of individual experience into the collective analysis of social forces that limit the economic, political, cultural  and personal options of women.

Featured Sites

  • Time's Up and #Me Too Worldwide movements against sexual assault, gendered economic inequality and all other dimensions of sexism. Site includes a host of resources including the Time's Up legal defense fund for women seeking legal remedies to abusive or unequal treatment.

Historical Documents and Sites.

Contemporary Websites

Books and Articles

  • Anzaldua, Gloria, and Cherrie Moraga, eds. This Bridge Called My Back. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Press, 1981. Pioneering anthology of Chicana, black, Asian, and Native American feminism that includes essays, poetry, and short fiction.
  • Fisher, Dexter, ed. The Third Woman. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1979. Collection of poetry and fiction by feminist women of color that helped signal the greater visibility of woman of color feminisms in creative work.
  • Howe, Florence, ed. No More Masks: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Women Poets. New York: Perennial, 1993. Newer edition of the groundbreaking anthology that did much to propel the feminist poetry movement.
  • Hull, Gloria, Patricia Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds. All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies. New York: Feminist Press, 1982. Classic anthology that did much to define a black feminist aesthetic and politics.
  • King, Katie. Feminist Theory in Its Travels. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Masterly book tracing relations between feminist theory and cultural production.
  • Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984. Brilliant, influential collection of essays redefining feminism through greater attention to intersections of race, class, sexuality, and gender.
  • Montefiore, Jan. Feminism and Poetry. London: Rivers Oram/Pandora, 2004. Excellent introduction to a variety of issues in the relations between various feminisms and poetries.
  • Ostriker, Alicia. Stealing the Language. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986. Places explicitly feminist poetry into the wider context of twentieth-century American women’s poetry.
  • Rich, Adrienne. Art of the Possible. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. Collects many of Rich’s most influential essays, including several on relations between poetry and feminism.
  • Smith, Barbara, ed. Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. 1983; repr. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001. Important follow-up volume to All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men.
  • Whitehead, Kim. The Feminist Poetry Movement. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986. The first full-length study of the connection between the feminist movement and feminist poetry.
  • Young, Stacey. Changing the Wor(l)d: Discourse, Politics, and the Feminist Movement. New York: Routledge, 1997. Analyzes and criticizes various histories of post–World War II U.S. feminism for their inattention to cultural factors, and offers a case study of the role of culture within the movement, especially poetry.
  • And books of poems by any of the following feminist poets: Paula Gunn Allen, Gloria Anzaldua, Margaret Atwood, Gwendolyn Brooks, Olga Broumas, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Lucille Clifton, Jayne Cortez, Toi Derricotte, Judy Grahn, Marilyn Hacker, Joy Harjo, Lyn Hejinian, June Jordan, Irena Kelpfisz, Audre Lorde, Janice Mirikitani, Cherrie Moraga, Harryette Mullen, Grace Paley, Marge Piercy, Adrienne Rich, Muriel Rukeyser, Sonia Sanchez, Ntozake Shange, Mitsuye Yamada, Anne Waldman, Alice Walker, among many, many others including a new generation of feminist and womanist spoken word artists.

Further Research