The Cause: A Short History Of The Women's Movement

1441 Words6 Pages

The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul is:
‘What does a woman want?’
Sigmund Freud, quoted in Jones (1955:421)
Since ancient times, the values and beliefs of and about women has been changing with the ruling ideals of the time, and thus caused a number of obstacles for women. Although women today are considered equal to men but still there are some issues that need to be addressed. Today in our media-governed society women are presented with multiple images of womanhood. But still there is a gap between what they see as themselves and what they are told that they should be. But all these come under one term and that is known as …show more content…

In his book he has talked about the history of the women’s movement in the whole history of the women’s movement in the whole history of the nineteenth century. He recorded the women’s struggles for personal, legal, political and social liberties from the late eighteenth century until after the First World War.
Sylvia Pankhurst has written The Suffragette: The History of the Women’s Militant Suffrage Movement (1911). In her book Sylvia offers an insider’s perspective on the importance of unity and development as well as the purpose that inspires everyone starting from the leaders to its followers.
Second Wave Feminism or the Women’s liberation Movement (WLM) from the late 1960s had the greatest impact on the writing of women’s history. Political activists in this wave had a view that there were lack of references about women in the standard texts and so they strived to re-discover once again the women’s active participation in the past. Sheila Rowbotham’s Hidden from History (1973) was considered as a masterpiece in which she had done a detailed investigation about varied aspects of women’s lives, including employment, trade unionism, women’s organizations, family life and …show more content…

Jennifer Drake’s Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing feminism (1997) talks about third wave agenda, feminists who were born between the years 1964 and 1973 talks about the achievements and the failures of the past and planning about the future. The numerous writers of this book are the young women and men who were activists, teachers, cultural critics, artists and journalists. They differentiate themselves from other feminists who only criticize about the second wave feminism but also talks about the coming generation of feminism.
Similarly Shelly Budgeon’s Third Wave Feminism and the Politics of Gender in the Late Modernity (2011) assesses the third wave feminist where she talks about the feminist politics. According to her, the main concern of postfeminist is of gender order i.e. to focus on the context where gender equality served as the mainstream and feminism has been