Introduction
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2013), a Nigerian writer, defines a feminist as being someone who believes that the sexes should be equal when it comes to the social, political and economic spheres of life. Theorists point out that there have been three waves of feminism throughout history.
(1) The first wave happened between the 1830s to the early 1900s. It was characterized by women fighting for equal contract and equal property rights.
(2) Between the 1960s and the 1980s, the second wave of feminism concentrated on the roles of women at work and in the familial cell. Moreover, feminist thinkers in that era shed light on issues dealing with sexuality and reproductive health.
(3) The third wave of feminism started in the 1990s and
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According to Wollstonecraft’s 1792 work, because females were given such a limited education, it led to the oppressed and marginalized status of women in the society. Women were treated as objects who had to be beautiful, sophisticated and docile and because of the status quo at that point in time, women could not easily advocate for their equal rights. In fact, women were considered to be too emotional, too uninteresting and too insignificant to be included in public debates (Wollstonecraft, …show more content…
Wood (2010) put forward that both the Democratic and the Republican parties supported the Equal Rights Amendment. However, it was only by the 1960s that the “Alice Paul Amendment” was taken seriously (Wood, 2010). The “Alice Paul Amendment” read that “the equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” (Wood, 2010). After the Second World War, women had to make room for the returning servicemen (Striking Women, n.d). As a result, rights of women were for a long time put in the