The Changing Face of Feminism: A Historical Perspective - Research Paper

Introduction

The biggest challenge to comprehending feminism might be the fact that the philosophy and ideology informing it has changed with time, generating different 'waves' of feminism. Some thinkers embarked on locating the roots of feminism, and most of them advocate for the intelligence, self-respect, and essential human budding of the female gender. Although, it was in the 19th century that the fight for equal rights for women merged into clearly self-conscious and identifiable movements.

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Additionally, not all waves have a distinct time frame. Instead, every wave is better described by its mechanisms and goals than merely an era. It is usual to discuss the three waves of modern feminism. Nevertheless, there is no consensus of characterizing these three phases or what should be done with women's movements before the late 19th century; making the framework a bit hard to direct, a new silhouette has come up and adopts the form of the fourth movement of feminism.

The First Wave of FeminismThis wave of feminism got on track primarily in the US and Britain and was focused on women's suffrage. Often taken for granted, women in the late 19th century, recognized that they ought to acquire political power and voting rights to enforce change. The wave officially started in 1848 during the Seneca Falls Convention where 300 hundred females and males assembled to voice the issue of women's impartiality (Dicker and Alison 138). Elizabeth Stanton drafted the Seneca Falls Declaration outlining the wave's political strategies and ideology. Their political issues extended to address economic, reproductive, and sexual problems. For several decades, individuals in the first wave protested, lectured, marched, and faced violence, ridicule, and arrest while fighting for their voting rights. During this time, the abolitionist movement resolutely joined the women's movement. Women of color, including Harper, Maria, and Sojourner truth, were the primary influencers in the wave (Rivers 32).

The nineteenth amendment was the most significant legal success during this wave. Even though specific groups went ahead to advocate - for black women's voting rights, equality in employment and education, and reproductive freedom - the movement generally started to be divided(Chamberlain 38). There was no common goal with a solid social drive anymore, and there was no other ambition until the second wave took off in the 1960s.

The Second Wave of Feminism

This wave came after the end of World War II and concentrated on the reproductive, family, sexuality, and workplace rights. Women were very much concerned with these problems; hence, they focused on strengthening their power by foremost advocating for gender equality (Dicker and Alison 212). Since the second movement of feminism voiced their issues amid several social activities, it became easily disregarded and perceived as less competent. This wave started associating women suppression with comprehensive reviews of normative heterosexuality, capitalism, and the women's responsibility as mothers and wives. From this, gender and sex were distinguished - the former being social while the later a biological construct (Dicker and Alison 9).

Unlike the first phase of feminism which was overly driven by white women, cisgender, western, and middle class, the second wave drew in developing nations and women of color, seeking solidarity and sisterhood, appealing the women struggle to be a fight for class. Feminists introduced an intense determination to free the world top-down of chauvinism, from kids' shows to the top government offices. Second wave feminists did, in any case, prevail here and there. The second wave woman's rights prompted an adjustment in attitudes concerning women's roles in society (Rivers 132). Hence they had the option of working away from their homes and sabotage their gender roles.

However, one major drawback in the first and second waves was that they never recognized the existence of lesbian relationships. Additionally, there was a big gap in race, class, and age in the two movements. The achievements of the second wavers did not represent every woman, and little girls of second-falters understood that this movement did not recognize lower class women of color thus leading to the onset of the third wave (Rivers 12).

The Third Wave of Feminism

Unlike the past waves, in the third movement, the phrase "feminist" was less disapprovingly acknowledged by the females because of the different feminist perspectives. There are the ecofeminists, academics, the electoral, the liberals, the radicals, and the geo-cultural feminists among others (Mann and Douglas 59) The crucial matters were prefaced by the events held by the previous women's waves. The struggle went ahead to conquer the differences in female and male roles and the women's reproductive rights. This wave was thus concerned with enforcing a real understanding and acceptance of the phrase 'feminism.' Even though tremendous improvement has been seen since the first wave, there is still a lot that needs to be addressed. As a result of the range of feminist problems today, it is even harder to place a tag on what a feminist is (Rivers 7). That leads to a new feminism movement; the fourth wave that rallies for women's rights and equality and causes quite a stir.

The Fourth Wave of Feminism

Women's activists have been envisioning the entry of the fourth wave from around 1986 when an author to the Wilson Quarterly discoursed that a fourth wave was at that point coming up. In recent times, as #MeToo and Time's Up get energy, the Women's March pushes several ladies to run for top government positions, it is starting to look like the proclaimed fourth wave may be here(Munro 22). Even though a ton of media reports of #MeToo portrays it as a development overwhelmed by third-wave women's rights, it is by all accounts focused in a movement which does not have the symbolic dissemination of the third wave. It feels unique.

The #MeToo campaign - the majority of women worldwide joined together, standing up to share their very own strike accounts of abuse applying the #MeToo hashtag (Munro 23). The former last was devoted to a progressively extreme move in man-centric culture, whereas the latter needed fairness in the home and working environment. Equal rights women's activists looked for guidelines like anti-discrimination acts in careers, as the radicals went past strategies and tried to deconstruct sexual orientation occupations and begin a literal feminist upheaval. Accordingly, the fourth wave's early stages are frequently roughly attached to around 2008, when YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook were soundly established in the social fabric (Chamberlain 126).As of now, the fourth-falters are pushing the surge behind #MeToo and Time's Up, yet in earlier years they were in charge of other social influence projects.

Like all of the women's liberation, the fourth wave is not a monolith. It implies various things to various individuals. These tentpole positions that are distinguished as having a place with fourth-wave women's liberation in 2015 happen to remain constant for a lot of fourth-falters; in particular, that fourth-wave woman's rights is body-positive, sex-positive, queer, and driven digitally. Additionally, the fourth-wave liberation appears to be hostile to misandry, yet given the merriment with which fourth-falters online groove on unexpected misandry, that might be more prescriptivist than descriptivist on their part (Phillips and Vivienne 936).

Presently, the fourth wave has started to consider societies most influential men responsible for their conduct. It has begun a thorough inspection of the power systems which enable slayers to target ladies without any potential repercussions. As the fourth wave builds up itself, and as #MeToo continues, individuals have started to create an account that claims the fourth wave's most significant obstructions are its forerunners - the women's activists of the second wave, and there surely are second-wave women's activists pushing a #MeToo criticism (Phillips and Vivienne 931). During the 2000s and 1990s, second-falters were given a role as the strict, aggressive, man-loathing grandmothers and mothers who impeded their little girls' sexual freedom. Currently, they are the conventional, dull relics which are too shy even to consider pushing for the real transformation. What's more, whereas young ladies have been advising their elders to be quiet and disappear in the dusk, the older women have been slamming and stereotyping the more youthful activists as boy-crazy, feather-headed pseudo-women's activists who waste their mothers' feminist improvements by underestimating them.

The second waves goals were never solidified to the degree that they could endure the lack of concern of third falters. The fourth feminist movement is rising because (for the most part) young men and women understand that the third wave is either excessively hopeful or disadvantaged by critics (Munro 24). Feminism is presently moving from the foundation and again into the domain of open debate. Issues that were vital to the earlier periods of feminism are getting national and global consideration by prevailing media and government officials. Issues including slut-shaming, unequal pay, violence against women, rape, sexual abuse, the weight on ladies to adjust to a solitary and impossible body-type and the acknowledgment that gains in the female portrayal in legislative issues and business, for instance, are incredibly minor (Phillips and Vivienne 933). It is never again viewed as "outrageous," nor is it seen as the domain of ratified scholarly individuals to discuss unfair work condition and wages, trans and homophobia, societal women abuse, rape in colleges, and the way that the US has one of the most exceedingly terrible records for lawfully ordered maternity benefits and parental leave on the planet.

A few individuals who wish to drive this new fourth wave experience difficulty with the phrase 'feminism', not in light of its more established implications of radicalism, but since the word feels like it is supported by presumptions of sex twofold and an exclusionary subtext: only for women. The majority of fourth wavers who are ready for the movement's inhabitants discover the expression 'feminism' being a stressful topic which is challenging to get its message out with a mark that raises passion for a more extensive gathering of people. However, the word is winning the day. The growing generation now realizes that feminists are facing difficulties as a result of how society is gendered (Munro 23). Women's liberation no longer alludes to women's struggles; it is a clarion demand for gender impartiality.

The emerging fourth wavers are not only rebirths of their second wave grandmothers; they convey to the dialog significant points of view instructed by third wave woman's rights. They talk as far as intersectionality whereby subjugation of women could be wholly comprehended in a setting of the relegation of different genders and groups-feminism thus appears as a piece of a more significant awareness of tyranny sexual orientation, ableism, classism, racism, and ageism. Amid the third wave's endowments is the significance of incorporation, an acknowledgment of the sexualized human body as non-compromising, and the part the media could play in leveling hierarchies and gender-bending. Some clarification as to why the fourth wave might be on the rise is as a result of millennials articulating themselves as 'feminists' on their own (Mann and Huffman 58). The magnificence of this new wave is that there is a spot in it for everyone. The scholarly and hypothetical mechanism is broad and very muc...