Dorling Kindersley - The Feminism Book

Fresh out of university, I applied for a job in the city. The older of the two men who interviewed me looked at my resum and, seeing that I had written about womens issues for the student paper, asked: Are you a feminist, then? I could practically see the thought cloud full of heavily dungareed women yomping around the streets with placards but I wanted a job, so I replied cautiously, Well, Im my idea of a feminist. I doubt whether Im yours. He acknowledged my diplomacy with a nod but kept returning to the subject anddespite attempted intervention by his younger colleaguebadgering me about it. In the end, in exasperation, I said, Oh for Gods sake! I shaved my legs for this interview, if that makes you feel any better! His colleague froze but he laughed. I got the job.

All of which is by way of saying: its a complicated business, feminism. Ignorance abounds, as do stereotypes, hostility, and simple confusion. The only way to dispel any and all of these is to provide greater information. To fill with facts the void that allows fears, doubts, and prejudices to rush in. Anything, from mastodons to global socio-political movements, become a whole lot less frightening when they step out of the shadows and you can see exactly what it is you are dealing with. This book illuminates feminism on all sides and beats back ignorance with every page.

The Feminism Book also performs a second vital functionto give women in particular a sense of their place in history, which is famously written by the victors. Female activists and their achievements have always been undercelebrated, underbroadcast, and underacknowledged. And when that happens, it becomes harder to build on what has gone before. The wheel has to be reinvented, which is exhausting even when you dont have to give birth to and raise the next generation at the same time.

Most of us are not taught the history of feminism in school. If we come to an awareness of the imbalance between the sexes, it is piecemeal. More often than not, for me, a tiny but outrageous snippet of news would catch my attention and lodge in my brain like a burr. When I was 10, for example, I learned that my friends younger brother got more pocket money than she did. Why? Because he was a boy. My body practically jackknifed with the pain of the injustice. A few years later, I read in Just Seventeen magazine that Claudia Schiffer, the most super of the 1980s supermodels, was consumed with anxiety about her uneven hairline. Somewhere deep within me I recognized that a world in which a young woman could feel like this was possibly not one that was fully arranged around womens comfort and convenience. Realizations come, large and small, over the years until the skewing of the world in favor of men eventually becomes too obvious to ignore. Then we start casting around for answers. Which is either electrolysisor feminism.

But what is feminism? Can you be equal, but different? Can you be against the patriarchy but still like men? Should you fight every little thing or save your energy for the big ones? And did I disqualify myself from the sisterhood forever by shaving my legs for that interview?

How much better it would be to know what forms feminism has taken over the years, how it has evolved, its strengths and its blind spots. To know what fights have already been fought and won, or fought and need fighting again. To be able to look to your historical reserves, marshal your argument troops, and go into battle armed with the knowledge that you are not, and have never been, alone in it.

Herein lie mystics, writers, scientists, politicians, artists, and many more who offered new thoughts, new attitudes, new definitions, new rules, new priorities, new insights, then and now. What is feminism? Its in here.

Lucy Mangan

For centuries, women have been speaking out about the inequalities they face as a result of their sex. However, feminism as a concept did not emerge until 1837, when Frenchman Charles Fourier first used the term fminisme. Its use caught on in Britain and the US during the ensuing decades, where it was used to describe a movement that aimed to achieve legal, economic, and social equality between the sexes, and to end sexism and the oppression of women by men.

As a consequence of differing aims and levels of inequality across the globe, various strands of what constitutes feminism exist. The evolving ideas and objectives of feminism have continued to shape societies ever since its conception, and as such, it stands as one of the most important movements of our timeinspiring, influencing, and even surprising vast populations as it continues to develop.

Male dominance is rooted in the system of patriarchy, which has underpinned most human societies for centuries. For whatever reasons patriarchy came into being, societies required more regulation as they became more complex, and men created institutions that reinforced their power and inflicted oppression on women. Male rule was imposed in every area of societyfrom government, law, and religion, to marriage and the home. Subordinate and powerless to this male rule, women were viewed as inferior to men in terms of their intellectual, social, and cultural status.

Evidence of women challenging the limitations imposed by patriarchy is sparse, mainly because men controlled the historical record. However, with the onset of the Enlightenment in the late 17th and early 18th centuries and the growing intellectual emphasis on individual liberty, pioneering women began to draw attention to the injustices they experienced. When revolutions broke out in the US (17751783) and France (17871799), many women campaigned for the new freedoms to be applied to women. While such campaigns were unsuccessful at the time, it was not long before more women took action.

Sociologists identify three main waves, or time periods, of feminism, with some feminists hailing a fourth wave in the second decade of the 21st century. Each wave has been triggered by specific catalysts, although some view the metaphor as problematic, reducing each wave to a single goal when feminism is a constantly evolving movement with a wide spectrum of aims.