How the women’s liberation movement came to be what it is today:

Half the sky: NOT THE SECOND SEX

Aditha Dissanayake

The hour was 5.30 in the morning. The date, sometime in the late 1960s. The place, London. Several women were walking around, surreptitiously sticking the message “this ad degrades women” on offensive posters. Fast forward. The time is now 5.30 in the evening. The stickers and targets have changed in the rush hour traffic. Men in suits, umbrella tucked under the arm, briefcase swinging, would suddenly feel the touch of a woman’s hand on their back. A sticker was left behind. “This man exploits women.”

These were the early days of the second-wave feminist movement in Britain. (The first wave was the suffrage campaign). A time of enormous innocence, enthusiasm and creative power, when small groups of women were gathering across Britain and the USA, talking about their circumstances, and feeling the rush of recognition as they realized they weren’t alone in their frustrations.

The talk at these gatherings would always focus on such facts as “women were very low paid. That they were expected to become either a nurse or a secretary. That most women were cleaners. Women were too poor. etc”

Yet, feminist organizing had first raised its head way back in the early 19th century. William Thompson, a remarkable defender of people whose interests were not his own, published an Appeal on behalf of one half of the human race, women, against the pretensions of the other half, men, to retain them in political and thence in civil and domestic slavery in 1825. Defending women with a rare passion, he admitted he was very conscious that he does not share the oppression known to women, directly.

“Though I do not feel like you-thanks to the chance of having been born a man ... though I am free from personal interest in this question; yet can I not be inaccessible to the plain facts and reason of the case.’ he questioned. Several years later,Charlotte Brontë in her novel, ‘Shirley ‘ had the heroine longing for a trade - even if it made her coarse and masculine-instead of the vacant, weary, lonely life of a woman of her class.

Though the phrase women’s liberation was first published in Simone de Beauvoir’s influential 1949 essay, The Second Sex, the roots of the women’s liberation movement reach back much further. Ever since men have claimed dominance over women in patriarchal societies, there have been strong women who have fought for dignity and human rights.

At various times in history, these women have banded together to form feminist social movements, such as those that arose at the end of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and during the 1920s and 1940s.

These movements were often followed by backlash periods of increased suppression of women. Such a period of suppression occurred during the 1950s, which in turn inspired a new period of female rebellion that began in the 1960s.

This latter rebellion constitutes the largest and most widely publicized social movement of women in history. It affected women of all races and classes around the world.

The first stirrings of this awakening was found in etty Friedan’s groundbreaking book, “The Feminine Mystique”.

Explaining what was wrong with the lives of apparently comfortable and economically secure women Friedan brought out into the public “the problem that has no name” -and then to give it a name. Until then, apart from the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, there were no laws against gender discrimination as such in the USA. The word “sexism,” in its current meaning, did not exist. Not surprisingly therefore, for many women, the publication of Friedan’s book was one of those events which seem, in retrospect, to have divided the sixties from the fifties as the day from the night.

By the early 1970s, the women’s liberation movement had expanded with energy and excitement. Women started women’s centers, women’s health clinics, rape crisis centers, and bookstores.

They formed political groups that published feminist political writings. Bread and Roses in Boston took over a building on the Harvard campus where they set up a day care center and taught classes for ten days before being forced out. They used money that they collected from supporters to open one of the longest running women’s centers in the United States. In 1969, Cornell University in Ithaca, New York became the first college to offer accredited Women’s Studies courses.

In 1966, at the Third Annual Conference on the Status of Women in Washington, D. C., a group of 28 women formed an organization to fight for women’s rights. They called it the National Organization for Women (NOW). By the end of the year, NOW had 300 members; by the end of the century it would have half a million.

Through mainstream organizations such as NOW, women began to demand changes in discriminatory laws, But women’s liberation encompassed far more than the quest for legal rights.

Women began to seek freedom, respect, and the right to an individual identity and a fulfilled life. No longer satisfied to define themselves in terms of husbands and families, these women performed the most radical act of all: they began to talk to each other.

Using a technique called “consciousness raising,” women began to meet and talk about their lives. In these groups, women found that problems they had thought were individual, were in fact, shared by many other women. They also began to think that these personal problems could be solved only by changing society. This idea gave rise to one of the most important slogans of the 1960s women’s liberation movement, “The personal is political.”

Traditional role rejected

The new feminists rejected the traditional role that had been imposed upon women of the 1950s. In one of the most famous actions of the women’s liberation movement, in 1968, a hundred women gathered to protest the shallow values of the Miss America pageant. Into a trashcan, they threw symbols of the sexual objectification of women such as bras, girdles, and make-up.

Though nothing was burned, the media seized on the event, and feminists were “bra-burners” ever after.

As the years went by the movement started to change. Thus, the feminists of the 1990s and after are conventionally referred to as the “Third Wave.”

These are women who recognized the way in which earlier feminism had been blind to the femininity of Blacks, working class and other women, and developed a much more general, reflexive analysis of status subordination.

As a result, while men, from government officials to radical leftists, trivialized women’s issues, by talking together women began to construct a political analysis of a sexist society that encompassed the government, the educational system, the media, religion, the family, and even the language.

In spite of the attempts of the Anti-feminists to trivialize the movement, calling feminists humorless and strident, the movement lives on, both in the work of older feminists who never stopped working to address the issues of sexism, and in the younger women who continue to be inspired by the courage and dedication of generations of women who fought for liberation.

In the end, everything boils down to power. As Mary Wollstonecraft, the ‘first feminist’ said let’s not wish women to have power over men, but over themselves.

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