Unit V: Historical and Contemporary Feminist Social Movements

What goals, other than the right to vote, were they primarily focused on?

Ending coverture, better education, better jobs

Asexual

Experiencing little to no sexual attraction to others or a lack of interest in sex.

The Equal Rights Amendment, passed by Congress in 1971

False

The Hyde Amendment was a constitutional amendment providing equal rights regardless of gender.

False

fatherhood premium

Fathers are rated favorably as more committed to their jobs and offered much higher salaries than non-fathers.

19th century feminist movements

First wave of the feminist movement begun in the mid-19th century and lasted until the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, which gave women the right to vote.

early to late 20th century feminist movements

Following women's suffrage in 1920, feminist activists channeled their energy into institutionalized legal and political channels for effecting changes in labor laws and attacking discrimination against women in the workplace. The Women's Bureau—a federal agency created to craft policy according to women workers' needs—was established in 1920, and the YWCA, the American Association of University Women (AAUW), and the National Federation of Business and Professional Women (BPW) lobbied government officials to pass legislation that would legally prohibit discrimination against women in the workplace.

Sojourner Truth, "Ain't I a Woman?"

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mudpuddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me!....I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman? - Feminist historian Nell Painter (1996) has questioned the validity of this representation of the speech, arguing that white suffragists dramatically changed its content and title. This illustrates that certain social actors with power can construct the story and possibly misrepresent actors with less power and social movements.

Michael Warner

The academic that first coined the term "heteronormativity"?

Commodification

The act of turning something into or treating something like an object that can be brought, sold, and traded

Transphobia

The fear, discrimination or hatred of trans people community?

The famous speech "Ain't I A Woman?" Was delivered by?

sojourner truth

sit-in movement

sparked by the Greensboro sit-ins, when four African American students in Greensboro, North Carolina, sat at and refused to leave a segregated lunch counter at a Woolworth's store in February of 1960.

cult of true womanhood

summarized in four key tenets—piety, purity, submission and domesticity—which held that white women were rightfully and naturally located in the private sphere of the household and not fit for public, political participation or labor in the waged economy an ideology of white womanhood that systematically denied black and working-class women access to the category of "women," because working-class and black women, by necessity, had to labor outside of the home.

Name the ideology that summarized in four key tenets:piety, purity, submission, and domesticity the role of women?

the cult of true womanhood

Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments

the resulting document of the first women's rights convention in the United States in 1848.

What was the name of the paper written by Susan B. Anthony?

the revolution

The decision of Roe v. Wade was based on....

the right to privacy

student non-violent coordinating committee (SNCC) by Ella Baker

the sit-in movement led to the formation of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), initiated by Ella Baker shortly after the first sit-in strikes in Greensboro.

Eventually, the Black Freedom Movement, also known now as the civil rights movement fundamentally changed US society

true

Transnational feminism is a theory/activism that highlights connections between sexism, racism, classism & imperialism

true

Why are feminist movements are fantastic examples of praxis?

use critical reflection of the world to change it

abolitionist movement

which sought to end slavery—and the racial justice movement following the end of the Civil War.

Homonationalism

white nationalism taken up by the LGBTQ community against immigrants

What did the abolitionist movement lead to?

women's rights protests and the abolition of slavery

Antoinette Brown

wrote in 1853 that, "The wife owes service and labor to her husband as much and as absolutely as the slave does to his master" (Brown, cited. in Cott 2000: 64). This analogy between marriage and slavery had historical resonance at the time, but it problematically conflated the unique experience of the racialized oppression of slavery that African American women faced with a very different type of oppression that white women faced under coverture. This illustrates quite well Angela Davis' (1983) argument that while white women abolitionists and feminists of the time made important contributions to anti-slavery campaigns, they often failed to understand the uniqueness and severity of slave women's lives and the complex system of chattel slavery.

Determined "Separate but Equal" did violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amend.

Brown v. Board of Education

The white middle-class leadership of the first wave movement shaped the priorities of the movement, often excluding the concerns and participation of working-class women and women of color.

ex. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony formed the National Women Suffrage Association (NWSA) in order to break from other suffragists who supported the passage of the 15th Amendment, which would give African American men the right to vote before women

What has come to be called the first wave of the feminist movement began in the?

mid 19th century

part-time pay penalty

Part-time pay for women not only translates into lower pay, lower retirement income, and less career advancement but also underscores the notion that woman are not serious about work and strengthens the model of the male breadwinner.

Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake (1997)

argue that a crucial goal for the third wave is "the development of modes of thinking that can come to terms with the multiple, constantly shifting bases of oppression in relation to the multiple, interpenetrating axes of identity, and the creation of a coalitional politics based on these understandings"

What were the The Greensboro sit-ins?

nonviolent lunch counter protests advocating for equal rights

coalitional politics

organizes with other groups based on their shared (but differing) experiences of oppression, rather than their specific identity,

Who wrote the Equal Rights Amendment?

Alice Paul

Name a white middle-class first wave feminist in the 19th century to early 20th century

Alice Paul, Elizabeth Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony

What year was the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments?

1848

What year was the Montgomery Bus Boycott?

1955

Decade that the second wave of feminism hit America.

1960s

Third Wave Feminism

1991-?: intersectional, focus on LGBTQ+ rights, equal pay, sex positivity

How long did the Montgomery bus boycott last?

381 days

Who was Rosa Parks?

A Civil Rights activist who refused to give up her seat in a segregated bus

gender fluidity

A gender Identity that is best described as a dynamic mix of boy and girl.

A Social Construct

A social mechanism, phenomenon or category created and developed within a society, an individual, group or idea that is constructed through cultural or social practice

gendered roles within movements

Although women played pivotal roles as organizers and activists throughout the civil rights movement, men occupied the majority of formal leadership roles in the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC), the NAACP, and CORE. Working with SNCC, Black women activists such as Fannie Lou Hamer and Diane Nash became noted activists and leaders within the civil rights movement in the early 1960s. Despite this, women within SNCC were often expected to do "women's work" (i.e., housework and secretarial work). White women SNCC activists Casey Hayden and Mary King critiqued this reproduction of gendered roles within the movement and called for dialogue about sexism within the civil rights movement in a memo that circulated through SNCC in 1965, titled "Sex and Caste: A Kind of Memo." The memo became an influential document for the birth of the second wave feminist movement

Which feminist activist/scholar wrote that working-class women were not as interested because their men still suffer.

Angela Davis

occupational feminization

As women move into an occupational field in larger numbers, relative pay diminishes.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony

primarily focused on women's suffrage (the right to vote), striking down coverture laws, and gaining access to education and employment.

What is Coveture?

property to women given to husband

What group launched the Freedom Rides in 1961?

CORE- Congress of Racial Equality

What is the Equal Rights Amendment

proposed to get rid of all distinctions based on sex

identity politics

refers to organizing politically around the experiences and needs of people who share a particular identity.

Ireland

From what country did the group come from that was regarded as racially different than Anglo-Saxons even though they are white?

Sex

It refers to characteristics used to classify a person as female, male, intersex, or another category that is grounded in biology.

facts

In a country where white women are paid only 75.3% of what white men are paid for the same labor (Institute for Women's Policy Research 2016), where police violence in black communities occurs at much higher rates than in other communities, where 58% of transgender people surveyed experienced mistreatment from police officers in the past year (James et. al 2016), where 40% of homeless youth organizations' clientele are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender (Durso and Gates 2012), where people of color—on average—make less income and have considerably lower amounts of wealth than white people, and where the military is the most funded institution by the government

Third Gender

In certain cultures, such as India and Native American Culture, there are individuals who are classified, either by themselves or society, as neither male nor female. They are called?

sex-positive feminism

sexual liberation, within a sex-positive culture that values consent between partners, would liberate not only women, but also men

Where did the famous bus boycott take place?

Montgomery, Alabama

What organization did Ida B. Wells help start?

NAACP

Two-Spirit is an umbrella term used By?

Native Americans

Where did the Greensboro Sit-ins take place?

North Carolina

Black Feminist Thought

Patricia Hill Collins developed this as a critique of the ways in which second wave feminists often ignored racism and class oppression and how they uniquely impact women and men of color and working-class people. ex. One of the first formal Black feminist organizations was the Combahee River Collective, formed in 1974. Black feminist bell hooks (1984) argued that feminism cannot just be a fight to make women equal with men, because such a fight does not acknowledge that all men are not equal in a capitalist, racist, and homophobic society. Thus, hooks and other Black feminists argued that sexism cannot be separated from racism, classism and homophobia, and that these systems of domination overlap and reinforce each other. Therefore, she argued, you cannot fight sexism without fighting racism, classism, and homophobia. Importantly, black feminism argues that an intersectional perspective that makes visible and critiques multiple sources of oppression and inequality also inspires coalitional activism that brings people together across race, class, gender, and sexual identity lines.

Which one of the following LGBT activist groups first shouted the expression, "We're here, we're queer. Get used to it

Queer Nation

Where did these women meet to create a document similar to the declaration of independence for women?

Seneca Falls, NY

Another defining characteristic of the third wave is the development of new tactics to politicize feminist issues and demands.

ex. ACT UP began to use powerful street theater that brought the death and suffering of people with HIV/AIDS to the streets and to the politicians and pharmaceutical companies that did not seem to care that thousands and thousands of people were dying. They staged die-ins , inflated massive condoms, and occupied politicians' and pharmaceutical executives' offices. Their confrontational tactics would be emulated and picked up by anti-globalization activists and the radical Left throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.

In what American state did the Riot Grrrl movement start?

Washington

a traffic intersection

What analogy did legal and feminist scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw use to describe intersectionality?

African American Vernacular English

What does AAVE stand for?

Marianismo

What is the Spanish term that is the opposite of Machismo that affirms submission, humility, and spirituality for women?

Cisgender

What is their proper term for someone who identifies with their sex assigned at birth?

Wall Street Journal 1986

When and where did the term "glass ceiling" first appear publicly?

NYC

Where did the Stonewall riots in 1969 take place?

Rwanda

Which countries has the highest percentage of women elected to parliament?

Maria Mies

Which feminist thinkers is identified with the ecofeminism?

Queer Nation

Which one of the following LGBT activist groups first shouted the expression, "We're here, we're queer. Get used to it!" during street demonstrations.

Denmark

Which one of the following countries do fast-food workers make a minimum wage the equivalent of $20.00 per hour?

Simone de Beauvoir

Who created the term "the second sex"?

Karoly Maria Kertbeny

Who used the terms "heterosexuality" and "homosexuality" for the first time in history?

Transnational Feminism

a body of theory and activism that highlights the connections between sexism, racism, classism, and imperialism. In "Under Western Eyes," an article by transnational feminist theorist Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1991), Mohanty critiques the way in which much feminist activism and theory has been created from a white, North American standpoint that has often exoticized "3rd world" women or ignored the needs and political situations of women in the Global South. ex. in the war on Afghanistan, begun shortly after 9/11 in 2001, U.S. military leaders and George Bush often claimed to be waging the war to "save" Afghani women from their patriarchal and domineering men. This crucially ignores the role of the West—and the US in particular—in supporting Islamic fundamentalist regimes in the 1980s. Furthermore, it positions women in Afghanistan as passive victims in need of Western intervention—in a way strikingly similar to the victimizing rhetoric often used to talk about "victims" of gendered violence (discussed in an earlier section). Therefore, transnational feminists challenge the notion—held by many feminists in the West—that any area of the world is inherently more patriarchal or sexist than the West because of its culture or religion through arguing that we need to understand how Western imperialism, global capitalism, militarism, sexism, and racism have created conditions of inequality for women around the world.

What happened In Alabama, on Day 11 of the Freedom Bus Rides in 1961?

a bus was set on fire, some of the Freedom Riders were beaten

National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA)

a descendent of the National Women Suffrage Association

the second wave feminist movement

a movement focused generally on fighting patriarchal structures of power, and specifically on combating occupational sex segregation in employment and fighting for reproductive rights for women

Ida B. Wells

a particularly influential activist who participated in the movement for women's suffrage, was a founding member of the National Association of the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a journalist, and the author of numerous pamphlets and articles exposing the violent lynching of thousands of African Americans in the Reconstruction period (the period following the Civil War). Wells argued that lynching in the Reconstruction Period was a systematic attempt to maintain racial inequality, despite the passage of the 14th Amendment in 1868 (which held that African Americans were citizens and could not be discriminated against based on their race) (Wells 1893).

Who is Angela Davis?

a political activist that fought for civil rights

Praxis

act, activity, practice use

Ellen Debois and Lynn Dumenil (2005)

argue that women's participation in the civil rights movement allowed them to challenge gender norms that held that women belonged in the private sphere, and not in politics or activism. Not only did many women who were involved in the civil rights movement become activists in the second wave feminist movement, they also employed tactics that the civil rights movement had used, including marches and non-violent direct action. Additionally, the Civil Rights Act of 1964—a major legal victory for the civil rights movement—not only prohibited employment discrimination based on race, but Title VII of the Act also prohibited sex discrimination. When the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)—the federal agency created to enforce Title VII—largely ignored women's complaints of employment discrimination, 15 women and one man organized to form the National Organization of Women (NOW), which was modeled after the NAACP. NOW focused its attention and organizing on passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), fighting sex discrimination in education, and defending Roe v. Wade—the Supreme Court decision of 1973 that struck down state laws that prohibited abortion within the first three months of pregnancy

Gayle Rubin (1984)

argued that no sexual act has an inherent meaning, and that not all sex, or all representations of sex, were inherently degrading to women. In fact, they argued, sexual politics and sexual liberation are key sites of struggle for white women, women of color, gay men, lesbians, queers, and transgender people—groups of people who have historically been stigmatized for their sexual identities or sexual practices.

Nancy Cott (2000)

argues that, in some ways, both movements were largely about having self-ownership and control over one's body. For slaves, that meant the freedom from lifelong, unpaid, forced labor, as well as freedom from the sexual assault that many enslaved Black women suffered from their masters. For married white women, it meant recognition as people in the face of the law and the ability to refuse their husbands' sexual advances

Becky Thompson (2002)

argues, in the mid and late 1960s, Latina women, African American women, and Asian American women were developing multiracial feminist organizations that would become important players within the U.S. second wave feminist movement.

The Equal Rights Amendment had popular support in Congress but failed to become an amendment

because it fell short of being ratified by 38 states

The cult of true womanhood was an ideology of white womanhood that systematically denied access to?

black and working class women

Who was Ida B. Wells?

campaigned against lynchings in the south

Homonationalism

coined by Jasbir Fuar, which describes the white nationalism taken up by queers, which sustains racist and xenophobic discourses by constructing immigrants, especially Muslims, as homophobic

Homonormativity

coined by Lisa Duggan (2002), which describes the normalization and depoliticization of gay men and lesbians through their assimilation into capitalist economic systems and domesticity—individuals who were previously constructed as "other."

queer

derogatory term often used against gay men and lesbians, also described anti-categorical sexualities

Jim Crow Laws

designed to enforce segregation of black form whites

Stanton and Anthony privileged white women's rights instead of creating solidarities across race and class groups. Accordingly, they saw women's suffrage as the central goal of the women's rights movement.

ex. For example, in the first issue of her newspaper, The Revolution, Susan B. Anthony wrote, "We shall show that the ballot will secure for woman equal place and equal wages in the world of work; that it will open to her the schools, colleges, professions, and all the opportunities and advantages of life; that in her hand it will be a moral power to stay the tide of crime and misery on every side" (cited by Davis 1981: 73). Meanwhile, working-class women and women of color knew that mere access to voting did not overturn class and race inequalities. As feminist activist and scholar Angela Davis (1981) writes, working-class women "...were seldom moved by the suffragists' promise that the vote would permit them to become equal to their men—their exploited, suffering men" (Davis 1981: 74-5). Furthermore, the largest suffrage organization, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA)—a descendent of the National Women Suffrage Association—barred the participation of Black women suffragists in its organization.

Although the stories and lives of the leaders of the civil rights movement are centered in popular representations, this grassroots mass movement was composed of working class African American men and women, white and African American students, and clergy that utilized the tactics of non-violent direct action (e.g., sit-ins, marches, and vigils) to demand full legal equality for African Americans in US society.

ex. Rosa Parks—famous for refusing to give up her seat at the front of a Montgomery bus to a white passenger in December, 1955 and beginning the Montgomery Bus Boycott—was not acting as an isolated, frustrated woman when she refused to give up her seat at the front of the bus (as the typical narrative goes). According to feminist historians Ellen Debois and Lynn Dumenil (2005), Parks "had been active in the local NAACP for fifteen years, and her decision to make this stand against segregation was part of a lifelong commitment to racial justice. For some time NAACP leaders had wanted to find a good test case to challenge Montgomery's bus segregation in courts" (Debois and Dumenil, 2005: 576). Furthermore, the bus boycott that ensued after Parks' arrest and lasted for 381 days, until its success, was an organized political action involving both working-class African American and white women activists. The working-class Black women who relied on public transportation to go to their jobs as domestic servants in white households refused to use the bus system, and either walked to work or relied on rides to work from a carpool organized by women activists. Furthermore, the Women's Political Caucus of Montgomery distributed fliers promoting the boycott and had provided the groundwork and planning to execute the boycott before it began.

These organizations, however, did not necessarily agree on what equality looked like and how that would be achieved.

ex. the BPW supported the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which they argued would effectively end employment discrimination against women. Meanwhile, the Women's Bureau and the YWCA opposed the ERA, arguing that it would damage the gains that organized labor had made already. The disagreement clearly brought into relief the competing agendas of defining working women first and foremost as women (who are also workers), versus defining working women first and foremost as workers (who are also women). Nearly a century after suffrage, the ERA has yet to be passed, and debate about its desirability even within the feminist movement continues

Why did conservatives not support the Equal Rights Amend (1972) which gave women equal rights?

feared it would go against traditional gender roies

What was the Civil Rights Act of 1964?

federal law that enforced desegregation

what does bell hooks mean when she talks about an "ideology of domination"?

feminism is the struggle against patriarchal oppression, women of colour do not share the same status as white women, class and race are used to oppress people as well as gender

Queer Nation

formed in 1990 by ACT UP activists, and used the tactics developed by ACT UP in order to challenge homophobic violence and heterosexism in mainstream US society.

Historian Nancy Cott (2000) argues that, in some ways, both movements, Women's and the abolitionists were largely about

having self-ownership and control over one's body

organizing politically around the experiences and needs of people who share a particular identity is called

identity politics

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony formed the National Women Suffrage Association (NWSA) ?

in order to break form other suffragists who supported black men

Homonormativity...

is narrow gay politics bound to existing heterosexual norms, plays off the myth of gay consumer affluence, is no visibility of poor, rural whites & P.O.C. in queerness

third wave feminism

is, in many ways, a hybrid creature. It is influenced by second wave feminism, Black feminisms, transnational feminisms, Global South feminisms, and queer feminism. This hybridity of third wave activism comes directly out of the experiences of feminists in the late 20th and early 21st centuries who have grown up in a world that supposedly does not need social movements because "equal rights" for racial minorities, sexual minorities, and women have been guaranteed by law in most countries

What was Plessy v Ferguson?

it upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation laws

What was the Second Wave of Feminism focused on?

liberation, reproductive rights, equal pay

What are the fundamental rights?

life, liberty, and property

What is a glass ceiling?

limit on minorities baring them from positions of authority