Feminism - From its beginnings to the 60s

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The purest definition of feminism says that it is an ideology that defends that women should have the same rights as men.

On another level, which is a social and political movement that began formally at the end of the 18th century, in which women as a human group struggle against the oppression, domination, and exploitation of which they have been and are being targeted by the collective males.

In France and England, at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century, the idea began to take shape that women were not recognized as deserving in many aspects and that the inferiority condition of women was not a natural matter but that it was the product of poor and limited access to education.

During the French Revolution (1789) the women fought hand in hand with the revolutionary men for the maxims that were intoned those days: «Freedom, equality, fraternity». They participated in political speeches, in republican clubs, in the march to Versailles to capture the monarchy and in the taking of the Bastille.

The citizens also presented in 1789, before the French Assembly, the notebooks of reforms, in which they asked for the right to vote, the reform of the institution of marriage and the custody of children, as well as access to education.

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797)

In England the most relevant figure of this moment was Mary Wollstonecraft, considered as the woman who started the feminist movement in 1792. This vindication focused mainly on economic and political rights: it also claimed the independence of women against men, in particular, in front of the husbands to whom women were totally submitted physically and legally, and went further: it demanded the equal access of women to education.

A period of change and progress was followed by a period of regression: not only were they not granted the rights they claimed, but they were oppressed even more. In 1793 the women's clubs were closed, the free association of women was forbidden by not allowing meetings of more than five of them, they were denied access to political assemblies and, in 1795, the Napoleonic Code established the obedience of women to husband within the marriage contracts. This code, as well as its copies in other countries, was valid for more than one hundred years.

From the mid-nineteenth century until the end of the Second World War, although many aspects were claimed, the main claim of women in this period was the right to vote and political participation.

On the other hand, liberal feminism sought political reforms that would allow women to choose and be elected: they did not question the political system, what they asked was to participate in it. Their demands focused on obtaining equality in issues such as the right to property, the disposition of their property and wages (which, although they earned, they were managed by their parents or husbands), equality of rights and treatment within marriage and, from the second half of the 19th century, the right to vote. Women's suffrage gave birth to what was probably the greatest feminist movement in history: suffragism.

Suffragists Parade down 5th Avenue (1917)

In England the suffragettes emerged; women of upper middle class, civil rights activists, who sought the bulk of their affiliates among the female working class exploited in the factories. The most outstanding names of this period are that of Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, Sylvia and Christabel.

The suffragists took the movement to the terrain of activism and demonstrated an enormous power of association and struggle: their actions ranged from non-violence, through demonstrations, pamphlets, rallies and chaining in public places to more radical actions such as breaking street furniture, commercial shop windows, detonations to cut communications, etc. that not only led to the split of the movement, but to the detention of thousands of them.

By the beginning of the twentieth century the two movements, the radical and the moderate, joined forces and progress was made in the race for the female vote. English women won the vote in 1918, for those over 30 years. Men could vote at 25, but women between 25 and 30 were considered too 'frivolous' to exercise the vote. In 1925 they obtained the rights over their children, until then totally in the hands of the husband, and in 1928, the vote on equal terms with men.

Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928)

By its own ideology, feminism found part of its path alongside socialism. The women of this movement asked, in addition to equality between the sexes, equality between social classes.

Socialist feminists criticized liberal feminism as a 'bourgeois' feminism, although they also participated in suffrage movements calling for women's votes.

Once the equality in the vote was achieved, between the beginning of the First World War and the beginning of the 60s the feminist movements lost strength and were relegated to the background.

At the outbreak of World War I, most women abandoned their own claims and joined the national cause in which they collaborated, ironically, as labour especially in factories; in those positions that men had left empty when they marched to war.

During the Second World War, women ended up forgetting and abandoning all struggle and vindication as a collective, and many of them turned back into labour. 

Once the war was over, they were stripped of the work they had done. Men returned and women were removed from work outside home; the governments considered that these positions had to return to men to recover the existing balance before the war.

The fifties created a prototype of femininity that spread through television, films and the media. And that was exported abroad as something wonderful. Women could not ask for more, because they had everything: state-of-the-art appliances, houses with gardens in residential neighborhoods, modern cars, magazines that cared for them and taught them how to take care of their children in a scientific way and how to run the domestic economy practically professional. They were the queens of their houses.

In the decade of the 60s, the anti-system, pacifist and anti-racist movements arose due to the dissatisfaction with the Vietnam War. New feminist currents appeared that now fought for social and cultural equality.

For all this, the idea of women as a sexual stereotype in the media, in art and in advertising should end. The abolition of patriarchy was requested, since it was concluded that beyond the right to vote, education and other achievements of the first feminists, patriarchy was the social structure that caused inequalities and that continued to establish hierarchies that benefited men.

The debate on female sexuality, violence against women, abortion and contraception began.