Saturday, March 21, 2009

The Modern Woman

Lynn Abrams's chapter on First-Wave feminism recounts the origins and breadth of this movement, which resulted in improvements in education (ability to attend the university), access to the professions, greater legal recognitions of women's rights within marriage and a nearly universal suffrage in Europe and the United States of America. This chapter fits squarely under the theme of feminism, but also relates to virtually all other themes except religion.

Abrams claims that the real impetus for First-Wave feminism was purely economic and political. I think she too strongly asserts this since each of these have more remote causes based in more fundamental areas such as culture, ideas and patterns of behavior. She actually seems to side with culture when later writing that "it was when 'the crust of patriarchy' began to crack from 1848 onwards" that organized feminism came about. Early feminists organized themselves through the release of statements (like the Quaker women's Declaration of Sentiment), political lobbying and protests. This process in turn assured greater women's rights as the women involved increased in oratory and written skill. They were successful in creating their own language and platform, from which they could activize on their own terms. Abrams also focuses on the relationship between socialism and First-Wave feminism, which was fruitful, but also split the feminist cause along class lines.

4 comments:

  1. I don't think Judith Bennett would agree with all of Lynn Abrams assertions, especially when she declares that the twentieth-century was the beginning of women's liberation. I don't agree with her on this point either. I also think that she invests too much of feminisms origins in the Enlightenment, for while it may have championed female virtues and sought to debunk cultural assumptions that were not based on reason, it lead to the fostering of scientific, or pseudo-scientific, qualifications of the inferiority of women (enter Darwin--"women have not evolved as men because they have been under men's protection", among others) that Karen Offen discusses.

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  2. I also question whether or not we can pin down the origin of modern feminism now that we have read and (partly) understood Hartman. However, I do think it is valid what Abrams and Grayzel argue concerning the turning point that World War I offered women in terms of rights. There was discussion today in class concerning this, and it seems that most of the students agreed that World War I was definitely a significant event in multiple terms. The loss of a generation of men, the oppurtunity to work, the recognition by governments that women provided the country with skills and services whether they were at home or in the workplace. These shifts in perception were crucial for the suffrage movement in particular, as well as an increase in women's presence generally speaking in the years following the war.

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  3. While I can see where everyone else is coming from I think there is another dimension to Abrams. I see her commentary about first wave feminism in an interesting response to Offen’s discussion of second wave feminism. While Abrams never directly addresses individualist and relational feminism she does allude to the idea that first wave feminism was more relational feminism. She asserts that first wave feminism succeeded because it did not “aim to overturn society but to work within it to achieve fundamental changes in the relations between the sexes based on recognition of women’s rights to equal opportunities.” (Abram, 295). It appears that Abrams is arguing that as you argue for relational feminism, the demands of individualistic feminism are also met. When she is discussing aspects of legal reform in Germany and how women’s status as mothers and wives did not limit their desire for individual rights. Rather, Abrams explains that “maternalism (or relationalism) and individualism were not necessarily in conflict and were never entirely analytically distinct. In some respects the disagreement between the two was about strategy more than about fundamental philosophy.” (Abrams, 275). Overall, I think that Abrams argument gains more depth and provides more insight when it is considered in the light of Offen’s Defining Feminism.

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  4. I find it interesting that first-wave feminism is often viewed as being practically synonymous with the women's suffrage movement during the early 1900s. This whole semester has shown evidence proving that feminism (although not yet coined under that term) existed WAY earlier. I think Abrams kind of misses the point when she says first-wave feminism was based solely on economic and political goals. While both of those are accurate goals I think it is important to realize that it would be more accurate to say that small ideals of freedoms and rights in different areas of Europe from as early as the 14th century were small building blocks which, over time, led to the sort of recognition of break-out feminist movements in the early 1900s.

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