This document discusses the history and evolution of feminism from the 1940s onwards. It begins by covering early feminist figures and works from the 1940s-1960s that challenged ideas of male chauvinism and the feminine mystique. The 1960s saw the rise of second-wave feminism in response to works like The Feminine Mystique and the establishment of groups like NOW. However, second-wave feminism has been criticized for primarily applying to white, middle-class women and ignoring issues of race and sexuality. More recent third-wave feminism seeks to be more inclusive of these intersecting identities and views gender as socially constructed.

1. An Alternative View: New
Directions in Feminism
• The Challenge to Male Chauvinism – 1940s – 50s
– Mary Inman coins term “Male chauvinism”
• personal and cultural aspects of sexism
• centrality of race and class
– Key Figures
• Betty Millard – BC ’34 – Woman Against Myth (1948)
• Gene Weltfish – BC ’25 – President, Congress of American Women
• Gerda Lerner – (CU PhD, ’66) member CAW -founder Women’s
History Month
• Betty Friedan – The Feminine Mystique (1963)

2. The Feminine Mystique
• Betty Friedan (1963)
– attacked the popular notion that women during this
time could only find fulfillment through childbearing
and homemaking.
– According to The New York Times obituary of Friedan
in 2006, it “ignited the contemporary women's
movement in 1963 and as a result permanently
transformed the social fabric of the United States and
countries around the world” and “is widely regarded
as one of the most influential nonfiction books of the
20th century.”

3. Woman at home?
• Feminine Mystique? -- For historians of American women, the
period between 1945 and 1963 poses bigger problems of historical
interpretation than any other comparable time. The more closely
one examines these years the more confusing the evidence seems.
• If one looks at the work of advertisers, for instance, as Betty
Friedan did for her 1963 book THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE, one is
impressed by the proliferation and power of images aimed at
pressing American women to embrace domesticity and
motherhood as the ultimate route to self-fulfillment.
• Demographic evidence confirms that either through this pressure,
or for some other reason, marriage and motherhood were on the
rise. In these years the age of marriage fell, the rate of marriage
rose, and the birth rate soared. By 1959 the U.S. birth rate rivaled
that of India.

4. Race and Sexuality Matters
• the idea of the feminine mystique had far
more resonance for white, heterosexual
women in America than it did for black
women or for lesbians.
• The biggest critique of 2nd wave feminism
is that it only applied to white, middle-class
women… in opposition to how it began.
• More on that later…

5. REASONS FOR THE REBIRTH
OF FEMINISM
• Why is it that feminism suddenly emerged
in the 1960s?
– Most historians would point to the
convergence of the following three forces:
• Social Climate
• Point of View
• Receptive Audience

6. STATE COMMISSIONS ON THE
STATUS OF WOMEN (1963)
• Investigated state laws that discriminated against women. In states
throughout the country these commissions found restrictions on
married women to sign contracts, to sell property, to have
access to credit, and to serve on juries. Moreover, in many
states:
– women who became pregnant had to quit their jobs and yet were
barred from unemployment benefits.
– Women who worked for the government did not have the same right
to benefits that men did.
– Newspapers divided their help wanted ads into "Men’s Jobs" and
"Women’s Jobs." Guess which list included the best paying jobs?
– Airlines hired young women to work as stewardesses and fired them if
they married or when they reached the age of 32.
– Magazines hired women to be researchers but barred them from the
more lucrative positions as writers.
– As the evidence of women's disadvantages mounted, the commissions
created pressure to fight for greater equality.

7. National Woman’s Organization
(NOW)
• Demands:
– End to occupational segregation and pay
disparities
– End to discrimination in education and the
professions
– Demand for a national system of child care.
– Support of the ERA and
– Abortion rights.

8. The Personal Is Political
• In the summer of 1968, Carol Hanisch, of New
York Radical Women, came up with the idea for
protesting the Miss American Pageant in
September.
• Hanisch coined the term "the personal is
political" to convey the idea that problems that
many women took to be personal – their lack of
self-confidence, failure to advance in their
careers, their unhappiness over their bodies –
were part of a larger political system that
oppressed women as a class.

9. The Role of Black Women in
the Civil Rights Movement
Anne Standley

10. Why is it important to recognize
these women?
• The origins of the Suffrage movement began –
and continued with white, middle-class women.
• Minorities were not recognized by the
movements leaders because of:
– Segregation
• The south was still very much split on segregation and race,
so the north was worried about losing their political stance if
whites marched with blacks.
– Economics
• Most of the Suffragettes had came from upper and middle
class families and had an education. As we have discussed,
African-Americans were not given these opportunities until
much later.

11. • 2nd Wave Feminism had direct connections
to the civil rights movement
• The women of the civil rights movement
were fighting for total equality, not
separating race, class, or gender.
• Most importantly,
• One of the leading moments of the civil
rights movement began with a woman.

12. Rosa Parks

13. Men took the helm
• Though women had spearheaded that campaign and many others,
when their efforts began to bear fruit prominent men often took the
helm
• “After the bus boycott got going and (Martin Luther) King got
involved, they wouldn’t even let Rosa Parks speak at the first mass
meeting,” she said. “She asked to speak, and one of the ministers
said he thought she had done enough.”
• Parks is often depicted as a deferential woman who defied
segregation laws at the urging of movement leaders, but in fact she
had for years quietly pushed for racial justice — and she had
carefully planned the actions that led to her arrest.
• “She was not just a symbol, she was an agent.”
• In 1963, tens of thousands of women who joined the March on
Washington witnessed a tribute to prominent women, songs by
several women, and brief remarks by the entertainer Josephine
Baker, but no woman made a speech.

14. • Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer of Ruleville, Miss., speaks
to Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party
sympathizers outside the Capitol in Washington
after the House of Representatives rejected a
challenger to the 1964 election of five Mississippi
representatives, in this Sept. 17, 1965 file photo.

15. • Bertha Gilbert, 22, is
led away by police
after she tried to enter
a segregated lunch
counter in Nashville,
Tenn., in this May 6,
1964, file photo.

16. • Countless women in the movement could have
spoken:
– Ella Baker was a charismatic labor organizer and
longtime leader in the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference. She believed the movement should not
place too much emphasis on leaders.
– Septima Poinsette Clark, often called the “queen
mother” of civil rights, was an educator and National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People
activist decades before the nation’s attention turned to
racial equality.
– Vivian Malone Jones defied segregationist Alabama
Gov. George C. Wallace to enroll in the University of
Alabama in 1963 and later worked in the civil rights
division of the U.S. Justice Department.
– Many others are known but unnamed.

17. Effects of the Movement on
Feminism
• As we discussed, 2nd Wave Feminism was
criticized for being too essentialist
– Essentialism: the view that, for any specific
kind of entity, there are a set of characteristics
all of which any entity of that kind must have.
• In affect, minorities, the poor, and
homosexual women were grouped
together with white, middle-class women
– Meaning that 2nd wave feminism claimed ALL
women experienced the same thing

18. Alice Walker and Womanism
• In her book In Search of Our Mother’s Garden:
Womanist Prose (1983), Walker used the word
to describe the perspective and experiences of
"women of color."
– Womanist: a woman who loves other women
sexually and/or nonsexually. Appreciates and prefers
women's culture … and women's strength …
committed to survival and wholeness of entire people,
male and female. Not a separatist … Womanist is to
feminist as purple is to lavender. (pp. xi–xii)
• Are there any problems here? Is anyone STILL
left out?

19. 3 Wave Feminism
rd
• The 3rd wave looks to be more accepting of
the fact that ALL people regardless of
race, sex, or sexual orientation are socially
constructed.

20. Where we went from here
The movement to 3rd wave
feminism and beyond

21. Womanism:
Queer Studies:
included women of
color Sexuality enters the
picture
3rd Wave Feminism:
2nd Wave Feminism:
All of these ideas / concepts are
too essentialist
socially constructed
left out minorities
left out sexuality
Everyone should be viewed as
equals
Cultural Studies: Masculism:
Culture becomes Men are socially
important constructed as well

22. 3 Wave Beginnings
rd
• Began in mid 1980’s with 2nd wave leaders who
wanted more subjectivity in feminism.
• Wanted the integration of race as a concept of
social construction
• Gained full strength in 1991 at the closing of the
Clarence Thomas nomination when Anita Hill
accused Clarence Thomas of sexual
harassment.

23. • Rebecca Walker, 1992 in Ms.
– "Becoming the Third Wave"
• "I am not a post-feminism feminist. I am the third
wave."
• When Rebecca Walker, daughter of author Alice Walker
and godchild of activist Gloria Steinem, published an
article in Ms. entitled "I Am The Third Wave," it drew a
surprising response. Young women from all over the
country wrote letters informing the magazine of the
activist work they were quietly engaged in and
encouraging older feminists and leaders of the women's
movement not to write them off.

24. Feminism is for Everybody
“Feminist politics aims to end domination, to
free us to be who we are - to live lives where
we love justice, where we can live in peace.
Feminism is for everybody.”

25. 3rd Wave Overview
• A generation that came of age in the wakes and
gains of the 2nd wave
• strives to combat inequalities that [women] face
as a result of [their] age, gender, race, sexual
orientation, economic status or level of
education.
• For example, today, 43 percent of U.S. women
under 45 have had abortions, and young women
today cannot imagine not having that right

26. Strategies of 3rd wave
• Cultural production- art, film, writing, magazines
– Bust, Bitch, Vagina Monologues, etc.
• Personal narratives
• Sexual politics
• But does cultural production translate to political
power, more female politicians, more female
CEOS, media execs, etc.?

27. 3rd wave- Intergenerational
Conflict
• For several people, the rallying of the youth is
the meaning that has fixed within 3rd wave
feminism.
• Constructed as intergenerational conflict
between 2nd and 3rd waves
• Problems
– Constructs 2nd wavers as outdated, racist, patriarchal,
boring
– Constructs 3rd wavers as the “future” of feminism, the
older generation leaves a gift for the younger- not
reciprocal
– Is there a way to construct a relationship between
the two waves?

28. 3rd Wave
• 3rd wave agenda
– Contains elements of 2nd wave critique of
power structures, sexual abuse, beauty
culture
– Adds pleasure and desire
– Deconstruction and reconstruction of gender
as a social construct

29. Theories from 3 Wave rd
• Cultural Studies:
– Post-colonialism
– African-American Studies
– Woman’s Studies
– Asian-American Studies
– Etc.
• Gender Studies
– Feminism AND Masculism
• Queer Studies

30. Contemporary Theories of
Sexuality

31. Sexuality
• Biological theory of Sexuality
– The biology of human sexuality examines the
influence of biological factors, such as organic and
neurological response, heredity, hormones, and
sexual dysfunction; it examines the basic functions of
reproduction and the physical means to carry it out.
– The biological perspective helps to analyze the
factors, and ultimately aids in understanding them
and using them to deal with sexual problems.
– Sexuality is part of our biological nature… We cannot
change it

32. Sexuality
• As a Choice
– We choose who we are attracted to, going
against “natural” biological concerns.
• As a Social Construction
– Human sexuality can also be understood as
part of the social life of humans, governed by
implied rules of behavior and the status quo.
– If it is constructed in this way, there is no
“natural” sexuality, but a scale of different
kinds of sexuality.

33. Kinsey, et al. (1948). Sexual
Behavior in the Human Male.
• Males do not represent two discrete populations,
heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not
to be divided into sheep and goats. It is a
fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely
deals with discrete categories... The living world
is a continuum in each and every one of its
aspects, (p 639).

34. 0- Exclusively heterosexual with no homosexual
1- Predominantly heterosexual, only incidentally homosexual
2- Predominantly heterosexual, but more than incidentally homosexual
3- Equally heterosexual and homosexual
4- Predominantly homosexual, but more than incidentally heterosexual
5- Predominantly homosexual, only incidentally heterosexual
6- Exclusively homosexual

35. Sliding Sexuality
• Goes beyond Homo and Hetero sexuality
• How do we explain
– Fetishes
– Monogamy vs. Polygamy
– Bi-sexuality
– Etc.

36. Queer Studies / Queer Theory
• Main Goals
– exploring the problems of the categorization of gender
and sexuality.
– Queer theory embraces the notion of a "normal"
identity, in favour of the subversive.
– Theorists claim that identities are not fixed – they
cannot be categorized and labeled – because
identities consist of many varied components and that
to categorize by one characteristic is wrong.
• For example, a woman can be a woman without being
labelled a lesbian or feminist, and she may have a different
race from the dominant culture. She should be classed as
possessing an individual identity and not put in the collective
basket of feminists or of colour or the like.

37. Judith Butler
Feminist Philosopher and Theorist

38. Life and Times
• Judith butler attended
Bennington College and
then Yale University
where she received her
B.A and Ph.D in
philosophy. She taught at
Wesleyan and Johns
Hopkins universities
before becoming
Chancellor Professor of
Rhetoric and
Comparative Literature at
the University of
California at Berkley

39. Situating Herself
• Although hailed as a foundational
contributor to Queer Theory, Butler
identifies herself as a Feminist Theorist,
taking commitments to Feminism as her
primary concern. –Interview in Radical
Philosophy

40. Gender Trouble
Feminism and the Subversion of
Identity

41. Trouble with Feminism
• Traditionally, • This performs “ an
unwitting regulation and
Feminism assert that reification of gender
women were a group relations” reinforcing a
with common binary gender view,
characteristics and men/women.
• Feminism closed options
interests. of identity
• Feminist reject the • Feminism works from an
idea that biology is account of patriarchal
destiny culture which assumes
masculine and feminine
genders will be built by
culture on male and
female bodies.

42. Pre-determined Fate
• Butler attempts to detach gender and sex
through critiques of feminism, structuralism,
post-structuralism and psychoanalysis.
• Through these critiques she argues that sex and
gender are both pre-determined and open to
construction depending upon the terms of the
debate.
• Her hope is the deconstruction of the patriarchal
hegemonic discourse on sexuality.

43. The deconstruction of the
male/female binary
• Butler calls to smash the links between sex and
gender where sex is seen to cause gender.
• Gender can then become flexible, free floating
and not caused by any other stable factor.
• We can then understand “those historical and
anthropological positions that understand gender
as a relation among socially constituted subjects
in specifiable contexts”
• Gender then becomes a fluid variable which
shifts for different contexts and situations rather
then a fixed attribute.

44. Slippery Gaps & Derrida
• La difference- 1) the relationship between a
word (the signifier) and what it signifies (the
signified) is always an arbitrary one 2) a single
word, or signifier, can connote any number of
different signifieds.
• Meaning is endlessly deferred as we seek to
differentiate among an array of interpretative
choices and to negotiate the gap between an
ever increasing number of signifiers and
signifieds.

45. The Floating Signifier
• If we acknowledge la difference, then we are left
with gender as a floating signifier.
• Therefore the meaning of gender is deferred,
leaving gender a multiplicity of meaning.
• Butler then argues that through the
deconstruction of the gender binaries, gender
exists on a continuum of identity.
• Gender then becomes what is constructed at a
specific place and time, i.e contextualized
historically and historically.

46. Gender as Performance
“Gender is always a doing, though
not a doing by subject who might
be said to pre-exist the deed”

47. The Hegemonic Apparatus
• “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of
gender […] identity is perfromatively constituted by the
very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its result”
• Gender is a performance; it’s what you do at particular
times, rather then a universal of who you are.
• Certain cultural apparatuses have hegemonic control,
have naturalized this culture.
• There is no sex, only gender and gender is a
performance.

48. Performing for the Camera
• I would like to look at how
gender is performed
through some
advertisements of men
and women. In naming
this performance we may
be able to identify the
hegemonic discourse that
construction our notion of
gender placed historically
and culturally.

49. Constructing Male Gender
• Calvin Klein

50. The Dapper Gentleman
• This is a liquor ad
found on a website
that analyzed
advertisements.

51. Performing the Feminine
There was little search
for women in
advertising.

52. Angels of the House
• The angel theme is a
common one in
Victoria’s Secret
advertising.

53. Performance Anxiety
Subverting gender identity

54. Subversive Action
• Butler argues that we all put on a gender
performance, so now the question becomes
what form will the performance take?
• Subversion can occur through a mobilizing,
subversive confusion and proliferation of
genders, thereby identity
• By choosing a difference we work to change
gender norms and deconstruct the binary
understanding of masculinity and femininity.

55. How do we do that?
• Butler opens up two cites for the “intervention,
exposure and displacement of [binary
masculine/feminine] reifications” (42).
• First using heterosexual constructs in non-
heterosexual frames. For example continued,
repeated performance of “queer” identities may
eventually become normalized and seen as
“culturally intelligible.”
• Second, is the potential of ender parody
exemplified through cross-dressing, drag and
butch/femme identities.

56. Madonna: A Virtual
Embodiment?
• Some critics have
argued that Madonna
could serve as an
embodiment of
Butler’s multiplicity of
identity.

57. Playing with Gender
• Madonna plays with
identity, reinventing
herself constantly.

58. Moving Through the Spectrum
• Madonna moves
through a spectrum of
gender identity, from
Hollywood Starlet to
transgendered cross-
dressing female.

59. Transgendering Trouble
Drag Queens and Butch Femmes

60. “Queering” Identities: The Drag
Queen
• Butler argues that the
performance of drag
emphasizes the
discontinuity between
anatomy and gender.
• Exposes the illusion
of gender identity as a
fixed inner substance
(187).

61. Confusing Gender
• Drag is subversive
because it confuses
gender.

62. Choosing your Identity
• Sexuality continues
on a spectrum of
choice.

63. Drag Kings
• While there is a
plethora of
constructions of
feminine genders in
advertisements, men
rule in cross—
dressing.

64. Constructing the male
• Butler and others have
found the problems with
using cross-dressing and
transgendering as the
epitome of subversive
acts.
• The construction of
gender in cross-dressing
often works within the
same hegemonic forces.

65. Using the Master’s Tools
• Cross-dressing uses
the Master’s tools,
switching the binary is
not as subversive as
we might like to think.
• Here gender might be
confused, but still
relies on binaries of
masculine/feminine.