International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest

Extract

Though the term was not introduced until 1890 or so, the movement that came to be called “feminism” became large and outspoken during the second half of the nineteenth century, arising in response to the exclusion of women from participating in political and public life. Women's exclusion was argued for and justified by references to their sexual differences from men, differences, it was asserted over and over again, that derived from nature. As a consequence, feminists had to answer their opponents in the language used to categorize women as inferior. They had to refuse the ideology of sexual difference that established their inferiority as fact, to transgress the boundaries and practices that normalized “women.” But they had also to focus on women as a collectivity on whose behalf they advocated. Paradoxically, they had both to embrace and refuse their identities as “women.” Feminists cast their arguments in the context of a larger discussion about the value and function of the family and its individual members' roles in industrial capitalist society, reserving their most furious objections for representations that equated the female with the sexual. The discussion of gender roles took place within a framework of centuries of political and economic change. The patriarchal household had rested on the presumption that the male head of the household owned his wife, his children, ... log in or subscribe to read full text