Feminism: A Very Short Introduction Very Short Introductions are for anyone wanting a stimulating and accessible way in to a new subject. They are written by experts, and have been published in more than 25 languages worldwide. The series began in 1995, and now represents a wide variety of topics in history, philosophy, religion, science, and the humanities. Over the next few years it will grow to a library of around 200 volumes – a Very Short Introduction to everything from ancient Egypt and Indian philosophy to conceptual art and cosmology. 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Taylor Amrita Narlikar Available soon: AFRICAN HISTORY HUMAN EVOLUTION John Parker and Richard Rathbone Bernard Wood ANGLICANISM Mark Chapman INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS THE BRAIN Michael O’Shea Paul Wilkinson CHAOS Leonard Smith JAZZ Brian Morton CITIZENSHIP Richard Bellamy THE MIND Martin Davies CONTEMPORARY ART PERCEPTION Richard Gregory Julian Stallabrass PHILOSOPHY OF LAW THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS Raymond Wacks Timothy Lim PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION Derrida Simon Glendinning Jack Copeland and ECONOMICS Partha Dasgupta Diane Proudfoot THE END OF THE WORLD PHOTOGRAPHY Steve Edwards Bill McGuire PSYCHIATRY Tom Burns EXISTENTIALISM Thomas Flynn RACISM Ali Rattansi THE FIRST WORLD WAR THE RAJ Denis Judd Michael Howard THE RENAISSANCE FUNDAMENTALISM Jerry Brotton Malise Ruthven ROMAN EMPIRE Christopher Kelly HIV/AIDS Alan Whiteside ROMANTICISM Duncan Wu For more information visit our web site www.oup.co.uk/vsi/ Margaret Walters FEMINISM A Very Short Introduction 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York AucklandCape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala LumpurMadrid MelbourneMexico CityNairobi New DelhiShanghaiTaipeiToronto With offices in ArgentinaAustriaBrazilChileCzech RepublicFranceGreece GuatemalaHungaryItaly Japan PolandPortugalSingapore South KoreaSwitzerlandThailand TurkeyUkraineVietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Margaret Walters 2005 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published as a Very Short Introduction 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organizations. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN 0–19–280510–X 978–0–19–280510–2 13579108642 Typeset by RefineCatch Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk Printed in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd., Padstow, Cornwall Contents List of illustrations ix Introduction 1 1 The religious roots of feminism 6 2 The beginning of secular feminism 17 3 The 18th century: Amazons of the pen 26 4 The early 19th century: reforming women 41 5 The late 19th century: campaigning women 56 6 Fighting for the vote: suffragists 68 7 Fighting for the vote: suffragettes 75 8 Early 20th-century feminism 86 9 Second-wave feminism: the late 20th century 97 10 Feminists across the world 117 Afterword 137 References 142 Further reading 149 Index 151 List of illustrations 1 Quaker women preaching 8 Emily Davison throws in the 17th century 12 herself under the © 2005 TopFoto.co.uk King’s horse, 1913 82 © 2005 TopFoto.co.uk 2 Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle 22 9 Poster showing a © 2005 TopFoto.co.uk suffragette being 3 Mary Wollstonecraft 37 force-fed, 1910 84 © 2005 TopFoto.co.uk © 2005 TopFoto.co.uk 4 Florence Nightingale 51 10 Margaret Sanger 92 © Mary Evans Picture Library © Bettmann/Corbis 5 Song-sheet of ‘The March of the Women’, 1911 76 11 Simone de Beauvoir 100 © 2005 TopFoto.co.uk © Photos12.com/Keystone Pressedienst 6 The Pankhursts lead parade, 1911 79 12 Betty Friedan 103 © Hulton-Deutsch © J. P. Laffont/Sygma/Corbis Collection/Corbis 13 Demonstration against 7 Emmeline Pankhurst the Miss America beauty arrested outside pageant, Atlantic City, Buckingham Palace, 1969 109 1914 81 © J. P. Laffont/Sygma/Corbis © 2005 TopFoto.co.uk 14 Women’s Liberation 17 South African women march through protest against the London, 1971 111 death sentence of © Bettmann/Corbis Amina Lawal, 2003 126 © Juda Ngwenya/Reuters 15 Women’s Liberation 18 Sundanese Muslim girl rally, New York, 1970 113 with inked finger, © Ellen Shumsky/The Image proof of having voted 128 Works/2005 TopFoto.co.uk © Chris Stowers/Panos Pictures 19 Protest by a women’s 16 Anti-female circumcision rights group, Jakarta, poster, Sudan 124 2000 132 © Sven Torfinn/Panos Pictures © Darren Whiteside/Reuters The publisher and the author apologize for any errors or omissions in the above list. If contacted they will be pleased to rectify these at the earliest opportunity. Introduction ‘I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is’, the writer Rebecca West remarked, sardonically, in 1913. ‘I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.’ The word was a comparatively new one when she wrote; it had only appeared in English – from the French – in the 1890s. Interestingly, the earliest examples of the word in the Oxford English Dictionary carried negative meanings. In 1895 the Athenaeum sneeringly referred to a piece about a woman whose ‘coquetting with the doctrines of feminism’ are traced with real humour. ‘In Germany feminism is openly socialistic’, the Daily Chronicle shuddered in 1908, and went on to dismiss out of hand ‘suffragists, suffragettes and all the other phases in the crescendo of feminism’. In those years, some writers used an alternative term – ‘womanism’ – with the same hostility. One long-forgotten writer was roused to angry sneers in his memoirs when he recalled meeting an intellectual woman living in Paris (she comes across, despite his prejudices, as lively and interesting) whose writings reflected ‘the strong-minded womanism of the nineteenth century’. Curiously, one of the sharpest attacks on the word ‘feminism’ came from Virginia Woolf, whose A Room of One’s Own is such an effective and engaging plea for women. In Three Guineas, written in 1