The Feminist Movement Essay

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The feminist movement or women’s rights movement emerged in four different waves to address the economic, political, and social marginalization that women faced in various time periods. Dominated mostly by middle-class white women, the first wave of feminism, arose in the late nineteenth century in response to the disenfranchisement of women. During that time, women were not allowed to pursue higher education and were relegated to a housewife status. Without labeling themselves as a feminist movement, in 1848, women banded together and organized the Seneca Falls Convention, where they drafted women’s grievances and their desire for enfranchisement (Rampton, 2015).
Almost a hundred years later, the second wave of feminism began in the 1960s …show more content…

Anthony, and Gloria Steinheim––who are all white women––for the essential role that they played in the struggle for female liberation; while simultaneously, excluded black women such as, Sourjourner Truth, Shirley Chisolm, Ida B. Wells, and Angela Davis who were instrumental in both the black liberation and feminist movements. Because of this ostracism by the feminist movement, black women decided to create womanism or black feminism, “to articulate the complexity of black American women's demand for social, economic and political equality” (Harlow). Black feminism addresses the ways in which both the black oppression and gender-based oppression operate jointly to subjugate black women in their communities, homes, jobs, and society; it is a movement that exposes the problematic practices that the feminist movement has operated under for years, and combats the notion that feminism is solely for white, upper-class women. Black female philosopher, Audre Lorde, utilizes a philosophical lens to explain the differences between black and white women in her essay, Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference. By virtue of the differences in the nature and experiences of black and white women, black feminism is a necessary and crucial movement in present-day

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