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Sunday 25 January 2015

Feminism

Christine de Pizan (1364-1430), wrote the first feminist tome, The Book of the City of Ladies, in which she compiled the great women who came before her, from Dido to the Queen of Sheba.

Illustration from The Book of the City of Ladies

The two-day Seneca Falls Convention, the first women's rights and feminist convention held in the United States, opened in Seneca Falls, New York on July 19, 1848. It advertised itself as "a convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman."

U.S. postage stamp commemorating the Seneca Falls Convention 

La Fronde (The Sling) was a French feminist newspaper first published in Paris on December 9, 1897 by activist Marguerite Durand. The paper gave extensive coverage to a broad range of feminist issues and profiled such things as admission to the Bar association and the École des Beaux-Arts. Financial problems forced the paper to cut back to a monthly publication, and then to close altogether in March 1905.



The term feminism was first used in Great Britain in the 1890s, and the United States in 1910. It comes from the French word "feminism," coined by the Utopian socialist Charles Fourier, in 1837.


Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique was first published on February 19, 1963. The book reawakened the Feminist Movement in the United States as women's organizations and consciousness raising groups spread.

By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35185130

The National Organization for Women, the United States' largest feminist organization, was founded in Washington D.C. on June 30, 1966. It was started by 28 people attending the Third National Conference of State Commissions on the Status of Women, the successor to the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women.

In the fall of 1968, a group of young feminists in New York created W.I.T.C.H.—the Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell.

The Women’s Strike for Equality was a strike which took place in the United States on August 26, 1970. It celebrated the 50th anniversary of the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment, which effectively gave American women the right to vote. More than 20,000 women participated in the strike, organized by Betty Friedan to demand equal rights gathered for the protest in New York City and throughout the country. At this time, the gathering was the largest on behalf of women in the United States.


In October 1970, Germaine Greer published The Female Eunuch. The thesis of the book was that the progress made by first wave feminists such as suffragettes had plateaued. A woman's life has become even more 'immobile', and the home even more of a prison than before. 

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