Feminism as a movement gained potential in the twentieth century, marking the culmination of two centuries struggle for cultural roles and socio-political rights- a struggle which first found its expression in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). The movement gained increasing prominence across three phases/waves- the first wave(political), the second wave(cultural) and the third wave(academic). Incidentally Toril Moi also classifies the feminist movement into three phases- the female(biological), the feminist(political) and the feminine(cultural).
The first wave of feminism, in the 19th and 20th centuries, began in the US and UK as a struggle for equality and property rights for women, by suffrage groups and activist organizations. These feminists fought against chattel marriages and for political and economic equality. An important text of the first wave is Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own(1929), which asserted the importance of woman’s independence, and through the character of Judith (Shakespeare’s fictional sister), explicated how the patriarchal society prevented women from realizing their creative potential. Woolf also inaugurated the debate of language being gendered- an issue which was later dealt by Dale Spender who wrote Man Made Language(1981) and Julia Kristeva who distinguished between the symbolic and semiotic language.
The second wave of feminism in the 1960s and 70s was characterized by a critique of patriarchy in constructing the cultural identity of woman. Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex(1949) famously stated, “ One is not born, but rather becomes a woman”- a statement that highlights the fact that women have always been defined as the “Other” , the lacking, the negative. Transcending their domestic and personal spaces, women began to venture into the hitherto male dominated terrains of career and public life.
In the third wave post 1980, Feminism has been actively involved in academics with its interdisciplinary associations with Marxism, Psychoanalysis and Poststructuralism, dealing with issues such as language, writing, representation.
“ The language that feminism speaks is in our experience, also one of dominance which we have been struggling against”.