Social Movement Feminism

In the early 20th century, women fought for the right to vote. After more than half a century of continuous activism, the 19th amendment was passed, granting women voting rights. This triumph was merely the beginning of what the women’s rights movement would accomplish. Over the next several decades, women campaigned for policies which challenged societal norms and gave them equal footing with men. Pinpointing a sole cause of this movement has proved to be somewhat problematic, as there are several factors to its rise. In other words, the rise of the women’s rights movement in the period 1940-1975 was prompted by a multitude of components.

Looking in from the outside, the journey of Women’s rights was a lengthy one, and it has come a significant way from what it began as. It was a long road to freedom that started with just a few women protesting together for change in the mid 1800’s to the large movement it is today. What started only as an effort to put women on equal footing with men in the voting realm blossomed into a full on fight against gender norms and independence through protesting, speeches, and gatherings. Gender norms or ‘roles’ are (as defined by Webster’s dictionary) “a set of societal norms dictating what types of behaviors are generally considered acceptable, appropriate, or desirable for a person based on their actual or perceived sex” and they are one thing that modern feminist have set their sights on to change for the better. Traditional gender roles have continued to exist for hundreds of years through perpetrators such as religion, government and society, and its effects have been felt by every woman, whether they realize it or not.

This chapter is organized in chronologically. The major the major themes of this chapter is Sexual Privacy, The Ninth amendment, and Unremunerated Rights. What are social Movements? Social Movements in American Politics, Slavery and Abolitionism, and Civil Rights and the Civil war Amendments. The major questions are as follows. Where does the energy that drives social movement come from? Does affirmative action to assist minorities and women inevitably mean reserve discrimination against white men? What were the similarities and differences between the movements for racial and gender equality.

Societal change occurs when one person or a group of people decide it's time to stand up against a norm, to engage in deviant behavior in order to change the pace of time. These deviances become known as social movements. Some of the biggest social movements include The Civil Rights Movement, The Women's Rights Movement, and The Environmental Movement. All of these have had a significant impact on society as a whole, after all, neither black persons nor females would have near the rights they do now had these movements not taken place. But, how and why do social movements become so big?

The article, In Defense of Gender by Cyra McFadden discusses the issue of gender equality in our language. The article discusses the neutering of masculine terms in our language. Instead of writing and speaking he or himself it became, him/her, himself/herself. Also instead of titles being mailman and waiter, this neutering made it mailpersons and waitpersons. The author writes of how ludicrous it is to completely change the way we write and even speak.

From the following classic definition of a “feminist” by believing the idea of equality, there is an added responsibility of delivering the idea, convincing people, and helping people realize the occurrence of feminism. Being a feminist by any means is not an easy task. As the idea of feminism is rapidly developing across the globe, it refers to various questions, misconceptions, and sometimes extreme detestation directed towards the feminists. Society still doesn’t understand the essence of feminism, and the true meaning of it. Some believe that a feminist fight for women's equality, while others believe that women should be able to fulfill their highest potential. Meanwhile, there is the misconception

Feminism is a huge problem in the world that still is existent to this day. Whether it’s from insulting someone and calling them a girl or comparing one’s skills at something to a girl’s skill at that thing. Many people have taken a stand against this problem. Because of those people it isn’t as bad as it was back in the 18 – 1900s.

Women are now demanding rights such as reproductive rights, equal wages, and a change of mankind’s oppressive language, all of which have never been thought even close to possible before. This is all due to the network of communications that women have been able to build, much of it on their own. It all began with literature such as The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, which opened up a feminist dialogue, leading to the modern day equivalent of Tumblr and feminist hubs all over the internet. The Scarlet Letter was a revolutionary piece of literature that remarked on the nobility of women and the unjust scapegoating of women as a whole. It contains still controversial topics of women and their sexuality and man’s role in determining the same women’s lives. In fact, The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, is quite comparable to modern (third wave) feminism in respects to them both addressing very controversial aspects of society; such as the self-deprecating act of slut shaming, the patriarchy’s repeated attempts of oppressing women, and the resilience

Music has long had the power to convey powerful and meaningful messages that were directed towards a specific audience throughout history. Its ability to do the aforementioned was exemplified during the beginning and early stages of the Feminist Movement, particularly with Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” (1967) and Helen Reddy’s “I am Woman” (1972). These two songs sought to empower the women of their era by encouraging gender autonomy. Though released five years apart, there were many similarities between the two songs in terms of their musical and lyrical composition, as well as their message and intended audience. However, due to the surrounding social issues of their time period, two very different underlying secondary messages were incorporated

The most important point or matter I’ve learned about Christian theology that I knew too little or nothing about is inclusive language. I was raised to see the pros and cons of both sides of the situation. Growing up in a semi-conservative church that is open and loving to everyone, yet the congregation is predominantly of one color, we always referred to God in the male pronoun. The idea of even bringing up “God as a female” or “God is no gender” to my congregation brings a sense of great fear. In this essay, I will propose the benefits of using inclusive language within the church. The working definition I will use for this paper is, “language that avoids the use of certain expressions or words that might be considered to exclude particular groups of people, especially gender-specific words, such as "man", "mankind", and masculine pronouns, the use of which might be considered to exclude women”.

Social movements, such as the Women’s Rights Movement and the Civil Rights Movement, are what helped to shape victimology into what it is today. Individual people took a stand for what was wrongfully done to them and demanded a change no matter what the cost entailed. Would you be willing to fight against injustice being done to you?

The first wave of feminism has been a revolutionary social movement in terms of that it could lead to an overcoming of the previous social order (Newman, 2012 p. 487) through its social agents and create, through this, a new social ordering of time and space. Moreover, through reaching their previously described aims, the first wave of feminism has been able to literally “overthrow the entire system itself, (…) in order to replace it with another one.” (Skocpol, 1979, as cited in Newman 2012, p. 487). Thereby, one can even state that a new ordering of time and space by which routines and routinised behaviour has been challenged as well as changed took place. The interactions influenced the way how societies work today. (Allan, 2013, p. 323).

Diffusion is a large component of social network theory. According to Everett Rogers, a communication scholar, it is the process by which an innovation is communicated through certain channels, over time among the members of a social system. Innovation has been the center of diffusion studies for many years. Recent research has started to focus on the field of social movements, to understand why information spreads a certain way, at different speeds and through different channels. Social movements are not self-contained and do not occur in isolated events but are rather built upon previous events or movements and influence each other through their effects on the larger environment (Meyer & Whittier, 1994). An example of this could be seen by

According to Wikipedia, “Feminism is a range of political movements, ideologies, and social movements that share a common goal: to define, establish, and achieve political, economic, personal, and social rights for women”.

In this article, we will be discussing how feminism is still needed as there is a lack of gender equality. Till this day there are still women that are not given the opportunity to be educated like men, females’ salaries are less than males’ salaries and women are treated as if their job is to serve men. Women and men should have equal rights because no one is more superior to the other gender. Sexism is still a struggle in our society that has to be tackled as it makes us as women feel unworthy and not capable of things that we can actually do. We are all human beings therefore we all have the same abilities as well as we all have goals we want to achieve but it is a struggle for women more than it is for men.