Feminism

Developments in Anglo-American feminism are often characterized in terms of waves, with the "first wave" in the United States beginning with initiatives as early as the organization of the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869 by Susan B. Anthony and other such efforts in the early decades of the twentieth century when women's liberation was seen in terms of "human" liberation. These struggles led to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in the U.S. Constitution, enfranchising American women in 1920.

Following this there was a comparative lull in feminist activity. Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963) is widely cited as a seminal text that precipitated public dialogue in America about feminism by pointing to an inchoate sense of "something wrong lodged in the minds of countless American housewives." Kate Millett's classic text Sexual Politics (1970) located women's oppression in patriarchies that operated through women's most intimate sexual relationships. Anglo-American feminists of this period were also drawn to developments in French feminism, which in turn drew inspiration from early seminal texts such as Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1953).

The "second wave" was marked by an explosion of complicated theories borrowing from philosophy, psychoanalysis, and politics that aimed (1) to challenge patriarchal values and constructs that oppressed women and to critique such portrayals in contemporary literature and popular culture, and (2) to represent the figure of the woman as an autonomous subject, focusing on the gendered body of woman to better understand such issues as reproductive rights, sexual harassment, and violence. Consciousness-raising was seen as a key tool for furthering feminism, and oft-repeated slogans of this phase were "sisterhood is powerful" and "the personal is political."

The active entry of black women served to expose polarities within U.S. "mainstream" feminist politics. Black feminist politics, rooted in the black liberation and civil rights movements (1960s–1970s), had convinced many African-American women of the need for a politics that was both antiracist and antisexist. The Combahee River Collective (a Boston-based black feminist group founded in 1974) aimed at "struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression." From these contestations emerged new practices of theorizing, most prominently articulated by bell hooks. Sisterhood, hooks asserted, required a commitment on the part of white women to examine their own complicity in white privilege, because black women's oppression was located at the intersections of race, class, and gender. Reacting to a narrowly defined feminism, the African-American writer Alice Walker coined the term womanist to describe a woman "committed to survival and wholeness of an entire people, male and female." Thus, responding to the reality of women's multiple identifications, feminism broadened out along issue-based trajectories.