Second Wave Feminism

Christina Hughes

christina.hughes@warwick.ac.uk

THE FIRST WOMEN’S LIBERATION MARCH 1971

(http://worldbbnews.com/2010/02/26/forty-years-of-womens-liberation/ accessed 4.03.10)

Introduction

This year (2010) is being marked in the UK as the 40th Anniversary of what has popularly become
known as ‘Women’s Lib’. This was when, for the weekend of 27 February to 1 March 1970, a few
students organised the first (UK) National Women’s Liberation Conference at Ruskin College, Oxford.
Five hundred people turned up. As Sheila Rowbotham commented:

“Everybody arrived with their sleeping bags on Friday night … which was turmoil, and then
they managed to extend the conference into the Oxford Union, an extraordinarily stiff
environment that was meant to produce male orators who would become prime ministers. I
remember being really scared of speaking in that room.”
(http://worldbbnews.com/2010/02/26/forty-years-of-womens-liberation/ accessed 4.03.10)

The demands of this conference were:

Equal pay for equal work (a liberal feminist demand)

Equal education and job opportunities (a liberal feminist demand)

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 Free contraception and abortion on demand (close to radical feminist concerns)
Free 24 hour nurseries under community control (close to socialist feminist concerns)

These demands were printed on banners and a petition was handed to the Prime Minister on 6
March 1971 when 4000 feminists marched through London on International Women’s Day. Many
aspects of this activism were highly successful, but as we will see, the movement began to lose
energy as we approached the 1980s and began to be marked by stronger vocalisation of its various
divisions.

This lecture addresses three themes:

From bra burning to consciousness raising to equal rights legislation: Second wave feminist
activism
What is the cause of women’s oppression? The main perspectives of Liberal, Radical and
Socialist Feminism
Critiques from within: issues of difference (‘race’, disability, class, Whiteness)

From Bra Burning to Consciousness Raising to Equal Rights

The image of bra burning feminists is one of those myths that have carried forward in time. This
image, as with all images, can be read in a number of ways. For example, we can see it as a symbolic
attempt to free women’s bodies from the yoke of sexualisation. And/or (because we can hold
contradictory meanings at the same time) we can see the creation of such mythology as an attempt
by a male dominated media that sought to trivialise the protests and actions of feminists. Despite
the resilience of this idea, feminists did not burn bras though they did engage in various protests
about the objectification of womanhood at beauty pageants and competitions. In the UK, feminist
action at the Miss World competition in November 1970 was headline grabbing direct action. This
demonstration followed earlier ones in the US when Miss America pageants were disrupted by
throwing stilettos and other items into the ‘Freedom Trashcan’. This US action was the starting
point of the bra burning mythology. The slogan of the British demonstrators was 'We're not
beautiful, we're not ugly, we're angry' . They threw flour bombs, tomatoes and stink bombs and in
so doing gained widespread newspaper and television coverage. Five of the protestors were
arrested and faced trial at Bow Street Magistrates.

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 The Trial of Miss World Demonstrators
(http://www.bl.uk/learning/images/21cc/counterculture/large8683.html, accessed 2.03.10)

The fact that bra burning is an enduring image of 1960s Second Wave feminism tells us much about
the stereotyping and misrepresentation of the complex and diverse activities and perspectives that
informed Second Wave feminism. Certainly women were engaged in various forms of direct action.
For example, feminists stuck messages around the London underground on offensive posters saying
‘this ad degrades women’. Men in suits travelling the underground might also have felt the touch of
a woman’s hand on their backs and discovered a message stuck on their jacket ’This man exploits
women’. (http://worldbbnews.com/2010/02/26/forty-years-of-womens-liberation/ accessed
4.03.10).

Whilst such action was concerned to challenge patriarchy to its fullest extent, it also raised a wider
social consciousness of issues of sexism and oppression. Indeed ‘consciousness raising’ and the
inception of ‘consciousness raising groups’ was viewed as a ‘radical weapon’ for second wave
feminism (see Sarachild, Kathie. "Consciousness-Raising: A Radical Weapon," in Feminist
Revolution, New York: Random House, c1978, pp.144-150,
http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/wlm/fem/sarachild.html, accessed 4.03.10). Consciousness raising

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groups prioritised personal experience and feelings as a way of testing out generalisations about
women and also as a test to much ‘scientific’ research. Sara child (op cit) puts it this way:

[The] group decided to raise its consciousness by studying women's lives by topics like
childhood, jobs, motherhood, etc. We'd do any outside reading we wanted to and thought
was important. But our starting point for discussion, as well as our test of the accuracy of
what any of the books said, would be the actual experience we had in these areas. One of
the questions, suggested by Ann Forer, we would bring at all times to our studies would be --
who and what has an interest in maintaining the oppression in our lives. The kind of actions
the groups should engage in, at this point, we decided -- acting upon an idea of Carol
Hanisch, another woman in the group -- would be consciousness-raising actions ... actions
brought to the public for the specific purpose of challenging old ideas and raising new ones,
the very same issues of feminism we were studying ourselves. Our role was not to be a
"service organization," we decided, nor a large "membership organization." What we were
talking about being was, in effect, Carol explained, a "zap" action, political agitation and
education group something like what the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee
(S.N.C.C.) had been. We would be the first to dare to say and do the undareable, what
women really felt and wanted. The first job now was to raise awareness and understanding,
our own and others -- awareness that would prompt people to organize and to act on a mass
scale.

The decision to emphasize our own feelings and experiences as women and to test all
generalizations and reading we did by our own experience was actually the scientific method
of research. We were in effect repeating the 17th century challenge to science to
scholasticism: "study nature, not books," and put all theories to the test of living practice and
action. It was also a method of radical organizing tested by other revolutions. We were
applying to women and to ourselves as women's liberation organizers the practice a number
of us had learned as organizers in the civil rights movement in the South in the early 1960's.

This period of feminist history was not only marked by the actions of self-avowed feminists who
sought to change social conditions. Of note, and a precursor to the Women’s Liberation conference,
is the Ford machinists strike at the Dagenham factory in East London when 850 women sewing
machinists went on strike on 7 June 1968 against sex discrimination of job grading. These women
were making car seat covers as were men but the women were paid at 87% of the male rate. The
strike spread to Ford’s Halewood plant in Merseyside and eventually halted the entire production of
cars at Ford. The women were not totally successful however. They managed to gain 92% of the
male rate and it took another 16 years to win a full regarding
(http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=15057, accessed 2.03.10).

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 Women Strikers at Dagenham, 1968

http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=15057, accessed 2.03.10)

The success of the women’s movement during the 1960s and 1970s can be seen in the development
of legislation which played variously liberal and radical feminist concerns:

The Equal Pay Act was passed in 1970 granting equal wages for women and men doing the
same work.
The Women's Aid Federation was formed in 1974 providing support and refuge for women
and children experiencing domestic violence.
The Sex Discrimination Act was passed in 1975 outlawing sexual discrimination in the
workplace.
The Domestic Violence Act was passed in 1976 enabling married or cohabiting women to
obtain a court order aimed at preventing further violence and to exclude her violent partner
from the home.

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Underpinning this activism and this legislation are a range of perspectives that informed different
positions within Second Wave feminism. Feminists were interested in finding the ‘cause’ of
women’s oppression – did this lie in their gender, in their class, in their ‘race’, their sexuality?
Maynard (1995) refers to liberal, radical and socialist feminism as the ‘big three’. This is a useful
description to a certain extent but it leads to criticisms that by focusing on these core theoretical
ideas one is marginalising a range of other perspectives. These criticisms have been most trenchant
from Black feminists, which we will come to in a moment, but broadly the designation of three
distinct types of feminism rather overlooks the complexity and interconnections of feminist theory.

Let’s turn to the ‘big three’ – liberal, radical and socialist feminism to have a sense of their core
concerns.

Liberal Feminism

Liberal feminism is the feminism that is the most familiar to everyone. Indeed, if you think of
feminism in terms of what it seeks, many people inevitably construe it in terms of the equal
opportunities of liberal feminism. Beasley (1999) suggests that liberal feminism is the moderate face
of feminism. Liberal feminism takes the view that women and men are essentially the same (ie we
are all born as equals) and therefore should have equal opportunities. In consequence, such a
perspective argues that all human beings have the same potential. Women can run boardrooms,
nations and galaxies as well as (actually better than) men. The feminist task is to find ways to
achieve these equal potentials. In undertaking this task, liberal feminists have used the social facts
of gender inequality to put forward a case that this inequality is an injustice. This case is based on
the rights arguments of liberalist thought more generally. Liberalism argues that it is a basic human
right for all individuals to participate fully in the organisation of society. As fellow human beings,
women have the same natural rights that men (though historically varied across class and ‘race’
dimensions) have traditionally enjoyed. Women have a right to equal civil liberties; they have a right
to economic independence; they have a right to the same positions and employment spheres as
men; they have a right to the same levels of education and training; and so forth.

In addition, liberal feminism argues that women are individuals with rights to freedom of choice
(Eistenstein, 1993). Here, some liberal feminists would fully subscribe to liberalist arguments that
the individual should be free of unwarranted restriction and restraint through, for example,
government interference. However, it is freedom from the ‘bonds of custom or prejudice’ (Beasley,
1999: 52) that is most commonly invoked. Women should be able to choose to be mathematicians,
engineers or scientists should they wish. These should not be the traditional preserves of men.
They should be able to choose both paid employment and motherhood. Women should not be
confined to the house simply by virtue of prejudicial assumptions related to their physiology.

In order to secure these rights to equality of opportunity, liberalism has also been strongly
associated with changes in the legislature. Thus, rights are enshrined in law. For example, through
the introduction of the national curriculum, the Education Reform Act 1998 contributed to a
reduction in gender differentiation in terms of the subjects girls and boys were taking to GCSE level
(P. Orr, 2000). These rights are also enshrined in organisational policy documents that set out the
rights of employees to promotion entitlement, maternity leave and so forth.

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Thus, in summary:

Builds, as the term suggests, on liberal political ideas of individual rights

Women's (as classed, raced, etc) oppression arises from the gendered distribution of
unequal rights
The solution is redistribution of benefits and opportunities through changes to the law, etc

Radical Feminism

Let’s begin here with looking at a very contemporary concern, that of violence and war – something
that radical feminists have long been concerned with. The following is an extract from a talk given
by Cynthia Cockburn at the Annual Centre for the Study of Women and Gender lecture (2007 – for a
fuller account see Cockburn, C (2007) From where we stand: war, women’s activism and feminist
analysis, London, Zed Books):

I would like to use this occasion to explore some ideas about militarism and war that don't
usually make it into the standard textbooks. Briefly, what I'm going to suggest is that experiencing
war, as a woman; or allying as a woman with women who are; and especially getting actively
involved in opposing war, give rises to a particular understanding. It’s the perception that militarism
and war are (in part, but importantly) driven and perpetuated by gender relations. Economic factors,
like blood for oil, or diamonds, drive war, yes. Ethno-national factors like the desire to kill all the
Muslims in India, or all Christians and animists in Sudan, yes, they too drive war. But gender factors
do also. And I'll try to explain how I think this works.

This perception is not just of academic interest. A host of people, both men and women, in
this country and many others, direct their passions and devote their energies to campaigns for
nuclear disarmament, against the arms trade, against the dominance of the military in society,
against the pursuit of political goals by armed conflict, and the defeat of supposed enemies through
neo-imperialist conquest and invasion - rather than through strategies of social and political inclusion
and economic equity. It's important to use all the tools at our disposal to dismantle the war system.
I'm going to suggest that challenging gender relations as we know them is one of these tools, and it
is badly neglected.

Cynthia Cockburn’s opening remarks to the Annual Lecture highlights the key point that a gendered
analysis is missing from the politics of anti-war movements. It is also missing from our everyday
understandings of the causes of war. So Cockburn remarks (ibid):

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 First, women see gender relations, and particularly certain manifestations of
masculinity, as implicated in violence and indeed as constituted in violence, and they
see no signs of the mainstream anti-war movement recognising this. They don’t see
them campaigning for transformations of gender (“Don’t exploit my masculinity for
militarism”) as they campaign for, let's say, the decommissioning of arms.

Secondly, at a more tactical level, the mainstream organizations are usually male-
led, and the masculine lack of self-critique in the movement often leads to a choice of
language, style, and even actions, that are themselves violent and conflictual. Many
women told me [Cynthia Cockburn] that they came out of such organizations (and
I’m thinking of particular groups not just in the US and UK, but in Spain, Turkey, India
and elsewhere) so as to be more in control of their methods. They wanted to choose
more carefully the language with which they reach out to the public, to choose ways
of demonstrating that de-fuse violence (the passive resistance of blockades and the
dignity of silent vigils, for instance), and to use prefigurative methods -- in which
what you do today anticipates and models the better world you want to create.
‘Peace camps’ are an activist method that have often been favoured by women, and
excluding men (though it’s often contested) has been found to add to women’s a
feeling of security.

Cockburn’s work points to how radical feminism has always had a strong double focus:

The first task was that of identifying, deconstructing and attacking the ways in which
women were oppressed in society and culture. The concept of patriarchy is
exceptionally important here. Patriarchy is the power of the father: a familial-social,
ideological, political system in which men - by force, direct pressure, or through
ritual, tradition, law, and language, customs, etiquette, education, and the division
of labor - determine which part women shall or shall not play, and in which the
female is everywhere subsumed under the male. It does not necessarily imply that
no woman has power, or that all women in a given culture may not have certain
powers. (Rich, 1997 in Weedon, 1999: 20)
Radical feminism in particular was concerned to uncover and celebrate the virtues and the
powers of women, which were discounted and sneered at in the dominant ‘masculinist’ or
‘patriarchal’ culture. Within radical feminism, ‘femininity’ is unnatural, imposed, (hence the
demonstrations at Miss World or other beauty pageants) and ‘femaleness’ natural and
positive. Radical feminist groups sought women only spaces as a way of both challenging
patriarchy and as a way of valorising the female. In Cockburn’s research on war and
violence, she identified feminist groups in Bosnia, Palestine and Ireland where women –
across divisions of ethnicity and religion – worked together.

In summary:

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 Attempts to develop new theories that do not build on malestream thought
Places a positive value on womanhood. Celebrates women's difference.
Women (whatever class, race, age, sex, ability, religion, etc) have more in common with
each other (as women) than with men.
Power (of men) derived from patriarchy (rule of the father). Views this as sexual oppression.
There has been a tendency to see men as the enemy and to argue that all men have some
power over at least some women. All men share the benefits of a social system based on
male supremacy.

Socialist Feminism

Wages for Housework

(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/uk/1948016.stm, accessed 3.03.10)

Whilst liberal feminists are more concerned with the individual, and radical feminists more
concerned with the valorisation of womanhood, socialist feminism was focussed on revolutionary
transformation at the level of class relations and capitalism. One way of considering this is through
the ‘Wages for Housework’ campaign. This campaign (see Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa
Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community) focuses on the unwaged labour that
women did in the home. This labour is analysed as a necessary part of capitalist requirements for
the reproduction of labour (through for example reproducing the next generation of workers
through child birth, raising and socialising children, through providing a recuperative home
environment for the tired husband as he returned home from a long day at work and needed to be
kept able for paid labour). The campaign had its detractors – for example paying women wages for
housework might feed into arguments that women should be primarily in the home and they would
have no reason to complain if they were paid for it – something that liberal feminism, with its focus
on getting women out of the private sphere of the home into the public sphere of paid work – had
been very concerned about. Nonetheless, it did introduce into feminist vocabulary the concept of
paid and unpaid work – thus domestic labour would be designated as unpaid work (hence low value
and marginalised).

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As Beasley (1999: 62) remarks ‘Socialist feminists attempt to maintain some elements of Marxism
regarding the significance of class distinctions and labour while incorporating the radical feminist
view that sexual oppression is not historically a consequence of class division’. For example, the
oppression of women predates capitalism. This led to what is called ‘dual systems’ approaches
(attempts to combine sex and class through the analysis of patriarchy and capitalism).

In summary:

As the name suggests, draws on marxist analyses of class. Power is derived from hierarchical
class relations. Sexual oppression is seen as a dimension of class power.
The class system is the main enemy.
Women and men could be the same if it were not for class relations.
But also dual systems approach (class plus patriarchy)

Feminisms of Difference

As we enter its later period, the narrative of feminist history arising out of Second Wave feminism is
one that focuses on issues of difference between feminists. ‘Difference’ became a key word, with
divisiveness as a consequence. The rise of ‘feminisms of difference’, those which rejected unifying
concepts of ‘sisterhood’, drew attention to the differences that separated women. This led to the
mobilisation of particular categories of women rather than all women. Lesbian feminism and black
feminism in particular, confronted hegemonic Western feminism with its taken-for-granted
heterosexism, its whiteness, and its predominantly middle-class privileges. Difference became the
buzzword of contemporary theory, inside and outside feminism, from the late 1980s, partly in
response to these ‘feminisms of difference’ that were often associated with identity politics. Suffice
to say that the challenge of lesbian feminism and black feminism was built around the obvious
problem that ‘women’ is not, as the saying goes, a unitary category, ie that because of the
intersections of ‘race’, class, age, dis/ability, sexuality and so forth the outcomes and experiences of
women vary.

Let’s consider some of these concerns.

Black Feminism

In the late 1970s in Britain the charge of racism exploded in the face of hegemonic white
feminism. In 1984, a special issue of Feminist Review (no 17) was devoted to this issue. The
Black feminist critique argued that hegemonic feminist theory and practice was actually
based not on the situation of ‘woman’ but on the experience and situation of an a-typical
and rather privileged group of ‘women’: young, white and middle class. Well-established
feminist positions on the family, reproductive rights, violence, did not speak to the situation
of women who occupied other positions in what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls ‘social
space’.

Many of these feminists were white and middle class, they were women from privileged
backgrounds who were in a position to write and publish theory. However, they failed to
see how their experiences, upon which their theories were based, were specific to women

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of their own background. For women of colour, working class and lesbian feminists, the
major feminist theories, therefore, failed to provide a voice, as did the discourses and social
practices in which these women were involved or embedded. For example:

Betty Friedan’s 'the problem with no name' (bored housewife living a comfortable
life) did not equate with women who had to work two jobs simply to maintain their
families above the poverty line.
Feminist's concerns for the right to abortion ignored how Black women were
frequently subject to forced sterilisation.
Also feminists’ views that motherhood was an oppressive institution discounts
African views of motherhood as an honour necessary for the tribe's continuance.

So a range of Black women began to draw to the attention of white feminists how their
accounts were culturally and racially specific.

Audre Lorde, for example, asked of Mary Daly who had written a text Gyn.Ecology
and in which there are various stories of goddesses, why all the goddess images she
had chosen were white, western european, judeo-christian. When Daly does deal
with non-European women she presents them as 'victims and preyers upon each
other'.
The silencing of Black history was also drawn upon by Omolade who traced the
differences in the experiences of black and white women over several centuries.
Omolade notes, for example, that in the Middle Ages the social position and status
of Western European was poor whereas black women enjoyed 'high status, and the
civil and human rights accorded all tribal members'. Also between 1500 and 1700
while in Europe thousands of women were burnt at the stake as witches, 'female
organisations in Western African tribes flourished and were responsible for
educating women about sexuality, obstetrics and gynecology'.
White feminist history had also ignored the contributions to feminist politics in the
more recent past. For example, they had ignored the work and skills of Black women
in contemporary feminist organisations.

Lesbian Feminism

The heart of lesbian-feminist politics … is a recognition that heterosexuality as an institution

and an ideology is a cornerstone of male supremacy. Therefore, women interested in
destroying male supremacy, patriarchy and capitalism must, equally with lesbians, fight
heterosexual domination – or we will never rend female oppression. This is what I call ‘The
heterosexual question’ – it is not the lesbian question (Bunch, 1987: 176 in Weedon, 1999:
58, emphasis in original)

Radical lesbian feminists point here to the centrality of sexuality as a route to understanding male
power. Lesbian feminists would argue that their radicalism arises from their non-dependence upon
men (Weedon, 1999) – both financially and in terms of reproductive (ie the rise of reproductive
technologies). They highlight that what many women take for granted and natural – their
heterosexual status – is a core political question. In this way lesbian feminism, via the second wave,

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has sought to extend questions of sexuality to all women not to have them sidelined only for lesbian
identified women. One core concept here is that of compulsory heterosexuality . This is the idea
that heterosexuality is not as ‘natural’ or innate as it appears but is socially constructed. As this
quote from Adrienne Rich illustrates, heterosexuality has to be ‘enforced’ through social regulation
that treats lesbianism and homosexuality as an aberration and through the social conventions that
begin at birth about presumptions that heterosexual relations are the norm:

… the assumption that 'most women are innately heterosexual' stands as a theoretical and
political stumbling block for feminism. It remains a tenable assumption partly because
lesbian existence has been written out of history or catalogued under disease, partly
because it has been treated as exceptional rather than intrinsic, partly because to
acknowledge that for women heterosexuality may not be a 'preference' at all, but has had to
be imposed, managed, organized, propagandized, and maintained by force, is an immense
step to take if you consider yourself freely and 'innately' heterosexual. (Rich, 1993: 238-9)

Summary

This lecture has focused on the campaigns of second wave feminism to illustrate how direct action
and legislative change have had a profound impact on women’s lives and the opportunities for
women in the UK. It has also highlighted core theoretical perspectives that were concerned with
finding the ‘cause’ of women’s oppression because, of course, if the cause could be found it could be
challenged and eradicated. Here I have outlined various feminist categories – liberal, radical,
socialist, Black and lesbian – with the caution that in practice (and in theory) there interrelationships
are far more complex than these thumbnail sketches allow. Next time (Week 1; Summer Term) we
will look at post-patriarchy and Third Wave feminism. Is feminism dead? Of course not. More next
time……

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