How did the movement for women’s rights in the 19th and early 20th centuries compare to the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s-1970s? For this question, don’t merely list similarities and differences. Rather, make sure to come up with a main argument comparing the two movements.
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Women Rights Movement
Throughout history, different societies downgraded women and their rights. The struggle for equal rights, liberties, and freedoms for every citizen in America has been ongoing for many centuries now. Freedoms and liberties that so many Americans in the modern-day take for granted cost energies and efforts of rights leaders. Women have not received equal treatment and could not enjoy employment, election, and even education before the late 20th century. Different women’s rights movements have existed across history, with the first, second, and third wave of women’s rights movement ending suffrage and discrimination and achieving equality.
The 19th-century women’s rights focused on the suffrage campaign. The suffrage Women’s Movement started in 1920, winning the rights of women to participate in elections and vote. Women engaged in several initiatives that ranged from violent hunger strikes and changed women’s lives throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. At the start of the 19th century, women did not have equal rights to men. The ideology was that women were the weaker sex. The impact of this was that majority of the middle-class woman could not work or leave their homes (Roy 28). At that time, the primary role of women was to serve at home and support their husbands. For many years, the society held women in low esteem, associating them with reproductive creatures. Men assumed prominent roles because of their capacity to think and physical strength. For this reason, unmarried women could not feel the rights of a married woman because, upon marriage, the women became the property of the husband.
In the early 20th century, married women began championing their rights. In the 1960s, married women expressed the need to pursue careers and contribute to the household’s income. Before the Women’s Rights Movement started in the 1960s, middle-class women had assumed subservient roles in society. Most of the white women stayed at home taking care of their families. However, over time, the early 20th century characterized the first wave of feminism that championed the cultural, political, and economic movements to establish equal rights for women. Feminist activities started championing the access of women to voting and ownership of property.
The 19th and 20th centuries’ feminism demotes the women’s rights movement concerned with the right of women to vote. Women campaigned for equal opportunities in property rights. The era characterized increased activities that opposed the ownership of married women to their husbands. Feminist activism in the late 19th century primarily focused on the right to vote (Roy 29). American first-wave feminists fought for the passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S constitution granting women voting rights in 1919. In a similar manner to many other movements formed in the American nation, women rights groups emerged to offer redress to a social problem; the social problem, in this case, was the discrimination and marginalization of women in the American nation. Therefore, the formation of this movement aimed to provide two leading solutions to the problem of discrimination against women. Primarily, the campaign sought to ensure that women gained access to the empowerment and need to lead controlled and independent lives. Besides, the intersection of the suffrage campaigns across the years was to make calls that would institutionalize solutions against marginalization. As a result, the women’s rights movements aimed to offer women opportunities to get rid of their woes due to marginalization. The movement impacted the social and civil policies in the American community.
In the 1960s and 1980s, the women’s rights movement focused on the equality of men and women. The gender equality movements identified political, social, and labor inequalities and encouraged women to resist sexist power structures (Roy 30). Different women’s activities criticized the idea that women could only find fulfillment through taking care of their homes and bearing children. The champion 1963 efforts through the Feminine Mystique ignited the contemporary women’s movement. Also, it resulted in permanently transforming the U.S social fabric. During this time, most feminists and gender activities hypothesized that women are victims of false beliefs that forced them to find identity in their husbands and children.
The proponents of the movement asserted great effort in elucidating how the discrimination and isolation that women suffered caused them to be in a state of constant oppression and depression. The 1960s movement sought to establish a social organization to connote to any form of societal configuration, beliefs, and the normative order regarding the general public’s behavior towards women and their rights. Women fought institutionalized marginalization and other socio-political and economic sets of procedures that promoted alienation and isolations of women from the processes and activities that occur in the mainstream of their society. Such acts of being left out denied the marginalized women their right to citizenship demonstrated unequal access to education, employment, property, and housing.
Over the years, third-wave feminism began in the early 1990s. The focus of the women’s rights movement was to respond to the failures of the 1970s rights movement. Society had resisted the call for women’s rights, which created a backlash of women’s rights initiatives. The ideology to challenge feminists that had grown out of the women’s rights movement argued that all these initiatives emphasized the experiences of white middle-class women. The continued campaign for gender equality saw women’s lives as intersectional. For these reasons, the movement is demonstrated how ethnicity, race, religion, class, nationality, and gender are significant factors in promoting women’s rights. As a result, women’s rights took an international approach and calling on women worldwide to fight for their rights.
The 1990 women’s rights movement is an extension of the 1960s wave of women’s rights. As a result, these movements have greatly benefited from other rights moments in the United States of America, such as the Civil Rights Movement. Leaders of the women’s rights movement sought to empower the women in society to impact social and civil institutions and practices to cause their involvement and eventual inclusion into mainstream society. The paradigm shift included women’s inclusion in American society’s social, economic, and political processes. These movements sought the opportunity, right, and capacity to exercise their independence as regards their life. They understood that this is an essential characteristic of being a human being. Therefore, any form of discrimination towards women denies them their right to autonomy and the ability to make and implement without the institutional frontier. These decisions affect their lives and well-being. It is for this matter that the acts of marginalization against women emerged as suppressive across the world.
Work Cited
Dicker, Roy. A History of U.S. Feminisms. Berkely: Seal Press, 2008
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