User:Elene.okamika/sandbox/Wikipedia contribution

First Wave of Feminism

Task division

The improvements for this article will be contributed by two group members: Iker Reiriz and Elene Okamika.

Tasks' division draft scheme:

1. Historical context

• French Revolution (1789)
• Illustration vs. Feminism
  • Rousseau’s ideas against gender equality

2.The polemic illustration

• Mary Wollstonecraft: Vindication
  • Origins of the book – Related with Rousseau’s Ideal Democratic Society of men
• Consequences – Suffragist movements

Draft of improvements

The improvements that I will be contributing into my selected article, are about the origins and historical context of First Wave of Feminsim. Then, I will contribute more information abot the focus of this event. The illustrated polemic will be my contribution's basis. Accordingly, the two key actors' relationship of the First wave of feminsim, which are Mary Wollstonecraft and Rousseau, is going to be explained in order to understand the emerging illustrated polemic, and the historical social context of the moment.

Draft contribution

Mary Wollstonecraft’s most famous work, which is called Vindication, was created on 1792. Its previous feminist work was Poullain de la Barre’s Equality of sexes (1673). This period was so affected by Rousseau’s philosophy, the Illustration. The father of the Illustration defined an ideal democratic society that was based on the equality of men, where women were totally discriminated.

Mary Wollstonecraft based her work on the ideas of Rousseau. Although at first it seems to be contradictory, Wollstonecraft’s idea was to expand Rousseau’s democratic society but based on gender equality. The term feminism was created like a political illustrated ideology at that period. Feminism emerged by the speech about the reform and correction of democracy based on equalitarian conditions. With Wollstonecraft’s work, the illustrated feminist polemic was displayed, and as a result, suffragist movements were stood up.

Infobox

First-wave feminism
XVIII-XIX centuries
Start	Era Baroque
End	XVIII century's end - XIX century's beginning
Before	Democracies emergence
Including	Individualism idea
After	Second-wave feminism
Characters	Rosseau vs. Mary Wollstonecraft

Final contribution

The final contribution does not vary a lot from the draft. What must be highlighted is that we enrich the historical context and origins fields of the article, and correct a data that was wrong, which says that the first wave of feminism was developed between the 19th and 20th centuries.

Therefore, the whole text would be the following:

FIRST WAVE OF FEMINISM

First-wave feminism was a period of feminist activity and thought, that occurred within the time period of the 18th and early 19th century throughout the world. It focused on legal issues, primarily on gaining women's suffrage (the right to vote).

Feminism has its source in the 18th century, specifically in the Enlightenment, in this cultural and philosophical movement there was a controversy on equality and gender differences. At the time appeared a new critical discourse that used the universal categories of this political philosophy. Enlightenment movement therefore was not feminist on its roots.

The origins of feminism came from The French Revolution(1789). This event raised legal equality, freedoms and political rights as its central objectives but soon came the great contradiction that marked the struggle of early feminism: freedoms, rights and legal equality that had been the great conquests of the liberal revolutions didn´t affect women. Rousseau's political theory designed the exclusion of women from the field of property and rights. So in the French Revolution the voice of women began to express themselves collectively.

The term first-wave was coined in March 1968 by Martha Lear writing in The New York Times Magazine, who at the same time also used the term "second-wave feminism". At that time, the women's movement was focused on de facto (unofficial) inequalities, which it wished to distinguish from the objectives of the earlier feminists.

ORIGINS

Main articles: History of feminism and Protofeminism

According to Miriam Schneir, Simone de Beauvoir wrote that the first woman to "take up her pen in defense of her sex" was Christine de Pizan in the 15th century. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa and Modesta di Pozzo di Forzi worked in the 16th century. Marie Le Jars de Gournay, Anne Bradstreet and François Poullain de la Barre wrote in the 17th.

Mary Wollstonecraft’s most famous work, which is called Vindication, was created on 1792. Its previous feminist work was Poullain de la Barre’s Equality of sexes (1673). This period was so affected by Rousseau’s philosophy, the Illustration. The father of the Illustration defined an ideal democratic society that was based on the equality of men, where women were totally discriminated. Mary Wollstonecraft based her work on the ideas of Rousseau. Although at first it seems to be contradictory, Wollstonecraft’s idea was to expand Rousseau’s democratic society but based on gender equality.

Mary Wollstonecraft published one of the first feminist treatises, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which she advocated the social and moral equality of the sexes, extending the work of her 1790 pamphlet, A Vindication of the Rights of Men. Her later unfinished novel, Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, earned her considerable criticism as she discussed women's sexual desires. She died young, and her widower, the philosopher William Godwin, quickly wrote a memoir of her that, contrary to his intentions, destroyed her reputation for generations.

The term feminism was created like a political illustrated ideology at that period. Feminism emerged by the speech about the reform and correction of democracy based on equalitarian conditions. With Wollstonecraft’s work, the illustrated feminist polemic was displayed, and as a result, suffragist movements were stood up. Wollstonecraft is regarded as the grandmother of British feminism and her ideas shaped the thinking of the suffragettes, who campaigned for the women's vote. After generations of work, this was eventually achieved.

A 1932 Soviet poster for International Women's Day.

Louise Weiss along with other Parisian suffragettes in 1935. The newspaper headline reads, in translation, "THE FRENCHWOMAN MUST VOTE".