Second wave (anywhere from the 60-80s ish..depends who you talk to): -many labour rights (equal pay, work rights, maternity leave), -sexuality rights (60's), -fighting back...it is often associated with the "butch" man-haters with buzz cuts and suits. There were many aspects to second wave and not everyone agrees. Issues of racism and heterosexism became great issues. Abortion rights.
Here: Second-wave feminism refers to a period of feminist thought that originated around the 1960s and was mainly concerned with independence and greater political action to improve women's rights. Feminism is a social theory and political movement primarily informed and motivated by the experience of women. ... Events and trends The 1960s was a turbulent decade of change around the world. ...

Second-wave feminism was most concerned with items such as economic equality between the genders and addressing the rights of female minorities rather than absolute rights such as suffrage, as first wave feminism had. One phenomenon included the recognition of lesbian women within the movement. Lesbians had an ambiguous relationship with other, generally heterosexual-oriented feminist groups. Many feminists did not want to be associated with lesbians because of the stereotypes of "mannish" lesbians that predominated at the time. As a result many feminist groups felt betrayed and rejected straight women, claiming that heterosexual sexual relationships automatically subordinated women, and that the only true independence could come in lesbian relationships. A lesbian (lowercase L) is a homosexual woman. ...

The second wave is most commonly linked with the radical feminist movement. Radical feminism views womens oppression as a fundamental element in human society and seeks to challenge that standard by broadly rejecting standard gender roles. ... "

Its persistence is matched only by the Superbowl Sunday myth.

I do have a lot of problems with the idea of the three waves and especially their periodisation. Modern feminism first developed out of the French Revolution - and its great disappointment in terms of hopes for the emancipation of women - and slaves, though some would push it even further back, to the Enlightenment and women's role in literary salons. (The term féminisme first came into use in French). And of course, in the anti-slavery movement, which first mobilised many women, in particular in Britain and the US.

It is also bound up inextricably with the socialist and workers' movement, and such issues as the safety of working women (think Triangle fire and the much earlier "song of the shirt") but also their dignity and "honour".

Strange as it seems to us where prohibitionism is more tied to the religious right - Christian, Muslim or other - the Temperance movement once got a boost from women struggling with the harm the "saloon" did to women and families, both through increased violence and the man drinking up all the pay packet. And as the "famous five" illustrate, there were a lot of contradictory aspects to the beliefs and actions of those who fought for suffrage and legal recognition.

The obvious weakness of the notion is that vague gesture towards all other women's movements before the sixties as the "first wave." Even if we're only talking suffragism, that movement extends over several generations, back into the C19, and as lagatta says, C19 and early C20 feminists became standard-bearers for a variety of causes, depending on the period: temperance, anti-slavery, eugenics, you name it. I think it is really dangerous and often anachronistic to generalize about these movements, all of which were believably rooted in the social upheavals of their times.

It is true that, in north and western Europe, from the late Renaissance to the late C18, numbers of women managed to thrive, either as creative individuals or, sometimes, with some social influence through media like the salons. But those women tended either to be from the privileged classes or they had become de-classed for one reason or other, often by becoming "exotic."

Between them and the rise of reforming movements in the C19 lies the tremendous, overwhelming backlash against women, the tsunami of the late C18-C19, when the triumphant bourgeoisie everywhere decided that turning their women into pretty little trophies was proof of their arrival. In many ways, the Victorian bourgeois woman was one of the most oppressed human beings who has ever lived. In other ways, of course, women of other classes were equally or more oppressed, but it was upon the bourgeois fantasies about their own women that all modern sexist fantasies about women were built.

Most sexist prejudice is still identifiably C19 bourgeois, I think. As are most other modern prejudices.

[ 05 August 2005: Message edited by: skdadl ]

I mentioned the Enlightenment not to deny the role of literary women in earlier centuries (hey, I did study Italian literature eh?) but because of the ferment leading up to the French and other revolutions.

The three-waves theory is deeply flawed. It also insinuates that women who contributed so much to the "second wave" are irrelevant or no longer politically active, which is certainly not true in all cases. A movement such as the Bread and Roses and World March of women events, that gave a new impetus to feminism here, included women of all generations and many social milieux.

It also writes out of history the complex and contradictory relations between women's emancipation (as they called it back then) and the socialist, workers', revolutionary movements...

quote:

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Originally posted by Mr. Magoo:
Actually, the idea that the term "rule of thumb" referred to a law allowing men to beat their wives with any stick of wood smaller is a myth debunked ten times over.

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So I read your link and found this:

quote:

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Historically, wife beating has been an acceptable
practice both socially and legally. The right of a husband
to physically chastise his wife was inherited from the
British Common Law tradition which considered married people
to be one person, specifically the husband, n91 and, which
gave the husband who beat his wife immunity from
prosecution. In Bradley v. State, n92 a
Mississippi court articulated and adopted this form of
immunity, holding that a husband should be able to
moderately chastise his wife without subjecting himself
to vexatious prosecution for assault and battery. Moderate
chastisement was measured by the " rule of thumb" which
allowed a husband to beat his wife with a stick no thicker
than his thumb. n93 The societal basis for this legal
acceptance of wife beating may be seen in the results of a
survey conducted for [*875] the National Commission on
the Causes and Prevention ofViolence, which found that
twenty-five percent of college educated men interviewed felt
that physical chastisement of a spouse was acceptable in
some situations.

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