Understanding Feminism

The history of women's struggle to change their lives is a long one. The term “feminism”, which highlights their oppression specifically in relation to men, however, has been in use in English only since the campaigns for women's suffrage during the last decade of the nineteenth century. More recently, it has been the resurgence of women's movements in the late 1960s – the so-called “second wave” – that is usually associated with feminist strivings for women's equal rights, and freedom from oppressive constraints of sex, self-expression and autonomy. Most of the theoretical work of modern feminism has occurred during the period since this resurgence, and it is this work that is our focus in Understanding Feminism..