Her interview with Sophia Amoruso gave me more of an understanding of the book after I read it. The first time I heard about Hunger, and Roxane Gay for that matter, was listing to the relaunch of Girlboss Radio. As someone who has been sexually assaulted and raped, I understand how she wanted to protect her body from being hurt again and yet it is constantly hurt until we learn to accept who we are and who we have become. It is also one of the many that have spoken to me. Hunger became part of the list last year for the months of September and October. I have read many of the books that have been part of the reading list. When it first started, I jumped on board as I was fairly new to the whole feminist thing. This consciousness of shared experience can be mobilized into radical political collective action to create a new social order that replaces the denigration of women's difference with a validation of it.In 2016, Emma Watson started the feminist book club, Our Shared Shelf. Using the term "the personal is the political" and the strategy of "consciousness-raising," radical feminisms advocate the analysis of experiences and conditions typically thought of as individual in terms of social problems (rape, domestic violence, sexual harassment) that are the result of gender inequality/male supremacy. Radical feminisms contend that a fundamental transformation of all institutions is needed to change the complex structure on which gender inequality rests. The origin of this hierarchal political arrangement is the traditional family unit, and the gender division of labor found in the family is reproduced in social institutions so that male superiority depends upon female subordination, especially the control of women's sexuality/reproduction. Gender is the foundation for the unequal distribution of a society's rewards and privileges. Organizations such as National Organization for Women (NOW) and the Women's Political Caucus (NWPC) can be effective in implementing gradual change.ĭating from Simone de Beauvoir's 1950s theory of women as a "sex class" and developed further in civil rights and New Left political groups, radical feminisms comprise another widely recognized wing of the contemporary US women's movement and contend that patriarchy is a sexual system of power in which the male possesses superior power and economic privilege. Contemporary liberal feminists took up where their predecessors left off and focused efforts on the Equal Rights Amendment, equal education, employment, pay, and credit legislation, as well as certain reproductive rights that would enable equal participation. In the contemporary second wave of the women's movement in the US, liberal feminists formed one of the two most recognizable wings. The first wave culminated in the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment or women's suffrage in 1920. Historically, the first wave of the women's movement in the US in the early-mid nineteenth century was a liberal feminist reform movement with roots in the abolition movement that sought equality for women, believing that if they obtained equal civil rights under law (the right to education, the right to own property, the right to vote, employment rights) they would attain equality with (white) men. Change can occur by working through and reforming the current system to expand educational, political, and economic opportunity for women.
Each person, regardless of sex, is entitled to individual rights and equal opportunity. The subordination of women is unjust in liberal democracy.
Speaking at an Akron, Ohio, women's rights convention in 1851, Sojourner Truth, a former enslaved woman, challenged the prevailing definition of womanhood as white, middle-class, and weak or unable to work in her speech "Ain't I a Woman?" The first wave of US women's movement sought legal equality and political rights for all women, including enslaved women, demanding the rights to vote, to own property, and to divorce, as outlined in the Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions.ĭ. Although typically considered the beginning of the "first wave" of US women's movement or feminist organizing, the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention was not the first successful feminist rebellion in the New World.Ĭ. The first wave of US women's movement or feminist organizing was inspired by the abolition movement to end slavery, and specifically the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London.ī. 1) According to assigned readings in Women's Lives and class discussion of the "first wave" of US women's movement or feminist organizing, which of the following is not accurate?Ī.