AMERICAN FEMINISM

Аннотация

This article shows the description of the theme of American Feminism. Feminism is defined as the belief in women's full social, economic, and political equality. Feminism arose largely in response to Western traditions that limited women's rights, but feminist thought has many forms and variations around the world. Shortly, this article is about the topic of American Feminism and its phases in America. KEYWORDS: Gender equality, worldwide movement, public life, feminist philosopher, a feminist broadside, Enlightenment, Declaration of Independence, Feminist movement, Feminist literature. INTRODUCTION allowed to participate in public life. Women were denied the right to own property, study, Feminism is the belief in gender equality in and participate in public life in medieval social, economic, and political matters. Europe. They were still forced to cover their Feminism is a worldwide movement that is heads in public in France at the end of the represented by various institutions dedicated nineteenth century, and a husband could still to advancing women's rights and interests, sell his wife in parts of Germany. Women could despite its origins in the West. Throughout not vote or hold elective office in Europe and most of Western history, women were most of the United States until the early confined to the home, while men were “AMERICAN FEMINISM” P age 93 | 6 twentieth century, when several territories By the end of the 16th century, when another and states granted women's suffrage long Venetian author, Moderata Fonte, published Il before the federal government did. Women merito delle donne (The Worth of Women, were not allowed to conduct business without 1600.) a feminist broadside, the defense of the presence of a male representative, such as women had become a literary subgenre. a father, brother, husband, legal agent, or Defenders of the status quo painted women as even a son.Without their husbands' superficial and inherently immoral, while permission, married women could not emerging feminists produced long lists of exercise control over their own children. courageous and accomplished women and Women also had limited or no access to declared that if women were given equal education and were excluded from the access to education, they would be intellectual majority of professions. Women are still equals to men. subjected to such restrictions in some parts of The so-called "women's debate" did not arrive the world. in England until the late 16th century, when THE MAIN RESULTS AND FINDINGS pamphleteers and polemicists fought over the true nature of womanhood. Following the There is little evidence of early organized publication of a series of satirical pieces opposition to such restrictions. When Consul mocking women, the first feminist Marcus Porcius Cato resisted attempts to pamphleteer in England, Jane Anger, wrote repeal laws restricting women's use of Jane Anger, Her Protection for Women (1589). expensive goods in the third century BCE, This debate raged on for more than a century, Roman women flooded the Capitoline Hill and until another English author, Mary Astell, blocked every entrance to the Forum. "What published A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, a will they not attempt now that they have more reasoned rebuttal (1694, 1697). The won?" Cato sobbed. "They will have become two-volume work proposed that women who your superiors as soon as they begin to treat were neither married nor religious should you as equals." establish secular convents in which they could However, that uprising was exceptional. For live, study, and teach. the majority of recorded history, only a few The Renaissance feminist voices never came isolated voices spoke out against women's together to form a coherent philosophy or inferior status, foreshadowing future debates. movement. Only after the Enlightenment did Christine de Pisan, the first feminist women begin to demand that the new philosopher, challenged prevailing attitudes reformist rhetoric about liberty, equality, and toward women with a bold call for female natural rights are applied equally to men and education in late 14th- and early 15th-century women. France. Laura Cereta, a Venetian woman who published Epistolae familiares ("Personal Initially, Enlightenment philosophers focused Letters"; Eng. trans. Collected Letters of a on social class and caste inequities, ignoring Renaissance Feminist, 1488;), a volume of gender. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a Swiss-born letters dealing with a wide range of women's French philosopher, for example, portrayed complaints, from denial of education and women as silly and frivolous creatures born to marital oppression to the frivolity of women's serve men. Furthermore, after the revolution attire, took up her mantle later in the century. of 1789, the Declaration of the Rights of Man “AMERICAN FEMINISM” P age 94 | 6 and Citizen, which defined French citizenship, passed, and Mott even got approval for a final omitted to address the legal st