feminism

• first wave feminism

  - focus: getting legal rights for women

  - key goal: women’s suffrage (rights to vote)

  - Other aims: access to education

  - Key figures: Pankhurst

  - achievements: right to vote first granted in 1918
• second wave feminism

  - focus: social + cultural equality

  - key goal: workplace equality + equal pay

  - key figure: Greer

  - achievements: equal pay act (1963)

  
  
• third wave

  - focus: diversity, challenging norms

  - key goals: including women of colour and LGBT

  - key figures: Crenshow (coined term intersectionality = difference feminism)

  - achievements: raising awareness eg through #MeToo campaign targeting online harassment
• dual system feminism

  - cause: patriarchy and capitalism

  - solution: adding new policies

  - key figures: Walby - patriarchy and capitalism are interrelated (capitalism exploits women for cheap labour) (patriarchy forces women to be subordinate in domestic sphere)
• criticism

  liberal

  - overstates the progress made by adding new laws eg women still deal with triple shifts

  radical

  - extreme approach and overly critical + unrealistic ideas eg political lesbianism

  marxist

  - dual system feminists (Hartmann + Walby) believe capitalism and patriarchy are inter-twined

  functionalists

  - gender roles are a necessity for society, women play instrumental role, men play expressive role (Parsons)

  marxists

  - focuses too much on gender rather than class inequality

  new right

  - feminists ignore biological differences

  postmodernist

  - feminism uses a meta-narrative which can’t explain a fragmented society