Women's Oppression Through The American Culture

One of the most important movements in the American history was feminism which began soon after the American Revolution. Based on some readings, feminism can be defined as a collection of movements focus on achieving equal politic, economic, and social opportunities and rights for every woman in the world. The movement was born so as to liberate women of the oppression that they suffered under the influence of the American chauvinistic society. During that period of time, women fought for their rights as citizen and human beings. The movement was divided into three main steps; the first one was called the First Wave in which women began to fight for their right to suffrage, and for political equality through the creation of an amendment in the American Constitution. The second one was known as the Second-Wave of Feminism in which the main focus was to combat social and cultural inequalities between genders, especially in themes related to education and reproductive rights. Finally, the Third-Wave of Feminism attempted to renew the campaigning for those women who wanted to be part of the political power. In the following lines, I will try to explain each of these three stages of the feminist movement that was a significant part of the American culture, which had been perpetuated by diverse authors through the literature of that specific period of the US history.

During the ninetieth century feminism was an activity mainly focused on the promotion of equality between genders, parenting, marriage, and in the property for women’s rights, but it principal axis was gaining political power and women’s suffrage. The most important woman indicated as the major feminist was the journalist Margaret Fuller, who acted under the transcendentalist movement and her main idea was that women had the same right in education than men. At the same time, the writer Virginia Woolf was one of the first to be associated with the concept of feminism throughout her book titled A Room of One’s Own in which she wrote “women are simultaneously victims of themselves as well as victims of men and are upholders of society by acting as mirrors to men.” throughout those lines the author highlighted the restrictions that women had during that time; and she used literature to denounce the inequality that women had suffered under the social construction of the period. In United Stated, some of the most notable women that participated on that women’s liberation movement were Lucretia Montt and Susan B. Anthony and her assistant Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who fought for the abolition of slavery and the women’s right to vote because in that period husband and society treated women as slaves.

After some years of fighting the first wave ended when the U.S. government added in the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United Stated Constitution (1919) in which was stipulated the women’s right to vote in all states. However, the first step of the movement was hardly criticized because it was primary conform by white, middle-class and educated perspective of women; which generate the creation of different groups into feminism based on ethnical and multicultural characteristics. As a result of those groups, it began to appear some important writers who wrote about the feminism importance and the different inequalities that a woman had suffered in the development of American culture. To sum up, the first wave point out the started point of the interminable fighting of women to be part of the American society of those days.

The second-wave was focused on trying to combat the social and cultural inequalities between genders during the twentieth century. This second wave came as a response of the end of the World War II in North America; that was characterized by the baby boom, the economic growth and the domain of the capitalism system. However, the idea that woman was just created for becoming in mothers and housewives; was the main detonating reason to continue with the feminist movement. One of the most transcendental issues in that step of the movement was the publication of The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, in which the author contextualized the image of women as wives and mothers limiting them in their potentials and wasted their talents for staying at home. In the first chapter of her book, Friedan said "We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: "I want something more than my husband and my children and my home” supporting her ideas of women’s roles. The impact of the best seller was so big that the president John F. Kennedy realized a report on the equality of genders in the American society; in which the president revealed the discrimination suffering for women through the years. During this stage of the movement the theme of reproductive rights

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