First Wave Feminists/Suffragists

I just finished reading the book“The Flipside of Feminism”by Suzanne Venker and Phyllis Schlafly.  I highly recommend reading this book; it is a quick read with so much great information.
My mind is simply swimming with the assertions made and the no-nonsense approach of these two wonderfully candid authors. While I really appreciated and agreed with many of the messages the book espoused (such as the need to build up the roles of men as protectors & that women are not inherently born victims by our gender), I could not get over one of the  lines in the introductory note from the authors.  It read, “Some have even tried to rehabilitate feminism by claiming conservative women belong to something called the “new feminism”, or even “pro-life feminism (Sarah Palin comes to mind) -as if there were such a thing.”

The book never goes into an explanation why such a thing as “new feminism” or “pro-life feminism” is an impossibility; but nonetheless, it set me to thinking and caused me to want to define what a New Feminist looks like. I think for the sake of length, I will do this in two short posts; the first giving you a brief history in order to understand how we ended up in this mess, and the second to explain how we can spark a new movement of women called New Feminists to set right the wrongs of previous movements.
In Feminist “herstory” (cute, I know) the commonly accepted genealogy of feminism begins with the First Wave Feminists, or Suffragists as they were called during their lifetimes.  This First Wave began roughly around the time of the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 and lasted until the Nineteenth Constitutional Amendment legalized voting rights for women (the primary goal of the movement) in 1920.

A "liberated" Second Wave Feminist


The Second Wave of Feminism doesn’t have quite as clear of a start date, but many of the ideas and foundational building blocks were already being promoted in society as early as the 1910s-20s.  Margaret Sanger was already hard at work bringing birth control to our country; although interestingly, she was never allied with the work of the suffragists even though they were working at the same time. Their missions never overlapped and as far as I can tell, there were no friendships or even working relationships between Sanger and the Suffragists. In fact, the main Suffragist magazine, The Revolution even prohibited advertisements for abortifacients and other birth control methods. This point, along with dramatic ideological differences, has led me to believe that the “Waves” theory of Feminism is flawed and that what actually emerged as “Second Wave Feminism” had really little or nothing to do with the work of “First Wave of Feminism”.
By defining Feminism in waves, it assumes that each subsequent movement grew out a previous movement with the same basic goals or ideas. I do not think that what Second Wave Feminism promoted (and what “The Flipside of Feminism” refers to exclusively in their book as the whole of Feminism) was at all in keeping with the intentions of the The First Wave. To say that these completely different groups of women, with completely different sets of standards are as closely related as “waves” or ripples from the same stone is a leap at best, and in reality was a complete hijacking of the success of a previous movement of women.
First Wave Feminists were largely family oriented. They were often Prohibitionists as they saw alcohol the downfall of many good family men. They explained their family planning decisions as “voluntary motherhood”, meaning they accepted that fertility and children were part of the vocation they signed up with in getting married. They did not speak of their children, or the children of poor women as millstones around their necks, but rather individual people who deserved love and respect and good families to bring them up. Their principles called for responsibility and patriotism…..all things that Second Wave Feminists abhorred and fought with all their strength against.
Second Wave Feminism is almost synonymous with the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s-1970s. Foundational principles to this movement include access to birth control and abortion, promotion of women in the workforce, the notion of “equality” between the sexes, and the liberation of women from marriage and motherhood. All of these ideas were central to the groundbreaking Feminist book, “The Feminine Mystique” by Betty Frieden, which is often credited with sparking the Second Wave of Feminism.
In this book Frieden points back to the Suffragists movement and said that the women of her day, the 1950s,  needed to do something similar in demanding new “rights” for themselves. They must create an escape from the “comfortable concentration camps” of their families and homes. They must demand the right to live as their husbands did and be free to work outside the home, have their own money, place their children in daycare, or not have any children at all.  Right there is where the entire ideology from First to Second Wave Feminism breaks apart. First Wave Feminists recognized that men and women were different by nature. They were not threatened by the roles of their husbands and brothers, but rather saw them as complimentary to what they were doing with thier lives. They saw men as partners, not competitors. New Feminists also hold this complimentary view of men…..and we’ll continue this conversation in the next post as we talk more about what New Feminists believe and how we differ from all previous waves (there is also a Third Wave that we’re supposedly in now, but it seems to basically be Second Wave Feminism allied with other social movements such as LGBT).
What other differences do you see existing from First to Second Wave Feminists? Do you feel like New Feminists should even use the name “feminist” as it did not come into popular use until the 1960s? I’m interested to hear what your thoughts are at this point.