Introducing Feminism

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INTRODUCING

FEMINISM .

A BASIC GUIDE

This book was developed for the Social Design project, as a part of the Unit “Language, Audicence and Environment”, for the second year of Graphic and Media Design course.

The content of this book is a collection of different sources, a general view about what it is femininsm according to the original basis.

Images: Pinterest

Leda Marília Furquim de Camargo FUR14438076 London, UK April/2015

SUMMARY

WHAT IS FEMINISM?

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ARE YOU A FEMINIST?

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THE DIFERENCE BETWEEN FEMINISM AND MACHISMO

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THE RIGHT TO CHOOSE

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FEMINIST VERSUS FEMININE

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FEMINIST IS A “WOMAN’S THING”

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF FEMINISM

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IT IS MY BODY!

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MEN’S INNOCENCE

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IT’S JUST THE BEGINNING

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WHAT IS

FEMINISM?

If you look into the dictionary, this is the definition you will find about Feminism:

the belief that women should be allowed the same rights, power, and opportunities as men and be treated in the same way, or the set of activities intended to achieve this state.

and for the definiton of a Feminist:

a person who believes in feminism, and tries to achieve change that helps women to get equal opportunities and treatment.

If you don’t understand what is means here, the next page will explain better and you will also see if you are a feminist person (you being a woman OR a man!)

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ARE YOU A

FEMINIST?

Here is a quick test. What do you think about the following questions?

- Women should receive the wage value as men for the same job?

- Women should choose whether and when to become mothers?

- Women should be free to manage their own property?

- Women should not suffer physical or psychological violence for refusing to have sex or to disobey his father or husband?

- Housekeeping is a resposability of all residents of the house, they being men or women?

- Women should receive the same education as men?

- Take care of the children should be an obligation of both the father and the mother?

- Women should be the only ones responsible for choosing their carrers, and this decision cannot be imposed by the State, the school or the family?

If you agree with the majority of those questions, then YES, you are a pro-feminist!

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THE DIFERENCE BETWEEN

FEMINISM AND MACHISMO

Feminism is the pursuit of equal rights for all women. Machismo is the domination of men over women.

Machismo, by definition, is a strong or exaggerated sense of traditional masculinity placing great value on physical courage, virility, domination of women, and aggressiveness.

Feminism and Machismo will never be the same thing; it is a false symmetry. By definition, 5 machismo is a anti-women behaviour, whereas feminism never was, and never will be anti-men. The enemy is this sexist and macho society we were living.

Machismo is something that happens everyday, worldwide, with billions of women. And worst of all, machismo kills. Feminism may have all the defects of the world, but different from machismo, it never killed anyone.

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THE RIGHT TO

CHOOSE

Feminism did not end with the choice of anyone. Instead, it took a world where women had no choice and turned it into a world where a woman can choose to be a doctor or not, be a housewife or not, be swimmer or not, be a lawyer or not, to vote or not.

Unfortunately, the freedom to choose brings with it the burden of dealing with the social costs of this choice. Women did not had to faced the cost of their choices before because they had to face a evenmore-costly reality of have no choice at all.

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FEMINISM VERSUS

FEMININE

“But I am not feminist, I am feminine!”

It is not true when they say that a feminst woman can not be feminine - it is true that some feminists chose to abdicate some of the beauty procedures for considering them a imposition of society, but there is no such a thing prohibiting women to “take care” of their beauty. This is not what feminsm is about.

Feminism stand up for equal rights and the freedom of choice for women, and that includes the freedom to do your nails or not, to shave or not to shave, to be a doctor or a housewife and mother, etc.

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FEMINISM IS A

“WOMAN’S THING”

This is also not true.

Feminism is, above all, a fight for human rights, equal rights for both genders. And this fight affects both men and women. When we set women free, the feminism also frees the men from the historical obligation to always take the first step, to be a step ahead, to be in charge, to earn more.

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF

FEMINISM

While feminists around the world have differed in causes, goals, and intentions depending on time, culture, and country, most Western feminist historians assert that all movements that work to obtain women’s rights should be considered feminist movements, even when they did not (or do not) apply the term to themselves.

18th century: the Age of Enlightenment The Age of Enlightenment was characterized by secular intellectual reasoning and a flowering of philosophical writing. Many Enlightenment philosophers defended the rights of women, including Jeremy Bentham (1781), whom spoke for complete equality between sexes including the rights to vote and to participate in government.

He opposed the asymmetrical sexual moral standards between men and women, Marquis de Condorcet (1790), a fierce defender of human rights, including the equality of women and the abolition of slavery, unusual for the 1780s, and Mary Wollstonecraft (1792), the most cited feminist writer of the time and often characterized as the first feminist philosopher.

19th century At the outset of the 19th century, the dissenting feminist voices were of little social influence. Caroline Norton, an English feminist and social reformer advocated

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF FEMINISM: PART 2

for changes in British law. She discovered a lack of legal rights for women upon entering an abusive marriage.

Feminists of previous centuries charged women’s exclusion from education as the central cause for their domestic relegation and denial of social advancement, and women’s 19th-century education was no better.

Campaigns gave women opportunities to test their new political skills and to conjoin disparate social reform groups. Their successes include the campaign for the Married Women’s Property Act (passed in 1882) and the campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866, and 1869, which united women’s groups and utilitarian liberals like John Stuart Mill.

First Wave The 19th- and early 20th-century Anglosphere feminist activity that sought to win women’s suffrage, female education rights, better working conditions, and abolition of gender double standards is known as first-wave feminism. The term “first-wave” was coined retrospectively when the term second-wave feminism was used to describe a newer feminist movement that fought social and cultural inequalities beyond basic political inequalities.

Suffrage The women’s right to vote, with its legislative representation, represented a paradigm shift where women would no longer be treated as second-class citizens without a voice. The women’s suffrage campaign is the most deeply embedded campaign of the past 250 years.

At first, suffrage was treated as a lower priority.

The French Revolution accelerated this with the assertions

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF FEMINISM: PART 3

of Condorcet and de Gouges, and the women who led the 1789 march on Versailles. In 1793, the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women was founded, and originally included suffrage on its agenda before it was suppressed at the end of the year. As a gesture, this showed that issue was now part of the European political agenda. The Australian State of South Australia was the first place in the world to officially grant full suffrage to women.

The Isle of Man was the first free standing jurisdiction to grant women the vote (1881), followed

by New Zealand in 1893, where Kate Sheppard[82] had pioneered reform. Some Australian states had also granted women the vote. This included Victoria for a brief period (1863–5), South Australia (1894), and Western Australia (1899). Australian women received the vote at the Federal level in 1902, Finland in 1906, and Norway initially in 1907 (completed in 1913).

Early 20th century

The early 20th century, the Edwardian era, saw a loosening of Victorian rigidity and complacency: women had more employment opportunities and were more active, leading to a relaxing of clothing restrictions. Books, articles, speeches, pictures, and papers from the period show a diverse range of themes other than political reform and suffrage discussed publicly.

Mid-20th century

Women entered the labor market during the First World War in unprecedented numbers, often in new sectors, and discovered the value of their work. The war also left large numbers of women bereaved and with a net 19

A BRIEF HISTORY OF FEMINISM: PART 4

loss of household income. The scores of men killed and wounded shifted the demographic composition. War also split the feminist groups, with many women opposed to the war and others involved in the white feather campaign.

Second Wave

“Second-wave feminism” identifies a period of feminist activity from the early 1960s through the late 1980s that saw cultural and political inequalities as inextricably linked. The ideas and efforts of this era continue to coexist with third-wave feminism. The movement encouraged women to understand aspects of their personal lives as deeply politicized and reflective of a sexist power structure.

As first-wave feminists focused on absolute rights such as suffrage, second-wave feminists focused on other cultural equality issues, such as ending discrimination.

Third Wave Third-wave feminism began in the early 1990s in response to what young women perceived as failures of the second-wave. It also responds to the backlash against the second-wave’s initiatives and movements.

Third-wave feminism seeks to challenge or avoid secondwave “essentialist” definitions of femininity, which overemphasized the experiences of white, upper middle class women. A post-structuralist interpretation of gender and sexuality, or an understanding of gender as outside binary maleness and femaleness, is central to much of the third wave’s ideology.

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IT’S

MY BODY!

One of the worst things for women is not to have control over their own bodies. Worse than not be able to vote, to work, to have an opinion about something. In practice, this is what distinguish most people: the racional, adult and responsible ones at one hand, and animals, children, incapable and elderly people... and women!

Men have total autonomy over their bodies.

Nobody tells them if they can have a tattoo or not, if they can or should have a vasectomy or not, if they have to do a prostate examination or not. Everytime a man say what we should or shouldn’t do with our bodies, we shrink ourselves, we feel poweless, inferior, childlike, objectfied, and we have every right to feel this way. Without the power to decide anything, we are nothing.

They are so used to tell us what to do, they don’t know when it’s time to just say nothing at all.

So, men, give us the cortesy that we’ve been given you for hundreds of years, and don’t tell us what to do with our bodies. It’s my body, not yours.

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MEN’S

INNOCENCE

Women are just as responsible as men by perpetuating sexist culture, but with one big difference: only men benefit from this. No men is innocent of machismo crimes. Even men who’d never do anything wrong benefits of this structure of domination create by machismo.

One of the major differences between men and women is the range of privileges enjoyed by them, often without even realising that they are privileges. For men, go through life without fear of dying or being raped is such a normal thing that they don’t realise. But from the point of view of a woman, this is one of the greatest male privileges.

It’s not enough just not being macho: in a society where machismo prevails, it’s necessary that men have act individually and structurally to give up these privileges.

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IT’S JUST

THE BEGINNING

This booklet was just a introduction, a tiny little piece of what it is feminism. If you want to learn more about feminism, here are some things that are a great starter:

HeforShe Campaign: http://www.heforshe.org/

HeForShe is a solidarity campaign for gender equality initiated by UN Women. Its goal is to engage men and boys as agents of change for the achievement of gender equality and women’s rights, by encouraging them to take action against inequalities faced by women and girls.

We Should All Be Feminists: https://youtu.be/hg3umXU_qWc What does “feminism” mean today? That is the question at the heart of We Should All Be Feminists, a personal, eloquently-argued essay – adapted from her much-viewed Tedx talk of the same name – by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. With humour and levity, here Adichie offers readers a unique definition of feminism for the twenty-first century – one rooted in inclusion and awareness. She shines a light not only on blatant discrimination, but also the more insidious, institutional behaviours that marginalise women around the world, in order to help readers of all walks of life better understand the often masked realities of sexual politics.

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THANK YOU

FOR READING! .