The Little Book of Feminism

Consider this a brief portrait of what feminism has looked like throughout the years, the issues that feminists have focused on and what they have achieved.

I have chosen to give a brief outline of the history and goals of Western feminism, mainly in the UK, mainland Europe and the US, concentrating specifically on the laws of the UK.

Senate candidate Todd Aikin asserted that women couldn’t get pregnant as a result of rape, claiming that ‘the female body has ways to shut that whole thing down’.

‘A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience.’

Feminism has always enjoyed strong links with socialism and anti-capitalist movements.

She undermined the idea that the sexual revolution was benefitting men and women alike, highlighting the disrespect and financial cheating the bunnies received by both colleagues and clients.

Germaine Greer’s 1970 book The Female Eunuch. She argued that there was no difference between the brain of a man and that of a woman and that it was the traditional nuclear family that oppressed women. She said that society taught women self-imposed limitations (e.g. through emphasis on motherhood and ‘ladylike’ behaviour) and that by limiting their place in society, both men and women were taught subconsciously to hate women.

personal experience and problems have political origins and solutions.

Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique, criticising how women were depicted in the media and the waste of women’s potential by limiting their sphere to the home.

Afterwards, with everyone desperate to return to a normal society that they could never regain and that perhaps hadn’t existed in the first place, more conservative values crept into society and the media.