History of the Movement for Gender Equality

The concept of equality of the sexes is a relatively new phenomena.

Until the end of the nineteenth century, women were treated as the
inferior sex and were excluded from taking part in public life, especially
in areas pertaining to politics, education and certain professions.
Resistance to the idea of gender equality drew its strength from Stoic
and Platonic misogyny, which was reinforced and justified under
different intellectual movements, from early Christianity through to the
Enlightenment. The history of the movement for gender equality is
therefore an intellectual, political, social and economic history of the
changing relationship between men and women, rather than how it is
often distortedly represented as a ‘pro-woman’ movement.

Legacy of ancient misogyny

Women have historically been associated with inferiority in

philosophical, medical and religious traditions. Hellenic

philosophical schools, such as Stoicism and Platonism distrusted all
that was corporal, favoring instead the spiritual. The hierarchical
dichotomy of body versus soul/intellect was seen to parallel the
division of the sexes, with women, due to their childbearing functions
and menarche, pejoratively associated with corporeality. The mistrust
of the flesh extended to mistrust of sexuality; a common anti-feminist
trope that developed over centuries was the idea of the woman as
temptress, someone who tempts the virtuous male from the true
ascetic path to wisdom. With the advent of Christianity, the Old
Testament figure of Eve came to embody earlier misogynist traditions:
Eve, the sinful Woman (Woman because she in fact represents all
women) who condemned humanity by corrupting Adam. Moreover,
since Eve was born out of Adam’s rib, the link between Woman’s
physicality and debt to Man was made more manifest.

Even in medical treatises of the first five centuries AD, women’s

inferiority to men was justified by their physiological weaknesses. In
Aristotelian physiological tradition, which influenced medieval, early
modern and even modern notions of sex and gender, Woman is the
imperfect version of Man: she is matter whereas he is form. For the
Greek philosopher and medical doctor, Galen (AD 129 – 200), women
lacked self-restraint whereas men were characterized by self-control.
These traditions intersected and justified the dominant view that
women were physiologically, intellectually and spiritually inferior to
men.

Protofeminism

Despite the dominance of these misogynist traditions, some individuals

during the Middle Ages and early modern period challenged the
status quo and called for greater equality between the sexes.

Christine de Pisan (d. 1430), a successful Italian-born female writer of

the French royal court is now often named as “the first proto-modern
woman” due to her treatise panegyrising the contributions of women
to civilization, in her famous works, The Book of the Cities of Ladies.
For Christine, gender inequality was not on account of any innate
differences between men and women. Instead, she recognized the role
of education and opportunities as the main cause:

“If it were the custom to send little girls to school and teach
them all sorts of different subjects there, as one does with little
boys, they would grasp and learn the difficulties of all the arts
and sciences just as easily as the boys.”

Christine comprehensively critiques the tradition of misogyny

underpinning literary, religious and philosophical discourses while at
the same time reconstructing a ‘new’ canon of literature and history in
which the contributions of women are included and applauded. There
remains considerable debate on the merits of the label ‘protofeminist’,
in particular as it applied to Christine de Pisan. Many contemporary
feminist historians find her ‘disappointing’ for not being more ‘radical’
yet (Delaney, 1987), others have argued that by her life example
(self-educated, supporting herself and her family through her writing,
publicly engaging with contemporary debates) and by her arguments
for greater appreciation, better treatment and equal access to
education for women, she embodied and espoused one of the earliest
formulations of gender equality.

Did Women enjoy a Renaissance?

This famous question, first posed by the historian Joan W. Scott

(1980?), raised the issue for historians of gender of the unequal fate
of men and women in periods of relative social, economic and political
‘renaissance’. Many Italian women, daughters or relatives of the
leading humanists of the time, it could be argued, did ‘enjoy’ some
kind of renaissance since they were permitted to receive educations
comparable to their male peers. However, even then, there was a
distinct glass ceiling. The humanist, Leonardo Bruni, in a letter
outlining a programme of study ‘most fitting to a woman’ for Battista
da Montefeltro Malatesa (1383-1450) argued:

“To her neither the intricacies of debate nor the oratorical

artifices of action and delivery are of the least practical use, if
indeed they are not positively becoming. Rhetoric in all its
forms, – public discussion, forensic argument, logical defence,
and the like, lies absolutely outside the province of woman.”

In addition, not only were many of these educated women eventually

compelled to abandon their studies and choose between the options of
marriage or the cloister, they also showed a certain level of acceptance
of their ‘inferior’ state. Isotta Nogarola (1417-1461) for example
defended Eve in her debate with Ludovico Foscarini, ‘Of the Equal or
Unequal Sin of Adam and Eve’, claiming that Eve was less guilty than
Adam on account of women’s ‘natural ignorance’ and her ‘desire for
knowledge of good and evil.’

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: The First

Wave

In A Room of One’s Own, the British author, Virginia Woolf (d. 1941),
lamented the absence of female authors, the ‘empty spaces on
bookshelves’ which were only filled by men writing, typically
negatively, about Woman.

“But whatever effect discouragement and criticism had upon

their writing – and I believe that they had a very great effect –
that was unimportant compared with the other difficulty which
faced them … that is that they had no tradition behind them, or
one so short and partial that it was of little help. For we think
back through our mothers if we are women.”

Other than a handful of authors, both men and women, (notably Mary

Wollstonecraft ), the idea of pursuin g greater gender equality was

rarely discussed. By the turn of the twentieth century, however,
Woolf’s contemporaries in Britain and in the Gender Equality in the
Gender Equality in the United States of America of America, New
Zealand and Australia were actively pushing for greater equality,
establishing new traditions and feminist mothers to inspire later
generations. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in the US
and the Suffragettes led by the Emmeline Pankhurst in England were
the key pioneers of ‘first-wave feminism’, a period in which women
organized themselves into public and high –profile advocacy groups,
campaigning for equality in property, economic and voting rights.
Beginning with New Zealand in 1898, women were granted the
Women's Suffrage and within half a century, enjoyed suffrage in a
majority of countries across all continents: the US in 1919 and the
United Kingdom in 1928 (to all women over 21).

The Second Wave

The second-wave of feminists campaigning for gender equality

targeted new objectives from their ‘first wave’ sisters. Having achieved
suffrage and equality in property rights, feminists after WWII
broadened their objectives to tackling discrimination in employment
opportunities, pay and education, reproductive rights and the role of
women in the family and household. The slogan and battle-cry of the
second wave was coined by Carol Hanisch: “The Personal is Political”
The second wave deconstructed and criticized for the first time power
relations between men and women in the realm of the personal as well
as the public: culture, sexuality, and political inequalities were
intimately intertwined, subjecting women to discrimination that only
self-realization of these power relations could overcome.

Key feminists of this period include Germaine Greer and Betty Friedan
. Their works explored the origins and contours of women’s inequality,
breaking the silence over the false myth of the domestic and docile
‘bliss’ of housewives and breaking taboos over female sexuality.

“Women have somehow been separated from their libido, from

their faculty of desire, from their sexuality. They’ve become
suspicious about it. Like beasts, for example, who are castrated
in farming in order to serve their master’s ulterior motives — to
be fattened or made docile — women have been cut off from
their capacity for action. It’s a process that sacrifices vigour for
delicacy and succulence, and one that’s got to be change”
(Greer, The Female Eunuch)

“The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds
of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of
dissatisfaction, a yearning [that is, a longing] that women
suffered in the middle of the 20th century in the United States.
Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the
beds, shopped for groceries … she was afraid to ask even of
 herself the silent question — ‘Is this all?” (The Feminine
Mystique)

Key achievements of second wave feminists in the area of gender

equality include:

 In the US: the Equal Pay Act of 1963, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of
1964, Title IX and the Women’s Educational Equity Act (1972 and
1975), Title X (1970, health and family planning), the Equal Credit
Opportunity Act (1974), the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, and
landmark Supreme Court cases overturning anti-abortion legislation
( Roe v Wade , 1973).

This period also saw international committees and conferences

dedicated to promoting gender equality. The United Nations
established a Commission on the Status for Women in 1946 whose
mission was

“to raise the status of women, irrespective of nationality, race,

language or religion, to equality with men in all fields of human
enterprise, and to eliminate all discrimination against women in
the provisions of statutory law, in legal maxims or rules, or in
interpretation of customary law”

In its first decade, the Commission passed the following conventions

aimed at promoting gender equality: Convention on the Political Rights
of Women, adopted by the General Assembly (1952); the Convention
on the Nationality of Married Women, (1957), the Convention on
Consent to Marriage, Minimum Age for Marriage and Registration of
Marriages (1962); and the Recommendation on Consent to Marriage,
Minimum Age for Marriage and Registration of Marriages (1965).

Under the auspices of the various UN agencies responsible for gender

equality, the first world conferences on women were held, first in
Mexico (1975), Copenhagen (1980), Nairobi (1985) and Fourth World
Conference on Women . In 1980, in the middle of the UN Decade for
Women, the CEDAW came into force on 3 September 1981, signed
initially by 64 countries.
Third Wave Feminism: diversifying the path to equality

By the late 1980s, the campaign for gender equality entered the ‘third

wave’. In response to what was seen as the predominantly ‘white’

and middle class agenda of the second wave, feminists called for
greater awareness of the specific equality concerns of other female
identities previously marginalized in second wave discourses for
gender equality: women from black and minority backgrounds,
bisexual, lesbian and transgender women, the ‘postcolonial’ voice and
lower social classes. The third wave criticizes the second wave’s
“conformism”:

“For many of us it seems that to be a feminist in the way that

we have seen or understood feminism is to conform to an
identity and way of living that doesn’t allow for individuality,
complexity, or less than perfect personal histories. We fear that
the identity will dictate and regulate our lives, instantaneously
pitting us against someone, forcing us to choose inflexible and
unchanging sides, female against male, black against white,
oppressed against oppressor, good against bad.” (Rebecca
Walker,1995)

An important shift in the past two decades has occurred in the

approach to gender equality issues. Previously departmentalized as
‘women’s issues’ that were studied, analyzed and of interest only to
women, issues such as equality in employment is now studied under
the rubric ‘gender’. While certain academics have criticized this shift as
cosmetic, that is another way of referring to ‘women’ or an attempt to
lend legitimacy to the study of women, the shift does have strong
epistemological justifications. As the feminist historian, Joan W. Scott
described:

“Gender as a substitute for ‘women’ is also used to suggest that

information about women is necessarily information about men,
that one implies the study of the other. This usage insists that
the world of women is part of the world of men, created in and
by it. This usage rejects the interpretive utility of the idea of
separate spheres, maintaining that to study women in isolation
perpetuates the fiction that one sphere, the experience of one
sex, has little or nothing to do with the other.”