Feminism Demystified-history and Beyond

The study explores Feminism by focusing broadly on its history and further examining using Marxism and critical discourses by other feminists. Feminism refers to the idea that women and men ought to have equal rights. In 1734, the Swedish Civil Code gave women more rights, most notably prohibiting husbands from selling their wives’ possessions without their approval. In her 1790 essay “On the equality of the sexes,” American women’s rights campaigner Judith Sargent Murray claimed that women are just as bright as men. British author Mary Wollstonecraft responded to philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and other 18th-century Enlightenment intellectuals who did not extend their concepts of freedom to women in her 1792 book A Vindication of the Rights of Women . She challenges the idea that women are less logical than males and opposes the injustice. “Who made man the exclusive judge?” she demands. However, Frenchman Charles Fourier coined the term “feminisme” in 1837, marking the beginning of the concept of feminism. The Victorian Social Convention exalted and imposed the domestic roles of wife and mother on most married middle-class women in 19th-century Britain. Career aspirations were restricted because they were not allowed to receive an education on par with that of males. In The Communist Manifesto , German philosophers and revolutionary political theorists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels contend that a bourgeois man regards his wife as nothing more than an apparatus of production. According to Engles, the family is at the core of the violence and oppression that women experience. Marxist feminists saw capitalism and patriarchy as the two fundamental systems that supported the subjugation of women. The British writer and social theorist Harriet Taylor Mill underlined that a lady who could support the family financially and had a good education would be respected by her husband and treated as a partner. However, men utilize rape as a means of controlling women, as seen by the social inequities that still affect women today. It’s shocking to learn that rape was a taboo topic until 1975 when Susan Brownmiller authored Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape . There was a notion