#first-wave feminism

[aishabellasbigblogofeverything]

I love it when women hate men. I love it when women are allowed to vent to each other about how horrible and creepy men are. I love it when women form friendships with and prioritize each other over relationships with men(whether they're attracted to them or not). I love it when women put men dni in their bios and on their nude photos and on posts on their blogs. I love it when women refuse to mollycoddle and accommodate entitled male feelings with "but this doesn't mean I hate all men, I know a few men who are great, I love my father/sons/brothers/uncles/male cousins/guy friends" I love it when women complain about men WITHOUT "not all men" being a disclaimer. I love it when women avoid socializing with/refuse to be around/befriend/get close to men because they know men can't be trusted. I love it when women make "kill all men" jokes. I love it when women offer absolutely no concern or care for men's feelings and if their misandry offends men whatsoever because why should we, men are the oppressor class who have raped and killed and abused us and kept us as subjugated as second-class citizens for millennia, they regularly mistreat us and the women in their own marginalized communities still every single day and make this world so much harder and more awful for us to be in, and if we choose to hate them and not spare them any sympathy then so be it, and I don't just mean "men as a class" either, you can be a woman who doesn't want to have anything to do with any man on an individual basis and completely cuts off men from her personal life too and ykw I will love and fucking support you in that because men deserve absolutely NOTHING from us. If they're so tough and strong then they can handle it just like they can handle being lonely. If you are a woman who hates men, ESPECIALLY IF YOU ARE A LESBIAN AND/OR A TRANS WOMAN, then just know that I love you. I love you, I support you, and you are safe here.

[eternalgirlscout]

i guess it's all building castles in the air about a character who only appears in flashbacks but i don't really get interpretations that claim shou's mom ~abandoned~ him when "lost the equivalent of a nasty custody battle with her supervillain ex husband and went behind his back anyway to at least stay in touch with her kid" feels like the much more obvious conclusion to come to about that whole situation given his dad's line about not "letting" shou see her

anyway i can admit i'm biased because i think shou, 13-year-old who sees himself as a responsible adult, suddenly having to deal with a parent who actually wants to be in his life As A Parent is a hysterical dynamic. he moves in with her like "so what do i owe you for my part of rent" and she's like "shou 1) you are my middle school aged son and 2) i own the house." there's a thematic argument to be made obviously vis a vis mob psycho 100's insistence on showing you genre-typical kids carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders and taking you by the chin and going "look. look. that's a child." but mostly i want to see shou ask his mom how they should revise the chore wheel he used with his adult lackeys to be fair for two people and her mentally screech to a halt and think maybe her plan to give him an allowance in case he wants to see a movie or something is not the biggest issue they need to deal with

[haggishlyhagging]

When I started looking at feminist efforts at the end of the nineteenth century, I knew that women had been involved in work against prostitution because there has been some feminist historical work on the Contagious Diseases Acts. What astonished me about these feminists was that the language they were using was so fiercely feminist. They described men's use of women in prostitution as an abuse of women, as dividing what they called the class of women, and putting aside one half of that class simply for men to use for their own purposes. I was surprised by the strength of the language that was used and the way in which these writers were very directly pointing out men's abuse of women in prostitution, and targeting men directly in everything they said.

I went on to discover something I had no knowledge of and about which there was virtually no information in secondary sources: there was a fifty-year campaign by those women against the sexual abuse of children. This started out of the struggle against prostitution, and it centered at first on raising the age of consent for girls so that young girls could not be used in prostitution. There wasn't a law against men using women in prostitution, but age of consent laws would have removed young girls from men's reach. That campaign culminated in the raising of the age of consent for sexual intercourse in Britain to 16 in 1885, and for indecent assault to 16 in 1922. It took fifty years.

Feminists were not simply trying to raise the age of consent. They were fighting incest, pointing out that incest was a crime of the patriarchal family, of men against women, and that sexual abuse of children was a crime carried out by men of all classes. They were fighting for women jurors, magistrates, women police to look after victims, fighting for all kinds of reforms that I thought had been invented by this wave of feminism. They were involved in setting up shelters for women escaping prostitution, something that is happening again in this wave of feminism.

I was enormously impressed by these feminists. In fact, I sat in the Fawcett Library in London getting terribly excited and wanting to tell everybody what I was finding out. Feminist theorists like Elisabeth Wolstenholme Elmy and Frances Swiney were writing at this time about sexuality. We haven't had access to their work because it hasn't been taken seriously. Where they are written about at all in history books, they are simply called prudes and puritans and their ideas are seen as retrogressive. What these women were arguing was that the sexual subordination of women—men's appropriation of women's bodies for their use—lay at the foundation of the oppression of women.

Interestingly, these two women, Swiney and Elmy, made clear their opposition to the practice of sexual intercourse. This practice has become so sacred that it is almost impossible to imagine any serious challenge being made to it. What we have seen in the last hundred years is the total and compulsory enforcement of that sexual practice upon women so that women are allowed absolutely no outlet or escape from it.

But at the end of the nineteenth century there were feminists who were prepared to challenge intercourse. They were prepared to say, for instance, that it was dangerous for women's health; that it led to unwanted pregnancies or forced women to use forms of technology, contraception, that reduced them simply to objects for men's use; that it humiliated women and made them into things. Feminists pointed out that sexual diseases transmitted through sexual intercourse were dangerous to women's lives. They felt sexual intercourse to be a humiliating practice because it showed men's dominance more obviously than anything else. They believed that this practice should take place only for the purposes of reproduction, maybe every three or four years. I know these are ideas which if you voiced them today would make people think that you had taken leave of your senses. But these were ideas that were absolutely mainstream; they were being put forward by respectably married women, one married to a general.

These women were campaigning fundamentally for a woman's right to control her own body and to control access to her own body. The integrity of a woman's own body was the basic plank of their campaign.

-Sheila Jeffreys, “Sexology and Antifeminism” in The Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism

[scobbe]

“Ah! Poor women, how they are misunderstood! And yet they love God in much larger numbers than men do and during the Passion of our Lord, women had more courage than the apostles since they braved the insults of the soldiers and dared to dry the adorable Face of Jesus. It is undoubtably because of this that He allows misunderstanding to be their lot on earth, since He chose it for Himself. In heaven, He will show that His thoughts are not men’s thoughts, for then the last will be first.”

- Saint Therese of Lisieux, A Story of a Soul, slyly suggesting not only does Christ suffer in solidarity with women but also that women will be elevated over men in heaven.

[femtheology]

The Dialectic of Sex by Shulamith Firestone (Chapter 2) (1970). On the condition of the American women even after the Civil War

[cridhe]

obsessed with this book im reading rn. essential reading for anyone interested in (first wave) feminism and/or imperialism:

Burdens of History British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915

[czolgosz]

sometimes i forget that not everyone knows "i love my neighbor as myself as often as i can, but it's abominably hard—my neighbor is a man!"

[my-thoughts-and-junk]

thinking about fallout 4 against my will

[j-esbian]

(one of) the most frustrating parts about the portrayal of drow society is that it wants to create Reverse Sexism without uncoupling itself from some. pretty foundational patriarchal ideas. it ascribes to the (tired, essentialist) notion that men are inherently good at certain things, and women are inherently suited for different things

but rather than the basic subversion of “women are warriors and men are the homemakers” or even early feminist thought experiments like “traditionally ‘women’s priorities’ are given importance over ‘men’s’ (ie things are governed by council, importance is placed on childrearing, etc)”, menzoberranzan is “this society still holds to patriarchal values and women are not as good at these things which is why it’s demonstrably worse”.

the biggest tell is that they have to control the male population to maintain female dominance, the implication being that in a fair fight, men would easily overpower them. it assumes the misogynist ideas as fact that “women are inherently weaker” and also “women are duplicitous” so the drow fighting style is based on stealth and sabotage rather than “”honorable”” face- to-face combat (letting lie also the assumption that the only avenue for ambition is through military violence, and therefore still making it so that they are reliant on men, even as disposable shock troops, for their success).

the only things that keep women in charge are by stacking the numbers on a systematic level, and through sexual domination on the individual level (because clearly the only real power a woman can have over men is her sexuality).

it is a society where “men act like men” but women don’t act like women; it is evil because an act of god created an aberration against the “natural order” of things, and there is no one to tend the hearth (because if the women won’t do it, no one will)

[zmkccommonplace]

The freedom that women were supposed to have found in the Sixties largely boiled down to easy contraception and abortion; things to make life easier for men, in fact.

- Julie Burchill, "Damaged Gods"

[edwardian-girl-next-door]

~ Paul C. Stahr, "Retouching an Old Masterpiece" (1915)

via the san francisco chronicle

[villalunae]

Are you an academic lesbian? 👀

unfortunately yes

[felidaefatigue]

hey i didnt expect this to come in handy when wanting to aggitate bigots but maybe someone else with also come across a terf or other woman with silly ideas

wonder woman's creator made her based off of him and his wife's (who was cocreator) life partner Olivia Byrne and she's meant to be a feminist icon bondage domme. hence the rope and cuffs.

the more ya know

[haggishlyhagging]

Why were women of the present cut off from women of the past and how was this achieved? While we had been ready to believe the lessons of our own education and to accept that there was but a handful of women in the past who had protested against male power, that they were ‘eccentric’ at best, and more usually ‘neurotic’, ‘embittered’ and quite unrepresentative, then the absence of women's voices from history seemed understandable. But when it began to appear that there had been many women who had been saying in centuries past what we were saying in the 1970s, that they had been representative of their sex, and that they had disappeared, the problem assumed very different proportions.

For years I had not thought to challenge the received wisdom of my own history tutors who had — in the only fragment of knowledge about angry women I was ever endowed with — informed me that early in the twentieth century, a few unbalanced and foolish women had chained themselves to railings in the attempt to obtain the vote. When I learnt, however, that in 1911 there had been twenty-one regular feminist periodicals in Britain, that there was a feminist book shop, a woman's press, and a women's bank run by and for women, I could no longer accept that the reason I knew almost nothing about women of the past was because there were so few of them, and they had done so little. I began to acknowledge not only that the women's movement of the early twentieth century was bigger, stronger and more influential than I had ever suspected, but that it might not have been the only such movement. It was in this context that I began to wonder whether the disappearance of the women of the past was an accident.

Dale Spender, Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them

[geschiedenisish]

The "feminist appearance" of 1901 Amsterdam

So I don't even know how but a while back, I have found this article in a local Dutch newspaper from 1901;

The article is about "a feminist appearance" around 3 o'clock Saterday afternoon on the terrace of a major Amsterdam hotel. This woman was so badass people stopped to look at her. Eventually she stood up and began walking down Kalverstraat, a major Amsterdam shopping street, by which point so many people had stopped to look at her everyone was blocking the street with how many people were trying to watch and follow her.

She was arrested by police and put into the Wilhelmina hospital. No one knows who she was or where she came from. (Although one short phrase suggests she had family members...) The article doesn't even give a nationality! We only know that she smoked a cigarette and was so badass part of 1901 Amsterdam stopped to look her!

I'll post a translation on my blog of the full article. Otherwise this post will get a bit too long. ;)

[femtheology]

The Dialectic of Sex by Shulamith Firestone (Chapter 2) (1970). On “reformers” vs feminists.