“Perhaps two wave of feminism will be enough to free us.”(Ellen DuBois) Ellen DuBois was quite optimistic when she publicized the article Feminism Old Wave and New Wave in 1971 during the Second-wave Feminism. Ellen DuBois might not have expected that the Second-wave Feminism declined only one decade after this article was first circulated, unlike the First-wave Feminism which lasted almost a century. But in the Second-wave Feminism, women tried to deal with varied issues and did gain a lot of rights that were previously unavailable to us: abortion has been made legal in the United States, birth control pills become available to unmarried people, and as illustrated in The Future That Never Happened:”The women’s movement introduced revolutionary ideas that caught on so thoroughly they now seem self-evident”. However, it took almost a hundred years for the suffragists in the First-wave Feminism just to win the voting right.
Both of the First and the Second waves resulted from women’s active participation in contemporary social reform movements, Abolitionism in the First-wave and Civil War before the Second-wave, as Ellen DuBois described, to prove “their political seriousness” and to gain reward from the society, which largely means the male-dominated society. However, as usual, most men did not even bother to care, not to mention to support, feminism; if I were a man, I would have chosen the same position for sure, why would ‘I’ bother to support something that will largely lessen those ‘privileges’ ‘I’ take for granted since ‘I’ was born while ‘I’ would not be blamed for not doing so? Feminists also started to realize that “the oppression of women was not top priority for anyone but women themselves” (Ellen DuBois) in the Abolitionism. In the World Antislavery Convention held in London, female abolitionists were only allowed to hear the Convention behind a curtain in the convention hall. And feminists were more convinced that we can only win by our own power since women were totally ignored in the 14th and 15th Amendment.
“I think that twixt the Negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon.”(Akron, December 1851) Akron also believed that it would not be hard for women to win our rights since Abolitionists and Feminists had the same enemy- white men, we might win together. But having the same enemy sometimes does not necessarily mean standing in the same line, as black women and white women did not assist each other in the Freedom Summer that demonstrated in The Re-Emergence of the “Woman Question”, and in present society, women like to keep other women down and often treated other women as competitors in work place.
In The Declaration of Sentiments, Elizabeth Cady Stanton crucially pointed out that it is our right to overturn the government which makes us painful and to create a new one, but throughout history, humans are more inclined to bear sufferings than to rebel the initiator of our sufferings for”governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes” (Elizabeth Cady Stanton). Therefore, though men and male-dominated government imposed injuries on women and deprived most of our self-evident human rights, women kept silent for centuries and government ran well with “entire disfranchisement of one-half the people of this country, their social and religious degradation”(Elizabeth Cady Stanton).
After reading many feminists’ works, I have a question: Is making everything being divided equally to women and men the ultimate aim of feminism?
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