In recent times a large volume of writings has come to be called Women Studies. With emphasis now being put on different facets of feminism, the subject is no longer a neglected area of study. The spate of feminist literature in western countries (particularly in Britain and the USA) has brought to the fore feminism as an organised movement in the panorama of history, beginning in the nineteenth century, passing through different stages of its development it culminated in the rise of new feminism in the twentieth century.
The nineteenth century feminist ideology in Britain and USA was fed by three intellectual traditions which originated in the eighteenth century. The first was that of evangelical Christianity. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Britain and the United States were swept by religious revivals that added fresh meaning and significance to religion. Primarily missionary in intent. the movement eventually developed into what it thought its legitimate concern for dominant social issues, of which campaign against slavery was the most significant. Women also began to emerge (and were drawn in at first as subordinates) from domesticity and take part in anti slavery and temperance campaigns. Evangelical feminism, in spite of the moral fervour that it brought to the movement, remained essentially conservative in its attitude towards women. Its influence was more powerful in motivating women to move out of the home into the public sphere and when women's realm was thereby widened, attitude towards women did not change a bit. It remained as conservative as before. For, it should be remembered that the religious revivalism in both British and American society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century could not provide much promising ground for the emergence of feminism. This is so because, firstly, Protestantism except in its radical forms, did not challenge the prevalent view of women being shown as subordinates to their husbands and secondly, the Protestant emphasis on family and domestic virtues was an essential ingredient of the Victorian anti-feminism and the doctrine that women's place was in the home Despite this, the Evangelical movement in the USA and to a lesser extent in Britain, was significant in promoting the development of feminist consciousness.
The Anti-Slavery movement in Britain and in the USA accustomed women to participate, albeit in a subordinate role, in political campaign and provided them opportunities to learn lessons in tactics some of which were later turned to good account in pursuit of specific feminine goals. It was however in the USA that the emotions awakened by the Evangelical revival were to lead directly the feminist causes. Development in England came later in the 1860s and 70s, rather than in the 40s.
The Quaker movement also shared the moral earnestness of the Evangelicals. The philanthropic and humanitarian zeal of both the Quakers and Evangelicals clearly provided a fruitful background from which feminist ideas emerged.
The second tradition was of equal rights which, having derived its strength from the French school of rationalism, was important in the development of feminist ideas in the West. The French philosophers in the eighteenth century. Montesquieu. Diderot and Voltaire, for example, were sympathetic to women's rights, while Rousseau was strongly anti-feminist. Though the French Revolution did little to further the emancipation of women in France, the ideas behind the revolution were important in the development of feminism in England and America. The enlightenment emphasis on reason, natural law and equality of rights was seen in the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft whose Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) was one of the earliest feminist statements in England. A friend of Tom Paine, Priestly and Godwn, she was well grounded in this tradition. Her work influenced feminist thinking in both England and the USA on both sides of the Atlantic. In England not only unitarians like William Fox, but radical philosophers like John Stuart Mill, found the enlightenment principles working in the development of their feminist thought.
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