 in the 1960s resulted in a large number of women moving into the workplace (59.8% of civilian women over age 16 were working in 1997, compared to 37.7% in 1960) and in broad changes in society.
See J. S. Mill, The Subjection of Women (1867); S. de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (tr. 1952, repr. 1968); B. Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963); G. Greer, The Female Eunuch (1970); K. Millett, Sexual Politics (1970); J. Hole and E. Levine, Rebirth of Feminism (1971); E. Janeway, Man's World, Woman's Place (1971); J. B. Elshtain, The Family in Political Thought (1982); D. Spender, ed., Feminist Theorists (1984); J. S. Chafetz and A. B. Dworkin, Female Revolt (1986); A. C. Rich, Of Woman Born (1986); H. L. Moore, Feminism and Anthropology (1988); B. Aptheker, Tapestries of Life: Women's Work, Women's Consciousness (1989); N. F. Cott, Grounding of Modern Feminism (1989); A. Ferguson, Blood at the Root (1989); W. L. O'Neill, Feminism in America (1989); D. E. Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic (1989); S. L. Bartky, Femininity and Domination (1990); M. Jacobs et al. Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science (1990); S. Ganew, A Reader in Feminist Knowledge (1991); E. Cunningham, The Return of The Goddess: A Divine Comedy (1992); B. S. Anderson, Joyous Greetings: The First International Women's Movement, 1830–1860 (2000); R. Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America (2000); G. Collins, When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present (2009).
- a holistic theory concerned with the nature of women's global oppression and subordination to men.
- a sociopolitical theory and practice which aims to free all women from male supremacy and exploitation.
- a social movement encompassing strategic confrontations with the sex-class system.
- an ideology which stands in dialectical opposition to all misogynous ideologies and practices. See also POST-FEMINISM.
Whereas feminism in the late 1960s was concerned with understanding and documenting an oppression believed to be commonly experienced by all women, much contemporary feminist writing emphasizes the diversity of women's relationship not only to the male social order but also to each other. It is more accurate, therefore, to talk of feminisms than feminism. Sebestyen (1978) charted over ten political tendencies within feminism, ranging from a liberal, equal rights position to a female supremacist strand. Palmer (1989) listed the following tendencies – academic feminism, cultural feminism, lesbian feminism, liberal feminism, psychoanalytic feminism, political lesbianism, radical feminism and socialist feminism. Furthermore, black feminism has been concerned with the implicit and explicit racism within feminist thought and has stressed the particular issues concerning the lives of black women (Lorde, 1979). The original four demands of the ‘second wave’ – equal pay now, equal education and opportunities, free contraception, abortion on demand and free 24-hour nurseries – have been identified as the primary concerns of white, Western women. Access to food, fuel and water are the primary needs of many THIRD WORLD women. Feminism has been identified with white women's culture, and many black women favour the term ‘womanist’ (Walker, 1983). Ecofeminism suggests that an end to the oppression of women is bound up with ecological values, and that women should be centrally concerned with ending the exploitation of the ecosystem (Collard, 1988). Ecofeminism has been particularly strong within radical feminism and within the GREEN MOVEMENT.
Case (1988) has followed the convention of distinguishing between two major theoretical divisions within feminism, namely, radical feminism and materialist (socialist) feminism. The former is characterized by the belief that PATRIARCHY is the major and universal cause of women's oppression, and that the power invested in men is the root problem. Radical feminism, the predominant form of feminism in the US, has fostered the notion of an exclusively women's culture, together with a belie