Modern world Feminism: a Saga

We live in the country where democracy is practiced at its best. But democracy faces many challenges each and everyday, although we know them very well but often many challenges are not discussed at all and one of these challenges include the very raging topic "Feminism". From the beginning we are taught to respect women and treat them as goddess because women are the backbone of our society. It's even right to do so, because women deserve that. but our so called modern society often misunderstand it with feminism. So let's start with what is the real meaning of feminism? Feminism is an ideology that aimed at defining and defending equal political, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Like their feminist counterparts all over the world, feminists in India seek gender equality: the right to work for equal wages, the right to equal access to education, and equal political rights. Indian feminists also have fought against culture-specific issues within India's patriarchal society. So let's talk about the 4 waves of Feminism. The first wave: 1848 to 1920:

The first wave basically begins with the Seneca Falls convention of 1848. There, almost 200 women met in a church in upstate New York to discuss “the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women.” Attendees discussed their grievances and passed a list of 12 resolutions calling for specific equal rights — including, after much debate, the right to vote. After fighting for so many years for women' right in 1920, Congress passed the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote. (In theory, it granted the right to women of all races, but in practice, it remained difficult for black women to vote, especially in the South.) The second wave: 1963 to the 1980s:

“The personal is political,” said the second-wavers. (The phrase cannot be traced back to any individual woman but was popularized by Carol Hanisch.) They would go on to argue that problems that seemed to be individual and petty — about sex, and relationships, and access to abortions, and domestic labor — were in fact systemic and political, and fundamental to the fight for women’s equality. The second wave worked on getting women the right to hold credit cards under their own names and to apply for mortgages. It worked to outlaw marital rape, to raise awareness about domestic violence and build shelters for women fleeing rape and domestic violence. It worked to name and legislate against sexual harassment in the workplace. As the women’s movement developed, it was rooted in the anti-capitalist and anti-racist civil rights movements, but black women increasingly found themselves alienated from the central platforms of the mainstream women’s movement. The third wave: 1991(?) to ????:

It is almost impossible to talk with any clarity about the third wave because few people agree on exactly what the third wave is, when it started, or if it’s still going on. Early third-wave activism tended to involve fighting against workplace sexual harassment and working to increase the number of women in positions of power. Intellectually, it was rooted in the work of theorists of the ’80s: Kimberle Crenshaw a scholar of gender and critical race theory who coined the term intersectionality to describe the ways in which different forms of oppression intersect; and Judith Butler, who argued that gender and sex are separate and that gender is performative. Crenshaw and Butler’s combined influence would become foundation to the third wave’s embrace of the fight for trans rights as a fundamental part of inter sectional feminism. Third-wave feminism had an entirely different way of talking and thinking than the second wave did — but it also lacked the strong cultural momentum that was behind the grand achievements of the second wave. The present day: a fourth wave?

Feminists have been anticipating the arrival of a fourth wave since at least 1986, when a letter written to Wilson Quarterly opined that the fourth wave was already building. Internet trolls actually tried to launch their own movement in 2014, planning to create a “pro-sexualization, pro-skinny, anti-fat” feminist movement that the third wave would revile, ultimately miring the entire feminist community in bloody civil war. (It didn’t work out.) But over the past few years, as #MeToo and Time’s Up pick up momentum, the Women’s March floods Washington with pussy hats every year, and a record number of women prepare to run for office, it’s beginning to seem that the long-heralded fourth wave might actually be here. Like all of feminism, the fourth wave is not a monolith. It means different things to different people. But these tent-pole positions that Bustle identified as belonging to fourth-wave feminism in 2015 do tend to hold true for a lot of fourth-wavers; namely, that fourth-wave feminism is queer, sex-positive, trans-inclusive, body-positive, and digitally driven. (Bustle also claims that fourth-wave feminism is anti-misandry, but given the glee with which fourth wavers on internet riff on ironic misandry, that may be more prescriptive than descriptiveness on their part.) Yet a lot of feminist rhetoric today does cross the line from attacks on sexism into attacks on men, with a strong focus on personal behavior: the way they talk, the way they approach relationships, even the way they sit on public transit. Male faults are stated as sweeping condemnations; objecting to such generalizations is taken as a sign of complicity. Meanwhile, similar indictments of women would be considered grossly misogynistic.