Feminism

Unlike traditional political theories and ideologies, feminism provides a way of looking at the world that sees women’s situation and the inequalities between men and women as central political issues; as such, it provides a fundamental challenge to dominant assumptions about the scope and nature of politics. Feminism was not similarly central to the revolutionary socialist ideas developed by Karl Marx later in the century. Central to all Marxist feminism is the belief that women’s subordination is not a permanent, natural or inevitable feature of human relationships, but the historically specific product of class society. The campaign for women’s suffrage developed during the second half of the nineteenth century, and reached a dramatic climax in Britain in the brief but famous period of suffragette militancy before the First World War. In Britain, women over thirty were given the vote in 1918, and in America the 1920 Constitutional Amendment enfranchised all adult women.