Post 8: Annotated Bibliography

  • Cott, N. (1987) The Grounding of Modern Feminism, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 

“The time has come to define feminism; it is no longer possible to ignore it.” The Century Magazine, 1914 In this landmark addition to scholarship, Nancy F. Cott, author of The Bonds of Womanhood, offers a new interpretation of American feminism during the early decades of this century — a period traditionally viewed as on in which women won the right to vote and  
then lost interest in feminist issues. Cott argues instead that his period was a time of crisis and transition from the nineteenth-century” woman movement to the beginning of modern feminism. 

This article describes Western understanding of feminism and where it started and how is it connected to non-Western regions. The first phase of the women’s movement in non-Western contexts is next to the Western understanding of the first wave and often connected to women’s participation in the anti-colonial nationalist movement from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s. During this period women modelled their plans for gender equity on Western feminists’ demands for electoral, educational, and employment rights adapted to an indigenous program of social reform in the public sphere as well as a re-assessment of gender and sexual mores in the private sphere. 

This is a huge article about feminism, and it shows the problem from different perspectives. It tells us about history of feminism, problems of it, it shows how it turned out.