Tag: feminism

In 1981 the noted British sociologist Olive Banks published a work called Faces of Feminism: A Study of Feminism as a Social Movement which provided an overview of feminism from the 1840s up to the end of the 1970s. She identified three feminist traditions: the equal rights tradition of the Enlightenment, the moral impetus of evangelical Christianity and socialism of both the Utopian and Marxist varieties.  This framework provided a useful background for the developments of second wave feminism although it was to become less useful as feminism began to fragment from the 1990s onwards.  However, now we in the UK have another kid on the block presenting another face of feminism; she is Caitlin Moran and her call to feminism entitled How to be a Woman has been the surprise best seller of this summer. Moran has an interesting background: she is the oldest of eight children, was home educated in a council house in Wolverhampton, joined the music weekly Melody Maker as a journalist at the age of sixteen, was briefly a TV presenter at the age of eighteen and has subsequently put in a solid eighteen years as a columnist for The Times.  She is therefore a seasoned media communicator who hasn’t (yet) learnt to keep her mouth shut about the kind of things that women have to go through. Thankfully, she has decided in this book to focus her intellect on making the case for feminism and its relevance to 21^st century lives. Continue reading “The New Face of Feminism: Caitlin Moran’s How to be a Woman” →