women's movement

Campaign for the rights and emancipation (freedom) of women, including social, political, and economic equality with men. Early campaigners of the 17th–19th centuries fought for women's rights to own property, to have access to higher education, and to vote. The suffragists campaigned for women's voting rights; in the UK they formed two groups, the suffragists, who pursued reform by purely peaceful means, and the suffragettes, who were willing to take militant action. Once women's suffrage (the right to vote) was achieved in the 20th century, the emphasis of the movement shifted to the goals of equal social and economic opportunities for women, including employment. A continuing area of concern in industrialized countries is the contradiction between the now generally accepted principle of equality and the actual inequalities that remain between the sexes in state policies and in everyday life.

General history
Pioneering feminists (see feminism) of the 19th and early 20th centuries, considered radical for their belief in the equality of the sexes, included Mary Wollstonecraft and Emmeline Pankhurst in the UK, and Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the USA. The women's movement was also supported in principle by progressives, such as the English philosopher John Stuart Mill in his essay On the Subjection of Women (1869), although he also believed that the political advocacy of the women's cause was not possible in the climate of opinion prevailing at that time.

The work of women during World War I, turned opinion in their favour; women's suffrage was achieved in the UK (1918) and the USA (1920). In the USSR, following the Russian Revolution (1917), women's social and economic equality was promoted with decrees on equal pay for equal work, liberal divorce and abortion laws, and the setting up of childcare systems. However, the women's movement first gained a worldwide impetus after World War II, with the work of such theorists as Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, Gloria Steinem, and Germaine Greer, and the founding of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in New York in 1966. From the late 1960s the movement argued that women were oppressed by the male-dominated social structure as a whole, which they saw as pervaded by sexism, despite legal concessions towards equality of the sexes. In this period the women's movement was critical of the use of women as sex objects in advertising, and also opposed the social indoctrination of women into passive and accommodating roles within the family and society in general. In the USA (1992) and Canada (1993) immigration rules were changed to grant asylum for women persecuted because of their sex.