The Waves of Feminism

While reading and familiarizing myself with Ms. Kristen Rowe-Finkbeiner's "A Tsunami in History" I found myself becoming more and more interested with the history on the Women's Movement that she was providing. I found it especially interesting that Abigail Adams encouraged her husband John Adams "'remember the ladies' while drafting the Declaration of Independence." This shows that even before the first wave of the movement, there were still women hoping for the chance of gender equality. When Rowe-Finkbeiner brought up the names of Harriet Tubman and Sorjourner Truth, I was pleasantly surprised because I had never thought of those women as feminists or advocates of the women's movement, but more as abolitionists and supporters in slavery escape. Later in the article when she brings up the excluding of African American women from the first and second waves, I couldn't help but think to myself that some of the first feminists were black women, how could they not have seen that? But of course, as Rowe-Finkbeiner states, women of color "were often (understandably) rebuffed because there was still the sentiment that black women should be working with black men on civil rights issues- they were torn." With the Civil Rights movement still going on or still very fresh in society during the second wave of the movement, it was hard to include colored women because they didn't know if they should be involved in such a white dominated movement.

I also found her personal connection to the movement extremely interesting as well. The fact that her great-grandmother had helped to run Planned Parenthood and help other women was very inspiring and captivating. The fact that her grandmother had been a volunteer nurse at the organizaton was also very cool because it showed that feminism is in fact a generational way of living. Women are not "just feminists." They are living a feminist lifestyle. By the time her mother had become apart of the movement, women were going to college and beginning to work their way into the work force. The generational gap between the women in her family was quite compelling, seeing how each women's actions had affected the life of the next.