women's movement/women's liberation movement/women's rights movement

in 1838, Adelaide Anne Procter wrote to her friend Anna Jameson: "The men are much alarmed by certain speculations about women; and well they may be, for when the horse and ass begin to think and argue, adieu to riding and driving." In the same year, Sarah M. Grimké wrote, "I ask no favors for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our necks." In 1739 it was Sophia, identified only as "A Person of Quality": "What a wretched circle this poor way of reasoning among the Men draws them insensibly into. Why is learning useless to us? Because we have no share in public offices. And why have we no share in public offices? Because we have no learning." Or Mary Astell in 1694: "Women are from their very infancy debarred those advantages with the want of which they are afterwards reproached.... So partial are men as to expect bricks when they afford no straw." Choose almost any year and you will find women writing, agitating, outlining arguments we are still using today. There has always been a women's movement. However, the women's rights movement as a formal movement commonly dates from 1848 when women met in Seneca Falls, New York, to draw up the first public protest in the U.S. against the political, social, and economic repression of women. The "women's liberation movement," which grew out of leftist politics in the 1960s, was never one monolithic organized group, but its proponents generally espoused more radical issues than those of the women's movement; they were also the first to promote consciousness raising. See also feminism, feminisms.