Feminism
... their move traditional suffragist sisters, they did not stake their claim on any presumed uplifting effect of the women’s vote on American politics, rather, they demanded the right to vote because they considered themselves fully equal to men. Feminism also brought a new and more radical type of woman progressive, and also led to other movements. Howard Zinn describes the feminist movement as beginning with socialist women active in the early 1900s. During the 1915 campaign for a referendum on women’s suffrage, in one day at the climax of the campaign, they distributed 60,000 English leaflets, 50,000 Yiddish leaflets, sold 2,500 one-cent books and 1,500 five cent books, put up 40,000 stickers and held 100 meetings. Howard Zinn asks if the problems of women that went beyond politics and economics, would be solved by a socialist system. Once the economic base of sexual oppression was corrected, would equality follow? Battling for the vote or anything less than revolutionary change – was that pointless? The argument became sharper as the women’s movement of the early twentieth century grew, as women spoke out more, organized, protested, and paraded for the vote and for recognition as equals in every sphere, including sexual relations and marriage. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose writing emphasized the crucial question of economic equality between the sexes, wrote a poem called “The Socialist and Suffragist”, ending with: “a lifted world lifts women up, you cannot lift the world at all while half of it is kept so small, your work is all the same, work together or work apart, work, each of you, with all your heart, just get into the game!” There were also women who insisted on uniting the two aims of socialism and feminism, like Crystal Eastman, who imagined new ways of men and women living together and retaining their independence, different from traditional marriage. There are several differences and similarities between these two descriptions of the feminist movement in the early 20th century. Our history book and Howard Zinn both state that women were trying to eliminate the double standard of sexual morals and sexual relations, and both state that feminists strived to eliminate ste...