History of feminism
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott met in 1840 while en route to London where they were shunned as women by the male leadership of the first World's Anti-Slavery Convention. In 1848, Mott and Stanton held a woman's rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, where a declaration of independence for women was drafted. Lucy Stone helped to organize the first National Women's Rights Convention in 1850, a much larger event at which Sojourner Truth, Abby Kelley Foster, and others spoke sparked Susan B. Anthony to take up the cause of women's rights. In December 1851, Sojourner Truth contributed to the feminist movement when she spoke at the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio. She delivered her powerful “Ain’t I a Woman” speech in an effort to promote women’s rights by demonstrating their ability to accomplish tasks that have been traditionally associated with men. Barbara Leigh Smith met with Mott in 1858, strengthening the link between the transatlantic feminist movements.
American modernism
Starting from the early 19th century, some women used the doctrines of the ideal femaleness to avoid the isolation of the domestic sphere. By the 1830s, women were openly challenging the women's sphere and demanding greater political, economic and social rights. They formed women's clubs and benevolent societies all over the U.S. Male domination of the public arena was no longer within acceptable limits to many of these middle-class activist women. Beginning with the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, American feminists held state and national conventions until the early 20th century. Some spokeswomen of the feminist movement connected the feminist cause with free love and the sexual revolution, which were the taboo issues of the Victorian Age. Therefore, feminists in both Britain and the United States concentrated on political and legal issues, the vote in particular, and other important women's issues regarding the domestic roles of women and the organization of domestic life in general. Eventually, after a long and hard struggle that included massive, sometimes violent protests, the imprisonment of many women, and even some deaths, the battle for women's suffrage was won. The suffrage law was passed in the United States in 1920 for women who were householders or wives of householders and in 1928 for all adult women. (African-American women were not included. They only received the right to vote in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.) The National Organization for Women (NOW) was founded in 1966 by a group of feminists. The largest women's rights group in the U.S. NOW aimed to end sexual discrimination, especially in the workplace, by means of legislative lobbying, litigation, and public demonstrations. The following years of the late 20th century witnessed a great expansion of women's rights in all areas of the modern society.
Modernist artists had an ambivalent attitude towards feminism: on the one hand they opted for equal treatment of men and women with regard to law, franchise, and professions; on the other hand they still had the perceived female inadequacies in terms of biology, culture, and transcendence in mind. As the radical feminist Emma Goldman proclaimed, "true liberation begins neither at the polls nor in courts [but rather] in a woman's soul" (qtd. in Lyon 223).