Just as themes are important in the analysis of a movement, the means used to promote those themes are just as significant and that is the purpose of this paper. More specifically, the purposes are (1) to describe the sub-groups and report their goals, [2) to describe the numerous rhetorical devices extant in the movement, (3) to classify the subgroups into conservative or liberal categories: conservative, liberal, and those devices used by both conservatives and liberals, and (5) to suggest any trend of device usage which is apparent.

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This thesis compares the campaigns and debates on sexuality by the British ‘Women’s Liberation Movement’ (WLM) and the French ‘Mouvement de libération des femmes’ (MLF), in the period c.1970 – c.1983. It examines five significant topics: abortion, lesbianism, pornography, prostitution, and rape, all of which were campaigned on by feminists in each country. There has been a distinct lack of historical comparative works on the two movements, and few attempts to compare their discussions and activism on sexuality, which has resulted in a limited view of each movement, something this thesis aims to rectify. Using written grassroots sources, published primary material, and oral history interviews, it argues there were broad similarities between the two movements, but differences in the scope, shape, and progression of their campaigns as a result of national, cultural, and social factors. This study covers the period when each movement was at its height but also when it began to wane in activism, and explores how each approached sexuality in public campaigns and discussions. Examining multiple topics allows a deeper comparison of the feminist approach to sexuality, including: how they dealt with outside organisations; the significance of personal experience; and connections between class, sexuality, and the limits of ‘sexual liberation’. By providing the first historical comparative analysis of the movements’ approaches, this project shows there were many parallel ideas between the two as result of similar origins and outside influences. Yet it was national events and contexts that converted these ideas on politicising the personal into distinctive feminist activism, and a ‘global sisterhood’ manifested differently on each side of the Channel.

The purpose of this study has been to analyze the rhetoric of Gloria Steinem in order to determine how she uses identification in her attempts to unify the members of the Women's Liberation Movement and to enlist the cooperation of others outside the movement.

This thesis explores the impact of the Women's Liberation Movement (WLM) in Scotland. Using documentary evidence and oral history interviews from twenty-nine participants this study charts the emergence of the movement, offering details on where it emerged, why it did and what campaigns were undertaken. It will complement other studies conducted on the WLM in various other parts of Britain, including London and Leeds. It argues for a more representative historiography in which material from other places outside of the main women's liberation centres are included, demonstrating that women's liberation was relevant to many women the length and breadth of Britain. This study covers the period of the WLM's early formation through to the supposed end of the movement in 1979. It describes what the membership was like, the movement's development through local women's liberation workshops,. newsletters and conferences and it analyses two of the most important single-issue campaigns for the movement in Scotland: abortion and violence against women. These issues were important in attracting new women to the liberation cause, forming alliances with other sympathetic groups and in educating the wider public on some aspects of seventies feminism. By providing the first full account of the WLM in Scotland, this research argues that by looking at smaller case-studies the chronology of the WLM can be questioned. The research illustrates that there were important links between the movement and other social and political groups. Moreover, in narratives of the WLM the increasing fragmentation of the movement is usually conflated with weakness and decline. Most accounts tend to describe how the decline of the movement in Britain in the late seventies was due to an inability to resolve conflict. This thesis seeks to challenge this point by arguing that fragmentation and a focus on single-issue campaigns was by no means an entirely negative development. It helped to create a diffusion of feminist ideas into wider society and in the Scottish context led to a flourishing of research and literature on women north of the border. In doing so they ensured the continued relevance of women's liberation ideas into the 1980s

A dominant theme in histories of twentieth century women's politics is the argument that there have been two 'waves' of high profile activity and unity: the pre 1914 suffrage Movement and the post 1960s Women's Liberation Movement. As a result of this historical temporality, the years 1918-68 have generally been presented as a period of longterm decline in women's politics. Since the late 1980s, research on women's politics in the interwar years has begun to challenge this consensus. However, there has been limited re-evaluation of women's political organisation in the 1940s and 1950s. Existing research presents this period primarily in terms of decline, and offers an interpretation of 1940s and l950s feminism through the unsympathetic lens of a 'second wave' definition of feminism based on opposition to women's traditional domestic roles. Using recently released archival material which has yet to be incorporated into analysis of women's politics in this period, and drawing on shifts in feminist thinking since the 1980s, the thesis offers a re-evaluation of self identified feminism in the period 1939-64. Taking as its primary focus, the Married Women's Association, a feminist organisation concerned with the legal economic rights of married women, the thesis argues that a new strand of feminism emerged in the late 1930s. Although the key themes of this 'new' feminism - economic equality and independence of the full-time housewife - were distinctive to the l940s and 1950s, they also revealed intimations of ideas and issues taken up by the Women's Liberation Movement from the late l960s. By arguing for equality in difference, 'new' feminists applied the language of equal rights to women's position in the private sphere. In the process they argued that full-time housewives, as workers and marital partners, were entitled to economic independence in the form of a legal right to half the male wage. From the late 1950s however, growing feminist recognition of married women's dual role led to the beginnings of a discussion about the effects of women's domesticity on their status in the workplace; this was to develop into a critique of the role of full-time housewife for women.

The purpose of this study has been to analyze the rhetoric of Gloria Steinem in order to determine how she uses identification in her attempts to unify the members of the Women's Liberation Movement and to enlist the cooperation of others outside the movement. The rhetorical theory and concepts of identification and consubstantiality developed by Kenneth Burke, literary and rhetorical critic, have been used in this study. The representative examples of Steinem's rhetoric which have been analyzed include a speech made at Southern Methodist University on February 3, 1972, Steinem's feature article "Sisterhood," which was published in the 1972 Spring Preview Issue of Ms. magazine, and a speech made by Steinem at the opening session of the National Women's Political Caucus in Houston, Texas, on February 9, 1973. This study has revealed Gloria Steinem to be, during the years from 1967 until the present time, a vital spokeswoman for the Women's Liberation Movement. The means through which Steinem chose to combat the oppression of women was rhetoric. The three examples of Steinem's rhetoric analyzed in this study indicate that her basic premise concerns the long-standing subjugation and exploitation of women by the ruling class -- white males.

The political tensions between different feminisms, emerging virtually in tandem with the origins of 'second wave' women's movements themselves, continue to present challenges for cooperation and collective action. If flourishing feminist solidarities are to be forged, it is imperative to attend to these divisions, requiring a robust understanding of how they have developed. Though a growing body of research exists on the emotions of feminism, alongside a much more expansive one on emotions and social movements more generally, the emotions of specific feminist movements remain relatively under-explored. This research aims to generate a deeper understanding of radical feminism through a historical examination of its emotion culture during the crucial transition between the development of the 'second wave' of Women's Liberation in the 1970s and the emergence of the 'third wave' in the 1990s. It takes radical feminist writings about the timely and controversial paradigms of medicine and psychoanalysis as a window on the movement's emotion culture in the 1980s. Employing archival documentary methods and a case study approach, the research draws upon the pivotal radical feminist magazine Trouble and Strife as its sole data source. Exploring the text through literary ethnographic analysis and foregrounding a historical lens, it surfaces radical feminism's emotion culture and highlights the way that its development was bound up with the specificities of its historical moment. The movement's emotion culture was fundamentally a relational one, constituted through its specific political lens on the relationships in which radical feminists were entangled. As the 'heady days' of 1970s radical social movements gave way to the British state's turn to neoliberalism, the proliferating reach of its individualist ideological paradigm, and deepening divisions between the evolving strands of the 'second wave', radical feminists were confronted with an array of changing relationships to negotiate. Their uniquely uncompromising stance toward men, their long-established tense relationship with socialist and Marxist feminisms, and their critical view of ascending feminist uptake of psychoanalysis gave rise to an emotion culture which centred around their relationships with each of these. This research contributes to theories of emotions in social movements by focusing on the historically and ideologically specific, rather than emphasising the more general social movement strategic goals which are a common (though not universal) focus in this area. It adds to a small body of work on background emotions, and shows one way that they can be studied empirically. It also contributes to the growing body of work on feminism and emotions, and particularly to research which aims to explain the contentions between feminisms, as feminist researchers move away from the outmoded view of these contentions as simplistic generational divides and seek out explanations through the complex emotionality of feminist relationships.

<p>French Feminism has little to do with feminism in France. While in the U.S. this now canonical body of work designates almost exclusively the work of three theorists—Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva—in France, these same thinkers are actually associated with the rejection of feminism. If some scholars have on this basis passionately denounced French Feminism as an American invention, there exists to date no comprehensive analysis of that invention or of its effects. Why did theorists who were at best marginal to feminist thought and political practice in France galvanize feminist scholars working in the United States? Why does French Feminism provoke such an intense affective response in France to this date? Drawing on the fields of feminist and queer studies, literary studies, and history, “Inventing ‘French Feminism:’ A Critical History” offers a transnational account of the emergence and impact of one of U.S. academic feminism’s most influential bodies of work. The first half of the dissertation argues that, although French Feminism has now been dismissed for being biologically essentialist and falsely universal, feminists working in the U.S. academy of the 1980s, particularly feminist literary critics and postcolonial feminist critics, deployed the work of Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva to displace what they perceived as U.S. feminist literary criticism’s essentialist reliance on the biological sex of the author and to challenge U.S. academic feminism’s inattention to racial differences between women. French Feminism thus found traction among feminist scholars to the extent that it was perceived as addressing some of U.S. feminism’s most pressing political issues. The second half of the dissertation traces French feminist scholars’ vehement rejection of French Feminism to an affectively charged split in the French women’s liberation movement of the 1970s and shows that this split has resulted in an entrenched opposition between sexual difference and materialist feminism, an opposition that continues to structure French feminist debates to this day. “Inventing ‘French Feminism:’ A Critical History” ends by arguing that in so far as the U.S. invention of French Feminism has contributed to the emergence of U.S. queer theory, it has also impeded its uptake in France. Taken as a whole, this dissertation thus implicitly argues that the transnational circulation of ideas is simultaneously generative and disabling.</p> / Dissertation

The women's liberation movement in the 1970s and 1980s utilized various means for activism and demonstrations, but women also used the judicial system to fight for equality in the workplace. This study focuses specifically on the field of journalism and how female reporters used the courts to fight the gender discrimination that was widespread and unbridled before the creation of legislation that outlawed it. The lawsuit filed by Mary Lou Butcher and approximately 90 other women against The Detroit News is one such case that exemplifies the process of filing a gender discrimination lawsuit, as well as the events that led to the suits and the impact that it and similar lawsuits had on the field of journalism and the women's liberation movement as a whole. Using textual analysis to examine the coverage of these lawsuits by industry literature and by the publications challenged by the lawsuits demonstrates what the field of newspapers and magazines was like during the time of the cases. Comparing the same media during the times of the lawsuits and post-settlement reveal how they contributed to an adjusted view of female journalists and aided women's acceptance in American newsrooms.