Demands by women for equality with men have been a continual theme in Western Society for at least the last 200 years. As early as 1777, women have been fighting for their rights. One such activist was Abigail Adams. She wrote to her husband john, then sitting in the Continental Congress, and warned him not to put such unlimited powers in the hands of the husbands. She went on to threaten that if particular care and attention was not paid to the ladies, they would most definitely foment a rebellion (Buechler, 1990).
Origins of Feminism
This concern demonstrates one of the two main precipitants of feminist sentiment in the Western World: the change in social values that justified an attempt to change social relations. The development of democratic values and the legitimisation of rebellion that resulted from the French and American revolutions were used by the Western women as a philosophical basis for their own rebellion (Amin et al 1990). Mary Wollstonecraft wrote the first......
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