research question 3

What is the evolution of feminism throughout its four waves?

Feminism's Timeline

Click on a category to see main events

Click on a category to see the main events
  • The first American women’s right convention, the Seneca Falls, was held.
  • The international women’s day started to be celebrated worldwide.
  • Conferences feminism-related begin to being held worldwide.
  • The expressions “First wave of feminism” and “Second wave of feminism” were coined.
  • The slogan “sisterhood is powerful” was used for the first time.
  • Turkish feminist Şenal Sarıhan shared the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award.
  • Scandal misogyny-related gave media attention to the feminist problem worldwide.
  • In different countries some jobs were specifically opened to women.
  • Women started to have the right to stand for election, although with some restrinctions.
  • The topic of equal payment for male and female jobs started to be discussed.
  • Margaret Thatcher became the first female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
  • Women started to held important job position in different countries worldwide.
  • Four women enter the US Senate to join the two already there, lending 1992 the label "Year of the Woman" in the US.
  • Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in Liberia becomes Africa's first elected woman leader and the first black female president in the world.
  • Angela Merkel becomes Germany's first woman chancellor.
  • In 1838, The Pitcairn Islands granted women the right to vote, followed by 25 other countries between the 1861 and 1934.
  • In Colombia, Cuba, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Portugal, United Kingdom and Uruguay, divorce was legalized.
  • It was in this first wave that women had, for the first time in most of the countries, the right to own and manage a property in their own name.
  • UK, USA, Canada, Japan and Northern Island started to make laws to end discrimination and spread equality, mostly those laws concerned mostly the employment.
  • In US and UK started the dibate around the rights concerning pregnancy.The Pregnancy Discrimination Act and the Employment Protection Act banned employment discrimination against pregnant women.
  • In Nebraska and Oregon, after some problematic events, started the debate around domestic violence.
  • The Domestic Violence Act became law in Britain, enabling women to obtain a court order against their violent husband or partner.
  • In Argentina the newspaper La Voz de la Mujer was published for the first time.
  • Dionísia Gonçalves Pinto, brazilian, published her first book.
  • In Denmark "Clara Raphael, Twelve Letters" by Mathilde Fibiger was published.
  • In England was set the first suffragette newspaper: Votes for women.
  • In South Africa: Olive Schreiner published Women and Labor.
  • The Feminist Center was founded in Argentina.
  • The New South Wales Womanhood Suffrage League was founded in Australia.
  • The National Federation of Women Workers, the East London Federation of Suffragettes, the Six point group, the women’s freedom leagued the women’s social and political union were founded in England.
  • The Danish Women's Society was founded in Denmark
  • Eve Ensler launched the V-day movement, rising money for women’s anti-violence groups
  • In 1913, 50.000 women took part in a pilgrimage organized by the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies.
  • Suffragettes started to fight for their rights, often ending up in a violent activism.
  • A delegation of women presented a petition to Parliament with 37.000 signatures demanding votes for women.
  • The first Take Back the Night march was held, followed by annual appointments.
  • The Guerrilla Girls formed in the early 1980s as a response to sexism and racism in the art world.
  • The first SlutWalk was held in response to police office's statement that "women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized".
  • Women’s March continued to be held worldwide to support women’s rights.
  • Free the Nipple argues for women's right to show breasts in public.
  • The protest spread in different areas, such as representation of women in media, and video-games
  • The 2012 Delhi gang rape sparks protests in India and global outrage.
  • In Bulgaria, Germany, Cuba, England,Iceland, Japan, Peru, Russia and Thailand, women begin to have access to universities.
  • Enrollment to elementary schools begins to be compulsory for both sexes in Netherland, Spain and Sweden.
  • Girls have access to primary school where it wasn’t possible before, such as Chile, Costa Rica and Tunisia.
  • Women have access to universities in different countries here it wasn’t possible before.
  • Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, became lawprohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex in any federally funded education program or activity.

Feminism in the digital Era

Trends of digital campaigns

The timeline, based on the data gained on Google Trend, compares the worldwide research interests on the most relevant online campaigns. All the values are counted in a scale from 0 to 100 as a relative proportion to the highest value that represent the biggest research frequency. We also used Google News to connect the spikes of the searches to their causative events.

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Description Protocol Data

Description

In order to better understand the evolution of feminism throughout time, we used Wikipedia to explore the events that marked history. The graphic underlines how the fight for equality changed through the four waves of feminism by showing the typology of their events.

Every wave is represented by a treemap changing according to the relevance of its category. It’s interesting to notice how in the first phase there is a great majority of events belonging to the “rights” category, like the right to vote or the right to own properties. The second wave it’s more about solving ”society” problems, such as reducing inequalities between sexes, but also achieving maternity-related rights. The third wave has a prevalence of ”publications” involving different types of media such as blogs, movies, and books. Finally, the fourth wave sees the raise of a new category which is the “online activism” associated with the use of social media through which feminism is spreading its message. Clicking on a category it’s possible to see the specific events under each wave, in order to give to the user a more complete information about the events.

By clicking on the “online activism” category it’s possible to explore a sparkline visualization that shows how social media allowed the feminist campaigns to spread in relationship to their main events. Among the most relevant online campaigns there is Everyday Sexism, Free The Nipple, HeForShe, MeToo and YesAllWomen. It’s interesting to notice how those campaign affect different aspect of the problem, highlighting its complexity.

Protocol

example of protocol

The timelines of the events are extracted from the english pages of the four waves on Wikipedia (except for the second-wave that has a specific Wikipedia page about the timeline). After merging the datasets we manually clustered the categories of the events and made a conditioned analysis of their percentages.

The spark line visualization of the fourth wave’s events is based on the data gained on Google Trend, and compares the worldwide research interests on the most relevant online campaigns. From the dataset downloaded from Google trend, we extracted the dates in order to search them on Google News and connect the spikes of the searches to their causative events.

Data

Timestamp: 13/11/2018
View Data (360KB)