Thread by @ForthFeminists

Welcome back to #FVFWomensFestival with @marstrina who will be giving a potted history of feminism!

@marstrina Marina: Scottish feminism debut! Feminism comes in waves like hot flushes! Feminism is the largest and most radical movement in the world. #FVFWomensFestival

@marstrina It aims to change the social institutions of the world and free half of the population. People with no shared or cultural history will find it difficult to think of a shared present or future #FVFWomensFestival

@marstrina Considering the share breadth and size of feminism it's extraordinary to think how young it is. There is no pre-feminist idyll, where women were happy with their lot... #FVFWomensFestival

@marstrina ...but we came to a political movement and see ourselves as worth participants in male institutions and build an intellectual framework in which repairs could begin. #FVFWomensFestival

4 demands. 1. Demand for moral equality: The right to have rights (tied to reformation). Encouraged to read the bible, we came to see ourselves as individual MORAL agents. #FVFWomensFestival

2. Demands of intellectual equality. That we have the capacity to have rights. Staking a claim that we have the capacity to be educated. (Tied to enlightenment)

3. Where feminism properly began. Political equality. Where women have LEGAL rights. The fight to be able to USE rights. not whether individual women were worth but whether the state as a whole is functional if women are not included (tied to revolution) #FVFWomensFestival

Mary Wollstonecraft was a transitional figure, wrote about education but who thought in the shadow of French revolution. Inspired by Olympe de Gouges. The cut off her head #FVFWomensFestival

4. The struggle for the right to hold our rights INDEPENDENTLY of men. Most visible alternation to society. #FVFWomensFestival (tied to WWI)

Many men killed, changed society. Common understanding of women going to work and then going back when men came back BUT there were no men to come back. Many of the gains in women's rights in 20th Century are dependent on that generation of women #FVFWomensFestival

These 4 epochs, cannot and should not be called waves. It is misleading. 1. imagine the waves concede. 2. Imagine between the sea is quietly. They are more like steps on a spiral staircase. Striving ever upwards. Passing ourselves. Finding the same problems #FVFWomensFestival

#FVFWomensFestival The first country in the world to give women the vote NZ's female leader has had to step down from burn out. We are still saddled with the majority of domestic labour. Childcare costs is counted in fractions of women's wages #FVFWomensFestival

#FVFWomensFestival feminism can never be over. We will always have to "protest this shit". It is not a bug not a feature. We are agents in history. We are always making an remaking history

Very tempted to get fixated on details. Which feminist was worse? Which magazine is more ant-feminist? Which change in law better? We progress in tiny steps always one step at a time. Old problems in new guises #FVFWomensFestival

Important to take a step back and look at overall puctue, give ourselves credit for where we have come. 250 years we have analysed, critiqued and overturned oppression that has lasted throughout recorded history. #FVFWomensFestival

We have turned events like the french revolution into opportunities #FVFWomensFestival

Population decline - women are now the primary deciding factor in population control. In the micro level we must promote women as agents in their own and political lives and in the macro level? I don't know #FVFWomensFestival

No one woman it. Liz Kelly says feminism is a tapestry. every feminist brings her own thread and weaves it into the tapestry. We must step back and admire the design so far #FVFWomensFestival