FEMINISM (from Fr. *féminisme*). It is the complex of theories, issues, and struggles agitated and conducted within feminist circles for the equalization of woman with man on the civil, social, and political plane, and implicitly for her emancipation. This emancipation, already mature in its fundamental postulates especially through the work of Christianity—whereby physiological differences do not constitute any barrier to moral equality, even if delayed or slowed across the centuries from ancient Latin times up to the entire eighteenth century—gave rise to the determination of the very problem of feminism only in very recent times, so that the feminist movement is a typically modern phenomenon: as modern, indeed, and for the most part contemporary, are its most resolute moments and its most advanced progress. One cannot, in fact, attribute a feminist spirit to that certain political or cultural emancipation enjoyed by women in Roman, Renaissance, or eighteenth-century society; for those were, so to speak, occasional interludes of a relative social influence and prominence, but not stages of a true and proper campaign of claims such as that to which the name of feminism is now specifically given.
Feminism is a product of the evolution of society, of its structure, of its changed conditions and juridical-economic conditions. Therefore, it too dates back to the French Revolution, that movement which revolutionized, along with its many defenses of the rights of man, the ideological fabric of old antifeminist conservatism. The act of birth of feminism is considered to be the *Déclaration des droits de la femme* presented by Olympe de Gouges to the Constituent Assembly in 1791. Her proposals, petitions, and protests, the feminist clubs she organized, were the first bold manifestations of the feminist idea that was asserting itself as a movement, and which later gained credence among French socialist theorists such as Charles Fourier, Étienne Cabet, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and Charles-Henri Saint-Simon. Fourier was the first to use, with regard to women, the word “emancipation.” Shortly afterward, in 1792, in England there appeared the first feminist work, *A Vindication of the Rights of Woman* by Mary Wollstonecraft, which advocated for women the same education as men and promoted state-run coeducational schools. Also from 1792, in Germany, is the work *Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Weiber* by Theodor von Hippel.
Thus the feminist question was framed in Europe on the threshold of the nineteenth century. The novelty and development of European economy in the early nineteenth century and the ferment of social ideas on the national and international stage facilitated, over the course of the century, the consolidation of feminist theories and their gradual social recognition. Effective promoters of this feminism, initially essentially theoretical, were intellectuals and writers of democratic-socialist or economic tendencies, such as George Sand or John Stuart Mill, who drew strength from their liberal individualism in the defense of the most integral human personality. The fact that this movement was promoted at the boundaries of socialism and liberalism, and more so the exaggerations to which these tendencies succumbed, caused Catholic opinion to view the movement with suspicion at first (cf. Nicola Marini, *Il valore scientifico delle nuove teorie intorno alla donna*, Rome 1887), but it ended by distinguishing the sound claims, fully in line with Christian thought, from doctrinal and practical exaggerations.
The book by John Stuart Mill, *The Subjection of Woman* (London 1869; Italian trans., Lanciano 1926), is considered the foundational text of feminist doctrine and contains the theoretical and popular premises of its modern development. According to it, the first feminist claims were made precisely in England: admission of women to voting in municipal councils (1869) and in poor-law boards (1885), abolition of marital authorization (1882), freedom of organization such as the Social and Political Union of suffragettes (led in 1903 by Emmeline Pankhurst), freedom of public meetings and demonstrations.
Feminist associations in other nations were simultaneously fighting for the same claims, until the World War of 1915–18, with its exigencies of wartime production and the wars themselves, represented an important turning point in the history of feminism and guaranteed its more rapid success. The forced assumption of women into all public and private offices, which did not cease but rather intensified after the war, validated the economic and productive equalization of the two sexes and hastened their legal and social equalization. Already by 1915–17 in Germany, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Poland, the U.S.S.R., Spain, and the United States, women were electors and elected deputies, ministers, undersecretaries, and diplomats. From 1918, women were electors and elected in England as well, and from 1946 they are also in Italy. Here the feminist movement was never as organized and vociferous as in England and America, but no less morally and economically felt, achieving notable results. A feminism less socialistic and materialistic, more idealistic and spiritualistic; less theoretical and more practical.
With the ancient prejudice of female inferiority and the exclusive hegemony of man now in decline, women have entered all forms of activity: commercial, industrial, cultural, artisanal, political, parliamentary; all university faculties, almost all careers and professions are open to women.
Economic and ideal reasons have together contributed to these successes of feminism, which today, at the mid-point of the twentieth century, can be said to have reached the culminating point of its parabola of realized claims. It must pause here, lest it degenerate harmfully by going too far. Some extremist currents of feminism, in fact, for example, aim at the disappearance of the family as a moral, economic, and juridical institution.
“And toward woman turn,” as His Holiness Pius XII recently and authoritatively observed, “various political movements, to win her to their cause. Some totalitarian systems hold out to her wonderful promises: legal equality with man, protection for pregnant and postpartum women, communal kitchens and other services that free her from the burden of domestic cares, public day-care centers and other institutions maintained and administered by the state and municipalities that relieve her of maternal obligations toward her own children, free schools, assistance in case of illness.” What His Holiness observed on that occasion may serve as a summary of the entire feminist movement: “One cannot deny the advantages that may accrue to man from some of these social measures, if applied in due measure... Yet the essential point of the question remains... Has woman’s condition thereby become better? The equality of rights with man has, with the abandonment of the home where she was queen, subjected woman to the same weight and duration of labor. Her true dignity and the solid foundation of all her rights have been disregarded, namely, the proper character of her feminine being and the intimate coordination of the two sexes; the end intended by the Creator for the good of human society and above all of the family has been lost sight of. In the concessions made to woman, it is easy to discern, more than respect for her dignity and her mission, the aim of promoting the economic and military power of the totalitarian state, to which everything must be inexorably subordinated” (*AAS*, 37 [1945], p. 288).
However, as the authoritative voice still taught, in the present legal, social, economic, and moral condition of women, within a regime of perfect equality, although it is desirable to restore to honor as much as possible the woman’s mission in the domestic hearth, she must not show herself reluctant to the movement that draws her, willingly or unwillingly, into the orbit of social and political life. She must cooperate with man for the good of the *civitas*, in which she shares equal dignity with him and must contribute according to her nature, her characteristics, her physical, intellectual, and moral aptitudes.
All this is not so much a question of distinct roles as of the manner of judging and applying these roles in concrete terms.