Womens Liberation

The women's liberation is an evolution focused in the vicinity of the eradication of demeanours and conventions that conserve inequalities based upon the assumption that men are superior to women. Women followed their predecessors' methods. They did this by trying to change biased laws so that they could also have an equal voice in the society. The women's liberation wanted to increment women's representation in authoritative institutions and in multifarious influential positions eg. Companies. To attain a dramatic metamorphosis in legislation so women tended to work closely with governments. The first -wave feminists converged on changing laws to ameliorate the women and the second wave focused on divergent facets of the society and had a diverse amount of ideas and method for change. Anything that was male-orientated power based women kept away and they also strongly believed that inequality was endemic in society. All women expanded their consciousness-raising activities in the form of demonstrations aimed at raising the consciousness of all of society. The International Women's Day and Reclaim the Night marches became well-attended, yearly events.

Some women held more dramatic protests, such as that of Zelda D'Aprano who chained herself to the Commonwealth building in Melbourne to protest against lower rates of pay for women. The main concern for women were culture and education, equal opportunities, health and sexuality. Through literature woman heightened apprehension which were visible in many magazines and books about women's rights were published throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch had a wide influence, as did Damned Whores and God's Police, a book about early colonial attitudes to Australian women, written by Australian academic Dr Anne Summers. Many universities took up the women's liberation movement in the form of women's studies courses that studied much of this literature. They also studied other literature from a feminist perspective.

Gradually the feminist perspective came to be divulged through all forms of culture and the arts, along with critiques of the media and popular culture's representations of women and men. Women wanted to revamp school levels by changing what was taught at schools so that education was not as influenced by patriarchy, but they needed to embolden girls to aim greater in their career decisions instead of been let down by the biased laws, so they needed to open up career paths for girls that had been seen as segregated to males only, such as sport and science.

In the health sector women wanted preeminent access to contraception, abortion and protection from violence by men. They urged for greater research into and treatment of women's health conditions such as breast cancer, they also urged fairness in the court system in cases of rape and domestic violence, issues which wasn't in the hands of the court and police to handle because it was considered "private".

Germaine Greer is a writer, and journalist, who was born in Australia and is generally contemplated as one of the most momentous and symbolic feminist voices of the twentieth century. Greer's book The Female Eunuch, published in 1970, became an international bestseller. The publicity turned Greer into the crucial figure in the emerging women's movement, bringing her both acclaim and criticism.

Germaine Greer was educated at the Universities of Melbourne and Sydney. In 1964 she travelled to England where she premeditated at Cambridge University, receiving her PhD in 1967. Greer wrote The Female Eunuch while working as a lecturer in English at Warwick University. The publication of the book jibed with the emergence of a second-wave of the women's movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The 'first-wave' of the women's evolution was in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This movement was to gain suffrage for women. It was an international movement leaded by Emmeline Pankhurst and Susan B. Anthony, who campaigned for the abolition of slavery prior to championing women's right to vote. Australia was in fact a leader in the women's suffrage movement. Women gained the right to vote in 1893 in New Zealand, in 1894 in South Australia, and in the 1920s in Britain and the US. The term 'first-wave' was not used during this time but emerged in the 1960s so as to distinguish this earlier period from the newer feminist movement.

'Second-wave' feminism was a period of writing, protest and other activities which began in the early 1960s and lasted until the late 1970s.The first wave of the women's movement focused predominantly on formal inequalities such as the right to vote. The second wave of feminism took the view that inequalities emanated from deeper issues of alienation and prejudice.

In the second wave of the women's movement encouraged women to look at aspects of their personal lives as having political value, and being reflective of a sexist and patriarchal

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