Women's and Feminist Activism in Western Europe

First- and second-wave Western European feminists struggled to realize full access to civil rights for women and the creation of a participatory democracy that ensured social solidarity. They consequently stressed the fact that in addition to the struggle for civil rights, women needed to contest the dominant images of womanhood. However, the initial deeply political commitment to participatory democracy and social justice included goals which, with hindsight, simultaneously served the neoliberal vocabulary of autonomy, choice, and meritocratic advancement. The ethical–political second-wave nuance, one geared toward justice for all rather than merely toward equality and emancipation, needs to be reactivated in the context of twenty-first-century feminist activism. The challenge for twenty-first-century third-wave feminists, therefore, is to develop and practice an activism that continues truly to connect the local and the global, the private and the public, the personal and the political, the empirical and the symbolical.