9.8 20th-Century Feminism

Women's suffrage, the right of women to vote, spread unevenly. Finland granted it in 1906, the first European country to do so. World War I sped things up: Britain (1918, for women over 30, equal terms in 1928), Germany (1918), Austria and Poland (1918) and the new Soviet state all enfranchised women around the end of the war, partly in recognition of their wartime work (8.10). Other countries waited much longer: France in 1944, Italy in 1945, and Switzerland not until 1971 at the national level.

In the Soviet Union and later the Eastern bloc, legal equality came from the top. The Bolsheviks declared equal rights, made divorce easy and legalized abortion in 1920, though Stalin banned it again in 1936 to raise the birth rate. Communist states needed women in the workforce, so they provided education, child care and maternity leave, and women worked as doctors, engineers and factory workers in large numbers. The Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space in 1963. But women were rarely found in top party leadership, and most carried a double burden: a full-time job plus nearly all the housework and shopping in an economy full of lines.

In Western Europe, many women went back to the home after 1945, encouraged by the baby boom and the ideal of the full-time housewife. Change came mostly from below, through activists, writers and organized movements.

The French writer Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) argued that society, not biology, had defined women as secondary to men, the “other,” and that femininity was something women were taught to perform rather than born with. Her analysis helped inspire second-wave feminism in the 1960s and 1970s. (The first wave had focused on the vote and legal rights.) The second wave targeted unequal pay, discrimination in jobs and education, domestic violence, and laws on contraception, abortion and divorce, often under the slogan that the personal is political.

Its gains came country by country, as the table shows. The birth control pill, available in parts of Western Europe from the early 1960s, gave women more control over when and whether to have children, which made longer education and careers easier to plan.

By the last decades of the century, women reached the highest offices. Margaret Thatcher became Britain's first female prime minister (1979–1990), Gro Harlem Brundtland led Norway's government in the 1980s and 1990s, Mary Robinson was elected president of Ireland (1990–1997), and Édith Cresson became France's first female prime minister (1991–1992). These careers showed real change, and women's share of seats in parliaments grew, fastest in the Nordic countries. Yet women remained a minority in most parliaments and in boardrooms, and gaps in pay and in the sharing of housework continued into the 21st century.