The Integration of Feminism into West European Politics

Abstract

The contemporary status of women in West European politics varies considerably. Each country has its own mix of feminism, its distinctive patterns of women’s political behaviour and its particular forms of gendered power structures. By the middle of the 1990s there had been at least two waves of feminism in most West European democracies. The women’s liberation movement (WLM) of the 1970s and 1980s developed an agenda first established almost a century earlier when feminists first mobilised to achieve citizenship and, in some cases, legal personhood for women. New or second-wave feminism brought fundamental issues of rights and representation to the policy agenda. They also extended the ambit of women’s demands as a women’s studies movement emerged which questioned relations between the sexes, the accompanying division of labour, and the meaning of gender in social life.

The data used in this article were prepared by Lucy Peake of Southampton University.