Terri Susan Fine: The Feminist Movement

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The feminist movement of the 1960’s had a lasting impact that has influenced women’s rights issues today. In the article Generations, Feminist Beliefs and Abortion Rights Support, Terri Susan Fine discusses how gender, generation, and political ideology impact feminist beliefs, and more specifically, abortion rights. Fine is a professor of political science at the University of Central Florida. One of the biggest women’s rights issues that plagues political and social debates in the U.S. is abortion. This article analyzes the impact that different factors have on feminist beliefs in order to try and understand where feminism support comes from. Fine first discusses how the feminist movement of the 1960’s impacted governmental public policy. …show more content…

Women, who were born before 1944, were politically socialized before women had economic rights. To this generation of women, the feminist movement is not effective because the majority of them already had attitudes about a women’s “proper” role, so they are more likely to believe that women should not try and fight for equality. The women who were born between 1945 and 1964 have the strongest feminist beliefs because the feminist movement was a part of their political socialization. This generation supported more government intervention to protect women’s rights, and are therefore more likely to publically advocate the right of choice for abortion. The women who were born in the more recent generation of 1965 to 1986 are less supportive of government support on a women’s behalf because they believe the feminist policies of the 60’s were effective, so they find it to be satisfactory for them. A generation focus helps understand how similar people express different policy opinions on certain issues. However, research that Fine discusses shows that the relationship between generations and feminist beliefs is not extremely …show more content…

Fine shows how both gender and generation play a role in the formation of feminist beliefs. I now know that different generations of women have different views on the role of women in society due to their political socialization they received as adolescence. I realized how men also took part of the feminist movement and how they are able to have feminist beliefs. However, women are more likely to have stronger support for women’s equality than men because they are a part of the oppressed

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