The Thammasat University Library has acquired a new book that may be useful for students interested in gender studies, political science, history, and related subjects.

Women’s Liberation!: Feminist Writings that Inspired a Revolution & Still Can is a collection of ninety American feminist writings from the 1960s through the 1990s.

The TU Library collection also includes many other books on different aspects of world feminism.

Women’s Liberation! explains what it meant to be a woman in the United States during the time in question and the societal changes that the writers were asking for.

In some cases, they arrived at their goals, while others still remain to be achieved.

This anthology is about what is called second-wave feminism in America.

First-wave feminism was about basic rights such as the right to vote and own property.

Second-wave feminism included a wider range of issues related to the family, employment, reproductive rights, and other issues.

Second-wave feminism began in the United States in the early 1960s and lasted about 20 years, spreading around the world.

Women’s Liberation! shows that the second wave included activists of different races, classes, and ethnicity as well as politics, interests, and overall viewpoints.

A number of celebrated feminist writers are included in this collection, whose books are available on the shelves of the TU Library.

They include Betty Friedan, Alice Walker, Kate Millett, Shulamith Firestone, Adrienne Rich, Gerda Lerner, Susan Brownmiller, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Susan Faludi, among many others.

Other books by writers in the anthology may be accessed by TU students through the TU Library Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service.

The editors of Women’s Liberation! encourage readers to consider these texts as blueprints for future social progress and sustainable development for rights and justice.

The book is shelved in the General Stacks of the  Pridi Banomyong Library, Tha Prachan campus.

Here are some thoughts about feminism by a number of authors. Most of them in the TU Library collection:

• We ask justice, we ask equality, we ask that all civil and political rights that belong to the citizens of the United States be guaranteed to us and our daughters forever.

Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Ida Husted Harper

• In the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.

Abigail Adams, in a letter to John Adams (31 March 1776), published in Familiar Letters of John Adams and his wife Abigail Adams (1875)

• Does feminist mean large unpleasant person who’ll shout at you or someone who believes women are human beings? To me it’s the latter, so I sign up.

Margaret Atwood, as quoted in Women Know Everything!

• The extension of women’s rights is the basic principle of all social progress.

Charles Fourier, The Theory of the Four Movements and of the General Destinies (1808)

• I am uncompromising in the matter of woman’s rights. In my opinion she should labour under no legal disability not suffered by man, I should treat the daughters and sons on a footing of perfect equality.

Mohandas Gandhi, 17th October 1929. Quoted in Gandhi: The Essential Writings. Judith M. Brown, Oxford University Press, 1998

• The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labour. Surely we must free men and women together before we can free women. The majority of mankind are working people. So long as their fair demands — the ownership and control of their lives and livelihood — are set at naught, we can have neither men’s rights nor women’s rights. The majority of mankind are ground down by industrial oppression in order that the small remnant may live in ease. How can women hope to help themselves while we and our brothers are helpless against the powerful organizations which modern parties represent and which contrive to rule the people? They rule the people because they own the means of physical life, land, and tools, and the nourishers of intellectual life, the press, the church, and the school.

Helen Keller, Out of the Dark: Essays, Lectures, and Addresses on Physical and Social Vision (1913)

• I suppose I am a feminist if I believe that women should be able to do anything they want to. And when I say a feminist, I just mean I don’t have to, for myself, get out and carry signs … I just really feel I can live my femininity and actually show that you can be a woman and you can still do whatever you want to do… It’s just that there’s a group of people that kind of fit into that category more than me. I just always say I don’t really go for titles or this or that. But I’m all for all our gals. I think everybody has the right to be who they are.

Dolly Parton, Dolly Parton clears her stance on feminism Asia News International (31 May 2020)

• …No doubt about it, ideas about what women can do, and do well, have changed. And what women mind has changed. Male behaviour, from the caddish to the outright violent, that until recently was accepted without demurral is seen today as outrageous by many women who not so long ago were putting up with it themselves and who would still protest indignantly if someone described them as feminists.

Susan Sontag, Where the Stress Falls: essays (2003).

Academic research on Thailand and feminism

Among academic research projects about feminism in the Kingdom, a publication by the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES), a non-profit German foundation funded by the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany, and headquartered in Bonn and Berlin, committed to the advancement of socio-political and economic development in the spirit of social democracy, was written by Duanghathai Buranajaroenkij, PhD., Lecturer at the Institute of Human Rights and Peace Studies, Mahidol University, Thailand:

Political feminism and the women’s movement in Thailand.

Ajarn Duanghathai’s study, available for free download in English and Thai language versions, is explained as follows on the website of the FES:

In recent years, challenges caused by social and political unrest and conflicts over natural resources and the environment have had an impact on the lives and livelihoods of Thai women. These challenges have disproportionately affected women and created new forms of pressure and difficulties in achieving gender equality, especially for those women who do not have decision-making power or access to resources and political policy-making. To rise and meet these challenges, women and women’s organizations need to take concerted actions to protect their rights.

Commissioned with these issues in mind, this paper proposes four areas through which gender issues can be strategically politicized and based on feminist principles and approaches: 1) Public communication through social media to deconstruct gender mystification; 2) Educational programms to uncover intersectional strife (e.g., involving gender, national origin and class) in care work from a feminist perspective; 3) Application of gender diversity as an analytical framework for sustainable national economic and social development policy-making; 4) Creation of spaces for women’s political participation and for legitimizing women’s political participation outside the formal political system to ensure women’s right to self-determination as dignified members of society.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)