Second Wave Feminism:

 The second wave feminism movement took place in the 1960s and 1970s and focused on issues of equality and discrimination. Starting initially in the United States with American women, the feminist liberation movement soon spread to other Western countries.

Unfolding in the context of the anti-war and civil rights movement, the catalyst for second wave feminism was Betty Friedan’s 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, which criticized the postwar belief that a woman’s role was to marry and bear children. The feminist movement took off, focusing on public and private injustices, such as rape, reproductive rights, domestic violence, and workplace harassment.

Second wave feminists realized that women’s cultural and political inequalities were totally linked. They worked under a unifying goal of social equality, with sexuality and reproductive rights being central concerns to the liberation movement, and with much of the movement’s energy being focused on passing the Equal Rights Amendment.

Second wave feminism had many successes. The approval of the contraceptive pill by the Food and Drug Administration in 1960 gave women more control over their reproductive rights—within five years, around 6 million women were using it. Feminists also worked and gained women the right to hold credit cards and apply for mortgages in their own name and banned marital rape.

This wave of feminism was largely defined and led by educated, middle-class white American women, so the movement was centered on issues affecting white women. Alienated women of color viewed white feminists as incapable of understanding their concerns. Black women became increasingly excluded from the central platforms of the mainstream women’s movement, which didn’t view the issues of women of color, such as stopping the forced sterilization of people of color and people with disabilities, as a priority.

Feminist film theory is a theoretical film criticism derived from feminist politics The development of feminist film theory was influenced by second wave feminism and women's studies in the 1960s and 1970s. Initially, in the United States in the early 1970s, feminist film theory was generally based on sociological theory and focused on the function of female characters in film narratives or genres. Additionally, feminist critiques also examine common stereotypes depicted in film, the extent to which the women were shown as active or passive, and the amount of screen time given to women.

 

Considering the way that films are put together, many feminist film critics have pointed to what they argue is the "male gaze" that predominates classical Hollywood filmmaking.

 

 Budd Boetticher summarizes the view:

"What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself, the woman has not the slightest importance.

 

in cinema, women are typically depicted in a passive role that provides visual pleasure through scopophilia, and identification with the on-screen male actor.

 

Mulvey argues that the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan is the key to understanding how film creates such a space for female sexual objectification and exploitation through the combination of the patriarchal order of society, and 'looking' in itself as a pleasurable act of scopophilia,(sexual pleasure derived chiefly from watching others) as "the cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking.

 

While Laura Mulvey's paper has a particular place in the feminist film theory, it is important to note that her ideas regarding ways of watching the cinema (from the voyeuristic element to the feelings of identification) are important to some feminist film theorists in terms of defining spectatorship from the psychoanalytical viewpoint.