What technological, social and logistical changes were most necessary for the emergence of feminism and women's rights?

by BigBootyBear

While the abolition of slavery is often described as a moral event, it conviniently occured in industrial or proto-industrial countries who had access to energy that wasn't 100% muscle powered (as opposed to Rome). Republics (and later democracies) couldn't have emerged without a wealthy merchant middle class, which was the result of Renaissance era innovations in financing.

So while Feminism and women's rights movement was a moral movement and an ideology, it must have had some "organic" precursors that enabled it. As much as the industrial revolution couldn't occur in metal-poor, labor-rich classical era Greece, Feminism couldn't have happened without the industrial revolution freeing women of the responsibility of making clothes (buy it instead of sew it), cooking food (tv dinners or takeout) and other time intensive house chores (washing machine etc). So my question is - what are the technological, political, social or financial "precursors" a society must develop for it to have, or accelerate a women's right movement?

*disclaimer - I am talking about an emergence of feminism (i.e. 18th - 19th century europe and NA) as opposed to adoption (20th century Africa or Switzerland).

mimicofmodes

As much as the industrial revolution couldn't occur in metal-poor, labor-rich classical era Greece, Feminism couldn't have happened without the industrial revolution freeing women of the responsibility of making clothes (buy it instead of sew it), cooking food (tv dinners or takeout) and other time intensive house chores (washing machine etc).

This is a reasonable supposition, but completely incorrect. The women's rights movement began long before household automation and tv dinners were common, and while there may be something to be said about the use of mass communication, it's not really a fundamental part of the process. I have a past answer on how/when the movement began, which I'll post below:

When we talk about the earliest history of the women's rights movement, we often pick out individuals who stood up for women's abilities and said "things could be arranged better than they are" throughout history, like Christine de Pisan, Mary Wollstonecraft, Olympe des Gouges, etc. As an organized political movement, however, there is a pretty defined start date: 1848. This was the year of the Women's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, NY, organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mary Ann M'Clintock, Lucretia Mott, and others.

I think it would be fair to say that the post-French Revolution west was an era of reform, or of agitation for reform. Organized support for abolition had been ongoing since the end of the American Revolution, Britons were protesting the outdated electoral system of the UK which deprived industrial areas of representation, the laws that made Catholics second-class citizens in England were being replaced, and so on. A wave of revolutions went across Europe in 1848. It's unsurprising that the women who supported their rights to education and suffrage would also coalesce into an organized movement at the same time, particularly as many of them were familiar with abolitionism, if not active abolitionist reformers themselves: a large proportion were Quakers, and the sect had been staunchly abolitionist for many years; Stanton was also closely related to Gerrit Smith, one of the leading abolitionists of the time. Given this, it's also unsurprising that once the abolition of slavery had been achieved, they would come to focus more energy into making gains for women's rights - both because an amendment banning slavery was a massive win, and because many of them were racists who wanted to achieve the concrete goal of abolition but did not feel the need to continue campaigning for the rights of African-Americans. This led to a narrowing of focus and successive improvements and milestones.

However, plenty of milestones relating to the movement or women's rights outside of it occurred before the [Civil War]. Acts to protect the property of married women and the vulnerability of women to their husbands' debts were being passed by a number of states before and after 1848. Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman to be accepted to and graduate from medical school (in the 1840s), and she would go on to found an infirmary in New York City in the 1850s, to compare to Lockwood and Taylor. However, yes, more happened after the war. Time is a major factor here: as an organization grows and ages, unless it falls into decline it will continue to make progress, and since the movement was organized only a little over a decade before the Civil War and continued to exist for many decades after it, it's inevitable that most of its successes would come during and after Reconstruction.

For more on the history of the women's rights movement, I cannot recommend enough Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History.

So my question is - what are the technological, political, social or financial "precursors" a society must develop for it to have, or accelerate a women's right movement?

This simply isn't how history works - you cannot find "laws" determining cause and effect, removing contingency from the equation.