Pamela Fishman

Pamela Fishman

She theorised the 'division of labour in conversations'. Her research stretched across the '70s through the '90s.

Pamela Fishman conducted an experiment and involved listening to fifty-two hours of pre-recorded conversations between young American couples. Five out of the six subjects were attending graduate school; all subjects were either feminists or sympathetic to the women’s movement, were white, between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five. Fishman listened to recordings and concentrated on two characteristics common in women’s dialect, including tag questions.

Her theory states that in mixed sex conversations women use more questions than men. She says that women uses tag questions such as “you know” to gain power in the conversation rather than lack of conversational awareness. She also says that women use questions so that the man will respond because men are less likely to respond to a declarative or give a minimal response. She also states that women are more likely to use minimal responses to signal their active involvement. 

Feminism

First Wave Feminism:

•Refers to the 19th and 20th century when feminist activity took place.

•It focused on legal issues, primarily on gaining women's suffrage (the right to vote).

•The term ‘first-wave’ was first used in the New York Times Magazine by Martha Lear in March 1968.

•First wave feminists spent hundreds of years working hard for the betterment and equality of their sex and gender. First wave feminists wanted the same rights as men. Main rights included suffrage, the right to vote, right to themselves and their own bodies, the right to an education, the right to work and to work safely, the right to a divorce and the right to their children

•First wave feminists didn't believe in the society rules that an unmarried woman was the property of her father and a married woman was the property of her husband.

•First wave Feminism mainly focused on suffrage and changing the worlds view on gender equality.

Second wave Feminism:

• Second-wave feminism was the period of feminist activity that first began in the early 1960s in the United States. Eventually spreading throughout the Western world and beyond. In the United States the movement lasted through the early 1980s. Second-wave feminism broadened the debate to a wide range of issues: sexuality, family, the workplace, reproductive rights, de facto inequalities, and official legal inequalities.
• Second-wave feminism drew attention to domestic violence and marital rape issues, establishment of rape crisis and battered women's shelters, and changes in custody and divorce law, as well as reinforcing issues from first wave feminism.
• Many historians view the second-wave feminist era in America as ending in the early 1980s with the intra-feminism disputes of the feminist sex wars over issues such as sexuality and pornography, which ushered in the era of third-wave feminism in the early 1990s.