feminism

The state of being feminine; femininity.

His hair is delicate and silky, and of a light chesnut[sic]—one of M. Lorrain's signs of feminism.

A social theory or political movement which argues that legal and social restrictions on women must be removed in order to bring about equality of the sexes in all aspects of public and private life.

Women are still forbidden to smoke there... Ardent though we are in feminism, we applaud this stand...

There are by now many feminisms (Tong, 1989; Humm, 1992). Alongside and often overlapping with older-identified distinctions between liberal, socialist, radical and cultural feminisms, for example (important as they are in their different accounts of sexual difference and gender power), are variously named black, third-world ethnic-minority feminisms, themselves far from homogenous.