Martina Chapana and the elementos of practical feminism
Abstract
When was feminism born? With Olympe de Gouges and the French Revolution, that “universal” revolution whose vision of the world turned out to be as wide as the four stakes that propped up the property of a white and European male? With the Anglo-American feminist wave? With the French intellectual Simone de Beauvoir and "The Second Sex" (1969), whose text forever misplaced biology and culture in the understanding of the female condition? Is it possible to conceive of a non-enlightened, non-literate and non-Euro-centered origin for feminism? Or perhaps the concept, like a magic, demiurgic pass, has given flesh to the reality that it proposes to name? If the patriarchy has an origin several times millennial, what then to call a history of struggles and resistance, sometimes furious and unleashed, sometimes deaf or whispering, which was stacking several centuries already by 1800? Or were there no feminist struggles until the 18th or 19th centuries, and the previous history was nothing more than a vast wasteland of resignations in the face of patriarchal systems? So, how to call the struggle, the resilient action of these pioneer women, inside and outside the narrow European margins of a vast universe despite everything?