feminism waves essay

Four Waves of Feminism Explained

Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

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Saul Mcleod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul Mcleod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

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Feminism generally means the belief in the social, economic, and political equality of the sexes.

Feminists share a common goal of supporting equality for men and women. Although all feminists strive for gender equality, there are various ways to approach this theory. 

The history of modern feminism can be divided into four parts which are termed ‘waves.’ Each wave marks a specific cultural period in which specific feminist issues are brought to light. 

This article will look into the waves of feminism throughout history until the present.

First Wave OF Feminism

How did the first wave start?

The first wave of feminism is believed to have started around 1848, often tied to the first formal Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York. The convention was notably run by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who were among the other 300 in attendance. 

Stanton declared that all men and women were created equal, and thus, she advocated for women’s education, their right to own property, and organizational leadership. Many of the activists believed that their goals would be hard to accomplish without women’s right to vote. Thus, for the following 70 years, this was the main goal. 

Early feminists are thought to have been inspired by feminist writings such as those by Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Vindication of the Right of Women (1792) and John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869). Those in the first wave were also thought to have been influenced by the collective activism of women in other reform movements such as drawing tactical insight from women participating in the French Revolution and the Abolitionist Movement. 

First wave activism

Despite its international range, the first wave of feminism was most active in the United States and Western Europe. 

Activists engaged in social campaigns that expressed dissatisfaction with women’s limited rights for work, education, property, reproduction, marital status, and social agency (Malinowska, 2010).

They protested in the form of public gatherings, speeches, and writings. 

The women’s suffrage movement campaigned for the right for women to vote. Their activism revolved around the press, which was the major source of information communication at the time. Early coverage of the movement was unfavorable and biased, often portraying the women as bad-looking, unfeminine, and haters of men.

In the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, suffrage was associated with a particularly prominent and militant campaign, often involving violence. 

One of the most notable ‘militant’ feminists was suffragette Emily Davidson who was sent to prison several times for her activism. In 1913, she tragically died as she threw herself onto the racetrack at the Epsom Derby, causing her to be trampled by a horse. The word ‘militant’ from then on became symbolic for media depictions of suffragists’ actions. 

As the movement developed, it began to turn to the question of reproductive rights for women. In 1916, Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, defying the New York state law that forbade the distribution of contraception. Sanger would later go on to establish the clinic that became Planned Parenthood. 

First wave feminists had to wait until August of 1920 to be granted the right to vote. After 1920, the momentum of the movement began to dwindle after this massive success. However, other activists continued to advocate for their rights within local organizations and special interest groups.

The issue with first wave feminism

The activism of first wave feminism is often criticized for being a feminism for exclusively white women. Although the vote was granted to white women in 1920, it would take much longer for women of color to be able to exercise their right to vote. 

As the suffrage movement progressed, the concerns of women of color were often overlooked by first wave feminists. For groups of women who did not fit the white, upper-class mold, the right to vote was not only tied to their gender, but also to their race and social class. 

Women of color often spoke out about facing not only sexism but also racism and classism. Despite this, groups of women were often uninvited or excluded from fully participating in feminist organizations. They would often have to join segregated suffrage associations if they were included at all. 

In her famous 1851 speech, ‘Ain’t I am Woman’, abolitionist Sojourner Truth described the oppression against women of color in terms of ideological inconsistency. She pointed out the exclusion of women of color from the feminist movement’s agenda. 

Despite the immense work of women of color in the women’s movement, the suffrage movement eventually became one specifically for white women, often of a higher social class.

Many of the women in the movement would use racial prejudice as fuel for their work, many arguing that men of color should not be allowed to vote before white women (Davis, 1980). 

Second Wave Of Feminism

How did the second wave start?

The second wave of feminism is believed to have taken place between the early 1960s to the late 1980s. This wave commenced after the postwar chaos, and it was thought to be inspired by the civil rights movement in the United States and the labor rights movement in the United Kingdom. 

After achieving the vote for women, the feminist movement gradually turned its attention to women’s inequality in wider society. Many women began questioning their social roles in the workplace and in the family environment. 

A noteworthy writing prior to the second wave, which may have been influential to the movement, is Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 book titled The Second Sex . In this book, she understands women’s oppression by analyzing the particular institutions which define women’s lives, such as marriage, family, and motherhood. 

Betty Friedan is thought to be one of the most famous second wave feminists. She wrote the book The Feminine Mystique in 1963 and is widely credited with kick-starting the second wave. Friedan’s book highlighted the increasing alienation and unhappiness felt by American housewives in the post-war boom years. 

What are the ideas of second wave feminism?

A common principle of the second wave of feminism was women’s autonomy: an insistence on women’s right to determine what they want to do with their lives and their body. Their goals were to legalize abortions, promote easier and safer contraception, and fight racist and classist birth-control programs.

Other major issues at the time were sexual discrimination and sexual harassment, especially in the workplace and other institutional settings. Second wave feminists aimed to highlight these issues and put legislature in place to prevent this. 

The second wave asked questions about the concept of gender roles and women’s sexuality. They coined the phrase ‘the personal is political’ as a means of highlighting the impact of sexism and patriarchy on every aspect of women’s private lives (Munro, 2013). 

Second wave feminists were concerned with women’s lived experiences but also in media representation. As television became the main medium at this time, it was observed that women struggled for televisual presence. Data from the BBC in the late 1980s showed a disproportionate balance of 5 women to every 150 men in television-related jobs (Casey et al., 2007). 

Second wave activism 

Many of the second wave feminists were radical and critical in their approach. They were impatient for social and political change and brought international issues into their politics (Molyneux et al., 2021).

Many activists agreed with socialist ideas, while others were active in peace movements, revolutionary workers’ rights, and anti-racist struggles. 

The practice of ‘consciousness raising’ was a popular form of activism at the time. This is where women met to discuss their experiences of sexism, discrimination, abortions, and patriarchy. This helped to create political awareness and solidarity expressed through the term ‘sisterhood’. 

A significant radical feminist group during this time was the ‘New York Radical Women’ group, founded by Shulamith Firestone and Pam Allen. They wanted to spread the message that ‘sisterhood is powerful’ through their protests.

A well-known protest occurred during the Miss America Pageant in 1968. Hundreds of women marched the streets outside the event and displayed banners during the live broadcast of the event which read ‘Women’s Liberation’, which brought a great deal of public awareness to the movement. 

During the second wave, the work of Black feminist groups brought the different experiences and priorities of Black feminists into focus. Writers such as bell hooks, Angela Davis, and Audre Lord paved the way for greater appreciation of the unequal power dynamics woven into early second wave feminism. 

Achievements of the second wave

The Equal Pay Act of 1963 was enforced which makes it illegal for employers to have different rates of pay for women and men doing the same job. It was also the first federal law to address sex discrimination. 

The Equal Credit Opportunity Act was enforced in the United States in 1974, banning discrimination in access to credit based on sex or marital status. Before then, many women could not get credit in their own name or would need to have a man’s permission to get loans or credit cards. 

The Roe v. Wade case was pivotal in the legalization of abortion. In 1973, this right was granted by the United States Supreme Court meaning that women had the choice of terminating their pregnancy in the first trimester. 

In addition to achieving abortion rights, second wave feminism accomplished other things such as opening up avenues for women to engage in ‘non-traditional’ educational options and jobs that would have been traditionally dominated by men. 

Third Wave Of Feminism

How did the third wave start?

The third wave is thought to have spanned from the late 1980s until the 1990s. There are some overlaps and continuations from second wave feminism, but many third wave feminists simply sought to rid the perceived rigid ideology of second wave feminists. 

The young feminists of this era were often the children of second wave feminists. They were growing up in a world of mass media and technology, and they saw themselves as more media savvy than the feminists from their mothers’ generation. 

Feminist writer Rebecca Walker explained that it seemed that to be a feminist before this time, was to conform to an identity and way of living that does not allow for individuality. That can lead people to pit against each other; female against male, black against white, etc. (Snyder, 2008). 

Third wave feminists are believed to be less rigid and judgmental compared to second wavers who are suggested to be sexually judgmental, anti-sexual, and see having too much fun as a threat to the revolution (Wolf, 2006). 

Third wave feminism is believed to be shaped by postmodern theory . Feminists of the time sought to challenge, reclaim, and redefine ideas of the self, the fluidity of gender, sexual identity, and what it means to be a woman. 

One of the defining moments of the third wave was when allegations were made against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. Anita Hill, who was a co-worker claimed that Thomas had sexually harassed her years prior. This led to a widely publicized case against Thomas which gained huge media attention. 

The ideas of third wave feminism 

Third wave feminists depict their feminism as more inclusive and racially diverse than previous waves.

Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality to describe how everyone has their own unique experiences of discrimination and oppression. For instance, a black woman can be oppressed on the basis of being a woman, but also for being black. 

The introduction of intersectionality by Crenshaw in 1989 may have helped shape third wave feminists’ perception of how each woman has a different identity.

Not only differences based on race, ethnicity, or social class, but also for identities such as women who partake in sport, beauty, music, and religion – those which may have clashed with previous ideas about feminism in the past.

Since third wavers question the gender binary male/female and have a generally non-essentialist approach to considering gender, transgender individuals fit better into this wave than in second wave thinking (Snyder, 2008).

Third wave feminism ideals are focused on choice. Whatever a woman chooses to do, it is feminist as long as she made that choice. They claim that using makeup is not a sign that a woman is adhering to the ‘male gaze’, instead, a woman can use makeup for themselves without any loaded issues.

Third wavers feel entitled to interact with men as equals and actively play with femininity. The concept of ‘girl power’ also came about at this time. 

Third wave feminism is often pro-sex, defending pornography, sex work, intercourse, and marriage, and reducing the stigma surrounding sexual pleasure in feminism. This contrasts with a lot of the radical feminists of the second wave who would often reject femininity and disengage from heterosexual intercourse with men.  

Many third wave literature emphasizes the importance of cultural production, focusing on female pop icons, hip-hop music, and beauty culture, rather than on traditional politics. 

Riot Grrrl was regarded both as a movement and a music genre in the early 1990s. It began in Olympia, Washington where a group of women met to discuss the sexism in the punk scene.

Being enraged by this, they sought to establish their own space to produce punk music that stood for female empowerment and created an environment where women could exist without the male gaze. 

Third wavers faced a lot of criticism. The sexualized behavior of feminists was questioned as to whether this truly represented sexual liberation and gender equality or whether it was old oppressions in disguise. 

Likewise, many claimed the movement lived past its usefulness and that the wave did not contribute to anything of substance. There was nothing revolutionary that happened during this wave like there was with the right to vote being granted to women in the first wave, and legislative changes made during the second wave.

Nevertheless, it can be argued that the third wave encouraged a new generation of feminists, and it was a step that paved the way for future waves to come. 

Fourth Wave Of Feminism

How did the fourth wave start?

While there is some disagreement, it is generally accepted that there is a fourth wave of feminism which may have started anywhere from 2007 to 2012 (Sternadori, 2019) and continues to the present day. 

Prudence Chamberlain (2017) defines the fourth wave by its focus on justice for women, particularly those who have experienced sexual violence. The current wave combines aspects of the previous waves though with an increased focus on intersectionality and sub-narratives such as transgender activism. 

Many claim that the internet itself and increased social media usage has enabled a shift from third wave to fourth wave feminism (Munro, 2013). Chamberlain notes that ‘feminists who identify as second or third wave are still participating in and driving activism’.

She claims generations have joined forces as ‘social media is providing a platform to a wide range of women who are able to use the connectivity and immediacy’. 

The internet has become a platform for feminists from around the world to come together to ‘call out’ cultures in which sexism and misogyny can be challenged and exposed. This is continuing the influence of the third wave, with a focus on micropolitics, challenging sexism in adverts, film, literature, and the media, among others. 

Facebook was forced to confront the issue of hate speech on its website after initially suggesting that images of women being abused did not violate its terms of service (Munro, 2013).

In the United Kingdom, campaigns such as ‘No More Page 3’ (a reference to The Sun’s page 3, which from 1970 to 2015 featured a topless model) and The Everyday Sexism Project were some of the earlier online campaigns in the fourth wave. 

After the inauguration of Donald Trump as president of the United States in 2017, a Women’s March was held which captured the international spotlight as arguably the largest and most peaceful single-day protest in US history. 

In the same year, the #MeToo movement hit social media in over 85 countries, where individuals shared their experiences of sexual abuse and harassment to demonstrate the widespread number of cases of sexual violence and to create solidarity among victims.

This allowed people to see that sexual violence is not a personal problem but a structural issue (Sternadori, 2019).

The fourth wave encourages women to be politically active and passionate about the previous wave’s issues, such as the wage gap and ending sexual violence.

The main goals of the fourth wave are thought to call out social injustices and those responsible for them, as well as to educate others on feminist issues and to be inclusive to all groups of women. 

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is a wave metaphor used to describe the feminist movement.

The wave metaphor of feminism is believed to have been coined in 1968 when Martha Weinman Lear published an article in the New York Times called ‘The Second Wave Feminist Wave’.

The article connected the suffrage movement of the 19th and early 20th centuries with the women’s movements during the 1960s. This new terminology quickly spread and became the popular way to define feminism.

The wave metaphor suggests that feminist activism is unified around one set of ideas that comes and goes like waves hitting the shore. This idea suggests that activism peaks at certain times and recedes at others (Nicholson, 2010). 

What is a criticism of the wave metaphor?

The wave metaphor is thought to be reductive since it suggests that each wave of feminism peaks with a single unified agenda, when in fact the feminist movement has a history of different ideas, goals, and activism. 

With a wave metaphor, there is also the general understanding that waves crash after one another – the newest wave is thought to replace or in some way, obliterate the previous waves. However, this diminishes the achievements of previous feminist movements.  

Are the waves of feminism universal?

A key thing to point out when considering the waves of feminism is that they mostly only apply to Western countries.

The activism of the suffragettes and of those in second wave feminism especially was focused primarily on the United States and Western Europe. As such, the waves of feminism cannot be applied universally. 

Calvert, B., Casey, N., Casey, B., French, L., & Lewis, J. (2007).  Television studies: The key concepts . Routledge.

Chamberlain, P. (2017).  The feminist fourth wave: Affective temporality . Springer.

Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. In Feminist Legal Theories  (pp. 23-51). Routledge.

Ford, D. R. (2021). Review of Prudence Chamberlain (2017). The Feminist Fourth Wave: Affective Temporality.  Postdigital Science and Education, 3 (2), 631-633.

Malinowska, A. (2020). Waves of Feminism.  The International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication,  1, 1-7.

Molyneux, M., Dey, A., Gatto, M. A., & Rowden, H. (2021).  New Feminist Activism, Waves and Generations  (No. 40). UN Women Discussion Paper.

Munro, E. (2013). Feminism: A fourth wave?.  Political insight, 4 (2), 22-25.

Nicholson, L. (2010). Feminism in ‘Waves’: Useful Metaphor or Not?.  New Politics, 12 (4), 34-39.

Snyder, R. C. (2008). What is third-wave feminism? A new directions essay. Signs: Journal of women in culture and society, 34 (1), 175-196.

Sternadori, M. (2019). Situating the Fourth Wave of feminism in popular media discourses . Misogyny and Media in the Age of Trump, 31-55.

Wolf, N. (2006). ‘Two Traditions,’from Fire with Fire.  The Women’s Movement Today: An Encyclopedia of Third-Wave Feminism (2006), 13-19.

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What are the four waves of feminism? And what comes next?

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In Western countries, feminist history is generally packaged as a story of “waves”. The so-called first wave lasted from the mid-19th century to 1920. The second wave spanned the 1960s to the early 1980s. The third wave began in the mid-1990s and lasted until the 2010s. Finally, some say we are experiencing a fourth wave, which began in the mid-2010s and continues now.

The first person to use “waves” was journalist Martha Weinman Lear, in her 1968 New York Times article, The Second Feminist Wave , demonstrating that the women’s liberation movement was another “new chapter in a grand history of women fighting together for their rights”. She was responding to anti-feminists’ framing of the movement as a “ bizarre historical aberration ”.

Some feminists criticise the usefulness of the metaphor. Where do feminists who preceded the first wave sit? For instance, Middle Ages feminist writer Christine de Pizan , or philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft , author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).

Does the metaphor of a single wave overshadow the complex variety of feminist concerns and demands? And does this language exclude the non-West , for whom the “waves” story is meaningless?

Despite these concerns, countless feminists continue to use “waves” to explain their position in relation to previous generations.

Read more: The Whitlam government gave us no-fault divorce, women's refuges and childcare. Australia needs another feminist revolution

The first wave: from 1848

The first wave of feminism refers to the campaign for the vote. It began in the United States in 1848 with the Seneca Falls Convention , where 300 gathered to debate Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Declaration of Sentiments, outlining women’s inferior status and demanding suffrage – or, the right to vote.

It continued over a decade later, in 1866, in Britain, with the presentation of a suffrage petition to parliament.

This wave ended in 1920, when women were granted the right to vote in the US. (Limited women’s suffrage had been introduced in Britain two years earlier, in 1918.) First-wave activists believed once the vote had been won, women could use its power to enact other much-needed reforms, related to property ownership, education, employment and more.

White leaders dominated the movement. They included longtime president of the the International Woman Suffrage Alliance Carrie Chapman Catt in the US, leader of the militant Women’s Social and Political Union Emmeline Pankhurst in the UK, and Catherine Helen Spence and Vida Goldstein in Australia.

This has tended to obscure the histories of non-white feminists like evangelist and social reformer Sojourner Truth and journalist, activist and researcher Ida B. Wells , who were fighting on multiple fronts – including anti-slavery and anti-lynching –  as well as feminism.

The second wave: from 1963

The second wave coincided with the publication of US feminist Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963. Friedan’s “ powerful treatise ” raised critical interest in issues that came to define the women’s liberation movement until the early 1980s, like workplace equality, birth control and abortion, and women’s education.

Women came together in “consciousness-raising” groups to share their individual experiences of oppression. These discussions informed and motivated public agitation for gender equality and social change . Sexuality and gender-based violence were other prominent second-wave concerns.

Australian feminist Germaine Greer wrote The Female Eunuch , published in 1970, which urged women to “challenge the ties binding them to gender inequality and domestic servitude” – and to ignore repressive male authority by exploring their sexuality.

Read more: Friday essay: The Female Eunuch at 50, Germaine Greer's fearless, feminist masterpiece

Successful lobbying saw the establishment of refuges for women and children fleeing domestic violence and rape. In Australia, there were groundbreaking political appointments, including the world’s first Women’s Advisor to a national government ( Elizabeth Reid ). In 1977, a Royal Commission on Human Relationships examined families, gender and sexuality.

Amid these developments, in 1975, Anne Summers published Damned Whores and God’s Police , a scathing historical critique of women’s treatment in patriarchal Australia.

At the same time as they made advances, so-called women’s libbers managed to anger earlier feminists with their distinctive claims to radicalism. Tireless campaigner Ruby Rich , who was president of the Australian Federation of Women Voters from 1945 to 1948, responded by declaring the only difference was her generation had called their movement “ justice for women ”, not “liberation”.

Like the first wave, mainstream second-wave activism proved largely irrelevant to non-white women, who faced oppression on intersecting gendered and racialised grounds. African American feminists produced their own critical texts, including bell hooks’ Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism in 1981 and Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider in 1984.

Read more: bell hooks will never leave us – she lives on through the truth of her words

The third wave: from 1992

The third wave was announced in the 1990s. The term is popularly attributed to Rebecca Walker, daughter of African American feminist activist and writer Alice Walker (author of The Color Purple ).

Aged 22, Rebecca proclaimed in a 1992 Ms. magazine article : “I am not a post-feminism feminist. I am the Third Wave.”

Third wavers didn’t think gender equality had been more or less achieved. But they did share post-feminists ’ belief that their foremothers’ concerns and demands were obsolete. They argued women’s experiences were now shaped by very different political, economic, technological and cultural conditions.

The third wave has been described as “an individualised feminism that can not exist without diversity, sex positivity and intersectionality”.

Intersectionality, coined in 1989 by African American legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, recognises that people can experience intersecting layers of oppression due to race, gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity and more. Crenshaw notes this was a “lived experience” before it was a term.

In 2000, Aileen Moreton Robinson’s Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism expressed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women’s frustration that white feminism did not adequately address the legacies of dispossession, violence, racism, and sexism.

Certainly, the third wave accommodated kaleidoscopic views . Some scholars claimed it “grappled with fragmented interests and objectives” – or micropolitics. These included ongoing issues such as sexual harassment in the workplace and a scarcity of women in positions of power.

The third wave also gave birth to the Riot Grrrl movement and “girl power”. Feminist punk bands like Bikini Kill in the US, Pussy Riot in Russia and Australia’s Little Ugly Girls sang about issues like homophobia, sexual harassment, misogyny, racism, and female empowerment.

Riot Grrrl’s manifesto states “we are angry at a society that tells us Girl = Dumb, Girl = Bad, Girl = Weak”. “Girl power” was epitomised by Britain’s more sugary, phenomenally popular Spice Girls, who were accused of peddling “ ‘diluted feminism’ to the masses ”.

The fourth wave: 2013 to now

The fourth wave is epitomised by “ digital or online feminism ” which gained currency in about 2013 . This era is marked by mass online mobilisation. The fourth wave generation is connected via new communication technologies in ways that were not previously possible.

Online mobilisation has led to spectacular street demonstrations, including the #metoo movement. #Metoo was first founded by Black activist Tarana Burke in 2006, to support survivors of sexual abuse. The hashtag #metoo then went viral during the 2017 Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse scandal . It was used at least 19 million times on Twitter (now X) alone.

In January 2017, the Women’s March protested the inauguration of the decidedly misogynistic Donald Trump as US president. Approximately 500,000 women marched in Washington DC, with demonstrations held simultaneously in 81 nations on all continents of the globe, even Antarctica.

In 2021, the Women’s March4Justice saw some 110,000 women rallying at more than 200 events across Australian cities and towns, protesting workplace sexual harassment and violence against women, following high-profile cases like that of Brittany Higgins, revealing sexual misconduct in the Australian houses of parliament.

Given the prevalence of online connection, it is not surprising fourth wave feminism has reached across geographic regions. The Global Fund for Women reports that #metoo transcends national borders. In China, it is, among other things, #米兔 (translated as “ rice bunny ”, pronounced as “mi tu”). In Nigeria, it’s #Sex4Grades . In Turkey, it’s # UykularınızKaçsın (“may you lose sleep”).

In an inversion of the traditional narrative of the Global North leading the Global South in terms of feminist “progress”, Argentina’s “ Green Wave ” has seen it decriminalise abortion, as has Colombia. Meanwhile, in 2022, the US Supreme Court overturned historic abortion legislation .

Whatever the nuances, the prevalence of such highly visible gender protests have led some feminists, like Red Chidgey , lecturer in Gender and Media at King’s College London, to declare that feminism has transformed from “a dirty word and publicly abandoned politics” to an ideology sporting “a new cool status”.

Read more: Friday essay: a sex-positive feminist takes up the 'unfinished revolution' her mother began – but it's complicated

Where to now?

How do we know when to pronounce the next “wave”? (Spoiler alert: I have no answer.) Should we even continue to use the term “waves”?

The “wave” framework was first used to demonstrate feminist continuity and solidarity. However, whether interpreted as disconnected chunks of feminist activity or connected periods of feminist activity and inactivity, represented by the crests and troughs of waves, some believe it encourages binary thinking that produces intergenerational antagonism .

Back in 1983, Australian writer and second-wave feminist Dale Spender, who died last year, confessed her fear that if each generation of women did not know they had robust histories of struggle and achievement behind them, they would labour under the illusion they’d have to develop feminism anew. Surely, this would be an overwhelming prospect.

What does this mean for “waves” in 2024 and beyond?

To build vigorous varieties of feminism going forward, we might reframe the “waves”. We need to let emerging generations of feminists know they are not living in an isolated moment, with the onerous job of starting afresh. Rather, they have the momentum created by generations upon generations of women to build on.

• Germaine Greer
• Women's suffrage
• Intersectionality
• Sojourner Truth
• Catherine Helen Spence
• Betty Friedan
• Vida Goldstein
• Alice Walker
• Kimberle Crenshaw
• Suffragists
• Elizabeth Cady Stanton
• Emmeline Pankhurst
• Fourth-wave feminism

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The waves of feminism, and why people keep fighting over them, explained

If you have no idea which wave of feminism we’re in right now, read this.

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by Constance Grady

If one thing’s for sure, it’s that the second-wave feminists are at war with the third-wave feminists.

No, wait, the second-wavers are at war with the fourth-wave feminists.

No, it’s not the second-wavers, it’s the Gen X-ers.

Are we still cool with the first-wavers? Are they all racists now?

Is there actually intergenerational fighting about feminist waves? Is that a real thing?

Do we even use the wave metaphor anymore?

As the #MeToo movement barrels forward, as record numbers of women seek office, and as the Women’s March drives the resistance against the Trump administration, feminism is reaching a level of cultural relevance it hasn’t enjoyed in years. It’s now a major object of cultural discourse — which has led to some very confusing conversations because not everyone is familiar with or agrees on the basic terminology of feminism. And one of the most basic and most confusing terms has to do with waves of feminism.

People began talking about feminism as a series of waves in 1968 when a New York Times article by Martha Weinman Lear ran under the headline “ The Second Feminist Wave .” “Feminism, which one might have supposed as dead as a Polish question, is again an issue,” Lear wrote. “Proponents call it the Second Feminist Wave, the first having ebbed after the glorious victory of suffrage and disappeared, finally, into the sandbar of Togetherness.”

The wave metaphor caught on: It became a useful way of linking the women’s movement of the ’60s and ’70s to the women’s movement of the suffragettes, and to suggest that the women’s libbers weren’t a bizarre historical aberration, as their detractors sneered, but a new chapter in a grand history of women fighting together for their rights. Over time, the wave metaphor became a way to describe and distinguish between different eras and generations of feminism.

It’s not a perfect metaphor. “The wave metaphor tends to have built into it an important metaphorical implication that is historically misleading and not helpful politically,” argued feminist historian Linda Nicholson in 2010 . “That implication is that underlying certain historical differences, there is one phenomenon, feminism, that unites gender activism in the history of the United States, and that like a wave, peaks at certain times and recedes at others. In sum, the wave metaphor suggests the idea that gender activism in the history of the United States has been for the most part unified around one set of ideas, and that set of ideas can be called feminism.”

The wave metaphor can be reductive. It can suggest that each wave of feminism is a monolith with a single unified agenda, when in fact the history of feminism is a history of different ideas in wild conflict.

It can reduce each wave to a stereotype and suggest that there’s a sharp division between generations of feminism, when in fact there’s a fairly strong continuity between each wave — and since no wave is a monolith, the theories that are fashionable in one wave are often grounded in the work that someone was doing on the sidelines of a previous wave. And the wave metaphor can suggest that mainstream feminism is the only kind of feminism there is, when feminism is full of splinter movements.

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Video: women are not as divided on #MeToo as it may seem

And as waves pile upon waves in feminist discourse, it’s become unclear that the wave metaphor is useful for understanding where we are right now. “I don’t think we are in a wave right now,” gender studies scholar April Sizemore-Barber told Vox in January. “I think that now feminism is inherently intersectional feminism — we are in a place of multiple feminisms.”

But the wave metaphor is also probably the best tool we have for understanding the history of feminism in the US, where it came from and how it developed. And it’s become a fundamental part of how we talk about feminism — so even if we end up deciding to discard it, it’s worth understanding exactly what we’re discarding.

Here is an overview of the waves of feminism in the US, from the suffragettes to #MeToo. This is a broad overview, and it won’t capture every nuance of the movement in each era. Think of it as a Feminism 101 explainer, here to give you a framework to understand the feminist conversation that’s happening right now, how we got here, and where we go next.

The first wave: 1848 to 1920

People have been suggesting things along the line of “Hmmm, are women maybe human beings?” for all of history, so first-wave feminism doesn’t refer to the first feminist thinkers in history. It refers to the West’s first sustained political movement dedicated to achieving political equality for women: the suffragettes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

For 70 years, the first-wavers would march, lecture, and protest, and face arrest, ridicule, and violence as they fought tooth and nail for the right to vote. As Susan B. Anthony’s biographer Ida Husted Harper would put it , suffrage was the right that, once a woman had won it, “would secure to her all others.”

The first wave basically begins with the Seneca Falls convention of 1848 . There, almost 200 women met in a church in upstate New York to discuss “the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women.” Attendees discussed their grievances and passed a list of 12 resolutions calling for specific equal rights — including, after much debate, the right to vote.

The whole thing was organized by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who were both active abolitionists. (They met when they were both barred from the floor of the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London; no women were allowed.)

At the time, the nascent women’s movement was firmly integrated with the abolitionist movement: The leaders were all abolitionists, and Frederick Douglass spoke at the Seneca Falls Convention, arguing for women’s suffrage. Women of color like Sojourner Truth , Maria Stewart , and Frances E.W. Harper were major forces in the movement, working not just for women’s suffrage but for universal suffrage.

But despite the immense work of women of color for the women’s movement, the movement of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony eventually established itself as a movement specifically for white women, one that used racial animus as fuel for its work.

The 15th Amendment’s passage in 1870 , granting black men the right to vote, became a spur that politicized white women and turned them into suffragettes. Were they truly not going to be granted the vote before former slaves were?

“If educated women are not as fit to decide who shall be the rulers of this country, as ‘field hands,’ then where’s the use of culture, or any brain at all?” demanded one white woman who wrote in to Stanton and Anthony’s newspaper, the Revolution. “One might as well have been ‘born on the plantation.’” Black women were barred from some demonstrations or forced to walk behind white women in others.

Despite its racism, the women’s movement developed radical goals for its members. First-wavers fought not only for white women’s suffrage but also for equal opportunities to education and employment, and for the right to own property.

And as the movement developed, it began to turn to the question of reproductive rights. In 1916, Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the US, in defiance of a New York state law that forbade the distribution of contraception. She would later go on to establish the clinic that became Planned Parenthood.

In 1920, Congress passed the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote. (In theory, it granted the right to women of all races, but in practice, it remained difficult for black women to vote , especially in the South.)

The 19th Amendment was the grand legislative achievement of the first wave. Although individual groups continued to work — for reproductive freedom, for equality in education and employment, for voting rights for black women — the movement as a whole began to splinter. It no longer had a unified goal with strong cultural momentum behind it, and it would not find another until the second wave began to take off in the 1960s.

Further reading: first-wave feminism

A Vindication of the Rights of Women , Mary Wollstonecraft (1791)

Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions , Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1848)

Ain’t I a Woman? Sojourner Truth (1851)

Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors: Is the Classification Sound? A Discussion on the Laws Concerning the Property of Married Women , Frances Power Cobbe (1868)

Remarks by Susan B. Anthony at her trial for illegal voting (1873)

A Room of One’s Own , Virginia Woolf (1929)

Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings , edited by Miriam Schneir (1994)

The second wave: 1963 to the 1980s

The second wave of feminism begins with Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique , which came out in 1963. There were prominent feminist thinkers before Friedan who would come to be associated with the second wave — most importantly Simone de Beauvoir, whose Second Sex came out in France in 1949 and in the US in 1953 — but The Feminine Mystique was a phenomenon. It sold 3 million copies in three years .

The Feminine Mystique rails against “the problem that has no name”: the systemic sexism that taught women that their place was in the home and that if they were unhappy as housewives, it was only because they were broken and perverse. “I thought there was something wrong with me because I didn’t have an orgasm waxing the kitchen floor,” Friedan later quipped .

But, she argued, the fault didn’t truly lie with women, but rather with the world that refused to allow them to exercise their creative and intellectual faculties. Women were right to be unhappy; they were being ripped off.

The Feminine Mystique was not revolutionary in its thinking, as many of Friedan’s ideas were already being discussed by academics and feminist intellectuals. Instead, it was revolutionary in its reach . It made its way into the hands of housewives, who gave it to their friends, who passed it along through a whole chain of well-educated middle-class white women with beautiful homes and families. And it gave them permission to be angry.

And once those 3 million readers realized that they were angry, feminism once again had cultural momentum behind it. It had a unifying goal, too: not just political equality, which the first-wavers had fought for, but social equality.

“The personal is political,” said the second-wavers. (The phrase cannot be traced back to any individual woman but was popularized by Carol Hanisch .) They would go on to argue that problems that seemed to be individual and petty — about sex, and relationships, and access to abortions, and domestic labor — were in fact systemic and political, and fundamental to the fight for women’s equality.

So the movement won some major legislative and legal victories: The Equal Pay Act of 1963 theoretically outlawed the gender pay gap; a series of landmark Supreme Court cases through the ’60s and ’70s gave married and unmarried women the right to use birth control; Title IX gave women the right to educational equality; and in 1973, Roe v. Wade guaranteed women reproductive freedom.

The second wave worked on getting women the right to hold credit cards under their own names and to apply for mortgages. It worked to outlaw marital rape, to raise awareness about domestic violence and build shelters for women fleeing rape and domestic violence. It worked to name and legislate against sexual harassment in the workplace.

But perhaps just as central was the second wave’s focus on changing the way society thought about women. The second wave cared deeply about the casual, systemic sexism ingrained into society — the belief that women’s highest purposes were domestic and decorative, and the social standards that reinforced that belief — and in naming that sexism and ripping it apart.

The second wave cared about racism too, but it could be clumsy in working with people of color. As the women’s movement developed, it was rooted in the anti-capitalist and anti-racist civil rights movements, but black women increasingly found themselves alienated from the central platforms of the mainstream women’s movement.

The Feminine Mystique and its “problem that has no name” was specifically for white middle-class women: Women who had to work to support themselves experienced their oppression very differently from women who were socially discouraged from working.

Earning the right to work outside the home was not a major concern for black women, many of whom had to work outside the home anyway. And while black women and white women both advocated for reproductive freedom, black women wanted to fight not just for the right to contraception and abortions but also to stop the forced sterilization of people of color and people with disabilities , which was not a priority for the mainstream women’s movement. In response, some black feminists decamped from feminism to create womanism. (“Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender,” Alice Walker wrote in 1983 .)

Even with its limited scope, second-wave feminism at its height was plenty radical enough to scare people — hence the myth of the bra burners. Despite the popular story, there was no mass burning of bras among second-wave feminists .

But women did gather together in 1968 to protest the Miss America pageant and its demeaning, patriarchal treatment of women. And as part of the protest, participants ceremoniously threw away objects that they considered to be symbols of women’s objectification, including bras and copies of Playboy.

That the Miss America protest has long lingered in the popular imagination as a bra-burning, and that bra-burning has become a metonym for postwar American feminism, says a lot about the backlash to the second wave that would soon ensue.

In the 1980s, the comfortable conservatism of the Reagan era managed to successfully position second-wave feminists as humorless, hairy-legged shrews who cared only about petty bullshit like bras instead of real problems, probably to distract themselves from the loneliness of their lives, since no man would ever want a ( shudder ) feminist.

“I don’t think of myself as a feminist,” a young woman told Susan Bolotin in 1982 for the New York Times Magazine. “Not for me, but for the guy next door that would mean that I’m a lesbian and I hate men.”

Another young woman chimed in, agreeing. “Look around and you’ll see some happy women, and then you’ll see all these bitter, bitter women,” she said. “The unhappy women are all feminists. You’ll find very few happy, enthusiastic, relaxed people who are ardent supporters of feminism.”

That image of feminists as angry and man-hating and lonely would become canonical as the second wave began to lose its momentum, and it continues to haunt the way we talk about feminism today. It would also become foundational to the way the third wave would position itself as it emerged.

Further reading: second-wave feminism

The Second Sex , Simone de Beauvoir (1949)

The Feminine Mystique , Betty Friedan (1963)

Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape , Susan Brownmiller (1975)

Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sex Discrimination , Catharine A. MacKinnon (1979)

The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination , Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1979)

Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism , bell hooks (1981)

In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose , Alice Walker (1983)

Sister Outsider , Audre Lorde (1984)

The third wave: 1991(?) to ????

It is almost impossible to talk with any clarity about the third wave because few people agree on exactly what the third wave is, when it started, or if it’s still going on. “The confusion surrounding what constitutes third wave feminism,” writes feminist scholar Elizabeth Evans , “is in some respects its defining feature.”

But generally, the beginning of the third wave is pegged to two things: the Anita Hill case in 1991, and the emergence of the riot grrrl groups in the music scene of the early 1990s.

In 1991, Anita Hill testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her at work. Thomas made his way to the Supreme Court anyway, but Hill’s testimony sparked an avalanche of sexual harassment complaints , in much the same way that last fall’s Harvey Weinstein accusations were followed by a litany of sexual misconduct accusations against other powerful men.

And Congress’s decision to send Thomas to the Supreme Court despite Hill’s testimony led to a national conversation about the overrepresentation of men in national leadership roles. The following year, 1992, would be dubbed “ the Year of the Woman ” after 24 women won seats in the House of Representatives and three more won seats in the Senate.

And for the young women watching the Anita Hill case in real time, it would become an awakening. “I am not a postfeminism feminist,” declared Rebecca Walker (Alice Walker’s daughter) for Ms. after watching Thomas get sworn into the Supreme Court. “I am the Third Wave.”

Early third-wave activism tended to involve fighting against workplace sexual harassment and working to increase the number of women in positions of power. Intellectually, it was rooted in the work of theorists of the ’80s: Kimberlé Crenshaw , a scholar of gender and critical race theory who coined the term intersectionality to describe the ways in which different forms of oppression intersect; and Judith Butler , who argued that gender and sex are separate and that gender is performative. Crenshaw and Butler’s combined influence would become foundational to the third wave’s embrace of the fight for trans rights as a fundamental part of intersectional feminism.

Aesthetically, the third wave is deeply influenced by the rise of the riot grrrls, the girl groups who stomped their Doc Martens onto the music scene in the 1990s.

“BECAUSE doing/reading/seeing/hearing cool things that validate and challenge us can help us gain the strength and sense of community that we need in order to figure out how bullshit like racism, able-bodieism, ageism, speciesism, classism, thinism, sexism, anti-semitism and heterosexism figures in our own lives,” wrote Bikini Kill lead singer Kathleen Hanna in the Riot Grrrl Manifesto in 1991. “BECAUSE we are angry at a society that tells us Girl = Dumb, Girl = Bad, Girl = Weak.”

The word girl here points to one of the major differences between second- and third-wave feminism. Second-wavers fought to be called women rather than girls : They weren’t children, they were fully grown adults, and they demanded to be treated with according dignity. There should be no more college girls or coeds: only college women, learning alongside college men.

But third-wavers liked being girls. They embraced the word; they wanted to make it empowering, even threatening — hence grrrl . And as it developed, that trend would continue: The third wave would go on to embrace all kinds of ideas and language and aesthetics that the second wave had worked to reject: makeup and high heels and high-femme girliness.

In part, the third-wave embrace of girliness was a response to the anti-feminist backlash of the 1980s, the one that said the second-wavers were shrill, hairy, and unfeminine and that no man would ever want them. And in part, it was born out of a belief that the rejection of girliness was in itself misogynistic: girliness, third-wavers argued, was not inherently less valuable than masculinity or androgyny.

And it was rooted in a growing belief that effective feminism had to recognize both the dangers and the pleasures of the patriarchal structures that create the beauty standard and that it was pointless to punish and censure individual women for doing things that brought them pleasure.

Third-wave feminism had an entirely different way of talking and thinking than the second wave did — but it also lacked the strong cultural momentum that was behind the grand achievements of the second wave. (Even the Year of Women turned out to be a blip, as the number of women entering national politics plateaued rapidly after 1992.)

The third wave was a diffuse movement without a central goal, and as such, there’s no single piece of legislation or major social change that belongs to the third wave the way the 19th Amendment belongs to the first wave or Roe v. Wade belongs to the second.

Depending on how you count the waves, that might be changing now, as the #MeToo moment develops with no signs of stopping — or we might be kicking off an entirely new wave.

Further reading: third-wave feminism

Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity , Judith Butler (1990)

The Beauty Myth , Naomi Woolf (1991)

“ Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color ,” Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991)

“ The Riot GRRRL Manifesto ,” Kathleen Hanna (1991)

Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women , Susan Faludi (1991)

The Bust Guide to the New Girl Order , edited by Marcelle Karp and‎ Debbie Stoller (1999)

Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics , bell hooks (2000)

Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture , Ariel Levy (2005)

The present day: a fourth wave?

Feminists have been anticipating the arrival of a fourth wave since at least 1986, when a letter writer to the Wilson Quarterly opined that the fourth wave was already building. Internet trolls actually tried to launch their own fourth wave in 2014 , planning to create a “pro-sexualization, pro-skinny, anti-fat” feminist movement that the third wave would revile, ultimately miring the entire feminist community in bloody civil war. (It didn’t work out.)

But over the past few years, as #MeToo and Time’s Up pick up momentum, the Women’s March floods Washington with pussy hats every year, and a record number of women prepare to run for office , it’s beginning to seem that the long-heralded fourth wave might actually be here.

While a lot of media coverage of #MeToo describes it as a movement dominated by third-wave feminism, it actually seems to be centered in a movement that lacks the characteristic diffusion of the third wave. It feels different.

“Maybe the fourth wave is online,” said feminist Jessica Valenti in 2009 , and that’s come to be one of the major ideas of fourth-wave feminism. Online is where activists meet and plan their activism, and it’s where feminist discourse and debate takes place. Sometimes fourth-wave activism can even take place on the internet (the “#MeToo” tweets), and sometimes it takes place on the streets (the Women’s March), but it’s conceived and propagated online.

As such, the fourth wave’s beginnings are often loosely pegged to around 2008, when Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were firmly entrenched in the cultural fabric and feminist blogs like Jezebel and Feministing were spreading across the web. By 2013, the idea that we had entered a fourth wave was widespread enough that it was getting written up in the Guardian . “What’s happening now feels like something new again,” wrote Kira Cochrane.

Currently, the fourth-wavers are driving the movement behind #MeToo and Time’s Up, but in previous years they were responsible for the cultural impact of projects like Emma Sulkowicz’s Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight) , in which a rape victim at Columbia University committed to carrying their mattress around campus until the university expelled their rapist.

The trending hashtag #YesAllWomen after the UC Santa Barbara shooting was a fourth-wave campaign, and so was the trending hashtag #StandWithWendy when Wendy Davis filibustered a Texas abortion law. Arguably, the SlutWalks that began in 2011 — in protest of the idea that the way to prevent rape is for women to “stop dressing like sluts” — are fourth-wave campaigns.

Like all of feminism, the fourth wave is not a monolith. It means different things to different people. But these tentpole positions that Bustle identified as belonging to fourth-wave feminism in 2015 do tend to hold true for a lot of fourth-wavers; namely, that fourth-wave feminism is queer, sex-positive, trans-inclusive, body-positive, and digitally driven. (Bustle also claims that fourth-wave feminism is anti-misandry, but given the glee with which fourth-wavers across the internet riff on ironic misandry , that may be more prescriptivist than descriptivist on their part.)

And now the fourth wave has begun to hold our culture’s most powerful men accountable for their behavior. It has begun a radical critique of the systems of power that allow predators to target women with impunity.

Further reading: fourth-wave feminism

The Purity Myth , Jessica Valenti (2009)

How to Be a Woman , Caitlin Moran (2012)

Men Explain Things to Me , Rebecca Solnit (2014)

We Should All Be Feminists , Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2014)

Bad Feminist , Roxane Gay (2014)

So is there a generational war between feminists?

As the fourth wave begins to establish itself, and as #MeToo goes on, we’ve begun to develop a narrative that says the fourth wave’s biggest obstacles are its predecessors — the feminists of the second wave.

“The backlash to #MeToo is indeed here,” wrote Jezebel’s Stassa Edwards in January , “and it’s liberal second-wave feminism.”

Writing with a lot less nuance, Katie Way, the reporter who broke the Aziz Ansari story , smeared one of her critics as a “burgundy-lipstick, bad-highlights, second-wave-feminist has-been.”

And there certainly are second-wave feminists pushing a #MeToo backlash. “If you spread your legs because he said ‘be nice to me and I’ll give you a job in a movie’ then I’m afraid that’s tantamount to consent,” second-wave feminist icon Germaine Greer remarked as the accusations about Weinstein mounted, “and it’s too late now to start whingeing about that.” (Greer, who has also said on the record that she doesn’t believe trans women are “real women,” has become something of a poster child for the worst impulses of the second wave. Die a hero or live long enough to become a villain, etc.)

But some of the most prominent voices speaking out against #MeToo, like Katie Roiphe and Bari Weiss , are too young to have been part of the second wave. Roiphe is a Gen X-er who was pushing back against both the second and the third waves in the 1990s and has managed to stick around long enough to push back against the fourth wave today. Weiss, 33, is a millennial. Other prominent #MeToo critics, like Caitlin Flanagan and Daphne Merkin , are old enough to have been around for the second wave but have always been on the conservative end of the spectrum.

“In the 1990s and 2000s, second-wavers were cast as the shrill, militant, man-hating mothers and grandmothers who got in the way of their daughters’ sexual liberation. Now they’re the dull, hidebound relics who are too timid to push for the real revolution,” writes Sady Doyle at Elle . “And of course, while young women have been telling their forebears to shut up and fade into the sunset, older women have been stereotyping and slamming younger activists as feather-headed, boy-crazy pseudo-feminists who squander their mothers’ feminist gains by taking them for granted.”

It is not particularly useful to think of the #MeToo debates as a war between generations of feminists — or, more creepily, as some sort of Freudian Electra complex in action. And the data from our polling shows that these supposed generational gaps largely don’t exist . It is perhaps more useful to think of it as part of what has always been the history of feminism: passionate disagreement between different schools of thought, which history will later smooth out into a single overarching “wave” of discourse (if the wave metaphor holds on that long).

The history of feminism is filled with radicals and progressives and liberals and centrists. It’s filled with splinter movements and reactionary counter-movements. That’s part of what it means to be both an intellectual tradition and a social movement, and right now feminism is functioning as both with a gorgeous and monumental vitality. Rather than devouring their own, feminists should recognize the enormous work that each wave has done for the movement, and get ready to keep doing more work.

After all, the past is past. We’re in the middle of the third wave now.

Or is it the fourth?

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By: History.com Editors

Updated: April 8, 2022 | Original: February 28, 2019

Feminism, a belief in the political, economic and cultural equality of women, has roots in the earliest eras of human civilization. It is typically separated into three waves: first wave feminism, dealing with property rights and the right to vote; second wave feminism, focusing on equality and anti-discrimination, and third wave feminism, which started in the 1990s as a backlash to the second wave’s perceived privileging of white, straight women. 

From Ancient Greece to the fight for women’s suffrage to women’s marches and the #MeToo movement, the history of feminism is as long as it is fascinating. 

Early Feminists 

In his classic Republic , Plato advocated that women possess “natural capacities” equal to men for governing and defending ancient Greece . Not everyone agreed with Plato; when the women of ancient Rome staged a massive protest over the Oppian Law, which restricted women’s access to gold and other goods, Roman consul Marcus Porcius Cato argued, “As soon as they begin to be your equals, they will have become your superiors!” (Despite Cato’s fears, the law was repealed.)

In The Book of the City of Ladies , 15th-century writer Christine de Pizan protested misogyny and the role of women in the Middle Ages . Years later, during the Enlightenment , writers and philosophers like Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and Mary Wollstonecraft , author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman , argued vigorously for greater equality for women.

READ MORE: Milestones in U.S. Women's History

Abigail Adams, first lady to President John Adams, specifically saw access to education, property and the ballot as critical to women’s equality. In letters to her husband John Adams , Abigail Adams warned, “If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice.”

The “Rebellion” that Adams threatened began in the 19th century, as calls for greater freedom for women joined with voices demanding the end of slavery . Indeed, many women leaders of the abolitionist movement found an unsettling irony in advocating for African Americans rights that they themselves could not enjoy.

First Wave Feminism: Women’s Suffrage and The Seneca Falls Convention

At the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention , abolitionists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott boldly proclaimed in their now-famous Declaration of Sentiments that “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal.” Controversially, the feminists demanded “their sacred right to the elective franchise,” or the right to vote.

Many attendees thought voting rights for women were beyond the pale, but were swayed when Frederick Douglass argued that he could not accept the right to vote as a Black man if women could not also claim that right. When the resolution passed, the women’s suffrage movement began in earnest, and dominated much of feminism for several decades.

READ MORE:  American Women's Suffrage Came Down to One Man's Vote

The 19th Amendment: Women’s Right to Vote

Slowly, suffragettes began to claim some successes: In 1893, New Zealand became the first sovereign state giving women the right to vote, followed by Australia in 1902 and Finland in 1906. In a limited victory, the United Kingdom granted suffrage to women over 30 in 1918.

In the United States, women’s participation in World War I proved to many that they were deserving of equal representation. In 1920, thanks largely to the work of suffragists like Susan B. Anthony and Carrie Chapman Catt , the 19th Amendment passed. American women finally earned the right to vote. With these rights secured, feminists embarked on what some scholars refer to as the “second wave” of feminism.

Women And Work

Women began to enter the workplace in greater numbers following the Great Depression , when many male breadwinners lost their jobs, forcing women to find “ women’s work ” in lower paying but more stable careers like housework, teaching and secretarial roles.

During World War II , many women actively participated in the military or found work in industries previously reserved for men, making Rosie the Riveter a feminist icon. Following the civil rights movement , women sought greater participation in the workplace, with equal pay at the forefront of their efforts

The Equal Pay Act of 1963 was among the first efforts to confront this still-relevant issue.

Second Wave Feminism: Women's Liberation

But cultural obstacles remained, and with the 1963 publication of The Feminine Mystique , Betty Friedan —who later co-founded the National Organization for Women —argued that women were still relegated to unfulfilling roles in homemaking and child care. By this time, many people had started referring to feminism as “women’s liberation.” In 1971, feminist Gloria Steinem joined Betty Friedan and Bella Abzug in founding the National Women’s Political Caucus. Steinem’s Ms. Magazine became the first magazine to feature feminism as a subject on its cover in 1976.

The Equal Rights Amendment , which sought legal equality for women and banned discrimination on the basis of sex, was passed by Congress in 1972 (but, following a conservative backlash, was never ratified by enough states to become law). One year later, feminists celebrated the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade , the landmark ruling that guaranteed a woman’s right to choose an abortion.

READ MORE: Why the Fight Over the Equal Rights Amendment Has Lasted Nearly a Century

Third Wave Feminism: Who Benefits From the Feminist Movement?

Critics have argued that the benefits of the feminist movement , especially the second wave, are largely limited to white, college-educated women, and that feminism has failed to address the concerns of women of color, lesbians, immigrants and religious minorities. Even in the 19th century, Sojourner Truth lamented racial distinctions in women’s status in a speech before the 1851 Ohio Women's Rights Convention. She was later quoted as saying:

In fact, contemporaneous reports of Truth’s speech did not include the words “Ain’t I a Woman?” and quoted Truth in standard English. The distortion of Truth's words in later years reflected the false belief that as a formerly enslaved woman, Truth would have had a Southern accent. Truth was, in fact, a New Yorker.

#MeToo and Women’s Marches

By the 2010s, feminists pointed to prominent cases of sexual assault and “rape culture” as emblematic of the work still to be done in combating misogyny and ensuring women have equal rights. The #MeToo movement gained new prominence in October 2017, when the New York Times published a damning investigation into allegations of sexual harassment made against influential film producer Harvey Weinstein. Many more women came forward with allegations against other powerful men—including President Donald Trump.

On January 21, 2017, the first full day of Trump’s presidency, hundreds of thousands of people joined the Women’s March on Washington in D.C., a massive protest aimed at the new administration and the perceived threat it represented to reproductive, civil and human rights. It was not limited to Washington: Over 3 million people in cities around the world held simultaneous demonstrations, providing feminists with a high-profile platforms for advocating on behalf of full rights for all women worldwide.

Women in World History Curriculum Women's history, feminist history,  Making History , The Institute of Historical Research A Brief History of Feminism, Oxford Dictionaries   Four Waves of Feminism, Pacific Magazine, Pacific University

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Feminist Philosophy

This entry provides an introduction to the feminist philosophy section of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP). Overseen by a board of feminist philosophers, this section primarily takes up feminist philosophy of the twentieth and twenty-first century. It has three subsections of entries (as can be seen in Table of Contents under “feminist philosophy”): (1) approaches to feminist philosophy, (2) feminist interventions in philosophy, and (3) feminist philosophical topics. By “approaches to feminist philosophy” we mean the main philosophical approaches such as analytic, continental, psychoanalytic, pragmatist, and various intersections. We see these as methodologies that can be fruitfully employed to engage philosophically isssues of feminist concern. The second group of entries, feminist interventions in philosophy, includes entries on how feminist philosophers have intervened in and begun to transform traditional philosopical areas such as aesthetics, ethics, the history of philosophy, metaphysics, and political philosophy. Entries in the third group, feminist philosophical topics, take up concepts and matters that traditional philosophy has either overlooked or undertheorized, including autonomy, the body, objectification, sex and gender, and reproduction. In short, this third group of entries shows how feminist philosophers have rendered philosophical previously un-problematized topics, such as the body, class and work, disability, the family, human trafficking, reproduction, the self, sex work, and sexuality. Entries in this third group also show how a particularly feminist lens refashions issues of globalization, human rights, popular culture, race and racism, and science. Following a brief overview of feminism as a political and intellectual movement, we provide an overview of these three parts of the feminist section of the SEP.

In addition to the feminist philosophy section of the SEP, there are also a number of entries on women in the history of philosophy, for example, on Mary Wollstonecraft , Mary Astell , Jane Addams , Rosa Luxemburg , Simone de Beauvoir , Iris Murdoch , and others. Additionally, dozens of other entries throughout the SEP discuss facets of feminist philosophy, including, to name just a handful, the entries on global justice , respect , contemporary Africana philosophy , multiculturalism , privacy , and Latinx philosophy .

• 1. Introduction
• 2. What is Feminism?

3. Approaches to Feminism

4. interventions in philosophy, 5. topics in feminism, other internet resources, related entries, 1. what is feminism.

Broadly understood, feminism is both an intellectual commitment and a political movement that seeks an end to gender-based oppression. Motivated by the quest for social justice, feminist inquiry provides a wide range of perspectives on cultural, economic, social, and political phenomena. It identifies and evaluates the many ways that some norms have been used to exclude, marginalize, and oppress people on the basis of gender, as well as how gendered identities have been shaped to conform and uphold the norms of a patriarchal society. In so doing, it tries to understand the roots of a system that has been prevalent in nearly all known places and times. It also explores what a just society would look like.

While less frequently than one would think, throughout history women have rebelled against repressive structures. It was not until the late 19th century that feminism coalesced into a movement. In the mid-1800s the term feminism was still used to refer to “the qualities of females.” After the First International Women’s Conference in Paris in 1892, the term feminism , following the French term féministe , was used regularly in English for a belief in and advocacy of equal rights for women based on the idea of the equality of the sexes. Hence the term feminism in English is rooted in the mobilization for women’s suffrage in Europe and the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

As a term, feminism has many different uses and its meanings are often contested. For example, some writers use the term to refer to a historically specific political movement in the United States and Europe; other writers use it to refer to the belief that there are injustices against women, though there is no consensus on the exact list of these injustices. Some have found it useful, if controversial, to think of the women’s movement in the United States as occurring in “waves.” The wave model has some virtues, but it also tends to overlook a great deal of heterogeneity of thought in any given moment. It works well enough for what is thought of as the first wave, identified as the period from the mid-nineteenth century until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. This first wave focused on the struggle to achieve basic political rights. According to the wave model, feminism in the United States waned after women achieved voting rights, to be revived in the late 1960s and early 1970s as “second wave” feminism. In this second wave, the model holds, feminists pushed beyond the early quest for political rights to fight for greater equality across the board, e.g., in education, the workplace, and at home. But in actuality, many feminists during this time were focusing on more than equality. Like the first wave, many of the leaders of the second wave of feminism were white women seeking equal rights. But also, as in the first wave, other voices emerged, broadening the movement. The second wave came to include women of different identities, ethnicities, and orientations. In addition to calling for equal political rights, they called for greater equality across the board, e.g., in education, the workplace, and at home. Transformations of feminism beginning in the 1990s have resulted in a “third wave.” Third Wave feminists often critique earlier feminists for their lack of attention to the differences among women due to class, ethnicity, nationality, religion, and race (see Breines 2002; Springer 2002), and emphasize “identity” as a site of gender struggle. (For more information on the “wave” model and each of the “waves,” see the subsection on Waves of Feminism in the Other Internet Resources section.)

Some feminist scholars object to identifying feminism in terms of waves on the grounds that doing so eclipses differences within each wave as well as continuity of feminist resistance to male domination throughout history and across cultures. In other words, feminism is not confined to a few (white) women in the West over the past century or so. Moreover, even considering only relatively recent efforts to resist male domination in Europe and the United States, the emphasis on “First” and “Second” Wave feminism ignores the ongoing resistance to male domination between the 1920s and 1960s and the resistance outside mainstream politics, particularly by women of color and working class women (Cott 1987). The wave model also cannot account for theoretical work taking place between waves, for example, of the tremendous work done by Simone de Beauvoir in her groundbreaking book of 1949, The Second Sex . Because of these many limitiations of the wave model, the feminist section of the SEP makes little use of it.

Although the term feminism has a history in English linked with women’s activism from the late nineteenth century to the present, it is useful to distinguish feminist ideas or beliefs from feminist political movements, for even in periods where there has been no significant political activism around women’s subordination, individuals have been concerned with and theorized about justice for women. So, for example, it makes sense to ask whether Plato was a feminist, given his view that some women should be trained to rule ( Republic , Book V), even though he was an exception in his historical context (see, e.g., Tuana 1994). Overall, feminism can be understood as not only a social movement but also a set of beliefs, concepts, and theories that seek to analyze, diagnose, and identify solutions to the manifold injustices that people suffer on account of gendered norms. Broadly understood, this is feminism as a intellectual movement. The SEP feminist section aims to chronicle and explain the various theories, concepts, and philosophical tools that feminist philosophers have developed.

Much has been made of the methodological differences or “divides” between various philosophical traditions, namely analytic and continental, but also pragmatist and psychoanalytic. But throughout these entries the reader will find a continuity of descriptions on the meaning of feminism, even with the heterogeneity of the philosophical methodologies these entries’ authors employ. The entry on feminist ethics, written by the analytic feminist philosopher Kathryn Norlock, describes that field in a way that is agreeable to almost any feminist philosopher:

Feminist Ethics aims “to understand, criticize, and correct” how gender operates within our moral beliefs and practices (Lindemann 2005, 11) and our methodological approaches to ethical theory. More specifically, feminist ethicists aim to understand, criticize, and correct: (1) the binary view of gender, (2) the privilege historically available to men, and/or (3) the ways that views about gender maintain oppressive social orders or practices that harm others, especially girls and women who historically have been subordinated along gendered dimensions including sexuality and gender-identity. (entry on feminist ethics , introduction)

Likewise, the entry on feminist perspectives on power, written by the critical theorist Amy Allen, proposes the idea that “although any general definition of feminism would no doubt be controversial, it seems undeniable that much work in feminist theory is devoted to the tasks of critiquing gender subordination, analyzing its intersections with other forms of subordination such as racism, heterosexism, and class oppression, and envisioning prospects for individual and collective resistance and emancipation.” (entry on feminist perspectives on power , introduction)

Even with general overall shared commitments about the meaning of feminism, numerous differences among feminist philosophers do show up in the array of arenas outlined in this section of the SEP. Some of these may be due to different methodological approaches (whether, for example, continental or analytic), but others show up because of different ontological commitments (such as the category of woman) and beliefs about what kind of political and moral remedies should be sought.

Nonetheless, over the decades there has been a lot of frustration, perhaps because as philosophers these feminist theorists often want to get to the (one) truth of the matter, for example, what is “a woman”? What is freedom? What is autonomy? Yet so far any search for a unified or unifying theory of feminism has yet to bear fruit. Consider the seemingly unproblematic claim that feminism is a commitment to women’s equal rights. Perhaps it is, but framing it this way comes with its own presuppositions. The first is that feminism is committed to a liberal model of politics. Although most feminists would probably agree that there is some sense of rights on which achieving equal rights for women is a necessary condition for feminism to succeed, most would also argue that this would not be sufficient. This is because women’s oppression under male domination rarely if ever consists solely in depriving women of political and legal rights, but also extends into the structure of our society and the content of our culture, and the workings of languages and how they shape perceptions and permeate our consciousness (e.g., Bartky 1988, Postl 2017). A second presupposition is that there is some clear and universal definition of what it is to be a woman. The SEP entry, Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender, gives a rich overview of what is problematic about this supposition. Any attempt to define “woman,” according to Judith Butler, is also an attempt to exclude some from that category. More recently this debate shows up in discussions about nonbinary and trans people. Previously, it showed up in suppositions that the typical subject of feminism was white and middle class. While feminism would be easier to theorize if it were clear who its subject is, any attempt to define it runs into trouble. (see the entry on feminist perspectives on trans issues )

Is there any point, then, in asking what feminism is? Rather than looking for a unified field theory of feminism, perhaps feminism can be identified as an engagement precisely where there are contradictions over questions of freedom, identity, and agency. These contradictions are not just logical ones but also historical ones. For example, the question of women’s political equality to men arose precisely at those historical moments when “all men” came to be deemed as equal (McAfee 2021). During the French Revolution, the French settled the matter by saying that “men” meant men and not women. In the American Revolution, “men” was not so clearly gendered but it was certainly raced as white. Equality becomes an issue precisely where there is a disjunct between what seems to be the case normatively and what is happening empirically. Questions about the category of women arise in the context of political diversity and biological malleability, where peoples of many cultures mingle and sexual or gender identity can be altered. Feminist debates over pornography and sex work become heated in the context, respectively, of a free press and economic precarity. In short, feminist inquiry arises in the context of disagreement and contradiction and it produces new ways of approaching issues and asking questions. Thus, that it lacks a cohesive set of answers may be beside the point.

In sum, “feminism” is an umbrella term for a range of views about injustices against women. There are disagreements among feminists about the nature of justice in general and the nature of sexism, in particular, the specific kinds of injustice or wrong women suffer; and the group who should be the primary focus of feminist efforts. Nonetheless, feminists are committed to bringing about social change to end injustice against women, in particular, injustice against women as women.

2. Feminist Scholarship

Contemporary feminist philosophical scholarship emerged in the 1970s as more women began careers in higher education, including philosophy. As they did so, they also began taking up matters from their own experience for philosophical scrutiny. These scholars were influenced both by feminist movements in their midst as well as by their philosophical training, which generally was anything but feminist. Until about the 1990s, one could not go to graduate school to study “feminist philosophy.” While students and scholars could turn to the writings of Simone de Beauvoir or look back historically to the writings of “first wave” feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft, most of the philosophers writing in the first decades of the emergence of feminist philosophy brought their particular training and expertise to bear on analyzing issues raised by the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s, such as abortion, affirmative action, equal opportunity, the institutions of marriage, sexuality, and love. Additionally, feminist philosophical scholarship increasingly focused on the very same types of issues taken up by mainstream philosophers.

Feminist philosophical scholarship begins with attention to women, and to limitations on their roles and locations and the ways they were valued or devalued. It developed further by considering gender in less binary terms as well as recognizing that gender is only one fact of the complex interactions among class, race, ability, and sexuality. Feminist scholarship asks how attention to these might transform feminist philosophy itself. From here we move to the realm of the symbolic and how it constructs “the feminine.” How is the feminine instantiated and constructed within the texts of philosophy? What role does it play in forming, either through its absence or its presence, the central concepts of philosophy?

Feminist philosophers brought their philosophical tools to bear on these questions. Since these feminist philosophers employed the philosophical tools they knew best and found most promising, feminist philosophy began to emerge from all the traditions of Western philosophy prevalent at the end of the twentieth century, including analytic, continental, and classical American philosophy. While the thematic focus of their work was often influenced by the topics and questions highlighted by these traditions, the larger shared feminist concerns often create as much commonality as difference. Hence, a given question could be taken up and addressed from an array of views in ways that are sometimes divergent and at other times complementary.

As an historically male discipline, many of the leading philosophical journals and societies did not recognize much feminist scholarship as properly philosophical. In response, feminist scholars began founding their own journals and organizations. The first leading feminist journal, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy , was founded in 1982 as a venue for feminist philosophical scholarship. It embraced a diversity of methodological approaches in feminist philosophy, publishing work from a variety of traditions. Feminist scholarship in each of these traditions is also advanced and supported though scholarly exchange at various professional societies, including the Society for Women in Philosophy, founded in the United States in 1972. Additionally, the Society for Analytical Feminism, founded in 1991, promotes the study of issues in feminism by methods broadly construed as analytic, to examine the use of analytic methods as applied to feminist issues, and to provide a means by which those interested in analytical feminism can meet and exchange ideas. The journal philo SOPHIA was established in 2005 to promote continental feminist scholarly and pedagogical development. The Society for the Study of Women Philosophers was established in 1987 to promote the study of the contributions of women to the history of philosophy. Similar organizations and journals on many continents continue to advance scholarship in feminist philosophy. Often a feminist philosophical society will publish its own journal, just as the International Network on Feminist Approaches to Bioethics publishes the International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics. While the discipline of philosophy in the West remains predominantly white and male, feminist journals and scholarship continues to proliferate.

Important feminist philosophical work has emerged from all the current major philosophical traditions, including analytic philosophy, continental philosophy, and American pragmatist philosophy. It is also emerging from other new areas of inquiry, such as Latin American thought, which arises out of the context of colonialism. Entries in the SEP under the heading “approaches to feminism” discuss the impact of these traditions and constellations of thought on feminist scholarship. The subsection also addresses how some work, such as psychoanalytic feminism, bridges two or more traditions. The editors of the feminist section of the SEP see these different traditions as a rich array of methodologies rather than “continental divides.” The array reflects a variety of beliefs about what kinds of philosophy are both fruitful and meaningful. The different methodologies bring their own ways of asking and answering questions, along with constructive and critical dialogue with mainstream philosophical views and methods and new topics of inquiry.

As the SEP continues to grow, we anticipate that this subsection on approaches to feminism will expand to address other traditions, including Black feminism. But for now, here are links to entries in this subsection:

• analytic feminism
• continental feminism
• Latin American feminism
• pragmatist feminism
• intersections between pragmatist and continental feminism
• intersections between analytic and continental feminism
• psychoanalytic feminism

Though not included along with these in the table of contents, another relevant approach can be found in the entry on gender in Confucian philosophy .

All these approaches share a set of feminist commitments and an overarching criticism of institutions, presuppositions, and practices that have historically favored men over women. They also share a general critique of claims to universality and objectivity that ignore male-dominated theories’ own particularity and specificity. Feminist philosophies of almost any philosophical orientation will be much more perspectival, historical, contextual, and focused on lived experience than their non-feminist counterparts. Unlike mainstream philosophers who can seriously consider the philosophical conundrums of brains in a vat, feminist philosophers always start by seeing people as embodied. Feminists have also argued for the reconfiguration of accepted structures and problems of philosophy. For example, feminists have not only rejected the privileging of epistemological concerns over moral and political concerns common to much of philosophy, they have argued that these two areas of concern are inextricably intertwined. Part 2 of the entry on analytic feminism lays out other areas of commonality across these various approaches. For one, feminist philosophers generally agree that philosophy is a powerful tool for, as Ann Garry states in that entry, “understanding ourselves and our relations to each other, to our communities, and to the state; to appreciate the extent to which we are counted as knowers and moral agents; [and] to uncover the assumptions and methods of various bodies of knowledge.” As such, philosophy is also a powerful tool for understanding how gender itself has been constructed, that is, why and to whose benefit it is to construct some people as lesser and less capable than others. Along these lines, feminist philosophers are keenly attuned to male biases at work in the history of philosophy, such as those regarding “the nature of woman” and supposed value neutrality, which on inspection is hardly neutral at all. Claims to universality, feminist philosophers have found, are usually made from a very specific and particular point of view, contrary to their manifest assertions. Another orientation that feminist philosophers generally share is a commitment to normativity and social change; they are never content to analyze things just as they are but instead look for ways to overcome oppressive practices and institutions.

Such questioning of the problems of mainstream approaches to philosophy has often led to feminists using methods and approaches from more than one philosophical tradition. As Ann Garry notes in Part 3 of the entry on analytic feminism (2017), it is not uncommon to find analytic feminists drawing on non-analytic figures such as Beauvoir, Foucault, or Butler; and because of their motivation to communicate with other feminists, they are more motivated than other philosophers “to search for methodological cross-fertilization.” Moreover, feminist philosophers are generally inclined to incorporate the perspectives of all those who have been oppressed.

Even with their common and overlapping orientations, the differences between the various philosophical approaches to feminism are significant, especially in terms of styles of writing, influences, and overall expectations about what philosophy can and should achieve. Analytic feminist philosophy tends to value analysis and argumentation, though anyone trained in philosophy does so as well. Continental feminist theory puts more emphasis on interpretation and deconstruction, and pragmatist feminism values lived experience and exploration. Coming out of a post-Hegelian tradition, both continental and pragmatist philosophers usually suspect that “truth,” whatever that is, emerges and develops historically. They tend to share with Nietzsche the view that truth claims often mask power plays. Yet where continental and pragmatist philosophers are generally wary about notions of truth, analytic feminists tend to argue that the way to “counter sexism and androcentrism is through forming a clear conception of and pursuing truth, logical consistency, objectivity, rationality, justice, and the good.” (Cudd 1996: 20).

These differences and intersections play out in the ways that various feminists engage topics of common concern. One key area of intersection, noted by Georgia Warnke, is the appropriation of psychoanalytic theory, with Anglo-American feminists generally adopting object-relations theories and continental feminists drawing more on Lacan and contemporary French psychoanalytic theory, though this is already beginning to change as it becomes clearer that continental psychoanalytic theory is also interested, via Julia Kristeva and Melanie Klein, in object-relations theory (see the entry on intersections between analytic and continental feminism ). The importance of psychoanalytic approaches is also underscored in Shannon Sullivan’s entry on intersections between pragmatist and continental feminism . Given the importance of psychoanalytic feminism for all three traditions, a separate essay on this approach to feminist theory is included in this section.

No topic is more central to feminist philosophy than sex and gender, but even here many variations on the theme flourish. Where analytic feminism, with its critique of essentialism, holds the sex/gender distinction practically as an article of faith (see the entry on feminist perspectives on sex and gender and Chanter 2009), continental feminists tend to suspect either (1) that even the supposedly purely biological category of sex is itself socially constituted (Butler 1990 and 1993) or (2) that sexual difference itself needs to be valued and theorized (see especially Cixous 1976 and Irigaray 1974).

Despite the variety of different approaches, styles, societies, and orientations, feminist philosophers’ commonalities are greater than their differences. Many will borrow freely from each other and find that other orientations contribute to their own work. Even the differences over sex and gender add to a larger conversation about the impact of culture and society on bodies, experience, and pathways for change.

Philosophers who are feminists have, in their work in traditional fields of study, begun to change those very fields. The Encyclopedia includes a range of entries on how feminist philosophies have intervened in conventional areas of philosophical research, areas in which philosophers often tend to argue that they are operating from a neutral, universal point of view (notable exceptions are pragmatism, poststructuralism, and some phenomenology). Historically, philosophy has claimed that the norm is universal and the feminine is abnormal, that universality is not gendered, but that all things feminine are not universal. Not surprisingly, feminists have pointed out how in fact these supposed neutral enterprises are in fact quite gendered, namely, male gendered. For example, feminists working on environmental philosophy have uncovered how practices disproportionately affect women, children, and people of color. Liberal feminism has shown how supposed universal truths of liberalism are in fact quite biased and particular. Feminist epistemologists have called out “epistemologies of ignorance” that traffic in not knowing. Across the board, in fact, feminist philosophers are uncovering male biases and also pointing to the value of particularity, in general rejecting universality as a norm or goal.

Entries under the heading of feminist interventions include the following:

• feminist aesthetics
• feminist bioethics
• feminist environmental philosophy
• feminist epistemology and philosophy of science
• feminist ethics
• feminist history of philosophy
• liberal feminism
• feminist metaphysics
• feminist moral psychology
• feminist philosophy of biology
• feminist philosophy of language
• feminist philosophy of law
• feminist philosophy of religion
• feminist political philosophy
• feminist social epistemology

Feminist critical attention to philosophical practices has revealed the inadequacy of dominant philosophical tropes as well as the need to turn philosophical attention to things that had previously gone unattended. For example, feminists working from the perspective of women’s lives have been influential in bringing philosophical attention to the phenomenon of care and care-giving (Ruddick 1989; Held 1995, 2007; Hamington 2006), dependency (Kittay 1999), disability (Wilkerson 2002; Carlson 2009), women’s labor (Waring 1999; Delphy 1984; Harley 2007), the devaluation of women’s testimonies (see the entry on feminist epistemology and philosophy of science ), and scientific bias and objectivity (Longino 1990). In doing so they have revealed weaknesses in existing ethical, political, and epistemological theories. More generally, feminists have called for inquiry into what are typically considered “private” practices and personal concerns, such as the family, sexuality, and the body, in order to balance what has seemed to be a masculine pre-occupation with “public” and impersonal matters. Philosophy presupposes interpretive tools for understanding our everyday lives; feminist work in articulating additional dimensions of experience and aspects of our practices is invaluable in demonstrating the bias in existing tools, and in the search for better ones.

Feminist explanations of sexism and accounts of sexist practices also raise issues that are within the domain of traditional philosophical inquiry. For example, in thinking about care, feminists have asked questions about the nature of the self; in thinking about gender, feminists have asked what the relationship is between the natural and the social; in thinking about sexism in science, feminists have asked what should count as knowledge. In some such cases, mainstream philosophical accounts provide useful tools; in other cases, alternative proposals have seemed more promising.

In the sub-entries included under “feminism (topics)” in the Table of Contents to this Encyclopedia , authors survey some of the recent feminist work on a topic, highlighting the issues that are of particular relevance to philosophy. These entries are:

• feminist perspectives on argumentation
• feminist perspectives on autonomy
• feminist perspectives on class and work
• feminist perspectives on disability
• feminist perspectives on globalization
• feminist perspectives on objectification
• feminist perspectives on power
• feminist perspectives on rape
• feminist perspectives on reproduction and the family
• feminist perspectives on science
• feminist perspectives on sex and gender
• feminist perspectives on sex markets
• feminist perspectives on the body
• feminist perspectives on the self
• feminist perspectives on trans issues

See also the entries in the Related Entries section below.

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

Resources listed below have been chosen to provide only a springboard into the huge amount of feminist material available on the web. The emphasis here is on general resources useful for doing research in feminist philosophy or interdisciplinary feminist theory, e.g., the links connect to bibliographies and meta-sites, and resources concerning inclusion, exclusion, and feminist diversity. The list is incomplete and will be regularly revised and expanded. Further resources on topics in feminism such as popular culture, reproductive rights, sex work, are available within each sub-entry on that topic.

• Feminist Theory Website
• Women and Social Movements in the US: 1600–2000
• The Path of the Women’s Rights Movement: Detailed Timeline 1848–1997
• Documents from the Women’s Liberation Movement (Duke Univ. Archives)
• Documenting Difference: An Illustrated & Annotated Anthology of Documents on Race, Class, Gender & Ethnicity in the United States
• Race, Gender, and Affirmative Action Resource Page

Associations

• The Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP)
• Association for Feminist Ethics and Social Theory (FEAST)
• Feminist Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Science Studies (FEMMSS) http://femmss.org/
• Feminist Theory Website (Introduction)
• philoSOPHIA: A Feminist Society
• Society for Analytical Feminism
• The Society for the Study of Women Philosophers

“Waves” of Feminism

• “Waves of Feminism” by Jo Freeman (1996).
• Winning the Vote (Western NY Suffragists).
• Amendments to the US Constitution: 13th, 14th, 15th, 18th, 19th, 21st
• NOW’s 1966 Statement of Purpose
• “The Women’s Liberation Movement: Its Origins, Structures, and Ideals” by Jo Freeman (1971).

Feminism and Class

Marxist, socialist, and materialist feminisms.

• WMST-L discussion of how to define “Marxist feminism” Aug 1994)
• Marxist/Materialist Feminism (Feminist Theory Website)
• A Marxist Feminist Critique

Feminist Economics

• Feminist Economics (Feminist Theory Website)
• International Association for Feminist Economics
• International Center for Research on Women

Women and Labor

• Rights for Working Women
• United States Department of Labor
• United States Department of Labor: Audience – Women , a shortcut to information and services the Department of Labor (DOL) offers for women.

Feminism and Disability

• Center for Research on Women with Disabilities (CROWD)

Feminism, Human Rights, Global Feminism, and Human Trafficking

• Global Feminism (Feminist Majority Foundation)
• NOW and Global Feminism
• Sisterhood is Global Institute
• Polaris Project
• Not For Sale Campaign
• Human Trafficking Search website

Feminism and Race/Ethnicity

General resources.

• Office of the Gender and Women’s Studies Librarian (U. Wisconsin)
• Women of Color Web Sites (WMST-L)

African-American/Black Feminisms and Womanism

• Feminism and Black Womanist Identity Bibliography (Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library)
• Black Feminist/Womanist Works: A Beginning List (WMST-L)

Asian-American and Asian Feminisms

• American Women’s History: A Research Guide (Asian-American Women)
• South Asian Women’s Studies Bibliography (UC Berkeley)
• Journal of South Asia Women’s Studies

Chicana/Latina Feminisms

• Chicano/a Latino/a Movimientos

American Indian, Native, Indigenous Feminisms

• Native American Studies Program (Dartmouth College)

Feminism, Sex, Sexuality, Transgender, and Intersex

• Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture (Duke Special Collections)

affirmative action | communitarianism | contractarianism | discrimination | egalitarianism | equality | equality: of opportunity | exploitation | feminist philosophy, approaches: Latin American feminism | feminist philosophy, interventions: epistemology and philosophy of science | feminist philosophy, interventions: ethics | feminist philosophy, interventions: history of philosophy | globalization | homosexuality | identity politics | justice: as a virtue | justice: distributive | legal rights | liberalism | Mill, Harriet Taylor | Mill, John Stuart | multiculturalism | parenthood and procreation | race

Acknowledgments

Over many revisions, thanks go to Ann Garry, Heidi Grasswick, Elizabeth Harman, Elizabeth Hackett, Serene Khader, Ishani Maitra, Ásta Sveinsdóttir, Leslee Mahoney, and Anita Superson.

Copyright © 2023 by Noëlle McAfee < noelle . c . mcafee @ emory . edu > Ann Garry Anita Superson Heidi Grasswick Serene Khader

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Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

5 Essays About Feminism

On the surface, the definition of feminism is simple. It’s the belief that women should be politically, socially, and economically equal to men. Over the years, the movement expanded from a focus on voting rights to worker rights, reproductive rights, gender roles, and beyond. Modern feminism is moving to a more inclusive and intersectional place. Here are five essays about feminism that tackle topics like trans activism, progress, and privilege:

“Trickle-Down Feminism” – Sarah Jaffe

Feminists celebrate successful women who have seemingly smashed through the glass ceiling, but the reality is that most women are still under it. Even in fast-growing fields where women dominate (retail sales, food service, etc), women make less money than men. In this essay from Dissent Magazine, author Sarah Jaffe argues that when the fastest-growing fields are low-wage, it isn’t a victory for women. At the same time, it does present an opportunity to change the way we value service work. It isn’t enough to focus only on “equal pay for equal work” as that argument mostly focuses on jobs where someone can negotiate their salary. This essay explores how feminism can’t succeed if only the concerns of the wealthiest, most privileged women are prioritized.

Sarah Jaffe writes about organizing, social movements, and the economy with publications like Dissent, the Nation, Jacobin, and others. She is the former labor editor at Alternet.

“What No One Else Will Tell You About Feminism” – Lindy West

Written in Lindy West’s distinct voice, this essay provides a clear, condensed history of feminism’s different “waves.” The first wave focused on the right to vote, which established women as equal citizens. In the second wave, after WWII, women began taking on issues that couldn’t be legally-challenged, like gender roles. As the third wave began, the scope of feminism began to encompass others besides middle-class white women. Women should be allowed to define their womanhood for themselves. West also points out that “waves” may not even exist since history is a continuum. She concludes the essay by declaring if you believe all people are equal, you are a feminist.

Jezebel reprinted this essay with permission from How To Be A Person, The Stranger’s Guide to College by Lindy West, Dan Savage, Christopher Frizelle, and Bethany Jean Clement. Lindy West is an activist, comedian, and writer who focuses on topics like feminism, pop culture, and fat acceptance.

“Toward a Trans* Feminism” – Jack Halberstam

The history of transactivsm and feminism is messy. This essay begins with the author’s personal experience with gender and terms like trans*, which Halberstam prefers. The asterisk serves to “open the meaning,” allowing people to choose their categorization as they see fit. The main body of the essay focuses on the less-known history of feminists and trans* folks. He references essays from the 1970s and other literature that help paint a more complete picture. In current times, the tension between radical feminism and trans* feminism remains, but changes that are good for trans* women are good for everyone.

This essay was adapted from Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability by Jack Halberstam. Halberstam is the Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Gender Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. He is also the author of several books.

“Rebecca Solnit: How Change Happens” – Rebecca Solnit

The world is changing. Rebecca Solnit describes this transformation as an assembly of ideas, visions, values, essays, books, protests, and more. It has many layers involving race, class, gender, power, climate, justice, etc, as well as many voices. This has led to more clarity about injustice. Solnit describes watching the transformation and how progress and “ wokeness ” are part of a historical process. Progress is hard work. Not exclusively about feminism, this essay takes a more intersectional look at how progress as a whole occurs.

“How Change Happens” was adapted from the introduction to Whose Story Is it? Rebecca Solnit is a writer, activist, and historian. She’s the author of over 20 books on art, politics, feminism, and more.

“Bad Feminist” extract – Roxane Gay

People are complicated and imperfect. In this excerpt from her book Bad Feminist: Essays , Roxane Gay explores her contradictions. The opening sentence is, “I am failing as a woman.” She goes on to describe how she wants to be independent, but also to be taken care of. She wants to be strong and in charge, but she also wants to surrender sometimes. For a long time, she denied that she was human and flawed. However, the work it took to deny her humanness is harder than accepting who she is. While Gay might be a “bad feminist,” she is also deeply committed to issues that are important to feminism. This is a must-read essay for any feminists who worry that they aren’t perfect.

Roxane Gay is a professor, speaker, editor, writer, and social commentator. She is the author of Bad Feminist , a New York Times bestseller, Hunger (a memoir), and works of fiction.

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About the author, emmaline soken-huberty.

Emmaline Soken-Huberty is a freelance writer based in Portland, Oregon. She started to become interested in human rights while attending college, eventually getting a concentration in human rights and humanitarianism. LGBTQ+ rights, women’s rights, and climate change are of special concern to her. In her spare time, she can be found reading or enjoying Oregon’s natural beauty with her husband and dog.

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Feminism: An Essay

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on April 27, 2016 • ( 6 )

Feminism as a movement gained potential in the twentieth century, marking the culmination of two centuries’ struggle for cultural roles and socio-political rights — a struggle which first found its expression in Mary Wollstonecraft ‘s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). The movement gained increasing prominence across three phases/waves — the first wave (political), the second wave (cultural) and the third wave (academic). Incidentally Toril Moi also classifies the feminist movement into three phases — the female (biological), the feminist (political) and the feminine (cultural).

The first wave of feminism, in the 19th and 20th centuries, began in the US and the UK as a struggle for equality and property rights for women, by suffrage groups and activist organisations. These feminists fought against chattel marriages and for polit ical and economic equality. An important text of the first wave is Virginia Woolf ‘s A Room of One’s Own (1929), which asserted the importance of woman’s independence, and through the character Judith (Shakespeare’s fictional sister), explicated how the patriarchal society prevented women from realising their creative potential. Woolf also inaugurated the debate of language being gendered — an issue which was later dealt by Dale Spender who wrote Man Made Language (1981), Helene Cixous , who introduced ecriture feminine (in The Laugh of the Medusa ) and Julia Kristeva , who distinguished between the symbolic and the semiotic language.

The second wave of feminism in the 1960s and ’70s, was characterized by a critique of patriarchy in constructing the cultural identity of woman. Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949) famously stated, “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman” – a statement that highlights the fact that women have always been defined as the “Other”, the lacking, the negative, on whom Freud attributed “ penis-envy .” A prominent motto of this phase, “The Personal is the political” was the result of the awareness .of the false distinction between women’s domestic and men’s public spheres. Transcending their domestic and personal spaces, women began to venture into the hitherto male dominated terrains of career and public life. Marking its entry into the academic realm, the presence of feminism was reflected in journals, publishing houses and academic disciplines.

Mary Ellmann ‘s Thinking about Women (1968), Kate Millett ‘s Sexual Politics (1969), Betty Friedan ‘s The Feminine Mystique (1963) and so on mark the major works of the phase. Millett’s work specifically depicts how western social institutions work as covert ways of manipulating power, and how this permeates into literature, philosophy etc. She undertakes a thorough critical understanding of the portrayal of women in the works of male authors like DH Lawrence, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller and Jean Genet.

In the third wave (post 1980), Feminism has been actively involved in academics with its interdisciplinary associations with Marxism , Psychoanalysis and Poststructuralism , dealing with issues such as language, writing, sexuality, representation etc. It also has associations with alternate sexualities, postcolonialism ( Linda Hutcheon and Spivak ) and Ecological Studies ( Vandana Shiva )

Elaine Showalter , in her “ Towards a Feminist Poetics ” introduces the concept of gynocriticism , a criticism of gynotexts, by women who are not passive consumers but active producers of meaning. The gynocritics construct a female framework for the analysis of women’s literature, and focus on female subjectivity, language and literary career. Patricia Spacks ‘ The Female Imagination , Showalter’s A Literature of their Own , Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar ‘s The Mad Woman in the Attic are major gynocritical texts.

The present day feminism in its diverse and various forms, such as liberal feminism, cultural/ radical feminism, black feminism/womanism, materialist/neo-marxist feminism, continues its struggle for a better world for women. Beyond literature and literary theory, Feminism also found radical expression in arts, painting ( Kiki Smith , Barbara Kruger ), architecture( Sophia Hayden the architect of Woman’s Building ) and sculpture (Kate Mllett’s Naked Lady).

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Washington Square News

A Crash Course on the Four Waves of Feminism

Veronica Liow

A pro-planned parenthood rally on Feb. 11, 2017 in Washington Square Park.

Natasha Roy , Managing Editor-at-Large March 19, 2018

The Women’s March Movement declared that feminism must be intersectional — that is, it can’t just account for women who fall under one specific demographic. As Vox explained , intersectional feminism means to pay “attention to the ways the gender-based discrimination and oppression a woman may experience can be compounded by her race, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation and more.”

It almost seems obvious and as though it should go without saying — all men, women and gender-nonconforming people should be treated equally under feminism, right? But during the first wave of feminism, the movement wasn’t always so inclusive.

If the different waves of feminism confuse you and you don’t understand the nuances of each — or if you don’t even know which one we’re currently living in — have no fear. Here’s a handy guide to the four waves of feminism.

First Wave Feminism: 1800s to Early 1900s

The first wave of feminism is recognized to have begun with the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, when hundreds of men and women advocated for women’s equality — specifically, for their right to vote. Pacific University professor Martha Rampton, the head of Pacific University’s Center for Gender Equity, wrote in Pacific Magazine that it also challenged the idea of the cult of domesticity and women’s limited political participation.

Major figures from the first wave included Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who wrote the Seneca Falls Declaration that detailed feminist goals, and Sojourner Truth.

Second Wave Feminism: 1960s to 1990s

According to HowStuffWorks, feminism’s second wave began with women protesting the 1968 Miss America Pageant contest. The second wave saw women fight for workplace equality, and it benefited from organizations that represented many ideologies.

The National Organization for Women formed in response to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission — which had focused more on racial discrimination in the workplace — and it fought for gender reform to be implemented via laws. Other organizations, like New York Radical Women and the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, put on public demonstrations to protest workplace sexism, according to HowStuffWorks.

This wave also targeted rape and abortion, among other so-called private issues. Second-wave feminists saw success through Roe v. Wade in 1973, in which the Supreme Court declared abortion legal. However, the movement was primarily led by middle-class white women, and many African-American women during this time were only just receiving the right to vote.

Third Wave Feminism: 1990s to 2000s

Third wave feminism is recognized as more intersectional. In her essay, Rampton said feminists tried to fight against many social constructs, including heteronormativity and ideal body types. It was also marked by more sexual liberation and Riot grrrls, those who rejected the notion of being sex objects.

“Pinkfloor expressed this new position when she said that it’s possible to have a push-up bra and a brain at the same time,” Rampton wrote.

Many third-wave feminists also avoided calling themselves feminists in order to avoid a so-called us-them construct.

“Grrrl-feminism tends to be global, multicultural and it shuns simple answers or artificial categories of identity, gender and sexuality,” Rampton wrote. “Its transversal politics means that differences such as those of ethnicity, class [and] sexual orientation … are celebrated and recognized as dynamic, situational and provisional.”

Fourth Wave Feminism: Now

The line between third and fourth wave feminism is blurry. The fourth wave still fights for many of the third wave’s causes — and, undoubtedly, some from the first two as well — but it also highlights sexual aggression against women and girls.

Major milestones for this wave were the Women’s March on Washington, the #MeToo Movement and the Time’s Up initiative.

A 2015 Bustle article by Kristen Sollee recognized the continuation of body positivity, sex positivity and LGBTQ inclusion from the third wave — though these ideals are arguable more heightened in social consciousness with the fourth wave. Sollee also pointed out the fact that the current wave pushes against misandry, or hatred against men.

“Although misandry can seem like the easiest way to combat misogyny, 4th [ sic ] wave feminists understand that centering queerness means embracing the myriad ways gender stereotypes, particularly masculine ones, can hurt us all,” Sollee wrote.

The fourth wave is perhaps the most significantly different in that it is digitally driven by what Sollee calls “hashtag activism,” as shown through the plethora of tweets and Facebook posts with the hashtag #MeToo that surfaced last year and still trickle on timelines today.

Read more from Washington Square News’ Intersectionality Feature here. Email Natasha Roy at [email protected] .

• #MeToo Movement
• body positivity
• intersectionality
• LGBTQ inclusion
• Riot grrrls
• sex positivity
• sexual liberation
• waves of feminism
• women's march on washington
• women's suffrage
• workplace equality

Natasha is a CAS sophomore studying journalism and public policy, and she's an editor-at-large at WSN this semester. Originally from a small town outside...

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Feminism: The Second Wave

FEMINISM : The Second Wave

The Second Wave

After the ratification of the 19th amendment in 1920, which granted women the right to vote, the first wave of feminism slowed down significantly. Although many of these activists continued to fight for women’s rights, the next sustained feminist movement is believed to have started in the 1960s. Much like the first wave that developed during a period of social reform, the second wave also took place amidst other social and political movements.

The Predecessor

In between the first and the second wave, French feminist author Simone de Beauvoir published a foundational book that set the tone for the next surge of women’s rights activism. Published in 1949, her book entitled “The Second Sex,” provided extensive definitions of womanhood and outlined how women have historically been treated as second to men. Originally published in France, “The Second Sex” quickly became a phenomenon and was published in the United States in 1953. Beauvoir was not only a feminist writer, but she was also considered a philosopher because her writings often answered complex and philosophical questions. In “The Second Sex,” she questions, “What is a woman?” Ultimately, she determined that “one is not born but becomes a woman.

The Instigator

Ten years after “The Second Sex” was published in the United States, American feminist writer Betty Friedan helped ignite the second feminist wave with her book “The Feminine Mystique.” Released in 1963, Friedan builds on the foundation of Simone de Beauvoir’s work. However, Friedan not only employed philosophical thought to discuss feminism, she also incorporated oral histories and her personal experiences to address the issues many women were facing. Friedan first began by researching the role of women in society to see if other women shared her feelings of dissatisfaction and “malaise” as housewives. To her surprise, she was not alone, and her interviews became the source material for her first book.

In the mid-1950s, Friedan found herself as a stay-at-home housewife after a long career as a journalist, writer, and activist. When she got married and had children, Friedan left her career and moved to the suburbs with her family. Even though she continued writing freelance, she soon realized that she was unhappy solely as a housewife. However, she felt the societal pressure to find ultimate happiness as a mother and a homemaker. In 1957 at her 15-year Smith College reunion, Friedan surveyed her classmates and found that they also were unhappy being confined to the home.

For the next five years, Friedan conducted interviews with white middle-class women who were grappling with their roles as housewives. She published her findings in “The Feminine Mystique,” and instantly became a household name. In her book she criticized the separate “sphere” of motherhood and homemaking that women were relegated to. In contrast, men were allowed to flourish in the “male sphere” of work, politics, and power. Friedan’s book encouraged women to step outside of their “sphere,” and fight gender oppression, which she called “the problem that has no name.”

The Movement Begins

Friedan’s book sold over three million copies within the first three years and quickly fueled a resurgence of the feminist movement. Middle-class women across the country began to organize to advocate for women’s social and political equality. The same year “The Feminine Mystique” was published, President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act of 1963 into law. The new legislation stipulated that women could no longer be paid less than men for doing “comparable work” at the same job. This Act was the result of a group of women in the White House, lead by labor activist Esther Peterson. Peterson was appointed as the head of the Women's Bureau in the Department of Labor in 1961. She convinced President Kennedy to establish a Presidential Commission on the Status of Women to work towards achieving equality. The commission included revolutionary women such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Dorothy Height. After collaborating with the commission, Peterson submitted a draft of the Equal Pay Act to congress on behalf of the Kennedy administration.

“Public service announcement (PSA) informing viewers of their rights under the equal pay law.”

Following the Equal Pay Act of 1963, two more legal victories propelled the fight for women’s rights forward. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Griswold v. Connecticut Supreme Court ruling of 1965 both secured rights for some feminists and encouraged them to continue to advocate for women’s equality.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prevented employers from discriminating against employees on the basis of race, religion, sex, or national origin. In addition to the Civil Rights Act, the Griswold v. Connecticut Supreme Court ruling of 1965 prevented anyone from limiting a woman’s access to contraception or other methods of birth control. This case would be used in the famous Roe v. Wade decision, protecting a woman’s right to have an abortion in 1973.

These legal victories gave some women more autonomy in both public and private life. However, many women of color were still disenfranchised.

The Women's Liberation Movement

Early in the second wave, feminist writer Gloria Steinem gained national attention by going undercover as a Playboy Bunny. Her exposé called “A Bunny's Tale,” highlighted the sexism and low wages that women faced in these clubs. Steinem went on to become one of the most recognizable leaders of the second wave. She co-founded both “New York” and “Ms.” magazines and covered political issues ranging from abortion to rape. Steinem first spoke publicly in 1969 at an event to legalize abortion in New York State. Shortly afterwards, she began writing and publishing books that would influence a generation of feminists. Her publications accompanied a host of other feminist work that was published during the period that became the women’s liberation movement. Some of these books include; Kate Millett’s “Sexual Politics” in 1969, Juliet Mitchell’s “The Subjection of Women” in 1970, and Shulamith Firestone’s “The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution” in 1970.

In 1972, Steinem teamed up with Betty Friedan and other activists such as Congresswoman Bella Abzug and Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm to form the National Women’s Political Caucus. This caucus was established to support gender equality and ensure proper women’s representation in political office. At the founding meeting, Steinem delivered a speech entitled “Address to the Women of America,” where she called for a women’s revolution.

That same year, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) proposed by Alice Paul in 1923 finally passed in Congress. Unfortunately, this amendment guaranteeing equal constitutional rights for women failed to be ratified in 38 states within seven years. Supporters of the ERA continue to fight for it’s ratification today.

The Civil Rights Movement

When the second wave of feminism began, the Civil Rights Movement was already in full swing. After emancipation, African American men and women still had to fight against racism, violence, and segregation to exercise their basic human rights. In addition, even after the ratification of the 19th Amendment ensuring that both men and women were able to vote, African American men and women were still restricted from voting by Jim Crow laws, literacy tests, and grandfather-clauses. As the second surge of feminism grew, African American women were once again fighting for their rights as women, alongside their fight for freedom from racial oppression.

In 1969, Frances M. Beal published “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female,” detailing the experiences of African American women during the feminist movement. Her essay specifically noted the exploitation of black women in society and the different struggles between white and “non-white” feminists.

That same year, Betty Friedan stepped down as president of the organization she co-founded called the National Organization for Women (NOW). Although the organization was racially inclusive, the concerns of black women were frequently sidelined. For example, Friedan and some of the African American members clashed over Friedan’s use of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to advocate for more jobs for middle-class white women, when many African American men and women faced racially motivated job discrimination and lived below the poverty line. By the time Friedan stepped down in 1969, African American women had already started forming their own feminist organizations.

By the 1970s, black women were convening as separate feminist organizations starting with the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO) in 1973. The Combahee River Collective formed in 1974 for a similar purpose, but they also focused on issues of sexuality that were often left out. Their statement notes, “we are committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression…” and the way those systems of oppression intersect.

As these women pursued their collective goals, revolutionary scholar and activist Angela Davis began publishing articles and books that would contribute to the foundation of the “Black Feminist” movement. She published an article on the harmful stereotypes of black women in society in 1972 and then followed that with her book entitled, “Women, Race & Class” in 1981. The Combahee River Collective and “Women, Race & Class” both provided a solid foundation for future feminists to study various forms of oppression.

Rethinking Feminism

”Although the women’s movement motivated hundreds of women to write on the woman question, it failed to generate in-depth critical analyses of the black female experience.” --bell hooks in “Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism”

Also writing in 1981, author Gloria Jean Watkins, known as “bell hooks,” published “Ain’t I A Woman? Black Women and Feminism.” Her book provides an analysis of the current movement and a critique of mainstream feminism for excluding the concerns of black women in their overall fight for equality. Instead, she provides an inclusive method for activism through black feminism. She states, “although the focus is on the black female, our struggle for liberation has significance only if it takes place within a feminist movement that has as its fundamental goal the liberation of all people.”

After her pioneering work, many feminist writings followed that addressed the concerns and activism of women of color. One of these books was “This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color” edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa in 1981. This work included several writings from black, Native American, Asian American, and Latina women feminists that advocated for their rights in the white-dominated feminist movement.

Although many African American women identified with hooks’ writing, Alice Walker introduced a new variation of black feminism called “womanism.” Coined by Walker in her 1983 book “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose,” Walker introduces readers to womanism through a collection of personal and political essays. Developed from the African American cultural significance of the word “womanish,” Walker writes that a womanist is “committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. Not a separatist, except periodically, for health.”

Womanism is closely aligned with black feminism and many people use the two terms interchangeably. Walker herself notes that the womanist is “a black feminist or feminist of color.” However, Walker also says: “Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.” With this analogy, Walker reminds her audience that there are many different forms and shades of feminism. Walker’s novel “The Color Purple” also became a film directed by Steven Spielberg, featuring Oprah Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg.

The Gay Rights Movement

Women of color weren’t the only group fighting for their voice in the larger feminist movement. During the 1960s, the gay rights movement also gained momentum as participants advocated for equal rights and unbiased information about homosexuality. The first gay rights demonstrations were held in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. as early as 1965. However, the riots at the Stonewall bar in 1969 marked a shift in LGBTQ activism. Starting on June 28, 1969, customers of the Stonewall Inn in New York’s Greenwich Village fought against targeted and frequent police raids.

As the movement progressed, lesbian women had concerns that were not addressed by gay rights activism. Many of these women decided to leave the male leadership of that movement to form their own lesbian organizations. These women advocated for gay rights, as well as feminist rights within organizations like Betty Friedan’s National Organization for Women (NOW). Unfortunately, many of these mainstream feminists rejected their participation. Lesbian women protested their treatment, including a demonstration at the Second Congress to Unite Women in 1970. These women called themselves the “Radicalesbians” and they read their declaration called “The Woman-Identified Woman” to the attendees. The very next year, the NOW adopted a resolution recognizing lesbian rights, and in 1973 they established the NOW Task Force on Sexuality and Lesbianism. Simultaneously, Lesbians of color like Audre Lorde started writing about their particular experiences. Lorde published "Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches" in 1984.

Bra Burning Women

The second wave of the feminist movement is not only known for the tensions between various streams of feminism. This wave is also heavily associated with the “bra-burning” protest of 1968. Although no bra-burning actually occurred, this myth continues to follow the women’s liberation movement. This rumor came from the 1968 Miss America Pageant protest in Atlantic City, New Jersey. On September 7, 1968 a few hundred women interrupted the live broadcast of the Miss America Pageant to protest beauty standards and the objectification of women. These women threw bras, high heels, Playboy magazines, and other symbolic feminine products into a “Freedom Trash Can.” Although the women did not actually ignite a fire, a reporter compared their actions to Vietnam war protesters that would burn their draft cards. This idea of bra-burning feminists followed the movement ever since and contributed to the stereotype of feminists as angry and “man-hating.”

By the late 1970s, the second wave of feminism began to lose steam. As multiple sub-groups created new organizations for themselves, other debates within feminism grew. One of the key debates was over pornography and sexual activity. Many feminists decided between being “anti-porn feminists” or “sex-positive feminists.” These debates accelerated an already dwindling larger movement. By the early 1980s, the second wave came to a close and a large-scale feminist movement would not return for another decade.

Exhibit written and curated by Kerri Lee Alexander, NWHM Fellow 2018-2020

Davis, Angela Yvonne. Women, Race & Class. London: Womens Press, 1986.

D’Emilio, John. “After Stonewall.” Queer Cultures. Eds. Deborah Carlin and Jennifer DiGrazia. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2004. 3-35.

Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013.

Gay, Roxane. “Fifty Years Ago, Protesters Took on the Miss America Pageant and Electrified the Feminist Movement.” Smithsonian.com, January 1, 2018. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/fifty-years-ago-protestors-took-on-miss-america-pageant-electrified-feminist-movement-180967504/.

hooks, bell. Aint I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. New York: Routledge, 2015. Pp. 12

Lee, Jennifer. “Feminism Has a Bra-Burning Myth Problem.” Time Magazine, June 12, 2014. https://time.com/2853184/feminism-has-a-bra-burning-myth-problem/.

Love, Barbara J. Feminists Who Changed America, 1963-1975. University of Illinois Press, 2006.

Morris, Catherine, Rujeko Hockley, Connie H. Choi, Carmen Hermo, and Stephanie Weissberg. We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85: a Sourcebook. Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Museum, 2017.

Morris, Bonnie J. “History of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Social Movements.” American Psychological Association, 2009. https://www.apa.org/pi/lgbt/resources/history.

Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Motherss Gardens: Womanist Prose. San Diego: Harvest, 1984. Pp. xii

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The women’s movement of the 1960s and ’70s, the so-called “second wave” of feminism, represented a seemingly abrupt break with the tranquil suburban life pictured in American popular culture . Yet the roots of the new rebellion were buried in the frustrations of college-educated mothers whose discontent impelled their daughters in a new direction. If first-wave feminists were inspired by the abolition movement , their great-granddaughters were swept into feminism by the civil rights movement , the attendant discussion of principles such as equality and justice , and the revolutionary ferment caused by protests against the Vietnam War .

Women’s concerns were on Pres. John F. Kennedy ’s agenda even before this public discussion began. In 1961 he created the President’s Commission on the Status of Women and appointed Eleanor Roosevelt to lead it. Its report, issued in 1963, firmly supported the nuclear family and preparing women for motherhood. But it also documented a national pattern of employment discrimination , unequal pay, legal inequality, and meagre support services for working women that needed to be corrected through legislative guarantees of equal pay for equal work, equal job opportunities, and expanded child-care services. The Equal Pay Act of 1963 offered the first guarantee, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was amended to bar employers from discriminating on the basis of sex.

Some deemed these measures insufficient in a country where classified advertisements still segregated job openings by sex, where state laws restricted women’s access to contraception, and where incidences of rape and domestic violence remained undisclosed. In the late 1960s, then, the notion of a women’s rights movement took root at the same time as the civil rights movement , and women of all ages and circumstances were swept up in debates about gender , discrimination , and the nature of equality.

Mainstream groups such as the National Organization for Women (NOW) launched a campaign for legal equity , while ad hoc groups staged sit-ins and marches for any number of reasons—from assailing college curricula that lacked female authors to promoting the use of the word Ms. as a neutral form of address—that is, one that did not refer to marital status. Health collectives and rape crisis centres were established. Children’s books were rewritten to obviate sexual stereotypes . Women’s studies departments were founded at colleges and universities. Protective labour laws were overturned. Employers found to have discriminated against female workers were required to compensate with back pay. Excluded from male-dominated occupations for decades, women began finding jobs as pilots, construction workers, soldiers, bankers, and bus drivers.

Unlike the first wave, second-wave feminism provoked extensive theoretical discussion about the origins of women’s oppression, the nature of gender, and the role of the family. Kate Millett ’s Sexual Politics made the best-seller list in 1970, and in it she broadened the term politics to include all “power-structured relationships” and posited that the personal was actually political. Shulamith Firestone, a founder of the New York Radical Feminists, published The Dialectic of Sex in the same year, insisting that love disadvantaged women by creating intimate shackles between them and the men they loved—men who were also their oppressors. One year later, Germaine Greer , an Australian living in London, published The Female Eunuch , in which she argued that the sexual repression of women cuts them off from the creative energy they need to be independent and self-fulfilled.

Any attempt to create a coherent , all-encompassing feminist ideology was doomed. While most could agree on the questions that needed to be asked about the origins of gender distinctions, the nature of power, or the roots of sexual violence, the answers to those questions were bogged down by ideological hairsplitting, name-calling, and mutual recrimination. Even the term liberation could mean different things to different people.

Feminism became a river of competing eddies and currents. “Anarcho-feminists,” who found a larger audience in Europe than in the United States , resurrected Emma Goldman and said that women could not be liberated without dismantling such institutions as the family, private property , and state power. Individualist feminists, calling on libertarian principles of minimal government, broke with most other feminists over the issue of turning to government for solutions to women’s problems. “Amazon feminists” celebrated the mythical female heroine and advocated liberation through physical strength. And separatist feminists, including many lesbian feminists, preached that women could not possibly liberate themselves without at least a period of separation from men.

Ultimately, three major streams of thought surfaced. The first was liberal , or mainstream, feminism, which focused its energy on concrete and pragmatic change at an institutional and governmental level. Its goal was to integrate women more thoroughly into the power structure and to give women equal access to positions men had traditionally dominated. While aiming for strict equality (to be evidenced by such measures as an equal number of women and men in positions of power, or an equal amount of money spent on male and female student athletes), these liberal feminist groups nonetheless supported the modern equivalent of protective legislation such as special workplace benefits for mothers.

In contrast to the pragmatic approach taken by liberal feminism, radical feminism aimed to reshape society and restructure its institutions, which they saw as inherently patriarchal. Providing the core theory for modern feminism , radicals argued that women’s subservient role in society was too closely woven into the social fabric to be unraveled without a revolutionary revamping of society itself. They strove to supplant hierarchical and traditional power relationships they saw as reflecting a male bias, and they sought to develop nonhierarchical and antiauthoritarian approaches to politics and organization.

Finally, cultural or “difference” feminism, the last of the three currents, rejected the notion that men and women are intrinsically the same and advocated celebrating the qualities they associated with women, such as their greater concern for affective relationships and their nurturing preoccupation with others. Inherent in its message was a critique of mainstream feminism’s attempt to enter traditionally male spheres. This was seen as denigrating women’s natural inclinations by attempting to make women more like men.

Like first-wave feminism, the second wave was largely defined and led by educated middle-class white women who built the movement primarily around their own concerns. This created an ambivalent, if not contentious , relationship with women of other classes and races. The campaign against employment and wage discrimination helped bridge the gap between the movement and white labour union women. But the relationship of feminism to African American women always posed greater challenges. White feminists defined gender as the principal source of their exclusion from full participation in American life; Black women were forced to confront the interplay between racism and sexism and to figure out how to make Black men think about gender issues while making white women think about racial issues. Such issues were addressed by Black feminists including Michele Wallace, Mary Ann Weathers, bell hooks , Alice Walker , and Bettina Aptheker.

The call by white feminists for unity and solidarity was based on their assumption that women constituted a gender-based class or caste that was unified by common oppression. Many Black women had difficulty seeing white women as their feminist sisters; in the eyes of many African Americans, after all, white women were as much the oppressor as white men. “How relevant are the truths, the experiences, the findings of White women to Black women?” asked Toni Cade Bambara in The Black Woman: An Anthology (1970). “I don’t know that our priorities are the same, that our concerns and methods are the same.” As far back as Sojourner Truth , Black feminists had seen white feminists as incapable of understanding their concerns.

Yet some Black women, especially middle-class Black women, also insisted that it was fundamentally different to be Black and female than to be Black and male. During the first conference of the National Black Feminist Organization, held in New York City in 1973, Black women activists acknowledged that many of the goals central to the mainstream feminist movement—day care, abortion, maternity leave, violence—were critical to African American women as well. On specific issues, then, African American feminists and white feminists built an effective working relationship.

By the end of the 20th century, European and American feminists had begun to interact with the nascent feminist movements of Asia, Africa, and Latin America . As this happened, women in developed countries, especially intellectuals , were horrified to discover that women in some countries were required to wear veils in public or to endure forced marriage , female infanticide , widow burning, or female genital cutting (FGC). Many Western feminists soon perceived themselves as saviours of Third World women, little realizing that their perceptions of and solutions to social problems were often at odds with the real lives and concerns of women in these regions. In many parts of Africa, for example, the status of women had begun to erode significantly only with the arrival of European colonialism. In those regions, then, the notion that patriarchy was the chief problem—rather than European imperialism—seemed absurd.

The conflicts between women in developed and developing nations played out most vividly at international conferences. After the 1980 World Conference of the United Nations Decade for Women: Equality, Development and Peace, in Copenhagen, women from less-developed nations complained that the veil and FGC had been chosen as conference priorities without consulting the women most concerned. It seemed that their counterparts in the West were not listening to them. During the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development, in Cairo, women from the Third World protested outside because they believed the agenda had been hijacked by Europeans and Americans. The protesters had expected to talk about ways that underdevelopment was holding women back. Instead, conference organizers chose to focus on contraception and abortion. “[Third World women] noted that they could not very well worry about other matters when their children were dying from thirst, hunger or war,” wrote Azizah al-Hibri, a law professor and scholar of Muslim women’s rights. “The conference instead centred around reducing the number of Third World babies in order to preserve the earth’s resources, despite (or is it ‘because of’) the fact that the First World consumes much of these resources.” In Beijing, at the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995, Third World women again criticized the priority American and European women put on reproductive rights language and issues of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and their disinterest in the platform proposal that was most important to less-developed nations—that of restructuring international debt.

Still, the close of the 20th century saw women around the world advancing their interests, although often in fits and starts. Feminism was derailed in countries such as Afghanistan, where the staunchly reactionary and antifeminist Taliban banned even the education of girls. Elsewhere, however, feminism achieved significant gains for women, as seen in the eradication of FGC in many African countries or government efforts to end widow burning in India. More generally, and especially in the West, feminism had influenced every aspect of contemporary life, communication, and debate, from the heightened concern over sexist language to the rise of academic fields such as women’s studies and ecofeminism . Sports, divorce laws, sexual mores, organized religion—all had been affected, in many parts of the world, by feminism.

Yet questions remained: How would Western feminism deal with the dissension of women who believed the movement had gone too far and grown too radical? How uniform and successful could feminism be at the global level? Could the problems confronting women in the mountains of Pakistan or the deserts of the Middle East be addressed in isolation, or must such issues be pursued through international forums? Given the unique economic, political, and cultural situations that obtained across the globe, the answers to these questions looked quite different in Nairobi than in New York.

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Essay: The four waves of feminism

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“Okoloma looked at me and said, ‘You know, you’re a feminist.’ It was not a compliment. I could tell from his tone – the same tone with which a person would say, ‘You’re a supporter of terrorism,” said Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her Ted Talk and then later, essay, We should all be Feminists (Adichie, 2014).

It was a speech that I came to realise was much more prevalent in the world than just in Africa, where the Nigerian born author talks about. Although Adichie shares the negative comparison of being a feminist as to being a terrorist in a humorous approach in her Ted Talk (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: We should all be feminists | TED Talk, 2012), the written script got me thinking about how the battle for equality between the sexes and for women’s rights is so widely interpreted by so many different people.

Feminism has been an ongoing discussion for years gone by and a problem with understanding it may well be the fact that the viewpoints and beliefs of it have changed over time, creating ‘waves’ of feminism. Many have come to view the ‘wave’ terminology as being a metaphor used to describe the three, or potentially four, era’s which important movements came out of, however, we must remember that these waves of feminism were based more around goals and ideals rather than any time frame (Sheber, 2017).

There is conversation on the first realms of feminism coming from a range of women, varying from ancient Greece with Sappho (d. c. 570 BC), the first female poet, to medieval times with Hildegard of Bingen (d. 1179) the saint, composer and writer (The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1998; Talking About: Why Sappho Might Be the World’s First Feminist — Truths + Edits, 2018) to more recent a time with Jane Austen (d.1817), the English novelist. However, these women were considered to be the founding foremothers, as they focused on changing history to include women narratives and promoting the potential of the female sex, rather than the founders of movements and fighting for equal rights (Rampton, 2008; Weber, 2019).

The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the turn of the first wave of feminism in Britain and the rest of the world. The objective was to open up opportunities for women in education, employment, and politics but concentrated mostly on suffrage (Block, 2010). The women who supported it, the ‘suffragists’ , practised peaceful protests over what they felt was important, political citizenship, although topics such as equal pay, property rights within marriage, control over fertility, domestic violence and the right to divorce were also introduced. The women in the United States of America began this first wave of feminism in 1848 with the Seneca Falls Convention, which eventually led to women gaining the right to vote in 1920 (Seneca Falls Convention – HISTORY, 2017).

In its early stages, feminism was highly interlinked with other social movements going on at the same time, which in a way could be seen as a stepping stone towards their fight for equality and freedom for women. The one movement was the temperance charge. This came about in the early 1800’s to limit drinking in the United States due to men ‘damaging the home through their consumption of alcohol’. It was said that drinking also encouraged the men to squander their money away and commit violence (Weber, 2019) and women at the time were extremely drawn to the movement as it was seen to be an end to a phenomenon that affected women’s quality of life (Rampton, 2008). Another extremely important movement, was the Abolitionist movement. It fell around the same time as the first wave and both the movements worked towards social reform and liberation from oppression (Anand, 2018).

A few years later in the United Kingdom, women formed their own improved version of the ‘suffragists’ and became famously known as the ‘suffragettes’. The Women’s Social and Political Union was founded by Emmeline Pankhurst in 1903 with their slogan being, ‘Deeds Not Words’. The group made sure it used extreme methods to make sure their voices were heard and was sometimes thought of as ‘radical and militant’ (Weber, 2019), as these women stopped at nothing to be heard and would smash windows, confront police and officials, chain themselves to the buildings and forego hunger strikes during the times they were imprisoned (Biography.com website, 2014). The women were granted limited suffrage in 1918 and were eventually given the full right to vote in 1928.

The second wave of feminism appeared around the 1960’s towards the late 1980’s. This wave came after the end of World War II where women’s focus shifted from political liberation and moved towards the economic and personal, including reproductive rights and violence against women and evoked a sense of ‘sisterhood’ (Pankhurst, 2018).

Many of the thoughts which accounted for this wave in both the United States and Britain were influenced by the fact that fundamental change had not followed on after the right to vote. Another large factor in the US was the reach of Betty Friedan’s 1963 best-selling book, The Feminine Mystique. This book criticised the fact that women could only find true satisfaction through childbearing and homemaking and claimed that women were victims in the homes and being deprived of their own lives (Binard and Florence, 2017). Friedan’s book had a unifying goal which brought women together, the concept that they were not only after political equality, like the first wavers had fought for, but after a social equality too. They adopted the phrase by Carol Hanisch, “The Personal is Political” and moved to change society’s view on women (Grady, 2018).

A revolutionary mark for this second wave was in 1968 at the Miss America pageant. Feminists gathered together to protest against the demeaning and belittling attitude towards women. As part of the protest, the women ceremoniously threw away objects that they felt defined women into a rubbish bin on the sidewalk. These included mops, brooms, cosmetics, playboy magazines and a few bras. Hence why ‘bra burning’ is often affiliated with this wave, despite there being no actual burning. It was a media generated idea which has long lived on in a negative regard to the word feminist, but as has the second wave in general with many referring to feminists of that time as man-hating, angry, lesbian and lonely (Grady, 2018).

The wave concentrated to rid society of sexism and was seen to create a new attitude throughout all of the population, men included, on the role of women in day to day life and how their sexuality should not be portrayed as decorative, nor domestic. Many notable developments came about throughout this period, some of those which include the introduction of the Contraceptive Pill (1961) and the passing of the Sex Discrimination Act (1975) in the UK and The Equal Pay Act (1963) and the right to educational equality in the US.

Despite this wave being increasingly radical, seeking sisterhood and solidarity, it did not, however, account for all women (Rampton, 2008). This historical wave was said to include race, but did not include the non-white, lower class women. It is only sometimes referred to, as Chela Sandoval refers to it, as being “hegemonic feminism” (Thompson, 2002), but it was a large contributing factor to the onset of the third wave.

In the mid 1990’s women began the third wave of feminism almost as a revolt of the failures of their mothers during the second wave, questioning the rise of women in all classes. It is shown that this third wave proved to be more academically thought out and deemed to challenge the ideologies which came out of the second wave. The women argued that the experiences of the upper middle-class women had been over-emphasized, and that class, race, ethnicity, religion, gender and nationality were all significant factors to be taken into consideration when discussing feminism. Intersectionality became of huge importance for this wave and they explored the importance of how much more complicated, for example, it was to be a black women, versus being a white woman (Ohio Humanities, 2018).

The third wave feminists were also more aware of gender constructs and how society created these gender specific roles and were therefore more open to other identities outside of cisgender and began to drop the idea of sisterhood and include queer and trans individuals, promoting feminism defined by the individual (Sheber, 2017). This wave of women seemed to be less rigid and judgemental than the women of the second wave, which was often seen as antimale, antisex and antifemininity. They managed to take back the sexual image they had lost to the second wave and played with femininity and identity while claiming sexuality and sexual pleasure for themselves rather than as a male oppression as it was seen before (Snyder, 2008). Make-up, push up bras and heels were embraced, bringing forth the idea that intellect and femininity could work together.

The women created a powerful and domineering stand to the topic of feminism all while continuing the efforts of the second wave movement, however, the wave metaphor had proved to have its limitations. The third wave had no specific movement and did not describe themselves as being a group with common grievances. The women (and men) of that era accepted that they were supporting equal rights for all but did not want the term feminism to define them (Rampton, 2008). Postfeminist ideas were construed from this era, whereby many, if not all, of the goals of feminism had been ‘complete’ and any further repetitions of it were believed unnecessary.

These postfeminist ideas came about due to a lack of support for feminism. It was becoming decreasingly popular all while an ‘anti-feminist’ response was increasing and having gained the right to vote, being given reproductive rights and achieving places of power in different fields meant that their successes no longer needed the feminist movement and that they were now more concerned about individual equal rights. Another ethos, that of Hall and Rodriguez, calls postfeminism the ‘no, but’ conception. This was an ambivalence between feminism and postfeminism whereby women did not want to be referred to as feminists, but still stood up for the feminist ideologies such as equal pay. The term ‘postfeminist’ became a slightly negative connotation by feminist critics and was sometimes used as an accusation against the unsatisfactory works of ‘feminist’ scholars who would often be seen as hostile and enemies of men (Gill, 2007; The CanLit Guides Editorial Team, 2013).

The whole concept it still in a slightly grey space and quite contradictory and accusatory, while it is sometimes regarded as a media phenomenon or as a backlash against feminism, at other times, it is seen to be a radical new way that young females were engaging in activism and feminist theories. Hall and Rodriguez discuss that the postfeminism era is alive due to the media but a comprehensive definition for it, does not exist. Some articles say that feminism is dead, and some conclude that it’s having an identity crisis (Hall and Rodriguez, 2003).

Nevertheless, we can state that feminism is indeed live and well, as a fourth wave is currently underway and driving itself forward in the global wave fuelled by social media. It is loosely pegged to have begun around 2009 and 2010 and is seen to be emerging due to many women and (some) men realising that the third wave and in turn, postfeminism, is extremely optimistic and somewhat hampered by blindness. The fourth wave’s most prominent feature is its use of social media and the internet. It has created a space where a ‘call out’ culture is involved, not just for academics, but individuals from all walks of life (Sheber, 2017).

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Essay on Feminism

500 words essay on feminism.

Feminism is a social and political movement that advocates for the rights of women on the grounds of equality of sexes. It does not deny the biological differences between the sexes but demands equality in opportunities. It covers everything from social and political to economic arenas. In fact, feminist campaigns have been a crucial part of history in women empowerment. The feminist campaigns of the twentieth century made the right to vote, public property, work and education possible. Thus, an essay on feminism will discuss its importance and impact.

Importance of Feminism

Feminism is not just important for women but for every sex, gender, caste, creed and more. It empowers the people and society as a whole. A very common misconception is that only women can be feminists.

It is absolutely wrong but feminism does not just benefit women. It strives for equality of the sexes, not the superiority of women. Feminism takes the gender roles which have been around for many years and tries to deconstruct them.

This allows people to live freely and empower lives without getting tied down by traditional restrictions. In other words, it benefits women as well as men. For instance, while it advocates that women must be free to earn it also advocates that why should men be the sole breadwinner of the family? It tries to give freedom to all.

Most importantly, it is essential for young people to get involved in the feminist movement. This way, we can achieve faster results. It is no less than a dream to live in a world full of equality.

Thus, we must all look at our own cultures and communities for making this dream a reality. We have not yet reached the result but we are on the journey, so we must continue on this mission to achieve successful results.

Impact of Feminism

Feminism has had a life-changing impact on everyone, especially women. If we look at history, we see that it is what gave women the right to vote. It was no small feat but was achieved successfully by women.

Further, if we look at modern feminism, we see how feminism involves in life-altering campaigns. For instance, campaigns that support the abortion of unwanted pregnancy and reproductive rights allow women to have freedom of choice.

Moreover, feminism constantly questions patriarchy and strives to renounce gender roles. It allows men to be whoever they wish to be without getting judged. It is not taboo for men to cry anymore because they must be allowed to express themselves freely.

Similarly, it also helps the LGBTQ community greatly as it advocates for their right too. Feminism gives a place for everyone and it is best to practice intersectional feminism to understand everyone’s struggle.

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Conclusion of the Essay on Feminism

The key message of feminism must be to highlight the choice in bringing personal meaning to feminism. It is to recognize other’s right for doing the same thing. The sad part is that despite feminism being a strong movement, there are still parts of the world where inequality and exploitation of women take places. Thus, we must all try to practice intersectional feminism.

FAQ of Essay on Feminism

Question 1: What are feminist beliefs?

Answer 1: Feminist beliefs are the desire for equality between the sexes. It is the belief that men and women must have equal rights and opportunities. Thus, it covers everything from social and political to economic equality.

Question 2: What started feminism?

Answer 2: The first wave of feminism occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It emerged out of an environment of urban industrialism and liberal, socialist politics. This wave aimed to open up new doors for women with a focus on suffrage.

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A Reviewer’s Life

The material constraints of writing criticism today.

I have been a freelance book reviewer for twenty years, which means that several times a week, the postal carrier delivers packages of books—some that I requested, some that I didn’t know I wanted, and some that I won’t ever want. A year and a half ago I received in this manner a book that I did want, Darryl Pinckney’s Come Back in September, about his friendship and apprenticeship with the critic and novelist Elizabeth Hardwick. The front cover features a photo of Hardwick looking prim and elegant on the low steps outside 15 West Sixty-Seventh Street in Manhattan, where she lived in a top-floor duplex from 1961 until her death in 2007. On the back cover are two photographs of her dramatic two-story living room.

I often think about this room. Its ceilings appear to be twenty feet high. Next to the built-in bookshelves and requisite rolling ladder, swag curtains frame an enormous window, giving a the­atrical effect. A Juliet balcony gently interrupts one wall. Floating in the middle of the room is a writing desk, really a library table, from which a ceramic bust of a young man rises, like a gravestone, between two lamps. I showed the pictures to my husband once. “Oh,” he said. “She lived in the Morgan Library.”

My own desk is wedged into one corner of the bedroom I share with my husband, behind the children’s trampoline, between a hulking armoire and an ugly IKEA thing exploding with file boxes and rolls of scribbled-on paper that I really ought to throw away. Cairns of books are at my feet. If I turn my head just so I can glimpse a cluster of grocery bags brimming with toys and still more books, which I plan, someday, to sell or give away. Sometimes I pile the bags on top of each other to reduce their footprint, and when they threaten to topple, spread them out again.

What interests me about the photographs of Hardwick’s living room is that they provide evidence of the environment in which a brilliant and original mind worked. The couch on which she sat when she thought about Donne or Melville expressed a sensibility, but it also incubated one. On my way to my own desk, I catch a glimpse of the bags filled with crap. Whether or not I acknowledge it, the crap is always buried in the piece. Sometimes it rises right to the top.

criticism is an act of autobiography. The work of making an argu­ment, coming to a judgment, or simply choosing which books or objects to give time and attention to is inevitably, helplessly, an expression of values—and an expression of self. Our tastes tell on us as much as our syntax and tone; that mysterious compound called sensibility is formed by some strange alchemy of innate tendencies, life experiences, and material circumstances. In the pursuit of explicating a text, observing its patterns and structure, how it works, what it means, I also explicate myself—revealing what catches my interest, where my attention lingers. I might do this more, or less, intentionally, but I always do it.

Whatever is going on in the life of the critic is going to show up in her reading; it can’t not. Reading, writing, and thinking have experiential texture. The place and context in which I do those activities shapes them. Whether we are informed by political events or everyday life, it is not always possible, or desirable, to block out the noise of the world. When I write criticism, then, I try to use this fact of myself in some way. I might openly acknowledge why I am so invested in some aspect of a work. I might try to think through myself, pushing to arrive at a point at the very far edge of what I can see. I am a passionate adherent of close reading, the practice of being carefully attentive to words that are not our own. But close reading always involves the critic layering her own point of view over or next to the text’s, even as she observes, explains, interprets, evaluates. What I should not do is pretend that my reading is definitive, neutral, objective, or somehow free of myself and my environment. I write criticism to encounter an object, and I read criticism to encounter another person encountering an object. If I wanted a randomized controlled trial, I would be in the sciences.

There is something hopeful about writing a review. It’s like putting a mes­sage in a bottle or sending up a flare.

Of course, the money one is paid to write a piece is one of the material constraints that shapes the work of criticism. Word rates have not increased in decades, while the cost of living goes up every year. According to Cathy Curtis’s A Splendid Intelligence: The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick , beginning in the late 1990s Hardwick was paid about $4,000 per New York Review of Books essay—an amount com­parable to what writers are paid to write long book reviews today at a marquee publication like NYRB or The New Yorker . (Small publications pay much less.) Newspaper book reviews have been contracting for decades, and while magazines like The Nation and The Atlantic cover books, the hourly rate on a piece, once you do the calculation, is dismal. “Little” magazines and online reviews are wonderful for the culture, but no one could pay the rent writ­ing for those outlets alone. If you have a secure academic job and write reviews on the side, it’s nice work. For the freelancer—I am one—it’s a foolish undertaking. As Russell Jacoby noted nearly forty years ago, one reason there are not more full-time freelance writers is that most take staff writer positions or university jobs or quit writing altogether. It is impossible to know what ideas never came into the world because someone couldn’t or wouldn’t accept an hourly rate that barely covers the babysitter.

if the criticism I write is always limited by the fact that it is I who am writing it, bounded as I am by material constraints, it is also true that within that limit a profound freedom of thought persists. Sometimes when I read, I do have the sensation of blocking out the immediate physical world, journeying to an entirely different place, losing the sense of my body. It’s not just leaving myself behind that is freeing; it’s discovering myself. Writing a review is the best, maybe the only, way I can discover what I think. I don’t come to reviewing with my ideas already formed; I have to build them, sentence by sentence. For me, writing a review is a way of getting closer to an object, taking it apart to understand how it works. I get closer to and farther away from myself in the process, even as I know that I will inevitably ask questions that betray myself and my interests. The question I am most aware of asking has to do with point of view: I want to understand an object’s way of looking at the world. What would I have to believe about the world in order for this book to be true ? This is the kind of question I get most excited about asking.

Criticism is a relationship with an object, and as such it involves all of the regular psychic drama—idealization and fantasy; avoid­ance, hostility, and disappointment; the desire to know and a fas­cination with what is unknown; displacement from our own life onto the object. The person writing criticism has to always be on guard that the irritations and frustrations of writing do not get taken out on the object under review. Even pieces that begin in love and admiration can end in resentment and hate. I have noticed that after writing a review, I often lose interest in the author or resist reading their next book. If reviewing is a way to know something deeply, it’s also a way to say goodbye.

in the popular imagination , the critic is usually evil, sneering, vicious, or frustrated at their own thwarted artistic dreams. But the truth is, people who do this quite insane and marginal thing of writing criticism do it because they have a passionate attachment to literature. There’s little money or power in it, and no fame. Writing book reviews today is a vocation, not a career. It’s for people who still believe, against all practicality, that a life organized around lit­erature is worth more than a life organized around money. “Making a living is nothing,” Hardwick once wrote. “The great difficulty is making a point, making a difference—with words.”

I always say that I write for myself, to find out what I think or what I can do. But it’s also true that the main reason I write reviews is because people ask me to. Writing a novel that might end up in the drawer makes sense to me; writing a review that might end up there does not. Criticism is a conversation—with oneself but also with one’s editors, with readers, and with other reviewers. There is something hopeful about writing a review. It’s like putting a mes­sage in a bottle or sending up a flare. I’m at my little desk, trying not to look at the bags on the floor. Who knows where the person who will read the piece is sitting?

Louise Glück’s Late Style

The critic as friend, rachel cusk, you might also like, white noise, new and improved, the feminism of elizabeth hardwick, new perspectives, enduring writing..

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A New Wave Of Masculinity In Indian Cinema: Daood Hussain Aka “Gunjan” On ‘Laapataa Ladies’

The sensitive and progressive representation of masculinity in Daood Hussain’s portrayal of Gunjan in the highly praised film Laapataa Ladies has garnered widespread acclaim. His caring and encouraging demeanor goes against traditional masculine norms, nudging Deepak (played by Sparsh Shrivastava) to remind Jaya (played by Pratibha Ranta) to continue writing to and visiting them as she pursues studies in organic farming in Dehradun. Also, he quickly arranges for flyers to be printed to help locate Deepak’s lost bride, Phool (played by Nitanshi Goel) at Jaya’s request. Gunjan shows a genuine feminist philosophy by prioritising the welfare and empowerment of the women in his circle. 

Gunjan shows a genuine feminist philosophy by prioritising the welfare and empowerment of the women in his circle. 

Actor Daood Hussain, who plays Gunjan, was born in Nainital and currently resides in Mumbai, has been involved in theatre from a very young age. We talked to him about the slow but sure evolution of male characters in modern Indian films and how they potentially impact social viewpoints amid fanfare.

Redefining masculinity in Indian cinema

Gunjan in Laapataa Ladies marks a significant shift in the portrayal of masculinity in Indian films. Hussain explains, ‘ Gunjan represents a man who is sensitive, vulnerable, responsible, and willing to express his emotions—a departure from the traditionally stoic image of male characters. ’ This compassionate, supportive, and empathetic character is atypical for Indian cinema, challenging longstanding stereotypes.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Bollywood’s portrayal of male characters was dominated by the much-discussed “angry young man” archetype, epitomised by defiance and dissatisfaction with societal norms. This image, deeply rooted in the era’s cultural context, painted men as rebellious and emotionally distant. Recent films such as Kabir Singh and Animal still depict male characters lacking supportive and loving interactions with women. In contrast, films like Newton (2017) and Satyaprem Ki Katha (2023) present a new wave of male characters who show care and support towards women, despite being part of mainstream films being made in India in the Hindi language. 

The male characters show a gradual change from old-fashioned patriarchal beliefs in Hindi-language cinema, starting with films such as Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi (2008) and still present in films like Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani (2023). As Daood Hussain notes, contemporary Indian cinema is evolving, offering more nuanced and empathetic portrayals of masculinity. ‘ The role of men in Indian films is evolving to be more inclusive and diverse. The masculine archetypes of the past are giving way to more nuanced portrayals of men that are representative of modern society. Men are no longer just portrayed in a heroic image but also as fathers, brothers, and friends ,’ says Hussain.

The role of men in Indian films is evolving to be more inclusive and diverse. The masculine archetypes of the past are giving way to more nuanced portrayals of men that are representative of modern society. Daood Hussain aka “Gunjan”, actor.

This transformation is not just about breaking stereotypes but also about offering a more realistic depiction of men and how they express love, not just romantically, like in Laapataa Ladies producer Aamir Khan’s 2016 film Dangal . By portraying men who embrace vulnerability and emotional openness, films like Laapataa Ladies are influencing societal perceptions and encouraging a more balanced view of gender roles. This evolution in cinema reflects broader changes in societal attitudes, providing a platform for more humane and wishfully everyday male characters.

Hussain’s approach and the impact on society

Playing a character like Gunjan required a different approach from Hussain. Originally selected for the role of Pradeep, Hussain was shifted to play Gunjan just two days before filming, a stark contrast to his usual 3-4 months of preparation. ‘ This was a last-minute casting change by Romil Modi since I had to let go of Pradeep’s role due to getting COVID and was broken-heartedly on my way to the airport. I had been quarantined for over a week in Nashik and lost hope of making it big ,’ Hussain reveals.

Despite the short notice, Hussain’s dedication shone through. His support extended beyond the character (Gunjan) to his co-star Pratibha Ranta (Jaya). Ranta, initially scared of cycling after an accident involving co-stars Sparsh and Nitanshi, found encouragement from Hussain. ‘ Even though my legs were in a lot of pain, I tried my best to both physically and morally support Pratibha, as I caught up with the other lead couple during multiple takes of the cycling scene. It later turned out to be one of the most fun shoot days ,’ he shares. This real-life support translated into authentic on-screen chemistry, with many conversations between Ranta and Hussain, captured organically, reflecting their supportive friendship.

Playing a character like Gunjan also required a different approach from Hussain. He drew inspiration from the village setting and the strong bond Gunjan shared with his friend Deepak (Sparsh Shrivastava). ‘ My performance was centered around themes of vulnerability, compassion, and acceptance. By tapping into these qualities and emphasising the simplicity with which villagers embrace newcomers, I created my portrayal of Gunjan as a welcoming and supportive man as is now often seen in rural India as well, ’ Hussain shares.

The influence of films such as this one directed by Kiran Rao on how masculinity is viewed in Indian society is extremely significant.

The influence of films such as this one directed by Kiran Rao on how masculinity is viewed in Indian society is extremely significant. ‘ I believe that films like Laapataa Ladies are playing a significant role in challenging and redefining societal perceptions of masculinity. By portraying men as sensitive, compassionate, and emotionally open, these films are breaking down stereotypes and providing a more realistic and positive portrayal of masculinity ,’  says Hussain. He envisions a future where masculinity in Indian cinema is portrayed more fluidly and less rigidly defined, with stories that challenge traditional ideas and explore the diverse ways men can be strong, compassionate, and complex.

The widespread popularity of Gunjan on social media, particularly the numerous Instagram edits showcasing his “soft boy” persona, has deeply moved Hussain. Many fans love how he places his support for Jaya above his love for her, further emphasising his nurturing and selfless nature.

‘ I am absolutely overwhelmed and honored by the love my character Gunjan has received – be it through various viral reels or from fan messages. The fact that people are recognising and celebrating the softer, more vulnerable side of masculinity is heartwarming and a testament to the power of filmmaking ,’ says Hussain.

Sohini (they/she) hails from Calcutta and loves to explore and write about all things society, culture, gender. With a background in journalism and English literature – they have finally been able to make having heartfelt conversations a huge part of their life outside of boxes.

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