One of the most important social movements of the past two centuries and certainly the

social movement which has brought about the most enduring and progressive
transformation of human society on a global scale. It is customary to divide the history
of feminism into a First, Second, and Third Wave, with each period signalling a different
era in the struggle to attain equality between the sexes. Today feminism means many
different things to different people, but at its core, if one goes back to its origins in the
late 18thcentury, it is primarily a social movement for the emancipation of women. That
movement was slow to start, and it wasn’t until the late 1880s that the term ‘feminism’
actually appeared. Before then, the more usual term was ‘women’s rights’. The first
advocates for women’s rights were for the most part lonely voices pleading against
obvious and manifest iniquities in society’s treatment of women.

This was certainly the case in one of the earliest self-consciously feminist works,
namelyMary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), which was
written at the height of the French Revolution. Establishing what would become a
common theme throughout much feminist writing, Wollstonecraft conducts her critique
on two fronts: on the one hand, she criticizes patriarchal society (as it would later be
called) for the unjust way it limits women’s rights, as well as their opportunity for
education, self-expression, and economic independence; while on the other hand, she
criticizes women for buying into femininity which, in her view, turns women into mere
‘spaniels’ and ‘toys’. Wollstonecraft’s solution was better education for young women,
not the granting of equal rights. So in this sense, one might say feminism begins not
with Wollstonecraft but rather with the various Women’s Suffrage movements that
sprang up in the early 1800s.

A century of struggle

Achieving full voting rights for all women regardless of age, race, or marital status took
more than a century of struggle, easily justifying Juliet Mitchell’s claim that feminism is
‘the longest revolution’. The focus on voting rights, as important as these are, tends to
obscure the fact that it was not only the right to vote that women were fighting for,
though this was of course emblematic inasmuch that once they could vote they would
be able to use the democratic process to bring about other forms of change. In point of
fact, however, even after women obtained the right to vote in most parts of the world at
the turn of the 20th century, it was still several decades before full equality was
obtained. And many would say that it has not yet been obtained.

It is worth mentioning that throughout the long First Wave of feminism women fought
against several other injustices as well, of which three are key. (i) Women were
restricted in terms of the ownership of property, requiring them to marry so as to inherit,
thus preventing them from attaining true independence (it is this issue which exercises
proto-feminist writers likeJane Austen and Charlotte Brontë). (ii) Women did not have
full rights over their own body, which meant they had no legal protection against sexual
violence (e.g. the idea that a husband could rape his wife was not admitted as law until
late in the 20th century). (iii) Women were discriminated against in the workplace, which
not only meant women were paid less than men for the same work, it also restricted
them from applying for certain jobs, denied them promotion, and made no allowance for
maternity leave. Many of these problems persist today.

Second Wave

Once suffrage was granted, the women’s rights movement fell into decline, and
remained quiescent until the late 1950s and early 1960s when it was reignited by a new
generation of activists who called themselves the Second Wave of feminism. Betty
Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique(1963) is generally credited as the tipping point for this
second round of political struggle. Echoing Wollstonecraft, she argued that women were
victims of a false belief in the promise of femininity and urged them to look beyond their
domestic situation for fulfilment. The National Organization for Women (NOW) was
formed in 1966 and became the central focus, in the US, for feminist activism. Its goal
was the ratification of an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, which it did not
manage to achieve in full, but it nonetheless made giant strides towards it. Second
Wave feminism also took the view that equality between the sexes would only come
about if there was a sea change in cultural attitudes on the part of both women and
men. Authors like Germaine Greer and Kate Millett called for a sexual liberation as well,
arguing that women could alter their status as the second sex (to borrow the title
of Simone de Beauvoir’s important book) by overturning the double standards applied to
their sexuality and behaviour.

The Second Wave of feminism came to an end in the early 1980s partly as a result of its
successes—many women felt that all the relevant battles had been fought and won—
but primarily because of the change in political climate. The Reagan-Thatcher era was
very unfriendly to equal rights and it rolled back many of the gains that had been made.
This is the period of the so-called ‘culture wars’ when feminism was caricatured as mere
political correctness and its political agenda scorned in the press.

Third wave

Third-wave feminism began in the early 1990s, arising as a response to perceived

failures of the second wave and also as a response to the backlash against initiatives
and movements created by the second wave. Third-wave feminism seeks to challenge
or avoid what it deems the second wave's essentialist definitions of femininity, which
(according to them) over-emphasize the experiences of upper middle-class white
women.

A post-structuralist interpretation of gender and sexuality is central to much of the third

wave's ideology. Third-wave feminists often focus on "micro-politics" and challenge the
second wave's paradigm as to what is, or is not, good for females. The third wave has
its origins in the mid-1980s. Feminist leaders rooted in the second wave like Gloria
Anzaldua, bell hooks, Chela Sandoval, Cherrie Moraga, Audre Lorde, Maxine Hong
Kingston, and many other black feminists, sought to negotiate a space within feminist
thought for consideration of race-related subjectivities.

Third-wave feminism also contains internal debates between difference feminists such
as the psychologist Carol Gilligan (who believes that there are important differences
between the sexes) and those who believe that there are no inherent differences
between the sexes and contend that gender roles are due to social conditioning.