Feminism

• 1. Introduction

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  Feminism is a range of socio-political movements and ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social equality of the sexes. It begins from a single claim about how the world is built. Modern societies, feminists argue, are patriarchal. They prioritize the male point of view, and women are treated unjustly within them. A person who advocates for feminism is known as a feminist. The word itself carries a strange origin. It first appeared in France in 1871, inside a medicine thesis, describing men with tuberculosis who had supposedly developed feminine traits. The label was meant as an insult. So how did a term born from medical scorn become the name of a movement credited with women's suffrage, reproductive rights, and the right to own property? What happens when a movement fractures into liberal, radical, and socialist camps that disagree on the cure? And why, two centuries after it began in late 18th-century Europe, do most people who hold its beliefs still refuse its name?

• 2. A Word Born In Scorn

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  Charles Fourier, a utopian socialist and French philosopher, is often credited with coining the word feminisme in 1837. Yet no trace of the word has ever been found in his works. The term that did survive came from elsewhere, and it traveled by insult. After its 1871 appearance in that French medicine thesis, the word feministe was coined by Alexandre Dumas fils in a 1872 essay, referring to men who supported women's rights. In both early uses, the tone was hostile. The word reflected a criticism of a supposed confusion of the sexes, aimed at women who refused the sexual division of society. The concepts spread on their own timeline. They appeared in the Netherlands in 1872, in Great Britain in the 1890s, and in the United States in 1910. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first English appearance in this meaning to 1895. Long before the label existed, the ideas had a founder. Mary Wollstonecraft is seen by many as a founder of feminism for her 1792 book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. In it she argued that class and private property are the basis of discrimination against women, and that women as much as men needed equal rights. Historians still argue over the word's reach. Most western feminist historians count every movement working for women's rights as feminist, even those that never used the term. Others reserve the word for the modern movement, labeling earlier efforts protofeminist.

• 3. The Waves

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  The history of the modern western feminist movement is divided into waves. The first comprised the women's suffrage movements of the 19th and early-20th centuries, promoting women's right to vote. In Britain and the United States it also focused on equal contract, marriage, parenting, and property rights. Legislation followed. The Custody of Infants Act 1839 in the UK introduced the tender years doctrine and gave women the right of custody of their children for the first time. The Married Women's Property Act 1870, extended in 1882, became a model for similar laws across British territories. Victoria passed such legislation in 1884 and New South Wales in 1889. The right to vote spread first through Britain's Australasian colonies. New Zealand granted women the vote in 1893, South Australia followed in 1894, and Australia granted female suffrage in 1902. In Britain, the Representation of the People Act of 1918 gave the vote to women over 30 who owned property, extended in 1928 to all women over 21. The second wave, the women's liberation movement, began in the 1960s. It campaigned for legal and social equality, treating women's cultural and political inequalities as inextricably linked. The activist Carol Hanisch coined the slogan The Personal is Political, which became synonymous with the second wave. In or around 1992, a third wave was identified, focused on individuality and diversity. Some argue for a fourth wave beginning around 2012, using social media to combat harassment, violence, and rape culture, and best known for the Me Too movement.

• 4. Leaders And Their Causes

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  Emmeline Pankhurst was the most notable activist in England, and Time named her one of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century. The magazine wrote that she shaped an idea of women for our time, and shook society into a new pattern from which there could be no going back. In the United States, the movement's leaders included Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony, who each campaigned for the abolition of slavery before championing women's right to vote. They were influenced by the Quaker theology of spiritual equality, which holds that men and women are equal under God. American first-wave feminism is considered to have ended with the Nineteenth Amendment in 1919, granting women the vote in all states. In Germany, Clara Zetkin pursued women's politics through socialism, editing the SPD women's newspaper Die Gleichheit from 1891 to 1917. In 1907 she became leader of the newly founded Women's Office at the SPD, and she contributed to International Women's Day. The movement reached far beyond Europe. Qasim Amin, considered the father of Arab feminism, wrote The Liberation of Women in 1899, arguing for legal and social reforms. In 1923 Hoda Shaarawi founded the Egyptian Feminist Union and became a symbol of the Arab women's rights movement. The Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1905 triggered the Iranian women's movement. During the Iranian revolution of 1979, many of the rights women had gained were systematically abolished, including the Family Protection Law.

• 5. The Long Wait For Rights

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  By the mid-20th century, women in much of the world still lacked significant rights. In France, women obtained the right to vote only with the Provisional Government of the French Republic of the 21st of April 1944. The proposal to grant women eligibility had passed at the Consultative Assembly of Algiers, where after an amendment by Fernand Grenier they were given full citizenship, including the vote, adopted by a margin of 51 to 16. Switzerland lagged further behind. Women gained the right to vote in federal elections only in 1971. In the canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden, women could not vote on local issues until 1991, when the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland forced the change. In Liechtenstein, women won the vote through a referendum in 1984, after three earlier referendums in 1968, 1971, and 1973 had failed. Marriage law trapped women for just as long. In France, married women did not receive the right to work without their husband's permission until 1965. Feminists also fought the marital exemption in rape laws, which barred prosecuting husbands for raping their wives. Early efforts by figures such as Voltairine de Cleyre and Victoria Woodhull to criminalize marital rape in the late 19th century had failed. That goal was achieved a century later in most Western countries, and remains unachieved in many other parts of the world. Two books crystallized the discontent. Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex in 1949, offering a Marxist and existentialist view of feminism's questions. In 1963, Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique gave voice to American women's unhappiness and is credited with sparking second-wave feminism in the United States.

• 6. The Big Three

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  Liberal, radical, and socialist or Marxist feminism are sometimes called the Big Three schools of feminist thought. Liberal feminism arose from 19th-century first-wave feminism and seeks equality through political and legal reform within a liberal democratic framework, without radically altering the structure of society. It works within the structure of mainstream society to integrate women into that structure. Karin Maria Bruzelius, a former Norwegian supreme court justice, described it as a realistic, sober, practical feminism. According to Zhang and Rios, liberal feminism tends to be adopted by mainstream, middle-class women who do not disagree with the current social structure, and it is viewed as the dominant and default form. Radical feminism took a sharply different path. It arose from the radical wing of second-wave feminism and calls for a radical reordering of society to eliminate male supremacy. It views the male-controlled capitalist hierarchy as the defining feature of women's oppression, and demands the total uprooting and reconstruction of society. Separatist feminism does not support heterosexual relationships, and lesbian feminism is closely related. The materialist strands grew out of Western Marxist thought. Marxist feminism argues that capitalism is the root cause of women's oppression. Socialist feminism distinguishes itself by holding that women's liberation requires ending both the economic and cultural sources of oppression. Anarcha-feminists believe that struggling against the state requires struggling against patriarchy, which they see as an involuntary hierarchy.

• 7. Many Feminisms

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  Womanism emerged after early feminist movements were largely white and middle-class. For much of its history, feminist movements and theory were led predominantly by middle-class white women from Western Europe and North America. This began to change in the 1960s with the civil rights movement in the United States and the end of Western European colonialism. Some forms of feminism, such as white feminism and gender-critical feminism, have been criticized for considering only white, middle-class, college-educated, heterosexual, or cisgender perspectives. These criticisms produced black feminism and intersectional feminism. Third-wave feminism is traced to the riot grrrl feminist punk subculture in Olympia, Washington, in the early 1990s, and to Anita Hill's televised 1991 testimony before an all-male, all-white Senate Judiciary Committee that Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her. The term third wave is credited to Rebecca Walker, who responded to Thomas's appointment to the Supreme Court with an article in Ms. magazine titled Becoming the Third Wave in 1992. She wrote, I am not a post-feminism feminist. I am the Third Wave. Feminist leaders rooted in the second wave, including Gloria Anzaldua, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Maxine Hong Kingston, sought space within feminist thought for race-related subjectivities. Decolonial feminism went further still. Maria Lugones proposed that the colonial imposition of gender cuts across ecology, economics, government, and everyday practice. Decolonial feminists like Karla Jessen Williamson examined colonialism as a force that imposed gender hierarchies on Indigenous women. Postfeminism reacts to all of this, holding that women have achieved second-wave goals while staying critical of later aims.

• 8. The Mark On Society

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  Merriam-Webster chose feminism as its 2017 Word of the Year, calling Word of the Year a quantitative measure of interest in a particular word. The label's popularity, however, hides a gap between belief and identity. According to a 2014 Ipsos poll covering 15 developed countries, 53 percent of respondents identified as feminists, and 87 percent agreed that women should be treated equally to men in all areas based on competency, not gender. Yet only 55 percent of women agreed that they have full equality with men. A 2015 poll found that 18 percent of Americans used the label feminist for themselves, while 85 percent were feminists in practice, believing in equality for women. A 2016 Survation poll for the Fawcett Society found just 7 percent of Britons used the label, while 83 percent supported equality of opportunity for women. The movement's concrete achievements are wide. Feminist campaigns are near-universally credited with women's suffrage, gender-neutral language, reproductive rights, and the right to enter contracts and own property. In the United States, the National Organization for Women began in 1966 to seek women's equality, including through the Equal Rights Amendment, which did not pass. Reproductive rights centred on Roe v. Wade, which enunciated a woman's right to choose whether to carry a pregnancy to term. In international law, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women has been described as an international bill of rights for women. The newest voices keep redrawing the map. In 2025, a group of 28 Nordic feminist studies departments, journals, and organizations defined feminism as a universal human rights movement built on solidarity, intersectionality, and compassion.