Feminism: Origins

Feminism can trace its intellectual roots back to Enlightenment thinkers such as Mary Wollstonecraft and John Locke.
Wollstonecraft’s seminal text ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’ (1792) is often considered the first feminist manifesto.
She criticised the denial of equal rights to women and argued against their relegation to ‘domestic sphere’.
She argued that women should have the same rights to education, work, and participation in civil society as men.

Initiated in the late 19th and early 20th century, first wave feminism primarily focused on legal inequalities and campaigned for women’s suffrage.
Notable figures of this wave include Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony who negotiated for women’s voting rights.
The first wave feminists successfully fought for women’s right to vote, which was achieved across most western nations by the end of the First World War.

Spanning the 1960s to early 1980s, the second wave feminism shifted its focus from legal rights to cultural and social inequalities, and deconstructed societal norms around gender and sexuality.
Key themes in this wave included reproductive rights, sexuality, family, the workplace, and more.
Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘The Second Sex’ (1949) is considered a major work in this wave, critiquing the societal construct of ‘womanhood’ and arguing against women’s second class status.

This wave emerged in the mid-1990s responding to the perceived failures of the second wave, and aiming to challenge or avoid what it deemed the second wave’s essentialist definitions of femininity.
It focused on intersectionality, integrating race, class, and sexuality into the discussion of feminism.
Notable individuals in this wave include Rebecca Walker and Anita Hill.

Modern day feminism consists of many different strands including liberal feminism, radical feminism, materialist feminism and intersectional feminism.
Contemporary issues focus on sex trafficking, online harassment, workplace inequality, and achieving genuine social and political equity.