- First-wave feminism refers to a period of feminist activity during the 19th and early twentieth century in the United Kingdom, Canada, the Netherlands and the United States. It focused on gaining the rights for women to vote.
- First wave feminists spent hundreds of years in activism, writing, protesting and working for the betterment and equality of their sex and gender. First wave feminists worked not only for suffrage, or the right to vote, but also for the right to an education, the right to work, the right to work safely, the right to the money they earned when they worked, the right to a divorce, the right to their children and the right to themselves and their own bodies.
- First wave feminists had to work against the society that allowed an unmarried woman to be property of her father and a married woman to be property of her husband.
- The term first wave was coined retrospectively after the term second-wave feminism began to be used to describe a newer feminist movement that focused as much on fighting social and cultural inequalities as political inequalities.
Second Wave Feminism
- Second-wave feminism is a period of feminist activity that first began in the early 1960s in the United States, and eventually spread throughout the Western world and beyond. In the United States the movement lasted through the early 1980s.
- Since the late 1960s there has been a growing revolt by women against their oppression as a sex. Throughout the world, millions of women, especially young women-students, working women, housewives-have challenged some of the most fundamental features of their centuries-old oppression.
- Many women went to college and worked professionally in the early 20th century, but the mid-20th century myth of the middle-class suburban housewife downplayed the importance of women’s education. Feminists knew that girls and women must be encouraged to seek an education, and not just as “something to fall back on,” if they were to become, and be seen as, "fully" equal.
- Feminists worked for the Equal Rights Amendment, the Equal Pay Act, the addition of sex discrimination to the Civil Rights Act and other laws that would guarantee equality.
In the 1960s and early 1970s the dominant tendency in the women’s movement was radical feminism. At that time the women’s movement included two more or less distinct tendencies. One of these called itself Socialist Feminism (or, at times, Marxist Feminism) and understood the oppression of women as intertwined with other forms of oppression, especially race and class, and tried to develop a politics that would challenge all of these simultaneously. The other tendency called itself Radical Feminism. Large-R Radical Feminists argued that the oppression of women was primary, that all other forms of oppression flowed from gender inequality.
