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 feminist 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.
Key Takeaways
- Four Waves: Suffrage (1848–1920), women’s liberation (1960s–80s), intersectional third wave (late 1980s–1990s), and digital fourth wave (2007–present).
- Origin: Journalist Martha Weinman Lear coined the “wave” label in 1968, linking 1960s activism back to 19th-century suffrage.
- Intersectionality: Kimberlé Crenshaw’s 1989 concept reshaped how third-wave feminists understood overlapping identities like race, class, and gender.
- Digital Activism: Hashtag campaigns such as #MeToo define the fourth wave, spreading across 85+ countries in 2017.
- Key Critique: The metaphor is often criticised as reductive and Western-centric, understating both internal disagreement and the movement’s global diversity.
- Ongoing Debate: Scholars still dispute exactly when each wave began and ended, and whether “waves” is the best way to describe feminist history at all.
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. She advocated for women’s education, property rights, and organisational leadership. Many activists believed these goals were unreachable without the vote. Suffrage became the movement’s central aim for the next 70 years.
Early feminists drew on earlier writings. Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869) are both thought to have been influential.
The movement also took inspiration from other reform causes. Activists drew tactical insight from women’s collective activism 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, 2020).
They protested through public gatherings, speeches, and writings. Marches were common.
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 notable ‘militant’ feminist was suffragette Emily Davison. She was imprisoned several times for her activism. In 1913 she died after throwing herself onto the racetrack at the Epsom Derby. The word ‘militant’ stuck as a lasting media label.
As the movement developed, it turned to reproductive rights. In 1916, Margaret Sanger opened the first US birth-control clinic, defying state law. She later founded 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 suffrage progressed, first-wave feminists often overlooked women of colour. Groups who did not fit the white, upper-class mould found the vote tied not only to gender, but also to race and class. Their exclusion ran deep.
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 1851, the abolitionist Sojourner Truth named this contradiction directly. She pointed to women of colour’s exclusion from the movement’s own agenda. Her words still resonate.
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.
Some activists in the movement even used racial prejudice as fuel for their own cause. They argued that men of colour should not vote before white women did. That stance fractured the movement’s own solidarity.
Second Wave Of Feminism
How did the second wave start?
The second wave of feminism ran from the early 1960s to the late 1980s. It began after post-war upheaval. Historians think it drew inspiration from the American civil rights movement and the British labour-rights movement.
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 also cared about media representation. Television was the main medium of the day.
Women struggled for televisual presence within it. BBC data from the late 1980s showed a stark imbalance. Roughly five women worked in television for every 150 men (Calvert 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 at the 1968 Miss America Pageant. Hundreds of women marched outside the event. They displayed ‘Women’s Liberation’ banners during the live broadcast, drawing wide 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 Lorde challenged the field. Their work exposed unequal power dynamics within 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 took effect in 1974. It banned credit discrimination based on sex or marital status. Before then, many women had no credit history of their own. They often needed a man’s permission for credit.
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.
Second-wave feminism achieved more than abortion rights. It opened up ‘non-traditional’ education and jobs long dominated by men. Its reach went further still.
The wave also reshaped academic disciplines. Sociology was already turning toward conflict theory, which treats society as an arena of competing interests. Second-wave feminism supplied one of its clearest applied cases: gender as an axis of domination alongside class and race.
Feminist psychology emerged too. It became its own academic subfield from the late 1960s onward. Researchers challenged how mainstream psychology had long described women (Stewart & McDermott, 2004).
Third Wave Of Feminism
How did the third wave start?
The third wave is thought to have spanned the late 1980s to the 1990s. It overlapped with the second wave at first. Many wanted to move past its rigid ideology.
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 argued that being a feminist before this time meant conforming to one fixed identity. It left no room for individuality. That framing pitted people against each other: female against male, Black against white (Snyder, 2008).
Third wave feminists are held to be less rigid and judgmental than second wavers. Second-wave feminists, by contrast, are often portrayed as anti-sexual. Too much fun, they say, threatens 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.
Third wavers also recognised identities beyond race, ethnicity, and class. Women who partake in sport, beauty, music, or religion held identities that had sometimes clashed with earlier feminist ideas.
Third wavers question the gender binary and take a non-essentialist approach to gender. Transgender individuals are held to fit more comfortably into this wave than into second-wave thinking (Snyder, 2008).
Third wave feminism centred on choice. Whatever a woman freely chooses counts as feminist.
Wearing makeup, for instance, need not mean adhering to the ‘male gaze’. A woman can wear it for herself, meaning nothing more.
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.
Enraged by this, they built their own space instead. There, they produced punk music that stood for female empowerment, free of 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 had outlived its usefulness. They argued it produced nothing as concretely revolutionary as the vote won in the first wave, or the legislative changes made during the second.
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?
There is some disagreement over when the fourth wave began. Estimates range from 2007 to 2012 (Sternadori, 2019). It is generally accepted to continue today.
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 worldwide. Together, they ‘call out’ cultures where sexism and misogyny can be challenged and exposed. This continues the third wave’s focus on micropolitics: challenging sexism in adverts, film, literature, and media.
Facebook was forced to confront hate speech on its platform. It had initially claimed that images of abused women did not violate its terms of service (Munro, 2013).
In the United Kingdom, ‘No More Page 3’ was one of the fourth wave’s earlier online campaigns. It targeted The Sun’s page 3, which featured a topless model from 1970 to 2015. The Everyday Sexism Project was another early campaign.
Donald Trump’s 2017 presidential inauguration prompted a Women’s March. It captured the world’s attention. Many call it the largest, most peaceful single-day protest in US history.
That same year, #MeToo spread across social media in over 85 countries. It went viral fast. People shared their own experiences of sexual abuse and harassment, showing how widespread sexual violence is and building 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 fourth wave has several main goals. It calls out social injustice and those responsible. It also aims to educate others on feminist issues and stay inclusive of all groups of women.
Real-World Applications of the Wave Framework
The wave framework is not just historical shorthand. It shapes real institutions today.
Education, Employment and Institutional Change
The second wave insisted that women’s lived experience mattered. This fed directly into women’s and gender studies as a field. It was a lasting change.
Feminist psychology also emerged as its own subfield. It grew from the late 1960s onward, with its own societies and journals (Stewart & McDermott, 2004). University courses now include a unit on gender or feminist theory as a result.
Second-wave law created a legal floor. The Equal Pay Act and credit-access law are examples. Later campaigns pushed employers to actually enforce them.
A hashtag-driven allegation can now damage a company’s reputation fast. It often moves faster than an internal grievance ever could. Many organisations have tightened harassment-reporting procedures, training, and investigation processes as a result. Independent investigations and public reporting have become standard practice at many large employers.
Media Practice and International Advocacy
Fourth-wave ‘call-out’ campaigns have shaped newsroom policy directly. Facebook reversed its stance on violent images of women in 2013. This followed sustained online campaigning (Munro, 2013).
It is a clear case of digital pressure changing policy. The ‘No More Page 3’ campaign pushed a major newspaper to retire a decades-old practice the same way. Editors now expect this kind of pressure and often respond faster than in the past.
Feminist organisations working internationally now track this pattern closely. UN Women, for instance, studies how generations of activists coordinate across borders. The wave framework has become a practical tool for that work.
It helps explain how coalitions form around shared campaigns. This holds even where national contexts differ sharply (Molyneux, Dey, Gatto, & Rowden, 2021).
Together, these examples show something important. The wave framework is more than a teaching label. It now shapes real institutions, from lecture halls to corporate policy to international diplomacy.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is a wave metaphor used to describe the feminist movement?
The wave metaphor is believed to date to 1968. That year, a journalist published it in the Times. Martha Weinman Lear titled it ‘The Second Feminist Wave.’
It linked the 19th- and early 20th-century suffrage movement to the 1960s women’s movement. 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. It implies each wave shares one agenda, when feminist ideas have always been more varied.
It also implies each wave replaces the last, which risks downplaying earlier feminists’ achievements.
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.
Critical Evaluation of the Wave Metaphor
The wave metaphor is a useful teaching device, but scholars raise several serious objections to it. The sections below set out the main criticisms, the framework’s real strengths, and how it compares to rival ways of telling the same history.
Internal Disagreement and Contested Boundaries
Treating ‘the second wave’ as one programme hides real disagreement. Within any wave, liberal feminism, radical feminism, and Marxist feminism coexisted. They argued over goals and methods.
A woman active in 1975 might have held several, often incompatible, positions. Compressing that argument into one label flattens real disagreement. It makes each period look more unified than it felt at the time.
Every transition point in this model is disputed, not settled. The fourth wave’s start alone has been dated anywhere from 2007 to 2012 (Sternadori, 2019). Scholars disagree just as much on the third-to-fourth handover.
A framework whose boundaries shift this much is a loose grouping tool, not a precise category. Even the second wave’s own end date varies across accounts.
Race, Class, and the Framework’s Strengths
The first wave’s exclusion of women of colour is not a one-off. Second-wave feminism is often criticised for centring white, middle-class concerns. Black feminist writers worked within and against it at the time.
Multicultural critics point to a ‘triple burden’ instead. Women marginalised by race, class, and gender face oppression that multiplies, not adds.
This same criticism resurfaces at every wave transition. That pattern suggests something structural. It is not a flaw later waves simply corrected.
None of this makes the metaphor worthless. It gives journalists, students, and activists a shared shorthand. They can place a campaign in context without first mastering decades of debate.
The metaphor has stayed durable since 1968. Broad brushstrokes are simply more memorable than an accurate, unwieldy list of overlapping currents. It also captures something real: certain concerns genuinely become more publicly salient in some periods than others, from 1910s suffrage to 2010s disclosure.
Alternative Ways to Frame Feminist History
Because the wave metaphor is a way of telling history rather than a theory, its real rivals are other ways of telling the same story.
- The generations model: treats feminist history as a sequence of generations in dialogue with one another, rather than discrete waves that crash and recede. It highlights continuity and mentorship, but can understate how disruptive moments like the vote or #MeToo really were.
- Postfeminism: some scholars argue the period between the third and fourth waves is better explained by postfeminism than by a quiet trough. As McRobbie (2009) and Gill (2007) explain, mainstream media absorbed feminist words like ‘choice’ and ’empowerment’ while stripping them of their political demand for structural change.
- Affective temporality: Chamberlain (2017) argues that feminist activism is better understood through its own relationship to time, in which past struggles and future goals are continually felt in the present, producing bursts of solidarity that look like a new ‘wave’. A review of this argument notes that it reframes, rather than resolves, the debate over whether the fourth wave is genuinely new (Ford, 2021).
- Non-Western historiography: the four-wave sequence describes a specifically Western history built around milestones, such as the 1920 US vote, with no direct equivalent elsewhere. Feminist movements in Latin America, South Asia, or the Middle East follow their own distinct chronologies.
Contemporary Research
The fourth wave’s defining claim is that the internet changed feminist activism, not just its venue. This claim has been tested directly with large-scale digital data.
How Social Movement Organisations Used #MeToo on Twitter
- Aim: Xiong, Cho, and Boatwright (2019) examined how social movement organisations used words, hashtags, and message frames to participate in #MeToo on Twitter, and whether this worked as one-way broadcasting or a genuinely two-way process with the public.
- Method: the researchers combined semantic network analysis, which maps which words and hashtags tend to appear together, with a qualitative analysis of the same tweets’ framing.
- Results: the network analysis revealed distinct sub-conversations within the #MeToo network. The framing analysis found six distinct strategies organisations used to invite public participation.
- Conclusion: hashtag activism functions as a two-way, co-creational practice between organisations and the public, not simply a broadcast channel.
- Evaluation: combining structural and content analysis of a very large, real dataset gives considerably stronger evidence than a single case study could. Its main limitation is that it describes communication patterns rather than proving they caused real-world change.
Why #MeToo Spread Further in Some Countries Than Others
- Aim: Lee and Murdie (2020) tested whether the cross-national spread of #MeToo was driven by transnational influence, or by each country’s own domestic political conditions.
- Method: the researchers collected over 35,000 #MeToo-related tweets worldwide and used statistical modelling to relate country-level activity to each country’s protection of political and civil rights.
- Results: countries that more strongly protect political and civil rights showed measurably higher #MeToo engagement, supporting the domestic-conditions explanation over cross-border contagion alone.
- Conclusion: the global spread of #MeToo-style activism depends on whether a country’s political environment is open enough to permit that kind of public claims-making in the first place.
- Evaluation: testing over 35,000 tweets across many countries with a statistical model is far more rigorous than comparing a handful of countries by hand. Its main limitation is that Twitter use itself is unevenly distributed, so tweet volume is an imperfect proxy for real activism levels, and the explanation remains correlational rather than experimental.
Read together, the two studies tell a consistent story. #MeToo-style activism is genuinely organised and co-created online (Xiong et al., 2019). But real, sustained activism still depends on each country’s political context (Lee & Murdie, 2020).
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