The First Wave of Feminism refers to the initial era of the organized women’s movement, primarily occurring during the 19th and early 20th centuries.
This period was defined by a heavy focus on legal issues, specifically suffrage (the right to vote). Activists believed women would not be viewed as equal citizens without it.
While the social movement formally began in the United States during the abolitionist period preceding the Civil War, its intellectual roots spanned across Europe and North America.
The movement’s central objectives included:
-
Suffrage: Securing the legal right for women to vote in elections.
-
Property Rights: Allowing married women to own, inherit, and manage property independently of their husbands.
-
Education: Expanding access to higher education and professional training.
-
Legal Identity: Gaining recognition as independent citizens rather than legal dependents of their spouses.
What was achieved by first-wave feminism?
While First-Wave Feminism achieved major legal and political victories, it was primarily associated with Liberal Feminism: seeking equality through reform within existing social and political systems.
Despite the right to vote, early laws regarding employment discrimination, such as unequal pay, remained legal until the mid-20th century.
Major Achievements
The most notable achievements of first-wave feminism were due to the suffrage movement.
The 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution granted women the right to vote in 1920 by stipulating that the right to vote could not be denied because of sex.
Likewise, the suffrage movement in Britain won a complete victory when the Equal Franchise Act of 1928 allowed all adult women over 21 to vote.
Married Women’s Property Acts in the US and UK expanded the rights of married women to acquire, hold, use, and dispose of their separate property.
Before this, a women’s property became her husband’s upon marriage. This act was gradually enforced in the US from 1839 and became UK law in 1882.
| Achievement | Region | Date |
| Married Women’s Property Act | US / UK |
1839 (US gradual) / 1882 (UK) |
| Right to Vote (Partial) | United Kingdom |
1918 (Women over 30) |
| Right to Vote (Full) | United States |
1920 (19th Amendment) |
| Right to Vote (Full) | United Kingdom |
1928 (Equal Franchise Act) |
The history of first-wave feminism
18th Century: Intellectual Foundations
Before the movement formally organized, individual thinkers challenged the patriarchal status quo, arguing that women possessed the same rational capacity for citizenship as men.
-
1792: Mary Wollstonecraft publishes A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. She critiqued French revolutionaries who championed the “rights of man” while arguing women lacked the rationality required for citizenship.
-
1837: Pioneering sociologist Harriet Martineau publishes Society in America. She analyzed the link between the oppression of women and slavery, arguing that women’s lack of economic power maintained their dependency.
-
1869: British philosopher John Stuart Mill publishes The Subjection of Women. He argued that the legal subordination of women was one of the last surviving relics of a bygone system of force-based social relations, incompatible with individual liberty.
United States (1848-1920)
In the United States, the movement emerged directly from the abolitionist movement as activists drew parallels between the condition of enslaved people and the subordination of women.
A pivotal turning point occurred when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other women were denied a place on the floor at an abolitionist convention. This sparked a demand for women’s own rights.
Wyoming acted first. In 1869, its territory became the first US jurisdiction to grant women full voting rights, proof that enfranchisement was workable, not just a theory.
1848 – Seneca Falls Convention
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 authored The Declaration of Sentiments, which expanded on the Declaration of Independence by adding the word ‘woman’ or ‘women’ throughout.
Stanton declared that all men and women were created equal, and thus, she advocated for women’s education, their right to own property, and organizational leadership.
Of the convention’s twelve resolutions, eleven passed easily. The ninth was different.
It demanded the vote itself, and it was contested. It passed only after the abolitionist Frederick Douglass spoke in its favour. That mattered. He could not accept his own right to vote while denying it to women.
Roughly 100 of the 300 attendees signed the Declaration of Sentiments. That was rare. Many activists believed their other goals were unreachable without the vote itself. So, for the next 70 years, that was the movement’s main goal.
1851 – Strategic Partnership Forms
Elizabeth Cady Stanton met Susan B. Anthony, beginning a 50-year collaboration traveling the country delivering speeches demanding the vote.
1851 – “Ain’t I a Woman?” Speech
Sojourner Truth, a formerly enslaved woman and abolitionist, delivered her famous speech challenging the exclusion of Black women from rights discourse and highlighting the intersections of race and gender.
1869 – The Movement Splits
Controversy over the 14th and 15th Amendments (granting voting rights to Black men) divided the movement.
Stanton and Anthony opposed these amendments, believing women should vote before Black men—a position that created lasting tensions around race.
This disagreement led to the formation of two competing organizations:
- National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) – led by Stanton and Anthony, focused on a federal constitutional amendment
- American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) – led by Lucy Stone and others, pursued state-by-state campaigns
1872 – Susan B. Anthony Arrested for Voting
One of the most dramatic moments of the first wave occurred when Susan B. Anthony was arrested for voting in the presidential election in Rochester, New York.
At her trial, she was refused the right to speak in her own defense.
When given the opportunity to speak at sentencing, she famously stated: “Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.” She was fined $100, which she refused to pay. The judge deliberately did not jail her, a strategic move to avoid setting a legal precedent.
1890 – Movement Reunifies
After operating independently for over two decades, the NWSA and AWSA merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), creating a more unified and powerful movement (Davis, 2010).
1913 – Woman Suffrage Parade
Over 5,000 suffragists marched in Washington D.C. the day before President Wilson’s inauguration, facing mob violence but gaining significant national media attention.
1916 – Birth Control Movement
Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, defying New York state laws forbidding contraception distribution.
She would later found the organization that became Planned Parenthood, expanding feminist concerns beyond legal rights to reproductive autonomy.
1920 – 19th Amendment Ratified
After more than 70 years of activism, the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, prohibiting sex-based voting discrimination.
This marked the major victory of first-wave feminism in America, though momentum began to dwindle afterward as activists shifted focus to local organizations and special interest groups.
United Kingdom (1866-1928)
The British movement was active from the mid-19th century until 1928 and became known for its division between constitutional and militant tactics.
1866 – Movement Begins
The first mass women’s suffrage petition was sent to the UK House of Commons. British suffragists used petitions and meetings to persuade parliament members.
1897 – Movement Unifies
Seventeen British suffrage societies united to create the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), led by politician and writer Millicent Fawcett. The NUWSS favored constitutional, peaceful methods—petitions, lobbying, and public meetings.
1903 – Militant Tactics Emerge
Viewing the NUWSS as unsuccessful, Emmeline Pankhurst founded the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in Manchester.
The WSPU became known for employing militant strategies to gain suffrage, including arson, vandalism, and hunger strikes.
Many members ended up in prison for their actions.
The women of the WSPU movement became known as “suffragettes” to distinguish them from the more moderate “suffragists” of organizations like the NUWSS (Van Wingerden, 1999).
The term “suffragette” was initially used by newspapers as a diminutive, mocking term, but the WSPU women embraced it proudly under their motto “Deeds not Words.”
1914 – The Movement’s Class Divide
Sylvia Pankhurst, one of Emmeline’s daughters, broke with her mother and sister Christabel over the WSPU’s increasingly middle-class focus on the vote alone.
Her breakaway group, the East London Federation of Suffragettes, combined the suffrage demand with broader socialist and labour causes rooted in London’s working-class East End.
1913 – Emily Davison’s Death
Suffragette Emily Davison, who had been imprisoned multiple times for activism, died after stepping in front of the King’s horse at the Epsom Derby.
Her death became a powerful symbol of the movement’s dedication, though “militant” also became a media label used to discredit suffragists’ actions.
1918 – Partial Victory
The Representation of the People Act passed, granting voting rights to women over 30 and men over 21 in the United Kingdom.
1928 – Full Suffrage Achieved
The Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act gave all women over 21 the right to vote on equal terms with men. This completed the suffrage victory and marked the end of first-wave feminism in Britain.
Beyond Suffrage: Property, Education, and Legal Identity Reform
Suffrage was the first wave’s most visible demand, but it was only one of four linked goals. The movement also fought a legal system that trapped married women in dependency long before they could vote.
Coverture and Property Rights
Under the common-law doctrine of coverture, inherited from English law, a married woman had almost no separate legal existence. Her property, earnings, and legal identity were absorbed into her husband’s.
She generally could not own property in her own name. She could not sign a contract or keep her own wages, either.
This was reinforced by a wider ideology of ‘separate spheres’ (Coontz, 1992). That was the theory. It held that men belonged to a public world of paid work and politics, while women belonged to a private, domestic sphere.
It framed a wife’s absorption into her husband’s identity as natural, not unjust.
Reformers targeted coverture directly, through Married Women’s Property Acts. Mississippi passed the first US statute in 1839. New York’s more comprehensive 1848 Act became the template most other states followed.
Britain took two steps instead.
An 1870 Act gave wives only limited rights over their own earnings. The 1882 Act finally gave married women the same property rights as unmarried women, ending coverture’s legal fiction for good.
Education and the Professions
Higher education was almost entirely closed to women before the mid-19th century.
Oberlin College in Ohio, founded in 1833, became the first American institution to admit women alongside men. By the 1860s, dedicated women’s colleges such as Vassar, founded in 1861, had opened too.
Access to the professions came more slowly.
Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman to earn a US medical degree, in 1849. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson had to train partly abroad before becoming the first woman formally licensed to practise medicine in England, in 1865.
Emily Davies co-founded Girton College, the first Cambridge college for women, in 1869. Both were firsts. Each was a first-wave achievement in its own right.
The vote was not the only door these women forced open.
Legal Identity and the Woman’s Bible
The fourth objective was legal identity: recognition as an independent citizen, not a dependent of one’s husband. This extended even into religious territory.
Late in her career, Elizabeth Cady Stanton turned from statute law to the religious doctrines she believed underwrote women’s subordination.
In 1895, she published The Woman’s Bible, a set of commentaries on the Bible’s patriarchal character (Stanton, 1895/1985). She argued this reflected the fact that men alone had written and interpreted it, not the will of a fair-minded deity.
The book caused an uproar.
It was disowned by the leadership of Stanton’s own suffrage organisation as too controversial, and condemned by many religious authorities of the day.
Even Stanton’s own movement, then, drew a line between the legal reforms it would fight for and a deeper challenge to the culture and religion underwriting women’s subordination.
Criticisms of first-wave feminism
Contemporary Anti-Feminist Backlash (19th & Early 20th Centuries)
During its prime, the first wave faced significant backlash from political and scientific figures who viewed the movement as a threat to social order.
-
Political and Social Opposition: Critics argued that women did not possess the intelligence required to vote and that their participation in politics would “wreak havoc” on society and ruin the family structure.
-
Scientific and Biological Determinism: Some thinkers used “scientific” arguments to suggest that a woman’s physiology dictated a strictly domestic role. They often asserted that women showed a “lower stage of evolution” regarding physical and sensory characteristics, casting doubt on the feasibility of public equality.
-
Reactionary Views: Anti-feminist figures often criticized the movement as a symptom of societal degeneration. They advocated for a return to traditional hierarchies where women remained subservient, viewing them primarily as vessels for procreation.
Critical Perspectives and Intersectionality
While the first wave made massive strides, it has faced significant criticism for its narrow focus and exclusionary practices:
-
Prioritization of White, Middle-Class Interests: The movement primarily reflected the needs of Western, affluent White women.
-
Exclusion of Black Women: Despite many Black women, such as Ida B. Wells and Sojourner Truth, being active suffragists, they were often marginalized or forced to march in the back of rallies.
-
Strategic Racism: Some leaders, including Stanton and Anthony, used racially charged arguments to oppose the 15th Amendment, suggesting that White women were more “deserving” of the vote than Black men.
-
Economic Barriers: Even after 1920, poll taxes and literacy tests continued to disenfranchise poor women and women of color in the U.S. until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Further Information
One of the biggest criticisms of first-wave feminism is its focus. It centred, above all, on the rights of white, western, middle-class women. That focus was narrow.
Suffragists were not a homogenous group simply because they were all women. Political stance, religion, and social class all shaped how involved a given woman could be.
Some conservative suffragists went further. They adopted a segregationist approach, prioritizing white women’s votes over Black men’s and women’s.
Many Black women were excluded outright, or formed their own suffrage groups instead. In some marches, they were made to walk behind white women (Duster, 2019).
Their struggles were often ignored. Black women faced discrimination for both their race and their sex, at once.
Sojourner Truth felt this directly. When she delivered her famous ‘Ain’t I a Woman’ speech at the 1851 women’s rights convention, many white women wanted her silenced. They feared she would divert attention from women’s suffrage (Crenshaw, 1989).
White feminists often fought for their own rights while staying complicit with structural racism (Brewer, 2020). Elizabeth Cady Stanton is a case in point.
She notably opposed the amendment granting Black men the vote. Stanton and others argued Black men should not vote before white women did, often leaning on racial arguments to make that case (Davis, 1981).
The 1920 victory was not the end of the story, either. Voters still had to pay a fee or pass a literacy test to cast a ballot.
Poorer voters lost out either way. This hit African Americans in poorer communities hardest, until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 finally removed these barriers.
Did First-Wave Feminism Really End in 1920?
The standard narrative says organised feminist activism largely dissolved after 1920, only to be “reborn” as the second wave in the 1960s. One study complicates this.
Aim: Taylor (1989) asked how social movements survive periods when public activism appears to have died out. The case: America’s women’s movement, 1920s to 1960s.
Method: The study combined social-movement theory with historical evidence on the activities and membership of American women’s-rights organisations. The focus was the National Woman’s Party during the 1940s and 1950s, a period called the feminist “doldrums.”
Results: Rather than disappearing, organised feminist activism persisted in a smaller, more centralised form. A small core kept it alive.
Conclusion: The movement’s apparent “death” after 1920 is better described as organisational abeyance. This means the first and second waves are linked by direct organisational continuity, not two separate movements. The evidence is one case study, though.
Contemporary Research
Two recent, methodologically distinct studies bear on the first wave’s biggest open questions: who it represented, and what changed once women could vote.
Aim: Nelson (2022) asked how race, class, and ethnicity intersected within one first-wave movement’s own organisational network. The case was Chicago, 1860 to 1920.
Method: The study combined network analysis of ties between Chicago’s women’s organisations with text analysis of their own public discourse.
Results: Class and ethnicity were deeply embedded in the movement’s organisational core and public discourse. Race, by contrast, stayed marginal to the structural core, even where Black women’s own organisations took part.
Conclusion: Chicago’s movement was “foundationally intersectional,” but unevenly so. Class and ethnicity were actively negotiated; race-gender intersections were structurally sidelined. The study covers only one city.
Aim: Cascio and Shenhav (2020) tracked how American women’s voter turnout, policy preferences, and party allegiance changed across the century after the 19th Amendment.
Method: The authors assembled historical data on turnout, preferences, and partisanship from 1920 to the early 2000s. They statistically separated within-cohort change from cross-cohort change.
Results: Women initially voted at lower rates than men. By the 21st century, women voted at higher rates than men, a reversal traced mainly to generational replacement and rising female education.
Conclusion: The 19th Amendment’s political effects took decades, not years, to fully appear. They arrived through generational replacement and shifting party platforms, not just changed behaviour among enfranchised women. The design cannot prove cause, though.
Frequently Asked Questions
What type of feminism is most associated with the first wave?
The main branch of feminism associated with the goals of first-wave feminists is liberal feminism. Liberal feminism is focused on achieving gender equality through political and legal reform within the systems already in place.
Advocating for women’s right to vote, so they have the same rights as men, is a liberal feminist goal.
What is a famous piece of first-wave literature?
First-wave feminism is thought to have been partly inspired by early feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft.
Her writing titled ‘The Vindication of the Rights of Women’ from 1792 was written in the wake of the French Revolution (Krolokke & Sorensen, 2006).
Wollstonecraft argued for girls and women to be allowed the same educational opportunities as men so they would be better wives, mothers, and capable workers.
Did the first wave of feminism occur globally?
Although the effects of first-wave feminism have been felt across the globe regarding achieving women”s voting rights, the activism did not occur globally during this period.
The first wave of feminism in the 19th and 20th centuries transpired in western countries, primarily in the United States and Western Europe.
Key Takeaways
- Definition: First-wave feminism was the first organised women’s movement, running roughly from the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention to 1928, centred on winning suffrage alongside property, education and legal-identity rights.
- Seneca Falls: The 1848 Seneca Falls Convention and its Declaration of Sentiments launched the US campaign and made the vote its central, unifying goal.
- US Victory: The 19th Amendment granted American women the vote in 1920, after more than 70 years of organised activism.
- UK Victory: British women won partial suffrage in 1918 and full, equal suffrage in the 1928 Equal Franchise Act.
- Criticism: The movement’s leadership was disproportionately white and middle-class, and its gains reached Black and poor women unevenly, if at all, before 1965.
- Modern Research: Recent network-analysis and voting-data studies have quantified both the movement’s internal race and class divides and suffrage’s slow-building political effects.
References
Brewer, R. M. (2020). Black feminism and womanism. Companion to feminist studies, 91-104.
Cascio, E. U., & Shenhav, N. (2020). A century of the American woman voter: Sex gaps in political participation, preferences, and partisanship since women’s enfranchisement. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 34(2), 24–48. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.34.2.24
Coontz, S. (1992). The way we never were: American families and the nostalgia trap. Basic Books.
Cowman, K. (2000). Women”s suffrage campaigns in Britain. Women”s History Review, 9 (4), 815-823.
Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory, and antiracist politics. In Feminist Legal Theories (pp. 23-51). Routledge.
Davis, A. Y. (1981). Women, race, and class. Vintage.
Davis, S. (2010). The political thought of Elizabeth Cady Stanton: women”s rights and the American political traditions. NYU Press.
Duster, M. (2019). From the Suffrage Movement to the Women”s March: Black Women”s Fight for Inclusion. Black History Bulletin, 82 (2), 10-11.
Krolokke, C., & Sorensen, A. S. (2006). Three waves of feminism: From suffragettes to grrls. Gender communication theories & analyses: From silence to performance, 1-25.
Mill, J. S. (1869). The subjection of women. Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer.
Nelson, L. K. (2022). The inequality of intersectionalities in Chicago’s first-wave women’s movement. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 47(4), 905–930. https://doi.org/10.1086/718866
Stanton, E. C. (1985). The woman’s bible: The original feminist attack on the Bible. Polygon Books. (Original work published 1895)
Taylor, V. (1989). Social movement continuity: The women’s movement in abeyance. American Sociological Review, 54(5), 761–775. https://doi.org/10.2307/2117752
Van Wingerden, S. A. (1999). The women”s suffrage movement in Britain, 1866-1928. Palgrave Macmillan.
