Feminism is a name we give to the belief that women deserve equal rights and treatment. It’s also a term tied to actions—campaigns, boycotts, political movements—in support of this belief. But is feminism a modern concept, or has it always been present, a belief held by some in many human societies?There’s plenty of evidence that women have long questioned, resisted, and redefined power structures, usually in patriarchal systems, ones where men held power and dominated most aspects of life. Consider the ancient story of Antigone, the defiant heroine of Sophocles’s ancient Greek tragedy. Antigone risked her life to bury her brother. By doing so, she defied her king’s order in a society in which women were supposed to be silent and submissive. Though fictional, this famous ancient story indicates that pro-women discussions were happening in Greek society over two thousand years ago. Sophocles could have selected a man as the main character of his play. Instead, he chose a woman, and in doing so he represented key themes of feminist ideologies—women’s control of their own values and decisions, resistance to patriarchal authority, and the fight for justice—that existed within mainstream Greek culture.

Sophocles’s Antigone is just one story that brings into view countless women throughout history who have challenged injustice based on their gender—often without recognition. Yet most historians consider feminism a modern social movement that emerged approximately 200 years ago. It wasn’t until the social and cultural upheavals of the modern world that a formalized movement calling for a wide spectrum of equal rights for women developed. This was the movement we call feminism.

In this article, we will look at the historical factors that gave life to the feminist movement beginning around the end of the eighteenth century. We will explore the social, political, and economic factors that came together to ignite the spark of the first organized efforts for women’s equality. And we will look at the ways this movement has changed, expanded, and spread over time.

The birth of modern feminism

The emergence of modern feminism is connected to wider historical developments including the Enlightenment, industrialization, and the spread of democracy. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, thinkers emphasized the importance of individual rights and human reason. Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau are part of this story, but neither made clear that women were included in these rights. Rousseau even wrote that women shouldn’t have a political role in society. There were many other Enlightenment scholars, however, and some held different ideas about the public roles of women. Two female scholars in particular took advantage of this Age of Reason to advance women’s rights. Mary Wollstonecraft, in her 1792 essay, “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” argued that women were just as capable of reason as men and deserved equal access to education as well as participation in society. Olympe de Gouges, in her 1789 “Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen,” demanded that women be included in the rights being claimed by French revolutionaries and that women should be allowed to escape their traditional roles in marriage and family.

The Industrial Revolution played an even more dramatic role in altering traditional gender roles. As wage labor became more prevalent, women joined men in the industrial workforce. Yet economic disparities between genders got worse, rather than better. Working-class women often worked long hours in factories while still being required to care for their children. At the same time, middle- and upper-class women became increasingly confined to the domestic sphere, and were often idealized as gentle and obedient caregivers.

Women fought back—sometimes loudly and sometimes quietly. In her 1899 novel The Awakening, American author Kate Chopin explores the life of Edna Pontellier. Fed up with domesticity, motherhood, and marriage, she moves out of her husband’s home. This storyline was scandalous at the time, but it painted a vivid picture of what transformed gender roles could look like for modern women.

Women not only sought economic and social freedoms, but also political rights. The spread of ideas about freedom in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries provided a framework for activism, as many women saw the right to vote as an important strategy for changing society. They saw democratic rights spreading among men and asked: Why not us, too? And so, they began to organize, demand inclusion, and declare that they should have a voice in government and the political process. This movement for suffrage—the right to vote—brought together women across social classes and even across continents.

First-wave feminism: The fight for suffrage

This first wave of feminism came together in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its primary goal was legal equality—specifically suffrage. In New Zealand, Kate Sheppard led a peaceful and successful voting-rights campaign using petitions, public meetings, and dialogue with politicians. In 1893, her country became the first in the world to have universal women’s suffrage. Britain’s suffragette movement, led by Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, used more bold and confrontational tactics such as hunger strikes, smashing windows, and even chaining themselves to buildings—all to demand the right to vote.

In the United States, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott organized the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention. This meeting of American suffragettes helped launch a decades-long fight that eventually led to the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, which gave women the legal right to vote.

Yet this wave of activism did not help every woman. The large movements, like the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in the United States, focused only on the concerns of white, middle-class women. Black suffragettes like Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrell were asked to march at the back of NAWSA parades. Across the Atlantic, the British Women’s Social and Political Union almost completely disregarded the rights of working-class women.

Yet even with its faults and omissions, the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century feminist movement caused a seismic shift that opened the doors for women to participate more in public life and political affairs. These pioneers laid the groundwork for the second wave of feminism, which would emerge after the Second World War.

Second-wave feminism: Challenging social norms

The second wave of feminism occurred mostly in the 1960s and 1970s. This movement was different from the first in that it focused more on social, cultural, and economic freedom rather than voting rights. This new push for rights was partly a result of conditions in many countries during World War II, during which women worked in factories and offices, replacing men who served in the military. Many women felt frustrated at being asked to return to childcare and domestic duties after the war. The expansion of college education in many countries after the war also inspired women, as did the civil rights movement in the United States and other movements for equality worldwide, including the fight to end colonial rule. Another contributing factor was the development of new birth-control technologies that allowed women to effectively manage their own fertility for the first time.

Important female authors such as France’s Simone de Beauvoir found large audiences eager to read their work. In The Second Sex (1949), de Beauvoir expressed the belief that gender roles were a social idea rather than something that is determined biologically. The idea that women were not genetically conditioned to work in the home, for example, became a core part of feminist theory. In 1963, Betty Freidan’s book The Feminist Mystique gave voice to thousands of American housewives who felt stifled by the domestic roles that society demanded of them. These women joined organizations such as the American National Organization for Women (NOW) or, in Germany, the Neue Frauenbewegung (New Women‘s Movement), which helped them change laws affecting reproductive rights and workplace discrimination.

Global feminist voices: Beyond the West

Thus far we’ve talked mostly about feminist movements in the West, but women from all over the world were fighting for their rights and demanding equality during the same period. Often, these movements were wrapped up in wider movements for national rights or sovereignty. In the British colony of Nigeria, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti founded the Nigerian Abeokuta Women’s Union in the 1940s. This group organized thousands of women. They not only rallied against unfair taxation of income from jobs women usually held—such as selling in markets—but also called for independence from Britain. Egyptian doctor, writer, and activist Nawwal El Saadawi became internationally known for her bold critiques of gender oppression in Arab societies. Her book, Woman at Point Zero, showed how patriarchal violence was connected to and influenced religion and authoritarianism. She argued that the combination of religious and authoritarian beliefs created an environment where it was impossible for women to be equal to men, and she called for changes in reproductive rights and education to promote equality.

During the 1970s in India, physicist and environmental activist Vandana Shiva showed the world that damage to the physical environment—specifically deforestation and pollution—impacted women more than men in rural communities that relied on natural resources to survive. Shiva helped organize grassroots protests in which women literally hugged trees to protect them from being cut down. Her work connected justice for women to environmental preservation.

Each of these women applied feminist thinking to her own cultural and political contexts. This showed the world that feminism could help secure justice for entire nations. They also shed light on the unique features of different groups of women, dispelling the notion that feminist ideologies affected all women the same way. This opened the door for an evolving set of political and cultural practices that aimed to secure justice all over the world.

Third-wave feminism: Intersectionality and identity

During the 1990s, feminists began to look more closely at the earlier waves of feminism that seemed to primarily focus on white, middle-class women. Echoing the sentiments of Black suffragettes like Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrell, these thinkers began to emphasize intersectionality—the overlapping of race, gender, class, and other identities, which meet and create unique experiences of oppression or advantage. African American author bell hooks wrote the book Feminism Is for Everybody to help make these complex ideas more understandable. Her text told a new story of feminism, one rooted in the ideas of social systems and aimed to cultivate accessibility, diversity, inclusiveness, and justice.

Third-wave feminism had many proponents in the global South and formerly colonized countries. Indian scholar Chandra Talpade Mohanty, for example, criticized Western feminists for depicting women who had lived in colonized nations as victims. Instead, she showed that women in formerly occupied nations had always organized, even if their efforts weren’t recognized as feminism. Meanwhile, Nigerian scholar Oyeronke Oyewumi showed that not all societies were equally patriarchal. She studied the alternative ways that Yoruba families understood members as equal—whether male or female. Indeed, rather than “brother” and “father,” the Yoruba language focuses on age: one is either ebgon (older sibling) or aburo (younger sibling). Ugandan scholar Sylvia Tamale went further, arguing that feminism as it was expressed in modern Western culture was not the only way for women to struggle for their rights. She argued that African tradition and family structures—and by extension those in other parts of the world—could also be routes to better conditions.

This wave of feminism highlights the reality that multiple truths and identities can exist together. It challenges binary thinking, and as a result has set the stage for activism and social movements that embrace people from a wider spectrum of backgrounds.

The fourth wave: Digital feminism and new frontiers

The focal points of feminism are still changing. Many of these changes have to do with how ideas are communicated—specifically in the digital world. Today, issues such as workplace harassment, sexual violence, and instances when schools, governments, or organizations allow harm to continue, can be shared via social media. Hashtags like #MeToo and #YesAllWomen have helped women all over the world share stories about sexual abuse and sexism.

Conclusion

Let’s circle back and return now to Antigone—a symbol of timeless resistance. Her defiance of the king resisted ancient cultural practices and social systems. She is a pivotal example of the pro-women thinking that is the foundation of feminism, which has always been rooted in resistance. She is joined across centuries by voices that eventually sounded the call to modern feminism. Her actions portray the power to decide what’s right and stand up for it.

Feminism is not finished—it’s both a movement and a process. There’s still plenty of work to be done to address age-old problems, such as continued of violence against women and unequal pay. There are new challenges as well, like the spread of online harassment on social media. And feminism has its critics. At its core, however, feminism strives to decrease the death rates of mothers during childbirth, protect women from violence, and give women the ability to pursue their dreams.