Feminists have been fighting for equality of the sexes for nearly 200 years—take a look back at the movement in photographs.
Feminism is one of the few—if not only—political movements that defines itself with distinct waves.
There’s the first wave, which encompasses the fight for women’s suffrage through the early 20th century. The second wave, which focused broadly on the fight for equality and reproductive rights. And the third wave, which began to embrace concepts like intersectionality, sex positivity, and more.
Then there’s the fourth wave, which is still ongoing and includes the #MeToo movement and the Women’s March.
It all sounds very neat and tidy, but even a cursory glance at one period will prove that these “waves” are much harder to pin down than they seem. Each one contains a multitude of distinct subgroups and competing philosophies, with echoes of the past that blur the lines of where one era stops and another begins.
But, through it all, one tenet remains the same—ending discrimination on the basis of sex.
Let’s take a look back at the various waves of the feminist movement as seen through photographs, from the suffragette marches of the early 1900s to the Supreme Court protests of today.
The First Wave
While the first wave represents the opening salvo in the fight for women’s rights, it wasn’t called that while it was happening. A New York Times journalist coined the term in 1968 while writing about the second wave, but the name stuck—and informed the classification of feminist movements for the next 50 years.
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In the United States, the first wave coalesced in the 19th century around the issue of women’s suffrage. The most potent symbol of this early movement is arguably the Seneca Falls Convention, the 1848 meeting organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott to discuss the place of women in society.
The attendees ultimately produced and signed the famous Declaration of Sentiments, detailing their goals for their women’s rights activism but, even then, there wasn’t a clear consensus about what they were fighting for.
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Only 100 of the 300 or so attendees signed the declaration, in part because of the debate over suffrage. Mott herself didn’t think it should be included, but Frederick Douglass—the famous abolitionist and orator—encouraged conventioneers to keep it in.
Douglass’s presence at the convention wasn’t a coincidence. The early women’s rights movement grew up alongside the abolitionist movement in the U.S. and the U.K. Sojourner Truth, for example, gave her famous “Ain’t I A Woman?” speech at the 1851 Women’s Rights Convention in Ohio.
But, while many abolitionists were on the side of women’s rights activists, the support wasn’t always mutual. Stanton and her compatriot Susan B. Anthony both participated in abolitionist activities, but they stopped short of supporting the 15th Amendment, which gave Black men the right to vote after the Civil War.
For her part, Stanton gave an explicitly racist address where she attempted to draw a line “between educated, refined women” and “the lower orders of men, especially in the South.”
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Neither Anthony nor Stanton lived to see the passage of the 19th Amendment. This amendment finally gave American women the right to vote in 1920, thanks to the efforts of early 20th century activists including Ida B. Wells, Carrie Chapman Catt, Alice Paul, Mary Church Terrell, and more.
This victory still rang hollow for millions of women, though, as many state constitutions prevented Black women from exercising their right to vote, while poll taxes, literacy tests, and other restrictions kept other women of color ineligible.
The Second Wave
With the right to vote secured (for some women), feminists of the mid-20th century turned their attention to a wide range of issues: reproductive rights, domestic violence, legal inequality, the unequal division of domestic labor, and more.
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Generally speaking, the movement came in part as a reaction to the years after World War II, when women who might have had jobs during the war effort returned home to raise children.
Another major turning point came in 1961, when the birth control pill became widely available after being approved by the FDA one year prior. Access, of course, wasn’t equal for all women, but those who could obtain it were able to more readily control the direction of their lives.
Feminists of this period also fought to legalize abortion which, at the time, was illegal in most states. In 1973, the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade conferred the right to abortion, representing a major victory for activists who knew that—as the slogan of the period went—the personal is political.
Around the same time, activists including Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm, and Betty Friedan reintroduced the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment, the first version of which was cowritten by Alice Paul in the 1920s.
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The ERA, which has still not passed, would have granted equal legal rights to all Americans regardless of sex, but ratification was severely hampered by the efforts of conservative women led by Phyllis Schlafly.
Other victories of the second wave include Title IX, which prohibits sex-based discrimination at school, and Title X, a federal grant program dedicated to family planning.
Meanwhile, opponents of this successfully cemented the stereotype of feminists as bra-burning women’s libbers who hate men. (The bra burning myth originated with a 1968 protest of the Miss America pageant. Bras were thrown into a symbolic “Freedom Trash Can” along with beauty products, Playboy magazines, and pots and pans, but police stopped participants from doing the actual burning.)
As with the first wave, however, much feminist activism of the period centered around the needs of white heterosexual women over women of color and those in the LGBTQ+ community.
Organizations like the Combahee River Collective, which argued that the mainstream feminist and civil rights movements were ignoring the needs of Black women and lesbians, sprung up in response and led the push for a movement that understood the specific needs of different groups.
In 1971, for example, the National Chicana Conference met in Texas to discuss the intersection of racism, classism, and sexism faced by Latina women in the United States.
The Third Wave
The third wave of feminism is somewhat less well-defined than the first two, but it’s widely considered to have started in the early 1990s. It also had something that the other waves didn’t—a healthy dose of punk rock.
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The third wave is closely associated with the riot grrrl movement, which sprung up in and around Olympia, Washington. Led by bands like Bikini Kill and Bratmobile, riot grrrl subculture was largely a reaction to the ongoing objectification of women and girls in the media, as well as gender-based sexual violence.
Bikini Kill’s first album, Revolution Girl Style Now, appeared the same year that Anita Hill publicly accused Clarence Thomas, then just a nominee for the Supreme Court, of sexually harassing her in the workplace. Thomas was ultimately confirmed to the highest court, but Hill’s testimony inspired untold numbers of women to come forward with their own stories of harassment.
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One month after the confirmation hearings, Congress passed a law that allowed victims of sexual harassment to seek damages, as well as back pay and reinstatement, and one year later, harassment complaints filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission had increased by 50%.
The third wave later saw the 1996 premiere of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, which inspired the creation of V-Day, a nonprofit organization dedicated to ending violence against women. While the play has since faced criticism for transgender exclusionism, among other things, it was then considered one of the most groundbreaking entries in political theater of its time.
Some third wave feminists also attempted to correct the mistakes of the first and second waves by actively working to include women of color and members of the LGBTQ+ community.
Three years before Hill’s testimony, legal scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality,” which refers to the ways a person’s different social identities combine to create different modes of discrimination. The term quickly became a cornerstone of feminist thought (and later resurfaced in 2021 amid conservative panics about critical race theory).
The Fourth Wave
While some (grievously incorrect) observers have argued that the 21st century is a period of postfeminism, others have posited that we are living through the fourth wave of the movement.
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Considered to have begun in the early 2010s, the fourth wave is highly focused on intersectionality and justice—justice for assault survivors, for climate refugees, for transgender people, and more.
The 2017 Women’s March—held the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration—is likely the most potent example of fourth wave feminism in action, at least numbers-wise. It was the largest single-day protest in U.S. history, with an estimate of between three and five million participating across the country.
Later that year, the #MeToo movement began in earnest after numerous people came forward with sexual allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. (Activist Tarana Burke originally used the #MeToo hashtag in 2006.)
Well before 2017, however, there were already plenty of fourth wave actions in motion.
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In September 2014, Columbia University student Emma Sulkowicz began carrying a mattress around campus for their senior art thesis, saying that the project would end when their alleged rapist was expelled or left school. The work—titled Mattress Performance—helped kick off a nationwide discussion about campus sexual assault and the responsibility of schools to protect their students.
Fourth wave feminism is also aligned with the body positivity movement, which pushes for the acceptance of all bodies regardless of size, shape, race, ability, or gender.
Other fourth wave issues included the end of rape culture, as represented by the SlutWalk movement and Right to Be (formerly called Hollaback!).
The first SlutWalk—which involves participants wearing their “slutty” clothing for the march—happened in Canada in 2011 after a Toronto police officer suggested that women shouldn’t dress “like sluts” if they don’t want to get raped. Right to Be, meanwhile, began as a campaign to end street harassment.
As the United States saw in 2022, the movement isn’t over. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, protests sprung up across the country and activists immediately began pushing back against proposed national and state bans.
If the summer of 2022 was any indication, then the fourth wave—and likely the fifth—will just keep cresting.
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