History of Feminism: Four Waves from Seneca Falls to #MeToo

Women Have Had the Vote in the US for Only 105 Years

The Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified on August 18, 1920, reads in its entirety: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." Seventy-two years of organized feminist activism — from the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 to the final ratification — separated the demand from the right. The U.S. suffrage victory came 27 years after New Zealand became the first self-governing country to grant women the vote in 1893, and 28 years before Swiss women gained the federal vote in 1971. The wave framework for describing feminist history captures real shifts in focus and strategy while obscuring the continuities of struggle that connected them.

First Wave: Suffrage and Legal Personhood

The first wave of feminism, roughly spanning the mid-nineteenth century through the early twentieth century, concentrated on the foundational legal disabilities that denied women civic personhood: the right to vote, to own property, to attend universities, to practice professions, and to retain legal identity after marriage.

The Seneca Falls Convention of July 19–20, 1848 — organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott in upstate New York — produced the Declaration of Sentiments, which adapted Jefferson's language to assert that "all men and women are created equal." Of the 300 attendees (men and women), 68 women and 32 men signed the declaration. Its most controversial demand — women's suffrage — passed by a narrow majority, with Stanton persuading Frederick Douglass to support it from the floor. Many attendees, including Lucretia Mott, initially opposed including suffrage as too radical.

Second Wave: Equality, Work, and the Body

The second wave of feminism (approximately 1960–1985) moved beyond legal personhood to challenge substantive economic inequality, workplace discrimination, sexual violence, and reproductive autonomy. Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963) named "the problem that has no name" — the dissatisfaction of educated middle-class women confined to domestic roles — and sold 3 million copies in its first three years, catalyzing mainstream feminist organizing.

• ERA (Equal Rights Amendment): Passed by Congress in 1972, the ERA stated: "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." It required ratification by 38 states. By 1982's original deadline, only 35 had ratified; a conservative backlash led by Phyllis Schlafly's STOP ERA campaign successfully blocked the amendment. Virginia became the 38th state to ratify in January 2020 — 48 years after congressional passage — but legal controversy over the deadline has prevented it from taking effect.
• Reproductive rights: Roe v. Wade (1973) recognized a constitutional right to abortion under the 14th Amendment's privacy doctrine. The decision was overturned in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (June 24, 2022), returning abortion regulation to states.
• Title IX (1972): Prohibited sex discrimination in any educational program receiving federal funding. Its implementation transformed women's athletic participation: from approximately 295,000 girls in high school sports in 1972 to over 3.4 million by 2018–2019 (NFHS data).
• International dimensions: The UN Decade for Women (1975–1985) produced CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, 1979) — the most ratified international women's rights instrument with 189 states parties as of 2024; the United States has signed but not ratified it.

Third Wave: Intersectionality and Identity

The third wave emerged in the early 1990s, partly as a critique of second-wave feminism's predominantly white, middle-class perspective. Its intellectual anchor was Kimberlé Crenshaw's theory of intersectionality, introduced in her 1989 paper "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex" in the University of Chicago Legal Forum and developed further in 1991. Crenshaw argued that identity categories — race, gender, class, sexuality — do not operate independently but interact to produce overlapping systems of discrimination that cannot be addressed by policies targeting a single axis of inequality.

The 1991 Anita Hill testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee during Clarence Thomas's Supreme Court confirmation hearings — in which she described detailed sexual harassment by Thomas when he was her supervisor — galvanized third-wave organizing. The hearings were televised; the all-male, all-white Judiciary Committee's skeptical treatment of Hill's testimony produced what became known as the "Year of the Woman" in the 1992 election cycle, when a record number of women were elected to Congress.

Fourth Wave: Digital Organizing and #MeToo

The fourth wave of feminism, dating roughly from 2012–2013 with the proliferation of feminist social media communities, is defined by the intersection of feminism with digital culture and its amplification of survivor testimony at global scale.

• #MeToo: Activist Tarana Burke coined the phrase "Me Too" in 2006 to build community among survivors of sexual violence, particularly women of color. When actress Alyssa Milano used #MeToo on Twitter on October 15, 2017 — 12 days after the New York Times published Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey's investigation of Harvey Weinstein — the hashtag was tweeted more than 500,000 times in 24 hours and used by 4.7 million people in 12 million posts in its first 24 hours on Facebook. Within months, high-profile men in media, entertainment, politics, and technology had lost positions based on credible accusations.
• Global reach: #MeToo inspired parallel movements across multiple languages and countries: #BalanceTonPorc (France), #YoTambién (Spain/Latin America), #MosquéeMeToo (Muslim communities), and movements addressing specific cultural contexts in Japan, South Korea, and India.
• Legislative impact: By 2022, all 50 U.S. states and the federal government had enacted or updated sexual harassment laws. The Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act of 2022 — signed by President Biden in March 2022 — prohibited mandatory arbitration clauses for sexual harassment claims, a direct outcome of #MeToo advocacy.

The wave framework has critics: many scholars argue it imposes false periodization on continuous activism, centers white Western experiences, and understates the contributions of women of color who organized throughout all "waves" without that designation. Still, the framework identifies real shifts — in targets, tactics, and theoretical frameworks — that shaped feminism's evolving engagement with power.