1.5: Feminism- History, Goals, and Ongoing Debates
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1.5: Feminism- History, Goals, and Ongoing Debates
Opening the book…
Equity-based thinking did not emerge on its own. It grew out of decades of organized resistance to the very systems of bias and power we have been describing. Feminism emerged as an effort to challenge systems (legal, political, and cultural) that limited women’s rights and opportunities. Feminists have compelled changes in professional fields by calling attention to biased practices and pushing for more equitable approaches. In law, feminist scholars reframed sexual harassment as a form of sex discrimination rather than a personal matter (MacKinnon, 1979). In medicine, activists challenged the routine exclusion of women from clinical trials, a practice that was not formally addressed until the NIH Revitalization Act of 1993. In psychological science, feminist scholars have questioned research that treats male experience as the default (Crawford & Marecek, 1989).
We will explore these research biases further across later chapters. More broadly, feminist scholarship has transformed not only what we study but how we study it, challenging the assumption that any research can be neutral when conducted within systems of inequality. Understanding feminism, then, is not only about learning political history. It is about recognizing how social movements reshape research questions and the categories we use to understand human psychology.
Although feminism has never been a single, unified movement, its central aim has been to question systems of gender inequality. Its history is often organized using a wave metaphor.
Indian suffragettes in the 1911 Women's Coronation Procession in London. Women of color have always been part of the movement for the vote, even where the historical record has tended to foreground White suffragettes. Via Woman and her Sphere, public domain, through Wikimedia Commons.
First Wave – late 1700s to early 1900s – suffrage and legal rights.
Second Wave – 1960s to 1970s – workplace equality, and reproductive rights.
Third Wave – 1980s to 1990s – intersectionality, critiques of earlier exclusion and marginalization among feminists.
Fourth Wave – 2000s to present – digital activism, global movements against sexual harassment and gender-based violence.
The wave framework can be helpful for an easy frame of reference, but it has limits. The framework oversimplifies activism by suggesting it happens in separate but internally cohesive stages. It also centers White Western narratives while overlooking feminists of color and feminist movements in other parts of the world (Mohanty, 2003). For example, first-wave feminism is usually pictured through White women in the United States and United Kingdom, even though women like the Indian suffragettes (pictured left) were part of these movements too.
A "Lavender Menace" T-shirt, the kind worn by lesbian activists who reclaimed Betty Friedan's insult as a badge of pride. Photo by Edenaviv5, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
For example, some first-wave White feminists prioritized White women’s suffrage while failing to fully support, and at times actively discounting and opposing, the humanity and rights of Black women (Davis, 1981; Giddings, 1984). During the second wave, much of the public narrative in the United States, both media coverage and among feminists themselves, centered on the concerns of White, middle-class women. The experiences of working-class women and women of color who had long been engaged in labor struggles and community activism were sidelined or ignored (hooks, 1984; Thompson, 2002). Second-wave feminists also marginalized lesbians within the movement. Betty Friedan, a major figure in second wave feminism, famously referred to feminist lesbians as “the lavender menace,” a phrase that lesbian activists later reclaimed and put on t-shirts to call attention to homophobia within feminist spaces (Jay, 1999).
Third-wave feminists criticized the reproduction of societal biases within the movement by focusing on intersectionality. Feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw introduced the term to describe the ways in which experiences of oppression can combine and compound (Crenshaw, 1989). For example, Black women face oppression both as women and as people of color. Intersectionality can help us recognize how Black women’s experiences differ from White women or Black men as a result. The concept of intersectionality has been fundamental in shifting how we understand the value of each person’s combination of identities.
Beyond the Waves: Differing Approaches
Despite what the wave model suggests, multiple different perspectives and approaches to feminism and feminist activism have been present across the waves.
Liberal feminists (e.g., Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan) tend to focus on enacting change within our current systems. Strategies often involve peaceful protest and legislative reform which has sometimes put them at odds with radical feminists (e.g., Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin), who have historically sought to demolish patriarchal systems they view as irreformable (MacKinnon, 1989). Radical feminists have even argued that performing femininity itself reproduces patriarchal roles (Dworkin, 1974). While radical feminism centers patriarchy as the primary system of oppression, socialist feminists (e.g., Angela Davis, Silvia Federici, Heidi Hartmann) have explored capitalism's role in women's oppression, arguing that gender and class exploitation are intertwined. For example, both individual men and capitalist systems in general benefit from women’s unpaid labor (Federici, 1975). Notably, the work of figures like Angela Davis bridged both socialist feminism and women of color feminism by arguing that race, gender, and class, must be considered in combination to be fully understood.
Audre Lorde in April 1980, the year she and Barbara Smith founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. Photo by K. Kendall, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.Building on this tradition, Black feminists and women of color feminists (e.g., Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa) pushed for attention to the overlapping oppressions of race and class with gender. Among the most influential works on Black feminism, The Combahee River Collective Statement, led by Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, and Demita Frazier, outlined the ways in which Black women experienced interlocking oppression as both women and people of color that were not addressed by feminist, Black civil rights, and socialist movements (Combahee River Collective, 1977/1983). Barbara Smith and Audre Lorde went on to found Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in 1980, the first US publisher run by and for women of color, because Black feminist and lesbian writers had no route into print that did not depend on White-dominated houses (Smith, 1989). Drawing on the ideas expressed in the statement, scholars like bell hooks (1981) and Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989), whose concept of intersectionality was discussed above, worked within feminist theory to focus on race intertwined with gender. Others moved beyond feminism towards womanism (Walker, 1983), drawing from Black women’s culture to center survival and community for all, not in terms of gender alone. While feminism, even in its most inclusive forms, focuses on gender as its organizing category, womanism treats gender as inseparable from race, class, spirituality, and community wellbeing.
“If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.”
- Combahee River Collective Statement (1977/1983)
Just as women of color feminists challenge mainstream feminism for universalizing White women's experiences, transnational feminists argue that Western feminism has imposed the experiences of women in Europe and North America while ignoring the particular conditions facing women in the Global South (Mohanty, 1988). These critiques have pushed feminist movements toward greater attention to intersectionality and global perspective, but the work of inclusion remains unfinished.
Ongoing Struggles with Inclusion
Despite years of criticism, prominent feminist priorities often still center White women’s experiences in everything from the Women’s March of 2017 to digital activism like #MeToo (Brewer & Dundes, 2018; Moni, 2019). Writer Mikki Kendall (2020) has argued that mainstream feminism continues to marginalize women of color by failing to adequately consider basic needs as feminist issues. Additionally, critics of “girlboss” feminism, epitomized in Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s (2013) Lean In, point out that this ‘brand’ of feminism focuses almost exclusively on individual achievement rather than structural inequalities that marginalize women of color (Rottenberg, 2018).
Recent debates over the inclusion of trans women in feminist spaces have drawn significant public attention. Lewis (2025) documents the origins of trans-exclusionary advocacy, tracing how a relatively small but vocal group has shaped public discourse on gender identity. In these discussions, the term TERF (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist) sometimes appears. The term TERF originated in 2008 within online activist communities (Smythe, 2018) and is used to criticize those who oppose the inclusion of trans women in women-only spaces, and even within the feminist movement itself and argue that womanhood should be defined strictly by biological sex assigned at birth. To be clear, many people labeled as TERFs reject the term as a slur and instead call themselves “gender critical,” indicating their view that biological sex should outweigh gender identity (Pearce et al., 2020). The term is particularly contested in the United Kingdom, where recent debates over gender identity have become prominent in media and legal discourse. The position, though, is older than the term. In 1979 Janice Raymond's The Transsexual Empire argued that trans women were not women and that trans medicine served patriarchal ends, a position that would reach a federal health agency two years later, as Chapter 11 will address.
The exclusionary position rests on two main assumptions. First, they argue that womanhood should be defined by being born female and socialized as a girl, so that trans women, whom they assume were socialized as boys in childhood, do not share the experience of sex-based subordination that grounds feminist solidarity. However, this not only assumes a single shared experience of girlhood that then defines womanhood, but also that boyhood and male socialization are the same regardless of felt gender identity. This contradicts arguments from Black feminist and intersectional scholars who have argued that race, class, and sexuality can all produce drastically different socialization experiences (Combahee River Collective, 1977/1983; see Pearce et al., 2020 as applied to trans-exclusion). Therefore, defining womanhood by a common socialization history runs the risk of excluding any cis woman whose experiences do not fit the assumed norm. Others point out that trans women are subject to the very gender-based discrimination and violence feminism opposes, in the compounded form Serano (2007) calls transmisogyny, where misogyny and transphobia reinforce each other.
The second assumption is that including trans women in women-only spaces endangers cis women. This second argument has been especially visible in public debate, but the claim at its center is not supported by the evidence. Studies of jurisdictions with trans-inclusive access policies have found no increased safety risks for cis women (e.g., Hasenbush et al., 2019).
The inclusion of trans women is broadly supported within feminist scholarship and by major feminist organizations, including the National Organization for Women (NOW), the Feminist Majority Foundation, as well as most LGBTQ+ advocacy organizations. Trans-exclusionary positions, while vocal in public discourse, represent a minority view within feminist spaces. Scholars documenting the movement note that its public prominence outstrips its actual support among feminists (Hines, 2020; Lewis, 2025). Those who support the inclusion of trans women argue that excluding trans women undermines core feminist principles. From this perspective, trans-exclusionary positions are not just an internal debate but a contradiction of feminist ethics. These disagreements point to broader questions about how gender is defined and put exclusionary positions in direct conflict with feminism’s commitments to combating gender-based oppression.
“What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heelprint upon another woman’s face? What woman’s terms of oppression have become precious and necessary to her as a ticket into the fold of the righteous, away from the cold winds of self-scrutiny?”
Indian suffragettes in the 1911 Women's Coronation Procession in London. Women of color have always been part of the movement for the vote, even where the historical record has tended to foreground White suffragettes. Via Woman and her Sphere, public domain, through Wikimedia Commons.
A "Lavender Menace" T-shirt, the kind worn by lesbian activists who reclaimed Betty Friedan's insult as a badge of pride. Photo by Edenaviv5, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Audre Lorde in April 1980, the year she and Barbara Smith founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. Photo by K. Kendall, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.Building on this tradition, Black feminists and women of color feminists (e.g., Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa) pushed for attention to the overlapping oppressions of race and class with gender. Among the most influential works on Black feminism, The Combahee River Collective Statement, led by Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, and Demita Frazier, outlined the ways in which Black women experienced interlocking oppression as both women and people of color that were not addressed by feminist, Black civil rights, and socialist movements (Combahee River Collective, 1977/1983). Barbara Smith and Audre Lorde went on to found Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in 1980, the first US publisher run by and for women of color, because Black feminist and lesbian writers had no route into print that did not depend on White-dominated houses (Smith, 1989). Drawing on the ideas expressed in the statement, scholars like bell hooks (1981) and Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989), whose concept of intersectionality was discussed above, worked within feminist theory to focus on race intertwined with gender. Others moved beyond feminism towards womanism (Walker, 1983), drawing from Black women’s culture to center survival and community for all, not in terms of gender alone. While feminism, even in its most inclusive forms, focuses on gender as its organizing category, womanism treats gender as inseparable from race, class, spirituality, and community wellbeing.