What is “first wave” feminism?
What we call the first wave was the movement that began in 1848 in Seneca Falls, N.Y., with the first gathering in the world devoted specifically to women’s rights. Out of that meeting came what was at first a very small group of women — for example, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth — concerned with righting the wrongs society imposed on women. After the Civil War, that movement broadened and diversified, so that by the 1890s it became arguably the most broad-based social movement in the country. It culminated with winning suffrage in 1920. Then, the discussion of women’s rights went into abeyance. It’s as if suffrage solved everything, though, for example, women were routinely excluded from juries, because of their domestic obligations, until the 1960s. And the “second wave”? The second wave of organized feminism we can date — depending on which you chose — from 1962, and JFK’s Commission on the Status of Women, or from 1965, and the founding of the Nation
