Feminist Movement

The feminist movement refers to historically specific and culturally contextual political movements that seek justice for women. A concerted effort to address women's social and legal inequalities in 19th- and early 20th-century Europe and America is recognized as the “first wave” of the feminist movement. British women joined together to begin publishing the English Woman's Journal in 1858; the First International Women's Conference in Paris in 1892 established the word feminism as the belief in and advocacy of equal rights for women based on the idea of the equality of the sexes; and in the United States, feminism that emerged out of the abolitionist movement culminated in the suffrage movement that won a decades-long struggle for women's right to vote in 1920. This first wave ...