Feminisms

Feminisms refer to political and academic movements that confront misogyny, sexism, and their compounded and unique effects on different women and girls. By deciphering and evaluating the oppression of women and girls, feminist scholars seek to alleviate sexism's various and harmful impacts. Here feminism is examined in the plural because common goals and a collective political identity have increasingly become difficult to delineate and justify given disparate theoretical explanations of gender, sexism, and patriarchy. Furthermore, feminist scholars use different methods to develop these models and often embrace dissimilar political affiliations. If there is one goal that unites feminisms, it is to improve the status and material conditions of all women. Political and academic feminisms, often but not always one and the same, have sought this goal through different trajectories over time. Often 19th-and 20th-century Western feminisms are referred to by their historical era and include first, second, and third waves.