The political and intellectual movement demanding equal rights, opportunities, and social power for women — organized in three historical 'waves' from the suffrage campaigns of the 19th century through second-wave liberal and radical feminism to contemporary intersectional feminism — and a philosophical tradition that has transformed every discipline it has touched by asking whose experience was left out of the dominant account.
Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, arguing that women's apparent inferiority was caused by their lack of education, not by nature. She was ridiculed. Almost two centuries later, in 1970, Germaine Greer published The Female Eunuch, arguing that women had been conditioned to suppress their own desires and accept their subordination as natural. She became famous. In 1989, Kimberlé Crenshaw coined 'intersectionality' to describe how race and gender oppression compound each other in ways that neither feminist nor anti-racist politics had adequately addressed. Today that concept structures how millions of people think about social justice. Feminism is not a single movement but a set of successive arguments about why women's subordination is not natural, not inevitable, and not acceptable — and about what to do about it.