: the three waves of feminism
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The first wave of feminism was a modern movement (1900s – 1920s) linked to the suffragettes, with the aim of giving women the right to vote and looking for legal enfranchisement.
The second wave of feminism was a movement driven by post-structural theory that looked to interrogate gender roles, marital responsibilities and the representation of women from a critical and intellectual perspective, in a renewed context of civil liberty. (1960s – 1980s)
Third wave feminism is a contemporary movement that generally seeks to broaden feminism to foreground additionally underprivileged women – women of colour, disabled women, queer and trans women. It’s also often linked to sex-positivity and can in some senses be defined as reactionary to the beliefs of particular second-wave feminists. (1990s – 2010s)
In the first movie, the goal was the right to vote. That film had a cliffhanger ending. The Women had got the right to vote, but there was still clearly a lot of work to be done.
After World War 2, the decision was made to bring The Women back together for a sequel. The villains of that previous cliffhanger were getting bolder in the post-war world, and it was time someone did something about it. And so, the second wave occurred, in which The Women struggled to gain legal and social equality, and to overcome the gender role of the domestic wife.
Then, feminism did what all social and political movements do when they achieve their primary goal: it splintered. With no core shared goal to unite all activists, each became free to pursue their own more personal interests within the sphere of feminist philosophy, as each had certain issues they held as more important than others. This was the Third Wave of feminism. There was still a lot of overlap, especially in regards to intersectionality (philosophy that explores the ways in which people who belong to multiple minority groups are disadvantaged in ways that people who are members of just one of those groups are not), but this was more akin to a set of mini-series than a movie. Although this can be seen as ineffective, it shouldn’t be. It should be seen as a mark of the success of previous generations that people of the third wave could explore more nuanced and niche issues.
The Fourth Wave kind of co-exists with the Third Wave. The third wave isn’t over, but a particular branch of it became sufficiently important and prominent thanks to social media that it became its own wave, kind of like how birds are a whole category that come from just one type of dinosaur. Fourth wave feminism concerns itself primarily with violence against women, and uses the internet to fight against it, particularly by calling out and publicly shaming alleged abusers.
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