The language of feminist ‘waves’ is a retrospective way of organising more than two centuries of women’s resistance to male domination, not a label that women necessarily used for themselves at the time. The metaphor can be useful, but it can also hide how continuous the struggle has been, and how much of that struggle has been about naming sex as a political reality with material consequences for women living under patriarchy.
This overview sketches a clear line from early writers such as Mary Astell and Mary Wollstonecraft, through to the suffragists and suffragettes, into what is now called the second, third and fourth waves of feminism. It also explains where liberal feminism sits in this history, and why materialist, sex‑based feminism continues to matter.
Before the waves: Astell and Wollstonecraft
Long before anyone spoke of ‘waves’, women were analysing our own subordination and insisting that it was political, not natural. Two key English writers are Mary Astell and Mary Wollstonecraft.
Mary Astell’s Some Reflections upon Marriage (1700) exposed how marriage law turned wives into dependants whose property and legal existence were effectively absorbed into their husbands. Astell rejected the claim that women were naturally inferior, arguing instead that women are rational beings who should not be subjected to the “inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary Will of Men”.
Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) argued that women’s apparent frivolity and weakness were the result of an educational system designed to keep us dependent, not evidence of an inferior nature. Wollstonecraft demanded serious education for girls and insisted that women should be treated as full moral and political subjects, capable of reason and virtue.
These early writers grounded a tradition that understands women’s subordination as a matter of law, custom and power, not biology or divine decree. Later activists drew directly and indirectly on this insight.
The first wave: law, suffrage and its limits
What is usually called the ‘first wave’ of feminism emerged in the nineteenth century, when women’s rights campaigns focused on legal reforms such as property rights, access to education and, above all, the vote. The Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 in the United States and suffrage campaigns in Britain and other countries are often used as markers of this period.
Suffragists and suffragettes organised petitions, public meetings, civil disobedience and, in some cases, militant direct action to force states to recognise women as citizens. Their victories on the franchise and related legal reforms built on the earlier arguments of Astell and Wollstonecraft that women are rational beings who should not be treated as overgrown children.
At the same time, the first wave movements were marked by class exclusions. Many campaigns focused on white, property‑owning women and were willing to trade away the interests of working‑class women to secure limited gains. Those tensions did not disappear; they re‑emerged in later debates and they expanded, too.
The second wave: women as a sex class
The mid‑twentieth‑century resurgence that came to be called the second wave took shape from the 1960s and is associated with the women’s liberation movement. Second‑wave feminists connected women’s individual experiences of marriage, motherhood, male violence and sex to wider structures of male power.
Second‑wave theory and organising developed the idea of women as a sex class: one half of humanity defined, controlled and exploited on the basis of our sex. Campaigns against rape and domestic violence, fights for divorce and employment rights, critiques of pornography and prostitution, and demands for access to contraception were all framed as challenges to a system of male dominance rather than a search for isolated reforms. Radical and materialist second‑wave theorists such as Shulamith Firestone, Marilyn Frye, Ti‑Grace Atkinson and Andrea Dworkin argued that women form a sex class in a system of male supremacy, analysing the family, sexuality and culture as key sites where male power is reproduced.
This is the tradition that insists on sex‑based protections and rights in law and policy and that fights for female‑only spaces where women and girls can meet, organise and recover from male violence. It is also the strand that has most clearly opposed prostitution, pornography and surrogacy as institutions that normalise men’s sexual and reproductive use of women’s bodies.
Liberal feminism: equality within existing institutions
Liberal feminism is a recent label for a long‑standing reformist strand of the movement; in the mid‑twentieth century it is associated with figures such as Betty Friedan and organisations like the National Organization for Women (NOW), which pressed for equal pay, anti‑discrimination law and access to professional careers through litigation and lobbying. Across these different moments, it shares a basic strategy: seeking to secure women’s formal equality within existing institutions, rather than transforming those institutions from the ground up.
It starts from the liberal principles of individual rights and formal equality, insisting that women should have the same legal and civic rights as men and be able to participate fully in public life. In practice, liberal‑feminist campaigns have pushed for anti‑discrimination law, equal pay provisions, access to education and professional careers, and the symbolic ‘breaking’ of glass ceilings in politics, business and the professions. This work has delivered real gains, especially for women with enough class and race privilege to take up new opportunities.
At the same time, much of what now dominates in governments, NGOs and corporate ‘diversity and inclusion’ work is an explicitly liberal‑feminist project that typically treats institutions such as the family, the labour market and the state as essentially neutral frameworks that can simply be opened up to women on equal terms. That puts it in tension with more materialist forms of feminism that start from the view that these institutions are structured by sex and male dominance, and that question whether anything we could honestly call equality can exist inside them at all.
Third wave: identity, diversity and choice
The third wave is usually dated from the late 1980s or early 1990s and is associated with younger feminists who grew up after many of the second‑wave legal gains had been won. Third‑wave writers placed strong emphasis on diversity among women and on the concept of intersectionality, developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe how race, class and other axes of oppression interact with sex.
Third‑wave feminism often criticised what it saw as the second wave’s blind spots on race, sexuality and culture, and worked to centre the experiences of women of colour, lesbians and working‑class women in feminist analysis. It also tended to frame many questions in terms of personal choice and identity: reclaiming slurs, playing with femininity, and defending practices such as prostitution and pornography as potentially empowering for women.
These interventions arguably broadened who was visible within feminist debate but also contributed to a shift away from analysing women as a material sex class. When every individual choice is treated as equally feminist, it becomes harder to talk about how institutions and markets profit from women’s subordination.
Fourth wave: digital activism and fragmentation
Many commentators now talk of a fourth wave, starting some time between the late 2000s and early 2010s and continuing into the present. This wave is closely linked to the rise of social media and digital platforms, which have made it easier to expose male violence, organise protests and connect women across borders.
Hashtag campaigns such as MeToo, and online movements against everyday sexism and harassment, have helped surface the scale of abuse that women face and have brought down some powerful men. Fourth‑wave feminism often uses the language of intersectionality and places a strong rhetorical emphasis on inclusion and diversity.
At the same time, much of what now dominates in governments, NGOs and corporate ‘diversity and inclusion’ work is an explicitly liberal‑feminist project. It typically treats institutions such as the family, the labour market and the state as essentially neutral frameworks that can simply be opened up to women on equal terms. This institutional feminism often treats sex as marginal or even suspect, which sharpens the faultline between feminists who insist on the political reality of sex and those whose politics are framed mainly around individual identity and feelings of inclusion.
Why sex‑based feminism still matters
Across these waves runs a persistent thread that can be traced back to Astell and Wollstonecraft: the insistence that women’s subordination is neither natural nor inevitable, but a political arrangement that can be named and changed. Sex‑based, materialist feminism keeps that thread in view and stands firmly in the second-wave tradition.
This strand of feminism starts from the fact that women are oppressed as a sex class in the family, the labour market, the state and the sex trade, and that we need collective, structural change, not just individual success stories. It defends sex‑based protections and rights in law and policy, fights for female‑only spaces, and opposes systems that treat women’s bodies and reproductive capacities as resources for others, including prostitution and surrogacy.
Understanding the different ‘waves’ can help clarify where these commitments come from and how they have been challenged, diluted or defended over time. It also makes clear that contemporary sex‑based feminism does not belong to the past; it stands in the long, living tradition that began well before the first wave and remains essential beyond the fourth.
Further reading
Mary Astell, Some Reflections upon Marriage (1700)
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics (1898)
Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (1970)
Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970)
Juliet Mitchell, Woman’s Estate (1971)
Ti‑Grace Atkinson, Amazon Odyssey (1974)
Marilyn Frye, ‘Oppression’, in The Politics of Reality (1983)
Christine Delphy, ‘Towards a Materialist Feminism?’ (1979)
Christine Delphy, ‘Patriarchy, Domestic Mode of Production, Gender and Class’ (1980s)
Kathleen Barry, Female Sexual Slavery (1979)
Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (1975)
Diana E. H. Russell, The Politics of Rape (1975)
Janice Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She‑Male (1979)
Janice Raymond, ‘Ten Reasons for Not Legalising Prostitution’
Andrea Dworkin, ‘Prostitution and Male Supremacy’ (1992)
Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981)
Catharine A. MacKinnon, ‘Prostitution and Civil Rights’ (1993)
Catharine A. MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (1987)
Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (1988)