Why Isn’t Feminism Just One Movement?

March 8 is a day to remember and reflect on the social progress women have achieved and the path that still remains to a fairer social structure. What does that mean today? Beyond the social injustices, feminism also tries to explain the who, how, and why of being a woman. Are they questions that fit within the movement, or are they questions that can no longer be understood?

Whether a woman is white, black, Muslim, trans, or belongs to the middle, upper, or lower economic class, it is necessary and transcendental to understand her position in a feminist context. Some positions within the movement are unique, with characteristics so different from others that they seem to belong to another social discourse. To understand this better, we need to be clear about two critical parameters that give meaning to feminism: its four waves of feminism and intersectionality.

Generally speaking, feminism is divided into four waves. It is said that we are in a transition to the fourth, but that is an issue on which there is no complete consensus. Advocating for women’s dignified existence, capacity, and intelligence precedes the formation of feminism as an organized movement. Examples of this can be found in Ancient Greece, Medieval Europe, and even Feudal Japan. These isolated but continuing occurrences led to an organized movement’s theoretical and intellectual foundation.

First Wave: The Right to Vote and Education

The first wave of feminism focused on demolishing the female role as subordinate and subservient to the male. The political objectives to achieve this were clear: gain the right to voting to obtain the power to access an egalitarian education and physical and financial freedom from their male guardians.

The agenda of this first wave was consolidated in 1848, with only 300 women and men in the ranks. At this historical moment, the movement had significant links to the abolitionist and suffragette forums with activists such as Sojourner Truth and Paulie Murray. The first wave understood equal rights as the admission of women to political and economic spaces. However, legally achieving the right to vote and having access to education did not mean feminism had achieved the goal of equality. Feminism as a movement had not triumphed completely and thereby worn out its usefulness.

Second Wave: Radicalization and the Sexual Revolution

The decades of the 60s and 70s unfolded within a framework of anti-war movements, distrust of the state, the civil rights movement, and growing awareness about social minorities beyond gender or race. Radical thinking within the movement already existed from the first wave. It became normalized and adopted as a fundamental part of feminist behavior. Voices like those of Gloria Steinem, Angela Davis, and Dolores Huerta became representative of the movement. Themes centered on reproductive and sexual rights, feminine empowerment, anticolonialism, and the stirrings of intersectionalities.

The involvement of more women outside the home transformed feminism. It was no longer just about women as a single group. Feminism began to encompass diverse topics such as women and civil rights, women and work, women and rural labor, among others. By the 90s, feminism consolidated as a social movement with a global reach. These years marked the end of the second wave and the dawn of the third. A different conceptual framework emerged to change how we understand grassroots feminism and its diversification, including queer theory.

Third Wave: Intersectionality and Queer Theory

The decade of the 80s was especially hard for the LGBT community. The public response to the AIDS epidemic made clear the need to create organizations that advocated for the human dignity of non-heteronormative people. Gender and sexuality became the subject of both feminism and the LGBT movement. The epistemic consequence of this space-time moment is queer theory. The term was coined by Teresa de Lauretis in 1991 in a feminist cultural studies journal. It encompasses three actions: promoting heterosexuality as not the only sexual dimension, challenging the belief that lesbian and gay sexuality studies are one, and shining the light on how race influences sexual biases.

Thus, feminism determined its main parameters for searching for social justice and equity: sex, race, economic class, sexuality, and gender. The diversity of these areas made intersectionality necessary. It led to targeting more areas of inequality but also created significant epistemic dissonances within feminism. These considerations invite us to question what feminism is really about. Is there a common denominator to such marked differences in sectors of feminism? How can you say that pro-life and pro-choice and reproductive rights people belong to the same movement? How does the movement incorporate people who recognize gender spectra and transsexuality and those who do not?

Fourth Wave: Diverse Feminism

The questions above underlie the framework of the fourth wave of feminism initiated in the early 2000s, whose central themes are sexual harassment, body shaming, and rape culture. These are not easy subjects. But feminism has been continuously resignified since its inception. In this process, ideas and perspectives that were “normal” or “positive” in one temporal context could be no longer acceptable in the next.

Paulie Murray, who laid the legal groundwork for an end to racial segregation, defended using the word “negro”. In the 40’s Gloria Steinem, one of the mo
st prominent leaders of second-wave feminism signed a letter that helped validate the tolerance of transphobic discourse in 2020. While she changed her mind two years later (signing another public message in 2022 favoring transgender rights), Steinem’s actions clarify that feminism is not set in stone. It is not beyond criticism, new learning, and evolution. If perspective can change for the same person over the years (Steinem, for example), even more so for the millions of people who consider themselves feminists.

Does this mean that feminism as such no longer exists or has lost its direction and purpose? That it is no longer effective or necessary? Not at all! Feminism as a social movement has survived long enough and integrated into the social fiber, so it does not disappear; instead, it establishes concrete methods, criticisms, and guidelines. It defines what it is for singular or groups of people and responds to all the areas of social imbalances it is currently directed to. Feminism organizes, schedules, and addresses the issues of this latest wave, benefitting from the lessons learned in the current social and political contexts, not clinging to what were once advances but today is anachronistic.

Translation by Daniel Wetta

Disclaimer: This is an Op-ed article. The viewpoints expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, viewpoints, and official policies of Tecnológico de Monterrey.

Sofía García-Bullé

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