The term “feminism” first came into use in the 1910s to describe an emerging movement committed to mobilizing women as a distinct social group and eliminating social hierarchies between men and women. As contemporary feminist Naomi Wolf succinctly puts it: “Feminism can be defined as women’s ability to think about their subjugated role in history, and then to do something about it.” But feminism has had a fragile hold on women’s consciousness in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, achieving great strides towards gender equality and then receding, only to re-emerge once the modest gains already achieved start to slip.

The leaders of the first wave of feminism in America were Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony whose work eventually helped women gain the right to vote in 1920 with the enactment of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. Feminism then disappeared from the American scene for several decades, giving way to a “postfeminist” period in which the earlier suffragists were decried as “man-haters” out of touch with the needs of contemporary women. But feminism re-emerged in the 1960s, more influential than ever. It is this second wave of feminism, roughly starting with the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963 and ending with the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982, which epitomizes modern American feminism.

Gloria Steinem, the founder of Ms Magazine, and Friedan, are widely viewed as the leaders and icons of this movement. With the Civil Rights movement providing an inspirational backdrop, Friedan’s fledgling group, the National Organization for Women (NOW), advocated for abortion and reproductive rights, equal opportunities in the workplace and at school, and passage of an Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution. Women got all but the latter. In 1973 the Supreme Court affirmed a woman’s right to an abortion in Roe v. Wade. Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it was declared unlawful for employers to discriminate on the basis of sex. By 1986 the US Supreme Court had interpreted this provision to include a claim for sexual harassment as well. In 1972 Congress passed Title IX, which prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex in any federally funded educational program or activity.

But, with the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, followed by Geraldine Ferraro’s failed vice-presidential bid in 1984, the golden age of American feminism came to an end. Feminism again lay dormant with the coming of another so-called “post-feminist” era. A Time/ CNN poll found that only 33 percent of women were willing to call themselves “feminists,” and only 16 percent of them were college-aged. College-age women in the 1980s (who had not participated in the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s, but had nonetheless benefited from gains made during that time) forgot, or never knew, that the struggle for the vote took over seventy years, that abortions had not always been legal in America, or that in their mothers’ lifetimes women could not obtain credit on their own. They wrongly believed that sex discrimination was a thing of the past. The repercussions for women were serious: without an active feminist movement, there was decreased access to abortions, abortionclinic violence and limited funding and public support for rape-crisis centers, women’s health facilities and battered women’s shelters.

Then, in 1991, two events converged to revitalize the movement: the publication of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Susan Faludi’s Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (1991) and the confirmation hearing of future US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, at which his former colleague Anita Hill testified that he had sexually harassed her at work. Backlash in particular, which documented a “powerful counter-assault on women’s rights” and an intense societal resistance to the modest advances towards gender equality achieved by the women’s movement, provided a clarion call to widespread action.

This wake-up call resulted in a “third wave” of feminism in the 1990s. This third wave did not reflect a single monolithic view of the appropriate path to gender equality.

Instead, it encompassed many disparate strands of thought, such as liberal feminism, difference feminism, radical feminism and critical feminist theory. Feminism also blended with more traditional legal, political and film theories to provide a broad, multidisciplinary perspective on women’s status in society.