In letters to her husband John Adams, Abigail Adams warned, “If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice.” Women's HistoryĪbigail Adams, first lady to President John Adams, specifically saw access to education, property and the ballot as critical to women’s equality.
Years later, during the Enlightenment, writers and philosophers like Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, argued vigorously for greater equality for women. In The Book of the City of Ladies, 15th-century writer Christine de Pizan protested misogyny and the role of women in the Middle Ages. Not everyone agreed with Plato when the women of ancient Rome staged a massive protest over the Oppian Law, which restricted women’s access to gold and other goods, Roman consul Marcus Porcius Cato argued, “As soon as they begin to be your equals, they will have become your superiors!” (Despite Cato’s fears, the law was repealed.) In his classic Republic, Plato advocated that women possess “natural capacities” equal to men for governing and defending ancient Greece. It is typically separated into three waves: first wave feminism, dealing with property rights and the right to vote second wave feminism, focusing on equality and anti-discrimination, and third wave feminism, which started in the 1990s as a backlash to the second wave’s perceived privileging of white, straight women.įrom Ancient Greece to the fight for women’s suffrage to women’s marches and the #MeToo movement, the history of feminism is as long as it is fascinating. Feminism, a belief in the political, economic and cultural equality of women, has roots in the earliest eras of human civilization.
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