Feminism as a movement has a storied history. This history is filled with mainstream and fringe components. To understand the terms utilized without definition by McIntosh and Sarkeesian, we must examine them in context. Please note that this history is not intended to be all-encompassing. It is a crash course.

Feminism as a school of thought has roots in the late 18th century in America and in Europe, but it was relatively quiet. It was the Age of Enlightenment that brought feminism into being. States, however, were making some movement on women’s rights including allowing married women to execute wills, manage property in case of incapacity, and manage their own money.

The first U.S. women’s rights convention was held in 1848 in Seneca Falls. This constituted as one of the first major moments in feminist history. There, Elizabeth Cady Stanton read the Declaration of Sentiments wherein Stanton and other women present put forth the argument that men have actively deprived and denied women a place in American society.

In 1884, Friedrich Engels also writes The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. In it, Engels appears to examine the nature of man-centered society in the oppression of women. In it, Engels uses the works of Lewis Morgan who states that cultures can be split into savage cultures and barbaric cultures in a progressive, linear fashion moving from savage to barbaric, and eventually civilized. Engels states that property, agriculture, and ownership changed a pattern of benevolent matriarchy. Men, to correct this and take power, created a male-centered patriarchy of rule reinforced by patrilineal lines.

Stanton’s sentiments included that women were not able to vote, join in the legislative process, made a woman dead as a result of marriage, taken the right of property, made women irresponsible, gave power in divorce to men, monopolized employment denied her education, excluded her from ministry, and taken God for man’s own. It is likely that Stanton’s work influenced Engels.

By 1895, women were able in most states to handle their own money and property.

However, it is worth noting that women had property rights but they were limited. Women at the time did not have the right to vote which they would go on to gain in 1920. This feminist movement becomes known as the first wave of feminism which continues until its end around 1950 after little is accomplished after the ratification of the 19th amendment.

Then in the 1950s and 1960s, the second wave of feminism begins with Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex. In her 1949 book, de Beauvoir argues that women are an “other” meaning that they are not human. In fact, she states,

“Thus humanity is male and man defines

woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is

not regarded as an autonomous being.”

de Beauvoir also argues that women have taken hold of their destinies through participating in manufacture and industry and liberation from “reproductive slavery.” For de Beauvoir, motherhood makes a woman’s body animal-like. Men were allowed to transcend. Women were not. Women were tainted by pregnancy, motherhood, and fertility and it serves as the method by which men “other” women. She goes on to write:

“The truth is that just as — biologically — males and females are never victims of one another but both victims of the species, so man and wife together undergo the oppression of an institution they did not create. If it is asserted that men oppress women, the husband is indignant; he feels that he is the one who is oppressed — and he is; but the fact is that it is the masculine code, it is the society developed by the males and in their interest, that has established woman’s situation in a form that is at present a source of torment for both sexes.”

Biologically, men and women are not victims, but socially men have established a social order by which women are naturally oppressed to men’s interest and betterment. In short, de Beauvoir gives a woman-informed proto-patriarchy. Additionally, de Beauvoir is one of the first radical feminists to assert that women are “othered” as a result of men’s oppressive behaviors.

While academics argue that patriarchy as a force of inequality between men and women has been extant since the dawn of human civilization, nailing down women’s origins of the word prior to de Beauvoir’s above paragraph is difficult. Along with Engels work, patriarchy was born with a concerted male and female definition.

Moving into the 60s and 70s, feminism focuses heavily on the nature of male oppression of women chiefly through sex. Helen Gurley Brown, In Cosmo, suggests that women should have independent sexual relationships regardless of marriage. Betty Friedan’s Feminist Mystique retold a story and examined structures of dissatisfaction, though she also champions choosing to become a mother while also decrying it as the pinnacle of female achievement:

“Over and over again, stories in women’s magazines insist that women can know fulfillment only at the moment of giving birth to a child. They deny the years when she can no longer look forward to giving birth, even if she repeats the act over and over again. In the feminine mystique, there is no other way for a woman to dream of creation or of the future. There is no other way she can even dream about herself, except as her children’s mother, her husband’s wife.”

Friedan also utilizes Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs while criticizing Freud’s psychoanalytic approach as sexist. She states that women are stuck only in biological needs and reduced simply to their sexual abilities and becoming mother. As an editorial note, Friedan is incorrect. Sexual intimacy, of which women were allowed at the time of her book’s writing, fits into the long/belonging stage. Additionally, esteem includes respecting others. However, women were possibly not allowed the full range of access of Maslow’s hierarchy.

In Daring to be Bad, Alice Echols writes that 1967 was one of the first organizational moments where radical feminists met to establish a voice that, by 1969, had become one of “the most vital and imaginative forces within the women’s liberation movements.” She cites Friedan as one of the driving women of radical feminism. This movement, writes Freeman arose from the 60s and became transformative but feminists at the time expressed that men were the enemy and women should be organized to defeat the patriarchy. Those who did not share the system were called politicos. Non-politicos, or feminists, who share this thought are now called radical feminists.

Valarie Solanas, in 1967, publishes the SCUM Manifesto which argues that men have ruled the world through patriarchy and women must fix it through the overthrowing of society and elimination of the male sex. SCUM stands for “society cutting up men.” While the text is considered satirical, Solanas went on to attempt to kill Andy Warhol by shooting him. In 1968, women target the Miss America pageant as sexist for the first time with the No More Miss America protest that was said to be anti-sexist and anti-racist, but the demonstration included only throwing bras, pots, and other objects into a trashcan.

Also in 1968, the term “sexism” appears for the first time in print in Caroline Bird’s “On Being Born Female” speech: “There is recognition abroad that we are in many ways a sexist country. Sexism is judging people by their sex when sex doesn’t matter. Sexism is intended to rhyme with racism. Both have used to keep the powers that be in power.”

Also during the move from 1968 to 1971, NARAL (National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws) forms, Coretta Scott King expands the Civil Rights movement to include women’s rights after the death of Martin Luther King, Title X is passed, and women’s liberation participant Gloria Steinem delivers the Address to the Women of America in which she states:

“This is no simple reform. It really is a revolution. Sex and race, because they are easy, visible differences, have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups, and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends. We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen, or those earned. We are really talking about humanism.”

It is worth noting that what Steinem is talking about is not humanism. It is communism as a socioeconomic system whereby production occurs in absence of stratification, money, or statehood. Production is enjoined by those with no roles who join in particular roles freely and for the good of all people. Humanism merely sees humanity as central to life through critical thought, empiricism, rationalism, and inquiry often free of religion.

Simply put, the time period from 1960 to 1980 was hopping for feminist progress on abortion, educational access, and the elimination of gender roles requiring women as homemakers. Joan Little murders a guard who raped her and is acquitted in 1975, Roe v Wade is decided in 1973, the Equal Rights act continues forward to ultimately fail in the 1980s, and women gain more of a presence in Congress.

However, at the start of the 1980s, a new schism occurs in feminism. The sex wars erupt. Starting in 1976, radical feminist Andrea Dworkin starts to attack pornography after the release of the film Snuff that was not pornographic. Protests around the country start up against violence against women and eventually shift to include pornography as violence. In response, pro-sex or sex-positive feminists start to speak against the anti-pornography stance they see as puritan and authoritarian while also identifying positives of pornography for women.

Sex-negative feminists, according to sex-positive feminists, see sex, sexuality, and pornography as an exercise of the patriarchy in an attempt to censor expression. Dworkin and others write books which espouse this very view as seeing sex both in action and in culture as oppressive of women.

As the 1980s close with the sex wars, the second wave of feminism also comes to a close with a focus on gender, sex, sexuality, and politics of sex as oppression. Whereas the first wave won rights in voting, education, and property, the second wave won rights in abortion, divorce, rape law.

In 1991, in response to the treatment of Anita Hill, Rebecca Walker calls for a new wave of feminism to focus on the treatment of minority women. As a result of this, minority feminists start to demand a voice after feeling excluded from discussions of predominately white feminists of the first two waves. Authors such as bell hooks and Shannon Liss join Walker in calling for a new wave as the Family Medical Leave Act is passed, the Violence Against Women Act becomes law, and women begin to pay a stronger attention to media representations and linguistic labels such as “bitch.”

As a result of many of the above policies, women became more engaged in society and work. They started to enter the workplace in larger numbers along with men who traditionally worked. This resulted in a generation being called “latchkey kids” as both parents were busy providing in shrinking economies and widening inequalities. Women and men are branching out in occupations in ways they had not before resulting in less gendering of work and even behaviors. Women now earn most degrees at every level except doctorate, have access to universal property and economic rights, and have access to most forms of healthcare.

While some problems persist, women have made amazing progress in the short time feminism has existed.