The early feminist movement grew out of the desire to grant women certain personal rights (e.g., access to education and the right to inherit property) and political rights (e.g., suffrage). The focus of the feminist movements in both the US and Europe was to secure women the right to vote, perhaps as the first and most important step in addressing the other issues that confronted them.

In the United States, The Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 was the first major conference involving both men and women who supported women's suffrage. It led to the trend of having conferences every year. In fact, just two weeks later, another major convention—even bigger than that at Seneca Falls—was held in Rochester. Two of the participants at Seneca Falls, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, had met in London at an anti-slavery convention. Many suffragists found their voices and discovered the language to describe their own oppression by speaking out for the abolition of slaves. Lucy Stone, for example, was forbidden to take speech classes while a student at Oberlin College. She practiced speech alone in the woods near the college and later gave anti-slavery speeches, like Mott and Stanton.

Suffragists were ambivalent about the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, which granted all men the right to vote, because it did not include women. Women were not granted universal suffrage in the US until 1920. In Britain, suffrage was first granted to property-owning women over 30, but the voting age was not lowered to 21 until 1928. Some countries had much longer to wait—women were not granted suffrage in France until 1945. New Zealand was the first Western country to grant women suffrage in 1893, followed by Australia and the Scandinavian countries. Under Leninist Communism, Russia granted women the right to vote in 1917.

The second-wave feminist movement was revived in the United States in 1963. I will focus on the US, not only because it is the country that I know the most about, but also because it is a country that tends to serve—for better or worse—as a role model to other nations. Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in that year, a book which illuminated the oppression of white, middle-class women by gender stereotypes, advertising, and unfair cultural expectations nurtured by scholarship, film, the publishing industry, and educational institutions. The book articulated for many women what Friedan described as "the problem that has no name." The "mystique" was a stereotype of femininity that many women felt pressure to live up to, despite how oppressive the image was.

Though Friedan's book is credited with sparking the second-wave, she was very often at odds with other feminists, including Gloria Steinem, but also lesbian feminists whom she characterized as "the lavender menace." Friedan wanted women to be full participants in society as it was, while other feminists sought to revolutionize or overturn the systems that Friedan valued, such as capitalism and marriage. However, Friedan agreed with the importance of reproductive freedom. The birth control pill became widely available around the time her book was published and abortion became legal throughout the US in 1973, after the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade. Other goals of that movement, which were accomplished, included granting women their own lines of credit and eliminating discrimination in employment, education, and sports at educational institutions. What did not get accomplished was the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1979, which would have included a constitutional amendment saying that men and women were equal under the law.

The current feminist movement is harder to peg. All kinds of people identify as feminists—conservative and progressive women, Republicans and Democrats, libertarians and socialists. The current feminist movement exists as more of an ideology than a movement with clear social goals. Arguably, only the recent rise of the "Me Too" movement has done work similar to that of the second-wave movement in addressing an ongoing problem related to women's oppression and suggesting steps on how to remedy the problem of routine harassment and assault. There is also the issue of "equal pay for equal work," but this problem has proven to be more difficult to address.