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These debates and discussions culminated in the first women’s rights convention, held in July 1848 in the small town of Seneca Falls, New York. It was a spur-of-the-moment idea that sprang up during a social gathering of Lucretia Mott, a Quaker preacher and veteran social activist, Martha Wright (Mott’s sister), Mary Ann McClintock, Jane Hunt, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the wife of an abolitionist and the only non-Quaker in the group. The convention was planned with five days’ notice, publicized only by a small unsigned advertisement in a local newspaper.

Stanton drew up the “Declaration of Sentiments” that guided the Seneca Falls Convention. Using the Declaration of Independence as her guide to proclaim that “all men and women [had been] created equal,” she drafted 11 resolutions, including the most radical demand—the right to the vote. With Frederick Douglass, a former slave, arguing eloquently on their behalf, all 11 resolutions passed, and Mott even won approval of a final declaration “for the overthrowing of the monopoly of the pulpit, and for the securing to woman equal participation with men in the various trades, professions and commerce.”

Yet by emphasizing education and political rights that were the privileges of the upper classes, the embryonic feminist movement had little connection with ordinary women cleaning houses in Liverpool or picking cotton in Georgia. The single nonwhite woman’s voice heard at this time—that of Sojourner Truth, a former slave—symbolized the distance between the ordinary and the elite. Her famous “Ain’t I a Woman” speech was delivered in 1851 before the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, but Truth did not dedicate her life to women’s rights. Instead, she promoted abolitionism and a land-distribution program for other former slaves. In the speech, Truth remarked, “That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman?”

Although Seneca Falls was followed by women’s rights conventions in other states, the interest spurred by those first moments of organizing quickly faded. Concern in the United States turned to the pending Civil War, while in Europe the reformism of the 1840s gave way to the repression of the late 1850s. When the feminist movement rebounded, it became focused on a single issue, women’s suffrage, a goal that would dominate international feminism for almost 70 years.

After the American Civil War, feminists assumed that women’s suffrage would be included in the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibited disfranchisement on the basis of race. Yet leading abolitionists refused to support such inclusion, which prompted Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, a temperance activist, to form the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869. At first they based their demand for the vote on the Enlightenment principle of natural law, regularly invoking the concept of inalienable rights granted to all Americans by the Declaration of Independence. By 1900, however, the American passion for such principles as equality had been dampened by a flood of Eastern European immigrants and the growth of urban slums. Suffragist leaders, reflecting that shift in attitude, began appealing for the vote not on the principle of justice or on the common humanity of men and women but on racist and nativist grounds. As early as 1894, Carrie Chapman Catt declared that the votes of literate, American-born, middle-class women would balance the votes of foreigners: “[C]ut off the vote of the slums and give to woman…the ballot.”

This elitist inclination widened the divide between feminist organizers and the masses of American women who lived in those slums or spoke with foreign accents. As a result, working-class women—already more concerned with wages, hours, and protective legislation than with either the vote or issues such as women’s property rights—threw themselves into the trade union movement rather than the feminists’ ranks. Anthony, however, ceded no ground. In the 1890s she asked for labour’s support for women’s suffrage but insisted that she and her movement would do nothing about the demands made by working women until her own battle had been won. Similarly, when asked to support the fight against Jim Crow segregation on the nation’s railroads, she refused.

Radical feminists challenged the single-minded focus on suffrage as the sine qua non of women’s liberation. Emma Goldman, the nation’s leading anarchist, mocked the notion that the ballot could secure equality for women, since it hardly accomplished that for the majority of American men. Women would gain their freedom, she said, only “by refusing the right to anyone over her body…by refusing to be a servant to God, the state, society, the husband, the family, etc., by making her life simpler but deeper and richer.” Likewise, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in Women and Economics (1898), insisted that women would not be liberated until they were freed from the “domestic mythology” of home and family that kept them dependent on men.

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Mainstream feminist leaders such as Stanton succeeded in marginalizing more extreme demands such as Goldman’s and Gilman’s, but they failed to secure the vote for women. It was not until a different kind of radical, Alice Paul, reignited the women’s suffrage movement in the United States by copying English activists. Like the Americans, British suffragists, led by the National Union of Woman Suffrage Societies, had initially approached their struggle politely, with ladylike lobbying. But in 1903 a dissident faction led by Emmeline Pankhurst began a series of boycotts, bombings, and pickets. Their tactics ignited the nation, and in 1918 the British Parliament extended the vote to women householders, householders’ wives, and female university graduates over the age of 30.

Following the British lead, Paul’s forces, the “shock troops” of the American suffrage crusade, organized mass demonstrations, parades, and confrontations with the police. In 1920 American feminism claimed its first major triumph with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

The post-suffrage era

Once the crucial goal of suffrage had been achieved, the feminist movement virtually collapsed in both Europe and the United States. Lacking an ideology beyond the achievement of the vote, feminism fractured into a dozen splinter groups: the Women’s Joint Congressional Committee, a lobbying group, fought for legislation to promote education and maternal and infant health care; the League of Women Voters organized voter registration and education drives; and the Women’s Trade Union League launched a campaign for protective labour legislation for women.

Each of these groups offered some civic contribution, but none was specifically feminist in nature. Filling the vacuum, the National Woman’s Party, led by Paul, proposed a new initiative meant to remove discrimination from American laws and move women closer to equality through an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) that would ban any government-sanctioned discrimination based on sex. Infighting began because many feminists were not looking for strict equality; they were fighting for laws that would directly benefit women. Paul, however, argued that protective legislation—such as laws mandating maximum eight-hour shifts for female factory workers—actually closed the door of opportunity on women by imposing costly rules on employers, who would then be inclined to hire fewer women.

Questions abounded. Could women be freed from discrimination without damaging the welfare and protective apparatus so many needed? What was the goal of the feminist movement—to create full equality, or to respond to the needs of women? And if the price of equality was the absence of protection, how many women really wanted equality? The debate was not limited to the United States. Some proponents of women’s rights, such as Aletta Jacobs of the Netherlands or Beatrice Webb of England, agreed with Paul’s demand for equality and opposed protective legislation for women. Women members of trade unions, however, defended the need for laws that would help them.

This philosophical dispute was confined to relatively rarefied circles. Throughout the United States, as across Europe, Americans believed that women had achieved their liberation. Women were voting, although in small numbers and almost exactly like their male counterparts. Even Suzanne LaFollette, a radical feminist, concluded in 1926 that women’s struggle “is very largely won.” Before any flaws in that pronouncement could be probed, the nation—and the world—plunged into the Great Depression. Next, World War II largely obliterated feminist activism on any continent. The war did open employment opportunities for women—from working in factories (“Rosie the Riveter” became an American icon) to playing professional baseball—but these doors of opportunity were largely closed after the war, when women routinely lost their jobs to men discharged from military service. This turn of events angered many women, but few were willing to mount any organized protest.

In the United States the difficulties of the preceding 15 years were followed by a new culture of domesticity. Women began marrying younger and having more children than they had in the 1920s. Such television programs as Father Knows Best and Ozzie and Harriet reflected what many observers called an idyllic suburban life. By 1960 the percentage of employed female professionals was down compared with figures for 1930.