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Whose freedom? The beginnings of Western feminism

It’s the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and campaigns for women’s suffrage are gaining strength across Europe and the United States. Women are marching, petitioning and demanding access to education, property, employment and political power. Their message is simple: why should being born female determine the limits of your freedom?

Feminism is broadly understood as ideas and movements that challenge women’s subordination and seek greater equality, autonomy and freedom from gender-based discrimination. But its history does not begin with the suffragettes.

Long before modern Western feminism emerged, women were challenging restrictions on their rights, autonomy and participation in public life. Western feminist movements have also long been contested over whose experiences they represent and whose they leave out.

This is not simply a story of Western women discovering inequality and organising to overcome it. It is a history of women challenging gendered power across different societies and periods, while continually debating who feminism includes, who it represents and what freedom should mean.

This article is the first in a three-part series. Part 2 will explore how racism and exclusion continue within Western feminist movements, before Part 3 turns towards what a more equitable future could look like – one that challenges gender inequality and supports the freedom and wellbeing of people of all genders.

Feminism didn’t begin with the suffragettes

If women were challenging gendered restrictions long before the word feminism was in common use, what did that resistance look like?

One example comes from ancient Rome. In 215 BCE, the Lex Oppia restricted women’s wealth and public display, limiting the gold they could possess, the colours they could wear, and their use of horse-drawn vehicles. In 195 BCE, women gathered in large numbers and blocked access to the Forum, demanding the law’s repeal.

Their protest targeted restrictions on wealth, dress and mobility, rather than representing a broader campaign for equality across every area of Roman life. As Livy later portrayed it, consul Marcus Porcius Cato warned that “as soon as they begin to be your equals, they will have become your superiors.”

The women succeeded, and the Lex Oppia was repealed.

The significance is not that Roman women were practising modern feminism, but that collective resistance to gendered restrictions long predates the modern feminist movement. The next question is whether societies everywhere organised gender and power in the same way.

Gender and power were organised differently across societies

Patriarchy is a system in which men hold greater authority, power and access to resources than women across institutions such as family, law, politics and the economy. But it was not the only way societies organised gender and power. Some were matrilineal, while others gave women significant political or economic authority. Neither necessarily meant gender equality.

The Khasi of northeast India provide one example. Khasi society is matrilineal: children inherit their mother’s clan name, and the youngest daughter, ka khadduh, becomes custodian of ancestral property and remains responsible for the family home and dependent relatives. This does not mean women held all authority. The maternal uncle, or u kni, traditionally held significant authority over family and clan property, as well as important social and religious roles. British colonial rule altered these customary arrangements during the 19th century. From the 1850s, colonial authorities increasingly formalised relationships with Khasi chiefs through sanads and by the 1870s had greater involvement in recognising and determining succession. Historians argue that these changes reshaped customary authority and land and property rights, weakening the maternal uncle’s traditional authority over property and contributing to the masculinisation of land rights. British officials also sometimes interpreted Khasi matriliny through European ideas of gender, equating women’s inheritance rights with female dominance rather than recognising the distinct roles of the ka khadduh and u kni.

In some Igbo communities in what is now southeastern Nigeria, pre-colonial governance included separate institutions through which women and men exercised authority. Women played important roles through organisations such as the umuada, or “daughters of the lineage,” which helped resolve conflicts, as well as through collective forms of protest such as “sitting on a man.” British colonial rule disrupted these structures by appointing male warrant chiefs and excluding women from formal political authority. The Women’s War of 1929, also known as the Aba Women’s Riots, began as organised resistance by women who feared that colonial authorities would extend direct taxation to them, amid broader anger over abuses by warrant chiefs.

Among the Cherokee, women could hold recognised political and diplomatic authority. Nanye’hi (Nancy Ward), for example, was a Ghigau, or Beloved Woman, who headed the Women’s Council and participated in diplomacy, war and peace. European settlers viewed Indigenous societies through a patriarchal lens, and the political authority of the Ghigau challenged their belief in universal male dominance.

These examples challenge the assumption that there has always been one universal way of organising gender and power. Colonial control also extended to gender identities and roles that did not fit European expectations. As Indigenous studies scholar Sandy O’Sullivan argues in The Colonial Project of Gender (and Everything Else) (2021), colonial systems worked to suppress forms of Indigenous gender diversity that did not fit European social and religious understandings.

The point is not that pre-colonial societies were universally equal, but that patriarchy was not the only possible way to organise gender and power. This matters because Western feminism represents one particular history of challenging gender inequality, not the universal history of women’s struggle.

The waves of Western feminism

The “waves” of Western feminism are useful shorthand for tracing its history, but not all scholars and activists agree that feminism can be divided into four distinct waves. The model is used in histories of feminism in the United States, Britain and other Anglophone Western countries, while feminist movements elsewhere followed different trajectories.

The first wave, roughly the mid-19th century to the 1920s, is associated with formal legal and political rights, particularly voting, education, property and political participation.

The second wave, spanning the 1960s to the 1980s, widened the lens to work, marriage, sexuality, reproduction, domestic labour and violence.

The third wave, associated with the 1990s and 2000s, placed emphasis on race, class, sexuality, identity and intersectionality.

The fourth wave, emerging in the 2010s, is associated with digital activism and campaigns addressing sexual violence, harassment, misogyny, reproductive rights and structural inequality. But contemporary feminism also extends beyond online spaces through community organising, protests, advocacy and political campaigns.

Within this Western timeline, one question kept resurfacing: who did the movement mean when it spoke about “women”?

Who was Western feminism actually fighting for?

This is where history gets uncomfortable.

The dominant feminist organisations were often led by white, middle-class women, and their priorities did not always reflect all women’s experiences. This did not mean Black women were separate from feminism: they were involved in women’s rights and suffrage organising while also challenging racism and exclusion within movements that claimed to speak for women.

The 1913 suffrage parade in Washington, D.C., offers one example. Black suffragists faced pressure to march separately or at the back of the procession. Ida B. Wells-Barnett refused and joined the Illinois delegation instead. A movement demanding political equality for women could still reproduce racial inequality among the women fighting for that right.

Sojourner Truth had exposed this contradiction decades earlier. As a formerly enslaved Black woman, the dominant image of womanhood as fragile, dependent and protected by male chivalry did not describe her life. She had worked, been enslaved and experienced racial violence. One of her children had died young, and her son Peter was illegally sold from New York to Alabama while she was still fighting to secure her family’s freedom.

At the 1851 Women’s Rights Convention, Truth challenged assumptions about who counted within the movement. This article draws on the contemporaneous account recorded by Marius Robinson and published in the Anti-Slavery Bugle on 21 June 1851. The question raised by Truth’s intervention was whose experiences were recognised. A movement centred on white, middle-class women could not assume that its priorities represented women whose lives were also shaped by racial violence and economic exploitation.

Black women also built their own organisations when white-led movements failed to address their experiences. In 1896, Black women’s clubs came together to form the National Association of Colored Women, which campaigned for suffrage, racial justice, education and community welfare.

These tensions continued during the second wave. In Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), bell hooks criticised a feminist movement shaped around the experiences of white women with class privilege and argued for a feminism that confronted gender, race and class together. In Sister Outsider (1984), Audre Lorde argued that differences among women could not simply be ignored in the name of unity.

Kimberlé Crenshaw gave this problem a language: intersectionality. She described how systems of inequality (beginning with racism and sexism) interact in ways that cannot be fully understood when examined separately. Crenshaw introduced the term in her 1989 paper, but Black feminists had long articulated these interconnected experiences before the term existed.

Black feminists helped shape the movement while challenging racism and exclusion within it. The movement has always contained debates over whose experience should shape its priorities and what liberation should actually mean.

So, what is the history of feminism actually telling us?

The history does not offer a neat progression from oppression to liberation. Feminist campaigns won important rights, but those gains did not reach all women equally. Women challenged gendered restrictions long before modern Western feminism; societies organised gender and power in different ways; and feminist movements themselves have continually been shaped by disagreements over whose freedom matters, whose experiences count and who gets to define the agenda.

That matters because a movement can challenge one form of inequality while reproducing another. If feminism is about freedom, then its history asks us to look beyond who gained rights and ask whose understanding of freedom became the movement’s starting point, and who was still being asked to fit themselves into it.

Part 2 will explore how racism and exclusion continue within Western feminist movements.

Who gets to be free, and who gets to decide what freedom looks like?

About the authors

Amali Aluthgamage

Amali has over 15 years experience working primarily with not-for-profits, Aboriginal Community Coordinated Organisations and State Government. She is an expert on cultural safety and anti-racism and has a keen interest in understanding how systems compound intersectional disadvantage.

Souraya Krayem

Grounded in a deep commitment to equity and evidence-informed practice, Souraya applies an analytical and systems-focused lens to understanding and addressing complex social issues. She combines critical analysis with practical insight to explore the intersections of policy, systems, and lived experience. Her work spans research design and delivery, data synthesis, and stakeholder engagement across projects focused on family, domestic, and sexual violence, gender (in)justice, and social equity.