PROLOGUE

The history of feminism is important not just to feminists and not just to women. The women’s movement

we trace in this book has transformed the world we all live in, transformed it utterly. As individuals we
have all changed, men as much as women. Institutions have changed—educational, medical, religious—as
have the professions, child-rearing practices, and the armed forces. Government has changed. So has the
culture, from pop music, TV, and film to literature and the fine arts. The very nature of knowledge,
whether in medicine, science, history, literature, or philosophy, has changed. One cannot understand the
world we live in without an understanding of the women’s movement and its influence. Feminism was
integral to larger progressive changes, with the result that it has sometimes blended so entirely into larger
movements that historians have not noticed it. This book aims to remedy that omission.
Chapter 1 highlights labor and “social justice” feminists, from the 1920s through the 1960s, because
they forged the dominant women’s movement in that era. These feminists sought women’s rights as part of
a broad agenda concerned with economic fairness and civil rights. Chapter 2 focuses on activists
involved in the myriad streams of the women’s liberation movement that emerged in the late 1960s and
extended into the 1980s—a shorter time because this was the period of most intense and widespread
activism on behalf of women’s equality and freedom. These feminists, often raised in relative prosperity
and with greater access to higher education and birth control, created a feminism that emphasized sexual
and reproductive freedom, economic opportunity, and challenging gender altogether. Chapter 3 describes
the feminism developed by generations who grew up taking for granted the opportunities newly opened
for women. In the 1990s, new technologies spawned a decentralized and wired feminism that often
promoted individual responses to the persistence of gender inequality. But in the twenty-first century,
these feminists increasingly came to respond collectively to America’s widening economic inequality and
to the feminism led by women from poorer countries.
Our century-long view allows us to sketch a new and different picture of American feminism. By
providing a long and continuous rather than an episodic history, we offer a fuller and more inclusive
perspective that changes how the history of feminism is understood. Much writing about the women’s
rights movement conceives of it as coming to a halt after women won the right to vote in 1920, then
reawakening fifty years later in the 1970s and evaporating again in the 1980s. Our book challenges this
conventional view. We thus decenter the movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, which is frequently taken
to be the main expression of twentieth-century feminism. We show the existence of a continuous women’s
movement. In our view, there was no period in the last century when women were not campaigning for
greater equality and freedom. Feminism has been not a series of disconnected upsurges but a continuous
flow. Of course the movement was larger at some times, smaller at others, but in every period women
were coming together to press collectively for more respect, more freedom, and less discrimination.
Our century-long view also challenges how feminism itself has been understood. Within its continuity,
we show, feminism was constantly changing, as all social movements do. No one would have expected
the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s to look like that of the 1890s, or the struggles of
northern big-city African Americans to look like those of southern sharecroppers. So too the feminism of
the 1920s is not identical with that of the 1970s or the 2000s. Our narrative uses a historicized definition
of feminism, which must be a capacious one, allowing for historical change and for social diversity. As