The Personal Is Political 271identify with the suffering of the working-class Jemima by listening to her
personal story of lifelong patriarchal oppression: “thinking of Jemima’s
peculiar fate and her own, she was led to consider the oppressed state of
women, and to lament that she had given birth to a daughter” (Wollstone-
craft [1798] 1994, 54; Lorch 1990). Taylor has emphasized that this sense
of solidarity — specifi cally, the identifi cation of the individual with group
oppression — is a psychological precondition for the formation of any so-
cial movement to alleviate collective injustice (2003, 238 –239).
The nineteenth century saw the rise of organized (formal, public, and
collective) feminism, beginning with the 1846 state-level legislative peti-
tion and the 1848 Seneca Falls public convention for women’s rights in up-
state New York (Ginzberg 2005). Modern feminist activism had informally
begun with the women’s political clubs of the liberal stage of the French
Revolution, only to be squashed by Robespierre (Landes 1988). Abolition-
ist, temperance, and benevolent societies also provided a springboard for
women’s creative involvement in social reform and informal politics in
early to mid-nineteenth-century American culture.
Feminist wings arose within the socialist and anarchist movements in
France, Britain, Germany, and the United States. There were foundings of
female academies, colleges, and universities, and a push for coeducational
access to men’s institutions of higher learning; women’s rights movements
from Britain to Russia to Chile were often organized around these educa-
tional causes (Stites [1978] 1991, 73 –74; Tagle 2005). From the 1830s
to the 1860s, feminist ideas quickly spread through complex international
networks of like-minded women and men (Anderson 2000). By the 1870s
and 1880s, a variety of feminist organizations fl ourished: from indigenous
women’s reading groups in Maharashtra, to evening classes on women’s
rights in St. Petersburg, to the National Woman Suffrage Association in the
United States (Bykov 1911; Deshpande 2008).
By 1900, many national-level organizations had joined international
networks of feminist groups, such as the International Women’s Suffrage
Association (Holton 2010). Although the term “feminist” was not coined
until 1870 in France, it spread rapidly around the world (Offen 2000,
19 –20). It came to be used as a general category, which could describe a
variety of arguments and activism against patriarchy and for the well-being
of women as a group (Offen 2010, 16).
In 1901, Elvira Lopez in Argentina titled her doctoral dissertation on
the international growth of feminism “El Movimiento Feminista.” She lo-
cated the movement’s philosophical origins with Saint Thomas More, Mary
Astell, and especially Wollstonecraft in “Inglaterra,” and then documented