First Wave Feminism

First wave feminism describes the period of time in the late 19th and early 20th century. Wikipedia claims that the movement earned the name “first wave” after the second wave of feminism, which occurred forty years later. According to Martha Rampton’s article in the PACIFIC magazine, women like Olympes de Gouge, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Jane Austen are the “foremothers of the modern women’s movement.” However, Rampton goes on to note that the movement officially didn’t begin until July 19th, 1848 at the Seneca Falls Convention where almost 300 men and women met to discuss gender inequality. Elizabeth Cady Stanton drafted the famous Declaration of Sediments, modeled after the Declaration of Independence, which, according to Rampton, “[outlined] the new movement’s ideology and political process.” Waves of Feminism, a Georgetown article, states that the First Wave Feminism movement focused on “education, employment, the marriage laws, and the plight of intelligent middle-class single women.” Women only focused on their own struggles; they didn’t care for working-class women’s problems. The Georgetown article also states that their achievements include, “the opening of higher education for women; reform of the girls’ secondary-school system, including participation in formal national examinations: the widening of access to the professions, especially medicine.” Additionally, women made progress in “divorced and separated women’s child custody rights.” Wikipedia notes that the first wave ended in 1919 when when the 19th amendment gave women the right to vote.