Throughout history, the feminist movement has not stopped evolving. From the beginning of the women’s suffrage movement in 1848 to the most recent outcry in any given form of social media, the rally for gender equality in the workplace and society has not quieted. Three main waves of feminism have been since classified to organize the movement’s progress.

“The first one was the fight for equal legal rights, and that culminated in the right to vote, which most Western countries gave to women right after WWI,” Libby Reimann, AP European History teacher, said. “Partially because women lined up and really supported the causes of their country during WWI, and it was kind of seen as a reward for that kind of work and patriotism.”

The first in a line of prominent and essential line of victories, advocators of women’s suffrage set off a chain of events that emphasized the need for feminism in a rapidly advancing world.

“The second wave of feminism was in the 1960s,” Reimann said. “We supposedly had these legal rights, but when you look at the results, women were expected to be in part-time jobs, not full-time jobs. We were expected to stay home with children. Women were making much, much less than men.”

Comparatively, today’s feminism has advanced to an intensified, aggressive form of past values.

“The third wave of feminism is people younger than me, and I think it’s more in-your-face,” Reimann observes. “It doesn’t matter what I wear, what my education is, what I look like, I demand to be treated equally.”

Reimann has observed a pattern with the feminist advocates of her generation that she can see manifesting in a new group of young activists.
“I think women get more radical as they get older,” she said. “They take more time to look at the injustices in the world; I think their elbows get a little sharper. They get a little pushier for their causes. And I don’t doubt that that will happen with young women today.”