Among writers on feminism it has become conventional to identify three ‘waves’ in feminist thought and practice. The first wave came in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and was characterised by women’s demand for the same political rights as men. The second wave in the 1960s insisted that the ‘personal is political’, meaning that a focus on the public aspects of equality alone — voting rights, property rights — ignored what second wave feminists claimed to be the oppressive nature of the private sphere. The term ‘wave’ is important: it suggests a historical process and it allows for much debate and disagreement within each wave. Although these were ‘waves’ rather than ‘movements’, each had a paradigm, that is, a pattern of thinking about the relationship between men and women.
The first wave emphasised that women did not exist solely in the home (private sphere) but were also citizens, who should have a say in the public life of the nation through voting and standing for office and being allowed to have a career. The second wave extended the idea of women’s liberation into the private sphere and identified informal sources of inequality, such as the unequal division of child-rearing tasks. What is more, the theoretical underpinning of feminism shifted from a classical liberal emphasis on equal personal and civic rights to a more radical critique of ‘patriarchy’. Since the source of patriarchy — male domination focused on the father and husband figure — was located in personal relationships, the scope of feminist action now extended into the family and took a further radical turn with lesbian separatism.
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