Feminism: Waves, Philosophical Currents, and Critiques

Feminism is not a single doctrine but a heterogeneous family of theories and movements — often in tension with one another — that share the claim that the relations between the sexes involve inequalities deserving critical examination. As an object of philosophical study, it is also one of the most contested fields in contemporary thought: it is internally divided into currents that disagree about the diagnosis, the causes, and the remedies, and it draws vigorous objections from outside. This article maps the history (the model of “waves”), the main currents, the central concepts, and — with particular attention — the criticisms feminism has met, from within and from without.

1. The “waves” and the limits of the metaphor

The history of feminism is usually told in waves. The metaphor, of journalistic and Anglophone origin (the 1960s), is didactic, but it is itself a target of criticism: it suggests a linear succession, centered on the Western experience, that erases continuities, precursors, and non-European feminisms. It is best used, then, as a provisional scaffold, not as historical truth.

Even before the “first wave” there were precursors. Christine de Pizan, in The Book of the City of Ladies (1405), refuted the misogynist clichés of her age. The Cartesian François Poulain de la Barre, in On the Equality of the Two Sexes (1673), formulated a famous rationalist argument — “the mind has no sex” — and was one of the authors Beauvoir would cite as an epigraph to The Second Sex.

2. First wave: equality of rights

The first wave (from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century) is, for the most part, Enlightenment and liberal in inspiration. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Mary Wollstonecraft argued that women’s apparent inferiority is not natural but an effect of being denied education: endowed with reason like men, they should receive the same instruction. In the nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill — in dialogue with Harriet Taylor Mill — defended legal and political equality in The Subjection of Women (1869). The movement issued in the struggle for suffrage.

3. Second wave: “the personal is political”

The second wave (from the 1960s to the 1980s) shifts the focus from legal equality to the social and cultural structures of domination. Its founding philosophical landmark is earlier: The Second Sex (1949), by Simone de Beauvoir, with the thesis that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” — femininity as a social construction, and woman as the “Other” relative to man taken as the norm. The period consolidates the distinction between sex (the biological datum) and gender (what is socially constructed), and the slogan “the personal is political,” which carries analysis into the domestic and sexual sphere.

It is here that feminism branches into distinct currents: the liberal (equality of opportunity within institutions), the radical (which sees patriarchy as the most fundamental system of oppression — Shulamith Firestone, Catharine MacKinnon), and the Marxist/socialist (which articulates gender with class).

4. Third wave: difference, intersectionality, deconstruction

The third wave (the 1990s) is born of a self-critique: the “universal woman” of the second wave was, in practice, white, Western, and middle-class. Hence three shifts. The legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coins the concept of intersectionality (1989): oppressions of gender, race, and class intersect and cannot be added up linearly. Black feminism (bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins) lays claim to that plurality of experiences. And Judith Butler, in Gender Trouble (1990), turns deconstruction on the very concept of “woman”: gender, she argues, is performative, an effect of repeated acts rather than an essence. To this is added postcolonial feminism (Gayatri Spivak, Chandra Mohanty).

The fourth wave (the 2010s onward), finally, is above all a digital phenomenon, associated with networked campaigns such as #MeToo, without a unified theoretical platform.

5. The main philosophical currents

More than a temporal sequence, feminism is a spread of currents that coexist and diverge:

• Liberal: seeks equality of rights and opportunities within existing institutions (Wollstonecraft, Mill, and, in a contemporary key, the capabilities approach of Martha Nussbaum).
• Radical: sees patriarchy as the primary form of domination, prior to class (Firestone, MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin).
• Marxist/socialist: subordinates or articulates gender oppression within the analysis of capitalism (Silvia Federici).
• Difference and care ethics: rather than equating woman with the masculine standard, it values traits regarded as feminine. The psychologist Carol Gilligan, in In a Different Voice (1982), opposed to a “masculine” morality of rules and justice a “feminine” morality of care and relationship; Nel Noddings developed it in philosophy of education. In the French vein, Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous explore “sexual difference.”
• Intersectional and Black: Crenshaw, hooks, Collins.
• Poststructuralist / gender: Butler.
• Decolonial: María Lugones, Mohanty — criticizes the universalization of the Western experience.

6. Key concepts

• The sex/gender distinction: separates the biological substrate (sex) from the social construction of roles (gender). It is one of the pillars of the second wave — and, as we will see, one of the most disputed points today.
• Patriarchy: a system of male domination; central to radical feminism, contested by those who find it too generic.
• The personal is political: private life (family, sexuality, domestic labor) is a terrain of power relations.
• Intersectionality: the crossing of multiple axes of oppression.
• Care ethics: morality thought from relationship and responsibility, not from abstract principles alone.
• Gender performativity: gender as the effect of reiterated acts (Butler).

7. Critiques and controversies

Few fields are so traversed by disputes — many of them internal.

Critiques from within. The wave metaphor itself is charged with being reductive. The notion of a unified “woman subject” was attacked as essentialist, first by Black and postcolonial feminism, then by Butler. Care ethics, in turn, met the objection that it reinscribes the stereotype: by associating woman with care and relationship, it risks naturalizing the very division of roles feminism sought to contest; empirical critiques also questioned whether Gilligan’s data support a moral difference between the sexes. Intersectionality, though widely adopted, has been criticized for methodological vagueness and for, taken to an extreme, fragmenting the political subject to the point of making common action impossible. And Chandra Mohanty, in Under Western Eyes (1984), accused Western feminism of treating the “Third World woman” as a homogeneous victim, reproducing a colonial gesture.

The fiercest internal controversy of the moment sets the so-called gender-critical feminism — which holds that the category “woman” is anchored in biological sex — against the poststructuralist and trans-inclusive currents, in Butler’s wake, for which gender is socially or discursively constructed. The debate, intense and politically charged, shows that not even the concept of “woman” is settled within feminism.

Critiques from outside (and from the margins). The philosopher Martha Nussbaum — herself a feminist — delivered in “The Professor of Parody” (The New Republic, 1999) a severe attack on Butler: the emphasis on symbolic subversion and on hermetic prose (Butler’s writing even “won” a bad-writing contest in 1998) would amount to a quietist retreat, abandoning the material and legal reforms for which concrete women still struggle. The philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers, in Who Stole Feminism? (1994), distinguished an “equity feminism” (equality of rights, which she endorses) from a “gender feminism” that, in her view, exaggerates victimhood and biases research. Critics of radical feminism point to the monocausal character of explaining nearly everything by patriarchy. And from conservative positions there persists the objection that certain strands of feminism weaken the family and the complementarity of the sexes — a thesis most of the academic literature contests, but which is part of the public debate.

8. Assessment

Taken as an object of study, feminism proves to be less a bloc than an internally plural and self-critical tradition, in which each current is contested by the next. Its historical achievements in the domain of rights (education, the vote, legal equality) enjoy broad consensus; its stronger philosophical theses — about the nature of gender, the reach of the concept of patriarchy, or the relation between equality and difference — remain genuinely in dispute, including among feminists. To understand feminism therefore requires taking seriously both its arguments and the objections it provokes.

Essential reading

• Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).
• John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (1869).
• Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949).
• Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (1982).
• Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (1990).
• Martha Nussbaum, “The Professor of Parody” (1999) — an influential critique of Butler.
• Christina Hoff Sommers, Who Stole Feminism? (1994) — a critique of “gender feminism.”

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