In the 1850s and 1860s women began to organise on a significant scale to challenge their subordinate position in European society.

By 1900 there were organised women's movements in most states, including all of western Europe, the Nordic countries, Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Between 1906 and 1919, women in most European countries obtained the vote.

First-wave feminism was born out of ‘the woman question' which had simmered since the third quarter of the eighteenth century. Ironically, it arose out of the attempts of Enlightenment writers like Rousseau to rational­ise and legitimate women's subordinate status on the basis of their morally ‘higher' domestic role. From this, women and men had been engaged in a dialogue about women's position. First set alight by the French Revolution, the European intellectual scene thereafter witnessed progressive waves of criticism about the condition of women. Anti-slavery campaigners, utopian socialists, evangelists, liberals, political radicals and revolutionaries — all with their different agendas — had addressed the status of women, often in the context of broader critiques of social and political organisation, and they proposed reforms to improve woman's position in the home, education, the workplace and the state. In this way, the Enlightenment had created ‘the woman question' by questioning privilege and subjecting all social rela­tions to analysis, and as a result made feminist thought and the feminist movement possible by inventing a language concerning the rights of the indi­vidual. By inventing separate spheres as an ideology, the Enlightenment also made possible feminism as an ideology.

Yet, organised feminism was not just an intellectual response to the contradictions of the Enlightenment. It was an active protest against the very real discrimination of women in diverse areas of public and private life: in marriage, in education, the workplace, the courts and in politics. In the new conditions created by industrial capitalism, women were being excluded from opportunities open to men on grounds of their sex. Men, and especially those of the new middle classes, were making advances at women's expense. The barring of women from admission to higher education and the pro­fessions, denying women economic independence, treating married women as possessions — it was such practical experiences of overt discrimination that stirred the first wave of feminists to action.

Feminism was, and is, a practice as well as a theory. It was about protesting and challenging injustice in the home, the workplace and on the streets, in words and in actions. The language used was important, but so were the things feminists did; their presence was as powerful as their words. Feminist campaigners adopted a variety of ideological and tactical positions, but for simplicity one might categorise their arguments as either individualist or rela- tional.¹ The individualist approach was the more straightforward inheritor of the Enlightenment discourse on rights, adopting the position that theories of the rights-bearing individual should be applied equally to women as to men. Individualist feminism has sometimes been regarded as the more legitimate and certainly more radical form, perhaps because it equates more closely to the uncompromising equal rights position adopted by feminists of the second wave in the 1960s and 1970s. By contrast, relational feminism (some­times called social or maternal feminism), emphasised woman's difference, relating women to men in terms of differences rather than similarities, echo­ing the Enlightenment construction of woman's natural moral superiority, and thus seemingly playing into the hands of those who advocated separate spheres.

The words ‘feminism' and ‘feminist' did not enter widespread popular usage until the 1890s, some decades after women had begun to organise in a commitment to change. They were coined by Hubertine Auclert in France in the 1880s as terms to denote those who concerned themselves with the woman question. But feminisme and feministe soon became catch-all descrip­tions incorporating a diverse range of beliefs and standpoints, and yet flexible enough to include all those who agitated for the emancipation of women.² Despite the differences in theory and tactics between individualists and relationalists, radicals, moderates and socialists, working- and middle­class women, these women shared a number of characteristics which allow us to speak of feminism as a movement and an ideology which Karen Offen described thus:

First, they consciously recognised the validity of female experience. Second, they analysed women's subordination as a problem of institutional injustice... Third, they sought the elimination of such injustices by attempting both to enhance the relative power of women and to curb the coercive power, whether political, eco­nomic or cultural, available to men.³

Although some scholars have traced elements of feminist consciousness and action to earlier in the century — notably in connection with the anti-slavery campaigns and radical politics in Britain and the utopian socialists in France — it is the phase of feminist activism that started in the 1850s that combined these three characteristics.⁴