Abstract
In this chapter, we take a longer and more inclusive view inspired by new scholarship in women’s history that reconstructs the history of feminism by challenging the familiar waves metaphor (Cobble, Gordon, & Henry, 2014; Hewitt, 2010). Although the waves metaphor effectively captures key aspects of the history of activism for women’s rights by providing a coherent narrative of punctuated periods, it highlights and schematizes certain points in time at the expense of a more inclusive, if messier, account of the multiple sites and varieties of feminism over time. In a recent history of 20th-century feminism, political scientist Deborah Coole (2000) argued that “the kind of interventions made at each stage were those appropriate to the specific situation they engaged, rather than phases of one continuous project” (p. 38).