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So while I’m going to do my best to give you some background about how we got where we are today, I want to spend more time writing about where we’re going. Because as important as feminism’s history is, and as proud as we should be of our foremothers, the more important question is about how we move forward. Together.

We’ve Come a Long Way, Baby

It’s difficult to say who the first feminists really were. I imagine women have been subverting sexism for as long as it’s existed. But no one talks about the small things women do every day to buck the system, I suppose because it’s impossible to measure. So when most people talk about feminist history, it’s limited to the organized, popular movements.

If you’re all-knowing about the “wave” history, feel free to skip this section. I don’t want you to get bored. But if you’re not, read on.

Most feminists discuss the movement’s history in terms of waves: first, second, and third. Nowadays, the absence of a “fourth” wave seems to indicate a desire to end the wave terminology and just move forward without labels.

FIRST!

When folks talk about feminism’s first wave, they’re talking about women who fought for the vote. Think Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. (If you didn’t learn about them in school—at least—I might cry). Some mark the beginning of the first wave as the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention—when women got together in New York and created the Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions, which outlined the issues and goals for a women’s movement.

If you want to watch a good movie (with a somewhat unfortunate soundtrack) about the later part of the first wave, check out Iron Jawed Angels. It follows the fight for suffrage through the story of Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, who formed the National Woman’s Party.

So, very long story made short: Women got the vote via the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Yeah, so it took them a long-ass time (wonder why . . . ).

The problem with the way the first wave is generally talked about and taught is that it tends to ignore contributions by women of color and women who weren’t all rich and privileged. It’s all white, middle- to upper-class women all the time. (You’ll see that this is a trend through the waves.) In fact, the most famous suffragettes turned out to be a tad racist. Stanton and Anthony got all pissed that black men got the vote over white women and forged some pretty unsavory alliances with groups that opposed enfranchisement for black people and even said that the vote of white women (of “wealth, education, and refinement”) was needed in order to combat the “pauperism, ignorance, and degradation” of voting immigrants and men of color.1 Lovely.

Feminists never really burned their bras. That rumor started after women protesting the 1968. Miss America Pageant threw their bras in a trashcan.

Fact is, women of color were fighting their own battles at the time and not getting nearly enough recognition. One speech that (thankfully) gets a lot of play is Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?” delivered in 1851 at the Women’s Convention in Ohio.

❂ That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?2

Awesome.

Now, of course, it’s great that women got the vote and that so many women fought for it—hard. But we have to take an honest look at history. Because unfortunately, this dismissive nonsense about anyone other than educated white women would repeat itself, to some extent, later on in feminism.