Dr. Julia Sass Rubin, Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University

For much of the history of the United States, women had many fewer rights and privileges than men. Laws did not allow women to vote and prohibited married women from controlling their property. Women also were severely limited in their educational and career opportunities.

The US feminist movement emerged in response to these restrictions, which discriminated against women in all spheres of their lives. The movement is commonly described as having multiple phases or waves. The first wave was in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, culminating in the 1920 adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitutions, which gave women the right to vote.