What are the four waves of feminism? And what comes next?

In Western countries, feminist history is generally packaged as a story of “waves”. The so-called first wave lasted from the mid-19th century to 1920. The second wave spanned the 1960s to the early 1980s. The third wave began in the mid-1990s and lasted until the 2010s. Finally, some say we are experiencing a fourth wave, which began in the mid-2010s and continues now.

The first person to use “waves” was journalist Martha Weinman Lear, in her 1968 New York Times article, The Second Feminist Wave, demonstrating that the women’s liberation movement was another “new chapter in a grand history of women fighting together for their rights”. She was responding to anti-feminists’ framing of the movement as a “bizarre historical aberration”.

Some feminists criticise the usefulness of the metaphor. Where do feminists who preceded the first wave sit? For instance, Middle Ages feminist writer Christine de Pizan, or philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).

Does the metaphor of a single wave overshadow the complex variety of feminist concerns and demands? And does this language exclude the non-West, for whom the “waves” story is meaningless?

Despite these concerns, countless feminists continue to use “waves” to explain their position in relation to previous generations.