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Mary Astell
A High Church Tory who defended monarchy, Astell turned Locke's arguments against him. In the 1706 preface to Some Reflections upon Marriage she asked: "If all men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves?" Her answer was not revolution but education, including a proposed women's college, and careful choice of husband. Starting here shows that feminist argument began on the political right as well as the left.
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Olympe de Gouges
Born
De Gouges answered the French Revolution's Declaration of the Rights of Man with her own Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen (1791), rewriting it article by article: "Woman is born free and remains equal to man in rights." She added that if women can mount the scaffold, they should be able to mount the speaker's rostrum. A moderate who opposed the Jacobins, she was guillotined in 1793, which makes the point for her.
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Mary Wollstonecraft
Born
Read Wollstonecraft against Rousseau, the thinker she most admired and most attacked. Émile had argued that girls should be educated only to please men; A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) replied that the "weakness" Rousseau described was the product of that very education, and that women denied reason could be neither good wives nor good citizens. Her case for equality rests on shared rationality, a premise later feminists would both build on and question.
More about Mary Wollstonecraft4
Harriet Taylor Mill
Born
Taylor Mill's essay The Enfranchisement of Women (1851) went further than her husband John Stuart Mill's later The Subjection of Women: she argued that married women should be free to work outside the home and earn their own income, while he assumed most would choose domestic life. Reading the two together shows a live disagreement inside liberal feminism, and raises the long-argued question of how much of "his" work was hers.
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Anna J. Cooper
Born
Born into slavery in North Carolina, Cooper became a Washington school principal and, at 66, earned a doctorate at the Sorbonne. A Voice from the South (1892) argued that Black women faced both a "woman question" and a "race problem", and that white suffragists and Black male leaders each ignored half of her situation. It anticipates the later idea of intersectionality by nearly a century, and makes a natural pairing with Kimberlé Crenshaw further down.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Born
Gilman moved the argument from votes to money. Women and Economics (1898) claimed that women's economic dependence on husbands, not any natural difference, shaped their characters, and proposed kitchenless homes, professional cooking and shared childcare so wives could earn. Her utopian novel Herland imagines a society of women alone. Her views on race and immigration, which drew on the eugenics of her day, are part of reading her honestly.
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Emma Goldman
Born
Goldman thought the suffrage campaign was a distraction. Her essays "Woman Suffrage" and "The Tragedy of Woman's Emancipation" (1910s) argued that the vote would not free women any more than it had freed men, and that real liberation meant freedom from marriage, the church and the state, including access to birth control, for which she was jailed. She is the best counterweight to every entry here that puts its faith in law and representation.
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Virginia Woolf
Born
A Room of One's Own (1929) is the famous one, arguing that women's creative achievement depended on money and space of their own. The more political book is Three Guineas (1938), which links the exclusion of women from universities and professions to militarism and fascism, and refuses to join men's institutions on men's terms: "as a woman, I have no country". Set it beside Friedan or Okin to see the old split between joining institutions and refusing them.
More about Virginia Woolf9
Simone de Beauvoir
Born
The Second Sex (1949) supplied the movement's core idea: "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." Using existentialist philosophy, Beauvoir argued that men have defined themselves as the human norm and women as the "Other", so femininity is a situation imposed rather than a nature. Later feminists split over her legacy: some built on it, others objected that she treated motherhood and the female body mainly as obstacles.
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Betty Friedan
Born
The Feminine Mystique (1963) named "the problem that has no name": the dissatisfaction of educated suburban housewives told that domesticity should fulfil them. Friedan co-founded the National Organization for Women in 1966 to win equal employment and legal rights, the model of liberal reform feminism. Critics then and since note that her subjects were white and middle class, and she notoriously warned against a "lavender menace" of lesbians damaging the movement's image.
More about Betty Friedan11
Kate Millett
Born
Millett's Sexual Politics (1970), a doctoral thesis turned bestseller, argued that relations between the sexes are political in the full sense: "patriarchy" is a system of power maintained through family, religion, literature and psychology, not just unequal laws. Her readings of D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller and Norman Mailer were the evidence. She marks the shift from Friedan's reform feminism to radical feminism, which treats changing the law as far from enough.
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Shulamith Firestone
Born
Firestone wrote The Dialectic of Sex (1970) at 25 and pushed materialist feminism to its limit: the root of women's oppression is biological reproduction itself, so liberation would require technology, including artificial wombs, to free women from pregnancy and dissolve the family. Few followed her all the way, but debates about surrogacy, reproductive technology and care work keep returning to her question of whether nature or society is the obstacle.
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Gloria Steinem
Born
Steinem was more essayist and organiser than theorist, but her writing defined how many Americans met second-wave feminism. Her undercover report "A Bunny's Tale" (1963), the essay "If Men Could Menstruate" and the magazine Ms., which she co-founded in 1972, made the case for reproductive rights and equal pay in plain, funny prose. She and Friedan clashed over strategy and inclusiveness for years. Steinem died in September 2026, aged 92.
More about Gloria Steinem14
Audre Lorde
Born
Lorde, who described herself as "Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet", challenged white feminists from inside the movement. Her 1979 conference talk "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House" criticised an event that included almost no Black or lesbian women, and the essays in Sister Outsider argue that differences among women are a source of strength to be named, not smoothed over. She is essential for seeing why "women" as a single category came under strain.
More about Audre Lorde15
Angela Davis
Born
Women, Race and Class (1981) is a Marxist history of the American women's movement that shows how class and race shaped it from the start, including racism in parts of the suffrage campaign and the different meaning of "work" for enslaved and freed Black women. Davis, a former Communist Party vice-presidential candidate, places gender inside a critique of capitalism and, later, of prisons. Her answer to Friedan is that housework and the home look very different from the bottom.
More about Angela Davis16
Silvia Federici
Federici helped launch the 1970s Wages for Housework campaign, whose pamphlet Wages Against Housework (1975) argued that unpaid domestic labour is the hidden foundation of capitalism, so demanding a wage for it would expose that work rather than celebrate it. Angela Davis, in Women, Race and Class, rejected the demand as entrenching women in the home; reading them together is a sharp lesson in socialist feminist disagreement. Caliban and the Witch extends Federici's argument back to the early modern witch hunts.
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Bell hooks
Born
hooks took aim at the idea that women are bonded by a common oppression. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984) argued that this assumption reflected the lives of privileged white women, and redefined feminism as a movement to end sexist oppression for everyone, men included, tied to the struggles against racism and class exploitation. Her clear, informal style makes her one of the easiest entry points, and her critique of Friedan is pointed and specific.
More about Bell hooks18
Chandra Talpade Mohanty
Mohanty's essay "Under Western Eyes" (1984) criticised Western feminist scholarship for portraying "the Third World woman" as a single, passive victim of tradition, set against a liberated Western norm. She argued for studying women in specific places, economies and histories, and for solidarity built across borders rather than rescue. It is the necessary corrective to any list, this one included, that leans heavily on European and American writers.
More about Chandra Talpade Mohanty19
Catharine A. MacKinnon
Born
MacKinnon turned radical feminism into law. Sexual Harassment of Working Women (1979) argued that harassment is sex discrimination, an argument the US Supreme Court accepted in 1986. Her dominance theory holds that the question is not difference between the sexes but hierarchy, and with Andrea Dworkin she drafted ordinances treating pornography as a civil rights violation, which courts struck down. Free speech advocates and "sex-positive" feminists remain her strongest critics.
More about Catharine A. MacKinnon20
Carole Pateman
Born
Pateman's The Sexual Contract (1988) reread Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau and argued that the famous social contract had a hidden partner: a sexual contract that gave men access to women's bodies and labour through marriage. On this view, liberal contract theory cannot simply be extended to women, because it was built on their subordination. It is the strongest challenge to liberal feminists such as Okin, who believe the tradition can be repaired.
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Susan Moller Okin
Born
Okin accepted Rawls's framework and turned it on the family. Justice, Gender, and the Family (1989) argued that a household where women do most unpaid work is unjust by liberal standards, and that it is where children first learn, or fail to learn, a sense of justice. Her later essay "Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?" (1999) claimed group rights can entrench patriarchal practices, provoking a fierce response from multiculturalists and postcolonial feminists.
More about Susan Moller Okin22
Kimberlé Crenshaw
Born
Crenshaw coined "intersectionality" in a 1989 law review article about a specific legal gap: Black women suing General Motors lost because courts would consider race discrimination or sex discrimination but not the combination, since the company hired Black men and white women. The term has since travelled far beyond employment law and become a target in culture-war arguments; her original article is short, concrete and worth reading before either praising or attacking the idea.
More about Kimberlé Crenshaw23
Iris Marion Young
Born
Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990) argued that justice is not only about how goods are distributed but about domination and oppression, which Young broke into five "faces": exploitation, marginalisation, powerlessness, cultural imperialism and violence. That checklist is still one of the most useful tools for analysing power. Her call for group representation in politics put her at odds with liberals such as Okin and with Nancy Fraser, who worried it neglected economic redistribution.
More about Iris Marion Young24
Judith Butler
Born
Butler pushed Beauvoir's idea further: in Gender Trouble (1990), gender is "performative", produced through repeated acts rather than expressing an inner essence, and even the category of sex is shaped by social norms. That unsettled feminism's subject, "women", and helped found queer theory. Martha Nussbaum's 1999 attack on Butler's style and politics is the classic critique; gender-critical feminists today reject the theory outright, and Who's Afraid of Gender? (2024) is Butler's reply.
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