20th-Century Feminism

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Account for how women's roles and status developed and changed across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (Skill 2.C; LO H).
• Account for KC-4.4.II: how the lives of women were defined by family and work responsibilities, economic changes, and feminism.
• Account for KC-4.4.II.B: how Western European women obtained the vote, education, and professional careers through feminist effort, and how Eastern European and Soviet women obtained comparable rights through government policy, while continuing to face social inequalities.
• Account for KC-4.4.II.D: how new modes of marriage, partnership, motherhood, divorce, and reproduction produced more options in women's personal lives.
• Account for KC-4.4.II.E: how women attained high political office and increased their representation in legislative bodies.
• Examine the point of view, purpose, historical situation, and audience of feminist primary sources across the period (Skill 2.C in direct practice).

Topic 9.8 covers the twentieth- and twenty-first-century development of European women's roles and status. KC-4.4.II captures the framework: women's lives were defined by family and work responsibilities, economic changes, and feminism. The lesson is structured in four parts: the long-running first-wave foundations (late nineteenth century through 1945, partly covered in Topics 8.10 and 8.11); the postwar second-wave feminist movement and the reproductive-rights revolution (1945-1980); the late-twentieth-century rise of women to high political office; and the third- and fourth-wave feminist movements of the 1990s and 2010s.

The first-wave foundations. Topic 8.10 covered the principal first-wave feminist trajectory through 1945: the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century suffrage movements (Emmeline Pankhurst's Women's Social and Political Union from 1903; the German Social Democratic women's movement; the French and American suffrage organizations); the wartime mobilization of women into industrial and military-auxiliary work during the First World War; and the postwar suffrage extensions in Britain (1918 and 1928), Germany (Weimar Constitution 1919), the United States (Nineteenth Amendment 1920), Spain (1931), and others. The Second World War produced a comparable wartime mobilization at higher industrial scale (approximately 8 million Soviet women in war-related production; approximately 800,000 Soviet women in Red Army uniformed service; approximately 80,000 British women in the Auxiliary Territorial Service and Women's Auxiliary Air Force) and the postwar extensions of suffrage in France (21 April 1944, the post-Liberation provisional government of Charles de Gaulle), Italy (constitutional referendum of 2 June 1946), and Switzerland (federal level 7 February 1971; the canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden held out against women's suffrage at the cantonal level until a Federal Supreme Court decision compelled it on 27 November 1990).

The principal interwar feminist contributions extended beyond the suffrage focus. Marie Stopes's Married Love (1918) and the parallel American work of Margaret Sanger anchored the early-twentieth-century reproductive-rights movement; the British and Western European birth-control clinic networks of the 1920s and 1930s provided the institutional foundation for the postwar reproductive-rights movement. Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938) anchored the modernist feminist literary tradition (Topic 8.10 covered). The interwar Western European labor movement increasingly addressed women's wage and working-condition concerns; the German Social Democratic women's movement and the British Trades Union Congress women's section produced the principal organizational frameworks. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Topic 8.11) included Article 16 on equal marriage rights and Article 23 on equal pay.

The postwar second-wave feminist movement (KC-4.4.II.B). The postwar second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s extended the first-wave suffrage focus into substantially broader cultural, economic, and personal-life dimensions. Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (Le Deuxieme Sexe, published in two volumes by Editions Gallimard in 1949) provided the principal postwar intellectual articulation: the existentialist analysis of "woman" as a socially constructed category produced by the long historical pattern of male dominance, and the call for women's self-conscious construction of an autonomous existence outside the patriarchal framework. The book sold approximately 22,000 copies in its first week and substantially shaped the postwar Western European feminist intellectual tradition; the English translation by H. M. Parshley appeared in 1953. Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (American, 1963) extended the analysis to the postwar middle-class American suburban context; the resulting US National Organization for Women of 1966 substantially shaped the parallel American second-wave movement.

The Western European second-wave movement produced substantial institutional and legal change across the 1960s and 1970s. The British framework included the Equal Pay Act of 29 May 1970 (in force 29 December 1975, requiring equal pay for equal work between men and women); the Sex Discrimination Act of 12 November 1975 (prohibiting sex discrimination in employment, education, and the provision of goods and services); the Employment Protection Act of 1975 (introducing statutory maternity leave); and the Equal Opportunities Commission established under the Sex Discrimination Act. The European Community framework included Council Directive 75/117/EEC of 10 February 1975 on equal pay; Council Directive 76/207/EEC of 9 February 1976 on equal treatment of men and women in employment; and the substantial subsequent expansion of EC and EU equal-treatment law. The French framework included the Veil Law of 17 January 1975 (legalizing abortion under specified conditions; named for Health Minister Simone Veil who navigated the legislation through the National Assembly with substantial cross-party support); the 1965 reform of marriage law that ended the husband's legal authority over the wife's professional and financial activity; and the 1972 equal-pay law.

The Eastern European and Soviet pattern followed the parallel-and-different track that KC-4.4.II.B identifies. Soviet ideology committed to formal women's equality from the 1917 revolution onward (the 1918 Family Code; the 1919 Constitution; the establishment of the Zhenotdel women's section of the Communist Party 1919-1930); the Stalinist consolidation from the 1930s reversed several of the early Soviet reforms (the 1936 abortion ban, partially reversed in 1955; the 1944 Family Code restricting divorce). Postwar Soviet bloc women had substantial formal employment (Soviet women's labor-force participation rate approximately 80 percent by the 1970s, the highest of any major economy), substantial educational access (Soviet women approximately 50 percent of higher-education enrollment by the 1970s), and substantial state-provided childcare; the parallel limitations included substantial under-representation in senior political and economic leadership (Soviet Politburo membership remained almost exclusively male across the period; the only senior Soviet woman politician was Yekaterina Furtseva, Minister of Culture 1960-1974), the persistent "double burden" of paid employment and unpaid domestic labor, and the sustained absence of independent feminist civil-society organizations.

The reproductive-rights revolution (KC-4.4.II.D). New modes of marriage, partnership, motherhood, divorce, and reproduction gave women more options in their personal lives. The principal twentieth-century reproductive-rights developments include the introduction of the combined oral contraceptive pill (developed under the principal scientific direction of Gregory Pincus and John Rock with funding from Margaret Sanger and Katharine McCormick; approved by the United States FDA on 9 May 1960; available in the United Kingdom under prescription from December 1961; available in France under the December 1967 Neuwirth Law; in West Germany from 1961). The pill substantially reshaped the demographic, social, and economic life of European women: by the late 1960s approximately 70 percent of British women under 30 used the pill; the Western European fertility rate declined from approximately 2.7 children per woman in 1960 to approximately 1.6 by 1980; women's labor-force participation increased substantially; the postwar pattern of early marriage and large families gave way to later marriage and smaller families.

Abortion legalization across Western Europe followed the contraceptive revolution. The British Abortion Act of 27 October 1967 (introduced by Liberal MP David Steel) authorized abortion under specified conditions including risk to the mother's physical or mental health and substantial fetal abnormality. The French Veil Law of 17 January 1975 (sponsored by Health Minister Simone Veil under President Valery Giscard d'Estaing) authorized abortion in the first ten weeks of pregnancy; the law passed with substantial cross-party support after Veil's celebrated National Assembly speech on 26 November 1974. The Italian Law 194 of 22 May 1978 followed substantial popular feminist pressure (Italian referendums of 1981 confirmed the legislation against Catholic-Church-supported repeal efforts). The German abortion-law reform proceeded through complex constitutional litigation (the 1974 Fifth Criminal Law Reform Act; the 1975 First Federal Constitutional Court Abortion judgment; the post-reunification 1995 reform); contemporary German law permits abortion in the first twelve weeks subject to mandatory counseling. The Polish Communist regime had liberalized abortion in 1956; post-Communist Poland substantially restricted abortion through the 1993 Family Planning Act and the 2020 Constitutional Tribunal ruling.

The development of in-vitro fertilization (IVF) extended the reproductive-rights revolution into assisted reproduction. The principal scientific work was conducted by Robert Edwards (Cambridge physiologist) and Patrick Steptoe (gynecologist at Oldham General Hospital) from the late 1960s; the first IVF birth was Louise Joy Brown, born by caesarean section at Oldham General Hospital at 11:47 p.m. on 25 July 1978. Edwards received the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the work (Steptoe had died in 1988 and was thus ineligible). Subsequent assisted-reproduction technologies (intracytoplasmic sperm injection from 1992; preimplantation genetic diagnosis from the early 1990s; egg freezing from the 2010s) substantially extended reproductive options. The legal and ethical framework remained substantially contested: the British Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (established under the 1990 Act) provides the principal European regulatory model; the Vatican's Donum Vitae (1987) and subsequent documents articulate the Catholic moral opposition; the long-running European debate over surrogacy has produced varying national legal frameworks.

The broader marriage-and-family-law transformation extended the personal-life reorganization. Western European divorce law liberalized substantially across the postwar period (the British Matrimonial Causes Act of 1973 introduced the principle of irretrievable breakdown; the French divorce reform of 11 July 1975 introduced no-fault divorce; the Italian divorce law of 1 December 1970, confirmed by the May 1974 referendum); divorce rates rose from approximately 5-10 percent of marriages in 1950 to approximately 30-50 percent in most Western European countries by 2020. Same-sex marriage was legalized progressively across Western Europe (the Netherlands first, on 1 April 2001; Belgium 2003; Spain 2005; Norway and Sweden 2009; Iceland and Portugal 2010; Denmark 2012; France and Uruguay 2013; the United Kingdom and Ireland 2014-2015; Luxembourg 2015; Finland and Germany 2017; Malta 2017; Austria 2019; Switzerland 2022; Liechtenstein and Greece 2024-2025). The Irish marriage-equality referendum of 22 May 2015 produced a 62 percent yes vote in the first national referendum to legalize same-sex marriage by direct popular vote.

Women in high political office (KC-4.4.II.E). Women attained high political office and increased their representation in legislative bodies in many nations across the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The principal European examples include Margaret Thatcher (British Conservative Prime Minister 1979-1990; Topic 9.6 covered); Mary Robinson (Irish Labour Party-supported Independent President of Ireland 7 November 1990 to 12 September 1997; subsequently UN High Commissioner for Human Rights 1997-2002); Edith Cresson (French Socialist Prime Minister 15 May 1991 to 2 April 1992, the first woman to hold the office; subsequently European Commissioner for Research, Science, and Education 1995-1999); Gro Harlem Brundtland (Norwegian Labour Prime Minister 1981, 1986-1989, and 1990-1996; subsequently Director-General of the World Health Organization 1998-2003); Tarja Halonen (Finnish Social Democratic President 2000-2012, the first woman to hold the office); Vigdis Finnbogadottir (Icelandic Independent President 1980-1996, the first woman directly elected head of state in Europe); Angela Merkel (German Christian Democratic Chancellor 22 November 2005 to 8 December 2021, the first woman to hold the office; subsequent international recognition as one of the principal late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century European leaders).

The 2010s and 2020s produced further milestones: Theresa May (British Conservative Prime Minister 13 July 2016 to 24 July 2019); Liz Truss (British Conservative Prime Minister 6 September to 25 October 2022, the shortest-serving PM in modern British history); Giorgia Meloni (Italian Brothers of Italy Prime Minister from 22 October 2022, the first woman to hold the office); Sanna Marin (Finnish Social Democratic Prime Minister 2019-2023, the youngest world leader at her appointment); Mette Frederiksen (Danish Social Democratic Prime Minister from 2019); Magdalena Andersson (Swedish Social Democratic Prime Minister 2021-2022); Kaja Kallas (Estonian Reform Party Prime Minister 2021-2024 and subsequent EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy from December 2024); Ursula von der Leyen (European Commission President from 1 December 2019, the first woman to hold the office). Women's representation in European national legislatures rose from approximately 5-10 percent in the 1950s to approximately 30-45 percent by the 2020s; the Nordic states have led the substantial rise (approximately 45-50 percent in Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Iceland); the Mediterranean states have lagged substantially (approximately 25-40 percent in Italy, Spain, Greece).

Third- and fourth-wave feminism. The 1990s third-wave feminist movement extended the second-wave critique into intersectionality (the analysis of overlapping categories of gender, race, class, sexuality, and other identity axes; the term coined by American legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989); queer theory (Judith Butler's Gender Trouble 1990); and substantial critique of the second-wave movement's principal Anglo-American-Western-European-middle-class focus. The 2010s fourth-wave feminist movement combined sustained focus on sexual harassment, sexual violence, and reproductive rights with substantial use of digital and social-media organizing. The principal fourth-wave moment was the #MeToo movement, in which the October 2017 New York Times reporting on Harvey Weinstein and the subsequent Tarana Burke-coined "Me Too" hashtag (originally from 2006; popularized in October 2017) produced an international reckoning with sexual harassment and assault. The European 2017-2018 episodes included the resignation of senior figures across film, media, politics, and academic life; the parallel French #BalanceTonPorc ("expose your pig") movement; and the substantial subsequent legal-institutional reform across Western European workplaces.

The post-2010 European feminist movement has continued to address persistent inequalities: the gender pay gap (approximately 13-15 percent across the European Union average; substantial national variation); the under-representation of women in senior corporate leadership (approximately 9-15 percent of CEOs of major listed European firms); the substantial gender violence and femicide rates (the European observatory on femicide reports approximately 2,300 European femicides per year); the contested abortion-rights position in several countries (Polish 2020 Constitutional Tribunal ruling; the 2024 French constitutional protection of abortion rights, the first national constitution to provide explicit constitutional protection); the long-running debate over the underrepresentation of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields. The Beijing Declaration of the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women of 15 September 1995 (signed by 189 states) provided the principal late-twentieth-century international institutional framework; the subsequent UN Sustainable Development Goal 5 ("Gender Equality") of 2015 extended the framework into the post-Millennium institutional period.

The Skill 2.C argument. Topic 9.8's suggested skill is 2.C (Sourcing and Situation: account for the significance of a source's point of view, purpose, historical situation, and audience). The skill applies particularly to the substantial documentary record of twentieth-century European feminism: the early-twentieth-century suffrage and reproductive-rights pamphlets (Marie Stopes; the Pankhurst writings); the postwar second-wave intellectual articulations (Beauvoir; Friedan; Greer's The Female Eunuch of 1970); the legal-institutional documents (the British Equal Pay Act; the French Veil Law; the EU equal-treatment directives); the late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century international declarations (the Beijing Declaration of 1995); and the contemporary fourth-wave digital documentary record (#MeToo and #BalanceTonPorc). Each source's point of view, purpose, historical situation, and audience substantially shape the substantive feminist claim it advances; the cumulative documentary record reveals both the substantial transformation of European women's roles and the persistent inequalities that the movement has continued to address.

Three sources framing the twentieth-century European feminist trajectory: the early-twentieth-century reproductive-rights pamphlet, the European institutional framework, and the international declaration.

1. (Continuity and Change, Skill 2.C) Examine the point of view, purpose, historical situation, and audience of Marie Stopes's Married Love (1918), Council Directive 76/207/EEC (1976), and the Beijing Declaration (1995) as three different forms of feminist documentary record. What does each source advance as its substantive claim, and how does each source's purpose and audience shape that claim?
2. (Continuity and Change) Account for KC-4.4.II.B: how did Western European feminists and Eastern European/Soviet government policy produce parallel-but-different paths to women's vote, education, and professional careers? Cite specific institutional frameworks and the persistent inequalities each pattern produced.
3. (Continuity and Change, Skill 2.C) Examine the principal twentieth-century reproductive-rights revolution (KC-4.4.II.D). How did the contraceptive-pill introduction, the Western European abortion-legalization pattern, and the IVF and assisted-reproduction technologies cumulatively reshape European women's personal lives?
4. (Continuity and Change) Account for KC-4.4.II.E: how did European women rise to high political office in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries? Cite Margaret Thatcher, Mary Robinson, Edith Cresson, Angela Merkel, and at least three other examples and the cumulative pattern they reflect.
5. (Continuity and Change, Skill 2.C) Examine the third-wave (1990s) and fourth-wave (2010s) feminist movements as continuations of and adjustments to the second-wave movement of the 1960s and 1970s. What does each subsequent wave reinforce, and what does each adjust?

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP European History codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, V.1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.