Transnational feminism
In the "Oxford Handbook of Transnational Feminist Movements", Valentine Moghadam says that "women have worked together across borders since at least the mid-1800s. (55)" What is now called first wave feminism started in the early twentieth century in the West with a focus on women's suffrage. 
During World War II, the United States government gave women jobs because the war had caused a national shortage of labor. After the war ended, Irene Tinker says (oxford transnational), these jobs were taken away but women were no longer satisfied going back to their previous gender roles. Starting in the 1960s in the United States, second wave feminism emerged, defined by women's organization around "equal right to education, employment, and equal pay for equal work, and on sexual and reproductive rights."
Equality feminism
In both law and in theology women were portrayed as both physically and intellectually inferior. One of the first feminist documents that set the stage for feministic movements occurred when Mary Wollstonecraft wrote "Vindication of the Rights of Woman" in 1792. While this literature was seen as rebellious at the time it echoed the feelings of women throughout France as women's republican clubs demanded that liberty, equality and fraternity should be applied to both men and women. While this movement gained notoriety it was eventually extinguished by Napoleon Bonaparte's Code Napoleon that established that the husband had complete control over the family and regressed equality feminism.