History of feminism
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott met in 1840 while en route to London where they were shunned as women by the male leadership of the first World's Anti-Slavery Convention. In 1848, Mott and Stanton held a woman's rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, where a declaration of independence for women was drafted. Lucy Stone helped to organize the first National Women's Rights Convention in 1850, a much larger event at which Sojourner Truth, Abby Kelley Foster, and others spoke sparked Susan B. Anthony to take up the cause of women's rights. In December 1851, Sojourner Truth contributed to the feminist movement when she spoke at the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio. She delivered her powerful “Ain’t I a Woman” speech in an effort to promote women’s rights by demonstrating their ability to accomplish tasks that have been traditionally associated with men. Barbara Leigh Smith met with Mott in 1858, strengthening the link between the transatlantic feminist movements.
Equality feminism
After the expansion into Europe, the movement stifled its growth until 1920 where the woman suffrage movement occurred, as many women were divided when determining whether or not women were on equal standing with men. This continued until the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women was established in 1946 to secure equal political, economic and educational opportunities for women throughout the world. In 1949, a French Existentialist Simone de Beauvoir published the work "The Second Sex", in which she debunks many of the claims made towards women and fights for gender equality. In 1963 another literature pertaining to equality feminism arose, with Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique" in which she discussed "the problem that has no name", being the widespread unhappiness of women in the 1950s. She uses this information to describe many of the gender inequalities that society has created that has resulted in this unhappiness, such as giving up her psychology career to tend to her children. Using these literatures as a guide feminism once again arose in the United States with the development of the National Organization for Women (NOW) formed in 1966. This organization fought for the removal of all legal and social barriers placed upon women to once again influence true equality between men and women. In 1972 women leaders such as Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, and Gloria Steinem pushed the Equal Rights Amendment through Congress; however, it fell short of ratification by 1982.