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."
American modernism
Starting from the early 19th century, some women used the doctrines of the ideal femaleness to avoid the isolation of the domestic sphere. By the 1830s, women were openly challenging the women's sphere and demanding greater political, economic and social rights. They formed women's clubs and benevolent societies all over the U.S. Male domination of the public arena was no longer within acceptable limits to many of these middle-class activist women. Beginning with the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, American feminists held state and national conventions until the early 20th century. Some spokeswomen of the feminist movement connected the feminist cause with free love and the sexual revolution, which were the taboo issues of the Victorian Age. Therefore, feminists in both Britain and the United States concentrated on political and legal issues, the vote in particular, and other important women's issues regarding the domestic roles of women and the organization of domestic life in general. Eventually, after a long and hard struggle that included massive, sometimes violent protests, the imprisonment of many women, and even some deaths, the battle for women's suffrage was won. The suffrage law was passed in the United States in 1920 for women who were householders or wives of householders and in 1928 for all adult women. (African-American women were not included. They only received the right to vote in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.) The National Organization for Women (NOW) was founded in 1966 by a group of feminists. The largest women's rights group in the U.S. NOW aimed to end sexual discrimination, especially in the workplace, by means of legislative lobbying, litigation, and public demonstrations. The following years of the late 20th century witnessed a great expansion of women's rights in all areas of the modern society.
Modernist artists had an ambivalent attitude towards feminism: on the one hand they opted for equal treatment of men and women with regard to law, franchise, and professions; on the other hand they still had the perceived female inadequacies in terms of biology, culture, and transcendence in mind. As the radical feminist Emma Goldman proclaimed, "true liberation begins neither at the polls nor in courts [but rather] in a woman's soul" (qtd. in Lyon 223).