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.
Violence against women
The third wave of feminism is the newest wave of feminism led by young feminists whose understanding and context are of the globalized world order and the technological advances that have come with it. Also, this wave is a transition of the fall communism to more complex issues of new kinds of 'warfare', threats and violence. This new wave also "embraces ambiguity" and introduced a feminist approach of 'intersectionality' that includes the issues of race, gender, age, and class. Other than that, the third wave marks a period of feminism dealing with identity politics, body politics as well as the issues of violence.
Nonetheless, the VAW movement was initiated in the 1970s where some feminist movements started to bring the discussion on the issue of violence into the feminist discourse and that many other groups, on the national as well as international levels, had attempted to push for the betterment of women through lobbying of the state officials and delegates, demanding the conferences on 'gender issues' and thus made the VAW known to a wider range of population. Therefore, to put this into the theoretical context, VAW can be categorized along with the second and third waves of feminism which share a focus on violence.