The term feminism encompasses various social movements, from the late-nineteenth-century women's rights movement to the mid-twentieth-century women's movement in Europe and the United States, as well as referring to theories that identify and critique injustices against women such as Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) or Harriet Taylor Mill's Enfranchisement of Women (1868). A core connotation of "feminism" is thus a commitment to revealing and eliminating sexist oppression.

In the early twenty-first century, the label "feminist ethics" is used to signify a method or focus of attention for ethical theory and practice. Many scholars have marked the genesis of contemporary feminist philosophy and ethics with Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1993 [1953]), which provides one of the first sustained analyses of the lived experience of "becoming woman." Beauvoir opened her classic text with a critique of theories contending that there are basic biological differences between...