First-Wave Feminism

Although women had been fighting for equal rights in various areas since the late eighteenth century, around the time that Mary Wollstonecraft wrote her seminal A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), most historians consider modern feminism to fall into two time periods. The first period, known as first-wave feminism, consists of the efforts of women—primarily in Europe and the United States—in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to gain more rights, mainly legal rights such as voting, or suffrage. Second-wave feminism, a movement that reached its height in the 1960s and 1970s, had a larger focus and strove for equality between the sexes in every category. Second-wave feminism is commonly known as the women's movement.

During the first-wave feminism period, in the first decade of the twentieth century when Gilman wrote "Three Thanksgivings," women's rights were a hot issue. Says J...