Modern feminist thought is conventionally traced from Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), which argued that women's apparent inferiority stemmed from denied education, to Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949), which analysed how women had been culturally constructed as the 'other'. Between and beyond these works, campaigners challenged women's exclusion from the vote, property, the professions and equal standing in marriage. The movement developed in successive waves, first around legal and political rights, then around work, the body and everyday life. It originated largely in Western Europe and North America before becoming global.
Feminism transformed law, work and family life, and its later critique exposed how housing layouts, transport networks, public space and the separation of home from workplace were built around gendered assumptions about who does what and goes where.
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