‘What Has Been Won Can Be Lost’: A Look at the Past and Future of Feminism

Estelle Freedman, emerita professor at Stanford University specializing in women’s history and feminist studies.

“There’s a long history both of struggle within and resistance to feminism,” said Dr. Freedman in a phone interview. “But despite major setbacks over the century and a half of feminist activism, the long story is one of enormous social and political change.”

The decades-long suffrage movement in the United States resulted in American women’s right to vote after 1920, which laid the groundwork for future equal rights policies, like Title IX, the 1972 law prohibiting sex-based discrimination in federally funded education. Today, many organizations work locally, nationally and globally to combat gender-based violence and achieve full political representation, organizations “that did not exist during the American feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s,” said Dr. Freedman, who has a Ph.D. in history and is a co-founder of Stanford’s program in feminist, gender, and sexuality studies.

Another huge difference between the movement then and the movement now, she said, is the internationalization of feminism outside “the first world, industrialized superpowers.”

“Look at the changes that have been made because diverse groups of people kept mobilizing and organizing,” Dr. Freedman said, building on what earlier activists did, “reframing feminism for the era we live in.” But the recent rollback in reproductive rights in the United States, which included defunding global women’s health programs, she added, “is a stark reminder that we’ve got plenty of work to do to actually achieve gender equality.”