🌍 The Long Road to Liberation:

A History of Women’s Roles in Society and the Fight for Equality

I. Before the Revolution: A Long History of Subordination

Throughout most of recorded human history, the roles assigned to women have been defined more by power than by nature. The societal expectation that women should be submissive, domestic, and self-sacrificing is not innate—it is constructed. To understand how the Women’s Liberation Movement came to be, we must first trace the historical arc of gender roles from prehistory to the modern era. Only then can we appreciate the scale and courage of the revolution it sparked.

🪨 Prehistoric and Ancient Societies: Echoes of Equality and the Seeds of Control

In humanity’s earliest days—among hunter-gatherer tribes—evidence suggests that gender roles were more egalitarian than many might assume. Anthropological studies show that women played central roles in food gathering, early medicine, child-rearing, and even leadership within tribal communities. In many groups, survival depended on cooperation, not hierarchy. But with the rise of agriculture, private property, and state-based systems, power began to consolidate—typically in male hands.

In ancient civilizations, early glimpses of female power—queens, priestesses, traders—existed but were the exception, not the norm. Patriarchal structures hardened as societies grew more complex.

  • In Mesopotamia, women could trade and inherit land, but were legally subordinate to male relatives.

  • In ancient Egypt, women held relatively more rights, including the right to divorce and own property; a few, like Hatshepsut, even ruled as pharaohs. Still, the public realm was deeply male-dominated.

  • In Athens, arguably the cradle of democracy, women were excluded from political life, denied education, and confined to the domestic sphere. They were considered extensions of their fathers or husbands.

  • In Rome, elite women had some influence, but patriarchal law (patria potestas) ensured male dominance over the household and family.

Religion often sanctified these roles. In many early texts, women were associated with temptation, sin, and disorder—Eve’s fall from grace in Genesis being a particularly enduring narrative. Thus, the groundwork was laid: woman as the helpmate, the seductress, the mother—but never the equal.

🕍 The Middle Ages: Piety and Patriarchy

With the spread of organized religion and feudal social systems, women's roles became increasingly codified in service of male authority. In medieval Europe, the Christian Church played a central role in shaping ideas about women. The ideal medieval woman was chaste, obedient, and silent, often modelled after the Virgin Mary—but paradoxically, women were also associated with original sin and moral weakness, echoing Eve.

Marriage was considered a sacred duty, not a personal choice. A woman's identity was almost entirely defined through her relationship to men: daughter, wife, widow. Women were barred from owning property, excluded from most professions, and subject to strict moral codes that men were not equally expected to follow.

And yet, there were contradictions. Religious institutions offered some women education and autonomy—particularly nuns, abbesses, and mystics like Hildegard of Bingen, who composed music, wrote theology, and advised emperors. In the Islamic world, Fatima al-Fihri founded the world’s first university in 859 CE, and early Islamic law granted women rights to education and inheritance—though patriarchal interpretations soon narrowed these freedoms.

In Asia, traditions like Confucianism in China emphasized filial piety and female obedience. The “Three Submissions” (to father, husband, and son) structured a woman’s entire life. Foot-binding emerged as a horrific beauty practice that physically enforced passivity and dependence. In India, women were often restricted to domestic spheres, though female sages, queens, and poets occasionally emerged against the grain.

Everywhere, women worked—often harder than men—but their labour was unpaid, unrecognised, and unrecorded. Whether on the farm, at the loom, in childbirth, or in the kitchen, women formed the backbone of society—and yet had no voice within it.

🎨 Renaissance and Enlightenment: The Mind Opens, But the Door Stays Shut

The Renaissance (1300–1600) brought humanism, science, and art—but it did not liberate women. Educated men celebrated the human mind, while denying women access to books, schooling, or public discourse. Women were muses, not makers. They were idealised in paintings and poetry but silenced in courts and classrooms. A woman’s virtue was still measured by chastity, beauty, and obedience.

During the same period, the witch hunts that swept across Europe and colonial America (from 1400–1700) disproportionately targeted women—especially widows, midwives, and those living outside male supervision. Up to 80% of those executed for witchcraft were women. This mass persecution reveals a deep societal fear: women with knowledge, autonomy, or power were dangerous.

The Enlightenment (1600s–1700s) championed liberty, rationality, and the rights of man. But it seldom included women in its vision. Rousseau, for example, argued that women were meant to please and educate men, not act independently. Into this contradiction stepped voices like Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), demanding that women be treated as rational beings deserving of education and autonomy.

Her radical idea? That women were human beings, not property or ornaments. It would take another century for the world to begin listening.

II. The Birth of Feminism: Resistance Takes Root

By the 19th century, women had endured millennia of subordination. But a critical mass of resistance was building. The fight for women’s rights—especially the right to vote, own property, and access education—coalesced into what became known as the First Wave of feminism.

✊ First Wave Feminism (1848–1920): Votes for Women

The Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 is widely considered the birth of the organized women’s rights movement. Led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, the convention produced the Declaration of Sentiments, which boldly asserted that “all men and women are created equal.”

This was followed by decades of suffrage campaigns across the U.S., Britain, and parts of Europe.

  • Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells in America

  • Emmeline Pankhurst, Millicent Fawcett, and the suffragettes in the UK

  • Kate Sheppard in New Zealand, where women won voting rights in 1893—the first country to do so

The fight was long and often brutal. Women were beaten, arrested, force-fed in prison, and dismissed as hysterical. But by 1920, after relentless struggle, the 19th Amendment granted American women the vote. The UK followed with full suffrage by 1928.

But the movement was still dominated by white, middle-class women. Many Black, Indigenous, and working-class women were excluded or marginalized—a legacy that would haunt feminism for decades.

III. Feminism Expands: The Personal is Political

🔥 Second Wave Feminism (1960s–1980s)

After WWII and the brief freedom women found during wartime labour, the 1950s restored a conservative ideal: the suburban housewife. But by the 1960s, women began to rebel against their cages.

The second wave of feminism sought more than legal rights—it demanded cultural transformation. It asked: why are women paid less? Why are housewives so miserable? Why is sexuality policed?

Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) exposed “the problem that has no name”—the deep unhappiness of educated women relegated to the kitchen. Feminism became a national conversation.

Women’s liberation groups formed across the globe. Key demands included:

  • Equal pay

  • Reproductive rights (birth control and abortion)

  • Protection against domestic violence and rape

  • Access to education and employment

Radical feminists challenged not only patriarchy but capitalism, militarism, and heteronormativity. Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, bell hooks, and Adrienne Rich began to redefine feminism through the lens of race, class, and sexuality.

Legislative wins followed: the Equal Pay Act, Title IX, Roe v. Wade (1973). In the UK, the Sex Discrimination Act (1975) and Equal Pay Act (1970) marked important steps.

But many women felt that feminism still didn’t speak for them. And so, the movement split and evolved again.

IV. Intersectionality and Identity: A New Generation Emerges

🌈 Third Wave Feminism (1990s–2010s)

By the 1990s, feminism had grown more diverse, more global, and more complex. The third wave focused on intersectionality—a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe how race, gender, class, and other identities overlap and shape experience.

This era embraced diversity, sexual agency, and cultural critique.

  • The Riot Grrrl punk movement fought misogyny through zines and music.

  • Feminists challenged body shaming, slut shaming, and gender binaries.

  • Women of colour, queer women, trans women, and disabled women all demanded space at the table.

Third-wave feminism didn’t just want equality—it wanted justice.

V. The Digital Rebellion

⚡ Fourth Wave Feminism (2012–present): Online and Unstoppable

The internet brought feminism into every home, every phone, every corner of the globe. The fourth wave of feminism is digital, intersectional, and activist-driven.

  • #MeToo went viral in 2017, exposing sexual violence across industries.

  • Hashtags like #TimesUp, #NiUnaMenos, and #BringBackOurGirls mobilized millions.

  • Feminists now fight on multiple fronts: from trans rights to racial justice, from eco-feminism to decolonisation.

The fourth wave is ongoing. And while it is often chaotic, it is vibrant and alive—driven by the belief that feminism is for everyone, or it is for no one.

VI. The Road Ahead: Unfinished Business

Despite progress, the global picture remains sobering.

  • Women and girls account for the majority of victims of violence worldwide.

  • In many countries, reproductive rights are being rolled back.

  • Women still carry the burden of unpaid care work, and the gender pay gap persists.

  • Feminist activists are targeted, imprisoned, or killed in dozens of countries.

But feminism has shown that the arc of history bends only if we push it.

The history of women’s roles in society is not a linear march toward freedom—it is a cycle of resistance, backlash, and rebirth. From being denied property, voice, and autonomy to leading nations, writing revolutions, and shaking the foundations of power, women have never stopped fighting.

The Women’s Liberation Movement is not a single story—it is millions of stories, still unfolding.

“I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.” — Audre Lorde