The history of women's struggle to change their lives is a long one. The term “feminism”, which highlights their oppression specifically in relation to men, however, has been in use in English only since the campaigns for women's suffrage during the last decade of the nineteenth century. More recently, it has been the resurgence of women's movements in the late 1960s – the so-called “second wave” – that is usually associated with feminist strivings for women's equal rights, and freedom from oppressive constraints of sex, self-expression and autonomy. Most of the theoretical work of modern feminism has occurred during the period since this resurgence, and it is this work that is our focus in Understanding Feminism.

Second-wave feminisms emerged in the west in conjunction with the social contestations of student protest movements, anti-war movements and, in the United States, the struggle for civil rights for blacks. In this they echoed earlier challenges to women's subordination that characteristically reflected and radically extended wider social movements for change. British sociologist Sheila Rowbotham's Women in Movement (1992) traces some of these developments across the world during the period since the Enlightenment: from the struggles of women against the identification of human reason and progress with the reason and progress of men during the eighteenth-century revolutions in America and France, and their organization for women's rights during the movement to abolish slavery, to their mobilization on behalf of women in nineteenth-century social reform, the Russian revolution, the quest for Indian self-rule and Chinese communism.