History of Feminism

Welcome to the fourth wave of feminism. This movement follows the first-wave campaign for votes for women, which reached its height 100 years ago, the second wave women's liberation movement that blazed through the 1970s and 80s, and the third wave declared by Rebecca Walker, Alice Walker's daughter, and others, in the early 1990s. That shift from second to third wave took many important forms, but often felt broadly generational, with women defining their work as distinct from their mothers'. What's happening now feels like something new again. It's defined by technology: tools that are allowing women to build a strong, popular, reactive movement online. Just how popular is sometimes slightly startling. Girlguiding UK introduced a campaigning and activism badge this year and a summer survey of Mumsnet users found 59% consider themselves feminists, double those who don't. Bates says that, for her, modern feminism is defined by pragmatism, inclusion and humour. "I feel like it is really down-to-earth, really open," she says, "and it's very much about people saying: 'Here is something that doesn't make sense to me, I thought women were equal, I'm going to do something about it.'"

They demonstrated outside the Sun headquarters, organised by Yas Necati, 17, in a protest against Page 3, the biggest image of a woman that appears each day in the country's biggest-selling newspaper – a teenager or twentysomething smiling sunnily in her pants. Necati, a student at sixth-form college, laughed shyly as she told me about the mocked-up pages she has sent Sun editor David Dinsmore, suggesting feminist comedians, artists and writers to appear on the page instead. One of her favourites showed a woman flashing bright blue armpit hair. The the No More Page 3 petition started by Lucy-Anne Holmes, 37, in August 2012,, has been signed by 128,000 people.

Ikamara Larasi, 24, started heading a campaign to address racist and sexist stereotypes in music videos, just as students began banning summer hit Blurred Lines on many UK campuses, in response to its sexist lyrics. Jinan Younis, 18, co-founded a feminist society at school, experienced online abuse from some boys in her peer group – "feminism and rape are both ridiculously tiring," they wrote – and wasn't deterred. Instead, she wrote an article about it that went viral. When I spoke to her in September, she was juggling shifts in a call centre, babysitting for neighbours, preparing for university, while helping out with a campaign to encourage feminist societies in schools countrywide. UK Feminista, an organisation set up in 2010 to support feminist activists, has had 100 people contact them this year, wanting to start their own school group. In late August, their national day of action against lads' mags included 19 protests across the UK.

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Southall Black Sisters protested outside the offices of the UK Border Agency against racist immigration laws and propaganda – including the notorious "Go Home" vans. They also marched in solidarity with protesters in Delhi, who began a wave of demonstrations following the death of a woman who was gang raped in the city last December, protests against rape culture that soon spread to Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The African LGBTI Out & Proud Diamond Group demonstrated opposite Downing Street after allegations emerged of the sexual abuse of women held at Yarl's Wood immigration removal centre

With so many pressing issues, feminists are fighting on several fronts, and the campaigns of the past few years have often been started by individuals or small groups, who have responded to issues they feel strongly about, and can usefully address. Holmes and Necati both grew up with the Sun at home, which has shaped their opposition to Page 3. Criado-Perez was outraged by all-male discussions of teenage pregnancy and breast cancer treatment on the Today programme, so set up a database of female experts, The Women's Room, with Catherine Smith in 2012. In the first three days of that year, seven women were killed by men, and Karen Ingala Smith, chief executive of the charity Nia, started counting the toll of misogynist murders. Her Counting Dead Women project puts names and stories to the statistics we often hear, and is asking the government to take an integrated approach to understanding violence against women.