ABSTRACT
Feminist thought is an increasingly important component of cultural studies. The first wave of feminism can be said to have begun at the end of the eighteenth century with the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women, published in 1792. It also developed in the later decades of the nineteenth century in Britain and the United States. A so-called 'third wave' of feminism started developing, as a social and political movement, in the sixties and seventies, though it has roots in early feminist thought and actions as early as the 1850's, when it principally focused on gaining equal rights for women. By women as a category of analysis, Janet Radway refers to the crucial assumption that all of us of the same gender, across classes and cultures, are somehow socially constituted as a homogenous group identified prior to the process of analysis.
