The conventional narrative of feminism's origins reads like a map with a single point of departure: Seneca Falls, the suffragettes, Simone de Beauvoir. From this European and North American epicenter, feminist ideas supposedly radiated outward to the rest of the world, awakening women elsewhere to their oppression. This diffusionist account has shaped both popular understanding and scholarly frameworks for generations.

Yet this narrative collapses under serious comparative scrutiny. When we examine the historical record across multiple societies, we find not a single origin point but a constellation of feminist thought and practice emerging through complex global interactions. Women in Qing China, Ottoman Egypt, colonial India, and early republican Latin America were articulating sophisticated critiques of gender hierarchies—often drawing on indigenous intellectual traditions that predated contact with European feminist movements.

What becomes visible through a connected histories approach is something far more interesting than simple diffusion: feminist modernity emerged through multidirectional exchanges, where ideas traveled in unexpected directions and colonial encounters served as catalysts that provoked new syntheses. Understanding this global genealogy matters not merely for historical accuracy but for grasping how feminist thought continues to evolve through transnational dialogue rather than emanation from a presumed center.

The assumption that feminist consciousness required Western enlightenment to spark it into existence fundamentally misreads the historical record. Across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, women developed sophisticated analyses of gender relations drawing on local intellectual resources—analyses that often preceded or developed independently of European feminist influence.

Consider the Chinese case. By the late Qing dynasty, women writers like He-Yin Zhen were articulating a radical feminist theory rooted in anarchist principles, arguing that women's liberation required the abolition of both capitalism and the family system. Her 1907 essays drew on classical Chinese philosophy while engaging with global socialist thought, producing analyses of gendered labor exploitation that anticipated arguments Western feminists would make decades later.

In the Ottoman Empire, women's journals proliferated from the 1860s onward, with writers like Fatma Aliye Topuz developing feminist critiques that engaged Islamic jurisprudential traditions. These thinkers didn't simply reject or accept religious frameworks but worked within them, producing internally coherent arguments for women's education, legal reform, and public participation that resonated precisely because they spoke the intellectual language of their societies.

Latin American feminist genealogies complicate the picture further. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's seventeenth-century defenses of women's intellectual capacity drew on both Scholastic philosophy and indigenous Mesoamerican traditions of learned women. By the nineteenth century, writers across the region were developing feminist thought that synthesized liberal republicanism, Catholic social teaching, and indigenous worldviews in ways that produced distinctly regional feminisms.

What these cases reveal is not merely that feminism had multiple origins but that indigenous intellectual traditions provided generative resources for feminist critique. The question was never whether women outside Europe could think critically about gender—they always had—but how their thinking engaged with, transformed, and sometimes rejected ideas circulating through increasingly connected global networks.

Takeaway

Feminist consciousness didn't require Western enlightenment to exist—women across the world developed sophisticated gender critiques by working within their own intellectual traditions, not by abandoning them.

Colonialism's relationship to feminism presents a profound paradox: the same systems that oppressed colonized peoples often catalyzed new forms of feminist organizing. This wasn't because colonizers introduced feminist consciousness—as we've seen, that existed already—but because the colonial situation created specific conditions of possibility that reshaped how gender politics operated.

The mechanism worked through several dynamics. Colonial administrators frequently justified imperial rule by pointing to gender practices in colonized societies—sati in India, foot-binding in China, veiling in the Middle East—constructing a narrative of European gender enlightenment versus native barbarism. This discourse forced colonized intellectuals to engage the 'woman question' as a matter of collective dignity and national identity.

The results were complex and contradictory. In Egypt, Qasim Amin's 1899 The Liberation of Women argued for gender reform partly by internalizing colonial critiques, producing what Leila Ahmed has called 'colonial feminism.' Yet simultaneously, women like Huda Sha'arawi developed feminist positions that rejected both patriarchal tradition and colonial paternalism, insisting that Egyptian women would liberate themselves on their own terms.

Colonial education systems, designed to produce compliant subjects, often backfired spectacularly. Schools for girls across Asia and Africa created new networks of educated women who turned their learning against both indigenous patriarchy and colonial domination. In India, organizations like the All India Women's Conference (founded 1927) explicitly linked feminist demands to anticolonial nationalism, rejecting the claim that women's liberation required Western tutelage.

This dynamic reveals something crucial about how modernity itself operates: it emerges not through simple imposition but through creative responses to domination. Colonial feminism—whether embraced, rejected, or transformed—became a catalyst for debates that produced distinctly postcolonial feminist traditions. The colonial encounter didn't create feminist consciousness; it restructured the terrain on which existing feminist traditions evolved.

Takeaway

Colonial power didn't introduce feminism to the colonized world—but by forcing the 'woman question' into debates about national identity and resistance, it transformed existing feminist traditions into new political forms.

The conventional image of international feminism depicts ideas flowing from metropole to periphery: European and American women's organizations benevolently extending their insights to women elsewhere. The actual historical networks reveal a far more multidirectional circulation, where feminists from different societies engaged in genuine intellectual exchange that transformed movements in multiple directions simultaneously.

Consider the Pan-Pacific Women's Conference held in Honolulu in 1928. Delegates from Australia, China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and the United States gathered not as teachers and students but as interlocutors wrestling with shared questions from different positions. Japanese delegates challenged Western feminists' assumptions about family structure; Chinese participants articulated connections between feminist and anti-imperialist struggle that American women found unsettling. The conference produced not consensus but productive friction.

These transnational networks operated through multiple channels: international conferences, traveling lecturers, translated texts, and—crucially—the movements of women themselves as migrants, exiles, and students. When Pandita Ramabai traveled from India to the United States in the 1880s, she didn't simply absorb American feminist ideas. Her critiques of American racism and class inequality challenged her hosts, while her understanding of caste and gender transformation offered analytical frameworks American feminists had never considered.

The circulation was genuinely reciprocal. Egyptian feminist Doria Shafik corresponded with Simone de Beauvoir; Latin American feminists at 1920s conferences influenced European socialist women's movements; African American women like Ida B. Wells built connections with anti-imperial movements across the colonized world. These networks produced what we might call feminist internationalism—not the export of Western feminism but the emergence of shared struggles through dialogue across difference.

Recognizing this multidirectionality fundamentally reframes how we understand feminist modernity. Rather than a single movement spreading outward, we see multiple movements emerging in relation to each other, each transformed by the encounter. The 'global' in global feminism isn't a destination ideas eventually reach but the very condition under which modern feminisms developed from the beginning.

Takeaway

Global feminist networks weren't about Western ideas flowing outward—they were multidirectional exchanges where women from different societies challenged each other's assumptions and built shared frameworks through productive friction.

Reframing feminism's origins as genuinely global transforms more than our historical understanding—it restructures how we think about feminist possibility today. If modernity itself emerged through connected interactions rather than diffusion from a single center, then no single tradition holds the master key to gender liberation.

This doesn't collapse into relativism or deny the specific violence of colonial and patriarchal systems. Rather, it insists that the resources for challenging those systems exist within multiple traditions, that the work of feminist transformation happens through translation and dialogue rather than simple adoption.

The ongoing vitality of feminist thought depends on recognizing this global genealogy—not to celebrate cosmopolitan connection as an end in itself, but to understand that feminist futures will emerge, as they always have, through the difficult work of building solidarity across profound difference.