First wave feminism is usually defined as the wave of reform that spanned the entire nineteenth century, beginning with late-eighteenth-century calls for female emancipation such as Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, gaining momentum with the Seneca Falls Convention on the rights of women in 1848, and culminating in the suffrage campaigns that won women in the United States the right to vote in 1919. Dress reform was an important focus of first wave feminist activism. Amelia Bloomer, for example, argued in the 1840s that long skirts and cumbersome undergarments were
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