Throughout the twentieth century, the feminist movement has been made up of shifting and more or less closely connected groups, united by the conviction that women are unfairly disadvantaged by comparison with men. While this minimal consensus contributes to an understanding of feminism as an enduring position, it exists alongside great internal diversity. The normative conception of disadvantage around which consensus revolves stands in need of analysis and has in fact been interpreted in strikingly divergent ways, giving rise to a variety of feminisms, some of them with conflicting goals and theoretical commitments. Feminism is therefore internally complex, but the divisions within it can be traced to enduring disputes and differences.

One of these sources of conflict concerns the relation between theory and practice. During the first quarter of the century, feminism gained much of its identity from a series of political campaigns aimed at improving the lives of at least some women, and in many quarters it has continued to represent itself as a practical programme striving for social and political reform. Like any movement which challenges the status quo, it depends on a critical kind of theorising – on an ability to expose the limitations or inconsistencies of established principles in order to undermine the practices that flow from them. Within feminism, however, critical theorising of this sort has sometimes developed a degree of autonomy that has separated it from practical politics, and this in turn has led to divisions between feminists concerned with immediate political change, and those with more abstract philosophical interests (Barrett 1980, pp. 201–19; hooks 1984, pp. 17–31; Yeatman 1994, pp. 42–53). But although the balance between these two preoccupations varies, they are rarely completely disjoined.