Feminists agree that women have faced injustice, but they disagree about its roots and remedies. Several broad schools emerged, especially during the second wave. Many people combine elements of more than one.

Liberal feminism

Liberal feminism stresses equal rights and equal opportunity, pursued through legal and political reform. It runs from Wollstonecraft and Mill to Friedan and NOW. The aim is to remove barriers so that each woman can make her own choices. The political philosopher Susan Moller Okin, in Justice, Gender, and the Family (1989), pushed liberalism further, arguing that justice must extend into the family, since an unequal division of housework and childcare shapes women's opportunities everywhere else.

Criticisms: radical and socialist feminists say liberal feminism treats the male career as the norm and leaves deeper structures untouched. Conservatives say it underrates real differences between the sexes.

Radical feminism

Radical feminism holds that patriarchy, a system of male dominance running through all institutions, including family and sexuality, is the root of women's oppression. “Radical” here means going to the root. Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970) argued that relations between the sexes are structured by power, as in politics. Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex (1970) traced inequality to the burdens of pregnancy and childbirth. The legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon argued that the key question is not whether women are the same as or different from men, but how male dominance has shaped both.

Criticisms: some say it portrays women mainly as victims, treats men as a class too harshly, or generalizes from some women's experience to all.

Socialist and Marxist feminism

Friedrich Engels, in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), linked women's subordination to the rise of private property, which he described as a defeat of world historical importance for women. Socialist feminists focus on the connection between capitalism and women's position, especially unpaid domestic labor: cooking, cleaning and raising the next generation of workers. The Wages for Housework campaign, launched in 1972, drew attention to this work by demanding that it be paid.

Criticisms: male dominance existed long before capitalism, and socialist states did not free women from the double burden of paid work plus housework.

Difference feminism and care ethics

Difference feminism seeks not sameness with men but recognition for qualities and work associated with women. Its best known source is the psychologist Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice (1982). Gilligan challenged her colleague Lawrence Kohlberg, whose stages of moral development were built on studies of boys and men and ranked reasoning about care and relationships as less mature than reasoning about abstract rules and rights. She described a different voice, often heard among the women she studied, that reasons through responsibility and connection, and argued it was different rather than lesser.

Philosophers such as Nel Noddings developed this into care ethics, which grounds morality in caring relationships and human dependency rather than in rules between independent strangers.

Criticisms: later studies found small or no sex differences in moral reasoning, and some feminists warned that praising women as natural carers reinforces old stereotypes. Defenders reply that care ethics stands on its own merits whatever the sex differences, and Gilligan herself said the different voice was defined by theme, not by gender.

Other strands

There are many more: ecofeminism links the domination of women and of nature; postcolonial feminists question Western feminists speaking for women elsewhere; and Christian, Jewish and Muslim feminists reinterpret their own traditions from within.

Worked example: one problem, four lenses

Consider an invented couple, Dana and Sam, who both work full time at a factory. Dana earns less, partly because she turned down a promotion requiring night shifts. At home, Dana does most of the cooking, cleaning and childcare. How would each school of feminism read this situation?

• Liberal feminist. Check for discrimination: is Dana paid less for the same work? Is the promotion process fair? Support policies such as affordable childcare so night shifts are not impossible for parents. Following Okin, ask whether the unequal division of housework is just, since it limits Dana's options at work.
• Radical feminist. Look beneath the choices. Why is it assumed that Dana, not Sam, adjusts her career? The pattern repeats across millions of families because of a wider system of male dominance that shapes expectations from childhood.
• Socialist feminist. Notice that Dana's unpaid labor at home keeps the factory supplied with rested workers and raises the next generation at no cost to the employer. The problem lies in how capitalism depends on unpaid care, not only in this couple's arrangement.
• Care ethicist. Ask why care work is valued so little, by employers and by society. The aim might be not for Dana to work more like Sam, but for both to have time to care, and for caring to be honored and supported.

Now add a critic's lens. A conservative or libertarian might ask what Dana and Sam themselves want. If they chose this arrangement freely and are content, is it anyone else's business? Each feminist school has an answer, from respecting their choice to questioning how free it really was, which shows how much the schools differ.