Social justice feminism was a movement started by Florence Kelley in the nineteenth century and continued by her protege Molly Dewson in the 1930s. Social justice feminists such as Rose Schneiderman and Mary Anderson strove to pass labor legislation for women to pave the way for protections for all workers. Historian Dorothy Sue Cobble writes in "Halving the Double Day" that activist Katherine Pollak Ellickson "...and many other labor women of her generation composed the core of America's forgotten wave of feminism: the social justice feminism that was the dominant wing of the women's movement from the 1920s to the 1960s."
More recently, activists and writers such as Linda Burnham of the Women of Color Resource Center have proposed an expanded form of social justice feminism that crosses "lines of race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, class, sexual orientation, physical ability and age."