The term describes a pattern, not every feminist who is white. It names feminism that centers the concerns of white, middle-class women and treats them as universal, while ignoring how race, class, disability and immigration status shape other women's lives. It can also mean seeking equality with white men within existing systems rather than challenging those systems.
The pattern has a long US history. Some white suffragists opposed the 15th Amendment in 1870 because it enfranchised Black men before women. At the 1913 suffrage parade in Washington, organizers asked Black women to march at the back, and Ida B. Wells refused. After the 19th Amendment in 1920, most Black women in the South remained blocked from voting by Jim Crow laws.
Black feminists named these exclusions. The Combahee River Collective's 1977 statement and Kimberlé Crenshaw's work on intersectionality offered a broader frame. In 2021, Rafia Zakaria's book Against White Feminism examined the pattern in global aid and activism. The critique matters because a movement that leaves out women of color can win gains that do not reach them, from pay equity to reproductive rights.