Feminist ideas date as far back as 1792, when Mary Wollstonecraft’s essay A Vindication on the Rights of Women was published. In her essay, Wollstonecraft advocates for a better education of women and she also criticizes the portrayal of women as being in the perpetual state of childhood promoted in works such as Rousseau’s Emile, or On Education (1762). Women’s suffrage movement began in the first half of the eighteenth century both in Britain and the USA. Feminism defies the patriarchal social system, which leads to feminism being perceived as a threat to the social order. Additionally, feminism is interpreted negatively owing to the false assumptions that it represents radicalism against men and that feminists are manhaters. Research conducted with the aim of studying the feminists’ perception of masculinity disproves that feminists harbour negative feelings towards men, yet in the twenty-first century this is still the dominant assumption. To help explain the initial meaning of feminism and account for the reasons why negative connotations are still tied to the term feminism, this paper analyses two works from two different eras of feminism: Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists (2012). The uncanny similarities between these two texts highlight the unfortunate truth that despite centuries-long feminist struggle, women still face misogyny, discrimination, sexism, and ambivalent benevolence. Moreover, the paper shows that negative attitudes towards feminism result from the assumption that feminism is an attack on men, which is not the case because feminism defies the patriarchal social structure as an attempt to achieve equal rights for all persons regardless of gender.