This first volume presents the trajectory that leads from the «memorials of grievances», which collect the complaints of women against the abuses of patriarchal power, to the formulation of «the vindications». The latter give expression to the crisis of legitimacy of this power, as will become clear from the struggles for women's access to citizenship in the French Revolution, to the suffrage movement. The work of the existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, 'the second sex', will act as Hinge between the formulation of the final questions raised by this first phase and the opening of the new thematic areas typical of the so-called "second wave" of feminism .