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This article studies the dynamics of women’s movements, composed of failures and new beginnings. Ute Gerhard recalls the birth of the 1970s movement which, in West Germany especially, wanted to be radical and multiform ? with the weaknesses and the forces that such a mode of organization supposes. The fall of the Wall, then the reunification generated tensions between feminists in the West and the East, who were marked by different experiences, but 1989 also opened new prospects on a worldwide scale for gender policies. Looking beyond the declines noted in more than one country, movements called “third wave feminism” offered a new resonance to the fact that human rights are also women’s rights.