The exclusive focus on the Goddess sets Dianic Wicca apart from the duotheistic mainstream of the craft and links it to the wider current of feminist witchcraft. Its women-centred character has been a defining feature and, at times, a subject of debate within the broader Pagan community. The affirmation expresses a deliberate theological and social choice, to make the Goddess the whole of the divine, and connects Dianic practice to the movement that understands witchcraft as feminist spirituality.
Budapest, a Hungarian-American witch who emigrated to the United States in 1956, founded the first Dianic coven, the Susan B. Anthony Coven No. 1, in Los Angeles in 1971, explicitly linking her practice to the feminist movement of the period. A related but doctrinally distinct feminist tradition, Reclaiming, founded in San Francisco in 1979 by Starhawk and others, also centres feminist and Goddess spirituality but has positioned itself as explicitly trans-inclusive and non-hierarchical, illustrating that feminist Pagan witchcraft has developed at least two significant and, on the question of gender boundaries, opposed lineages rather than a single unified position. Both traditions nonetheless share roots in the wider second-wave feminist spirituality movement of the 1970s, which read goddess-centred religion as a deliberate corrective to millennia of male-dominated theology and clergy.