Dianic Wicca, the strand most associated with women-only practice, was founded in Los Angeles in 1971 by Zsuzsanna Budapest, a Hungarian-born writer who established the Susan B. Anthony Coven Number One explicitly to combine Goddess worship with feminist politics, at a time when the wider women's movement was actively looking for religious forms that did not centre a male deity. Budapest wrote and circulated her own rituals rather than working from an existing Wiccan lineage, and the tradition she founded restricted membership to women from the outset, reasoning that ritual space built around female experience, menstruation, childbirth, the body's changes across life, required a room without men in it to do that work honestly.
The restriction has become the subject of a long and unresolved argument inside modern Paganism, sharpened considerably as gender identity politics have developed since Budapest's founding generation. Budapest herself maintained into her later years that Dianic ritual should remain restricted to those born female, a position transgender-inclusive Pagan groups and a number of younger Dianic practitioners have rejected as excluding trans women from a Goddess tradition they hold should welcome them, a dispute that has split covens and produced competing organisations rather than a single resolution. Other feminist spirituality that grew from the same period, women's seder tables within Judaism and women-led ritual within Christian feminist theology among them, generally did not adopt the same restriction, which makes Dianic Wicca's membership rule distinctive even within the broader feminist religious movement it belongs to.