Second-wave feminism

Second-wave feminism was a wave of feminist activism across the Western world from the early 1960s to the early 1980s. Building on the earlier campaigns that had won women the vote, it widened the debate to work, family, sexuality, reproductive rights and violence against women, aiming at equality in practice rather than only in law. Its legacy includes equal-pay and anti-discrimination laws, rape crisis centres and women's refuges, and lasting changes in attitudes to women's roles.

After the Second World War, a post-war boom, a baby boom and a move to the suburbs idealised domestic life, especially in the United States. Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949), which argued that male-centred society treated women as the "other", appeared in English in 1953. The contraceptive pill, approved in the United States in 1960 and available from 1961, made it easier for women to plan careers.

The movement is usually dated to 1963 and the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, which described the frustration of educated housewives as "The Problem That Has No Name", and President John F. Kennedy's Commission on the Status of Women, led by Eleanor Roosevelt, reported on inequality. Legal gains followed quickly: the Equal Pay Act of 1963, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Supreme Court's Griswold v. Connecticut ruling of 1965. In 1966 Friedan and others founded the National Organization for Women (NOW), with Friedan as its first president. The journalist Gloria Steinem, who in 1963 had exposed the treatment of waitresses at the Playboy Club, became one of the movement's most influential figures.

A more radical wing grew out of the civil rights movement and the student New Left, where women found themselves sidelined. In 1965 Casey Hayden and Mary King compared assumptions of male superiority with those of white supremacy in their paper "Sex and Caste". After women's demands were brushed aside at a political conference in Chicago in 1967, Jo Freeman and Shulamith Firestone helped form the city's first women's liberation group. The journalist Martha Lear popularised the term "second wave" in a New York Times Magazine article in March 1968. Consciousness-raising groups, feminist bookshops and presses, and more than 500 feminist periodicals published between 1968 and 1974 spread the ideas, and women's studies courses entered American universities from 1970.

Further American gains included Title IX of 1972 on equality in education, the Supreme Court decisions in Reed v. Reed (1971) and Roe v. Wade (1973), the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 and the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978. The 1977 National Women's Conference in Houston adopted a 26-point National Plan of Action. The main defeats were President Nixon's veto of a national childcare bill and the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment, which in 1982 fell three states short of ratification.

The movement was international. In Australia, a 1965 protest at the Regatta Hotel in Brisbane challenged a ban on women drinking in public bars. In the Netherlands a 1967 essay, "The Discontent of Women", is often seen as the starting point, and in Sweden eight women founded Group 8 in Stockholm in 1968. Members of the Irish Women's Liberation Movement took the "Contraceptive Train" to Belfast in 1971 and returned with condoms, then illegal in the Republic. In Spain feminists organised under Franco's dictatorship, while in Turkey and Israel a second wave began only in the 1980s.

Black feminists such as Florynce Kennedy stressed the links between racism and male dominance, and Audre Lorde argued that a single vision of "sisterhood" ignored race, class and sexuality in a movement whose public voice was largely white and middle-class. In 1989 Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term "intersectionality". Many historians date the end of the second wave to the early 1980s, when the "feminist sex wars" over pornography and sexuality divided activists. A third wave emerged in the early 1990s.

Our 1960 and 1985 maps show the world in which the movement rose and peaked, including the United States, where it was most visible, and Australia.