1. The Core Claim
Second-wave feminism’s core claim is that the formal legal equality achieved by first-wave suffragism was insufficient: women’s subordination was reproduced through domestic labour, sexual violence, reproductive control, and the cultural and psychological internalisation of inferiority. ‘The personal is political’ — the movement’s defining slogan — argued that the private sphere of home, family, and sexuality was not outside politics but was its most intimate terrain. Its key texts include Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970), Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (1970), Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970), and the socialist feminist tradition represented by Juliet Mitchell’s Woman’s Estate (1971).
2. Origins and Development
Second-wave feminism emerged in the 1960s from two main sources. First, the women’s liberation movement drew on the experience of women activists in the civil rights and New Left movements, who found that even in ostensibly radical organisations they were expected to make coffee and sleep with male leaders rather than lead. Second, Friedan’s analysis of ‘the problem that has no name’ — the dissatisfaction of educated middle-class women confined to domestic life — reached a mass audience and gave the movement its first popular manifesto. The founding of the National Organisation for Women (1966) and consciousness-raising groups across the US and Europe institutionalised the movement.
Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), which argued that ‘woman’ was not a biological given but a social construction (‘One is not born, but rather becomes, woman’), provided the philosophical foundation. The movement diversified through the 1970s into liberal feminism (equal rights, workplace equality), socialist feminism (patriarchy as intertwined with capitalism), radical feminism (male dominance as the primary form of oppression), and lesbian feminism.
3. Political Application
Second-wave feminism’s political achievements were substantial: abortion rights (Roe v. Wade, 1973; earlier gains in the UK), equal pay legislation, anti-discrimination law, the creation of rape crisis centres and domestic violence shelters, the transformation of university curricula through Women’s Studies, and the fundamental challenge to the legal and cultural assumption that rape within marriage was not a crime. In the cultural sphere, the movement changed what could be said, depicted, and demanded across the entire range of social life.
4. Consequences and Failures
The movement’s internal conflicts were real and productive but also limiting. The ‘sex wars’ of the 1980s — between anti-pornography feminists (Dworkin, MacKinnon) and pro-sex feminists — consumed significant political energy. The movement was criticised, primarily by Black feminists including bell hooks and the Combahee River Collective, for centring the experience of white, middle-class women and neglecting the intersection of race, class, and gender. This critique gave rise to intersectionality (Kimberlé Crenshaw, 1989), which became the theoretical framework for third-wave feminism. The backlash from the Reagan-Thatcher era, which reframed feminism as anti-family, eroded its popular support.
5. Legacy
Second-wave feminism transformed the legal and cultural landscape of Western societies in ways that are now so deeply institutionalised as to be largely invisible. Its theoretical legacy — the concepts of patriarchy, the male gaze, the social construction of gender, reproductive rights as human rights — shaped subsequent feminist theory and practice. The gains around abortion rights have proved more fragile than assumed, as the US Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision demonstrated. The question of how feminist gains are sustained and extended in the face of organised backlash is the central challenge of contemporary feminist politics.
6. Key Figures
- Simone de Beauvoir — the philosophical foundation of second-wave feminism
- Simone Weil — earlier tradition of radical engagement with oppression
- Rosa Luxemburg — socialist feminist precursor
7. Historiographical Debates
- Decolonisation — the intersection of gender and anticolonial politics
8. Podcast Episodes
9. Cross-Links
- Existentialism — de Beauvoir as bridge between existentialism and feminism
- Black Power — the intersection of race and gender politics
- Postcolonialism — feminist postcolonial theory
- Anarchism — shared anti-authoritarian traditions
