Between roughly 1963 and 1980, women in the developed world renegotiated the basic terms of their participation in public and private life. Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique (1963) named the problem that had no name — the quiet desperation of the educated suburban housewife. The contraceptive pill (FDA-approved 1960) decoupled sex from procreation for the first time at scale. The Equal Pay Act (1963) and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act (1964) made workplace sex discrimination illegal. Roe v. Wade (1973) constitutionalized abortion access. Within a generation, the assumption that married women would not work, would not control their own reproduction, and would not run for office was overturned — in law if unevenly in practice.
Second-wave feminism's analytical move was to argue that what had been treated as private — housework, child-rearing, sexual relations, domestic violence — was actually political, a domain of organized male advantage that needed public scrutiny. 'The personal is political' became the slogan; Friedan co-founded the National Organization for Women in 1966 to press it institutionally, while a younger, more confrontational wing built the consciousness-raising groups that turned private grievance into shared analysis. The victories were substantial and fast: legal equality in employment, education (Title IX, 1972, which within four decades made women a majority of US university graduates), credit, and property; no-fault divorce; the criminalization of marital rape, state by state into the 1990s; the establishment of women's studies as an academic field; and sharp increases in women's share of the professions and, more slowly, elected office. Underwriting all of it was a structural shift — the entry of half the population into paid work, which remade the family economy and the labour market at once. The internal tensions were equally real: between liberal feminism, focused on legal equality, and radical feminism, focused on patriarchal structures; between white middle-class feminists and Black, working-class, and lesbian feminists — voices like bell hooks and the Combahee River Collective, which in 1977 named the interlocking of race, class, and sex that later hardened into 'intersectionality' — who argued the movement's priorities ignored their lives; and over pornography, sex work, and biology. The backlash — the rise of evangelical anti-feminism marshalled by Phyllis Schlafly, the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982, and the long erosion of abortion access culminating in Dobbs (2022) — has been continuous since about 1980.
Dobbs v. Jackson (2022) ended fifty years of constitutional abortion access in the United States and reopened what had seemed settled. The #MeToo movement (2017–) reopened the workplace harassment settlement. Current debates over reproductive rights, parental leave, gender identity, the gender pay gap, and the demographic implications of women's economic independence — including falling birth rates across the rich world — all run on second-wave categories. The work the second wave started is demonstrably not finished, and in some jurisdictions is being actively reversed.