women's liberation essay

50 Years Ago, Gloria Steinem Wrote an Essay for TIME About Her Hopes for Women’s Futures. Here’s What She’d Add Today

I n the half-century since I wrote the essay below, as part of a cover story on “The Politics of Sex,” there has been some definite progress. “Women’s issues” are no longer in a silo but are understood as fundamental to everything. For instance, the single biggest determinant of whether a country is violent, or will use military violence against another country, is not poverty, natural resources, religion or even degree of democracy; it is violence against women . And since racial separation can’t be perpetuated in the long run without controlling reproduction—and thus women’s bodies— racism and sexism are intertwined and can only be uprooted together.

A belief in equality , without division by sex or race, is now held by a huge majority in public–opinion polls. But a stubborn minority of Americans feel deprived of the unearned privilege of that old hierarchy and are in revolt. The time of greatest danger comes after a victory, and that’s where we are now. Many of the predictions of my 50-year-old essay about the future hold up, but there are a few lessons I’ve learned since then (including to negotiate a writing fee beforehand, since my agent later told me I was paid less than male contributors).

I won’t be around when these words are read 50 years from now, but I have faith in you who will be.

Steinem is a writer and feminist organizer

What It Would Be Like If Women Win

By Gloria Steinem Originally published: Aug. 31, 1970

Seldom do utopias pass from dream to reality, but it is often an illuminating exercise to predict what could happen if they did. The following very personal and partisan speculations on how the world might be different if Women’s Lib had its way were written for TIME by Gloria Steinem, a contributing editor of New York magazine, whose journalistic curiosity ranges from show business to Democratic politics. Miss Steinem admits to being not only a critical observer but a concerned advocate of the feminist revolt.

Any change is fearful, especially one affecting both politics and sex roles, so let me begin these utopian speculations with a fact. To break the ice.

Women don’t want to exchange places with men. Male chauvinists, science-fiction writers and comedians may favor that idea for its shock value, but psychologists say it is a fantasy based on ruling-class ego and guilt. Men assume that women want to imitate them, which is just what white people assumed about blacks. An assumption so strong that it may convince the second-class group of the need to imitate, but for both women and blacks that stage has passed. Guilt produces the question: What if they could treat us as we have treated them?

That is not our goal. But we do want to change the economic system to one more based on merit. In Women’s Lib Utopia, there will be free access to good jobs — and decent pay for the bad ones women have been performing all along, including housework. *Increased skilled labor might lead to a four-hour workday , and higher wages would encourage further mechanization of repetitive jobs now kept alive by cheap labor.

*Gloria Steinem in 2020: As people look at screens more than at one another, the opposite has happened; the workday never ends

*With women as half the country’s elected representatives, and a woman President once in a while , the country’s machismo problems would be greatly reduced. The old-fashioned idea that manhood depends on violence and victory is, after all, an important part of our troubles in the streets, and in Viet Nam. I’m not saying that women leaders would eliminate violence. We are not more moral than men; we are only uncorrupted by power so far. When we do acquire power, we might turn out to have an equal impulse toward aggression. Even now, Margaret Mead believes that women fight less often but more fiercely than men, because women are not taught the rules of the war game and fight only when cornered. But for the next 50 years or so, women in politics will be very valuable by tempering the idea of manhood into something less aggressive and better suited to this crowded, post-atomic planet. Consumer protection and children’s rights, for instance, might get more legislative attention.

*Gloria Steinem in 2020: With Trump as a backlash to Obama, almost any woman President would be a relief

Men will have to give up ruling-class privileges, but in return they will no longer be the only ones to support the family, get drafted, bear the strain of power and responsibility. Freud to the contrary, anatomy is not destiny, at least not for more than nine months at a time. In Israel, women are drafted, and some have gone to war. In England, more men type and run switchboards. In India and Israel, a woman rules. In Sweden, both parents take care of the children. In this country, come Utopia, men and women won’t reverse roles; they will be free to choose according to individual talents and preferences.

If role reform sounds sexually unsettling, think how it will change the sexual hypocrisy we have now. No more sex arranged on the barter system, with women pretending interest, and men never sure whether they are loved for themselves or for the security few women can get any other way. (Married or not, for sexual reasons or social ones, most women still find it second nature to Uncle-Tom.) No more men who are encouraged to spend a lifetime living with inferiors; with housekeepers, or dependent creatures who are still children. No more domineering wives, emasculating women, and “Jewish mothers,” all of whom are simply human beings with all their normal ambition and drive confined to the home. No more unequal partnerships that eventually doom love and sex.

In order to produce that kind of confidence and individuality, child rearing will train according to talent. Little girls will no longer be surrounded by air-tight, self-fulfilling prophecies of natural passivity, lack of ambition and objectivity, inability to exercise power, and dexterity (so long as special aptitude for jobs requiring patience and dexterity is confined to poorly paid jobs; brain surgery is for males).

Schools and universities will help to break down traditional sex roles, even when parents will not. *Half the teachers will be men , a rarity now at preschool and elementary levels; girls will not necessarily serve cookies or boys hoist up the flag. Athletic teams will be picked only by strength and skill. Sexually segregated courses like auto mechanics and home economics will be taken by boys and girls together. New courses in sexual politics will explore female subjugation as the model for political oppression, and women’s history will be an academic staple, along with black history, at least until the white-male-oriented textbooks are integrated and rewritten.

*Gloria Steinem in 2020: Not until we start paying public-school teachers as much as every other democracy does

As for the American child’s classic problem—too much mother, too little father—that would be cured by an equalization of parental responsibility. Free nurseries, school lunches, family cafeterias built into every housing complex, service companies that will do household cleaning chores in a regular, businesslike way, and more responsibility by the entire community for the children: all these will make it possible for both mother and father to work, and to have equal leisure time with the children at home. For parents of very young children, however, a special job category, created by Government and unions, would allow such parents a shorter work day.

The revolution would not take away the option of being a housewife. A woman who prefers to be her husband’s housekeeper and/or hostess would receive a percentage of his pay determined by the domestic relations courts. If divorced, she might be eligible for a pension fund, and for a job-training allowance. *Or a divorce could be treated the same way that the dissolution of a business partnership is now.

*Gloria Steinem in 2020: Once domestic labor is accorded the same value as salaried work

If these proposals seem farfetched, consider Sweden, where most of them are already in effect. Sweden is not yet a working Women’s Lib model; most of the role-reform programs began less than a decade ago, and are just beginning to take hold. But that country is so far ahead of us in recognizing the problem that Swedish statements on sex and equality sound like bulletins from the moon.

Our marriage laws, for instance, are so reactionary that Women’s Lib groups want couples to take a compulsory written exam on the law, as for a driver’s license, before going through with the wedding. A man has alimony and wifely debts to worry about, but a woman may lose so many of her civil rights that in the U.S. now, in important legal ways, she becomes a child again. In some states, she cannot sign credit agreements, use her maiden name, incorporate a business, or establish a legal residence of her own. Being a wife, according to most social and legal definitions, is still a 19th century thing.

Assuming, however, that these blatantly sexist laws are abolished or reformed, that job discrimination is forbidden, that parents share financial responsibility for each other and the children, and that sexual relationships become partnerships of equal adults (some pretty big assumptions), then marriage will probably go right on. Men and women are, after all, physically complementary. When society stops encouraging men to be exploiters and women to be parasites, they may turn out to be more complementary in emotion as well. Women’s Lib is not trying to destroy the American family. A look at the statistics on divorce—plus the way in which old people are farmed out with strangers and young people flee the home—shows the destruction that has already been done. Liberated women are just trying to point out the disaster, and build compassionate and practical alternatives from the ruins.

What will exist is a variety of alternative life-styles. Since the population explosion dictates that childbearing be kept to a minimum, parents-and-children will be only one of many “families”: couples, age groups, working groups, mixed communes, blood-related clans, class groups, creative groups. Single women will have the right to stay single without ridicule, without the attitudes now betrayed by “spinster” and “bachelor.” Lesbians or homosexuals will no longer be denied legally binding marriages, complete with mutual-support agreements and inheritance rights. Paradoxically, the number of homosexuals may get smaller. With fewer overpossessive mothers and fewer fathers who hold up an impossibly cruel or perfectionist idea of manhood, boys will be less likely to be denied or reject their identity as males.

*Gloria Steinem in 2020: I would cut this line, since it’s now more clear that we are born whoever we are.

Changes that now seem small may get bigger:

MEN’S LIB. Men now suffer from more diseases due to stress, heart attacks, ulcers, a higher suicide rate, greater difficulty living alone, less adaptability to change and, in general, a shorter life span than women. There is some scientific evidence that what produces physical problems is not work itself, but the inability to choose which work, and how much. With women bearing half the financial responsibility, and with the idea of “masculine” jobs gone, men might well feel freer and live longer.

RELIGION. Protestant women are already becoming ordained ministers; radical nuns are carrying out liturgical functions that were once the exclusive property of priests; Jewish women are rewriting prayers—particularly those that Orthodox Jews recite every morning thanking God they are not female. In the future, the church will become an area of equal participation by women. This means, of course, that organized religion will have to give up one of its great historical weapons: sexual repression. In most structured faiths, from Hinduism through Roman Catholicism, the status of women went down as the position of priests ascended. Male clergy implied, if they did not teach, that women were unclean, unworthy and sources of ungodly temptation, in order to remove them as rivals for the emotional forces of men. Full participation of women in ecclesiastical life might involve certain changes in theology, such as, for instance, a radical redefinition of sin.

LITERARY PROBLEMS. Revised sex roles will outdate more children’s books than civil rights ever did. Only a few children had the problem of a Little Black Sambo , but most have the male-female stereotypes of “Dick and Jane.” A boomlet of children’s books about mothers who work has already begun, and liberated parents and editors are beginning to pressure for change in the textbook industry. Fiction writing will change more gradually, but romantic novels with wilting heroines and swashbuckling heroes will be reduced to historical value. Or perhaps to the sadomasochist trade. ( Marjorie Morningstar , a romantic novel that took the ’50s by storm, has already begun to seem as unreal as its ’20s predecessor, The Sheik .) As for the literary plots that turn on forced marriages or horrific abortions, they will seem as dated as Prohibition stories. Free legal abortions and free birth control will force writers to give up pregnancy as the deus ex machina .

MANNERS AND FASHION. Dress will be more androgynous, with class symbols becoming more important than sexual ones. Pro-or anti-Establishment styles may already be more vital than who is wearing them. Hardhats are just as likely to rough up antiwar girls as antiwar men in the street, and police understand that women are just as likely to be pushers or bombers. Dances haven’t required that one partner lead the other for years, anyway. Chivalry will transfer itself to those who need it, or deserve respect: old people, admired people, anyone with an armload of packages. Women with normal work identities will be less likely to attach their whole sense of self to youth and appearance; thus there will be fewer nervous breakdowns when the first wrinkles appear. Lighting cigarettes and other treasured niceties will become gestures of mutual affection. “I like to be helped on with my coat,” says one Women’s Lib worker, “but not if it costs me $2,000 a year in salary.”

For those with nostalgia for a simpler past, here is a word of comfort. Anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer studied the few peaceful human tribes and discovered one common characteristic: sex roles were not polarized. Differences of dress and occupation were at a minimum. Society, in other words, was not using sexual blackmail as a way of getting women to do cheap labor, or men to be aggressive.

*Thus Women’s Lib may achieve a more peaceful society on the way toward its other goals. That is why the Swedish government considers reform to bring about greater equality in the sex roles one of its most important concerns. As Prime Minister Olof Palme explained in a widely ignored speech delivered in Washington this spring: “It is human beings we shall emancipate. In Sweden today, if a politician should declare that the woman ought to have a different role from man’s, he would be regarded as something from the Stone Age.” In other words, the most radical goal of the movement is egalitarianism.

If Women’s Lib wins, perhaps we all do.

*Gloria Steinem in 2020: The relationship between violence against females and all violence other than self-defense should inform our foreign policy

This article is part of 100 Women of the Year , TIME’s list of the most influential women of the past century. Read more about the project , explore the 100 covers and sign up for our Inside TIME newsletter for more.

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A Brief History of Women’s Liberation Movements in America

Alix kates shulman and honor moore map genealogies  of feminist activism.

During the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, feminist activism—richly diverse both in the women involved and in its aims, tone, and strategies—exploded in the United States and around the world, forever changing society by expanding the rights, opportunities, and identities available to women. And at the center of everything that the women’s liberation movement achieved was the writing that both forged and propelled it, writing that continues to inspire, challenge, educate, and even offend.

Yet, by the mid-1980s, despite occasional victories, the feminist movement had become so distorted and vilified that the tag “feminist” was rejected by many women who had welcomed the changes in their lives the movement produced. At the end of World War II—and even as recently as 1970, as detailed by Gene Boyer in her essay, excerpted in this volume, “Are Woman Equal Under the Law?”—a husband’s forcing sex on his wife was not legally considered rape. In some states, unless there was a title establishing the wife’s ownership, all her purchases belonged to her husband, even if bought entirely with her own earnings, and a married woman could not make a contract or obtain a credit card without her husband’s signature.

In many states a mother who daily lifted and carried her toddler could be barred from any job that required lifting more than 25 pounds, or, in California, newspaper employment ads were segregated by sex, and sometimes also by race. There were no policewomen or female firefighters and hardly any women broadcasters—female voices were considered too “shrill.” In fact, any job that required authority was in practice off limits to women: most law and medical schools had female quotas, and women were excluded from the clergy of most religions. Women made on average 59 cents for every dollar a man made for similar work, with the largest gender pay gap for women of color. All hurricanes bore female names, women being considered the creators of chaos, and in 1970 a prominent physician famously declared on TV that women were unfit for high office due to “raging hormonal imbalances of the lunar cycle.”

The revolution began quietly in 1946, when a French philosopher in her thirties named Simone de Beauvoir began to write about what it meant to be a woman. When her book Le Deuxième Sexe ( The Second Sex ), which criticized all Western thought for positioning woman as Other and man as default, was published in France in 1949, it became a sensation, and, given its stance on religion and sexuality, was banned by the Vatican.

When The Second Sex: Woman as Other was published in the US in 1953, it had a profound effect, influencing many of the women who would go on to create the American feminist movement. One of them was Betty Friedan, then a freelance writer for women’s magazines, who surveyed her Smith College class at their fifteenth reunion and found that an overwhelming number had a common set of complaints, ranging from the vague to the desperate. To their shared malaise she gave the appellation “the problem that has no name.” The Feminine Mystique , published in February 1963, quickly became a best seller. Friedan based her conclusions, which included the need for married women to work outside the home, on her sample of white educated housewives. Though she did not take up the concerns of women, both white and of color, who already had outside jobs and whose paychecks were essential to a family’s survival, the book’s revelations of discrimination against all women reverberated through the culture.

Like The Second Sex, The Feminine Mystique was a call to action, but no movement yet existed. This changed in 1966, during the Third National Conference of Commissions on the Status of Women in Washington, DC, which was attended by Friedan. The network of state commissions had been created five years earlier by President John F. Kennedy to document the barriers that limited women’s full participation in American life. The initial report of the commissions, published in 1963, endorsed women’s legal equality, and sex—what is now called gender—was included in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as one of the bases for which employment discrimination was prohibited. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) was established as Title VII’s enforcement arm, but although nearly a third of the almost two thousand complaints filed during the EEOC’s first year concerned sex discrimination, those complaints were seldom acted upon. Anger at this injustice led 28 conference attendees, meeting in Friedan’s hotel room in June 1966, to plan a civil rights organization “to bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society now, assuming all the privileges and responsibilities thereof in truly equal partnership with men.”

The result was the National Organization for Women (NOW), the first grassroots organization of the movement that has been written into history as the second wave of feminism. (The 19th-century women’s rights movement, which won the women’s suffrage amendment in 1920, is known as the first wave.) NOW’s first organizing conference was held in Washington, DC, four months later. The 49 members in attendance—five of whom have writings in this volume: Friedan, Gene Boyer, Mary O. Eastwood, and civil rights activists Pauli Murray and Shirley Chisholm—hammered out a platform focused on ending legal discrimination in employment, education, and reproductive rights. NOW grew rapidly and today has hundreds of thousands of members, female and male, in more than five hundred chapters nationwide.

Soon after its founding, NOW would feel pressure from an emerging movement of radical women activists to broaden its concerns. That movement, which named itself women’s liberation, had its own history, goals, and style that differed from those of NOW. Its members, many of them young veterans of the civil rights, antiwar, and student movements, began to extend the radical social analyses they had learned in those movements to the situation of women. Some organized women’s caucuses within their civil rights and New Left organizations, such as the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Young Lords Party (both represented in this volume); but others, after presenting their ideas to dismissive or contemptuous male comrades, decided their cause required an independent women’s movement. Unlike women’s rights activists (also sometimes called moderate, reformist, or liberal feminists) who created traditional organizations like NOW and the National Women’s Political Caucus with officers, bylaws, and chapters, radical feminists came together in small, autonomous, women-only groups that rejected formal structure and focused on exposing the deep-rooted attitudes of sexism and misogyny and challenging everyday humiliations and injustices.

In Chicago, in 1967, a small band of radical feminists established The Westside Group, widely considered the country’s first radical feminist group. When its cofounder, a 22-year-old art student named Shulamith Firestone, moved to New York City later that year, she helped organize New York Radical Women, the first group in that city. Soon small groups were forming in cities, in towns, and on campuses all over the country—from Boston, New York, and Gainesville, to Chicago, Detroit, Iowa City, and Madison, to Seattle, Berkeley, and Los Angeles. By the early 1970s, radical feminists of diverse identities, ethnicities, races, classes, and sexualities had organized into groups—mainly of like rather than mixed membership—of Black feminists, lesbian feminists, socialist feminists, separatist feminists, high school feminists, as well as collectives devoted to a particular feminist activity, such as providing safe, though illegal, abortions; publishing a journal or books; opening a gallery or bookstore; opposing racism; practicing women’s self-defense; teaching vaginal self-examination; and starting a day care center or a battered women’s shelter.

In some cities, umbrella organizations like The Chicago Women’s Liberation Union or the Boston area’s Bread and Roses gathered autonomous groups into loose coalitions. Frequently groups divided or split apart—resulting in the proliferation of new ideas and new organizations, and sometimes anger or heartbreak. Yet despite their many differences, radical feminists shared the overarching goal of creating a mass women’s liberation movement to transform power relations between the sexes and thus revolutionize society.

Having grown up in a society in which female subordination in nearly every aspect of life was not only taken for granted but so normal as to be often invisible, radical feminists embraced as their foremost task convincing women of their oppression as women—and the need for a women’s liberation movement. This was accomplished through two major organizing methods: the technique of consciousness-raising (CR), by which women in small groups gained understanding of their subjugation through shared personal testimony—described in Kathie Sarachild’s article on CR in this volume—and women’s liberation writings, a creative ferment of ideas proliferated via feminist newspapers, journals, conferences, and radio programs on radical stations. For many, recognition of a need for change was instantaneous—an experience Jane O’Reilly named a click! moment in her 1972 article “The Housewife’s Moment of Truth,” included here. A mounting sense of purpose aroused excitement, commitment, and sometimes such feelings of rebirth that some women, rejecting patronymics, renamed themselves: Elana Dyke-woman, Laura X, and Judy Chicago, whose name change proclamation we include in our photo insert.

Under the slogans “the personal is political” (discussed by Carol Hanisch in her article “The Personal Is Political”) and “sisterhood is powerful,” women in small groups, in many thousands of living rooms, kitchens, and newly opened women’s centers throughout the country, practiced CR by describing their maltreatment and exploitation in a range of ordinary experiences concerning sex, race, class, family, jobs, housework, health care, childcare, and more. Speaking for the first time of forbidden truths or private humiliations—as would women in the #MeToo movement decades later—they discovered that feelings they thought unique were widely shared: resentment at being judged by their looks, at having to fake orgasms, at being overlooked, silenced, and patronized. In 1969, CR went public in a Greenwich Village church, when the radical feminist group Redstockings presented the movement’s first public speakout—on the subject of abortion—to be followed in subsequent years by other groups’ speakouts on rape and sexual harassment, which ended taboos and opened vital national conversations. It was after reading about the first rape speakout that I, Honor, joined my first CR group in Manhattan.

At the same time, from the mid-1960s on, beginning with Valerie Solanas’s notorious SCUM Manifesto , excerpted here, there was a great outpouring of feminist writing, from incitements to action, group manifestos, and visionary analyses to seething satires, passionate polemics, and the burgeoning of feminist poetry, fiction, plays, film, and visual arts. Before photocopier technology and the Internet, these writings circulated as mimeographed pamphlets piled onto literature tables at every feminist gathering, and in the new feminist newsletters and journals springing up across the country, such as Chicago’s Voice of the Women’s Liberation Movement and The Lavender Woman , Washington DC’s off our backs , Denver’s Big Mama Rag , Iowa City’s Ain’t I a Woman? , Seattle’s Lilith , Baltimore’s Women: A Journal of Liberation , Boston’s No More Fun & Games , New York’s Aphra , Triple Jeopardy , and Notes from the First Year , and the San Francisco Bay Area’s Tooth and Nail , It Ain’t Me Babe , and Mother Lode .

In 1970, the first anthologies of these writings were issued by mainstream publishers and reached an eager mass audience: Sisterhood Is Powerful, The Black Woman, Voices of Women’s Liberation, Women’s Liberation: A Blueprint for the Future. Also that year, two scathing book-length radical feminist manifestos, The Dialectic of Sex by Shulamith Firestone and Sexual Politics by Kate Millett, both excerpted here, swept the nation and the best-seller lists.

On August 26, 1970—50 years to the day after the suffrage amendment was adopted and two years after the small, now iconic Miss America protest garnered national media attention for women’s liberation (see photo insert), and which I, Alix, helped to plan and gleefully attended—the movement held its first mass demonstration. A huge march, organized by a coalition of feminist groups as a Women’s Strike for Equality, urged women not to go to work or do housework that day (“Don’t iron while the strike is hot!”).

Some fifty thousand feminists, individually and in more than seventy groups—with names like Revolutionary Childcare Collective, the Lesbian Food Conspiracy, Black Women’s Liberation, Women Artists in Revolution, and Half of Brooklyn, representing both the radical and moderate branches of the movement—paraded together in triumph down New York’s Fifth Avenue (see photo insert). Demonstrators carried signs expressing the day’s spirit and demands: “Free Universal Childcare,” “I Am Not a Barbie Doll,” “Free Abortion on Demand,” “Liberté Egalité Sororité,” “Equal Pay for Equal Work.” In Boston, Syracuse, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Minneapolis, St. Louis, San Francisco, and Los Angeles “sister marches” were held, drawing between one hundred and five thousand demonstrators. The movement had entered the mainstream.

The new movement encompassed a culturally, ideologically, and racially diverse multitude of activists and visionaries and a cadre of daring writers and theorists who would reevaluate nearly every aspect of women’s lives and so thoroughly open new avenues of opportunity that it would seem to subsequent generations they had always been there. The movement that began by addressing “a problem that has no name” had become a movement that named with impunity, bringing into being new ideas and opportunities. Among the new terms were sexism, sexual harassment, marital rape, date rape, wife battering, sisterhood, double and triple jeopardy (early designations of what came to be called intersectionality), womanism, and women’s liberation. The ninety pieces in this volume trace that movement’s arc.

The week of the August 26, 1970, strike and marches, the mass newsweekly magazine Time profiled author Kate Millett and put on its cover her portrait by Alice Neel. Meanwhile, at Newsweek, the other mass-circulation newsweekly, 46 women, many of them researchers who had no opportunities for advancement, let alone bylines—though their qualifications were usually equal to those of the male writers they assisted—were preparing to file an EEOC Title VII suit for sex discrimination. They shrewdly filed their suit on the very day Newsweek published “Women in Revolt,” a cover story about the new movement, for which the male editors had hired a freelance female writer. In 1973 the magazine settled the suit.

Frustrated at their marginalization by the mainstream media, another group of women journalists and editors launched, in January 1972, a national feminist monthly magazine they named Ms. for the honorific that conceals—as “Mr.” does—marital status. A year later, two young feminists, Kirsten Grimstad and Susan Rennie, hit the road to gather information on the panorama of the new women’s culture for a pair of books titled The New Woman’s Survival Catalog (1973) and The New Woman’s Survival Sourcebook (1975), which spread news of women-run services and resources available in towns and cities all over the country. In one locale, a discretely situated lesbian bar was repurposed as a venue for feminist poetry readings and theatre performances; in another, feminists took over an old-line sexist radical newspaper. Playwrights, fed-up actresses, and women directors who couldn’t get hired started women’s theatre groups, and women singers and musicians started festivals and record labels.

These guidebooks are snapshots of the scope and reach of feminism at the time, including women’s centers, women’s restaurants, bookstores, schools, communes, and other enterprises that catered to women, including, in Kansas City, a feminist hotel. Many of them would vanish within a few years, but some, like the Feminist Press, the Boston Women’s Health Collective, and a national network of battered women’s shelters and rape crisis centers, endured, sometimes evolving into nonprofit institutions.

__________________________________

Excerpted from the introduction to  Women’s Liberation! Feminist Writings that Inspired a Revolution & Still Can , edited by Alix Kates Shulman and Honor Moore. Copyright © 2021 by Library of America. Used by permission of Library of America.

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What Was Women’s Liberation?

The short-lived radical movement within feminism has gotten a bad reputation for centering white women’s experiences. Is that deserved?

Fifty years ago, the Women’s Strike for Equality brought tens of thousands of women out onto the street in more than ninety cities. Shortly thereafter,  Sisterhood Is Powerful , a collection of key writings by radical women, was published. These events represent a high-water mark for women’s liberation, a hugely influential but short-lived current within feminism. As historian Sara Evans writes, over the past half-century, that movement has been enormously misrepresented .

Women’s liberation took shape in small groups all over the country starting around 1967. One of its key insights was articulated in the catchphrase “the personal is political.” Many women of all races threw themselves into the work of understanding and transforming basic facts about their own lives, as well as legal and institutional frameworks. While the August 1970 March on Washington was called by the National Organization for Women, a liberal feminist group, many of its participants were energized through participation in local women’s liberation groups.

“In many places that energy shifted very quickly from naming the problem to doing something about it,” Evans writes. “Start a journal, write a book, create a daycare center, set up softball teams and karate classes, organize clerical workers, hold a demonstration, dramatize with guerrilla theater.”

Looking back on that era, many people today see a movement made up of white, middle-class women fixated on their own problems. But Evans writes that this is a misunderstanding. In the 1960s, radical women of all races were reacting against the sexism of male leadership in leftist groups like the Black Panthers and Students for a Democratic Society. They were also applying ideas from antiracist and anticolonial struggles to their experiences as women. Evans acknowledges that this sometimes led to troubling results within majority-white women’s liberation groups.

“There is no doubt that white women too often universalized their own experience by presuming to speak to and for ‘all’ women,” she writes. “But later generations failed to notice that women of color from the beginning raised the problem of their double jeopardy, pointing out the sharp differences in experience when gender interacts with race and class.”

The energy of women’s liberation activists produced huge results in the early 1970s. Title IX banned gender discrimination in most educational institutions. Domestic violence centers and rape crisis hotlines won public funding. Employers began to address sexual harassment .

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But the intensity of women’s liberation declined under the weight of infighting, burnout, and a general cultural retreat from utopian thinking. By the mid-1970s, almost no one talked about women’s liberation anymore. Meanwhile, in most colleges and universities, intersectional analysis was still years away. Many white, privileged feminists developed theories that centered gender oppression , often at the cost of considering class and race.

“It was these academy-based theorists who fixed the perception of 1970s Second Wave feminists as white, middle-class, self-interested, and anti-sex,” Evans writes.

In today’s era of multiracial street protest, often led by Black women and other women of color, it’s worth revisiting the multiracial activism that was women’s liberation.

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The Women’s Liberation Movement Essay

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In 2021, the U.S experienced the highest number of abortion restrictions made law by states. The restrictions denied women their reproductive rights and have influenced many challenges, such as a shortage of abortion pills and medication. The Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) is the most significant feminist movement in the U.S committed to championing women’s freedom, equal opportunities, and rights. Over time the WLM has developed autonomy to support women’s reproductive rights. The restrictions have influenced a patchy, inequitable, or non-existent access to pregnancy termination alternatives that have given rise to the black market of cheap abortion pills not approved by the Foods and Drugs Administration (FDA). More than ever, the WLM is challenged by the trending restrictions on abortion in the U.S that have substantial impacts on women’s control over their bodies, rights, responsibilities, and social status.

Adkins, C. M. (2018). The impact of Roe v. Wade (1973) on the American abortion rights movement . Web.

Aiken, A. R. (2019). Erosion of women’s reproductive rights in the United States . BMJ, 366 . Web.

British Library. (2018). Reproductive rights and the Women’s Liberation Movement . British Library. Web.

Centre for Reproductive Rights. (2022). After Roe Fell: Abortion Rights State by State . Center for Reproductive Rights. Web.

Cusick, J. V., Lofgren, E., Director, A., Spitzer, E., Buchanan, M. J., Schmitt, A., Rapfogel, N., & Simpson, E. (2022). State abortion legislation in 2021 . Center for American Progress. Web.

D’Ambrosio, A. (2022). Is the ‘abortion pill’ restricted by state bans? ABC News. Web.

Hussein, J. (2020). COVID-19: What implications for sexual and reproductive health and rights globally? Sexual and reproductive health matters , 28 (1), 1746065. Web.

Ikemoto, L. C. (2019). Reproductive rights and justice: a multiple feminist theories account . In Research Handbook on Feminist Jurisprudence (pp. 249-263). Edward Elgar Publishing. Web.

KFF. (2022). The availability and use of medication abortion . KFF. Web.

Leader, L. (2022). Roe v. Wade overturned: The rollback of Reproductive Rights is an ominous sign . MSNBC. Web.

Moret, W. (2019). Economic Strengthening and Social Empowerment Training for Female Sex Workers . Web.

Oxfam Canada. (2021). Sexual and reproductive health and rights theory of change . Web.

PBS. (2019). The pill and the Women’s Liberation Movement . PBS. Web.

Reproductive rights. (2018). Status of Women in the States . Web.

USAID. (2020). United States Agency for International Development . GENDER EQUALITY AND WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT 2020 POLICY. Web.

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women’s rights movement , diverse social movement , largely based in the United States , that in the 1960s and ’70s sought equal rights and opportunities and greater personal freedom for women . It coincided with and is recognized as part of the “second wave” of feminism . While the first-wave feminism of the 19th and early 20th centuries focused on women’s legal rights, especially the right to vote ( see women’s suffrage ), the second-wave feminism of the women’s rights movement touched on every area of women’s experience—including politics, work, the family , and sexuality . Organized activism by and on behalf of women continued through the third and fourth waves of feminism from the mid-1990s and the early 2010s, respectively. For more discussion of historical and contemporary feminists and the women’s movements they inspired, see feminism .

In the aftermath of World War II , the lives of women in developed countries changed dramatically. Household technology eased the burdens of homemaking, life expectancies increased dramatically, and the growth of the service sector opened up thousands of jobs not dependent on physical strength. Despite these socioeconomic transformations, cultural attitudes (especially concerning women’s work) and legal precedents still reinforced sexual inequalities. An articulate account of the oppressive effects of prevailing notions of femininity appeared in Le Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex ), by the French writer and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir . It became a worldwide best seller and raised feminist consciousness by stressing that liberation for women was liberation for men too.

The first public indication that change was imminent came with women’s reaction to the 1963 publication of Betty Friedan ’s The Feminine Mystique . Friedan spoke of the problem that “lay buried, unspoken” in the mind of the suburban housewife: utter boredom and lack of fulfillment. Women who had been told that they had it all—nice houses, lovely children, responsible husbands—were deadened by domesticity, she said, and they were too socially conditioned to recognize their own desperation. The Feminine Mystique was an immediate best seller. Friedan had struck a chord.

Initially, women energized by Friedan’s book joined with government leaders and union representatives who had been lobbying the federal government for equal pay and for protection against employment discrimination . By June 1966 they had concluded that polite requests were insufficient. They would need their own national pressure group—a women’s equivalent of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). With this, the National Organization for Women (NOW) was born.

The organization was not an instant success. By the end of its second year, NOW had just 1,035 members and was racked by ideological divisions. When the group tried to write a Bill of Rights for Women, it found consensus on six measures essential to ensuring women’s equality: enforcement of laws banning employment discrimination; maternity leave rights; child-care centres that could enable mothers to work; tax deductions for child-care expenses; equal and unsegregated education; and equal job-training opportunities for poor women.

Two other measures stirred enormous controversy: one demanded immediate passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution (to ensure equality of rights, regardless of sex), and the other demanded greater access to contraception and abortion . When NOW threw its support behind passage of the ERA, the United Auto Workers union—which had been providing NOW with office space—withdrew its support, because the ERA would effectively prohibit protective labour legislation for women. When some NOW members called for repeal of all abortion laws, other members left the fledgling organization, convinced that this latest action would undermine their struggles against economic and legal discrimination.

NOW’s membership was also siphoned off from the left. Impatient with a top-heavy traditional organization, activists in New York City, where half of NOW’s membership was located, walked out. Over the next two years, as NOW struggled to establish itself as a national organization, more radical women’s groups were formed by female antiwar, civil rights , and leftist activists who had grown disgusted by the New Left ’s refusal to address women’s concerns. Ironically, sexist attitudes had pervaded 1960s radical politics, with some women being exploited or treated unequally within those movements. In 1964, for example, when a woman’s resolution was brought up at a Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee (SNCC) conference, Stokely Carmichael flippantly cut off all debate: “The only position for women in SNCC is prone.”

While NOW focused on issues of women’s rights, the more radical groups pursued the broader themes of women’s liberation. Although they lacked the kind of coherent national structure NOW had formed, liberation groups sprang up in Chicago, Toronto, Seattle, Detroit, and elsewhere. Suddenly, the women’s liberation movement was everywhere—and nowhere. It had no officers, no mailing address, no printed agenda. What it did have was attitude. In September 1968 activists converged on Atlantic City , New Jersey , to protest the image of womanhood conveyed by the Miss America Pageant . In February 1969 one of the most radical liberation groups, the Redstockings, published its principles as “The Bitch Manifesto.” Based in New York City , the Redstockings penned the movement’s first analysis of the politics of housework, held the first public speak-out on abortion, and helped to develop the concept of “consciousness-raising” groups—rap sessions to unravel how sexism might have coloured their lives. The Redstockings also held speak-outs on rape to focus national attention on the problem of violence against women, including domestic violence .

Responding to these diverse interests, NOW called the Congress to Unite Women, which drew more than 500 feminists to New York City in November 1969. The meeting was meant to establish common ground between the radical and moderate wings of the women’s rights movement, but it was an impossible task. Well-dressed professionals convinced that women needed to reason with men could not unite with wild-haired radicals whose New Left experience had soured them on polite discourse with “the enemy.” NOW’s leadership seemed more comfortable lobbying politicians in Washington or corresponding with NASA about the exclusion of women from the astronaut program, while the young upstarts preferred disrupting legislative committee hearings. NOW leaders were looking for reform. The more radical women were plotting a revolution.

Home / Growth and Turmoil, 1948-1977 / Feminism and the Backlash / Why Women’s Liberation

Why Women’s Liberation?

Gloria Steinem’s testimony supporting the Equal Rights Amendment before the United States Senate.

“Statement of Gloria Steinem, Writer and Critic”, United States Senate testimony, 1970.

Journalist Gloria Steinem was one of the most recognized leaders of the women’s liberation movement. Her 1969 article “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation,” raised her to national fame. In it, she discussed the history and goals of women’s liberation. Gloria was an expert at explaining women’s liberation clearly and succinctly. Her firm commitment to gender equality as well as her excellent communication skills made her a powerful and natural spokeswoman.

Gloria held leadership positions in the National Organization for Women and the National Women’s Political Caucus. She supported and fought for an inclusive movement. Gloria aimed to collaborate with women of various races and identities throughout her career.

About the Document

In 1970, the United States Senate held hearings about the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) . Gloria Steinem testified in favor of the ERA. This is an excerpted version of her testimony. In it, she explains why liberation and the ERA should be important to all Americans.

In 1971, the House of Representatives voted in favor of the ERA. The Senate followed one year later. A total of 38 states were needed to ratify the ERA to make it a constitutional amendment. Despite early momentum, only 35 ratified by the initial deadline. When the ERA was reintroduced to Congress in 1983, neither the House nor the Senate passed it. To this day, ERA advocates—including Gloria Steinem—continue to promote the ratification of the amendment in select states.

• amendment: A change or addition.
• Equal Rights Amendment (ERA): A proposed amendment to the United States Constitution stating that rights may not be denied on the basis of a person’s sex.
• ratification: The process by which an amendment to the federal Constitution is approved or rejected by states.
• succintly: Clearly and briefly.

Discussion Questions

• Why does Gloria Steinem personally care about women’s liberation and the ERA?
• Why do you think Gloria acknowledges that she is “very lucky”? What is she trying to communicate with this statement?
• What are some of the myths Gloria mentions in her speech? What responses does she have to these myths?
• Why does Gloria mention the current political turmoil of the United States? How does she connect this to women’s liberation?

Suggested Activities

• APUSH Connection: 8.11: The Civil Rights Movement Expands
• 3.11: Government responses to social movements
• 4.3: Changes in Ideology
• 4.4: Influence of Political Events on Ideology
• Compare the various subgroups that existed within the women’s liberation movement by examining this document alongside photos of the Women’s Strike for Equality , the essay by the Furies , the amended documents from the Young Lords , and the interview with Black Panthers . Why are different approaches to feminism important?
• Towards the end of the document, Gloria criticizes masculinity. Compare her testimony to the work of the Young Lords to end the glorification of machismo.
• Gloria’s testimony was in support of the passage of the ERA. Learn more about the ERA by pairing this document with the life stories of Bella Abzug and Phyllis Schlafly , as well as the pro-ERA document from the 1920s and the anti-ERA document from the 1940s.
• Gloria Steinem worked closely with leaders like Betty Friedan , Shirley Chisholm , and Bella Abzug . Combine this document with resources highlighting these other women. How did each woman define women’s liberation? How did they all work together and to what purpose?

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Collection Civil Rights History Project

Women in the civil rights movement.

Many women played important roles in the Civil Rights Movement, from leading local civil rights organizations to serving as lawyers on school segregation lawsuits. Their efforts to lead the movement were often overshadowed by men, who still get more attention and credit for its successes in popular historical narratives and commemorations.  Many women experienced gender discrimination and sexual harassment within the movement and later turned towards the feminist movement in the 1970s.  The Civil Rights History Project interviews with participants in the struggle include both expressions of pride in women’s achievements and also candid assessments about the difficulties they faced within the movement.

Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons was a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and one of three women chosen to be a field director for the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project.  She discusses the difficulties she faced in this position and notes that gender equality was not a given, but had to be fought for:  “I often had to struggle around issues related to a woman being a project director.  We had to fight for the resources, you know.  We had to fight to get a good car because the guys would get first dibs on everything, and that wasn’t fair…it was a struggle to be taken seriously by the leadership, as well as by your male colleagues.” She continues, “One of the things that we often don’t talk about, but there was sexual harassment that often happened toward the women.  And so, that was one of the things that, you know, I took a stand on, that ‘This was not – we’re not going to get a consensus on this.  There is not going to be sexual harassment of any of the women on this project or any of the women in this community.  And you will be put out if you do it.’”

Lonnie King was an activist with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Atlanta. He remembers meeting other students from the Nashville movement when SNCC became a nationwide organization in 1960. He recalls his surprise that Diane Nash was not elected to be the representative from Nashville, and echoes Simmons’ criticisms about male privilege and domination: “Diane Nash, in my view, was the Nashville movement and by that I mean this:  Others were there, but they weren’t Diane Nash. Diane was articulate; she was a beautiful woman, very photogenic, very committed. And very intelligent and had a following. I never did understand how, except maybe for sexism, I never understood how [James] Bevel, Marion [Barry], and for that matter, John Lewis, kind of leapfrogged over her. I never understood that because she was in fact the leader in Nashville. It was Diane. The others were followers of her… I so never understood that to be honest with you. She’s an unsung... a real unsung hero of the movement in Nashville, in my opinion.”

Ekwueme Michael Thewell was a student at Howard University and a leader of the Nonviolent Action Group, an organization that eventually joined with SNCC. He reflects on the sacrifices that women college students at Howard made in joining the struggle, and remarks on the constraints they faced after doing so: “It is only in retrospect that I recognize the extraordinary price that our sisters paid for being as devoted to the struggle as they were. It meant that they weren’t into homecoming queen kind of activities. That they weren’t into the accepted behavior of a Howard lady. That they weren't into the trivia of fashion and dressing up. Though they were attractive women and they took care of themselves, but they weren’t the kind of trophy wives for the med school students and they weren’t—some of them might have been members of the Greek letter organizations, but most of them I suspect weren’t. So that they occupied a place outside the conventional social norms of the whole university student body. So did the men. But with men, I think, we can just say, ‘Kiss my black ass’ and go on about our business. It wasn’t so clear to me that a woman could do the same thing.”

Older interviewees emphasize the opportunities that were available to an earlier generation of women. Mildred Bond Roxborough , a long-time secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, discusses the importance of women leaders in local branches: “Well, actually when you think about women's contributions to the NAACP, without the women we wouldn't have an NAACP.  The person who was responsible for generating the organizing meeting was a woman.  Of course, ever since then we've had women in key roles--not in the majority, but in the very key roles which were responsible for the evolution of the NAACP.  I think in terms of people like Daisy Lampkin, who was a member of our national board from Pittsburgh; she traveled around the country garnering memberships and helping to organize branches.  That was back in the '30s and '40s before it became fashionable or popular for women to travel.  You have women who subsequently held positions in the NAACP nationally as program directors and as leaders of various divisions.” She goes on to discuss the contributions of many women to the success of the NAACP.

Doris Adelaide Derby , another SNCC activist, remembers that the challenge and urgency of the freedom struggle was a formative experience for young activist women, who had to learn resourcefulness on the job:   “I always did what I wanted to do.  I had my own inner drive.  And I found that when I came up with ideas and I was ready to work to see it through, and I think that happened with a lot of women in SNCC.  We needed all hands on deck, and so, when we found ourselves in situations, we had to rely on whoever was around.  And if somebody had XYZ skills, and somebody only had ABC, we had to come together. We used to joke about that, but in reality, the women, you know, were strong.  In the struggle, the women were strong.”

Ruby Nell Sales , who later overcame psychological traumas from the racial violence she witnessed in the movement, encourages us to look beyond the simplistic story of Rosa Parks refusing to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery. As she explains, Parks was a long-time activist who had sought justice for African American women who were frequently assaulted—both verbally and physically-- in their daily lives: “…When we look at Rosa Parks, people often think that she was – she did that because of her civil rights and wanting to sit down on the bus.  But she also did that – it was a rebellion of maids, a rebellion of working class women, who were tired of boarding the buses in Montgomery, the public space, and being assaulted and called out-of-there names and abused by white bus drivers. And that’s why that Movement could hold so long.  If it had just been merely a protest about riding the bus, it might have shattered.  But it went to the very heart of black womanhood, and black women played a major role in sustaining that movement.”

The Civil Rights History Project includes interviews with over 50 women who came from a wide range of backgrounds and were involved in the movement in a myriad of ways. Their stories deepen our understanding of the movement as a whole, and provide us with concrete examples of how vital they were to the gains of the Civil Rights Movement.

Gloria Steinem

From her humble Ohio childhood, Gloria Steinem grew up to become an acclaimed journalist, trailblazing feminist, and one of the most visible, passionate leaders and spokeswomen of the women’s rights movement in the late 20 th and early 21 st centuries.

Steinem was born on March 25, 1934 in Toledo, Ohio, the second child and daughter of Leo and Ruth Steinem. Her father worked as a traveling salesman. In 1944, her parents divorced, leaving a young Steinem to take care of her mentally ill mother in Toledo. After graduating high school, her sister came to care for their mother, and Steinem attended Smith College in Massachusetts where she studied government. She graduated magna cum laude in 1956 and earned the Chester Bowles Fellowship, which enabled her to spend two years studying and researching in India. Her time abroad inspired an interest in grassroots activism, which would later manifest itself in her work with the women’s liberation movement and the Equal Rights Amendment.

Steinem started her professional career as a journalist in New York, writing freelance pieces for various publications. Getting plumb assignments was tough for women in the late 1950s and 1960s, when men ran the newsrooms and women were largely relegated to secretarial and behind-the-scenes research roles. Steinem’s early articles tended to be for what was then called “the women’s pages,” lifestyle or service features about such female-centered or fashion topics as nylon stockings. Steinem once recalled that, “When I suggested political stories to The New York Times Sunday Magazine, my editor just said something like, ‘I don’t think of you that way.’”

Undeterred, Steinem pushed on, seeking more substantial social and political reporting assignments. She gained national attention in 1963 when Show magazine hired her to go undercover to report on the working conditions at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Club. While Steinem’s expose — “I Was a Playboy Bunny” — revealed the not-so-glamorous, sexist, and underpaid life of the bunny/waitresses, Steinem struggled to be taken seriously as a journalist after this assignment. She worked hard to make a name for herself, and in 1968, she helped found  New York magazine, where she became an editor and political writer.

At New York magazine, Steinem reported on political campaigns and progressive social issues, including the women’s liberation movement. In fact, Steinem first spoke publicly in 1969 at a speak-out event to legalize abortion in New York State, where she shared the story of the abortion she had overseas when she was 22 years old. The event proved life-changing, sparking Steinem’s feminism and engagement with the women’s movement. She attended and spoke at numerous protests and demonstrations, and her strong intellect and good looks made her an in-demand media guest and movement spokesperson.

In 1970, feminist activists staged a take-over of Ladies Home Journal , arguing that the magazine only offered articles on housekeeping but failed to cover women’s rights and the women’s movement. Steinem soon realized the value of a women’s movement magazine, and joined forces with journalists P atricia Carbine and Letty Cottin Pogrebin to found Ms. Magazine. It debuted in 1971 as an insert in New York magazine. In 1972, Ms. became an independent, regular circulation magazine. Steinem remained an editor and writer for the magazine for the next fifteen years and continues in an emeritus capacity to the present.

Steinem’s life has been dedicated to the cause of women’s rights, as she led marches and toured the country as an in-demand speaker. In 1972, Steinem and feminists such as Congresswoman Bella Abzug, Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, and feminist Betty Friedan formed the National Women’s Political Caucus. It continues to support gender equality and to ensure the election of more pro-equality women to public office. Other organizations Steinem has co-founded in her vast career include the Women’s Action Alliance (1971), which promotes non-sexist, multi-racial children’s education; the Women’s Media Center (2004) to promote positive images of women in media; Voters for Choice (1977), a prochoice political action committee; and the Ms. Foundation for Women. In the 1990s, she helped establish Take Our Daughters to Work Day, the first national effort to empower young girls to learn about career opportunities.

In 2000, at age 66, the long single Steinem married for the first time in a Cherokee ceremony in Oklahoma. Her husband, entrepreneur and activist David Bale, sadly died of lymphoma four years later.

An award-winning and prolific writer, Steinem has authored several books, including a biography on Marilyn Monroe, and the best-selling My Life on the Road . Her work has also been published and reprinted in numerous anthologies and textbooks. In 2013, President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor. In her honor, in 2017, Rutgers University created The Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies.

Heilbrun, Carolyn G. The Education of a Woman: The Life of Gloria Steinem . (Dial Press, 1995).

http://www.gloriasteinem.com/who-is-gloria/

HBO Documentaries. Gloria: In Her Own Words.

Steinem, Gloria. My Life on the Road . (Random House, 2016).

Steinem, Gloria. Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, Second Edition . (Holt Paperbacks: 1995).

http://www.womensmediacenter.com/author/profile/gloria-steinem

PHOTO: Library of Congress

MLA – Michals, Debra. “Gloria Steinem.” National Women’s History Museum, 2017. Date accessed.

Chicago – Michals, Debra “Gloria Steinem.” National Women’s History Museum. 2017. www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/gloria-steinem.

http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/steinem-gloria

http://www.biography.com/articles/Gloria-Steinem-9493491?part=1

http://www.feminist.com/gloriasteinem/

Voices of Feminism, Oral History Project. Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College. https://www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/ssc/vof/transcripts/Steinem.pdf

https://forwomen.org/staff/gloria-steinem/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIneqs4ejP1QIV1xyBCh3yRQUlEAMYASAAEgKXfPD_BwE

https://www.pbs.org/kued/nosafeplace/interv/steinem.html

http://nymag.com/news/features/ms-magazine-2011-11/

http://dlib.nyu.edu/undercover/bunnys-tale-gloria-steinem-show-magazine

Marcello, Patricia Cronin. Gloria Steinem: A Biography. (Greenwood Press, 2004).

Steinem, Gloria. Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem . (Little Brown and Co., 1993).

Steinem, Gloria. Moving Beyond Words: Age, Rage, Sex, Power, Money, Muscles: Breaking the Boundaries of Gender

https://www.makers.com/gloria-steinem

Biography.com https://www.biography.com/people/gloria-steinem-9493491

Gloria: In Her Own Words. (Documentary.) Information online: http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/gloria-in-her-own-words/interview/gloria-steinem.html

Radio interview/NPR, 2015: http://www.npr.org/2015/10/26/451862822/at-81-feminist-gloria-steinem-finds-herself-free-of-the-demands-of-gender

http://www.cc.com/video-clips/yu257u/the-colbert-report-gloria-steinem

http://www.makers.com/blog/making-history-gloria-steinem-creates-ms-magazine

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By: History.com Editors

Updated: April 8, 2022 | Original: February 28, 2019

Feminism, a belief in the political, economic and cultural equality of women, has roots in the earliest eras of human civilization. It is typically separated into three waves: first wave feminism, dealing with property rights and the right to vote; second wave feminism, focusing on equality and anti-discrimination, and third wave feminism, which started in the 1990s as a backlash to the second wave’s perceived privileging of white, straight women. 

From Ancient Greece to the fight for women’s suffrage to women’s marches and the #MeToo movement, the history of feminism is as long as it is fascinating. 

Early Feminists 

In his classic Republic , Plato advocated that women possess “natural capacities” equal to men for governing and defending ancient Greece . Not everyone agreed with Plato; when the women of ancient Rome staged a massive protest over the Oppian Law, which restricted women’s access to gold and other goods, Roman consul Marcus Porcius Cato argued, “As soon as they begin to be your equals, they will have become your superiors!” (Despite Cato’s fears, the law was repealed.)

In The Book of the City of Ladies , 15th-century writer Christine de Pizan protested misogyny and the role of women in the Middle Ages . Years later, during the Enlightenment , writers and philosophers like Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and Mary Wollstonecraft , author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman , argued vigorously for greater equality for women.

READ MORE: Milestones in U.S. Women's History

Abigail Adams, first lady to President John Adams, specifically saw access to education, property and the ballot as critical to women’s equality. In letters to her husband John Adams , Abigail Adams warned, “If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice.”

The “Rebellion” that Adams threatened began in the 19th century, as calls for greater freedom for women joined with voices demanding the end of slavery . Indeed, many women leaders of the abolitionist movement found an unsettling irony in advocating for African Americans rights that they themselves could not enjoy.

First Wave Feminism: Women’s Suffrage and The Seneca Falls Convention

At the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention , abolitionists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott boldly proclaimed in their now-famous Declaration of Sentiments that “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal.” Controversially, the feminists demanded “their sacred right to the elective franchise,” or the right to vote.

Many attendees thought voting rights for women were beyond the pale, but were swayed when Frederick Douglass argued that he could not accept the right to vote as a Black man if women could not also claim that right. When the resolution passed, the women’s suffrage movement began in earnest, and dominated much of feminism for several decades.

READ MORE:  American Women's Suffrage Came Down to One Man's Vote

The 19th Amendment: Women’s Right to Vote

Slowly, suffragettes began to claim some successes: In 1893, New Zealand became the first sovereign state giving women the right to vote, followed by Australia in 1902 and Finland in 1906. In a limited victory, the United Kingdom granted suffrage to women over 30 in 1918.

In the United States, women’s participation in World War I proved to many that they were deserving of equal representation. In 1920, thanks largely to the work of suffragists like Susan B. Anthony and Carrie Chapman Catt , the 19th Amendment passed. American women finally earned the right to vote. With these rights secured, feminists embarked on what some scholars refer to as the “second wave” of feminism.

Women And Work

Women began to enter the workplace in greater numbers following the Great Depression , when many male breadwinners lost their jobs, forcing women to find “ women’s work ” in lower paying but more stable careers like housework, teaching and secretarial roles.

During World War II , many women actively participated in the military or found work in industries previously reserved for men, making Rosie the Riveter a feminist icon. Following the civil rights movement , women sought greater participation in the workplace, with equal pay at the forefront of their efforts

The Equal Pay Act of 1963 was among the first efforts to confront this still-relevant issue.

Second Wave Feminism: Women's Liberation

But cultural obstacles remained, and with the 1963 publication of The Feminine Mystique , Betty Friedan —who later co-founded the National Organization for Women —argued that women were still relegated to unfulfilling roles in homemaking and child care. By this time, many people had started referring to feminism as “women’s liberation.” In 1971, feminist Gloria Steinem joined Betty Friedan and Bella Abzug in founding the National Women’s Political Caucus. Steinem’s Ms. Magazine became the first magazine to feature feminism as a subject on its cover in 1976.

The Equal Rights Amendment , which sought legal equality for women and banned discrimination on the basis of sex, was passed by Congress in 1972 (but, following a conservative backlash, was never ratified by enough states to become law). One year later, feminists celebrated the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade , the landmark ruling that guaranteed a woman’s right to choose an abortion.

READ MORE: Why the Fight Over the Equal Rights Amendment Has Lasted Nearly a Century

Third Wave Feminism: Who Benefits From the Feminist Movement?

Critics have argued that the benefits of the feminist movement , especially the second wave, are largely limited to white, college-educated women, and that feminism has failed to address the concerns of women of color, lesbians, immigrants and religious minorities. Even in the 19th century, Sojourner Truth lamented racial distinctions in women’s status in a speech before the 1851 Ohio Women's Rights Convention. She was later quoted as saying:

In fact, contemporaneous reports of Truth’s speech did not include the words “Ain’t I a Woman?” and quoted Truth in standard English. The distortion of Truth's words in later years reflected the false belief that as a formerly enslaved woman, Truth would have had a Southern accent. Truth was, in fact, a New Yorker.

#MeToo and Women’s Marches

By the 2010s, feminists pointed to prominent cases of sexual assault and “rape culture” as emblematic of the work still to be done in combating misogyny and ensuring women have equal rights. The #MeToo movement gained new prominence in October 2017, when the New York Times published a damning investigation into allegations of sexual harassment made against influential film producer Harvey Weinstein. Many more women came forward with allegations against other powerful men—including President Donald Trump.

On January 21, 2017, the first full day of Trump’s presidency, hundreds of thousands of people joined the Women’s March on Washington in D.C., a massive protest aimed at the new administration and the perceived threat it represented to reproductive, civil and human rights. It was not limited to Washington: Over 3 million people in cities around the world held simultaneous demonstrations, providing feminists with a high-profile platforms for advocating on behalf of full rights for all women worldwide.

Women in World History Curriculum Women's history, feminist history,  Making History , The Institute of Historical Research A Brief History of Feminism, Oxford Dictionaries   Four Waves of Feminism, Pacific Magazine, Pacific University

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Sisters in arms: the Women's Liberation Movement

Mel Sherwood looks back at the emergence of Britain’s Women’s Liberation Movement, and the direct action that paved the way for today’s feminists…

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The activists of the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) of the 1960s-80s discovered that they would need to employ shock tactics in their fight, which largely focused on gaining equality in the workplace, in the family and for rights over their own bodies. Much like the suffragettes before them, many of these women realised that it was deeds, not words, that would win the day. Of course, this direct action went hand in hand with more practical and administrative activism, but it was the subversive and spectacular acts that made it impossible for the world to ignore the inequality they suffered.

A nameless problem

Second-wave feminism emerged in the US in the 1960s. When Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963, in which she called out "the problem that has no name" – a widespread unhappiness among the middle-class housewives of America – she opened something of a Pandora's box. The discontent that she shone a light on was not restricted to the US. Feminists around the world were waking up.

The first action on this side of the pond might, today, seem almost stereotypically polite. Fifty years ago this June, 187 female sewing machinists at Ford's Dagenham factory went on strike. They objected to the fact that they were classed as 'unskilled' workers, despite the fact – writes Emmeline Pankhurst's great-granddaughter Helen in her book Deeds not Words – "that they needed to pass a skills test to be employed". This classification meant that they earned less than men in equivalent work. The act may seem civilised enough, but for women to strike at this time took courage and came after years of asking, in vain, for their roles to be reclassified.

£117 million

On 28 June 1968, all 187 machinists travelled to London and marched the streets of Whitehall before meeting up with MP Barbara Castle, the Employment Secretary. They brokered a deal that ended their three-week strike and which would, ultimately, lead to the momentous Equal Pay Act of 1970. But it was not exactly a glorious victory for the strikers; their conditions were much improved, but they were still considered ‘unskilled’. They were not reclassified or given equal pay until they striked again in 1984.

Many more controversial feminist strikes followed, including the Night Cleaners' Campaign of 1970-72, which sought to unionise the victimised and underpaid women who cleaned London's office blocks at night, and the Grunwick Film Processing Laboratories strike of 1976-78, headed up by Jayaben Desai: "A small, middle-aged woman [who] led the 'strikers in saris' on a two-year battle that included a hunger strike," says Helen Pankhurst in Deeds Not Words . This fight for better working conditions saw, for the first time in UK history, Asian women at the forefront of a major industrial action. But, more immediately, the Ford strike inspired thousands of activists to come together into what would eventually become the WLM.

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At the end of the sixties, this emerging group of women and feminist thinkers was ready to fight for equality. They had lived through a remarkable era of rapid social and cultural change – many were realising that the sexual liberation that the decade brought did not necessarily bring with it the women’s liberation that had been imagined.

Seven demands that make the womanifesto

Women were still expected to earn less while they worked; to give up work when they got married or became pregnant (being sacked upon announcing a pregnancy was not uncommon); to settle down and be good housewives; and to serve their husbands and children. To see any effective change, they had to get organised and be more than a little bit daring.

Flour power

At the end of February 1970, some 600 activists arrived at Ruskin College, Oxford. Men manned the crèche and made the sandwiches for lunch, while the women settled down for three intensive days of feminist discourse. It was the first conference of its kind in the UK (another seven would follow), and the discussions were groundbreaking.

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Delegates from around the world spoke to the engaged and excited audience. They narrowed their objectives down to four key demands, which they believed would benefit all women in all walks of life: equal pay; equal educational and job opportunities; free contraception and abortion on demand; and free 24-hour nurseries. These were formally adopted at the following conference the next year (a further three were added at a later conference). But it wasn’t all talk, no action. They also planned a demonstration that would capture the whole world’s attention.

In November of 1970, anyone turning on their television to watch the Miss World contest would have been presented with a different spectacle to the one scheduled. Activists descended upon the Royal Albert Hall, the venue for the pageant, to disrupt the event in protest of the way it objectified women. And disrupt it they did, pelting the stage, hosts and participants with flour bombs, tomatoes and stink bombs. People watching at home even went out into the streets to join the protests, and they caused so much chaos that the event had to be abandoned. Five activists were arrested. Though the press coverage of the protest and the ensuing trials was incredibly negative, Women’s Lib had never been so popular.

• Read more | A brief history of International Women's Day: what is it and why do we celebrate it?

Just a few months later, on 6 March 1971, 4,000 women took to London’s streets for the first Women’s Lib march. The WLMs demands were brandished on banners, while the mob waved washing lines and chanted “One, two, three, four, we want a bloody damn sight more!” They descended on 10 Downing Street to hand over a petition, which called for the government to meet their four demands, after which the march culminated with a series of speakers at Trafalgar Square.

Timeline: how the second wave of feminism rolled out…

In the months that followed, away from the dramatic spotlight of direct action, there were more practical, local activists working tirelessly for the cause. Hundreds of groups and campaigns emerged, with membership of London’s Women’s Liberation Workshop reportedly rising from 16 to 66 groups.

Such groups would have ranged from refuges that offered women security in the face of domestic violence to basic centres where women could gain free family planning and legal advice. At these hubs, feminist publications were also circulated. Newsletters and leaflets communicated local feminist news, while magazines such as Spare Rib and, later, Shocking Pink , helped to communicate the messages of the movement, report on any political progress and threats, and to organise and report on direct action – of which there was plenty to discuss.

Though it does not appear among the initial demands, one of the WLM’s great achievements was in making violence against women – a largely invisible crime – visible and impossible to ignore. There was much activity on this front: rape crisis centres were established, anti-rape conferences were held and, by 1977, there were some 170 Women’s Aid refuges in Britain. Arguably, the centre of activity on this front was Leeds, where the most extreme example of violence against women could be found – the Yorkshire Ripper, later discovered to be Peter Sutcliffe, was at large.

• Read more | From running marathons to working the nightshift: 8 surprising things women were banned from doing through history

Between 1975 and 1980, Sutcliffe murdered 13 women and assaulted seven more. At the time, the police advised that women should not go out at night, especially not without a male escort. This was hardly the message to send to a group of empowered women, and it was perceived as an extension of victim-blaming: why curfew the potential victims as opposed to the potential perpetrators?

To the feminists of the Leeds area, this could not be borne. Inspired by similar marches in Europe and in Edinburgh, on 12 November 1977 the Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group organised a women-only ‘Reclaim the Night’ march through the city, with supporting marches elsewhere throughout the country. Brandishing torches and banners reading ‘No curfew on women – curfew on men’, some 130 Leeds women marched a route that covered many of the sites of Sutcliffe’s attacks. This march was controversial for more than just the intended reasons – the organisers were later accused of racism, as there was a lack of sensitivity to issues of diversity, and also sexism, as these marches excluded men and trans people.

Separate agendas

Such rifts had long divided the feminist community, and continue to do so to this day. It is small wonder, then, that through the sixties and seventies, feminism developed a remarkable number of branches. In her book Radical Feminism , Finn Mackay lists liberal feminism, socialist feminism, anarcho-feminism, black feminism, womanism, eco-feminism, radical feminism, lesbian feminism, separatist feminism, pro-feminism and revolutionary feminism as just some of the schools recognised today. National lesbian feminist conferences began in 1974, the Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent formed in 1978 and, in 1979, Southall Black Sisters was founded, in order to support all black and Asian women in the fight against racism and domestic violence.

What is fourth-wave feminism?

The extent and diversity of feminist support and action at this time was incredible. The primary concerns had increased from the four demands, too. Objectives ranged from political representation to abortion rights and combating racist immigration laws. There were only a handful of topics that truly united them all, but one of them was violence against women.

• Read more | The gender pain gap: perceptions of women's health through history

Into the 1980s, such campaigns increased and became more militant. Activists occupied the office of The Sun newspaper, "to protest at the use of rape stories for titillation", explain Joni Lovenduski and Vicky Randall in their book Contemporary Feminist Politics . They also shattered the windows of strip clubs and, in Leeds, "a woman campaigner drove her car through the front of a sex shop".

It is perhaps all the more alarming then that, today, two more waves of feminism down the line, violence against women, and the sexual coercion of women, are still everyday occurrences. As the Time’s Up campaign says on its website: “The clock has run out on sexual assault, harassment and inequality in the workplace. It’s time to do something about it.” The activists of second-wave feminism would surely agree.

Mel Sherwood is the editor of Your Home magazine

This article was first published in the July 2018 issue of BBC History Revealed

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The Women's Liberation Movement

Explore the campaigns of second wave feminism..

By The Feminist Library

No Liberation without Revolution The Feminist Library

The thousand plus posters in the Feminist Library historic ephemera collection (housed at the Bishopsgate Institute) demonstrate the wide range of activities and issues that the Women’s Liberation Movement was involved in between the late 1960s and the early 1990s. This period is sometimes also referred to as Second Wave Feminism.

The iconic symbolism of the second wave of the feminist movement is still used today. This is a play on a popular beer ad of the time.

Many issues that were at the heart of the Women's Liberation Movement are still central to feminism today, like the unequal distribution of wages and unpaid labour, and their connection with the objectification of women's bodies.

Black Lesbians & gays Fight Back! The Feminist Library

Second wave feminists were militant

Fighting back against racism, homophobia and sexism, and standing in solidarity with those affected my multiple forms of oppression.

Standing up for the rights of women in prison. In the early 1980s, an important group called Women in Prison was started, which is still going strong today.

The discussion on the intersectional nature of oppression was introduced to feminism during the second wave and is at the heart of the movement today.

Campaigning for an end to rape, and the culture of victim blaming that surrounds it.

And addressing physical abuses like female genital mutilation.

Women Unite - International Women’s Day - Demonstrate The Feminist Library

They marched

Like the great theatrical processions of the suffrage movement, the Women's Liberation Movement marched every year as a form of collective protest and campaigning.

Marching was a way of coming together for a common cause – to celebrate women and their achievements, and to lobby for change.

Violence against women was a key theme. Many events, like this torchlight procession and the annual Reclaim The Night marches, took place after dark, in protest against the idea that women should avoid violence by not going out alone at night.

The Women's Liberation Movement was successful in many of its campaigns, including this one - to criminalise violence in marriage, which was legal in the UK until it was made a crime in 1991.

Many second wave feminists were also active in the peace movement, campaigning against nuclear weapons.

With my Speculum I am Strong! I Can Fight! The Feminist Library

They organised around women's health and our bodies

Second wave feminists campaigned for better women's healthcare, more freedom of choice over their own bodies, and fought against the tyranny of the idealised female image.

Some objected to the medical sexism that meant many medicines and treatments were exclusively made by and tested on men.

The 1967 Abortion Act was a landmark win for women's reproductive rights, but remained (and remains to this day, in many countries) constantly under threat. The Women's Liberation Movement passionately made the case for a woman's right to choose.

After many years of struggle, Irish women have successfully campaigned to get the 8th amendment repealed. This is a great achievement, but further work is needed for women to have full access to reproductive rights.

The HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s primarily focused on the male gay community, but feminists ensured the impact on women was not ignored.

Women! Don’t Just Sit There The Feminist Library

Feminists occupied South London Women Hospital to campaign against its closure. By this time, it was the only hospital in Britain run exclusively by women and for women, as the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital had been absorbed into University College Hospital and was no longer for women only. There had been some other women's hospitals in earlier times but they were long gone.

They campaigned against racist beauty standards, and helped teach girls to love the skin they're in.

They opposed ageism and sexism, in both culture and society.

They fought back against sexual and racial harassment in public places, arguing that women should be free to go out without fear of physical threats.

GEN Anti-sexist Education Magazine The Feminist Library

They organised in education

Teachers in the Women's Liberation Movement worked together to confront gender roles and sexist stereotyping in schools.

Workshops trained up feminists to become activists.

And women's studies emerged to ensure the history of the women's movement, and inspiring women from the past, would be remembered, celebrated, and their work carried forwards. The Feminist Library has carried on this tradition by launching Women's Studies Without Walls, where women can learn and share skills and experience outside the Academy.

Make a Break with Women in Manual Trades The Feminist Library

They organised around workplace issues

Women began to break into traditionally 'male' professions, and established women's networks to support and train each other up in skills such as carpentry, plumbing, and car mechanics.

Feminists campaigned on workers' rights - calling for fairer conditions, equal pay, and free childcare for working mothers.

Especially to support the poorer paid women working from home.

They fought for women's caring work to be recognised...

...and for improved access to childcare, so that women could be more than just mothers.

They supported broader trade union campaigns, standing side by side with striking printworkers…

…and miners, fighting to save their jobs, under the government of Margaret Thatcher during the 1980s.

The Feminist Library designed this badge at the time of Margaret Thatcher's death, to highlight her anti-women policies without using sexist imagery to attack her. Although she was the UK's first female prime minister, most second wave feminists rejected Margaret Thatcher as 'not my sister', because of the harm her government did to vulnerable communities and women's rights.

Feminists tackled the double discrimination that lesbians faced in the work place – for both their gender and their sexuality.

Trust in God She Will Provide The Feminist Library

And they challenged gender norms

The Women's Liberation Movement was closely linked with the sexual revolution and the LGBT rights movement, challenging social norms about sex, gender, family and relationships, and exploring alternatives to the traditional nuclear family.

They challenged the notion that women are helpless without a man, and some rejected heterosexual relationships altogether.

Second wave feminists fought for the rights and representation of lesbians.

And they highlighted the sexist and patriarchal structures of traditional marriage, in which women are expected to be subjugated and subservient to their husbands.

This prescient badge, from the early 1980s, refers to the forthcoming (and ill-fated) marriage of Prince Charles and Princess Diana. The badge was connected with the campaign within the Women's Liberation Movement for women's financial and legal independence - which also produced the very popular Y B A Wife slogan

WLM Symbol The Feminist Library

Second wave feminists took part in many, many campaigns, and fought on a wide range of issues affecting women and marginalised communities globally – as this tiny selection of posters and badges shows. There are several hundred more in the Feminist Library , which has been archiving feminist history since 1975. Many of the badges in our collection were collected by Astra Blaug, feminist author, artist, and activist, whose archive was donated to us on her death in 2015.

21st century feminist activism

The feminist library, second wave sisterhood.

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Join us as this panel of esteemed authors discuss the urgent need for reparations in today’s society. This discussion brings together voices that advocate for justice, equity, and historical accountability. Through thoughtful analysis, personal narratives, and historical context, these authors explore the deep-rooted impact of systemic injustices on Black communities and the moral imperative of reparations with tips and talking points we all can use to take back what ours.

She Did That!: Celebrating HerStory

Step back in time and explore the captivating world of Black historical fiction. From forgotten heroes to pivotal moments in history, these authors weave together vivid narratives that transport readers to different eras and perspectives. Through meticulous research and creative storytelling, they breathe new life into the past, shedding light on the triumphs, struggles, and resilience of Black communities throughout history.

Empowerment Unveiled: Telling Your Story Your Way

Join us for a captivating author panel featuring insightful explorations of childhood, identity, and the ways we hold space for complex truths. Discover the rich narratives that celebrate Black creativity and strength. This discussion promises to inspire and empower, inviting all to engage in a dynamic conversation.

The ESSENCE Festival of Culture™ presented by Coca-Cola® will take place July 4-7. For more information and updates on the festival, visit our website and follow us on social media @ESSENCEFest on X, Facebook, and Instagram.

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Looking Ahead to the Biden-Trump Debate

More from our inbox:.

• The Ten Commandments in Public Classrooms
• Turning Our Backs on Desperate Asylum Seekers
• Health Care Disparities Affecting Black Women
• Alito’s Wife and the Sacred Heart Flag

To the Editor:

Re “ Biden Practices and Trump Improvises in Run-Up to Revamped Debate ” (news article, June 17):

There is one question that I hope President Biden gets to ask the former president at Thursday’s debate. For the last four years, Donald Trump has told anyone and everyone who would listen that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

The man in charge of the federal government at the time, the most powerful man in the nation and the world, was Mr. Trump. So, how did Joe Biden do it?

How did a man out of power rig the federal election so as to win by more than seven million votes in the popular vote as well as defeat Mr. Trump in the Electoral College? And do so right under Mr. Trump’s nose, metaphorically?

Stuart Altshuler New York

It would be great if CNN would run a chyron during the debate with real-time fact-checking. By debunking both minor misstatements and big, bold lies immediately, the fact-checking would provide a counterpoint to the social media and news outlets spreading erroneous statements like wildfire.

I appreciate that the campaigns and their supporters will still spread debate clips out of context, but this would be one small step toward furthering a substantive discussion on the implications of electing either candidate.

Alison Harris Brunswick, Maine

Given Donald Trump’s lack of general knowledge and debating skills, as well as now legendary bullying tactics during his media “performances,” I suspect that he will soon raise unjustifiable objections to CNN’s recently announced debate forum.

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