Women's Liberation Movement - Second Wave Feminism

Second Wave Feminism

A creative tension between a growing general climate of liberalisation - culminating in legal liberalization in the late 1960s and early 1970s, for example on abortion, gay rights and equal pay in the UK; what was termed a 'second wave' of liberalising feminism, perhaps best characterized by the formation of the National Organization of Women (NOW) and the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in the USA; and a more 'liberation' inspired movement with strong roots in the US Civil Rights Movement - and, it must be said, as much reacting against as working with the more radical political groups of the late 1960s.

To see the blossoming of the latter, it is most useful to look at publications coming out of 'the underground', such as off our backs in 1970 in the USA (still strong today) and Spare Rib in 1972 the UK. It could be argued that Spare Rib itself did not explicitly identify itself as part of the women's liberation movement until its coverage of the 2007 National Women's Liberation Movement Conference - before that still working out how much it aimed to be a challenging popular women's magazine and how much an explicitly radical political publication. (See the Penguin Spare Rib Reader for a good description and depiction of its development.) The fact that Spare Rib reached its high point of circulation and influence (after some very good PR when it first started) in the late 1970s usefully charts the women's liberation movement itself.

It's in 1981, for example, the European Union invited editors from the four leading WLM magazines in Europe (from Germany, France, Italy and UK) to a debate on women's rights in the European Parliament in Luxembourg; and the number of women's initiatives in the late 1970s has still to be documented. It is important not to back date views and influence: the 1970s were a crucial time for significant changes in attitudes to women in Western societies.

Some argue that the Women's Liberation Movement was a consequence of World War II, during which so many women got to experience "men's" jobs. This gave them a taste of the working life and the drive to fight for equality in society in the years to come, so they could continue to expand the traditionally "female" roles, as they were known then.