In the West, organized feminism had lost momentum by the end of the 1920s, when many countries in Western Europe and North America had achieved women’s suffrage. When it revived in the 1960s in both Western Europe and the United States, it did so with a quite different agenda. In France, for example, the writer and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir in 1949 had published The Second Sex, a book arguing that women had historically been defined as “other,” or deviant from the “normal” male sex. The book soon became a central statement of a reviving women’s movement. French feminists staged a counter–Mother’s Day parade under the slogan “Celebrated one day; exploited all year.” To highlight their demand to control their own bodies, some 343 women signed a published manifesto stating that they had undergone an abortion, which was then illegal in France.

Across the Atlantic, millions of American women responded to Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique (1963), which disclosed the identity crisis of educated women, unfulfilled by marriage and motherhood. Some adherents of this second-wave feminism took up the equal rights agenda of their nineteenth-century predecessors, but with an emphasis now on employment and education rather than voting rights. A more radical expression of American feminism, widely known as “women’s liberation,” took broader aim at patriarchy as a system of domination, similar to those of race and class. One manifesto from 1969 declared:

We are exploited as sex objects, breeders, domestic servants, and cheap labor. We are considered inferior beings, whose only purpose is to enhance men’s lives…. Because we live so intimately with our oppressors, we have been kept from seeing our personal suffering as a political condition.11

Thus liberation for women meant becoming aware of their own oppression, a process that took place in thousands of consciousness-raising groups across the country. Many such women advocated direct action rather than the political lobbying favored by equal rights feminists. They challenged the Miss America contest of 1968 by tossing stink bombs in the hall, crowning a live sheep as their Miss America, and disposing of girdles, bras, high-heeled shoes, tweezers, and other “instruments of oppression” in a Freedom Trashcan. They also brought into open discussion issues involving sexuality, insisting that free love, lesbianism, and celibacy should be accorded the same respect as heterosexual marriage.

Yet another strand of Western feminism emerged from women of color. For many of them, the concerns of white, usually middle-class, feminists were hardly relevant to their oppression. Black women had always worked outside the home and so felt little need to be liberated from the chains of homemaking. Whereas white women might find the family oppressive, African American women viewed it as a secure base from which to resist racism. Solidarity with black men, rather than separation from them, was essential in confronting a racist America. Viewing mainstream feminism as “a family quarrel between White women and White men,” many women of African descent in the United States and Britain established their own organizations, with a focus on racism and poverty.12