Beginning in the 1940s, large demographic changes laid the preconditions for a resurgence of feminism. As more and more women took jobs, the importance of their paid work to the economy and their families challenged traditional views of women and awakened many women workers, especially labor union women, to the inferior conditions of their employment. The democratization of higher education brought more women to college campuses, where their aspirations exceeded the confines of domesticity and of routine, subordinate jobs.

Policy initiatives in the early 1960s reflected both these larger transformations and the efforts of women’s rights activists. In 1961, Assistant Secretary of Labor Esther Peterson persuaded President Kennedy to create the President’s Commission on the Status of Women. Its 1963 report documented widespread discrimination against women and recommended remedies. One of the commission’s concerns was addressed even before it issued its report, when Congress passed the Equal Pay Act of 1963, making it illegal to pay women less than men for the same work.

Like other movements, the rise of feminism owed much to the black freedom struggle. Women gained protection from employment discrimination through Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the extension of affirmative action to women by piggybacking onto civil rights measures. They soon grew impatient when the government failed to take these new policies seriously. Determined to speed the process of change, writer and feminist Betty Friedan, civil rights activist Pauli Murray, several union women, and others founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966.

Simultaneously, a more radical feminism grew among civil rights and New Left activists. Frustrated with the unwillingness of male activists to take sexism seriously, many women walked out of New Left organizations and created an independent women’s liberation movement throughout the nation.

Women’s liberation began to gain public attention, especially when dozens of women picketed the Miss America beauty pageant in 1968, protesting against being forced “to compete for male approval [and] enslaved by ludicrous ‘beauty’ standards.” Women began to speak publicly about personal experiences that had always been shrouded in secrecy, such as rape and abortion. Throughout the country, women joined consciousness-raising groups, where they discovered that what they had considered “personal” problems reflected an entrenched system of discrimination against and devaluation of women.

Radical feminists, who called their movement “women’s liberation,” differed from feminists in NOW and other more mainstream groups in several ways. NOW focused on equal treatment for women in the public sphere; women’s liberation emphasized ending women’s subordination in family and other personal relationships. Groups such as NOW wanted to integrate women into existing institutions; radical groups insisted that women’s liberation required a total transformation of economic, political, and social institutions. Differences between these two strands of feminism blurred in the 1970s, as NOW and other mainstream groups embraced many of the issues raised by radicals.

Although NOW elected a black president, Aileen Hernandez, in 1970, the new feminism’s leadership and constituency were predominantly white and middle-class. Women of color criticized white feminists for their inadequate attention to the disproportionate poverty experienced by minority women and to the additional layers of discrimination based on race or ethnicity. To black women, who were much more frequently compelled to work in the lowest-paying jobs for their families’ survival, employment did not necessarily look like liberation.

In addition to struggling with vast differences among women, feminism also contended with the refusal of the mass media to take women’s grievances seriously. When the House of Representatives passed an Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1970, the New York Times criticized it in an editorial titled “The Henpecked House.” After Gloria Steinem founded Ms: The New Magazine for Women in 1972, feminists had their own mass-circulation periodical controlled by women and featuring articles on a broad range of feminist issues. Ms. reported on a multifaceted movement that included numerous organizations, reflecting the diverse experiences, backgrounds, and goals of American women. New women’s organizations represented ethnic and racial minorities, labor union women, religious women, welfare mothers, lesbians, and more. Other new groups focused on single issues such as health, education, abortion rights, and violence against women. Common threads underlay the great diversity of organizations, issues, and activities. Feminism represented the belief that women were barred from, unequally treated in, or poorly served by the male-dominated public arena, encompassing politics, medicine, law, education, culture, and religion. Many feminists also sought equality in the private sphere, challenging traditional norms that identified women primarily as wives and mothers or sex objects, subservient to men.