Chapter 56: Women's Liberation in the Age of Mass Media
Core idea
The first wave won the vote; the second wave came for everything else
By the mid-twentieth century, the first wave of feminism had largely accomplished its central goal in the West: ending categorical, gender-based voting discrimination. Most adult women in democracies could vote. But the right to vote turned out to be a thin layer on top of a thick stack of unaddressed inequalities — in employment, property, reproduction, sexuality, education, and the daily expectation that an adult woman’s life would be organized around full-time, unpaid domestic labor. The second wave, which crested between roughly 1963 and the late 1970s, took on that whole stack at once.
”The problem that has no name”
In The Feminine Mystique (1963), Betty Friedan named the diffuse unhappiness she found among middle-class American housewives — women whose material lives looked perfect on paper but who reported widespread depression, frustration, and a sense that their actual capacities were going unused. Friedan’s diagnosis was that the postwar suburban ideal had forcibly channeled adult women into a single life script. The book sold three million copies in three years and became the organizing manifesto for the movement that would soon found NOW (the National Organization for Women, 1966) and push the legal reforms of the decade that followed.
Why it matters
Workplace equality is where the second wave concentrated its fire
First-wave activists had targeted the law; second-wave activists targeted the workplace. Title VII of the US Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned sex-based employment discrimination almost as an afterthought — the word “sex” was added by a Southern segregationist who hoped it would sink the bill — and feminists then spent the next two decades using that single word to dismantle hiring quotas, “men only” job listings, and unequal pay scales. Title IX (1972) did the same for education. The British Sex Discrimination Act (1975) extended the same logic across the Atlantic. None of these laws fixed the underlying problem on their own, but each gave activists a legal lever they had not previously had.
Reproductive autonomy as the linchpin
The 1960 approval of the oral contraceptive pill, the 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut decision (which struck down state bans on contraception for married couples), and the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision (which protected abortion access nationally in the US) collectively did something more radical than any of the workplace reforms: they made it possible for a woman to choose when, and whether, to bear children. Every other gain of the second wave — career continuity, education, economic independence — depended on that choice. Half a century later, reproductive rights remain the most contested terrain in every Western political system precisely because they are the linchpin.
Intersectionality: the movement’s self-critique
For as long as there has been an organized women’s movement in the West, women of color, working-class women, lesbians, and disabled women had pointed out that “women’s issues” were usually framed in ways that fit the lives of middle-class, white, heterosexual women in particular. In 1989, the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw gave that critique a name: intersectionality. The idea is that most people who are oppressed are oppressed on more than one axis simultaneously, and that single-axis movements (race-only, gender-only, class-only) tend to leave behind precisely the people who need them most. Intersectionality is now standard vocabulary across feminist theory and activism.
Key takeaways
Key takeaways
- First-wave feminism won the vote in most Western democracies by the early twentieth century.
- Second-wave feminism (roughly 1963 to late 1970s) targeted workplace discrimination, reproductive rights, property rights, and laws against sexual assault.
- Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963) named 'the problem that has no name' and helped launch the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966.
- The US Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title IX (1972), and Roe v. Wade (1973) were the second wave's principal legal victories in the United States.
- Kimberlé Crenshaw coined 'intersectionality' in 1989 to describe how race, gender, class, and other axes of oppression compound rather than operate separately.
- A 2016 World Economic Forum study found a gender pay gap in every country on Earth, with Iceland the smallest (88 cents on the dollar) and Yemen the largest (52 cents).
- Countries often stereotyped as 'less progressive' on gender — Rwanda, Nicaragua — outperform the US and UK on measured wage equality.
Mental model
Read it as: A handful of mid-1960s catalysts — the pill, Friedan’s book, NOW — fed into a chain of legal victories that the movement consolidated through the 1970s. Each victory generated its own backlash, and the present-day movement is still negotiating both the gains and the counter-pressure they produced.
Key figures
Betty Friedan (1921-2006)
A Smith-educated psychologist and journalist whose interviews with her own college classmates produced The Feminine Mystique. She co-founded NOW in 1966 and served as its first president. Her later relationships with the broader women’s movement were prickly — she was famously hostile to lesbian feminists in the 1970s — but the agenda she articulated set the terms for everything that followed.
Gloria Steinem (1934-)
A magazine journalist who went undercover as a Playboy Bunny in 1963 and co-founded Ms. magazine in 1971. Steinem became the public face of second-wave feminism in a way Friedan never quite did, and her concise rhetorical style (“if the shoe doesn’t fit, must we change the foot?”) translated the movement’s arguments into mass-media-friendly form.
Kimberlé Crenshaw (1959-)
A Columbia and UCLA law professor whose 1989 article “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” gave the movement its most influential post-1980s analytical concept. Crenshaw was building on a much longer tradition — Mary Church Terrell co-founded the National Association of Colored Women in 1896 with similar arguments — but her single word, intersectionality, captured the idea in a way the broader movement could use.
Example
Why the pay gap persists even after the legal gap closed
Imagine two workers, a woman and a man, both hired into the same engineering role on the same day, at the same starting salary, under the same anti-discrimination law. Track them for thirty years. In most countries, the woman will end up earning less. Why?
A few measurable causes: she is more likely to take time out for childcare; she is more likely to be the one who relocates for a partner’s job rather than her own; she is more likely to be steered, formally or informally, toward roles that pay less; she is less likely to negotiate aggressively (and when she does, she is more often penalized for it). Each individual mechanism may be small. Compounded over a career, they produce the persistent gap that the 2016 WEF study measured.
The deeper lesson is that anti-discrimination law is necessary but not sufficient. Equality of outcome depends on a thousand small daily decisions — by employers, partners, schools, and the workers themselves — that no statute can directly govern. That is why the second-wave movement evolved into the third-wave and fourth-wave movements: each generation discovers that the legal floor needs new repairs, and that the cultural ceiling needs new pressure.
Related lessons
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