The sixties were home to what is commonly described as the second wave of feminist theory and protest. There is much debate about when the first wave started, ended, and was at its height. Generally, it’s associated with women’s voting rights in the early twentieth century. If the first wave was about voting, the second wave was about society, domesticity and the right to be loud. It brought about change in many people’s attitudes and an increase in the more radical side of the liberal movement. The attitudes and social laws that were fought by second-wave feminists seem far removed from today’s society. In reality, they are not that far away at all.
Like many movements of the later twentieth century, second-wave feminism was loud, brash and in your face. In fact, it had to be for anyone to pay attention. Literature like ‘The Bitch Manifesto’ and ‘The Feminine Mystique’ made bold, aggressive claims about the nature of women, men, and their interactions.(1) As more people got hold of these ideas, more women started questioning the sexual status quo. These women burned bras, marched through the streets, and refused, at any cost to ‘settle down dear’. The impact (and indeed as was intended), was a certain degree of social upheaval. Certainly, domestic life for many would never be the same again, and many young women would never even enter into the same life their mothers did as a result. These bold women had goals: the legal equality of the sexes, and to move women out of the kitchens of the world and into offices, hospitals, labs and courts. This was about equal pay and equal opportunities as well as about the more legal issues of abortion rights and sexual health. To achieve their goals, second wavers did a lot of what all good social movements of the sixties did; march.
Women also did not just get involved in ‘women’s issues’. The Sixties was a time for loud, unapologetically political women, who took political action on a number of issues.
Marching through the streets was significant in a couple of ways for women in the Sixties. On one hand, public protests echoed other liberal movements of the era. Civil rights, nuclear disarmament, student rights and (to some extent later) workers’ rights movements all used public marching and picketing to get their points across to the masses. Using the same methods not only meant that feminists knew this approach was likely to have an impact but it also that it lent a degree of authority to them. It also would have been a significant sight. Women in large numbers, taking up large amounts of space was simply not the done thing. There was a lot of discussion during this period and onwards, about the effects of socially enforced domestic life on the mental wellbeing of housewives. It was concluded that many women were depressed, anxious, unhappy and angry because of their practical confinement.(2) Physically moving out of the domestic spaces they were traditionally allowed to inhabit would have been liberating in its own right.
The second wave of feminism was complex. It was nuanced, loud, transformative and (at times) exclusionary. It broke some taboos and enforced others. Over the next two posts, I will explore one great success of the movement and one great failure.
References
1: Freidan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique, (London : Penguin Books , 1992), chapter 5.
2: Haggett, Ali. "'DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES' AND THE DOMESTIC ENVIRONMENT IN POST-WAR BRITAIN: INDIVIDUAL PERSPECTIVES." Oral History 37, no. 1 (2009): 53-60. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40650218.
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