By the 1950s women could vote across most of the Western world, yet law, work and family life still treated them very differently from men. The second wave asked why formal political equality had changed so little in everyday life.

Simone de Beauvoir

The French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex in 1949. Writing as an existentialist, she argued that man has been treated as the default human being, while woman has been defined as the Other, always in relation to him. In her most famous line, she held in effect that a person is not born a woman but becomes one: womanhood, as a social position, is shaped by upbringing, expectations and institutions rather than simply given by biology. She did not deny bodily differences, but argued that they do not settle what a woman's life must be.

Betty Friedan

In the United States, Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963) described widespread unhappiness among educated suburban housewives, a problem that, she said, seemed to have no name. The feminine mystique was her term for the idea that women could find fulfillment only as wives and mothers, an idea she found promoted by magazines, advertisers and experts. In 1966 Friedan co-founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) and became its first president. Critics, including Black feminist writers, later noted that her book spoke mainly to white, middle-class women, many of whom could afford not to work, while millions of other women had always worked for wages.

Law and the workplace

Second-wave campaigns won major legal changes:

• In the US, the Equal Pay Act of 1963; Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned sex discrimination in employment; and Title IX (1972), which banned it in federally funded education.
• In Britain, the Equal Pay Act of 1970, passed after women sewing machinists struck at Ford's Dagenham plant in 1968, and the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975.
• Gradual reforms of marriage law, credit and property, and the spread of shelters for women escaping domestic violence.

Not every campaign succeeded. The US Equal Rights Amendment passed Congress in 1972 but was not ratified by enough states before its deadline. Its opponents, led by the conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, many of them women, argued that it would remove protections such as exemption from the military draft and support for homemakers. Supporters argued that it would simply write equal treatment into the Constitution.

Access to contraception, after the first birth control pill was approved in the US in 1960, changed women's ability to plan education and careers. Abortion also became central to second-wave politics and remains one of the most deeply contested moral questions, with sincere disagreement among women and among people who call themselves feminists.

The personal is political

The slogan “the personal is political”, linked to a 1969 essay by the activist Carol Hanisch, captured a key second-wave idea: problems that seem private, such as housework, sexuality and relationships, reflect wider patterns of power and can be addressed collectively. Women met in small consciousness-raising groups to share experiences and discover common patterns. Critics argued that the slogan could license intrusive judgments about private choices.

Myths and memory

At a 1968 protest against the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, demonstrators threw bras, girdles and other items into a “Freedom Trash Can,” but nothing was actually set on fire. The image of “bra-burning” feminists became a lasting myth.

Worked example: a consciousness-raising group, 1970

Imagine eight women meeting weekly in a living room in 1970. The group has a simple rule: each woman speaks in turn about a topic from her own experience, without interruption or judgment. This week's topic is money.

Joan, a teacher, says she earns her own salary, but a store refused her a credit card in her own name without her husband's signature. Carol says her bank asked whether she planned to have children before approving a car loan. Rita, a widow, says she could not get a mortgage despite a steady job. Each woman had assumed her experience was a private misfortune or a quirk of one bank.

Hearing the stories together, the group sees a pattern: lenders routinely treated women's income as unreliable and required male signatures. That is the insight behind “the personal is political”: what felt like personal bad luck turns out to be a shared, structural problem that could be changed.

The group decides to act. Members write to their representatives, document cases, and join a larger campaign. Pressure from many such groups and organizations contributed to the US Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974, which banned credit discrimination based on sex or marital status.

Now consider the criticism. Suppose one member says she prefers to let her husband handle the family finances. Should the group treat that as a problem? A thoughtful facilitator would say no: the point of the method is to uncover barriers, not to judge every private arrangement. Where to draw that line was a real tension within the movement, and it still is.