You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 10 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
Second-wave feminism (c. 1960s–1980s) was the period in which feminism became a fully developed political ideology rather than a single-issue campaign. Where the first wave fought for legal and political rights, the second wave turned to the deeper structures of women's subordination — the family, sexuality, reproduction, the workplace, and the very meaning of gender. It is also the period in which feminism's internal strands crystallised into the recognisable forms — liberal, socialist/Marxist, and radical — that dominate exam questions. Mastering the distinctions between them, and the central disagreement they express about the root cause of oppression, is the single most important skill for the 24-mark question.
For the Edexcel specification, the second wave is in many ways the centre of gravity of the whole topic. Three of the five named feminist thinkers — de Beauvoir (whose Second Sex underpins the wave), Millett, and Rowbotham — are most closely associated with this period, and the strands developed here supply the conceptual framework for almost any feminism question. A 24-mark answer that can move confidently between the liberal, socialist, and radical analyses of the second wave, attaching the right thinker and the right concept to each, and can evaluate their disagreements rather than merely describe them, has the essential architecture of a top-band response.
Second-wave feminism grew out of the wider upheavals of the 1960s:
Out of this ferment came the slogan that defined the era — "the personal is political" — and the insight that the home and the bedroom were as much sites of power as the parliament and the factory.
The decisive break with the first wave lay in the target of the analysis. First-wave feminism had concentrated on the public sphere: the law, the franchise, the professions. The second wave argued that women could enjoy full legal and political equality and still be profoundly unfree, because the deepest sources of their subordination lay in the private sphere — in the family, in sexuality, in reproduction, and in the everyday texture of relationships between women and men. Formal equality, the second wave insisted, was necessary but radically insufficient: it left untouched the unequal division of housework and childcare, the control of women's bodies and fertility, the prevalence of sexual violence, and the cultural messages that shaped what women were permitted to be. This reorientation — from public to private, from formal to substantive equality — is the single most important thing to understand about the second wave, and it is what made possible the emergence of distinctively socialist and radical strands alongside the older liberal one. Once the private sphere was recognised as a site of political power, questions that the first wave had never asked — about who does the housework, who controls reproduction, who is safe from violence in their own home — moved to the centre of feminist politics, and the analysis of patriarchy could extend into territory that formal legal equality had never reached.
Liberal feminism applies the principles of liberalism — individual rights, equality of opportunity, and legal reform — to the position of women. It is the most moderate strand, seeking equality within existing structures rather than their overthrow.
Core ideas:
Key thinker — Betty Friedan (1921–2006). In The Feminine Mystique (1963) Friedan diagnosed the unhappiness of comfortable, educated American housewives, trapped by an ideology that defined female fulfilment solely through marriage, motherhood, and housework. She named this malaise "the problem that has no name" — the inchoate sense of emptiness felt by women who had everything society told them should make them happy and yet were not, because they had been denied the chance to develop and use their own talents and identities beyond the home. The "feminine mystique" itself was the cultural machinery — advertising, women's magazines, popular psychology — that manufactured and sustained this confining ideal of femininity. Friedan co-founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966 to press for equal pay, reproductive rights, and an end to sex discrimination. Within the Edexcel specification Friedan is one of the named liberalism thinkers, and she is the clearest exemplar of liberal feminism in a feminism answer; her remedy was characteristically liberal — open education, careers, and public life to women so that they might pursue self-fulfilment as individuals on the same terms as men.
Key achievements associated with liberal-feminist campaigning:
The liberal-feminist conception of equality. What liberal feminism fundamentally seeks is equality of opportunity: a level playing field on which individuals are judged on their merits, with gender no more relevant to a person's prospects than eye colour. It does not, characteristically, demand equality of outcome, nor does it seek to abolish competition or hierarchy; it asks only that women be admitted to the competition on equal terms. This is a recognisably liberal vision, and it explains both the strand's strengths and its limits. Its strength is that it is achievable, broadly popular, and consistent with the values of liberal-democratic societies, which is why so much of the second wave's legislative success belongs to it. Its limit is that equality of opportunity can leave very large inequalities of outcome in place — if women remain disproportionately responsible for childcare, formally equal opportunities in the workplace will not produce equal results — and it does nothing to challenge the structures of the private sphere from which those unequal outcomes flow.
Criticisms:
Socialist feminism holds that women's oppression is inseparable from capitalism, fusing feminist analysis with Marxist class analysis.
Core ideas:
Key thinker — Sheila Rowbotham (b. 1943). A leading British socialist feminist, Rowbotham argued that under capitalism women sell their labour like other workers, while the family simultaneously disciplines women and shelters men from alienation — cushioning male workers from the dehumanising effects of capitalist labour at women's expense. Her work (including Woman's Consciousness, Man's World, 1973) insisted that gender and class oppression must be analysed together, and stressed the importance of women developing a collective consciousness of their shared, structural situation rather than experiencing their subordination as a private misfortune. Friedrich Engels is an important antecedent: in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) he tied the subordination of women to the rise of private property, arguing that the monogamous family had emerged to secure the inheritance of property through legitimate heirs, and so institutionalised the control of women — what he memorably called the "world-historic defeat of the female sex".
Criticisms:
The "dual systems" debate. A central theoretical question for socialist feminism is the relationship between capitalism and patriarchy: are they a single system, or two? "Single-system" theorists treat women's oppression as essentially a function of capitalism, to be ended when capitalism is ended. But this invites the obvious objection that patriarchy long predates capitalism and has survived in non-capitalist societies, which suggests it has an independent existence. "Dual-systems" theorists therefore argue that capitalism and patriarchy are two distinct but interacting systems of oppression, each with its own logic, which happen to reinforce one another under modern conditions. This more sophisticated position allows socialist feminism to take patriarchy seriously as something more than an economic by-product, but at the cost of conceding much of the radical-feminist claim that male domination is a distinct and fundamental oppression in its own right. The debate is a good illustration of how socialist feminism is pulled between its Marxist and its feminist commitments, and of why the relationship between class and gender is so contested.
Radical feminism makes the boldest claim: that patriarchy — not capitalism, not mere prejudice, but a systematic structure of male domination — is the original and most fundamental form of oppression in every society. It is "radical" in the strict sense of going to the root (Latin radix): where liberals see surface discrimination and socialists see an economic system, radicals see beneath both a still deeper structure, the domination of women by men, which they regard as the model and origin of all other forms of domination. This is a genuinely distinctive analysis, and it is what makes radical feminism the most theoretically ambitious — and the most controversial — of the strands.
Core ideas:
Key thinker — Kate Millett (1934–2017). In Sexual Politics (1970) Millett argued that undoing the patriarchal family is the key to any genuine sexual revolution, and that patriarchy reproduces itself culturally — for example through art and literature that degrade and objectify women. Her concept of "sexual politics" reframed personal and cultural life as arenas of political power: "politics", on her account, refers not only to the institutions of government but to any structured relationship in which one group dominates another, and the relationship between the sexes is the most basic and pervasive such relationship. By analysing the work of celebrated male novelists, Millett showed that even the most admired culture could function as an instrument transmitting patriarchal attitudes, so that the subordination of women was sustained not only by law and economics but by the stories a society tells about itself. Shulamith Firestone (The Dialectic of Sex, 1970) pushed the analysis further, locating women's oppression in biological reproduction itself and speculating that only the technological transcendence of childbearing could finally free women, while Germaine Greer (The Female Eunuch, 1970) argued that patriarchal society had suppressed women's energy and sexuality, reducing them to passive, desexualised "eunuchs".
Criticisms:
Subscribe to continue reading
Get full access to this lesson and all 10 lessons in this course.