The 1960s and 1970s women’s movement, nicknamed the “second wave” of feminism, was a stark departure from the idyllic suburban existence portrayed in American popular culture. However, the roots of the new insurgency were buried in the dissatisfaction of college-educated moms, whose blow spurred their daughters in a new direction. 

If the abolitionist movement inspired first-wave feminists, the civil rights movement swept their great-granddaughters into feminism, with its attendant discussions about equality and justice and the revolutionary upheaval of anti-Vietnam War rallies.

President John F. Kennedy was concerned about women’s issues long before this public debate. He established the President’s Commission on the Status of Women in 1961 and nominated Eleanor Roosevelt to chair it. 

Its 1963 study advocated for the nuclear family and helped women prepare for parenthood. It did, however, highlight a national trend of workplace discrimination, unequal pay, legal injustice, and a lack of support services for working women. To remedy it, statutory guarantees of equal pay for equal work, equal job opportunities, and improved child-care services were required.

The Equal Pay Act of 1963 created the first guarantee, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was revised to prohibit employers from discriminating based on gender.

Some saw these efforts as insufficient in a society where classified advertisements still segregated job posts by gender, state laws restricted women’s access to contraception, and rape and domestic abuse incidents went unreported.

 Along with the civil rights movement, the concept of a women’s rights movement emerged in the late 1960s, and women of all ages and conditions were swept up in arguments about gender, discrimination, and the definition of equality.

Racism as a Factor

Like the first, the second wave was defined and led by educated middle-class white women who organised the movement primarily around their interests. As a result, she had an uneasy, if not antagonistic, relationship with women of many classes and ethnicities. 

The struggle against pay and employment discrimination helped the movement reconcile with white labour union women. 

However, feminism’s relationship with African American women has always been more difficult. White feminists believe that gender is the underlying cause of their exclusion from full participation in American life. 

Black women were obligated to address the interplay of racism and sexism, as well as figure out how to get Black males to consider gender issues while forcing white women to consider race. Black feminists such as Michele Wallace, Mary Ann Weathers, bell hooks, Alice Walker, and Bettina Aptheker addressed such issues.

White feminists’ call for unity and solidarity was founded on the belief that women formed a gender-based class or caste that was bound together by common oppression. Many Black women had difficulties viewing white women as feminist sisters; after all, many African Americans saw white women as just as oppressors as white men. Toni Cade Bambara enquired in The Black Woman: An Anthology (1970),

“How relevant are the truths, experiences, and findings of White women to Black women?” “I don’t know that our priorities are equal, that our issues and strategies are similar.” Since Sojourner Truth, black feminists have asserted that white feminists are incapable of comprehending their challenges.

However, at the first gathering of the National Black Feminist Organisation in New York City in 1973, some Black women, primarily middle-class Black women, argued that being Black and female was fundamentally different from being Black and masculine. 

According to black women activists, many of the mainstream feminist movement’s goals—daycare, abortion, maternity leave, and violence—were also important to African-American women. 

As a result, African-American and white feminists formed strong alliances on specific causes.

The Internationalisation Of Feminism

By the conclusion of the 20th century, contact between European and American feminists and nascent feminist organisations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America had commenced. Intellectuals among women in developed nations were taken aback when they discovered that certain countries enforced the veil-wearing requirement for public appearances or subjected women to female infanticide, widow burning, female genital mutilation/cutting, or forced marriage. 

Numerous Western feminists mistakenly believed that they were the saviours of women in the Third World, oblivious to the fact that their conceptions of societal issues and proposed solutions frequently diverged from the realities and concerns of women in these regions. 

The substantial decline in the status of women in many regions of Africa did not commence until the advent of European colonialism. It appeared implausible that patriarchy, as opposed to European imperialism, was the principal issue in those nations.

The visibility of women’s disputes in developing and developed countries was highest during international conferences. In the aftermath of the 1980 Copenhagen World Conference of the United Nations Decade for Women: Equality, Development, and Peace, women representing underdeveloped countries expressed discontent with selecting the veil and FGC as conference objectives, contending that such decisions failed to adequately consider the impact on women. 

It appeared that their Western counterparts were not paying heed to them. 

Third-world women protested outside the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, asserting that the United States and Europe had stolen the agenda. 

The protesters had anticipated hearing about the barriers that women faced due to poverty. The conference organisers opted to shift their focus towards the topics of abortion and contraception.

 “[Women of the Third World] observed that they could not possibly be preoccupied with other matters while their children perished from hunger, thirst, or war,” wrote Muslim women’s rights expert and law professor Azizah al-Hibri. 

Conversely, the conference centred on reducing Third World infant mortality rates to conserve the planet’s resources, notwithstanding (or is it “because of”) the substantial consumption of these resources by the First World? 

Third-world women criticised European and American women during the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 for placing greater emphasis on reproductive rights, language, and sexual orientation discrimination rather than the platform proposal that developing countries deemed most crucial—restructuring international debt.

Nevertheless, albeit in fits and starts, women around the globe were making progress by the end of the twentieth century. Feminism encountered significant setbacks in nations like Afghanistan, where the Taliban, an extreme anti-feminist group, strictly prohibited all activities, including the education of women. In contrast, feminism has yielded substantial advancements for women in various domains, including the elimination of female genital mutilation (FGC) in numerous African nations and governmental initiatives in India aimed at ceasing widow burning (Sati). 

From the emergence of academic fields like ecofeminism and women’s studies to the growing concern over discriminatory language, feminism has impacted all facets of contemporary life, communication, and discourse. Feminism influenced sports, divorce laws, sexual norms, and organised religion in numerous world regions.

However, concerns persisted regarding how Western feminism would address women who believed the movement had become excessively radical and had progressed too far. How effective and consistent can global feminism be? Might the plight of women residing in the arid regions of the Middle East or the mountains of Pakistan be amenable to isolation, or do these matters require the attention of international forums? 

The differences in economic, political, and cultural circumstances across the globe suggested that the approaches taken by Nairobi and New York in addressing these inquiries were notably dissimilar.

Third Wave of Feminism 

In the mid-1990s, the third phase of feminism began to emerge. Gen Xers, born in the developed world during the 1960s and 1970s and grew up in a culturally and economically diverse society saturated with media, were its driving force. While greatly benefiting from the legal rights and protections won by first- and second-wave feminists, they also offered critical assessments of the perspectives and unresolved issues of second-wave feminism.

The Foundation

Increased economic and professional influence and status during the second wave, the immense expansion of options for communicating ideas during the information revolution of the late 20th century, and the maturation of Generation X academics and activists all contributed to the emergence of the third wave.

Daughters of the second generation were among the first to advocate for the new system. 

The Third Wave Foundation was established in 1997 as an extension of the Third Wave Direct Action Corporation, established in 1992 to support “groups and individuals working towards gender, racial, and economic equality.” 

Rebecca Walker was among their founders, the progeny of both organisations and the offspring of novelist and second-waver Alice Walker. 

Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, co-authors of Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future (2000), were both born in 1970 and brought up by second-wave feminist parents who challenged the gendered division of labour within their households and instructed their daughters to become independent, powerful, articulate, and successful women.

Similar to numerous others, these women were brought up with the anticipation of achievement and instances of successful women, in addition to an awareness of the obstacles posed by misogyny, racism, and classism. 

By employing strategies such as subverting symbols that propagate sexism, racism, and social classism, resisting patriarchy via irony, addressing violence through the narratives of survivors, and opposing further exclusion through grassroots activism and radical democracy, they elected to surmount these challenges. Instead of assimilating into the “machine,” the third wave initiated its disassembly and reconstruction.

Third-wave feminists endeavoured to challenge, reclaim, and reinterpret notions, terminology, and media that conveyed, among other things, femininity, masculinity, sexuality, womanhood, and attractiveness. Assuming that specific characteristics are inherently feminine and others are intrinsically masculine, gender concepts evolved significantly, resulting in the conception of a gender continuum. 

According to this perspective, each person possesses, manifests, and represses the entire spectrum of traits traditionally associated with a particular gender. 

Subsequently, the term “sexual liberation,” which was a central objective of second-wave feminism, was expanded to encompass the progression of initially developing an understanding of the societal impact on one’s sexuality and gender identity, followed by actively determining one’s true gender identity and gaining the ability to freely express it.

Contradictory opinions

Third-wave adherents were justifiably censured. Amidst the emergence of the third wave, certain writers self-identified as postfeminists, asserting that the movement had surpassed its practical utility. In contrast, elderly feminists maintained the view that the prevailing concerns remained unchanged and that the contributions of younger women were not substantial. 

Some authors, inside and outside the movement, predicted that the wave peaked by 2000. In addition, it was debatable whether revealing clothing, stiletto heels by designer labels, and amateur pole dancing reflected genuine sexual emancipation and gender equality or merely an appearance of subjection.

Fourth Wave of Feminism

A fourth phase of feminism, which emphasised issues such as body shaming, sexual harassment, and rape culture, arose in 2012, according to some scholars. Social media platforms played a pivotal role in generating and resolving these issues. 

A handful of noteworthy instances served as catalysts for the recent upswing. In December 2012, a juvenile female was tragically murdered and subjected to a horrendous gang rape in India, sparking both domestic demonstrations and global indignation.

After two years, the Gamergate controversy emerged as a concrete embodiment of the purported “men’s rights movement” that originated on the digital forum 4chan. 

GamerGate, which was initially designed to promote ethical standards in video game journalism, transformed unintentionally into a harassment campaign that specifically targeted individuals who were advocating for social justice.