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CALIFORNIA SOCIOLOGY JOURNAL, 2010, VOL. 2 (ISSUE 1: 31-36) 

Women’s Liberation Movement:  

The Second Wave 
 

 

Lin Wang 

Department of Sociology 

California State University, Los Angeles 

 

 

                       This paper examines some of the achievements and setbacks 

that the “second wave” of the Women’s Movement faced 

based on their organizational capacity.  Women across the 

United States have the equality and opportunities that they 

have today because of the sacrifice of feminists during this 

period in time.  However, due to a lack of cohesiveness 

during a majority of the “second wave,” feminists ended up 

being both a friend and a foe to feminism and their 

objectives. 

 

1
For a brief moment in history, 

supporters of President John F. Kennedy 

thought that his election to the White 

House in 1960 signified the beginning of 

women’s liberation.  That belief was 

short-lived.  In fact, many soon realized 

that President Kennedy was “neither a 

friend nor a foe of feminism” (Berkeley 

1999:19).   It would be the indifference 

of the political climate—that of his 

unresponsiveness and the lack of real 

support from his successor and the 

newly formed Equal Employment 

Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in 

accordance to the Title VII Amendment 

of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that 

prohibited sex discrimination in employ-

ment—as well as the economic and 

                                                      
1
 Lin Wang is an undergraduate student at the 

Department of Sociology.  Her paper was 

originally submitted to SOC 418 Crowd 

Behavior and Social Movements, taught by 

Professor Hyojoung Kim in Summer 2009.  

cultural social structural shift that would 

ignite the “second wave” of the 

Women’s Liberation Movement through 

the establishment of its first social 

movement organization of the National 

Organization for Women (NOW).  In the 

decades that followed, many collective 

groups of the Women’s Movement 

industry found triumphs and failures, 

unity and dissent.  This paper will 

examine some of the achievements and 

setbacks that they faced based on their 

organizational capacity and choices of 

collective action tactics and demonstrate 

that the results of some of their ups and 

downs came directly from themselves—

from feminists who were both a friend 

and a foe to feminism. 

     According to Berkeley (1999), 

the organizational structure of NOW was 

closely modeled after that of the Inter-

Department Committee on the Status of 



THE SECOND WAVE by Lin Wang                                                                                          32 

 

           CALIFORNIA SOCIOLOGY JOURNAL, 2010, VOL. 2 (ISSUE 1: 31-36) 

Women.  Shortly before his death, 

President Kennedy had issued an 

executive order that created this 

committee, which was later matched at 

the state level by August of 1963.  

NOW’s first 28 members adopted the 

committee’s tactic of utilizing annual 

meetings to compare notes on the status 

of women of various states, share 

strategies for promoting change, renew 

friendships, and decide key issues that 

they would address as a group.  The 

expectation was for policies to be 

hammered out during these annual 

meetings with the bulk of the actual 

work being carried out by officers, board 

of directors, and task force leaders.  

Local chapters would then be formed 

across the country to work on specific 

task force issues, lobbying for their 

changes and funds in federal legislations.  

This strategy of organization brought 

early success to NOW.  In 1968, they 

were able to pressure the EEOC to 

review violations of sex discrimination 

in employment on a case-by-case basis 

rather than through uniform policies and 

convince the EEOC to rule in favor of 

integrating sex-segregated want adver-

tisements in newspapers.   Because of 

these early successes, NOW’s member-

ship grew to 1,200 members in its first 

year. 

     Despite these early successes, 

NOW’s strategy of organization was 

flawed.  The leaders of NOW focused 

too intently on controlling the issues that 

they felt were important to all women.  

They never stopped to realize that they 

did not possess the leadership skills or 

dedicate the time and effort needed to 

actually convince all of the women that 

their views were right.  Rather, they 

resorted to implementing a “to-do” list 

of issues and policies and placing them 

to a vote.  Consequently, their actions 

angered a significant number of women, 

whose “minority” opinions were simply 

dismissed and never given the chance to 

be heard.  Dissension would come from 

members who disagreed with NOW’s 

policies.  Those who were more radical 

or more conservative in their views 

became fed up with the way that NOW 

was organized.  After NOW’s 2
nd

 annual 

meeting, they disbanded from the 

organization and established their own 

social movement groups. 

     One of the more conservative 

organizations that sprang up was the 

Women’s Equity Action League 

(WEAL).  Led by Elizabeth Boyer, a 

lawyer from Ohio, WEAL had chapters 

in 40 states in only three short years that 

represented the interests of elite, 

professional women (Berkeley 1999: 

34).  These women were all members 

that NOW could have potentially 

reached out to had they been more 

willing and capable of adjusting or 

expanding their views.  Various radical 

women’s organizations also sprouted 

across the United States.  Unlike the 

large national organizations of NOW 

and WEAL, which represented liberal 

ideologies and called for “equal rights 

before the law” through legal and 

legislative changes, radical organizations 

were small and localized anti-hierarchal 

groups that emphasized revolutionary 

socioeconomic and cultural changes that 

liberated them from their oppressors.  

Radical organizations encouraged wide-

ranging levels of participation and 

expression and did make small, 

individual contributions to the Women’s 

Movement.  However, their organiza-

tional capacity was severely limited.  



THE SECOND WAVE by Lin Wang                                                                                          33 

 

           CALIFORNIA SOCIOLOGY JOURNAL, 2010, VOL. 2 (ISSUE 1: 31-36) 

Even from the beginning, these groups 

could not agree on either the root cause 

of their oppression—capitalism or male 

supremacy—or on a single strategy for 

achieving liberation.  Not known for 

their staying power, most radical 

organizations disappeared or trans-

formed by the 1980’s.  

     Both liberal and radical feminists 

found some levels of success in their 

early years.  However, at the same time, 

they were enemies to themselves in 

terms of organizational capacity.  

Feminists from both sides stood in their 

own ways of gaining activists and 

awakening their target audience by being 

stubborn and egotistical in what they 

perceived as right or wrong and 

important or trivial for feminism.  

Fortunately, the 1970’s witnessed a 

renewed effort toward “united 

sisterhood”.  WEAL began favoring 

NOW’s abortion stance and started 

leaning towards the radical side by 

accepting “responsible rebellions.”  

Radical feminists began acknowledging 

that their extreme protests led to few 

long-lasting results.  Eventually, prag-

matism won out and all groups began 

seeking reforms of laws and established 

institutions through participation in 

politics.  Ideological differences between 

the two branches also diminished as they 

both sought common ground on defining 

“feminist” issues, which included 

securing the passage of the Equal Rights 

Amendment (ERA), abortion, child care, 

rape, and domestic violence.  As proof 

of their changed ways, tens of thousands 

of members from different organiza-

tions gathered to celebrate the 50
th

 

Anniversary of Woman’s Suffrage by 

taking it to the streets for Women’s 

Strike for Equality Day on August 26, 

1970.  “Women demonstrated that day in 

practically every major city in the 

country, and in some smaller ones as 

well . . . [that] Strike Day was a high for 

virtually everyone involved” (Davis 

1991: 116).  This strategy of demon-

strating the new organizational capacity 

of the women’s movement garnered 

tremendous success.  Millions of Ameri-

cans that were previously unaware of the 

Women’s Movement awoke to its 

political potential as a “unified 

sisterhood” on that day.  Their public 

support increased dramatically—as did 

their memberships.  For instance, NOW 

who had started the decade with 4,000 

members reached 20,000 by the 

year1973 and 125,000 by the year 1980.  

NOW would go on to be the largest 

feminist organization in the United 

States in 2009 with a total of 500,000 

contributing members and 550 chapters 

in all 50 states (The National Organiza-

tion of Women 2009).   

     The effort towards “united 

sisterhood” merged not only ideologies 

but choices of collective action tactics.  

During the beginning stages, liberal 

feminists highly favored legal and 

lobbying tactics.  Unfortunately, results 

from such tactics were painstakingly 

slow.  It took a long time for any 

changes to be enacted and an even 

longer time for such changes to be 

enforced.  For example, it took the 

federal agency EEOC years after it was 

created to even bother doing what they 

were funded to do, which was to enforce 

the law’s sex discrimination provisions.  

In fact, between “1964 and 1966, women 

workers filed some four thousand claims 

of sexual discrimination and in nearly 

every case, the commission ruled against 

them” (Shomp 2007:101).  At times, it 



THE SECOND WAVE by Lin Wang                                                                                          34 

 

           CALIFORNIA SOCIOLOGY JOURNAL, 2010, VOL. 2 (ISSUE 1: 31-36) 

simply appeared that the efforts of 

liberal feminists were a joke to the entire 

political system, and radical feminists 

would tolerate none of it.  They devised 

tactics that shocked and awed their target 

audience.  According to Berkeley, the 

more outrageous and radical their stance 

or action was, the easier it became to 

popularize their political message of 

liberation (1999).   

     Radical feminists chose their 

tactics based on the source of their 

blame for oppression.   Those that that 

blamed capitalism frequently chose the 

tactic of direct action, which were public 

demonstrations staged for the media. 

“Though the mass media were, for the 

most part, hostile to feminism . . . they 

lavished attention on the women’s 

liberation movement until there was 

hardly an American who hadn’t heard of 

the movement” (Davis 1991:106).  Some 

of the more well-known and highly 

publicized demonstrations included the 

1968 Miss America Beauty Pageant 

demonstration by the New York Radical 

Women (NYRW) and the hexing on 

Wall Street delivered by the Women’s 

International Terrorist Conspiracy from 

Hell (WITCH) on October 31, 1968.  On 

the other hand, the radical feminist 

groups that blamed male supremacy 

frequently utilized conscious-raising 

tactics.  These tactics involved gathering 

women into small groups to share 

personal experiences of oppression with 

the goal of making them aware of how 

their lives were being shaped by 

patriarchy and its male chauvinists value 

system.  Overall, with the exception of a 

few radical feminist groups, most radical 

feminist organizations preferred dis-

cussion over action.  Their goal centered 

on informing women of their treatment 

as an exploited class under a patriarchal 

society.     

     As the Feminist Movement 

matured in the 1970’s, tactical dis-

tinctions between the two branches of 

feminism became less pronounced.  

Eventually, both sides turned to tactics 

that sought reforms in legal and social 

institutions through the use of “petitions, 

letter-writing campaigns, and lawsuits to 

force legal reform” (Schomp 2007:106).  

Consequently, significant moments of 

success for the Women’s Liberation 

Movement followed.  Recognizing that 

equal opportunity for women in the job 

market meant equal opportunity in 

education, NOW and WEAL placed 

their legal and lobbying talents to work 

in the 1970’s.  Along with other 

women’s groups, members targeted over 

300 colleges and universities and all 

medical and law schools, charging them 

with sex discrimination towards women 

in education.  Their efforts proved to be 

fruitful.  On June 23, 1973, Title IX 

cleared Congress, banning sex dis-

crimination in all schools that received 

federal funds.  Private under-graduate 

schools were the only ones exempt from 

this legislation.  In 1975, the Women’s 

Movement also directed public attention 

to areas of household violence and 

battered women.  They helped change 

the way that the public viewed domestic 

violence—from that of a private issue to 

a public outrage. The numbers of 

shelters for battered women grew as a 

result.  By 1978, 300 shelters spanned 

over the United States.  In addition, 40 

states passed laws that eased restrictions 

on restraining orders and increased 

criminal penalties for batterers.  Some 

states even began imposing surcharges 

on marriage licenses to raise funds for 



THE SECOND WAVE by Lin Wang                                                                                          35 

 

           CALIFORNIA SOCIOLOGY JOURNAL, 2010, VOL. 2 (ISSUE 1: 31-36) 

sustaining these shelters.  The Women’s 

Movement then went on to contribute 

vital reforms for rape victims.  The many 

changes that they helped make included 

revisions in the Federal Rules of 

Evidence that prohibited defense 

attorneys from introducing a victim’s 

sexual history and style of dress as 

“evidence” and legislation amendments 

that dropped the marital exemption 

clause from rape statutes.  Tackling all 

of the various “feminist” issues as a 

“unified sisterhood” allowed feminists to 

be friends of feminism.  However, 

tackling all of these issues at once also 

backfired on them.  Feminists would go 

on to witness the evaporation of support 

for one of the most critical policy 

reforms for the Women’s Liberation 

Move-ment—that of the Equal Rights 

Amendment (ERA). 

     ERA had sailed through 

Congress in early 1972 and was 

seemingly on a fast-track process to 

ramification.  According to Berkeley, in 

order for the amendment to become law, 

it “needed to be ratified by thirty-eight 

states and by December 1972, twenty-

two states had affirmed their support for 

the amendment” (1999:83).  Although 

support from additional states slowed 

somewhat in the following three years, 

feminists remained optimistic.  “After 

all, a public opinion poll conducted in 

1974 had indicated that 74% of the 

Americans queried supported the ERA” 

(Berkeley 1999:83).   And, by 1975, 

feminists only needed three more “yes” 

votes before their deadline on March 22, 

1979.  However, what the feminists 

failed to anticipate was that ramification 

would stall in that same year and 

nosedive only two short years later.  

Prior to this time, feminists’ energies 

and resources had been focused on a 

myriad of issues, mostly dealing with 

localized needs and concerns.  As a 

result, feminists never really noticed or 

cared about the conservative Republican 

activist Phyllis Schlafly or her seemingly 

small publication called The Phyllis 

Schlafly Report that centered on what 

was wrong with the ERA.  In fact, 

feminists figured that Schlafly’s 

opposition was not a big deal, since they 

had the support from both Republicans 

and Democrats at the time.  They never 

thought that Schlafly and her 

organization of STOP ERA would turn 

the tide from support to complete and 

utter resistance.  In a final ditch effort, 

feminists tried to salvage the weakening 

support for ERA by gathering at the 

1977 National Women’s Conference.  

However, by the time that the feminist 

organizations shifted their focus to 

ramification of the ERA, it was too late.  

They discovered a well-entrenched 

opposition and nothing that they tried to 

do, from televised debates to fasting 

vigils to economic boycotts, seemed to 

resonate with the “white, middle-aged 

males from business or professional 

backgrounds” who comprised the 

majority of legislators in unratified states 

(Berkeley 1999:85).  Schafly had won 

and defeated the ERA.   

      In conclusion, in terms of 

organizational capacity and choices of 

collective action tactics, feminists were 

both a friend and foe of feminism.  

Throughout the decades following their 

rise in the 1960’s, feminists have 

succeeded countless times in pressuring 

lawmakers to make the necessary legal 

and legislative changes that gave women 

equal rights and protection before the 

law.  Women across the United States 



THE SECOND WAVE by Lin Wang                                                                                          36 

 

           CALIFORNIA SOCIOLOGY JOURNAL, 2010, VOL. 2 (ISSUE 1: 31-36) 

would not have the equality and 

opportunities that they have today had it 

not been for the “second wave” of the 

Women’s Liberation Movement.  

However, organizational capacity of 

feminists was severely limited in the 

beginning by their years of disputes and 

their sheer inability to compromise.  The 

nation watched as feminists scattered to 

form various organizations that seemed 

to all want different things.  Also, for the 

most part, the tactics Feminists chose 

seemed to work both for them and 

against them.  They finally managed to 

come together in the 1970’s for the sake 

of tackling multiple women’s issues.  

However, multi-tasking only turned out 

to hurt them in the end as one of their 

most important areas of reform failed 

with the defeat of the ERA.   

   

REFERENCES 

 

Berkeley, Kathleen C. 1999. The 

Women’s Liberation Movement in 

America. Westport, Connecticut: 

Greenwood Press. 

Davis, Flora. 1991. Moving the 

Mountain: The Women’s Movement 

in America since 1960. New York, 

New York: Simon & Schuster. 

Schomp, Virginia. 2007. American 

Voices from the Women’s Movement. 

Tarrytown, New York: Marshall 

Cavendish Benchmark. 

National Organization for Women. 2009. 

“About NOW.” Retrieved August 

23, 2009. (http://www.now.org/-

organization/info.html). 

 

 

      

 
 


