Second-wave feminism

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Second-wave feminism was a period of feminist activity that began in the early 1960s and lasted roughly two decades, ending with the feminist sex wars in the early 1980s^[1] and being replaced by third-wave feminism in the early 1990s.^[2] It occurred throughout the Western world and aimed to increase women's equality by building on the feminist gains of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Second-wave feminism built on first-wave feminism and broadened the scope of debate to include a wider range of issues: sexuality, family, domesticity, the workplace, reproductive rights, de facto inequalities, and official legal inequalities.^[3] First-wave feminism typically advocated for formal equality and second-wave feminism advocated for substantive equality.^[4] It was a movement focused on critiquing patriarchal or male-dominated institutions and cultural practices throughout society.^[5] Second-wave feminism also brought attention to issues of domestic violence and marital rape, created rape crisis centers and women's shelters, and brought about changes in custody law and divorce law. Feminist-owned bookstores, credit unions, and restaurants were among the key meeting spaces and economic engines of the movement.^[6]

Because white feminists' voices have dominated the narrative from the early days of the movement, typical narratives of second-wave feminism focus on the sexism encountered by white middle- and upper-class women, with the absence of black and other women of color and the experience of working-class women, although women of color wrote and founded feminist political activist groups throughout the movement, especially in the 1970s.^[7] At the same time, some narratives present a perspective that focuses on events in the United States to the exclusion of the experiences of other countries. Writers like Audre Lorde argued that this homogenized vision of "sisterhood" could not lead to real change because it ignored factors of one's identity such as race, sexuality, age, and class.^[8] The term "intersectionality" was coined in 1989 by Kimberlé Crenshaw at the end of the second wave. Many scholars believe that the beginning of third wave feminism was due to the problems of the second wave, rather than just another movement.^[9]

Postmodern theories mark a significant historical moment and help define the dominant critical atmosphere of the period. In The Post-war Novel and the Death of the Author (2020), Arya Aryan argues that although postmodern theorists saw their work as a radical break from tradition, their theories – whether deconstructive, poststructuralist or post-phenomenological – remain arguably patriarchal. Despite offering powerful critiques of authority and authorship, they largely overlook questions of gender. Concepts such as supplementarity and decentring may hold potential for exploring gendered power dynamics, yet these frameworks fail to engage explicitly with the issue of women as authors or with women’s writing as a critique of patriarchal notions of authorship. As Aryan puts it:

It is hardly insignificant therefore that at precisely this historical moment, a time of "the destruction of every voice" when "the voice loses its origin" and "the author enters into his own death" (Barthes 2008, 146 emphasis added), some women set out to make their own "voices" heard. Almost coinciding with second-wave feminism, the Death of the Author debate was and has remained curiously male in orientation.^[10]

Aryan argues that Roland Barthes’ concept of the author who must be "killed" is inherently tied to masculinity. Aryan raises the critical question: "what if women, with few exceptions, have never had a voice to lose its origin, or what if they have never been treated as the site of origin in a piece of work at all?"^[11] As Aryan contends, this issue became a key focus for many second-wave feminists, prompting them to challenge it directly. He argues that prior to the emergence of second-wave feminism, many women writers had already begun to assert and establish their own agency and subjectivity. As he notes, their writing "concerns with the patriarchal discourse that had dominated society and literary cultures by bringing to the fore obsessions and problems that had beset all women under patriarchy, but particularly women writers as they sought to counteract or challenge male dominated discourses."^[12]