Women's liberation movement in Europe

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The women's liberation movement in Europe was a radical feminist movement that started in the late 1960s and continued through the 1970s and in some cases into the early 1980s. Inspired by developments in North America and triggered by the growing presence of women in the labour market, the movement soon gained momentum in Britain and the Scandinavian countries. In addition to improvements in working conditions and equal pay, liberationists fought for complete autonomy for women's bodies including their right to make their own decisions regarding contraception and abortion, and more independence in sexuality.

Groups which formed typically rejected hierarchical structure and operated on the basis of membership consensus, rejecting the idea that leadership conferred any expert status, and instead was simply another experience. They believed direct actions, which informed the public on the issues women faced, were more productive in changing thoughts than reforming laws. Their aims were to redesign society by changing the perception of women and their roles in society.

Though European liberationists were more aligned with socialist movements than liberationists in the groups which formed elsewhere, women in the WLM typically viewed class-based struggle as secondary to addressing patriarchy. Liberationists were resistant to any political system which ignored women entirely or relegated their issues to the sidelines. As groups operated autonomously without centralized organization, there was a fluidity in issues they addressed, but almost all members in the movement felt that unfettered access to education, jobs and child care were primary issues. Bringing issues to the public, which up to the time had been considered private matters, such as division of household labor, lesbianism, objectification of women, and sexual violence, was controversial and met with backlash from the media and public who labeled liberationists as man-haters.

There were robust liberationist movements in almost all Western European countries, though Greece, Portugal and Spain were late to form movements, as they emerged from dictatorship in the era. By the middle of the 1970s or early 1980s, as compromises were made by liberal reformers and governments on major target issues, most liberationist groups had disbanded or gone on to work on single focus issues.