The second-wave feminist movement developed in the mid to late 1960s. Its goal was to provide women with equality in pay and educational and career opportunities and to change the broader social culture so that women's roles were not narrowly confined to those of wife and mother. In the 1950s and early 1960s, women were often steered towards traditional roles. After they were married, they tended to drop out of the workforce. Even before marriage, women were only widely accepted into certain jobs, such as teaching, nursing, or related fields. Very few women were accepted into graduate school in areas such as medicine, law, or business, and they were not generally encouraged to take athletics seriously. The 1963 book The Feminist Mystique by Betty Friedan, which exposed the way in which middle-class women felt trapped in their roles as housewives, was a catalyst for this movement.
The women's rights movement that developed in the 1960s was concentrated on opening up graduate school programs, including in what had been traditionally masculine fields such as medicine and law, to women. In addition, the movement changed the ways in which people thought about women's ability to succeed in academics, professions, and athletics.
The second-wave feminist movement concerned itself with more substantive issues relating to women's equality. It argued that it was no longer enough to remove legal obstacles to women's participation in public life or in the economy; women needed to demand more positive rights. In other words, activists involved in second-wave feminism demanded the freedom to do instead of just freedom from, which had been the main focus of the first-wave of feminism.
Second-wave feminism sought to raise women's consciousness as much as anything, alerting them to the numerous injustices which women faced in all walks of society. Many of these injustices arose from issues such as domestic violence, the very discussion of which was regarded as taboo in many quarters. As this would suggest, second-wave feminism embraced a broad range of issues, and in their diagnosis of the ills of patriarchal society, many of its most strident activists sought to change that society from top to bottom.
It wasn't enough that women should be protected from injustice; the gendered notion of justice as it had hitherto operated in traditional patriarchal society needed to be challenged. In this sense, as in many others, second-wave feminism was considerably more radical than its first-wave predecessor. It advocated an agenda of comprehensive social and economic reform that struck at the very roots of patriarchal society, pointing a way towards substantive, rather than simply legal, equality between the sexes.
Second-wave feminism focused on gaining equality and rights for women in all sectors of life—social, legal, employment-related, and reproductive. First-wave feminism had focused on legal rights such as women’s right to vote and had been successful following the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. The next wave was not as singularly focused.
During World War II women aided the war effort by working in factories. After the war they were sent home to resume domestic life, and boredom set in. By the 1960s, this lifestyle was no longer acceptable. The second-wave feminists who rose up in response wanted the same opportunities in life that their male counterparts enjoyed. This included equality in the workplace and higher education institutions, fairness in divorce proceedings, and reproductive rights.
There was resistance and outright rejection of the aims of the movement. A major failure was that of the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have codified equal rights in America. Discord existed within the movement as well due to discrepancies between conflicting groups of feminists. Some were only interested in equal legal rights (such as the ERA would have provided), while more radical thinkers wanted complete liberation. The issue of abortion was a major break between the groups. Some were against it, believing that it would tarnish the entire movement, while others felt a personal contention with the procedure itself; others advocated abortion access and the right to choose.
Despite these issues, the second-wave feminists were able to achieve significant success in many areas: new jobs opened to women, divorce laws were passed, Title IX allowed women into historically male colleges, and Roe v. Wade allowed abortion in all fifty states. Most of the equal rights that women enjoy today are a direct result of the second wave of feminism.
https://www.britannica.com/event/womens-movement
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