In the late 1960s, American women and women throughout the world began to awaken to the fact that the victories of women’s rights to work, to vote and to be educated had not solved the problem of women’s inequality. A silent problem was gnawing away at women of the middle classes in industrialized nations, a problem “without a name” as Betty Friedan put it in her pioneering book, The Feminine Mystique, in 1962. In the 1950s all the media of culture and socialization had been directed toward convincing women that their place was in the home, that full-time child-raising and domesticity was their highest vocation. The women who had accepted the “feminine mystique” felt increasingly entrapped and stifled.

At the same time, the Civil Rights Movement and the Peace Movement were raising American consciousness about the structures of social oppression. Many young women responded enthusiastically to the call to win equality for Black Americans and to end the war in southeast Asia, only to find themselves treated as second-class citizens by their male colleagues, expected to be sexually available, to do the rote labor of the movement, but not to make the real decision. Out of these various forms of discontent, an explosion was gradually building, the explosion of a new movement for women’s liberation.

Betty Friedan had called women to seize their discontent by leaving their exclusive homemaking roles, returning to school for further education and seeking interesting jobs. Entrance into the public world of work was to be the panacea. But many women already suspected that this was not enough; that the world of work was also a place where women were marginalized and exploited.