This is a Timeline of second-wave feminism, from its beginning in the mid-twentieth century, to the start of Third-wave feminism in the early 1990s.
Timeline
1960s
1960
Enovid is approved for sale in the United States 9 May 1960 as a contraceptive pill by the Food and Drug Administration. (It had been approved three years earlier for menstrual symptoms.) Within three years, 2.3 million women are using "The Pill", as it became known, in the United States. The arrival of the pill ushered in and coincided with the second wave of feminism.
1961
The [American] Presidential Commission on the Status of Women was created; its report found discrimination against women in every aspect of American life and outlined plans to achieve equality. Specific recommendations for women in the workplace included fair hiring practices, paid maternity leave, and affordable childcare.
1962
The non-fiction book Sex and the Single Girl was released in the U.S. and sold two million copies in three weeks. Author Helen Gurley Brown encouraged women to become financially independent, and to become sexually active before marriage.
1963
Twenty years after it was first proposed, the Equal Pay Act became law in the U.S., and it established equality of pay for men and women performing equal work. However, it did not originally cover executives, administrators, outside salespeople, or professionals. In 1972, Congress enacted the Education Amendments of 1972, which (among other things) amended the Fair Labor Standards Act to expand the coverage of the Equal Pay Act to these employees, by excluding the Equal Pay Act from the professional workers exemption of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique was published, became a best-seller, and laid the groundwork for the second-wave feminist movement in the U.S. Alice S. Rossi presented "Equality Between the Sexes: An Immodest Proposal" at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences conference. Gloria Steinem went undercover as a Playboy bunny in a New York Playboy Club, and published the exposé "A Bunny's Tale" in Show magazine in two installments in May and June, 1963.
1964
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 became law in the U.S., and it barred employment discrimination on account of sex, race, etc. by private employers, employment agencies, and unions. However, the Bennett Amendment, a US labor law provision in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, §703(h) was passed to limit sex discrimination claims regarding pay to the rules in the Equal Pay Act of 1963. It says an employer can "differentiate upon the basis of sex" when it compensates employees "if such differentiation is authorized by" the Equal Pay Act. The [U.S.] Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was established; in its first five years, 50,000 complaints of gender discrimination were received. Haven House, the first "modern" women's shelter in the world, opened in California.
1965
Casey Hayden and Mary King published "Sex and Caste: A Kind of Memo", detailing women's inequality within the civil rights organization SNCC. The U.S. Supreme Court case Griswold v. Connecticut struck down the only remaining state law banning the use of contraceptives by married couples. The "Woman Question" was raised for the first time at a Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) conference. EEOC commissioners were appointed to enforce the Civil Rights Act. Among them there was only one woman, Aileen Hernandez, a future president of the National Organization for Women. The term "sexism" was most likely coined November 18, 1965, in a report by Pauline M. Leet during the "Student-Faculty Forum" at Franklin and Marshall College.
1966
Twenty-eight women, among them Betty Friedan, founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) to function as a civil rights organization for women. Betty Friedan became its first president. The group is now one of the largest women's groups in the U.S. and pursues its goals through extensive legislative lobbying, litigation, and public demonstrations. Barbara Jordan was elected to the Texas Senate. She was the first African-American woman in the Texas legislature. Flight attendants filed Title VII complaints about being forced to quit when they married, got pregnant or reached age 35.