ABSTRACT
The twentieth century witnessed an extraordinary gender revolution. ‘Gender’ is the term applied to mean the social construction of women’s and men’s identities, which change with different historical epochs. In this regard, the nature of what it meant to be a woman and to be a man altered to a greater degree than in any previous century. Much of the transformation was crammed into the last 40 years of the century, and the central change – by far the most extensive – was to the social and political role, work and education, and sexual and life freedoms of women. The most important time was the period 1968–78, commonly referred to as the period of ‘second wave feminism’ and of the Women’s Liberation Movement.
