ABSTRACT
The term ‘Anglo-American feminism’ is often used to describe the body of thought which has emerged from the second-wave women’s movement in England and the United States since the late 1960s. The use of the term ‘second-wave’ points to a significant prior history of feminist activism, which resulted in women gaining the vote in England and the US in the 1920s. The re-emergence of feminism in the late 1960s has been attributed to a number of factors, including expanding female entry into higher education and the paid workforce, which led to a widening gap between women’s own expectations and dominant representations of the role as that of full-time wife and mother. The relationship between sexuality and power has been a key theme of second-wave feminism, with radical feminists focusing on the sexual objectification of women as the primary mechanism of patriarchal oppression: ‘Sexuality is to feminism work is to Marxism: that which is most one’s own, yet most taken away’.
