ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about the origins of the second wave of feminism in America. It is known that the long period of feminist quiescence was not entirely without activism and that many women (in the 1930s, 1940s, and even 1950s) found their way into leftwing and labor politics, where they championed peace, international cooperation, desegregation, unionism, and even equal pay. Women's liberation contributed significantly to the theory and politics of the second wave of feminism. As movement women began to circulate their thoughts on paper—some of them as early as 1965, when Casey Hayden and Mary King distributed a memo about sexual inequality within the movement at a staff retreat in Mississippi—movement men retaliated. Davis points out that the early second-wave feminists largely ignored the fact that nonwhite women were rarely hired as stewardesses, an example of the legacy that led to the complex, difficult, and sometimes painful relationship between early white feminists and women of color.
