ABSTRACT
From 1968 through roughly 1975, legislative and enforcement victories came swiftly to feminist activists. One would not have thought that the reclassification of rape as a crime of assault would be controversial. But when second-wave feminists extended the idea of rape to other relations between the sexes, rape became an issue that some thought feminists were taking too far. At least as troubling for Americans who did not share feminist assumptions about egalitarian marriage was the specter of no-fault divorce. While struggling under Title IX to eliminate quotas on women's access to higher and postgraduate education, feminists were mobilizing support for what their opposition called quotas in affirmative action hiring. Even though abortion was legalized by a remarkably swift and comprehensive Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade in 1973—an earlier and more complete victory than the new feminists had any right to expect— abortion was and remained for decades the consummate second-generation issue.
