Whose Liberation?

By the mid-1970s, second-wave feminism had become a household term and was making strides toward reshaping the national conversation around gender equality and the movement was steadily gaining momentum. Women were no longer afraid to demand equal pay, reproductive rights, and access to jobs and education previously denied them. Feminist leaders wrote bestsellers, testified before Congress, and filled the streets to call for equality. Behind the headlines, though, not everyone felt included. Women of color, working-class women, and queer activists often saw the mainstream women’s movement less as a universal fight for equality and more as an exclusive campaign for white, middle-class, heterosexual women.
Tension within the movement played out in activist strategy sessions, around kitchen tables, and sometimes made its way onto protest signs. At a time when middle-class white feminists were focused on fighting for access to male-dominated professions, domestic workers, many of them Black and Latina, were still trying to secure the most basic labor protections. And while some women saw the passing of the Equal Rights Amendment as the ultimate victory, others questioned whether legislation alone would ever be enough to undo systems built on racism and patriarchy. In general, the movement shared a common enemy in sexism, but it did not always agree on how or for whom to fight.

No Home in the Movement

The personal is political, second-wave feminists declared.¹ But whose personal experiences were being politicized? Women of color complained that calls for “liberation from the home” ignored a central truth: Black and Brown women had always worked outside their own homes – most often in other people’s homes. It was precisely the work of Black, brown, and working-class women in kitchens, nurseries, and laundry rooms across America that enabled the liberation of white, middle-class women from their own. It was a paradox hiding in plain sight: freedom for some women was built squarely on the backs of other women, but one the movement struggled to treat as anything more than tomorrow’s problem.
For generations, domestic work had been one of the few jobs available to women of color. Yet even by the 1970s, it remained one of the least protected and most exploited sectors in the U.S. economy. Under President Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal, domestic workers were excluded from key labor protections established by the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, leaving them without minimum wage guarantees, the right to organize, or unemployment insurance.² It was no surprise, then, that when middle-class feminists spoke of escaping housework, it rang hollow to those who had never had the luxury of viewing home as a sanctuary to begin with.
At the same time, Black feminists were increasingly frustrated with both the feminist movement and the male-dominated civil rights movement. They were often caught between the two and accused by both of putting their gender before their race or their race before their gender. Often, they were explicitly asked to choose one or the other. Of course, their lives did not split so neatly, and they resented the push and pull from both groups. The Combahee River Collective, a group of Black lesbian feminists based in Boston, addressed this frustration in the 1977 statement: “We are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression,” they wrote. “We see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking.”³
Their message was clear: liberation could not be won in fragments; to succeed, they must confront all interlocking systems that restricted and diminished their lives.

Working-Class, Working Double

Economic inequality was yet another fault line in the foundation. The feminist movement’s focus on glass ceilings to the exclusion of broken paychecks left many working-class women feeling alienated from the cause. The fight for executive titles or admission to Ivy League universities was all good and well, but it did little for women clocking in at factories, hospitals, or cleaning jobs who just wanted a livable wage and a system that supported their efforts to maintain and manage a work/home balance.
The women in this sector of the movement wanted affordable childcare and protection from workplace harassment. And they understood that to get them, they first needed to win the right to form unions. They needed the kind of feminism that cared about lunch breaks and night shifts, not just courtroom arguments and congressional hearings. But because college-educated professionals filled most leadership roles in national feminist organizations, these women were often sidelined by the movement.
Groups like the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union tried to narrow the divide by creating opportunities for women to organize around labor issues. They worked to bring attention to the specific challenges women faced in blue-collar jobs, including discriminatory hiring, sexual harassment, and the double burden of waged work and caregiving. ⁴ There was progress, but their efforts often operated on the margins of the mainstream movement.

Queering the Family Script

Meanwhile, the tension between public and private roles took on new meaning for queer women. Mainstream feminism often invoked the home and family as a site of female oppression where women must serve, support, and stay silent. But many lesbian feminists argued that the movement was mistakenly operating from the assumption that women wanted to be part of heterosexual families to begin with.
For these women, coming out as gay meant more than just defying social expectations. It meant creating entirely new models of kinship and support, often outside the nuclear family, as well as the law. Lesbian separatist communities formed across the country to offer alternatives to the patriarchal structures that feminism critiqued but did not always reject.⁵ These communities were also imperfect, and sometimes exclusionary in their own ways, but they represented an attempt to build a new domestic order that was not defined by male dominance or heterosexual norms.
For their efforts, queer women were often marginalized within mainstream feminist circles. Even organizations like the National Organization for Women, treated open discussion of sexuality as controversial. In the early 1970s, some chapters pushed back against including lesbian rights in the feminist agenda, worried it would alienate supporters or “distract” from more broadly accepted goals.⁶ The phrase “Lavender Menace,” coined by Betty Friedan, was used to describe what she and other feminists saw as the threat of lesbian issues to the success of the larger movement and the need to deemphasize or delay addressing their concerns and goals.

Legislative Lag

Even as intersectionality worked its way into the language and the movement’s priorities evolved, legislation did not keep pace. Federal labor laws continued to leave domestic workers largely unprotected, and early reform attempts were resisted at the national level. Legislation for a domestic worker’s bill of rights guaranteeing overtime pay, rest breaks and protection from harassment would not be implemented until decades later, and then, only in states like New York and California.⁷

Similarly, concerns about police violence, healthcare access, and public housing were often considered separate issues beyond the scope of feminist activism. For many women, though, especially those in poor or marginalized communities, these issues were inseparable from their daily lives and shaped whether home represented a place of safety or struggle.

A House Not Divided, Not Yet in Order

The second-wave feminist movement expanded the boundaries of public debate around gender equality. It brought private struggles into the light and demanded that women be seen as full political beings. But the house that feminism built was cramped and had uneven floors; not everyone felt comfortable or even safe.
The work of activists like the Combahee River Collective, domestic worker organizers, and queer feminists across the country strove to reshape the foundations of feminist thought — even as the movement often left them unprotected and exposed. Their critiques were not meant to break the movement apart, but to build it up and broaden it to include all women.
By the start of the 1980s, the work to provide broader support for a greater number of women was gaining traction, although not always in law. Legislative progress on intersectional issues remained slow, and efforts to protect domestic workers and queer families still faced powerful political resistance. But it was the conversation within the feminist movement itself that had most dramatically evolved. Feminists increasingly embraced the tenets of intersectionality and were finally seeing the importance of a comprehensive approach. Once defined by a single sisterhood, the movement was now opening its doors to a broader community and growing its foundation broad enough for everyone’s fight and strong enough for everyone’s safety.

Personal Is Political,” in Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation, ed. Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt (New York: Radical Feminism, 1970). Although Hanisch authored the essay, she stated that Firestone and Koedt supplied the title. The phrase later became a widely used slogan of the women’s liberation movement.
Premilla Nadasen, Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015), 5–9.
Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective Statement,” in Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought, ed. Beverly Guy-Sheftall (New York: The New Press, 1995), 232.
Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 111–15.
Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Vintage, 1980), 243–47.
Leila J. Rupp and Verta Taylor, Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women’s Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 200.
Rachel Devlin, “Domestic Workers’ Rights,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Social History, ed. Lynn Dumenil (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 215–16.