The Personal Was Political

By the late 1960s, a new generation of feminists had grown impatient with gradualism. They had read The Feminine Mystique, they had marched in civil rights protests, and they had sat through countless meetings of male-led leftist organizations where women took notes but only the men spoke. These radicalized feminists were dissatisfied with National Organization for Women’s measured approach and were unmoved by the tedious process of navigating the halls of power and mastering the language of bureaucracy. Radical feminists took their cause from their kitchen tables into the streets. Their tools weren’t policy memos or legal briefs, but a loud refusal to pretend that homemaking was some kind of dream job. And when they raised their voices and raised their fists, it was to demand more than equality in the workplace or access to credit cards in their own names. Radical feminists were questioning the very fabric of American womanhood, from marriage to motherhood, and specifically, the myth that their personal fulfillment existed only in their participation in those institutions.
It was during this period in 1968, when protesters at the Miss America pageant tossed symbols of female submission into a “Freedom Trash Can.” False eyelashes, curlers, dishwashing gloves, and bras went up in symbolic flames. No actual bras were burned, but the phrase, “burning bras” became one of the most iconic rallying cries in the movement, and so did the message that femininity itself had become a trap. The protest wasn’t frivolous; it was strategic. It illuminated the invisible and made the personal political.

Housework: Labor of Love or Just Unpaid Labor

At the heart of radical feminist critique was an indictment of unpaid labor. For centuries, women were conditioned to see housework as a moral duty, an act of love rather than labor. But the spell had worn thin, and by the 1970s, feminists were calling it what it was: work. Physical, repetitive, isolating, and most importantly, unpaid.
Scholar Silvia Federici launched the Wages for Housework campaign in 1972 with an argument that was both practical and revolutionary: housework was labor and the women who performed it produced real and invaluable economic value. They propped up capitalism by having babies and caring for the men of the nation’s workforce and did so without pay or even acknowledgment. As Federici put it, “They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work.”
The campaign stripped away the sentimentality around motherhood and housework. Instead of treating domestic roles as a noble calling, feminists spoke of them in stark terms of exploitation and servitude.
In groups across the country, women compared notes on what they’d previously assumed were their own individual problems. Seeing the similarities with the struggles of others like them was illuminating. They realized that the isolation, exhaustion, and low self-worth they’d felt as homemakers were not the result of personal failures, and they were not unique to them. Instead, they were predictable outcomes in a system that pressured women to be everything to everyone at the expense of their own well-being — and to do it with a smile, by the way. For many, this awakening was the spark that turned desperation and discontent into the resolve to fuel a revolution.

Marriage Under Fire

Marriage also came under scrutiny and not just as a vaguely flawed institution, but as one of the main sources of women’s discontent. Traditional marriage laws perpetuated women’s status as second-class citizens by making them legally and financially subordinate to their husbands. In some states, a husband had the legal power to control his wife’s property, dictate her earnings, and even to prevent her from working. And it’s worth mentioning that it wasn’t until the 1980s that men were no longer allowed to rape their wives.
Radical feminists attacked the myth of the happy housewife as a form of propaganda. And while more moderate feminists took a pragmatic approach, fighting for legal reforms to give women greater autonomy inside and outside of marriage, Shulamith Firestone wrote The Dialectic of Sex, published in 1970, arguing that the biological family structure itself was the root of gender oppression.
California’s passage of the first no-fault divorce law in 1969 was a critical turning point for women in bad marriages. Previously, courts required partners to prove wrongdoing like adultery or abuse to get a divorce. This requirement included invasive questions and testimony full of embarrassing details to be revealed during court proceedings. That alone was enough to deter many women from filing, even in cases where personal safety was at risk. No-fault divorce changed the rules and made it possible for either party to end a marriage without scandal or embarrassment, simply by citing irreconcilable differences. This was an important victory and within a decade, nearly every state followed California’s lead. Suddenly, women no longer had to prove they deserved to leave. And many of them did.
Critics argued that these laws contributed to the breakdown of the nuclear family. Feminists countered that they simply gave women the freedom to walk away from toxic marriages. The same freedom men had always enjoyed socially, if not legally. A woman’s right to self-determination, they argued, did not end at the altar.

Embracing the Radical: Women Find Their Footing

Many radical feminists turned away from traditional politics but still managed to spread their message outside the system. The claim that the personal was political rippled across public debate and eventually made its way into congressional legislation.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972 expanded the enforcement powers of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, giving teeth to legislation that previously only had the power to investigate cases and refer them to the Department of Justice. Although the legislation was originally part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and meant to target discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, it was second-wave feminists who lobbied relentlessly for its passage and played a central role in shaping the final result. Their efforts paid off in the increased number of women wo came forward to file complaints against employers who trapped them in secretarial pools or fired them for becoming pregnant. These were not isolated workplace issues. They reflected a culture that systemically devalued women’s work both at home and on the job. And as more women entered the workplace, it became more difficult for employers to disguise the discrimination as anything other than the abuse that it was.
It was during this period that even the language began to shift. “Ms.” Replaced “Mrs.” and “Miss” as the default honorific. Women now held status as individuals and could not be categorized by a title announcing their marital status. The change was mocked in mainstream media, and many called it silly or superficial, but gender equality advocates recognized that the shift represented something deeper: women were seizing their independence and rejecting any notion that their identities were defined by their relationship to men.

House Rules: Redefining the Domestic

As legislation and workplace rights laws began to work their way through courts and Congress, the meaning of home itself came under fire. Once a symbol of security and domestic tranquility, many began to question if home would ever again represent what they’d grown up believing and whether child-rearing and cooking could ever be liberating under patriarchy, or whether those roles should be abandoned entirely.
At the extreme end, some women did abandon their homes to join feminist communes or form separatist communities. Most stayed but demanded new terms. Men were asked to wash dishes and children were taught that “mom” wasn’t a job title. Books like Our Bodies, Ourselves empowered women to understand their reproductive health with no doctor — and certainly no man –required. Control of their time, their bodies, and their marriages, was no longer negotiable.

Toward a New Kind of Space

Now, it was the early 1970s, and feminism had cracked open the door to conversations that were once taboo. But conversations alone weren’t enough. Real change needed institutions to follow. All institutions. As women demanded equal footing in marriage and employment, they also set their sights on the classroom and the locker room.
The next frontier lay in education. Title IX of the Education Amendments was passed in 1972 and prohibited sex-based discrimination in any federally funded educational program. The American housewife had been unmade. Now, she would be rebuilt. Not in the image of imposed domestic service, but with agency, ambition, and full access to the public square.

Notes
Sara Evans, Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century’s End (New York: Free Press,
Rachel Fudge, “The Bra-Burner Myth,” Bitch Magazine, September 1, 1998.
Sylvia Federici, Wages Against Housework (Bristol: Power of Women Collective and Falling Wall Press, 1975), 1–3.
Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts’ Advice to Women (New York: Anchor Books, 2005), 242–245.
Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York: William Morrow, 1970), 199–203.
Lenore J. Weitzman, The Divorce Revolution: The Unexpected Social and Economic Consequences for Women and Children in America (New York: Free Press, 1985), 20–22.
Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, Pub. L. No. 92-261, 86 Stat. 103.
Elizabeth Aries, “Gender and Communication in Everyday Life,” in Gender and Conversational Interaction, ed. Deborah Tannen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 217–220.
Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, Our Bodies, Ourselves (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973), 9–11.
Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, 20 U.S.C. §§ 1681–1688.