Second-wave feminism began in 1963. Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique a few months before President Kennedy was shot. Her preoccupations were not those of the “first wave” of nineteenth-century abolitionists, prohibitionists, and suffragists. She did not philosophize about the inequalities, incompatibilities, and quarrels that the feminist Robin Morgan called “a five-thousand-year-buried anger.” Friedan was describing something more modest: the ground women had lost since she herself had gone to all-female Smith College in western Massachusetts in the late 1930s.
