The resurgence of feminist activity around the world in the late 1960s is frequently referred to as ''second wave feminism,'' implicitly connecting late-twentieth-century feminism with earlier campaigns for women's political rights, most notably for the suffrage. The women's liberation movement, however, grew from the specific historical circumstances of Europe after World War II. Stagnation of male wages and European commitment to fair competition for men and women in the workforce made waged labor for women increasingly desirable and, indeed, in many cases imperative. The development of a contraceptive pill gave women control over their fertility and meant that for the first time in human history, women could decide to have sexual relations without unwanted pregnancies. The women's liberation movement was part of a number of protest movements known as the ''New Left,'' which emerged in the period of affluence characteristic of European nations after 1960.Women active in organizations of students, trade unionists, and antiwar activists experienced great frustration with men's inability to recognize women's sexual oppression as an issue.

The women's liberation movement utilized consciousness-raising as a means of educating women about the political dimensions of their own experiences. ''The personal is political,'' the movement's slogan, exemplified feminists' attempt to raise awareness of the political significance of issues traditionally deemed outside of politics, such as sexuality and reproduction. Feminists fought for access to contraception and abortion, against the sexual victimization of women, and for an end to discrimination against lesbians in the arenas of employment, health care, and child custody. Ecofeminism explicitly linked women's condition to that of the earth, with large numbers of women belonging to and supporting the Green Party in Germany and protesting the United States' cruise missile installation at Greenham Common in England.

By 1980, feminism had entered mainstream European culture and had become a familiar concept in most countries. In the 1980s more than half a million women in West Germany, France, and Italy marched in favor of abortion rights. The United Nations declared the years from 1975 to 1985 the decade of women, sponsoring conferences in Mexico City, Copenhagen, and Nairobi, where the public visibility of women's issues and networks of activists brought women's condition before the world. And in Germany by the end of the decade, abortion rights became a significant issue in negotiations over national unification.

This phase of feminist activity implemented forms of protest used by other New Left movements, including spontaneous demonstrations. More organized campaigns, such as the ''Reclaim the Night'' marches in England and West Germany in 1977 and Italy in 1978, drew attention to the effect of violence against women upon their personal freedom. Feminists also engaged in acts of civil disobedience, as in the 1972 open letter to the French press signed by three hundred women, attesting to their procurement of illegal abortions. The women's liberation movement largely sought change peacefully, with notable exceptions like the Italian group Rivolta Femminile, which argued that feminism and pacifism were not synonymous. Like other feminist movements before it, the women's liberation movement produced its own journals, magazines, books, and celebrities. And like earlier movements, this phase of feminism generated not only critiques of women's oppression but also alternative ways of analyzing the world. The creation of entirely new fields of inquiry, like women's studies in the university curriculum, is perhaps its most lasting legacy.

The women's liberation movement generated a number of texts analyzing the sexual and psychological dimensions of women's oppression and emancipation. Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970) explored male supremacy in European and American literature. In Woman's Estate (1971), Juliet Mitchell continued the tradition of linking women's subordination to other forms of oppression, such as class. Feminists also grappled with the oppression of race, particularly within feminism itself. The 1981 essay by the black British feminist Hazel Carby, ''White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood,'' challenged the implicit whiteness of feminist theory. French and Italian feminists, in particular, celebrated women's sexual difference in texts such as Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un (This sex which is not one; 1977), by the French philosopher and linguist Luce Irigaray.

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