Reproductive Futures

Abstract

While first-wave feminism had brought about women’s political enfranchisement and had strengthened their legal rights, second-wave feminism developed out of the recognition that gender inequality was perpetuated as much by the power of ideology as by political and legal structures. The second wave thus went beyond campaigning for material change and began to explore and challenge dominant ideological representations of femininity. Apart from the construction of woman as sex-object (critiqued most famously in the 1968 Miss America ‘bra burning’ protest), the most entrenched ideological construction was that of woman-as-homemaker, the twentieth-century version of Coventry Patmore’s ‘Angel in the House’. Both the ideological construction and material determinants of such femininity came under attack, and from a bewildering variety of positions, for second-wave feminism was anything but uniform.