The Women's Liberation Movement

• The Women's Liberation Movement was an extra-parliamentary organisation which broadened political advancement for women
• Feminist authors drew attention to the inequalities of a profoundly patriarchal society such as Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer
• Betty Friedan wrote a Feminist bestseller called the 'The Feminine Mystique' in 1963
• Germaine Greer wrote a Feminist bestseller called the 'The Female Eunuch' in 1970
• Betty Friedan's 'The Feminine Mystique' (1963) and Germaine Greer's 'The Female Eunuch' (1970), feminist literature argued that women would remain unfulfilled, second-class citizens unless they actively stood up to the male-dominated state of affairs
• The success of the 1968 strike by the female employees at the Ford Car Factory in Dagenham attracted national attention and helped galvanise (take action) female activism
• The National Women's Liberation Conference first met in Oxford in February 1970, and Socialist and Historian Sheila Rowbotham organised this meeting
• Sheila Rowbotham organised the first Women's Liberation Conference in Oxford, February 1970 to set up an agenda for 'Women's Lib':

  • Equal Education
  • Equal Pay
  • Free Contraception & Abortion
  • Universal Provision of Childcare