Second-wave Feminism, also called The Feminist Movement, or the Women's Liberation Movement, is a period of feminist activity. In the United States it began during the early 1960s and lasted through the late 1990s. In Turkey and Israel it began in the 1980s, and it began at other times in other countries.

Whereas first-wave feminism focused mainly on overturning legal obstacles to gender equality (i.e. voting rights, property rights), second-wave feminism broadened the debate to a wide range of issues: sexuality, family, the workplace, reproductive rights, de facto inequalities, and official legal inequalities. Second-wave Feminism radically changed the face of western culture, leading to marital rape laws, establishment of rape crisis and battered women's shelters, significant changes in custody and divorce law, and widespread integration of women into sports activities and the workplace. It also tried and failed to add the Equal Rights Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Many feminists view the second-wave feminist era as ending with the intra-feminism disputes of the Feminist Sex Wars over issues such as sexuality and pornography, which ushered in the era of third-wave feminism.

Gloria Marie Steinem (born March 25, 1934) is an American feminist, journalist, and social and political activist who became nationally recognized as a leader of, and media spokeswoman for, the women's liberation movement in the late 1960s and 1970s. A prominent writer and political figure, Steinem has founded many organizations and projects and has been the recipient of many awards and honors. She was a columnist for New York magazine and co-founded Ms. magazine. In 1969, she published an article, "After Black Power, Women's Liberation" which, along with her early support of abortion rights, catapulted her to national fame as a feminist leader. In 2005, Steinem worked alongside Jane Fonda and Robin Morgan to co-found the Women's Media Center, an organization that works to amplify the voices of women in the media through advocacy, media and leadership training, and the creation of original content. Steinem currently serves on the board of the organization. She continues to involve herself in politics and media affairs as a commentator, writer, lecturer, and organizer, campaigning for candidates and reforms and publishing books and articles.

Naomi Wolf (born November 12, 1962) is an American author and political consultant. With the publication of The Beauty Myth, she became a leading spokesperson of what was later described as the third wave of the feminist movement.

Wolf was born in San Francisco in 1962 of Jewish descent. Her mother is Deborah Goleman, an anthropologist and the author of The Lesbian Community. Her father is the Romanian-born horror scholar Leonard Wolf. She attended Lowell High School and debated in regional speech tournaments as a member of the Lowell Forensic Society. She attended Yale University, where she received in 1984 her Bachelor of Arts in English literature; she was a Rhodes Scholar at New College, Oxford from 1985 to 1987.

Wolf was married to the former Clinton speechwriter David Shipley. They had two children, Rosa (b. 1995) and Joseph (b. 2000). Wolf and Shipley divorced in 2005.

In the early 1990s, Wolf garnered international fame as a spokesperson of third-wave feminism as a result of the success of her first book The Beauty Myth, which became an international bestseller. In the book, she argues that "beauty" as a normative value is entirely socially constructed, and that the patriarchy determines the content of that construction with the goal of reproducing its own hegemony.