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.

Second wave may refer to:

Gloria Jean Watkins (born September 25, 1952), better known by her pen name bell hooks (intentionally uncapitalized), is an American author, feminist, and social activist. She took her nom de plume from her maternal great-grandmother Bell Blair Hooks.

Her writing has focused on the interconnectivity of race, capitalism, and gender and what she describes as their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and class domination. She has published over thirty books and numerous scholarly and mainstream articles, appeared in several documentary films and participated in various public lectures. Primarily through a postmodern perspective, hooks has addressed race, class, and gender in education, art, history, sexuality, mass media and feminism.

Gloria Jean Watkins was born on September 25, 1952 in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. She grew up in a working class family with five sisters and one brother. Her father, Veodis Watkins, was a custodian and her mother, Rosa Bell Watkins, was a homemaker. Throughout her childhood, she was an avid reader.