A bit of background, the earlier days of the feminist movement were divided into the first wave (starting from the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention), and the goal of the first wave was to gain various de jure (legal) rights that women have been denied, i.e. the right to own property, the right to vote and hold public office, the right to employment, the right to enter into contracts as a single party, and not having one's legal identity subsumed under that of the husband when married. Coincident with the first wave was the introductory phases of the sexual revolution, where women wore more revealing clothing, sex was becoming discussed more openly, and various early forms of contraception and family planning were being made available. Most of these goals were (more or less) achieved by WWII.

This fed into the Second Wave Feminism (usually said to have started with the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique in 1963). In this wave, women synthesized Feminist Theory with Marxist Theory and tackled more insidious de facto inequalities, such as sexist hiring and promotion practices, the unvoluntary "streaming" of women into traditionally "feminine" education and jobs, the wage gap, sexism in the workplace, marital abuse/rape (and sexual violence in general), lack of access to contraception and abortion services, demonization of divorce and single-parenthood, and the various forms of sexual objectification.

During the second wave, women not only argued that they are legal entities equal to men (as happened in the first wave), they now argued that they can be equal to men in all respects. This was when women began moving aggressively into traditionally male dominated career fields. And they also became much more vocal in establishing their personhood independent of males. Which fed into the Era of Sexual Liberation, where women took equal dominance in the bedroom.