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As Banks (1990) points out, it is difficult accurately to pinpoint the beginnings of second wave feminism because it emerged through a combination of grass- roots activism, nationally based political campaigns around key issues such as abortion, and the circulation of new ideas and research on women’s status by academics and activists. Many feminists were also involved in and influenced by the battle for civil rights in the USA during the 1950s and 1960s, and later and elsewhere by the emergence of the New Left: a range of radical political movements, often associated with anti- war protests (particularly against the USA–Vietnam conflict), critiques of capitalism and student politics. Furthermore, many feminists have described how the impetus to develop independent political action for women was in part a response to the sexism encountered in these other movements [8]. In the following brief sketch we outline how the protosociological ideas of first wave feminism were transformed, as a result of second wave feminism and gay liberation, into specifically sociological concepts and theories. In doing so, we cover a time span that stretches across three decades, illustrating that the impact of feminist and lesbian and gay thought on academic sociology was a drawn- out process, with many key academic publications appearing some time after the activism and political writings that inspired them.

Most historians of feminist movements agree that Britain, France and the United States became the initial centres of second wave feminist activity. This is not to deny the emergence of such concerns across other western societies, or indeed around the world, but it is to identify these countries as significant contexts for the development of feminist theories. Second wave feminist activism is notable for the entirely new development of radical feminism – radical, in part, because of its sociological approach – but this period also saw the re- emergence of earlier first wave traditions, and so most histories of feminism categorize the movement from the 1960s as having three distinct but related strands: liberal or equal rights; socialist or Marxist; and radical.