The year 1979 marked the end of a decade known as the feminist movement's "second wave." The phrase, coined by the Australian writer Germaine Greer in her book The Female Eunuch, referred to the resurgence of feminist activity in the decades after the suffragist movement had succeeded in most of the Western world. The 1970s brought about big changes with regard to women's political, economic, and social power.

Several works published in the early 1970s have become landmarks in the history of feminist thought. Greer's work discussed the "eunuch-like" condition of the socially constructed "ideal woman," a being without sex drives whose "sexual organs are shrouded in mystery." Kate Millet's Sexual Politics examined the male domination promulgated in most literature written by men. Meanwhile in France, Luce Irigaray was struggling with the inability of women to achieve their own voice in a language that reflected gendered...