The Feminist Movement

Following in the turbulent wake of the civil rights movement, the Second Wave feminist movement in the 1970s marked an effort to ensure equal pay for women who performed work equal to that of men. To address this fundamental issue of equality, feminists first had to challenge preconceptions about women's capabilities in the workplace.

According to Susan Estrich's Sex and Power, feminism scored a major victory in 1972 when the Supreme Court of the United States first recognized that legal rights for women were specifically mandated by the Constitution. As gender roles were being challenged by more women moving into the workplace, the notion of men's and women's roles in fantasy fiction were being called into question as well.

Feminist writers like Marion Zimmer Bradley, author of the "Darkover" novels, and C. J. Cherryh, who wrote Gate of Ivrel (1976), influenced a score of young writers and...