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== Lead up to the Second Wave ==
Women’s history in before the 1920s is infamous famous for the suffrage movement and a push for a larger social safety net for the poor and less fortunate. What is not usually talked about in basic history text is that women did not just stop fighting for their rights after they got the right to vote. Since the 1920s there have been multiple instances of women organizing around their rights in multiple spaces and places.
For example in the 1930s, women of color in the Southwest of the United States joined labor unions like ILGWU and UCCAPAW and put their bodies on the line in protest of the extremely poor wages and work environment they had to endure while also helping with their large extended families. <ref>
Ruíz, Vicki. <i>Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930-1950</i>. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987.</ref>
In the 1940s, women gained employment in lieu of men fighting overseas in WWII. The labor unions that had grown in the 1930s became stronger because women became more involved as they found work. It was in the 1940s that women successfully achieved maternity leave, day care, and women counselors in the factories instead of men. <ref> Laughlin, Kathleen A., and Jacqueline L. Castledine. <i>Breaking the Wave: Women, Their Organizations, and Feminism, 1945-1985</i>. New York: Routledge, 2011, 4. </ref> The National Council of Negro Women also fought for the rights of African American women’s jobs that were to be swiftly taken away and replaced with domestic jobs as the war ended, as well as fought to gain racial and gender equality concerning larger umbrella women’s organizations. <ref> Laughlin, Kathleen A., and Jacqueline L. Castledine. <i>Breaking the Wave: Women, Their Organizations, and Feminism, 1945-1985</i>. New York: Routledge, 2011, 80-83. </ref> As the war ended, many women who enjoyed working in the public sphere were forced to back into the home and private sphere.
As the 1950s rolled around and the Cold War was in full swing, anti-communist sentiments would end most women’s organizing efforts due to red-baiting (assuming someone or something is communist in nature) and challenging anything liberal in nature. <ref> Laughlin, Kathleen A., and Jacqueline L. Castledine. <i>Breaking the Wave: Women, Their Organizations, and Feminism, 1945-1985</i>. New York: Routledge, 2011, 90. </ref> The four decades in between the 1960s and the 1920s proved to be a harsh climate for women to achieve any real change across race and class lines. It was the social atmosphere of the 1960s and 1970s that would ignite women of all racial and ethnic backgrounds to become involved in the effort to gain equal rights among men.
== Ideology that Shaped the Movement ==
