The women's liberation movement (WLM) was a political alignment of women and feminist intellectualism. It emerged in the late 1960s and continued till the 1980s, primarily in the industrialized nations of the Western world, which resulted in great change (political, intellectual, cultural) throughout the world. The WLM branch of radical feminism, based in contemporary philosophy, comprised women of racially and culturally diverse backgrounds who proposed that economic, psychological, and social freedom were necessary for women to progress from being second-class citizens in their societies.

Towards achieving the equality of women, the WLM questioned the cultural and legal validity of patriarchy and the practical validity of the social and sexual hierarchies used to control and limit the legal and physical independence of women in society. Women's liberationists proposed that sexism—legalized formal and informal sex-based discrimination predicated on the existence of the social construction of gender—was the principal political problem with the power dynamics of their societies.

In general, the WLM proposed socio-economic change from the political left, rejected the idea that piecemeal equality, within and according to social class, would eliminate sexual discrimination against women, and fostered the tenets of humanism, especially the respect for human rights of all people. In the decades during which the women's liberation movement flourished, liberationists successfully changed how women were perceived in their cultures, redefined the socio-economic and the political roles of women in society, and transformed mainstream society.

The wave theory of social development holds that intense periods of social activity are followed by periods of remission, in which the activists involved intensely in mobilization are systematically marginalized and isolated. After the intense period fighting for women's suffrage, the common interest which had united international feminists left the women's movement without a single focus upon which all could agree. Ideological differences between radicals and moderates, led to a split and a period of deradicalization, with the largest group of women's activists spearheading movements to educate women on their new responsibilities as voters. Organizations like the African National Congress Women's League, the Irish Housewives Association, the League of Women Voters, the Townswomen's Guilds and the Women's Institutes supported women and tried to educate them on how to use their new rights to incorporate themselves into the established political system. Still other organizations, involved in the mass movement of women into the workforce during World War I and World War II and their subsequent exit at the end of the war with concerted official efforts to return to family life, turned their efforts to labor issues. The World YWCA and Zonta International, were leaders in these efforts, mobilizing women to gather information on the situation of working women and organize assistance programs. Increasingly, radical organizations, like the American National Woman's Party, were marginalized by media which denounced feminism and its proponents as "severe neurotics responsible for the problems of" society. Those who were still attached to the radical themes of equality were typically unmarried, employed, socially and economically advantaged and seemed to the larger society to be deviant.

In countries throughout Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, the Middle East and South America, efforts to decolonize and replace authoritarian regimes, which largely began in the 1950s and stretched through the 1980s, initially saw the state overtaking the role of radical feminists. For example, in Egypt, the 1956 Constitution eliminated gender barriers to labor, political access, and education through provisions for gender equality. Women in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Nicaragua and other Latin American countries had worked for an end to dictatorships in their countries. As those governments turned to socialist policies, the state aimed to eliminate gender inequality through state action. As ideology in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean shifted left, women in newly independent and still colonized countries saw a common goal in opposing imperialism. They focused their efforts to address gendered power imbalances in their quest for respect of human rights and nationalist goals. This worldwide movement towards decolonization and the realignment of international politics into Cold War camps after the end of World War II, usurped the drive for women's enfranchisement, as universal suffrage and nationhood became the goal for activists. A Pan-African awareness and global recognition of blackness as a unifying point for struggle, led to a recognition by numerous marginalized groups that there was potential to politicize their oppression.

In their attempt to influence these newly independent countries to align with the United States, in the polarized Cold War climate, racism in U.S. policy became a stumbling block to the foreign policy objective to become the dominant superpower. Black leaders were aware of the favorable climate for securing change and pushed forward the Civil Rights Movement to address racial inequalities. They sought to eliminate the damage of oppression, using liberation theory and a movement which sought to create societal transformation in the way people thought about others by infusing the disenfranchised with political power to change the power structures. The Black Power movement and global student movements protested the apparent double standards of the age and the authoritarian nature of social institutions. From Czechoslovakia to Mexico, in diverse locations like Germany, France, Italy, and Japan, among others, students protested the civil, economic and political inequalities, as well as involvement in the Vietnam War. Many of the activists participating in these causes would go on to participate in the feminist movement.

Socially, the baby boom experienced after the Second World War, the relative worldwide economic growth in the post-war years, the expansion of the television industry sparking improved communications, as well as access to higher education for both women and men led to an awareness of the social problems women faced and the need for a cultural change. At the time, women were economically dependent on men and neither the concept of patriarchy nor a coherent theory about the power relationships between men and women in society existed. If they worked, positions available to women were typically in light manufacturing or agricultural work and a limited segment of positions in the service industries, such as bookkeeping, domestic labor, nursing, secretarial and clerical work, retail sales, or school teaching. They were expected to work for lower wages than men and upon marriage, terminate their employment. Women were unable to obtain bank accounts or credit, making renting housing impossible, without a man's consent. In many countries they were not allowed to go into public spaces without a male chaperone.

Married women from Commonwealth countries and thus with a common law legal code were legally bound to have sex with their husbands upon demand. At the time, marital rape was not a concept in common law, as it was legally considered that women had given consent to regular intercourse upon marrying. The state and church placed enormous pressure on young women to retain their virginity. Introduction of the birth control pill gave many men a sense that as women could not get pregnant, they could not say no to intercourse. Though by the 1960s the pill was widely available, prescription was tightly controlled and in many countries, dissemination of information about birth control was illegal. Even after the pill was legalized, contraception remained banned in numerous countries, like Ireland where condoms were banned and the pill could only be prescribed to control menstrual cycles. The Catholic Church issued the encyclical Humanae vitae in 1968, reiterating the ban on artificial contraception. Abortion often required the consent of a spouse, or approval by a board, as in Canada, wherein the decisions often revolved around whether pregnancy posed a threat to the woman's health or life.