page_title: Timeline of second-wave feminism
section_title: 1972
hierarchical_section_title: Timeline of second-wave feminism / Timeline / 1970s / 1972
caption_attribution_description: English: Ms. magazine, Spring 1972 issue
context_page_description: This is a Timeline of second-wave feminism, from its beginning in the mid-twentieth century, to the start of Third-wave feminism in the early 1990s.
context_section_description: Britain's first second-wave feminist magazine, Spare Rib, was launched by Marsha Rowe and Rosie Boycott.
  Egyptian feminist Nawal El-Saadawi published her book Women and Sex.
  American feminists Gloria Steinem and Letty Cottin Pogrebin co-founded Ms. magazine.
  The National Action Committee (NAC) was established to spur action by the Canadian government to implement recommendations made by the Royal Commission on the Status of Women (1970). Funded in part by the federal government and founded as a wide coalition of women's groups, NAC was seen as the voice of Canadian women.
  The Equal Rights Amendment was sent to the U.S. states for ratification. The amendment reads: "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex".
  In Eisenstadt v. Baird the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that unmarried couples have a right to use contraception.
  The International Feminist Collective was founded in 1972 in Italy by Selma James, Brigitte Galtier, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and Silvia Federici, to promote political debate and action around the issue of housework; the International Wages for Housework Campaign, which grew out of the Collective, was a feminist global social movement founded in 1972 in Padua, Italy. The Campaign was formed to raise awareness of how housework and childcare are the base of all industrial work and to stake the claim that these unavoidable tasks should be compensated as paid wage labor. The demands for the Wages for Housework formally called for economic compensation for domestic work but also used these demands to call attention to the affective labors of women, the reliance of capitalist economies on exploitative labor practices against women, and leisure inequality.
  Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, became law. It is a comprehensive federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any federally funded education program or activity. The Educational Amendments of 1972 also amended the Fair Labor Standards Act to expand the coverage of the Equal Pay Act to executives, administrators, outside salespeople and professionals, by excluding the Equal Pay Act from the professional workers exemption of the Fair Labor Standards Act.
  The [American] National Women's Political Caucus was founded.
  Gloria Steinem delivered her Address to the Women of America.
  New York Radical Feminists held a series of speakouts and a conference on rape and women's treatment by the criminal justice system.
  The Feminist Women's Health Center was founded in Los Angeles by Carol Downer and Lorraine Rothman.
  In San Francisco, California, Margo St. James organized Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics (COYOTE) to improve the working conditions of prostitutes.
caption: Cover of Preview issue of Ms. magazine.
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