Homosexuality at this time was still classified as a mental illness, a disease that could be cured through medicine or religion. Gays and Lesbians were frequent targets in police raids and were banned from even assembling in public. They too were denied the ability to stand up and speak for themselves with legal or social support. .
The Second Wave of the feminist movement focused on challenging the stereotypical domestic role of women. Because this view of women has been so ingrained in society, the dominant goal was "valuing equally that which was marked as female or feminine, and having equal access to domaine that had been exclusive to men" (Baumgardner, p. 38). This fight against the "cult of domesticity" grew to define the Second Wave of feminism. This wave began around the 1960s and developed from the greater civil rights movement. Women had won the right to vote in the 1920s but were still largely defined by their domestic roles. Thus, the focus of this wave moved from political equality to social equality. The women involved in the Second Wave were fighting "for women to share in the opportunities and responsibilities men had, including creating a career, pushing off the drudgery of housework, and refusing to be held hostage by their reproductive systems" (Baumgardner, p. 38). .
There was also a need to fundamentally change the roles that society saw women as being born into. This is an issue that spurred an intense enthusiasm in the LGBTIQ community to stand up for their rights alongside the feminist movement. As Firestone discusses, there is a biological reality that men and women are born differently and it is this biological separation that men have used to justify the unequal treatment of women (p. 47). Indeed, the "biological family is an inherently unequal power distribution" (Firestone, p. 47). Women, as the ones essentially producing children, have traditionally borne the responsibility of rearing the children.
"Examine the major contributions and criticisms of critical theory to the understanding of social life in both the modern and contemporary society." The 'Frankfurt school' of critical theory founded in 1923 in German mainly aimed to bring together different types of Marxist thinking to constru...