After women gained the vote in Canada in 1918 and in the United States in 1920, the feminist consciousness seemed eclipsed by other issues. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, clamor for economic reform took precedence over questions of discrimination, and during World War II, women, whether feminists or not, joined the work force as men left their jobs to fight overseas. During the late 1940s and the 1950s, most women across North America returned to the traditional gender roles of mother and housewife. Although the 1950s may have seemed to have been a tranquil decade—in regard to conventional notions of the family—various trends and events contributed to the evolution of the women's liberation movement that would gain momentum in the 1960s. In both nations the number of college graduates swelled in the years following World War II, although many women who had achieved some degree of higher education married soon after graduation or even before.

 In their new roles as housewives, these women often found themselves bored and frustrated with the repetitive domestic routines and unsatisfied in their roles as mothers. It was these educated women who helped form the core of the feminist movement in the 1960s. Secondly, though conventional wisdom preached that a woman's place was in the home, a growing percentage of wives supplemented their husbands' incomes by taking jobs. In fact, Life magazine reported that in 1956 women held one-third of all jobs in the United States. Many of those who enjoyed their work and sought advancement and equal pay were dismayed to find that women had few chances for these rewards and even less legal recourse. Such discriminatory practices also led to an increase in the number of women who became involved in the feminist movement. Finally, successes in the civil rights movement—for example, the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka ruling that outlawed segregation in public schools—convinced women that reform was indeed possible.

Throughout the first half of the 1970s the feminist movement continued to gather strength. Public opinion polls indicated that a majority of U.S. citizens supported the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), a bill that had been proposed before Congress every year since 1923 and said simply “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex” (Radl, p. 106). In 1972 the U.S. Congress passed the amendment. It then needed only to be ratified by three-fourths of the states in order to become law. Within a month fourteen states had ratified the ERA. The likelihood of passage seemed promising, but then activists for the New Right, a faction of religious zealots and proponents of traditional values, helped turn the public against the ERA. The New Right was not exclusively a reaction against feminism. Members of the New Right rallied to combat a myriad of trends that they thought threatened traditional values. 

Among the trends that caused alarm were the rise in the number of single mothers, the liberalism pervading college campuses, and a growing acceptance of homosexuality. Feminism was linked to these trends and targeted as a prime enemy. Perhaps the most influential leader of the antifeminist campaign in the U.S. was Phyllis Schlafly, the mother of six children and a long-time Republican Party activist. Schlafly contended that the ERA threatened the traditional family because it relieved a husband of the obligation to provide for his wife and children. “The women's liberation movement is antifamily,” she claimed. “The Equal Rights Amendment ... would take away the marvelous legal rights of a woman to be a full-time wife and mother in the home supported by her husband” (Schlafly in Falwell, p. 151). Schlafly also objected that feminists aimed to give a mother of an illegitimate baby the same respect as a mother of a child born in wedlock. She founded and appointed herself chairman of STOP ERA, an organization that staged nationwide rallies to foment opposition to the ERA. “Fight,” she urged voters, “against the ERA and ... win this battle for God” (Schlafly in Falwell, p. 152). Schlafly galvanized a campaign against the ERA. Across the nation women spoke out against the amendment. Most insisted that the government could not legislate the equality of the biologically different sexes. Women had been ordained by nature, went one argument, to spend their energy meeting the needs of others. Hundreds of thousands of letters from such organizations as ProFamily United, Concerned Women for America, Women United to Defend Existing Rights, and Citizens for God, Family and Country helped convince a sufficient number of elected officials not to vote for ratification of the ERA. 

Such antifeminist rhetoric appealed to women who felt they had been belittled by the feminist movement. Many stay-at-home wives and mothers resented the contention that housework was mindless or demeaning. In fact, as indicated by articles in the popular press during the 1980s, the antifeminists convinced many women that the women's liberation movement had brought them nothing but grief. One of them claimed that “[although] women's lib has given my generation high incomes, our own cigarette, the option of single parenthood, rape crisis centers, personal lines of credit, free love, and female gynecologists[,] in return it has effectively robbed us of the one thing upon which the happiness of most women rests—men” (Charon, p. 25). In reality, what had happened was that many women now shouldered dual burdens—rushing home from low-paying jobs to cook and clean for their families. In return, they blamed their frustrations on the feminist movement that had encouraged them to seek employment.

The American family has undergone some dramatic changes in the later years of this century: Divorce rates have risen sharply, as has the number of unmarried couples living together. Female-headed, single-parent households, once regarded as “broken homes,” doubled from 1960 to the late 1980s. Nearly 60 percent of married women were working outside the home by the late 1980s.

 Alarmed at these changes, religious fundamentalists and antifeminists banded together to form a pro-family movement. Its members blamed the feminists for encouraging wives and mothers to work outside the home. They asserted that modern children receive less support and guidance than in the past and yet are exposed to a permissive society replete with sex, alcohol, drugs, and violence. The solution, argued the pro-family movement, lay not only in reversing Roe v. Wade but also in restoring prayer to the public schools and in monitoring the content of young people's textbooks. Experts outside the pro-family movement agreed that feminism had indeed made a significant impact on family life. Women exhibited more concern with personal fulfillment than in prior generations and were now more reluctant to sacrifice their own happiness and goals for someone else's. Such self-determination grew in part from a growing public acceptance that the traditional family was not without its serious flaws behind closed doors. 

Often, wives and mothers who found themselves victims of abuse, alcoholism, and mental illness had no real options for leaving prior to the era of feminist legal gains. By urging women to consider their own needs and abilities, the feminist minority has influenced the majority of females in the United States. “This is true,” maintain two of the experts, “even among women who claim to reject feminism. Polls have shown ... a far greater unwillingness to subordinate personal needs and interests to the demands of husbands and children. 

A growing majority of women now believe that both husband and wife should have jobs, both do housework, and both take care of children” (Mintz and Kellogg, p. 208). In essence, the experts suggest, the pro-family movement may be alarmed at what only seems to be a breakdown of the American family. The family has not in fact collapsed; rather it is undergoing a transition beyond the old standard of husband as breadwinner and wife as housewife. In other words, it is the survival of the traditional family, not of the family altogether, that appears to be at risk.