It was the 50th anniversary of the passage of woman suffrage, and the Women’s Strike for Equality March, led by the National Organization for Women, was calling for new rights: free childcare, equal opportunities in education and employment, and access to abortion. Among the activists who spoke alongside Millett were Betty Friedan, Eleanor Holmes Norton, and Bella Abzug.

In 1968 The New York Times Magazine published an article coining the term “the Second Feminist Wave.” While women in the 1960s and ’70s often invoked the “first-wave” suffrage generation, they also built on the continuous work of inter-generational New York activists. The women’s movement had long roots, but by 1970 it had arrived.

New York became the organizational and intellectual center of the new women’s liberation movement. New Yorker Carol Hanisch had coined the phrase “the personal is political” in 1968, and the women’s movement increasingly addressed issues of sexual politics, motherhood and marriage, and intersectional identity, along with causes such as equality under the law, financial independence, and gender parity.

The participants’ diverse identities, goals, and anger over their treatment as women sometimes produced conflict and dissent, but they also created a more multifaceted women’s movement than is often remembered—one that has paved the way for the surge in women’s activism today.