[3] Since then, active equality feminists have included Simone de Beauvoir, the Seneca Falls Convention Leaders, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Coffin Mott, Susan B. Anthony, Betty Friedan, and Gloria Steinem.
In 1869, John Stuart Mill published The Subjection of Women, in which he argued that equality between the sexes would translate to more moral and intellectual advancement, which in turn would result in more human happiness for everyone.
In 1949, French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir published the work The Second Sex, in which she debunks many of the claims made regarding women and the fight for gender equality.
In 1963, another literature pertaining to equality feminism arose, Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, in which she discussed "the problem that has no name," referring to the widespread unhappiness of women in the 1950s.
[8] She uses this information to describe many of the gender inequalities that society has created that have resulted in this unhappiness, citing the personal example of giving up her psychology career to tend to her children.
In 1972, women leaders such as Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, and Gloria Steinem pushed the Equal Rights Amendment through Congress; however, it fell short of ratification by 1982.
Thus, because both men and women are governed by principles of reason, then the biological elements such as sex, gender, and race are not contributing factors to the essence of the individual.
Mill notes that within a patriarchal society, "Men hold women in subjection by representing to them meekness, submissiveness resignation of all individual will into the hands of a man as an essential part of sexual attractiveness".
In her piece A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects, Wollstonecraft argues that women should have an education comparable to their position in society.
Mill believe that the moral and intellectual advancement from giving women the opportunity to be considered equal would translate to greater happiness for everyone involved.
Finally in part three, "Myths", de Beauvoir discusses the perceived "everlasting disappointment" of women from a male heterosexual point of view.
[8] It was through the impact of this piece of literature that women were finally given a voice to say it was okay to not want to conform to societal expectations and fight for equality of opportunities, choices, marriage, education, and voting.
This viewpoint, as championed by such feminists such as Carol Gilligan, Joan Tronto, Eva Feder Kittay, Genevieve Lloyd, Alison Jaggar, and Ynestra King, developed out of the rejection of the androgynous view of human nature as emphasized in equality feminism.
Begun largely in the 1980s, this viewpoint makes the case that equality feminism fails to account for the uniquely female experience, and thus creates the male perspective as the dominant aspiration.