We live in a world where a 21st century woman can vote, work full time, and raise a family on her own terms. Women can choose when to have children, whether they want to pursue a higher education, and get jobs that women of the 1960s only dreamed of. Most of these achievements were achieved by the Women's Movement of the 1960s. They brought out conventional thoughts and ideas that changed the course of history. However, in their quest for women's rights and equality among men, some were excluded from the mass movement. Lesbians of the 1960s were considered social pariahs by the Women's Movement of the 1960s and were not connected to them. Being the outcasts, lesbians created and founded their own movement focused not only on women's rights, but also on gay women's rights. This movement was just as controversial, if not more so, as the women's movement of the time, but it had just as much of an impact. Lesbian feminism emerged from the second wave of feminism. Second wave feminism finds its roots in Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. In her book, Friedan focuses on the need for women to find their independence socially and economically. “For women to have full identity and freedom, they must have economic independence… Only economic independence can free a woman to marry for love, not for status or financial support, or to leave a loveless, intolerable marriage , humiliating, or to eat, dress, rest and move if he intends not to marry”[Friedan 14]. Freidan's book was the push women needed to take the first steps necessary to become independent in traditional patriarchal society. Criticism of Friedan's book for focusing only on white, middle-class Americans quickly reached... middle of paper......://whataboutpeace.blogspot.com/2013/02/reconciliation-lesbian - e-liberal.html>.Echols, Alice. Dare to be bad: radical feminism in America, 1967-1975. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota P, 1989. Faderman, Lillian. Weird Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. Meeker, Martin. Desired contacts: Gay and lesbian communication and community, 1940s-1970s. Chicago: University of Chicago P, 2006.Radicalesbians. “Woman identified as female.” Duke Special Collections Library: Documents of the Women's Liberation Movement. 1997. Know, Inc. November 21, 2013. Westerband, Yamissette. "Lesbian History: Lesbian Feminism." Lesbian History: Lesbian Feminism. University of Michigan. 05 December. 2013 .