Transnational feminism
In the "Oxford Handbook of Transnational Feminist Movements", Valentine Moghadam says that "women have worked together across borders since at least the mid-1800s. (55)" What is now called first wave feminism started in the early twentieth century in the West with a focus on women's suffrage. 
During World War II, the United States government gave women jobs because the war had caused a national shortage of labor. After the war ended, Irene Tinker says (oxford transnational), these jobs were taken away but women were no longer satisfied going back to their previous gender roles. Starting in the 1960s in the United States, second wave feminism emerged, defined by women's organization around "equal right to education, employment, and equal pay for equal work, and on sexual and reproductive rights."
Sexual revolution
The women's movement redefined sexuality, not in terms of simply pleasing men but recognizing women's sexual satisfaction and sexual desire. "The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm" by Anne Koedt illustrates an understanding of a women's sexual anatomy, arguing against Freud's "assumptions of women as inferior appendage to man, and her consequent social and psychological role." The women's movement was able to develop lesbian feminism, freedom from heterosexual act, and freedom from reproduction. Feminist Betty Friedan published the Feminine Mystique in 1963, concerning the many frustrations women had with their lives and with separate spheres which established a pattern of inequality.
The Gay Rights Movement started when the Stonewall Riots of 1969 crystallized a broad grass-roots mobilization. New gay liberationist gave political meaning to "coming out" by extending the psychological-personal process into public life. During the 1950s the most feared thing of the homosexual culture was "coming out", the homosexual culture of the 1950s did everything they could to help keep their sexuality a secret from the public and everyone else in their lives, but Alfred Kinsey's research on homosexuality alleged that 39% of the unmarried male population had had at least one homosexual experience to orgasm between adolescence and old age. The "coming out" phenomenon helped mobilize people to live full-time as a homosexual, they no longer had to live in secret. They no longer had to sneak around and occasionally receive the sexual attention that they desire or force themselves into a heterosexual relationship in which they had no interest, and was full of lies. Brad Gooch wrote in the "Golden Age of Promiscuity" that the gay male community finally had reached a rich culture of "easy sex", sex without commitment, obligation or long-term relationships.