I spoke with Swinth about the still-relevant lessons of second-wave feminism presented in Feminism’s Forgotten Fight. An edited and condensed version of our conversation is below.

Ashley Fetters: One of the central theses of the book is that there’s been a sort of collective amnesia around what the feminism of the 1960s and ’70s was really about. Why do you think that collective memory lapse happened, exactly?

Kirsten Swinth: I think people forgot at a specific moment in the late ’70s and the early ’80s, when a couple of things went on: First of all, it was a super low moment for the women’s movement; they’d fought for the Equal Rights Amendment and seen its heartbreaking defeat. It was a moment when conservatives were really beginning to chalk up some victories, and what we now call the “pro-family movement” was very visible and increasingly politically powerful because they backed Ronald Reagan and helped get him elected in 1980. Part of what the pro-family movement did was systematically accuse feminists in the women’s movement of betraying the family or not caring about the family, being anti-family.

Second of all, there is the fact that Betty Friedan herself was a particularly significant leader, but that she would be the one to have that amnesia kind of makes sense. She was a slightly displaced leader; she was an older generation herself, alienated by a movement that was newly focused on sexual politics, particularly reproductive freedom and sexual liberation. So for her to see that as what the movement had become makes sense.

Fetters: In the research process, did you find that this forgotten aspect of feminism was hiding in plain sight and just fell out of the popular imagination, or was this all sort of obscured until you recovered it?

Swinth: I think it’s a mix of both. I rely on the work of a lot of other scholars, particularly those who have worked on the welfare-rights movement and those who’ve worked on the histories of legal feminism. But once I started asking questions and saying, Wait, isn’t there something here we aren’t seeing?, then I uncovered a bunch more research.