The Women's liberation movement in North America was part of the feminist movement in the late 1960s and through the 1980s. Derived from the civil rights movement, student movement and anti-war movements, the Women's Liberation Movement took rhetoric from the civil rights idea of liberating victims of discrimination from oppression. They were not interested in reforming existing social structures, but instead were focused on changing the perceptions of women's place in society and the family and women's autonomy. Rejecting hierarchical structure, most groups which formed operated as collectives where all women could participate equally. Typically, groups associated with the Women's Liberation Movement held consciousness-raising meetings where women could voice their concerns and experiences, learning to politicize their issues. To members of the WLM rejecting sexism was the most important objective in eliminating women's status as second-class citizens.
In North America, the movement began in the United States and Canada almost simultaneously with the first articles articulating their aims appearing around 1965. By 1967, organizations had formed in major US and Canadian cities spreading within a year throughout both countries. In Mexico, sparked by the movement in the north, groups began to form in 1971. Characterized as man-haters and radicals, the movement in North America gave way to more liberal reformers by the mid-1970s in the United States and Canada and by the early 1980s in Mexico.
Canada
The Women's Liberation Movement in Canada derived from the anti-war movement, Native Rights Movement and the New Left student movement of the 1960s. An increase in university enrollment, sparked by the post-World War II baby boom, created a student body which believed that they could be catalysts for social change. Rejecting authority and espousing participatory democracy as well as direct action, they promoted a wide agenda including civil rights, ethnic empowerment, and peace, as well as gay and women's liberation. The Canadian magazine, Chatelaine serialized Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique and published articles on birth control, modifications needed for the divorce laws, and other women's issues, making them public concerns. Institutionalized feminists, (liberal feminism) focused efforts on forming a royal commission to evaluate women's status and address them through reforms, but grass-roots feminists desired more radical change.
As early as 1967, women in Toronto had formed a Women's Liberation Group and in July 1968, a group of women students at Simon Fraser University (SFU) organized the Feminine Action League (FAL). Faculty, like Margaret Benston supported Women's Lib encouraging studies to gain an understanding of women's societal roles and the perception of women's place both by themselves and by men. In that year, the U.S. organization SNCC barred whites from participating in leadership positions, influencing the founders of FAL to ban men in their organization. Though often depicted in media as a sign of "man-hating", separation was a focused attempt to eliminate defining women via their relationship to men. Since women's inequality as child-rearers, citizens, sexual objects, wives, workers, etc. were commonly experienced by women, separation meant unity of purpose to evaluate their second-class status. Politicizing personal issues was done in consciousness-raising sessions aimed at eliminating the need to rally support for abstract causes, because the issues were those impacting women's daily lives. Soon after their forming, the group changed their name to the SFU Women's Caucus and initially focused on contraception and pregnancy prevention for students. In July 1969, the group moved off-campus, to downtown Vancouver, opening offices as the Vancouver Women's Caucus (VWC). They began publishing a newspaper, Pedestal, focused on women's liberation and protesting sexist hierarchy and male-domination in the student movement. Women's Caucuses also formed at the University of Alberta and the University of Regina, as offshoots of the Students for a Democratic Union (SDU) and at the University of Toronto aligned with the Student Union for Peace Action (SUPA). As in the U.S. a network of women's centers, which included spaces like the Ste-Famille Women's Centre in Montreal and the Prince George Women's Centre in northern British Columbia developed to facilitate meetings of women and provide them with services.