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By now it is almost trite to say that American society, Western society, and in fact international society, is undergoing a sexual revolution. Certainly, depending on country, social and economic class, and level of social and economic development, a sexual revolution has been taking place for over the past 150 years. In its simplest forms the sexual revolution has meant equal property, legal, marital, and divorce rights for women. In Africa and Asia and the underdeveloped nations of Latin America, demands still are made to free women from the economic, political, marital, and social bondage of males. This has meant an attack in some areas on polygamy, and the demand for equal rights to divorce, equal property rights in marriage, and equality in the contracting marriage.
In most instances it is the penetration of Western industrialism, culture, and ideologies, and the example of the role of Western women that has stimulated these demands. And these demands become available to cultures undergoing the process of modernization because, to a large measure they were achieved in Western industrial countries over a period of almost two hundred years.
In the meantime Western nations have developed far beyond these initial movements for the liberation of women from patriarchical domination. This is true despite the fact that (1) the “liberation” of women is not fully achieved in Western society, even in the present; and (2) within various segments of Western society the level of “liberation” is not evenly achieved. In the same sense, in non-Western society the penetration of new styles of marital behavior and sexuality is unevenly developed. The urban and more industrialized