Gay power is on the rise. But what about women?

In 1970, 100 women’s liberationists marched into the offices of Ladies’ Home Journal with a list of demands, including that the magazine have all editorial staffers, columnists and freelancers be female; hire nonwhite women “at all levels in proportion to the population statistics”; raise salaries to a minimum of $125 a week; open editorial conferences to all employees; and offer free in-house child care. The editor-in-chief didn’t meet most of these demands — one of which was that he replace himself with a woman — but the protesters didn’t leave until he agreed to let them produce a portion of the next issue.

Today more women work than ever before, but working women aren’t much better off than they were 40 years ago. Ladies’ Home Journal ceased monthly publication in July after 131 years. Its last four editors-in-chief were women, but the rest of the liberationists’ demands went unmet.

Contrast this scenario to the dramatic and welcome strides that gay rights activists have made in recent years. In 1969 gay people in New York revolted against police brutality and harassment in a series of protests that came to be known as the Stonewall riots. In 1987 activist Larry Kramer inspired the founding of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), a radical, grass-roots group dedicated to ending the AIDS crisis. ACT UP led effective AIDS-focused, pro-LGBT demonstrations at the New York Stock Exchange, the Food and Drug Administration and the New York General Post Office.

Today much of the once radical gay rights agenda — which pressed for the legalization of gay sex, same-sex marriage, adoption for same-sex couples and protection from discrimination — is coming to pass. Gay people do not yet have full equality under the law, but they’re well on their way to getting it, and they’re advancing further and faster than straight women.

The Daily Beast recently offered “10 reasons women are losing while gays keep winning,” which Slate expanded on by arguing that “[U.S. Supreme Court] Justice Anthony Kennedy likes gay rights more than women’s rights.” That point was echoed in The New York Times’ “Justices’ rulings advance gays; women less so.”

What accounts for this difference? And what can feminists learn from the success the gay rights movement has enjoyed in the last 40 years?

Sex is one important factor. For decades, gay rights were synonymous with sex between men, and AIDS, like unwanted pregnancy, was seen as the wages of sin. It was only 20 years ago that conservative U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms characterized gay people as “weak” and “morally sick.” But at some point AIDS stopped being seen as a gay men’s disease, and gay rights activists began to sever the connection between gay sex, which is still off-putting to many straight people, and gay rights, which most Americans now support.

As it turned its focus to fighting discrimination and ensuring marriage rights, the face of gay rights in the U.S. became love, not sex. It’s no accident that 84-year-old lesbian Edith Windsor, the “matriarch of the gay rights movement,” has become the poster girl for gay marriage. Most people think of women that age, gay or straight, as post-sexual (Windsor, apparently, is no such thing). But Windsor isn’t advocating for birth control or abortion, so we don’t have to think about her sex life.

By contrast, the rights of straight women of childbearing age are inextricably tied to what happens when they have sex with men. As of 2012, women were still being characterized as “sluts” and “prostitutes” for using birth control, regardless of whether they were using it as a prophylactic or for some other reason. No matter how feminists frame abortion rights — as reproductive rights, freedom or justice — women, especially those who have extramarital sex, are still treated by lawmakers as an “irresponsible subspecies,” to borrow a phrase from Slate.

Before Roe v. Wade, American women who wanted abortions had to appear before all-male tribunals and beg for them. Today American women face unprecedented restrictions on access to contraception and abortion; state-mandated, medically unnecessary ultrasounds; abortion taxes; abortion waiting periods; and humiliating requirements that they explain to their employers why they want birth control. Physical autonomy was a fundamental demand of the women’s movement — and one we were never granted.

Then there’s women’s ongoing exclusion from political life. Despite making up more than half the population, women occupy only 18.5 percent of congressional seats, 22.6 percent of statewide executive offices and 24.2 percent of the seats in state legislatures. Only five of 50 governors are female. As of last year, 16 states had no female representatives in Congress.

The mostly straight white men who run our government are less and less likely to care what other men do in bed, especially when making an issue of it might call attention to their own sexual behavior. Being gay no longer means being unelectable. Even Republican voters are increasingly unlikely to see a candidate’s sexual orientation as a disqualification for office. But female candidates invariably encounter sexism from voters and media.

Having more women in government poses a distinct threat — to the unequal division of domestic labor that props up most male politicians’ careers, to their ability to make decisions about women’s bodies and to the exclusive men’s club atmosphere of U.S. legislatures.

Whether in politics or the boardroom, motherhood makes it harder for women to achieve most forms of power. And even in the United States, where more than half of pregnancies are unintended, women who find themselves unexpectedly pregnant face a grim set of options. Have an abortion and you’re a selfish slut; have a child and you’ll be primarily responsible for its care, even if you’re married, which half of adult women in the U.S. are not.

Rather than pushing unmarried women who become pregnant to marry, we should build a society in which they have real choices, including unfettered access to abortion, jobs with decent wages and high-quality, government-subsidized child care. In one of the richest nations on Earth, all women should be free to raise children on their own, have abortion(s) without supplication or apology and marry only if, when, and whom they choose.

The women’s movement is most powerful at its most inclusive. The demands of the Ladies’ Home Journal protesters were wide-ranging and revolutionary, not narrow and elitist. Florynce Kennedy and Gloria Steinem were friends and allies. Unfortunately, solidarity among women has been undercut since the 1970s, partly by conservative women invested in preserving the traditional social order, which favors males and whites, and partly by the rise of corporate feminism, with its single-minded emphasis on C-suite-bound high potentials, to the occasional detriment of their pink-collar sisters. To be fair, feminists forge alliances across color and class lines more often than they’re given credit for. But if they want all women to be treated as equals, they need to keep it up and keep doing better.

Like the gay rights movement, feminism at its best is about freedom and happiness. It seeks to ease women’s daily burden. It is not opposed to free speech, babies, men, lipstick or ambivalence. It is about creating a world in which women, like men, control whether and with whom they have sex. A world in which women marry out of love, not fear or need. A world in which every child is wanted, nurtured and adequately provided for. Because gay men in the U.S. said yes to love and no to living in closets, being left to die of AIDS and being shamed, pathologized and treated as subhuman, they are increasingly likely to live in communities where their humanity is taken for granted and their sex lives are unpoliced. Women deserve no less.