This article discusses the impact of second-wave feminism on educational research with a focus on developments in the USA. It expands on the themes raised in the other articles in this issue of "Discourse" by considering the political nature of feminist educational research questions beginning in the 1970s and continuing to the contemporary world. The guiding theme of the article is to consider the meaning of the second-wave claim that the personal is political in its manifestations in the women's movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, and its application to educational research as feminist concerns were translated into the academy. It then considers the ways that feminist poststructural research both continues the political concerns of second-wave feminism and troubles them. (Contains 5 notes.)