Explain why a women's movement emerged in the USA in the 1960s, how it challenged authority, and what it changed, for whom and with what limits, by 1979.
Each is in the History glossary, with every other term in the subject.
Policies that require employers or institutions to take active steps to recruit and promote groups that have faced discrimination, such as women and racial minorities.
The main US federal welfare programme for poor families with children from 1935 to 1996, most of whose recipients were single mothers.
The sharp rise in the birth rate in the United States after the Second World War, from 1946 to about 1964, peaking in 1957.
A Black lesbian socialist feminist group in Boston (1974–1980) whose 1977 statement argued that the major systems of oppression are interlocking.
The practice of meeting in small groups to share personal experiences in order to discover their common, political causes, developed by radical feminists in 1967–1968.
A legal settlement approved by a court in which a party agrees to change its practices without admitting guilt, such as AT&T's 1973 agreement with the EEOC.
A procedure in the US House of Representatives that forces a bill out of a committee that refuses to act on it, if a majority of members sign.
The belief, dominant in post-war American culture, that a woman's fulfilment lay in being a full-time wife, mother and homemaker in a single-earner family.
Second-wave feminism was the movement for women's equality that emerged in the United States in the 1960s and reached its height in the 1970s. It changed American law on employment, education, credit and reproduction, and its ideas about work, family and sexuality still shape political argument in the United States and beyond.
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Frances Beal's term (1969) for the combined oppression of Black women by racism and sexism, together with economic exploitation.
A US law of 1974 banning discrimination in lending on the basis of sex or marital status.
The US federal agency created by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to enforce Title VII's ban on discrimination in employment. It opened in July 1965.
A US law of June 1963 requiring equal pay for women and men doing equal work in the same workplace.
A proposed amendment to the US Constitution banning the denial of equal rights on account of sex. Passed by Congress in 1972, it was ratified by only 35 of the 38 states needed.
Betty Friedan's name (1963) for the post-war belief that women could find fulfilment only as wives and mothers, spread by magazines, advertising, psychology and education.
The campaign for women's rights, above all the right to vote, from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth; in the USA it ended with the Nineteenth Amendment of 1920.
The Supreme Court ruling of 7 June 1965 that struck down a Connecticut ban on contraceptives and found a constitutional right to privacy for married couples.
A provision first passed by the US Congress in 1976 that bars the use of federal Medicaid funds for most abortions.
The idea that systems of oppression such as racism, sexism and class interlock and shape people's lives together; the term was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989.
The strand of feminism that seeks equal rights and opportunities for women within existing institutions, mainly through law, lobbying and elections.
The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965), a US government report by Daniel Patrick Moynihan that blamed problems in Black communities partly on a "matriarchal" family structure.
An organisation founded in New York in 1973 to address the combined effects of racism and sexism on Black women.
The largest liberal feminist organisation in the USA, founded on 30 June 1966 by Betty Friedan, Pauli Murray and others to win full equality for women through law and politics.
An organisation of welfare recipients, mostly poor Black mothers, active from 1966 to 1975, that campaigned for an adequate income and dignity for women on welfare.
The coalition of social and religious conservatives that grew in the USA in the 1970s, opposing feminism, abortion and the ERA, and helped elect Ronald Reagan in 1980.
The concentration of women and men in different jobs, with women crowded into a narrow range of lower-paid occupations.
A social system in which men hold most power in the family, the economy and politics, and in which male dominance is treated as natural.
Describes low-paid jobs dominated by women, such as clerical work, retail, nursing, teaching and domestic service.
A US law of 1978 that made discrimination against pregnant workers a form of sex discrimination under Title VII.
A commission set up by President Kennedy in December 1961, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, whose report American Women (1963) documented discrimination against women.
The movement opposing legal abortion that grew in the USA after Roe v. Wade (1973), led at first by the Catholic Church and later joined by evangelical Protestants.
Laws that limited women's working hours, night work or the weights they could lift. Meant to protect women, they also kept them out of better-paid jobs and overtime.
The strand of feminism that sees male power (patriarchy) running through the family, sexuality and culture, and argues that legal reform alone cannot end it.
The right to decide whether and when to have children, including access to contraception and abortion and protection from forced sterilisation.
A constitutional right found by the US Supreme Court in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), protecting intimate personal decisions such as contraception and, from 1973, abortion.
The US Supreme Court ruling of 22 January 1973 that recognised a constitutional right to abortion, limited by the stage of pregnancy. It was overturned in 2022.
The unpaid housework and childcare that women in paid work continue to do after their working day, a double burden found in capitalist and communist societies alike; the sociologist Arlie Hochschild named it the second shift (1989).
The women's movement in the United States and other Western countries in the 1960s and 1970s, which sought equality in work, education, law, the family and sexuality.
The sterilisation of people without their informed consent. In the 1970s USA it fell mostly on poor Black, Native American and Mexican-American women.
The campaign founded by Phyllis Schlafly in 1972 to prevent ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment; it later worked within her wider conservative organisation, Eagle Forum. STOP stood for "Stop Taking Our Privileges".
A section of the US Education Amendments of 1972 banning sex discrimination in any education programme that receives federal funding.
The radical, mostly younger wing of the women's movement of the late 1960s and 1970s; the press also used "women's lib" for the whole movement, often mockingly.
A nationwide day of protest on 26 August 1970, the fiftieth anniversary of women's suffrage, demanding abortion rights, equal opportunity and free child care.
A short, theatrical protest designed to win media attention, used by radical feminists, anti-war activists and gay liberationists around 1968–1972.
American feminism did not begin in the 1960s. Campaigners for women's rights had met at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, and after seventy years of struggle the Nineteenth Amendment gave women the vote in 1920. Historians call this earlier movement first-wave feminism. After 1920 a small group, the National Woman's Party, kept campaigning for an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution, first introduced in Congress in 1923, but most Americans believed that the main battle for women's rights had been won.
The second wave was larger and asked for much more. Its campaigners wanted legal equality, but also equal pay, access to every kind of job and education, control over pregnancy and childbirth, and an end to the assumption that housework and child care were women's work alone. The timeline of the movement shows three phases: a period of commissions, books and new laws in the early 1960s, a phase of rapid mobilisation and legal victories between 1966 and 1973, and a period of backlash and division afterwards.
The movement was never a single organisation. A useful distinction, used both by activists and by historians, separates two broad wings. Liberal feminism sought equal rights and opportunities inside existing institutions, mainly through lobbying, lawsuits and elections. Radical feminism argued that male power (patriarchy) ran through every part of life, including the family, sexuality and culture, and that changing laws was not enough. Alongside both, Black women, Chicanas, lesbians and working-class women developed their own analyses, often in criticism of the two main wings.
Strand | Main aims | Typical methods | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
Liberal feminism | Equal rights in law, work, education and politics | Lobbying Congress, lawsuits, complaints to federal agencies, electing women | NOW (1966), Women's Equity Action League (1968), National Women's Political Caucus (1971) |
Radical feminism ("women's liberation") | End male power in the family, sexuality and culture | Consciousness-raising groups, "zaps" and sit-ins, speak-outs, feminist publishing | New York Radical Women (1967), Redstockings (1969), The Feminists (1968) |
Black and Chicana feminism | End the combined oppression of race, sex and class | Separate organisations, community work, writing, campaigns on sterilisation and welfare | National Black Feminist Organization (1973), Combahee River Collective (1974), Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional (1970) |
Labour and welfare activism | Fair pay, union rights and an adequate income for poor mothers | Union caucuses, strikes, welfare rights campaigns | National Welfare Rights Organization (1966), Coalition of Labor Union Women (1974) |
The women's movement emerged from three kinds of cause working together. Long-term changes in women's lives, above all the growth of paid work, created grievances. Contraception gave women more control over their futures. Books and the example of the civil rights movement gave women the ideas and language to turn private frustration into public protest. The diagram of causes groups these factors.
After the Second World War, American culture celebrated the full-time housewife and mother. During the war about six million more women had taken paid jobs, many in industry, but in 1945–1946 many were dismissed or pressured to leave so that returning soldiers could have their jobs. In the prosperous years that followed, millions of families moved to new suburbs built for car owners, and the number of births rose sharply in the baby boom, which peaked in 1957 with about 4.3 million births.
Magazines, advertising, television comedies and advice books presented marriage, motherhood and homemaking as the natural fulfilment of a woman's life. Women married younger: the median age at first marriage fell to about 20 in the 1950s. Psychologists influenced by Freud warned that women who sought careers were unhappy or "neurotic". This set of beliefs is often called the domestic ideal, or, after Betty Friedan's book, the "feminine mystique".
Education reflected the same values. The GI Bill of 1944 paid for millions of returning servicemen to go to college, and because almost all veterans were men, women's share of college degrees fell. Women earned about 41 per cent of bachelor's degrees in 1940 but only about 35 per cent in 1960, and many women left college early to marry. Universities, law schools and medical schools often limited the number of women they admitted.
The domestic ideal described the lives of fewer women than its popularity suggests. The share of women aged 16 and over in the labour force rose steadily from 37.7 per cent in 1960 to 43.3 per cent in 1970 and 51.5 per cent in 1980. The biggest increase came among married women and mothers: many returned to work once their children were at school, to pay for the cars, houses and college fees of the new consumer society. For Black women and poor white women, paid work had never been optional.
The graph of work and pay shows the central grievance. Women were moving into paid work in ever larger numbers, but their position within it hardly improved. Most worked in a narrow range of pink-collar jobs, such as typing and clerical work, retail, teaching, nursing and domestic service, which were poorly paid because they were seen as "women's work". Newspapers printed job advertisements in separate "Help Wanted – Male" and "Help Wanted – Female" columns, and employers openly paid women less for the same work.
Women in paid work therefore experienced the gap between their real lives and the official ideal most sharply. A woman who worked full-time all year earned about 60 cents for every dollar earned by a man, and the figure did not rise between 1960 and 1980. Many state laws, originally passed to protect women workers, limited the hours women could work or the weights they could lift, which in practice also kept them out of better-paid jobs and overtime. These protective labour laws would later divide the movement, since many union women wanted to keep them.
The first national investigation of women's position came from the federal government. In December 1961 President John F. Kennedy set up the President's Commission on the Status of Women by Executive Order 10980. It was chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, the former First Lady, until her death in November 1962. The idea came from Esther Peterson, head of the Women's Bureau of the Department of Labor, who wanted to win support for equal pay and to head off the Equal Rights Amendment, which most labour unions opposed because it threatened protective laws.
The Commission's report, American Women, published in October 1963, documented discrimination in pay, employment, education and law. It recommended equal pay, paid maternity leave, child care and an end to discrimination in federal employment, but it did not back the ERA and assumed that most women would put their family first. States followed the federal example, and by 1967 every state had its own commission on the status of women.
The Commission's main effect was unintended. Its research gave women activists hard evidence and its meetings created a national network of women in government, the unions and voluntary organisations. When these women met in Washington in June 1966 for the third national conference of state commissions, they were frustrated that their reports were being ignored. That frustration led directly to the founding of the National Organization for Women.
In 1960 contraception was legal in most of the United States, but it was unreliable, and it was controlled by doctors, pharmacists and state law. Connecticut and Massachusetts still had nineteenth-century laws restricting birth control, and in many states unmarried women could not legally obtain it. The main methods, the diaphragm and the condom, depended on men's cooperation or on careful use, and failed often.
The oral contraceptive pill was developed in the 1950s by the biologist Gregory Pincus and the gynaecologist John Rock. The research was promoted by Margaret Sanger, the veteran birth-control campaigner, and paid for largely by Katharine McCormick, a wealthy suffragist. Their pill, sold by the drug company G. D. Searle as Enovid, was already approved for menstrual disorders. On 9 May 1960 the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that it would approve Enovid as a contraceptive, and formal approval followed in June.
Take-up was fast. By 1965 about 6.5 million American women were using the pill, making it the most popular form of birth control in the country. Unlike earlier methods, it was taken by the woman herself, separately from sex, and was more than 99 per cent effective when used correctly.
State laws still limited access. In Griswold v. Connecticut (7 June 1965) the Supreme Court struck down, by seven votes to two, an 1879 Connecticut law that banned the use of contraceptives. The case had been brought by Estelle Griswold, director of the state's Planned Parenthood League, who opened a clinic in order to be arrested. The Court found a constitutional right to privacy that protected decisions made within marriage. In Eisenstadt v. Baird (22 March 1972) the Court extended the same right to unmarried people.
The pill gave women more reliable control over when, and whether, to have children. The economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, in "The Power of the Pill" (2002), argue that its effect was greatest after states lowered the age at which young unmarried women could obtain it, around 1970. Women could now plan long courses of study with little risk of an unplanned pregnancy, and the share of women entering law, medicine and business school rose sharply in the 1970s.
The pill did not cause the women's movement on its own. Its users in the early 1960s were mostly married women, and the movement's first organisations were more concerned with jobs than with sexuality. But the pill helped separate sex from reproduction in public debate and made control of one's own body a central feminist demand, one that soon extended to the far more controversial question of abortion.
Feminists also criticised the pill. In The Doctors' Case Against the Pill (1969) the journalist Barbara Seaman showed that women had not been told of risks such as blood clots. When the Senate held hearings on the pill in January 1970, chaired by Senator Gaylord Nelson, women from D.C. Women's Liberation interrupted to protest that no women patients had been invited to testify. The protest helped win the first patient information leaflet for a prescription drug. It also showed a new theme in the movement: women demanding control over medicine as well as access to it. The Boston Women's Health Book Collective's Our Bodies, Ourselves (first printed in 1970) carried the same idea into a best-selling health guide written by women for women.
Books and essays turned private experiences into a shared political analysis. Two phases can be distinguished: the books of the early and mid-1960s, written mostly by educated women who wanted equality within existing society, and the radical writing of 1968–1970, which questioned the family, sexuality and male power itself.
The French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex in 1949; it appeared in English in 1953. She argued that throughout history men had defined themselves as the norm and women as the "Other". In the 1953 English translation her best-known line reads "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman": the roles of wife and mother were made by society, not by nature. The book was read by a small, educated audience in the United States, including Betty Friedan, and gave later feminists an intellectual foundation.
Betty Friedan was a journalist and a graduate of Smith College, an elite women's college. In 1957 she surveyed her former classmates for their fifteenth reunion and found many educated, comfortably-off housewives who were unhappy without knowing why. She spent five years researching the problem, and in February 1963 published The Feminine Mystique. It became a best-seller and sold more than three million copies in her lifetime. Its first chapter describes "the problem that has no name".
The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—"Is this all?"
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, New York: W. W. Norton, 1963, chapter 1. Friedan wrote as a journalist for a mass readership, and the vivid images of the suburban routine were chosen to make readers recognise themselves. The extract is valuable evidence of how educated white housewives experienced the domestic ideal, but the women it describes, with suburban homes and husbands earning enough to support them, were a minority of American women.
Friedan blamed the "mystique" on magazines, advertisers, Freudian psychology and educators who told women to find fulfilment only at home. Her solution was for women to take education and careers seriously. Thousands of readers wrote to her to say the book had changed their lives.
The civil rights movement gave women both a model and an experience of exclusion. Women such as Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer and Dorothy Height, president of the National Council of Negro Women from 1957, were central to the movement, and young white and Black women worked for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In November 1965 two SNCC veterans, Casey Hayden and Mary King, circulated a memo, "Sex and Caste", comparing the position of women to that of Black Americans and complaining that women in the movement were given typing and cooking while men made decisions. Women in the student New Left of the late 1960s made similar complaints, and many left to form women's groups.
The lawyer and civil rights activist Pauli Murray, a Black woman who had been refused entry to Harvard Law School because of her sex, made the same connection in law. In "Jane Crow and the Law" (1965), written with Mary Eastwood, she argued that the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of equal protection should apply to sex discrimination as it did to race. The phrase "Jane Crow", a play on the "Jim Crow" laws of racial segregation, captured the link between the two struggles.
By the end of the decade a younger generation produced more radical work. The best known texts are listed in the table of feminist writing.
Text | Author and date | Main argument |
|---|---|---|
The Second Sex | Simone de Beauvoir, 1949 (English 1953) | Femininity is made by society; men treat women as the "Other" |
The Feminine Mystique | Betty Friedan, 1963 | The domestic ideal left educated women unfulfilled; women need education and careers |
"Jane Crow and the Law" | Pauli Murray and Mary Eastwood, 1965 | The Constitution's equal protection clause should cover sex as it covers race |
"The Personal Is Political" | Carol Hanisch, written 1969, published 1970 | Women's private problems have political causes; consciousness-raising is political work |
Sexual Politics | Kate Millett, 1970 | Patriarchy is the basic form of power in society, visible even in literature |
The Dialectic of Sex | Shulamith Firestone, 1970 | Women's oppression is rooted in biological reproduction, which technology could end |
Sisterhood Is Powerful | Robin Morgan (ed.), 1970 | An anthology of radical writing, including Frances Beal's "Double Jeopardy" on Black women |
Our Bodies, Ourselves | Boston Women's Health Book Collective, 1970 (commercial edition 1973) | Women should understand and control their own health and bodies |
Carol Hanisch's essay explained the purpose of the small consciousness-raising groups that were spreading among radical women. Answering men on the left who dismissed the groups as therapy, she wrote:
One of the first things we discover in these groups is that personal problems are political problems. There are no personal solutions at this time.
Carol Hanisch, "The Personal Is Political", written as a memo in February 1969 and published in Notes from the Second Year: Women's Liberation (1970). Hanisch was an organiser in New York Radical Women writing for other activists, not for the public, so the essay shows how radical feminists justified their methods to sceptics within the left. The phrase "the personal is political", added as a title by the editors, became the best-known slogan of the movement.
The women's movement challenged several kinds of authority at once: Congress, the courts and federal agencies that made and enforced the law; employers, universities and unions; doctors and welfare offices; and the newspapers, magazines and advertisers that shaped ideas about women. Different groups chose different targets and different methods, as the diagram of strands and targets shows.
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned discrimination in employment on the basis of race, colour, religion, national origin and sex. The word "sex" had been added during the debate in the House by Howard W. Smith, a conservative Democrat from Virginia who opposed the bill; whether he meant to help women or to make the bill harder to pass is still debated. Martha Griffiths, a Democrat from Michigan, and other congresswomen made sure it stayed in. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), set up to enforce Title VII, at first gave sex discrimination little attention, as the chain of events from Title VII to NOW shows.
At the conference of state commissions in Washington in June 1966, Betty Friedan, Pauli Murray and others met in Friedan's hotel room after the organisers refused to allow a resolution demanding that the EEOC enforce the law. Friedan wrote the initials "NOW" on a napkin. The National Organization for Women was founded on 30 June 1966 and held its organising conference in October, with Friedan as president. Aileen Hernandez, a Black labour organiser who had resigned from the EEOC in frustration, became executive vice-president and later NOW's second president.
The purpose of NOW is to take action to bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society now, exercising all the privileges and responsibilities thereof in truly equal partnership with men.
National Organization for Women, Statement of Purpose, adopted at its organising conference, 29 October 1966, drafted by Betty Friedan and Pauli Murray. The language of "full participation" and "partnership with men" shows NOW's liberal aims: it wanted women admitted to existing institutions, not a revolution against them. As a founding statement written to attract members and to persuade politicians, it shows the aims of the leaders rather than the views of ordinary members.
NOW modelled itself on the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the leading civil rights organisation, and its statement said that there was "no civil rights movement to speak for women". Its methods were those of a pressure group: lobbying Congress and the White House, filing complaints and lawsuits, and organising public demonstrations. In 1967 it adopted a "Bill of Rights for Women" that called for the ERA, enforcement of Title VII, maternity leave, child care, equal education and the right to abortion. The last two demands led some members to leave.
Women's Equity Action League (WEAL, 1968): founded in Ohio by NOW members who disagreed with its support for abortion rights. It concentrated on education and employment; its member Bernice Sandler filed complaints against about 250 colleges and universities in 1970 for discriminating against women staff, which helped prepare the way for Title IX.
National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL, 1969): a single-issue group campaigning to repeal state abortion laws.
National Women's Political Caucus (NWPC, July 1971): founded by Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisholm, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Fannie Lou Hamer and others to elect women to office and win influence in both parties.
The movement had allies inside Congress, although women held only about 2 per cent of seats. Martha Griffiths used a rare procedure, a discharge petition, to force the ERA out of the House Judiciary Committee in 1970. Edith Green of Oregon held hearings on discrimination against women in education in 1970 that led to Title IX. Patsy Mink of Hawaii, elected in 1964 as the first woman of colour in Congress, was a co-author of Title IX. Shirley Chisholm of New York, elected in 1968 as the first Black woman in Congress, ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972. Bella Abzug of New York, elected in 1970, led the 1977 National Women's Conference.
Chisholm's speech in support of the ERA in August 1970 shows how she linked sex discrimination to racial discrimination.
It provides a legal basis for attack on the most subtle, most pervasive, and most institutionalized form of prejudice that exists. Discrimination against women, solely on the basis of their sex, is so widespread that it seems to many persons normal, natural, and right.
Shirley Chisholm, speech to the House of Representatives in support of the Equal Rights Amendment, 10 August 1970. Chisholm spoke as a congresswoman trying to win votes from male colleagues, so she presented the ERA as a moderate legal reform in the tradition of civil rights laws. As the first Black congresswoman, she could make the comparison between racial and sexual prejudice with unusual authority.
Radical feminist groups were small, local and deliberately without formal leaders. New York Radical Women (1967–1969), founded by Shulamith Firestone, Pam Allen, Robin Morgan, Carol Hanisch and others, developed consciousness-raising and organised the Miss America protest of 1968. It split in 1969 into groups such as Redstockings (founded January 1969 by Ellen Willis and Firestone), which held the first public abortion speak-out, and WITCH, which staged theatrical protests. Many radical women had come from the civil rights movement or the student New Left.
The radical groups also divided over sexuality. In 1969 Friedan called lesbians a "lavender menace" who would discredit NOW. On 1 May 1970, at the Second Congress to Unite Women in New York, a group of lesbian feminists took over the stage wearing "Lavender Menace" T-shirts and distributed their paper "The Woman-Identified Woman". NOW formally recognised lesbian rights as a feminist issue in 1971.
Black women, Chicanas, union women and women on welfare built their own organisations, partly because the main feminist groups did not address their priorities. These included the National Welfare Rights Organization (1966), the Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional (1970), the National Black Feminist Organization (1973), the Combahee River Collective (1974) and the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW, March 1974), founded in Chicago by more than 3,000 union women. Their aims and experiences are examined under the changes the movement achieved.
The movement used a wider range of methods than almost any other American protest movement of its time. They can be grouped into four: working through institutions (lobbying, lawsuits and complaints), consciousness-raising, direct action and mass demonstrations, and building alternative institutions run by women. The timeline of direct action shows the main protests.
Liberal groups used the legal system that Title VII had opened. NOW lawyers took up cases of women refused jobs or promotion, such as Weeks v. Southern Bell (1969), in which a federal appeals court ruled that a telephone company could not reserve a better-paid job for men on the grounds that the job involved lifting more than 30 pounds. NOW picketed newspapers until the EEOC ruled in August 1968 that sex-segregated job advertisements broke the law; the Supreme Court upheld a local ban on them in 1973. WEAL's complaints against universities used a 1967 executive order that banned sex discrimination by federal contractors. These methods were slow and unglamorous, but they produced many of the movement's lasting gains.
The protest that first brought "women's liberation" to national attention took place on the boardwalk at Atlantic City, New Jersey, on 7 September 1968, during the Miss America pageant. About 400 women, organised by New York Radical Women, crowned a live sheep, threw bras, girdles, false eyelashes, curlers and women's magazines into a "Freedom Trash Can", and unfurled a "Women's Liberation" banner inside the hall during the live television broadcast. Their press release, written mainly by Robin Morgan, listed ten objections to the pageant.
The Degrading Mindless-Boob-Girlie Symbol. The Pageant contestants epitomize the roles we are all forced to play as women. The parade down the runway blares the metaphor of the 4-H Club county fair, where the nervous animals are judged for teeth, fleece, etc., and where the best "Specimen" gets the blue ribbon.
New York Radical Women, "No More Miss America!", press release, 22 August 1968, point 1 of "The Ten Points We Protest". Written to attract both protesters and journalists, it uses deliberately shocking, humorous language. Its value for a historian is that it shows how radical feminists linked beauty, consumerism and the treatment of women as objects. Its second point, "Racism with Roses", noted that the pageant had never had a Black finalist; on the same evening a separate Miss Black America contest was held in Atlantic City.
Other direct actions followed. On 18 March 1970 about a hundred women occupied the office of John Mack Carter, editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, for eleven hours to protest at the magazine's image of women; the magazine agreed to publish a section written by the protesters. Radical groups held "zaps" (short, theatrical protests), occupied men-only bars and restaurants, and organised public "speak-outs" on abortion and rape. At the Redstockings speak-out of 21 March 1969 in New York, twelve women described their own illegal abortions in public, an act that turned a private, shameful experience into a political issue.
The largest demonstration of the period was the Women's Strike for Equality on 26 August 1970, the fiftieth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment. Betty Friedan proposed it as she stepped down as president of NOW. It had three demands: free abortion on demand, equal opportunity in employment and education, and free 24-hour child-care centres. Women were asked to stop work for the day. In New York, estimates of the march down Fifth Avenue range from about 10,000 to 50,000 people; there were marches and rallies in many other cities.
The strike showed that the movement had mass support and brought liberal and radical feminists together for one day. It also won wide press coverage, and NOW's membership grew rapidly in the following months. It did not win any of its three demands directly, but it put them on the national political agenda.
Many activists put their energy into building services run by and for women: health clinics, rape crisis centres (one of the first opened in Washington, D.C., in 1972), shelters for women escaping domestic violence (from the mid-1970s), bookshops, presses and credit unions. In Chicago an underground service known as "Jane" arranged thousands of illegal abortions between 1969 and 1973. These projects challenged the authority of doctors, police and courts by showing that women could provide for their own needs. They also changed the law: campaigns against domestic violence and rape led states to reform rape laws in the 1970s, and in 1975 South Dakota and Nebraska became the first states to make rape within marriage a crime.
By 1977 the movement had won enough political influence to hold a national conference funded by Congress, which voted 5 million dollars for state meetings and a national conference for International Women's Year. About 2,000 elected delegates and some 15,000–20,000 observers met in Houston from 18 to 21 November 1977, chaired by Bella Abzug. They adopted a National Plan of Action covering the ERA, abortion rights, child care, minority women's rights and lesbian rights. On the same weekend, Phyllis Schlafly led a rival "pro-family" rally of about 15,000 people in the city. The two Houston meetings showed how far the movement had come and how divided American women had become.
The women's movement grew up at the same time as national television news and mass-circulation magazines, and its relationship with them was double-edged. The media spread feminist ideas to millions of women who never joined a group, but they also shaped which feminists and which ideas the public saw, and often ridiculed them.
Feminists understood the power of publicity. The Miss America protest was designed for the cameras, and the "Women's Liberation" banner was unfurled during the live broadcast. Within two years the major news magazines had run cover stories on the movement: Newsweek's "Women in Revolt" appeared on 16 March 1970, and Time put Kate Millett on its cover in August 1970. Television talk shows gave Friedan, Gloria Steinem and other spokeswomen national audiences.
Feminists also built their own media. Hundreds of newsletters and small journals, such as off our backs (Washington, D.C., 1970), spread ideas between groups. Ms. magazine, edited by Gloria Steinem and others, first appeared as an insert in New York magazine in December 1971. A trial issue of 300,000 copies, published on its own in spring 1972, sold out within days, and regular monthly publication began in July 1972. Ms. brought feminist arguments about work, marriage, abortion and welfare into the homes of middle-class readers. The spring 1972 issue included Johnnie Tillmon's essay "Welfare Is a Women's Issue", an example of a poor Black woman's voice reaching a mass audience through feminist media.
The most lasting media image of the movement was false. No bras were burned at the Miss America protest: the organisers had wanted to set fire to the trash can but the police would not allow a fire on the wooden boardwalk. A New York Post report by Lindsy Van Gelder, headlined "Bra Burners and Miss America", compared the protesters to anti-war protesters who burned their draft cards. The label "bra-burner" stuck, and it was used for years to present feminists as silly, angry or obsessed with their appearance.
Television and newspapers also tended to focus on a few photogenic or quotable leaders, above all Friedan and Steinem, which annoyed radical groups that rejected leaders, and to report the most dramatic protests rather than the slow work of lawsuits and lobbying. Coverage of "women's lib" in the early 1970s was often mocking: news anchors joked about it, and opinion polls showed that many women who supported equal pay or day care did not want to be called "feminists".
The media were also employers. On the day Newsweek published "Women in Revolt", 46 of its women employees, mostly researchers who were not allowed to become writers, announced an EEOC complaint against the magazine for sex discrimination. Women at Time, the New York Times and other organisations followed. These cases, settled in the women's favour in the early 1970s, opened journalism careers to women and changed who reported the news.
Entertainment carried some feminist ideas to wider audiences. The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970–1977) was a popular television comedy about a single woman in her thirties with a career as a television news producer. On 20 September 1973 the tennis champion Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs, a former men's champion who had boasted that women could not compete with men, in a match billed as the "Battle of the Sexes" and watched by tens of millions on television. King also led women players in demanding equal prize money, which the US Open granted in 1973.
The media historian Susan Douglas, in Where the Girls Are (1994), argues that the mass media gave women contradictory messages: they mocked feminists while showing images of independent, assertive women, and the contradiction itself encouraged many young women to question their roles. Her argument suggests that the media helped the movement even when they set out to ridicule it.
YouTubeBetween 1963 and 1978 Congress, the president and the Supreme Court changed women's legal position more than in any period since the vote was won in 1920. The table of legal changes lists the main ones. Some came before the movement was organised, some were won directly by its campaigns, and some were decided by courts that responded to changing public opinion.
Date | Law or ruling | What it did |
|---|---|---|
June 1963 | Equal Pay Act | Made equal pay compulsory for men and women doing equal work in the same workplace; at first it excluded executive, administrative and professional employees |
July 1964 | Civil Rights Act, Title VII | Banned discrimination in employment on the basis of sex (as well as race, colour, religion and national origin); set up the EEOC |
June 1965 | Griswold v. Connecticut | Right to privacy protects married couples' use of contraception |
Oct 1967 | Executive Order 11375 | Banned sex discrimination by the federal government and federal contractors, bringing women into affirmative action programmes |
Nov 1971 | Reed v. Reed | First time the Supreme Court struck down a law because it discriminated against women |
Mar 1972 | Equal Rights Amendment passed by Congress | Sent to the states for ratification; never ratified |
Mar 1972 | Eisenstadt v. Baird | Extended the right to contraception to unmarried people |
June 1972 | Education Amendments: Title IX | Banned sex discrimination in any education programme receiving federal money; also extended the Equal Pay Act to professional workers |
Jan 1973 | Roe v. Wade | Recognised a constitutional right to abortion, limited by the stage of pregnancy |
May 1973 | Frontiero v. Richardson | Struck down unequal benefits for the husbands of women in the armed forces |
Oct 1974 | Equal Credit Opportunity Act | Banned discrimination in lending on the basis of sex or marital status |
Oct 1975 | Law opening the service academies | Women admitted to West Point, Annapolis and the Air Force Academy from 1976 |
Sep 1976 | Hyde Amendment | Barred the use of federal Medicaid funds for most abortions |
Oct 1978 | Pregnancy Discrimination Act | Made discrimination against pregnant workers a form of sex discrimination under Title VII |
The first two federal laws came before the movement had a national organisation. The Equal Pay Act of 10 June 1963 was the product of campaigning by Esther Peterson, women in the labour unions and the President's Commission. It banned paying women less than men for "equal work" in the same establishment, but because most women and men did different jobs it did little to close the gap in average earnings. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act (2 July 1964) was far broader, and once the EEOC began to enforce it after 1968, it became the main legal weapon against discrimination at work.
The Supreme Court began to treat sex discrimination as a constitutional issue in Reed v. Reed (22 November 1971), which struck down an Idaho law that preferred men to women as the administrators of a dead person's estate. The brief for Sally Reed was written by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who directed the Women's Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1972 and argued a series of cases before the Court in the 1970s. She later became a Supreme Court justice herself.
Title IX was a short section of a long education bill, signed by President Richard Nixon on 23 June 1972. It was drafted after Edith Green's hearings of 1970 and the complaints filed by WEAL, and steered through Congress by Green and Patsy Mink in the House and Birch Bayh in the Senate. Its central sentence is broad.
No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.
Education Amendments of 1972, Title IX, section 901(a), signed 23 June 1972. Because almost every school and university received some federal money, the law applied almost everywhere. The text says nothing about sport; its effect on athletics came from the regulations written to enforce it, issued in 1975 after a fierce campaign by college sports administrators to limit them.
Title IX ended quotas that limited the number of women admitted to many universities and professional schools, and opened courses such as vocational training that had been closed to girls. Its best-known effect was on sport. In 1971–1972 about 294,000 girls took part in high-school athletics, compared with about 3.67 million boys; by 1977–1978 the number of girls had passed 2 million, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations. Patsy Mink's role was recognised when the law was renamed the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act after her death in 2002.
Before 1967 abortion was a crime in every state except to save the woman's life. Hundreds of thousands of illegal abortions took place each year, and those performed by unqualified people killed and injured many women, especially poor women who could not pay a doctor or travel abroad. From 1967 some states reformed their laws, and in 1970 Hawaii, Alaska, Washington and New York legalised abortion in the early stages of pregnancy. Feminists turned abortion from a medical issue into a question of women's rights through speak-outs, NARAL's campaigns and lawsuits.
Roe v. Wade was brought on behalf of "Jane Roe", the pseudonym of Norma McCorvey, a pregnant woman in Texas, by two young lawyers, Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee. On 22 January 1973 the Supreme Court ruled, by seven votes to two, that the Texas law banning abortion was unconstitutional. Justice Harry Blackmun wrote the majority opinion.
This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment's concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment's reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.
Justice Harry Blackmun, majority opinion, Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, Supreme Court of the United States, 22 January 1973. As a legal judgment, the text grounds the right in privacy, building on Griswold, not in women's equality, which was the argument many feminists made. The same opinion said the right was "not unqualified" and set out a framework by stages of pregnancy, under which states could regulate abortion more strictly as pregnancy advanced.
Roe and its companion case, Doe v. Bolton, struck down the abortion laws of almost every state. Legal abortion became available across the country and deaths from unsafe abortion fell sharply. The ruling was also the movement's most divisive success. The Catholic Church and, increasingly, evangelical Protestants organised a pro-life movement to reverse it. In September 1976 Congress passed the Hyde Amendment, named after Representative Henry Hyde, which barred federal Medicaid funds from paying for most abortions. Its effect fell on poor women, who depended on Medicaid, which meant that the right recognised in Roe was in practice limited by income.
Roe was overturned by the Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization on 24 June 2022, which returned abortion law to the states. Its later reversal is one reason historians and the public still judge its significance so differently.
The ERA was the movement's central symbolic goal. Its key sentence read: "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." After Martha Griffiths' discharge petition, the House passed it in 1970 and again on 12 October 1971 by 354 votes to 24; the Senate followed on 22 March 1972 by 84 votes to 8. Hawaii ratified it the same day. An amendment needs ratification by three-quarters of the states, 38 of 50, and Congress set a deadline of seven years.
The chart of ratifications shows how the campaign stalled. Twenty-two states ratified in 1972 and eight more in early 1973, but only five in the following five years. Five states (Nebraska, Tennessee, Idaho, Kentucky and South Dakota) voted to rescind their ratification, although whether a state can legally do so has never been settled. In 1978 Congress extended the deadline to 30 June 1982, but no further state ratified and the amendment failed.
The main reason for the ERA's defeat was a counter-movement led by women. Phyllis Schlafly, a conservative Republican writer from Illinois and mother of six, turned against the amendment in early 1972 and founded STOP ERA in the autumn of that year (STOP stood for "Stop Taking Our Privileges"); it worked alongside, and later within, her wider conservative organisation, Eagle Forum. Her monthly newsletter, The Phyllis Schlafly Report, set out the case in February 1972.
Of all the classes of people who ever lived, the American woman is the most privileged. We have the most rights and rewards, and the fewest duties. Our unique status is the result of a fortunate combination of circumstances.
Phyllis Schlafly, "What's Wrong with 'Equal Rights' for Women?", The Phyllis Schlafly Report, February 1972. Written for conservative subscribers a month before the Senate vote, the essay argues that the ERA would take away women's "special privileges", above all a wife's legal right to be supported by her husband and not to be obliged to take a paid job. It is valuable as evidence of how many housewives saw feminism as an attack on their own choices and status, not as liberation.
Schlafly argued that the ERA would make women liable to be drafted into the armed forces and sent into combat, remove a wife's legal claim to support from her husband, weaken alimony and protective labour laws, and even require unisex public toilets. Many of these claims were disputed by lawyers, but they were effective. STOP ERA volunteers, many of them churchgoing housewives, lobbied state legislators in person (in Illinois they brought home-made bread, jam and apple pies), and their campaign was strongest in the South and the Midwest, where the ERA was never ratified. Its success was part of the rise of the New Right, the conservative coalition that helped elect Ronald Reagan in 1980.
YouTubeOnce the EEOC began to take sex discrimination seriously in the late 1960s, under pressure from NOW and from women members of Congress, Title VII changed employment practices. In Phillips v. Martin Marietta Corp. (1971), the Supreme Court ruled that an employer could not refuse to hire women with young children while hiring men with young children. Airlines were forced to stop dismissing flight attendants when they married or reached their early thirties. The largest settlement came in January 1973, when the telephone company AT&T, then the biggest private employer in the country, agreed in a consent decree with the EEOC and the Department of Labor to pay about 15 million dollars in back pay to women and minority workers and to open better-paid jobs to them.
Other laws addressed women's position as consumers and parents. Before the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974, banks and shops commonly refused credit cards or mortgages to married women in their own names, or counted only part of a wife's income. The Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 overturned a 1976 Supreme Court ruling (General Electric v. Gilbert) that had allowed employers to exclude pregnancy from sickness benefits, and made it illegal to dismiss or refuse to hire a woman because she was pregnant.
The clearest economic change was the entry of women into professions that had been almost closed to them. Title VII, Title IX, the pill and changing expectations worked together. Women's share of students in law and medical schools, which was under 10 per cent in the late 1960s, rose to between a quarter and a third by 1980, and women entered business schools, journalism, the police and the skilled trades in growing numbers. These women, mostly middle-class and white, were the main beneficiaries of the movement's economic gains.
The graph of work and pay shows that average pay hardly changed: women working full-time all year earned 59.4 per cent of men's median earnings in 1970 and 60.2 per cent in 1980. "59 cents", the ratio often quoted in the 1970s, became a slogan on campaign badges. The gap persisted because most women still worked in low-paid, female-dominated jobs, which the Equal Pay Act did not cover since they had no male equivalents, and because women's careers were interrupted by child-rearing. Feminists began in the late 1970s to argue for "comparable worth", equal pay for different jobs of equal value, but won little in this period.
Paid work also did not free women from unpaid work at home. Surveys in the 1970s found that employed wives still did most of the housework and child care. The sociologist Arlie Hochschild later called this the second shift (The Second Shift, 1989). The movement's demand for public child care came closest to success when Congress passed the Comprehensive Child Development Act in 1971, but President Nixon vetoed it, warning that it would weaken the family.
The movement's gains were unevenly shared. For many Black, Latina, Native American, poor and working-class women, the priorities of the best-known feminist organisations, such as access to the professions, the ERA and the critique of the suburban housewife, were less urgent than poverty, racism, welfare and the right to have children at all. Their experiences show both the limits of the mainstream movement and the existence of other feminisms.
Black women had been leaders in the civil rights movement, but they often found that Black organisations expected them to put race first and that white feminist organisations ignored race. In "Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female" (1969), Frances Beal of SNCC's Black Women's Liberation Committee, later the Third World Women's Alliance, argued that Black women suffered from racism and sexism together, and from the economic exploitation of capitalism as well. She criticised both Black men who wanted women to retreat into the home and white feminists who ignored race and class.
Black women also had to answer the Moynihan Report of 1965, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, written by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an assistant secretary of labor. It blamed many problems of Black communities on a "matriarchal" family structure, which in effect blamed Black women. Many Black women felt that the white movement's rejection of the housewife role did not fit their lives, since most had always worked for wages, many as domestic servants in white women's homes.
In 1973 Black feminists in New York, including Margaret Sloan and Florynce Kennedy, founded the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO), which drew about 400 women to its first conference at the end of that year. In Boston, members who wanted a more radical, socialist and lesbian-inclusive politics formed the Combahee River Collective in 1974, named after a raid led by Harriet Tubman during the Civil War. Its statement of April 1977, written by Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith and Demita Frazier, set out the idea of interlocking oppressions.
The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking.
Combahee River Collective, A Black Feminist Statement, April 1977. The Collective was a small group of Black lesbian socialists writing for other activists, and the statement records the arguments of a radical minority, not the views of all Black women. It is valuable because it explains why Black women organised separately: it says that "racism and elitism within the movement itself" had hidden their participation. The legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw later named this idea "intersectionality" (1989).
For many poor women and women of colour, the central reproductive issue included protection from sterilisation abuse: operations performed without informed consent, often in federally funded programmes. In June 1973 two Black girls, Minnie Lee and Mary Alice Relf, aged 14 and 12, were sterilised at a federally funded clinic in Montgomery, Alabama, after their mother, who could not read, signed a form with an "X". The case caused a national scandal. A 1976 report by the General Accounting Office found that the Indian Health Service had sterilised more than 3,000 Native American women in four of its areas in 1973–1976, many without proper consent. In Los Angeles, Mexican-American women sued a county hospital (Madrigal v. Quilligan, 1978) over sterilisations performed during childbirth.
Activists, many of them women of colour, formed groups such as the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse (1974) and won federal regulations in 1978 that made informed consent in the patient's own language and a 30-day waiting period compulsory. Their campaigns broadened the movement's demand from "the right to choose abortion" to reproductive rights, which included the right to have children.
Working-class women were already in paid work and often in unions. Many saw the ERA as a threat to protective laws that limited hours and heavy lifting, and the AFL-CIO, the national federation of unions, opposed the ERA until 1973. Union women increasingly used Title VII to challenge discrimination by employers and by their own unions, and in 1974 founded the Coalition of Labor Union Women to win equal pay, child care and more women in union leadership. The historian Dorothy Sue Cobble calls this tradition "labor feminism".
Some of the lowest-paid women organised for the first time. Dorothy Bolden, a domestic worker in Atlanta, founded the National Domestic Workers Union in 1968, and in 1974 Congress extended the federal minimum wage to most domestic workers. In California, Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers, led a union in which Mexican-American women farmworkers played a large part. Chicana feminists founded the Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional in 1970 to campaign on child care, health and employment for Mexican-American women.
Women on welfare formed the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) in 1966–1967; most of its members were poor Black mothers receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Its chair, Johnnie Tillmon, a former laundry worker from Los Angeles, explained why welfare was a feminist issue.
I'm a woman. I'm a Black woman. I'm a poor woman. I'm a fat woman. I'm a middle-aged woman. And I'm on welfare. In this country, if you're any one of those things you count less as a human being. If you're all those things, you don't count at all.
Johnnie Tillmon, "Welfare Is a Women's Issue", Ms., spring 1972. Tillmon wrote for the mainly middle-class readers of a new feminist magazine, and she set out to persuade them that poor women's struggles were their own. Later in the essay she contrasts the two groups directly: for middle-class women liberation was a matter of concern, for women on welfare a matter of survival. The essay shows that the movement's media could carry the voices of poor women, and also how far apart the two groups' priorities were.
Lesbians were active in every part of the movement but were often asked to stay hidden for fear of discrediting it. The Lavender Menace protest of 1970 and the paper "The Woman-Identified Woman" forced the issue, and by 1977 lesbian rights were part of the National Plan of Action adopted at Houston. The issue also gave opponents such as Schlafly a weapon, since she presented the ERA as a step towards homosexual rights.
Women who opposed the movement were also women with their own interests and agency. For many full-time housewives, especially older women with little education or work experience, the movement's criticism of homemaking felt like a criticism of their lives, and the end of legal duties of support by husbands looked like a loss of security. Their mobilisation through STOP ERA and the "pro-family" rally at Houston in 1977 shows that the movement never spoke for all American women.
Area | Achievements by 1979 | Limitations by 1979 |
|---|---|---|
Law and politics | Title VII enforced; Title IX; Roe v. Wade; credit and pregnancy laws; more women in elected office | ERA not ratified; Hyde Amendment; women still about 3 per cent of Congress |
Work and pay | Sex-segregated job adverts ended; AT&T and other settlements; women entering the professions | Earnings ratio still about 60 per cent; most women in low-paid "pink-collar" jobs; no national child care |
Education | Admission quotas ended; girls' sport transformed | Benefits went mostly to women able to go to college |
Body and family | Legal contraception and abortion; shelters and rape crisis centres | Abortion out of reach for many poor women after 1976; sterilisation abuse of women of colour |
Inclusion | Black, Chicana, lesbian and labour feminist organisations built | Main organisations seen as white and middle-class; division with conservative women |
Historians began writing about the movement while it was still active, and many early historians had been participants. Their interpretations differ on three main questions: where the movement came from, whether the idea of a single "second wave" describes it accurately, and how far it succeeded.
The first accounts stressed two separate origins. The political scientist Jo Freeman, herself an activist in Chicago, argued in The Politics of Women's Liberation (1975) that the movement had an "older branch" of professional women who founded NOW, and a "younger branch" of women from the civil rights movement and the New Left who formed radical groups. Sara Evans, in Personal Politics (1979), developed the second story. She showed that young women learned the language of rights and the skills of organising in SNCC and the student left, and that the sexism they met there pushed them to form a movement of their own.
Later historians questioned the central place of The Feminine Mystique. Joanne Meyerowitz ("Beyond the Feminine Mystique", 1993) studied post-war magazines and found that they praised women's public achievements as well as domesticity, so the culture Friedan attacked was less uniform than she claimed. Daniel Horowitz (Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique, 1998) traced Friedan's ideas to her years as a radical labour journalist. Both arguments suggest that the movement had deeper roots, in work and in the labour and civil rights movements, than the story of a single book awakening bored housewives allows.
From the 1980s Black feminist writers and historians challenged the idea that the history of feminism was the history of white middle-class women. bell hooks, in Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981), argued that the mainstream movement had ignored Black women and the effects of racism. Benita Roth (Separate Roads to Feminism, 2004) showed that Black, Chicana and white women built separate feminist movements in the same years, for reasons rooted in their different experiences, rather than joining a single white movement late. Kimberly Springer (Living for the Revolution, 2005) wrote the first history of Black feminist organisations of 1968–1980.
Others questioned the "wave" image itself. Dorothy Sue Cobble (The Other Women's Movement, 2004) showed that women in the labour unions campaigned for equal pay, maternity rights and child care throughout the supposed "trough" between the first and second waves, from the 1940s to the 1960s. The essays in Nancy Hewitt's collection No Permanent Waves (2010) argue that the wave model hides these continuities and makes the history of white women's organisations stand for the whole.
Alice Echols, in Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–1975 (1989), traced how radical feminism divided and declined by the mid-1970s, as many groups turned from political confrontation to building a separate women's culture. Ruth Rosen, in The World Split Open (2000), takes a broader view: the movement failed to win some of its legal goals but changed American culture deeply, altering how Americans thought about work, marriage, sexuality and violence against women.
The defeat of the ERA has its own debate. The political scientist Jane Mansbridge (Why We Lost the ERA, 1986) argues that the amendment would have changed far less than either side claimed, and that this exaggeration let opponents link it to fears about the draft and the family. Donald Critchlow (Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism, 2005) presents the STOP ERA campaign as a key stage in the rise of the New Right, built by women who had their own reasons for rejecting feminism.
Historian | Work | Argument | Evidence stressed |
|---|---|---|---|
Jo Freeman | The Politics of Women's Liberation (1975) | Two branches: older professional women (NOW) and younger radicals | Founding of NOW; radical groups in Chicago and New York |
Sara Evans | Personal Politics (1979) | Women's liberation grew from the civil rights movement and the New Left | SNCC, the Hayden–King memo, the student left |
Joanne Meyerowitz | "Beyond the Feminine Mystique" (1993) | Post-war culture was less uniformly domestic than Friedan claimed | Mass-circulation magazines of 1946–1958 |
Daniel Horowitz | Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique (1998) | Friedan's ideas came from the labour left, not suburban life | Friedan's journalism in the 1940s and 1950s |
bell hooks | Ain't I a Woman (1981) | The mainstream movement ignored Black women and racism | Experiences of Black women; writing of white feminists |
Benita Roth | Separate Roads to Feminism (2004) | Black, Chicana and white feminisms developed separately | Organisations of each group, 1968–1980 |
Dorothy Sue Cobble | The Other Women's Movement (2004) | "Labor feminists" kept women's rights alive between the waves | Union women's campaigns for pay and child care |
Alice Echols | Daring to Be Bad (1989) | Radical feminism split and declined by 1975 | Radical groups in New York and elsewhere |
Ruth Rosen | The World Split Open (2000) | The movement changed culture even where it lost political battles | Changes in attitudes to work, family, sexuality |
Jane Mansbridge | Why We Lost the ERA (1986) | Exaggerated claims on both sides and Schlafly's campaign defeated the ERA | State ratification campaigns, especially Illinois |
Donald Critchlow | Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism (2005) | STOP ERA built the grassroots New Right | Schlafly's papers and organisation |
These interpretations are not simply rivals. The origins debate is partly about which strand of the movement a historian studies, and the "waves" debate is partly about whose experience counts as feminist. Weighing them means asking which evidence each historian uses and which women each one puts at the centre. Most historians now accept that there were several women's movements in the 1960s and 1970s, which shared some goals and disagreed sharply about others.
Question 1 rewards specific content (quote or closely paraphrase at least two points from each source). Question 2 rewards analysis of how one source's context (author, date, audience, purpose, type of source) shapes what it can and cannot show. Question 3 rewards answers organised by perspective rather than source by source, ending with a synthesis that says how far the sources together answer the inquiry question and whose voices are missing.
In the style of Paper 1. Inquiry question: To what extent was dissatisfaction with domestic life the main reason for the emergence of the women's movement in the USA?
Source A: Betty Friedan, a journalist and former Smith College student, in the book The Feminine Mystique (1963), chapter 1.
For over fifteen years there was no word of this yearning in the millions of words written about women, for women, in all the columns, books, and articles by experts telling women their role was to seek fulfillment as wives and mothers. Over and over women heard in voices of tradition and of Freudian sophistication that they could desire no greater destiny than to glory in their own femininity.
Source B: National Organization for Women (NOW), in its founding Statement of Purpose (October 1966), drafted by Betty Friedan and Pauli Murray.
Working women are becoming increasingly—not less—concentrated on the bottom of the job ladder. As a consequence full-time women workers today earn on the average only 60% of what men earn … Discrimination in employment on the basis of sex is now prohibited by federal law, in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. … There is no civil rights movement to speak for women, as there has been for Negroes and other victims of discrimination.
Source C: The Combahee River Collective, a group of Black feminists in Boston, in A Black Feminist Statement (April 1977).
Black, other Third World, and working women have been involved in the feminist movement from its start, but both outside reactionary forces and racism and elitism within the movement itself have served to obscure our participation. … Black feminist politics also have an obvious connection to movements for Black liberation, particularly those of the 1960s and 1970s.
Using the three sources and considering the inquiry question, answer the following three questions. (The word "Negroes" in Source B was the standard term in 1966.)
In the style of Paper 1, question 1. Inquiry question: To what extent did the women's movement challenge authority mainly by working through the political and legal system?
Source D: Shirley Chisholm, congresswoman for New York, in a speech to the House of Representatives in support of the Equal Rights Amendment (10 August 1970).
The argument that this amendment will not solve the problem of sex discrimination is not relevant. If the argument were used against a civil rights bill—as it has been used in the past—the prejudice that lies behind it would be embarrassing. Of course laws will not eliminate prejudice from the hearts of human beings. But that is no reason to allow prejudice to continue to be enshrined in our laws—to perpetuate injustice through inaction.
Source E: New York Radical Women, in the press release "No More Miss America!" (22 August 1968).
There will be: Picket Lines; Guerrilla Theater; Leafleting; Lobbying Visits to the contestants urging our sisters to reject the Pageant Farce and join us; a huge Freedom Trash Can (into which we will throw bras, girdles, curlers, false eyelashes, wigs, and representative issues of Cosmopolitan, Ladies' Home Journal, Family Circle, etc.—bring any such woman-garbage you have around the house) …
In the style of Paper 1, question 2. Inquiry question: To what extent had the women's movement achieved its aims by 1979?
Source F: Phyllis Schlafly, conservative writer and founder of STOP ERA, in the essay "What's Wrong with 'Equal Rights' for Women?", first published in the newsletter The Phyllis Schlafly Report (February 1972) and later used for STOP ERA speeches.
The law now requires a husband to support his wife as best as his financial situation permits, but a wife is not required to support her husband (unless he is about to become a public charge). A husband cannot demand that his wife go to work to help pay for family expenses. He has the duty of financial support under our laws and customs. Why should we abandon these mandatory wife-support and child-support laws so that a wife would have an "equal" obligation to take a job?
I can explain the difference between the first and second waves of American feminism, and between liberal, radical and Black feminism.
I can describe the post-war domestic ideal and explain why the growth of women's paid work made it a source of grievance.
I can use data on women's labour force participation and the earnings ratio to explain the movement's economic grievances.
I can explain the role of the President's Commission on the Status of Women and its report American Women (1963).
I can explain how the pill and the rulings in Griswold (1965) and Eisenstadt (1972) changed women's lives, and how far they caused the movement.
I can explain the influence of The Second Sex, The Feminine Mystique, "Jane Crow and the Law" and the radical writing of 1968–1970, and the limits of Friedan's book as evidence.
I can explain how the civil rights movement and the New Left shaped the movement.
I can explain why NOW was founded in 1966 and describe its aims and methods.
I can describe the main radical groups, the organisations of marginalised women and the women in Congress who supported the movement.
I can describe the main protests from the Miss America protest (1968) to the Houston conference (1977) and explain what each was meant to achieve.
I can explain how the mass media both helped and hindered the movement, including the myth of bra-burning.
I can explain the significance of the Equal Pay Act, Title VII, Title IX and Roe v. Wade, and the limits of each.
I can explain why the Equal Rights Amendment failed, including the role of Phyllis Schlafly and STOP ERA.
I can explain the economic changes the movement achieved and why the pay gap and the second shift persisted.
I can explain the experiences of Black, Chicana, Native American, working-class and lesbian women, including "double jeopardy", sterilisation abuse and welfare rights.
I can compare the views of historians such as Evans, Echols, Rosen, hooks, Roth, Cobble and Mansbridge, and explain why they differ.
I can use sources on the women's movement to answer an inquiry question, grouping them by perspective.