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Oct 4, 2024 · The Women’s Rights Movement of the 1960s transcends the speeches and protests; it signifies the concrete shifts it precipitated. This led to landmark legal reforms, including the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which also made gender discrimination illegal.
- Overview
- Prologue to a social movement
- Reformers and revolutionaries
women’s rights movement, diverse social movement, largely based in the United States, that in the 1960s and ’70s sought equal rights and opportunities and greater personal freedom for women. It coincided with and is recognized as part of the “second wave” of feminism. While the first-wave feminism of the 19th and early 20th centuries focused on wom...
In the aftermath of World War II, the lives of women in developed countries changed dramatically. Household technology eased the burdens of homemaking, life expectancies increased dramatically, and the growth of the service sector opened up thousands of jobs not dependent on physical strength. Despite these socioeconomic transformations, cultural attitudes (especially concerning women’s work) and legal precedents still reinforced sexual inequalities. An articulate account of the oppressive effects of prevailing notions of femininity appeared in Le Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), by the French writer and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. It became a worldwide best seller and raised feminist consciousness by stressing that liberation for women was liberation for men too.
The first public indication that change was imminent came with women’s reaction to the 1963 publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. Friedan spoke of the problem that “lay buried, unspoken” in the mind of the suburban housewife: utter boredom and lack of fulfillment. Women who had been told that they had it all—nice houses, lovely children, responsible husbands—were deadened by domesticity, she said, and they were too socially conditioned to recognize their own desperation. The Feminine Mystique was an immediate best seller. Friedan had struck a chord.
Initially, women energized by Friedan’s book joined with government leaders and union representatives who had been lobbying the federal government for equal pay and for protection against employment discrimination. By June 1966 they had concluded that polite requests were insufficient. They would need their own national pressure group—a women’s equivalent of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). With this, the National Organization for Women (NOW) was born.
The organization was not an instant success. By the end of its second year, NOW had just 1,035 members and was racked by ideological divisions. When the group tried to write a Bill of Rights for Women, it found consensus on six measures essential to ensuring women’s equality: enforcement of laws banning employment discrimination; maternity leave rights; child-care centres that could enable mothers to work; tax deductions for child-care expenses; equal and unsegregated education; and equal job-training opportunities for poor women.
Two other measures stirred enormous controversy: one demanded immediate passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution (to ensure equality of rights, regardless of sex), and the other demanded greater access to contraception and abortion. When NOW threw its support behind passage of the ERA, the United Auto Workers union—which had been providing NOW with office space—withdrew its support, because the ERA would effectively prohibit protective labour legislation for women. When some NOW members called for repeal of all abortion laws, other members left the fledgling organization, convinced that this latest action would undermine their struggles against economic and legal discrimination.
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NOW’s membership was also siphoned off from the left. Impatient with a top-heavy traditional organization, activists in New York City, where half of NOW’s membership was located, walked out. Over the next two years, as NOW struggled to establish itself as a national organization, more radical women’s groups were formed by female antiwar, civil rights, and leftist activists who had grown disgusted by the New Left’s refusal to address women’s concerns. Ironically, sexist attitudes had pervaded 1960s radical politics, with some women being exploited or treated unequally within those movements. In 1964, for example, when a woman’s resolution was brought up at a Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee (SNCC) conference, Stokely Carmichael flippantly cut off all debate: “The only position for women in SNCC is prone.”
Women’s rights are the political, legal, economic and social rights granted to women. Rights cover an array of issues such as the right to vote, the right to equal education, the right to equal pay for equal work, reproductive rights and freedom of movement.
Women have struggled for equality and against oppression for centuries, and although some battles have been partly won - such as the right to vote and equal access to education – women are still disproportionally affected by all forms of violence and by discrimination in every aspect of life.
Aug 5, 2024 · The push for women’s rights emerged from a pressing need, rooted in the collective discontent and quest for equality shared by women from different cultures and epochs. This movement has evolved through several phases, tackling the distinct injustices and requirements of each era.
The radical movements of Civil Rights, Anti-Vietnam War, and Old and New Left groups from which many of us sprang were male dominated and very nervous about women’s liberation in general, but especially the spectre of the mushrooming independent women’s liberation movement, of which I was a staunch advocate.
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Oct 2, 2017 · A feminist consciousness, which identifies perceived oppressors and vehicles of social change, has four interrelated beliefs: (1) common fate, or the notion that what happens to women is universal and relevant to every women’s life; (2) power discontent, or the idea that women lack power and influence in society; (3) system blame, or the ...
