Feminist Movements of the 1960s and '70s

[Note: You will often see the women's campaigns of the 1960s labelled 'second wave' feminism (the first being the campaign for the vote in 1919).  Recently, Professor of Women's Studies Nancy Hewitt and other historians of feminism have questioned the idea of 'waves', instead seeing the movement as ongoing, overlapping and connected struggles.]

Roots of the Movement [WHO AM I?]

1. Working women

   • Many women had gone to work during WWII, and – despite a concerted effort after the war to get them back into the kitchen – by 1960 twice as many women were in work as in 1940, and 40% of women 16+ had a job. 

   • There they found that in many states they could not get a job that required lifting more than 11kg; could not work as a policewoman, firefighter, or a broadcaster (their voice was too “shrill”); and were kept out of managerial positions and the professions – 95% of company managers were men, and only 7% of doctors and 4% of lawyers were women.  President Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women found (1963) that women’s wages were only 59% of men’s.  Stewardesses had to maintain a set weight, and resign if they got married.  Journalist and activist Gloria Steinem went undercover to expose the sexual exploitation of Playboy ‘Bunnies’. 

   • At the same time, working wives began to demand a say in family decision-making, and that their husbands do more to help with the housework, and the divorce rate rose (perhaps as a result). 

2. Home and Momism

   • “Modern man needs an old-fashioned woman around the house” wrote the novelist Sloan Wilson in 1952. 

   • In the 1940s, Americans glorified ‘motherhood’.  Sociologists told women that they were genetically predisposed to live as homemakers, and psychologists warned they would turn into neurotic feminists if they did not. 

   • By the 1960s, this view was being challenged – sociologist Alice Rossi found (1964) that obsessive ‘momism’ was creating over-protected children ‘tied to their mother’s apron strings’ and that women who worked demanded less of their husbands, provided a ‘living model’ of independence and responsibility to their children, and had a healthy sense of their own worth as persons. 

3. Over-qualification

   • Educational reform was giving college degrees to women … who on marriage found themselves plunged into housework.  In some states, a wife’s purchases still belonged to her husband, even if bought entirely with her own earnings, and a married woman could not make a legal contract or obtain a credit card without her husband’s signature; could not serve on a jury; and could only go on the pill for ‘severe menstrual distress’.  A husband forcing sex on his wife was not legally considered rape in all of America until 1993. 

   • In 1963, Betty Friedan – who had been sacked by the newspaper she worked for when she became pregnant – published her book The Feminine Mystique, detailing the frustrations and in some cases psychiatric distress caused by the stifling home life to which many women were subjected (see Source A).

   • In 1966 – furious at the lack of progress on equal pay – Friedan and other activists founded the National Organisation for Women (NOW), to campaign for women’s legal rights (see Source B).  In 1971 Friedan, along with Steinem, Bella Azbug and 300 other activists, founded the National Women’s Political Caucus to get more women into political positions.

   • In 1968 feminists picketed the Miss America beauty contest because it objectified women, including burning their bras in a ‘Freedom Trash Can’.

   • In 1970 Betty Friedan organised a women’s Strike for Equality. 

4. Activism

   • In the 1960s women were prominent in both the Black Civil Rights Movement and the students’ movement, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). 

   • In BOTH these movements – even though both officially recognised female equality – women tended to be relegated to licking stamps and making the food, even though they proved much better than men in face-to-face and grassroots projects.  The SDS particularly treated female members with contempt, on one occasion pelting them with tomatoes when they tried to promote Women’s Equality. 

   • In 1979 historian Sara Evans suggested that, counter-intuitively, those experiences gave them the skills … and motivation … to campaign for women’s rights. 

   • Rather than join NOW or the NWPC – which were predominantly white, middle-class and political organisations – the radical feminists who formed groups like New York Radical Women (1967), and the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union (1969) tended instead to work in ‘consciousness-raising’ workshops at grassroots level. 

   • The Redstockings (founded 1969) held attention-grabbing public ‘zap’ protests, street theatre and ‘speak-outs’. 

5. Media popularisation

   • In 1962, Harper’s Magazine noted that modern labour-saving gadgets had created a dissatisfied ‘crypto-feminism’ in housewives who would not call themselves feminists. 

   • There were explicitly feminist magazines – Gloria Steinem launched Ms Magazine in 1971 explicitly to air feminist issues – and numerous underground and feminist zines, but feminist ideas were probably better popularised to American women by less direct consciousness-raising – by sympathetic news reports on TV; by TV shows such as That Girl, 1966-71, which had a personable, independent women in the lead role; and by the film Stepford Wives (1972) which demonised ‘the perfect homemaker’ stereotype. 

6. Intersectionality

   • In the 1980s, feminist historians realised that the movement for women’s rights intersected (crossed into) other issues – race, class, poverty, Third World and international anti-colonial movements.  If it was hard for a wealthy, white, well-educated, connected woman like Betty Friedan to win her rights, how much more difficult was it for a poor, Black woman in a rural backwater (see Source C)? 

   • In 1973, Black feminists in New York therefore formed the National Black Feminist Organisation – a separate Black feminist group for the “almost cast-aside half of the black race in America, the black woman”. 

Going Deeper

The following links will help you widen your knowledge:

Basic account from BBC Bitesize

The Feminine Mystique - interesting short BBC Sounds podcast on Betty Friedan's world-changing book

The Woman Who Stopped Equal Rights - BBC Witness History

Roe v Wade - BBC Witness History

  Essay: How far were the lives of American women changed by the feminist movement of the 1960s?

YouTube

Phyllis Schlafly and the failure of ERA

AQA-suggested Interpretation of Women in 1960s America:

Betty Friedan, the Feminine Mystique (1963)

Did the Women's Movement Fail?

It is undeniable that women today are much more free, equal and successful than they were in the 1950s, but it is also arguable that in many respects the feminist movement has failed to achieve it aims and that at the moment is actually losing ground:

• From the 1970s, a strong ‘New Right’ backlash has led many women to condemn feminists as 'man-haters' who want to undermine the family and relax traditional morality. 

• In the 1970s, the conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly’s ran a successful ‘Stop ERA’ campaign, arguing that ERA would strip women of certain benefits, would close women-only restrooms, and would make women liable to the draft – ERA has still not been ratified.

• In 1972 President Nixon vetoed the Comprehensive Child Development Bill, which would have provided a national day care system.

• By 1985 there were still only 24 female members of Congress.  Even in 2021 only 28% of the members of Congress were women. 

• The wage gap between men and women persists, with lower rates for the same job, and women still under-represented in high-paying professions and over-represented in lower-paying jobs.  In 2021 only 11% of the top 500 Companies’ CEOs were women.

• Women of Color are still disproportionally discriminated against.

• Women are deeply divided about issues such as the treatment of sex workers, homosexuality, transgender and abortion.

• The 2017 #MeToo movement highlighted the continued sexual exploitation of women.

• In 2022 the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, and many states banned or restricted access to legal abortions.