washed into the public consciousness, fueled by several seemingly independent
events of that turbulent decade. Each of these events brought a different
segment of the population into the movement.
First: Esther Peterson was the director
of the Women’s Bureau of the Dept. of Labor in 1961. She considered it
to be the government’s responsibility to take an active role in addressing
discrimination against women. With her encouragement, President Kennedy
convened a Commission on the Status of Women, naming Eleanor Roosevelt
as its chair. The report issued by that commission in 1963 documented discrimination
against women in virtually every area of American life. State and local
governments quickly followed suit and established their own commissions
for women, to research conditions and recommend changes that could be initiated.
Then: In 1963, Betty Friedan published
a landmark book, The Feminine Mystique. The Feminine Mystique evolved out
of a survey she had conducted for her 20-year college reunion. In it she
documented the emotional and intellectual oppression that middle-class
educated women were experiencing because of limited life options. The book
became an immediate bestseller, and inspired thousands of women to look
for fulfillment beyond the role of homemaker.
Next: Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights
Act was passed, prohibiting employment discrimination on the basis of sex
as well as race, religion, and national origin. The category “sex” was
included as a last-ditch effort to kill the bill. But it passed, nevertheless.
With its passage, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was established
to investigate discrimination complaints. Within the commission’s first
five years, it received 50,000 sex discrimination complaints. But it was
quickly obvious that the commission was not very interested in pursuing
these complaints. Betty Friedan, the chairs of the various state Commissions
on the Status of Women, and other feminists agreed to form a civil rights
organization for women similar to the NAACP. In 1966, the National Organization
for Women was organized, soon to be followed by an array of other mass-membership
organizations addressing the needs of specific groups of women, including
Blacks, Latinas, Asians-Americans, lesbians,! welfare recipients, business
owners, aspiring politicians, and tradeswomen and professional women of
every sort.
During this same time, thousands of young
women on college campuses were playing active roles within the anti-war
and civil rights movement. At least,that was their intention. Many were
finding their efforts blocked by men who felt leadership of these movements
was their own province, and that women’s roles should be limited to fixing
food and running mimeograph machines. It wasn’t long before these young
women began forming their own “women’s liberation” organizations to address
their role and status within these progressive movements and within society
at large.
New Issues Come to the Fore
These various elements of the re-emerging
Women’s Rights Movement worked together and separately on a wide range
of issues. Small groups of women in hundreds of communities worked on grassroots
projects like establishing women’s newspapers, bookstores and cafes. They
created battered women’s shelters and rape crisis hotlines to care for
victims of sexual abuse and domestic violence. They came together to form
child care centers so women could work outside their homes for pay. Women
health care professionals opened women’s clinics to provide birth control
and family planning counseling-and to offer abortion services – - for low-income
women. These clinics provided a safe place to discuss a wide range of health
concerns and experiment with alternative forms of treatment.
With the inclusion of Title IX in the Education
Codes of 1972, equal access to higher education and to professional schools
became the law. The long-range effect of that one straightforward legal
passage beginning “Equal access to education programs…,” has been simply
phenomenal. The number of women doctors, lawyers, engineers, architects
and other professionals has doubled and doubled again as quotas actually
limiting women’s enrollment in graduate schools were outlawed. Athletics
has probably been the most hotly contested area of Title IX, and it’s been
one of the hottest areas of improvement, too. The rise in girls’ and women’s
participation in athletics tells the story: One in twenty-seven high school
girls played sports 25 years ago one in three do today. The whole world
saw how much American women athletes could achieve during the last few
Olympic Games, measured in their astonishing numbers of gold, silver, and
bronze medals. This was another very visible result of T! itle IX.
In society at large, the Women’s Rights
Movement has brought about measurable changes, too. In 1972, 26% of men
and women said they would not vote for a woman for president. In 1996,
that sentiment had plummeted to just over 5% for women and to 8% for men.
The average age of women when they first marry has moved from twenty to
twenty-four during that same period.
But perhaps the most dramatic impact of
the women’s rights movement of the past few decades has been women’s financial
liberation. Do you realize that just 25 years ago married women were not
issued credit cards in their own name? That most women could not get a
bank loan without a male co-signer? That women working full time earned
fifty-nine cents to every dollar earned by men?
Help-wanted ads in newspapers were segregated
into “Help wanted – women” and “Help wanted- men.” Pages and pages of jobs
were announced for which women could not even apply. The Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission ruled this illegal in 1968, but since the EEOC had
little enforcement power, most newspapers ignored the requirement for years.
The National Organization for Women (NOW), had to argue the issue all the
way to the Supreme Court to make it possible for a woman today to hold
any job for which she is qualified. And so now we see women in literally
thousands of occupations which would have been almost unthinkable just
one generation ago: dentist, bus driver, veterinarian, airline pilot, and
phone installer, just to name a few.
Many of these changes came about because
of legislation and court cases pushed by women’s organizations. But many
of the advances women achieved in the 1960s and ’70s were personal: getting
husbands to help with the housework or regularly take responsibility for
family meals getting a long-deserved promotion at work gaining the financial
and emotional strength to leave an abusive partner.
The Equal Rights Amendment Is Re-Introduced
Then, in 1972, the Equal Rights Amendment,
which had languished in Congress for almost fifty years, was finally passed
and sent to the states for ratification. The wording of the ERA was simple:
“Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the
United States or by any state on account of sex.” To many women’s rights
activists, its ratification by the required thirty-eight states seemed
almost a shoo-in.
The campaign for state ratification of
the Equal Rights Amendment provided the opportunity for millions of women
across the nation to become actively involved in the Women’s Rights Movement
in their own communities. Unlike so many other issues which were battled-out
in Congress or through the courts, this issue came to each state to decide
individually. Women’s organizations of every stripe organized their members
to help raise money and generate public support for the ERA. Marches were
staged in key states that brought out hundreds of thousands of supporters.
House meetings, walk-a-thons, door-to-door canvassing, and events of every
imaginable kind were held by ordinary women, many of whom had never done
anything political in their lives before. Generous checks and single dollar
bills poured into the campaign headquarters, and the ranks of NOW and other
women’s rights organizations swelled to historic sizes. Every women’s magazine
and most general interest publications had st! ories on the implications
of the ERA, and the progress of the ratification campaign.
But Elizabeth Cady Stanton proved prophetic
once again. Remember her prediction that the movement should “anticipate
no small amount of misconception, misrepresentation, and ridicule”? Opponents
of the Equal Rights Amendment, organized by Phyllis Schlafly, feared that
a statement like the ERA in the Constitution would give the government
too much control over our personal lives. They charged that passage of
the ERA would lead to men abandoning their families, unisex toilets, gay
marriages, and women being drafted. And the media, purportedly in the interest
of balanced reporting, gave equal weight to these deceptive arguments just
as they had when the possibility of women winning voting rights was being
debated. And, just like had happened with woman suffrage, there were still
very few women in state legislatures to vote their support, so male legislators
once again had it in their power to decide if women should have equal rights.
When the deadline for ratification came in 198! 2, the ERA was just three
states short of the 38 needed to write it into the U.S. constitution. Seventy-five
percent of the women legislators in those three pivotal states supported
the ERA, but only 46% of the men voted to ratify.
Despite polls consistently showing a large
majority of the population supporting the ERA, it was considered by many
politicians to be just too controversial. Historically speaking, most if
not all the issues of the women’s rights movement have been highly controversial
when they were first voiced. Allowing women to go to college? That would
shrink their reproductive organs! Employ women in jobs for pay outside
their homes? That would destroy families! Cast votes in national elections?
Why should they bother themselves with such matters? Participate in sports?
No lady would ever want to perspire! These and other issues that were once
considered scandalous and unthinkable are now almost universally accepted
in this country.
More Complex Issues Surface
Significant progress has been made regarding
the topics discussed at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. The people
attending that landmark discussion would not even have imagined the issues
of the Women’s Rights Movement in the 1990s. Much of the discussion has
moved beyond the issue of equal rights and into territory that is controversial,
even among feminists. To name a few:
Women’s reproductive rights. Whether or
not women can terminate pregnancies is still controversial twenty-five
years after the Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade affirmed women’s choice
during the first two trimesters.
Women’s enrollment in military academies
and service in active combat. Are these desirable?
Women in leadership roles in religious
worship. Controversial for some, natural for others.
Affirmative action. Is help in making up
for past discrimination appropriate? Do qualified women now face a level
playing field?
The mommy track. Should businesses accommodate
women’s family responsibilities, or should women compete evenly for advancement
with men, most of whom still assume fewer family obligations?
Pornography. Is it degrading, even dangerous,
to women, or is it simply a free speech issue?
Sexual harassment. Just where does flirting
leave off and harassment begin?
Surrogate motherhood. Is it simply the
free right of a woman to hire out her womb for this service?
Social Security benefits allocated equally
for homemakers and their working spouses, to keep surviving wives from
poverty as widows.
Today, young women proudly calling themselves
“the third wave” are confronting these and other thorny issues. While many
women may still be hesitant to call themselves “feminist” because of the
ever-present backlash, few would give up the legacy of personal freedoms
and expanded opportunities women have won over the last 150 years. Whatever
choices we make for our own lives, most of us envision a world for our
daughters, nieces and granddaughters where all girls and women will have
the opportunity to develop their unique skills and talents and pursue their
dreams.
1998: Living the Legacy
In the 150 years since that first, landmark
Women’s Rights Convention, women have made clear progress in the areas
addressed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton in her revolutionary Declaration of
Sentiments. Not only have women won the right to vote we are being elected
to public office at all levels of government. Jeannette Rankin was the
first woman elected to Congress, in 1916. By 1971, three generations later,
women were still less than three percent of our congressional representatives.
Today women hold only 11% of the seats in Congress, and 21% of the state
legislative seats. Yet, in the face of such small numbers, women have successfully
changed thousands of local, state, and federal laws that had limited women’s
legal status and social roles.
In the world of work, large numbers of
women have entered the professions, the trades, and businesses of every
kind. We have opened the ranks of the clergy, the military, the newsroom.
More than three million women now work in occupations considered “nontraditional”
until very recently.
We’ve accomplished so much, yet a lot still
remains to be done. Substantial barriers to the full equality of America’s
women still remain before our freedom as a Nation can be called complete.