Women’s Liberation Movement

In the mid-1960s, almost half a century after women won the right to vote, women’s rights activism joined the explosion of civil rights, anti‐war, and student movements. For well over a decade hundreds of thousands of American women turned out for massive demonstrations, overturned discriminatory laws through legislation and court action, broke new ground by entering male dominated professions (law, medicine, clergy, corporate and blue-collar), and initiated a vast array of new institutions such as rape crisis centers, shelters for battered women, feminist journals, health clinics, and coffee houses. The movement was marked by the breadth of its challenge to traditional roles as thousands of women joined “consciousness-raising” groups to share with others the process of re-thinking the meaning and potentials of womanhood.

The context for this eruption of activism was a massive shift in women’s economic roles in the aftermath of World War II as married women entered the labor force in previously unthinkable numbers. Declining birthrates and middle-class lifestyles required dual incomes, while educational opportunities led more and more women to sense their potential for meaningful professional careers. Blatant discrimination in wages and access to jobs considered male (whether professional or blue collar) struck women in all walks of life as unfair, though it was women with college educations for whom the lack of opportunity and equal pay created the sharpest outrage.

Just as the movement against slavery had both modeled egalitarian ideals and trained women in the skills of movement building and activism, the civil rights movement in the 1960s demonstrated the possibility of a movement able to touch the conscience of the nation using militant, though non-violent means.

The founding moments of this movement were multiple. In 1966 the National Organization for Women organized to work through the legal system to overturn discriminatory laws. A year later, younger female activists in civil rights and student movements began to form “women’s liberation” groups where women told each other their stories and through the discovery of common experiences began to challenge cultural definitions of women as submissive, dependent, passive, emotional, and un‐intellectual.

Women’s liberation, in particular, was different from the woman suffrage movement, because it was not focused on a single symbolic issue. The virulent backlash against it was generated less by policy issues than by the fact that the movement called into question underlying definitions of gender – womanhood and manhood. Young women, for example, began to wear more gender-neutral clothing, to oppose the sexual double standard, and to claim for women the right both to sexual expressiveness and sexual preference inside or outside of marriage. Women also demanded choice about childbearing, by advocating for access to birth control and legal abortion. Reactions to the proposed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), a constitutional guarantee against gender discrimination, revealed anxieties about cultural change. Opponents worried about women in the military and feared that women with careers would raise divorce rates. Some even worried about “unisex bathrooms” if equality were required.

Despite the fact that the ERA was never ratified, this movement did create a revolution in public policy. It became illegal to discriminate in hiring, wages, education, and access to credit. Title IX generated a revolution in girls and young women’s access to sports. Roe v. Wade made abortion in the early months of pregnancy a constitutionally protected right if a woman wanted to choose it. And the actions of millions of women and men changed private lives as well. Labor force participation became the norm for women, married or not and birthrates continued to fall. Due in part to women’s empowerment, families increasingly included households with single parents or 2 parents of the same sex, as well as traditional heterosexual couples.

Feminist activism, stemming from the upsurge in the 1970s, spread around the globe through the end of the 20th century and into the 21st. The fight for full equality between women and men is far from over. Sexist attitudes remain pervasive in American popular culture and discrimination, though illegal, continually finds subtle expression, as most working women can testify. But just as the suffrage movement marked a fundamental shift and a new starting point, feminism in the late 20th century has also changed our world.

Sara Evans is Regents Professor of History Emerita at the University of Minnesota. Her research has focused on the history of feminism as a social movement and its relationship to a variety of related movements for equal rights. She is the author of Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left, Free Spaces: The Sources of Democratic Change in America (with Harry C. Boyte), Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America, Wage Justice: Comparable Worth and the Paradox of Technocratic Reform (with Barbara J. Nelson), and Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End.

A RECOMMENDED READING LIST ON "WOMEN'S LIBERATION"
(compiled by Sara Evans)