The women’s rights movement was a huge turning point for women because they had succeeded in the altering of their status as a group and changing their lives of countless men and women. Gender, Ideology, and Historical Change: Explaining the Women’s Movement was a great chapter because it explained and analyzed the change and causes of the women’s movement. Elaine Tyler May’s essay, Cold War Ideology and the Rise of Feminism and Women’s Liberation and Sixties Radicalism by Alice Echols both gave important but different opinions and ideas about the women’s movement. Also, the primary sources reflect a number of economic, cultural, political, and demographic influences on the women’s movement. This chapter really explains how the Cold War ideologies, other protests and the free speech movements occurring during this time helped spark the rise or the women’s right’s movements. In Cold War Ideology and the Rise of Feminism by Elaine Tyler May, May examines the impact of political changes on American families, specifically the relationship of a Cold War ideology and the ideal of domesticity in the 1960s. May believed that with security as the common thread, the Cold War ideology and the domestic revival reinforced each other. Personal adaption, rather than political resistance, characterized the era. However, postwar domesticity never fully delivered on its promises because the baby-boom children who grew up in suburban homes abandoned the containment ethos when they grew up. They challenged both the imperatives of the cold war and the domestic ideology that came with it. The first to criticize the status quo were postwar parents themselves. In 1963, Betty Friedan published her exposé of domesticity, The Feminine Mystique. Friedan was a postwar wife and mother who spoke directly to women and lived according to the domestic containment ideology. In her book she encouraged women to go back to school, pursue careers, and revive the vision of female independence that had been alive before WWII. The Feminine Mystique became a national sensation because it enabled women across the country to find their voices. Pretty soon, hundreds of readers wrote to Friedan telling their stories. Friedan’s book sparked the readers to comment not only on the connection between women’s and men’s fate, but between domesticity and cold war politics (May, 303-304). Even though The Feminine Mystique advocated a change for women, change came slowly. However, on November 1, 1961, 50,000 American housewives walked out of their homes and jobs in a massive protest, Women Strike for Peace. Within a year their numbers grew to several hundred thousand. The Women Strike for Peace leaders underwent a lot of problems regarding their protest. They were called before the House of Un-American Activities Committee to be questioned. They spoke as mothers while under questioning and they continued to protest and advocate for women. By increasing the political pressure, several important new public policies that challenged the status quo resulted. President Kennedy established the President’s Commission on the Status of Women chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt. Within the next three years, Congress passed the Equal Pay Act and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. While these policies were taking shape, student movements came and from these movements came the new feminism. This new feminist movement demanded access to professional occupations and skilled jobs, protested low wages and worked for pay equity. These were demands that were pushed way beyond Friedan’s call for self-realization. When Nixon became president, the ideology of the cold war remained a powerful force in national politics. Then when Reagan became president, containment returned with its support for cold war militancy and calls for strengthened “traditional” family. In recent decade, the domestic ideology and cold war militancy have risen and fallen together (May, 305-308). This brings me into to Alice Echols’ Women’s Liberation and Sixties Radicalism. In her essay she relates the rise of feminist consciousness in the 1960s to numerous changes in American society, especially the rise of other protest movements. Echols said, “On September 7, 1968, the sixties came to that most apple-pie of American institutions, the Miss America Pageant” (Echols, 308). The reason she said this was because one hundred women’s liberation activists descended upon Atlantic City to protest the pageant’s promotion of physical attractiveness as the primary measure of women’s worth. From there, the protestors set up a “Freedom Trash Can” and filled it with high-heeled shoes, bras, girdles, hair curlers, false eyelashes, typing books, and representative copies of Cosmopolitan, Playboy, and Ladies Home Journal. They wanted to burn the contents but couldn’t because of the laws for bonfires on the boardwalk. Also, word had been leaked to the press that there would be a symbolic bra-burning. However, there were no bras burnt that day. But the image of the bra-burning, militant feminists remains part of our popular mythology about the women’s liberation movement. The Miss America demonstration represents an important moment in the history of the sixties as well as the women’s movement (Echols, 309-310). Although the women’s liberation movement only began to take shape toward the end of the decade, it was a quintessentially sixties movement. The women’s liberation movement alone carried on and extended into the 1970s that decade’s political radicalism and rethinking of fundamental social organization. The women’s movement ideas were refined and recast versions of those already present in the New Left and black freedom movement. Women’s discontent with their place in America in the 1960s was produced by a broad range of causes. The number of woman being drawn into the paid labor force, as the service sector of the economy expanded and rising consumer aspirations fueled the desire of many families for a second income. By 1960, 30.5 percent of all wives worked for wages. Women’s increasing labor force participation was facilitated as well by the growing number of women graduating from college and the introduction of the birth control pill in 1960. Despite the fact that women’s “place” was increasingly in the paid work force, ideas about women’s proper role in American society were quite conventional throughout the fifties and early sixties. According to Echols, the women’s liberation movement might not have developed at all as an organized force for social change.
The climate of protest encourage women, even those not directly involved in the black movement and the New Left, to question conventional gender arrangements (Echols, 310-311). Echols states that given the internal contradictions and shortcomings of sixties radicalism, the repressiveness of the federal government in the late sixties and early seventies, and changing economic conditions in the United States, it is not surprising that the movements built by radicals in the sixties either no longer exist or do so only in attenuated form. Activists in the women’s liberation movement, however, helped to bring about the fundamental realignment of gender roles in this country through outrageous protests and many other things. Those of us who came of age in the days before the resurgence of feminism know that the world today , while hardly feminist, is nonetheless a far different, and in many respects a far fairer world than what we confronted in 1967 (Echols, 314). Along with the two historians views on the women’s movement, are many important primary sources that support and explain further the women’s movements. For example, The Problem That Has No Name by Betty Friedan supports what May talked about in her essay because in this article, Friedan attacked the postwar domestic ideal in her best-selling book, The Feminine Mystique. She explains the problem that accompanied the widespread acceptance of the domestic ideal. As for Civil Rights and the Rise of Feminism by Mary King, it explains how like pre-Civil War women’s rights activists, many modern feminists were first involved in other reforms or protests before becoming committed to feminism. This supports Echols essay on feminism and its connections to other forms of movements and protests. Mary King was a white civil rights worker involved in Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a civil rights organization founded in 1960 to coordinate efforts to desegregate the South. This article really showed how King’s involvement in the civil rights movement affected her. Another big topic mentioned in Echols’ essay was the National Organization for Women (NOW). NOW”S Statement of Purpose really explains their ideas and concerns for equality and civil rights. According to Echols, to woman’s liberationists, NOW’s integrationist, assess-oriented approach ignored the racial and class inequalities that were the very foundation of the “mainstream” that the feminists of NOW were dedicated to integrating. In this article, NOW proclaimed its premises and goals at its first meeting in 1966 (Primary Sources, 315-319). Redstockings Manifesto was a great source to read because it gave a different perspective on women’s inequality. It was especially different than the NOW’s point of view on women’s inequality. Redstockings was one of the many radical feminist organizations that had sprung up by the late 1960s. Redstockings Manifesto analyzed and revealed the influence of other protest movements in the 1960s. An interesting article was by Phyllis Schlafly. She was the chairwoman of STOP ERA, who was a leading critic of the Equal Rights Amendment. Her article “What’s Wrong with ‘Equal Rights’ for Women?” argues against equal rights for women. This source was very helpful in particular because it gave us the negatives and important factors limiting the success of the women’s movement. Factors like the greatest achievements of women’s rights, the financial benefits of chivalry, the real liberation of women, the fraud of the Equal Rights Amendment and women’s libbers do NOT speak for us all contributed to Schlafly’s argument. Another great source that supported Echols’ argument was The Combahee River Statement. The Combahee River collective was a black feminist group in Boston. Organized in 1974, the group took the name of an armed raid led by Harriet Tubman in South Carolina during the Civil War that brought freedom to greater than seven hundred slaves. This article shows the ways that the positions of black women in society were unique and different from other women (Primary Sources, 319-325). Joyce Maynard writes a great article called On Women and Sex. In this source Maynard looks at the effects of the sexual revolution. Maynard talks about how safe and increasingly available contraceptives make premarital sex possible and the result was that more people were having sex. This was definitely a big turning point for women because it changed the looks of a traditional woman waiting for marriage to have sex to a more modern and natural look at sex. Our Bodies, Ourselves was another great source that coincides with On Women and Sex very well about women being able to choose when they want to have children. However, Our Bodies, Ourselves explained more deeply about the knowledge of women’s bodies and the energy from them. This source was just an excerpt from the preface to the first edition of the book that has had a long history and a wide influence. I also thought that Sex Ratios of High School and College Graduates in the United States was a great source because it showed statistical, hard facts which can reveal important changes in women’s lives. According to this chart, it shows that women in the 1960s rejected domesticity and joined the women’s movement. This chart also provides evidence for the impact of the women’s movement during that time. Also, the Women’s Labor Force Participation, by Marital Status is another statistical source that gives good information and evidence on the impact of women’s movement during a certain period in time (Primary Sources, 326-332) In conclusion, the women’s movement was influenced by a lot of factors in the Cold War like its ideologies, and also other protests and free speech movements going on during that time. Based on what I have researched, history is important to understand because learning and understanding that what we have done in the past guides us for what we should do and not do in the future. Also, one way to understanding who we are and how we got to be that way is by studying the past. The women’s rights movement is a great example of events in the past that have completely turned around history. Elaine Tyler May and Alice Echols, along with the primary sources really helped to further explain the women’s rights movements and all the factors that influenced it. The women’s movement, which greatly stimulated the study of women’s history, is not history itself.