35 years ago, the women’s liberation movement raised the hopes and expectations of a generation of women. This movement challenged the prevailing notion that women were supposed to spend their entire lives engaged in housework and raising children. It demanded equal pay for women in the workplace, publicly funded child care, and the legalization of abortion. It challenged sexist stereotypes of women and the ideal of the traditional nuclear family, which often tied women to abusive or oppressive relationships. While the Ozzie and Harriet myth of the nuclear family—with a male breadwinner and stay-at-home mother—never really existed for many working-class Americans, the women’s liberation movement altered people’s ideas about the role of women …show more content…
Women still earn only $.76 to a man’s dollar. This figure, reported by the Census Bureau for 2003, represents a 1.4 percent decline in women’s wages and is the first statistically significant decline since 1995. While the wage gap has narrowed over the last thirty years, 59 percent of that is due to men’s falling wages rather than rising wages for women. However, even these figures do not fully account for the wage gap. When economists examined the long-term earnings gap between men and women, the results were even more stark. In a study of average men and women’s wages over a fifteen-year period from 1983 to 1998, women earned $274,000 while men earned $723,000. In other words, taken over fifteen prime working years, women averaged $.38 for a man’s dollar. This study more accurately measures the impact of women’s oppression because it takes into account the cumulative effect on women’s earnings from having to balance work and family. From the days of 1960, and the election of John F. Kennedy, continuing on through the 1960's and the presidency of Richard Nixon, our nation, and the women living in it, had seen drastic