The revival of feminism in the sixties is often dated from the appearance of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. This 1963 best-seller found a receptive audience among middle- and upper-class women whose experiences Friedan captured. Although her book was important for its challenge to the ideology of domesticity, other factors also contributed to the reemergence of feminism. Unprecedented numbers of married women were being drawn into the job market—albeit on unequal terms—as the service sector of the economy expanded and consumerism fueled the desire of many families for a second income. Both the growing numbers of women graduating from college and the availability of the birth-control pill (which accelerated the already noticeable decline in the birthrate) further encouraged women's entry into the work force. By the early sixties the contradiction between the realities of paid work and higher education, on the one hand, and the still pervasive domestic ideology, on the other, could no longer be reconciled. Equally important in sparking feminist consciousness were the oppositional movements of the sixties, particularly the black freedom movement, which was a source of inspiration and a model for social change for second-wave feminists.
The new feminism emerged from two groups of educated, middle-class, predominantly white women. The National Organization for Women (now) consisted mainly of politically moderate professionals; those who stressed women's liberation were younger, more radical women and typically veterans of the black freedom movement and the New Left. For the former, John F. Kennedy's establishment of the President's Commission on the Status of Women (pcsw) in 1961 and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited employment discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, and national origin, were important catalysts for change. The pcsw, with Eleanor Roosevelt as chair, was charged with the task of documenting the position of American women in the economy, legal system, and the family. Its 1964 report uncovered such pervasive sex discrimination that many commissioners were shocked. Most states also convened commissions that similarly documented widespread sex discrimination. It was at the third national meeting of the state commissions in 1966 that now was born. Angered by the failure of the newly created Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (eeoc) to enforce the anti-sex discrimination provision of Title VII, twenty-eight women (including Friedan) formed the organization to pressure the government into challenging sex discrimination.
Like the naacp after which it was modeled, now adopted a legalistic and assimilationist approach to achieving women's equality. Rather than challenging their subordination in domestic life, the feminists of now committed themselves to fighting for women's integration into public life. Early debates in now concerned the group's advocacy of abortion rights and the Equal Rights Amendment (era). Indeed, when now accorded top priority to the era in its 1968 Bill of Rights, women from the United Auto Workers (out of whose offices the first now mailings had been sent) were pressured to resign from now because of their union's opposition to the amendment. From the moment the era was first discussed by feminists in 1920, it had caused enormous divisiveness; many feared that its passage, by invalidating legislation protective of women, would lead to worsening work conditions for them. This time around, however, opposition to the era from progressive and feminist quarters evaporated quickly when it became clear that the courts and the eeoc were already interpreting Title VII as invalidating protective legislation. Indeed, the women of the United Auto Workers rejoined now two years later when their union endorsed the amendment.
Over the years now's membership became more heterogeneous and its political stance more daring. Although its primary commitment to the era continued, especially after the election of Eleanor Smeal as its president in 1977, now supported even more controversial issues, including lesbian and gay rights, an issue it had earlier skirted. The era ratification effort tripled now's membership (210,000 members by 1982), but its ultimate failure in 1982 deflated the organization's spirit and its numbers. The era campaign had been important in keeping alive public discussion of sex discrimination, but now's focus on the amendment had diverted attention from such pressing problems as child care, abortion rights, and the feminization of poverty.
Within a year of now's formation white women involved in the black freedom movement and the New Left began meeting in small groups to discuss sexism within the radical movement. In contrast to the Old Left, which gave token support to the struggle against male chauvinism, neither the New Left nor the black movement directly addressed the question of female inequality. But the New Left's efforts to expand political discourse to include personal relations (encapsulated in the slogan "the personal is political") unintentionally fueled feminist consciousness as it encouraged women to define housework, relationships with men, and sex in political terms. Moreover, despite the sexism they encountered, women through their work in these movements developed new skills and confidence, as they defied conventional norms of femininity. Important as well was their exposure in the black movement to assertive black women—both older community leaders and the younger activists—whose behavior was at odds with the ideology of domesticity.
Although they sometimes worked with now, these women's liberationists opposed now's moderate politics and its emphasis on legal equality on the grounds that this policy ignored women's subordination in the family and that it encouraged women's integration into a class- and race-stratified system rather than seeking to dismantle that system. Deeply skeptical of achieving substantive change through reform, they disagreed with now's focus on electoral politics, legislation, and lobbying. Instead, like other sixties' radicals, they sought a movement that would maximize individual participation and lead to a radical restructuring of society.
If women's liberationists were united in their opposition to now's liberal feminism, they found themselves in disagreement over two issues: (1) the proper relationship between their fledgling movement and the larger radical movement and (2) the source of women's oppression. Some women (who were called politicos and later identified themselves as socialist-feminists) argued that the two movements should be closely connected: socialism would achieve women's liberation. Others (who called themselves radical feminists) maintained that the women's movement should be entirely independent: capitalism was not the sole source of male dominance nor socialism its remedy. This schism often resulted in separate organizations in larger cities.
The arguably most far-reaching and provocative analyses of male supremacy were propounded by radical feminists such as Shulamith Firestone, Kate Millett, and Ti-Grace Atkinson, who, following Simone de Beauvoir, maintained that gender exists as a social construct, not a biological fact. They were the first to criticize marriage, the nuclear family, normative heterosexuality, violence against women, and sexist health care. By the early seventies both socialist-feminists and liberal feminists had come to agree with much of their analyses.
In the mid-seventies radical feminists became concerned less with confronting male dominance than with building a women's counterculture where "male" values would be banished and "female" values nourished. In this shift, they were following a course taken by some radicals of the sixties. Socialist-feminists who had organized a network of women's liberation unions in many cities found these unions attacked by sectarian leftists who believed that feminism was diverting women from the more important class struggle. As a consequence, socialist-feminism exists primarily in the academy as a theoretical tendency. The liberal feminists of now, benefiting most from the refocusing of radical feminism and the attenuation of socialist-feminism, became the recognized voice of feminism. By 1975 the women's movement as a whole was facing a formidable backlash, one that was orchestrated by the Right but did not lack female adherents. The antifeminists exploited women's fears that feminism would encourage male irresponsibility and female vulnerability and would eliminate male protection of women, especially wives.
Each strand of feminism had drawbacks. Liberal feminism's emphasis on the liberating nature of work ignored the realities of the jobs held by most American women. Radical feminists' contention that gender is the primary contradiction impeded their efforts to reach beyond their white, middle-class base. Socialist-feminists often spoke a language too abstract and jargon-filled to appeal to most women. As one of them, Barbara Ehrenreich, conceded, in trying to "fit all of women's experience into the terms of the market," socialist-feminists were at times "too deferential to Marxism."
Nevertheless, the women's movement probably accomplished more profound and lasting changes than the other radical movements of the sixties:
- Although the increase in the number of women elected to Congress from 1975 to 1988 has been slight—from 19 to 27—the number of women elected to state legislatures has doubled in the same period, from 604 to 1,261.
- Women's rights to work and to equal pay are generally no longer arguable. Because sex segregation in the work force has preserved the wage differential, however, feminists have pioneered a new concept—that of comparable worth for jobs of equal skill and expertise. By 1987 more than forty states and seventeen hundred local governments had taken steps to implement the comparable-worth policy.
- The number of women in professional occupations and in professional and graduate schools has risen dramatically. For example, in the late 1980s one-quarter of all new graduates of law, medical, and business schools were women, compared to 5 percent twenty years earlier. Most colleges and universities have established women's studies programs, and feminist scholars produced some of the most significant work to come out of the academy in the seventies and eighties.
- Feminist efforts to reverse the law's traditionally punitive stance toward victims of rape and domestic violence have been fairly successful. In cases of rape, most states now prohibit evidence regarding a woman's past sexual history and no longer require corroboration in the form of a witness or proof of resistance. Moreover, many police departments have adopted new policies for investigating rape and domestic violence.
- Because feminists have regarded abortion rights as vital to women's self-determination, they have played a key role in abortion's decriminalization and in subsequent efforts to keep it legal.
- The movement's critique of the nuclear family and compulsory heterosexuality has eliminated much of the stigma attached to remaining single and has made it easier for lesbians and gay men to live "outside the closet."
- Most important, the movement has brought about a rethinking of gender that has resulted in far less constricting cultural definitions of maleness and femaleness.
Future prospects depend upon the movement's ability to acknowledge women's differences—both those rooted in race, class, and sexual preference and those arising from different political perspectives. Although it was black women's example that originally helped inspire white women's liberationists, few black women became involved in the early women's movement. Their noninvolvement had many sources, but crucial were white feminists' dichotomization of race and gender, their hostility to the family (traditionally a refuge from racism for blacks), and their idealization of paid work as liberating for women—all of which were at odds with the lived experience of most black women. Since the mid-seventies growing numbers of women of color have joined the feminist movement, and it is from within that they have criticized white feminists' tendency to speak of "women" as a single concept and to analyze gender in isolation rather than in relation to other systems of oppression. How the movement responds to this challenge in the future will determine whether or not it becomes truly multiracial.
Also emerging in the eighties as a divisive issue was the question of pornography. Some feminists, contending that pornography causes violence against women, campaigned for legislation that would effectively eliminate much of it. Other feminists opposed such efforts on civil libertarian grounds and criticized as well the antipornography feminists' critique of pornography as "male"; they argued that this unin tentionally fortifies the traditional distinction between "good" and "bad" women. These "sex wars" did not follow the familiar fault lines of the past; indeed, the salient categories of the late sixties and seventies (radical feminism, socialist-feminism, and liberal feminism) were far less useful for understanding feminist politics in the eighties.
On another issue, some feminists questioned whether mandating equality in circumstances of inequality might not in some cases have deleterious consequences for women: they called for an equality that acknowledges or includes difference. But as other feminists noted, arguments rooted in female difference have usually been invoked by conservatives wishing to maintain gender inequality. It remained to be seen how successfully "equality with difference" could be pursued.
Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975 (1985); Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (1970).
Alice Echols
See also Abortion; Education; Equal Rights Amendment; Friedan, Betty; National Organization for Women; Steinem, Gloria; Women and the Work Force.
