Quick questions on Women's liberation movement 1960-1980: VCE Modern History Unit 4

After WWII, women in most Western countries were pushed out of wartime industrial jobs and back into the home. The American "feminine mystique," in Betty Friedan's phrase, was the cultural ideal of the suburban housewife: married young, defined by motherhood, supported by a male breadwinner. Marriage age dropped from 22 (1900) to 20 (1956). The American birthrate rose to a peak of 3.7 children per woman in 1957 (the Baby Boom).

The contraceptive pill (Enovid) was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration on 9 May 1960. By 1965, 6.5 million American women were using the Pill. Together with the spread of the diaphragm, the IUD, and (later) the legalisation of abortion, the Pill separated heterosexual sex from reproduction in a way that altered women's lives across the developed world.

Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique was published on 19 February 1963. Based on a 1957 survey of her Smith College classmates 15 years after graduation, the book named "the problem that has no name": the loneliness, depression and frustration of educated suburban women whose lives had been narrowed to domesticity. The book sold around 1.4 million copies in paperback in its first three years.

A younger, more radical movement emerged from the civil rights and New Left movements from 1967 to 1968. Many women had been treated as junior members in those movements. The New York Radical Women (founded 1968) and Redstockings (founded 1969) experimented with consciousness-raising (CR): small groups in which women shared personal experiences and analysed them politically. "The personal is political" (Carol Hanisch, 1969) became a movement slogan.

On the 50th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, NOW organised the Women's Strike for Equality. Around 50,000 marched down Fifth Avenue in New York; demonstrations were held in around 90 cities. The three demands were equal employment and education, free 24-hour childcare, and free abortion on demand.

Title IX of the Education Amendments (signed 23 June 1972) banned sex discrimination in any federally funded education program. It transformed women's access to higher education, athletics and professional schools.

In the UK, the Equal Pay Act (29 May 1970) and the Sex Discrimination Act (12 November 1975) followed Ford Dagenham machinists' strike (1968) and other industrial actions. The first National Women's Liberation Conference at Ruskin College, Oxford (27 February to 1 March 1970) launched the British movement.

Wage gaps persisted. American women earned around 60 per cent of male wages in 1980 (around 64 per cent in 2010). Occupational segregation kept women concentrated in service and care work.

Sara Evans (Personal Politics, 1979) traces the origins of women's liberation in civil rights and New Left organising. Many of the radical second-wave activists came directly from SNCC and SDS.

Congress passed the ERA on 22 March 1972 with the support of NOW and a broad coalition. The text: "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." 30 states ratified within a year; the 38 state threshold was never reached.

American women earned around 60 per cent of male wages in 1980 (around 64 per cent in 2010). Occupational segregation kept women concentrated in service and care work.

The conservative mobilisation against the ERA, the rise of the Religious Right (Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, 1979), and the Republican abandonment of ERA support (1980 platform) ended the constitutional project.

The Combahee River Collective Statement (April 1977) named the failure of mainstream feminism to address race and class. Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Angela Davis (Women, Race and Class, 1981) and bell hooks (Ain't I a Woman, 1981) developed Black feminist theory. The Chicana movement (Las Hijas de Cuauhtemoc, 1971) developed parallel critiques.

Friedan's reference to lesbians as the "lavender menace" (1969) alienated lesbian feminists; the Radicalesbians group founded in response. The Stonewall riots (28 June 1969) had launched the gay liberation movement; lesbian feminism formed at the intersection.

Roe v Wade galvanised the National Right to Life Committee and the Religious Right. The election of Ronald Reagan (1980) and the appointment of Sandra Day O'Connor (first female Supreme Court justice, 1981, opposed Roe) marked a partial reversal.