the women's liberation movement (1960 to 1980), including The Feminine Mystique (1963), the Equal Pay Act (1963), the founding of NOW (1966), the contraceptive pill, Roe v Wade (1973), and the consequences for work, law and culture

What this dot point is asking

VCAA expects you to explain how the postwar feminist movement (the "second wave") reshaped Western law, work, education and culture between the late 1950s and the early 1980s. Strong responses pair the legal landmarks (Equal Pay Act, Title VII, Roe v Wade) with the cultural texts (The Feminine Mystique, consciousness-raising, the Women's Strike for Equality) and at least one historian.

The answer

The postwar context

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 reality was more mixed. Women's labour force participation in the US actually rose through the 1950s (from around 32 per cent in 1948 to 38 per cent in 1960) as married women returned to part-time work. Black women had always worked at higher rates than white women. Working-class women never left the workforce.

Women had won the vote in waves: New Zealand (1893), Australia (1902), the UK (1918, fully 1928), the US (1920), France (1944), Italy (1946), Switzerland (1971). But anti-discrimination law in employment, marriage law reforms and reproductive rights were almost entirely the work of the post-1960 movement.

The Pill and the Presidential Commission

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.

President John F. Kennedy established the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women on 14 December 1961, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt. Its report (American Women, 11 October 1963) documented widespread discrimination in employment, education and law and led to the Equal Pay Act (signed by Kennedy on 10 June 1963). State commissions on the status of women followed; their members became the seedbed of NOW.

The Feminine Mystique and NOW (1963 to 1966)

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.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, signed on 2 July 1964, banned sex discrimination in employment under Title VII. (The "sex" amendment was added by Virginia Representative Howard Smith, a segregationist who may have intended to scuttle the bill; it survived.) The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was created to enforce Title VII but treated sex discrimination as secondary. Frustrated activists, including Friedan and Pauli Murray, founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) on 30 June 1966 in Washington DC with 28 founders.

NOW's Statement of Purpose committed to "take action to bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society now." Membership grew from 300 (1966) to around 150,000 (1979).

The radical second wave and consciousness-raising

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.

The Miss America Protest (Atlantic City, 7 September 1968) drew media coverage; protesters threw bras, girdles, and false eyelashes into a "Freedom Trash Can." (No bras were burned; the "bra-burner" stereotype was a media invention.) Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex (1970) and Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970) offered radical-feminist theory. Robin Morgan edited the influential anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful (1970).

The Women's Strike for Equality (26 August 1970)

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.

The strike marked the moment second-wave feminism became a mass movement. Time magazine put Kate Millett on its cover on 31 August 1970.

Legal landmarks (1970 to 1978)

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.

The Equal Rights Amendment. 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. Phyllis Schlafly's Stop ERA campaign (founded 1972) mobilised conservative women on a defence-of-the-family platform. The ratification deadline lapsed on 30 June 1982; the ERA remains unratified.

Roe v Wade (22 January 1973): the US Supreme Court (7 to 2 majority) held that the constitutional right to privacy extended to a woman's decision to have an abortion, subject to state regulation in the second and third trimesters. Around 1 million legal abortions had occurred annually in the US before Roe (most illegal); Roe brought them above ground and regulated.

Equal Credit Opportunity Act (28 October 1974) banned sex and marital status discrimination in credit. Until 1974, married women in the US often could not obtain credit cards without their husband's signature.

Pregnancy Discrimination Act (31 October 1978) amended Title VII to ban discrimination on the basis of pregnancy.

Other Western movements

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.

In Australia, the McMahon Equal Pay Case (1969) granted equal pay for equal work. Whitlam's Labor government (1972 to 1975) implemented the supporting mother's benefit (1973), legalised the Family Law Act (1975), and removed sales tax from contraceptives. Anne Summers's Damned Whores and God's Police (1975) was a landmark Australian feminist text.

In France, the Loi Veil (17 January 1975) legalised abortion. Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (Le deuxieme sexe, 1949) had been an earlier intellectual foundation across Europe.

The limits and the critiques

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.

The ERA failed. 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.

Black and intersectional critique. 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.

Lesbian feminism. 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.

Conservative backlash. 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.

Historiography

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.

Ruth Rosen (The World Split Open, 2000) is the standard one-volume history of second-wave feminism in the US.

Susan Faludi (Backlash, 1991) analyses the conservative reaction against feminism in the 1980s.

Estelle Freedman (No Turning Back, 2002) places second-wave feminism in long historical perspective from the 19th-century woman question.

Becky Thompson ("Multiracial Feminism," 2002, Feminist Studies) revises the standard "second wave" narrative to centre women of colour from the start.

Common exam traps

Treating second-wave feminism as monolithic. It contained liberal feminists (NOW, ERA), radical feminists (consciousness-raising, separatism), socialist feminists, lesbian feminists, and Black and Chicana feminists with different priorities and analyses.

Saying women got the vote in the 1960s. Most Western women had the vote by the 1920s; Switzerland (1971) was the late outlier in Western Europe. The second-wave fight was about employment, education, reproductive rights and law, not suffrage.

Calling the "bra-burning" historical. No bras were burned at the Miss America Protest in 1968. The image was a journalistic invention.

Forgetting the legal scaffolding. The Equal Pay Act (1963), Title VII (1964) and Title IX (1972) were as important as the cultural texts. The movement combined consciousness-raising with litigation and lobbying.

In one sentence

Between 1960 and 1980 the women's liberation movement transformed Western societies through the contraceptive pill (FDA approval 9 May 1960), foundational texts (The Feminine Mystique, 1963), mass organisations (NOW, 30 June 1966), direct action (the Women's Strike for Equality, 26 August 1970), and legal landmarks (Equal Pay Act 1963, Title VII 1964, Title IX 1972, Roe v Wade 22 January 1973), but failed to win the Equal Rights Amendment (lapsed 30 June 1982), close the wage gap, or fully include working-class women and women of colour.