“Boomers”—from the phrase “baby boom”—got that name because so many of their generation were born after World War II, when returning soldiers were reunited with their girlfriends and wives, and when ample job opportunities made it easier to raise families. Boomers’ parents married earlier and had children sooner after marriage than at any other time in the twentieth century. By the late 1950s, the birthrate of the United States approached that of teeming India.
A decisive force in the early lives of Boomers was Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Common Sense Guide to Baby and Child Care. First published in 1946, Spock’s manual sold 24 million copies during the next quarter century. Spock’s book guided young parents through the common medical crises of parenthood— ear infections, colic, chickenpox—and also counseled them on psychological issues. A mother’s most important job, Spock insisted, was to shore up her children’s sense of self by providing continuous support and affection. Women who worked outside the home necessarily “neglected” their children. The child who was “mildly neglected,” Spock added, was apt to grow up “mildly disturbed.” Psychologists such as Marynia Farnham added that a woman’s reproductive system influenced her mental processes: Women were naturally attuned to nurturing and childcare. Those women who entered the aggressive “men’s world” of work would be at odds with their own psychological inclinations.
Television picked up on this theme and hammered away at it each week in sitcoms such as Robert Young’s ironically titled Father Knows Best (1954-1962) and Jackie Gleason’s equally ironic take on working-class marriage, The Honeymooners (1953-1962). Repeatedly irascible or befuddled patriarchs blundered into family matters, only to be gently eased out of harm’s way by their understanding and psychologically savvy wives. Even Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance, the screwball housewives in the popular sitcom I Love Lucy (1952-1957), had a better grasp of family dynamics than their stumble-bum husbands.
But the reality of the postwar woman was more complicated. Economic expansion generated many new jobs, especially in the burgeoning corporate bureaucracies and retail stores. Women were in high demand because they would work for lower wages than men. Many took jobs, ignoring Spock and cultural conventions. In 1940, only one in four civilian employees was female, one-third of them married. Three decades later, four in ten paid employees were
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Women, two-thirds of them married. By 1970 perhaps 20 million women—after returning home from work, fixing dinner, putting the children to bed, and doing a load of laundry—collapsed in front of the television set and watched domestic heroines such as Donna Reed vacuuming the house in high heels and pearls, making clothes and cakes from scratch, soothing the fragile psyches of her husband and children, and otherwise living a fantasy that accorded with the views of Spock and others.
When they returned to the office, store, or factory the next day, however, such women were acutely aware of the fact that men in similar jobs were paid more and had better opportunities for advancement. Women noticed, too, that minorities had improved their situations by fighting publicly. Increasingly activists for women’s rights adopted similar strategies; they were the founders of the modern women’s liberation movement.
One of its leaders was Betty Friedan, an activist journalist in the labor movement during the 1930s and 1940s who shifted to gender issues in later decades. In The Feminine Mystique (1963), Friedan argued that advertisers, popular magazines, and other “authorities” brainwashed women into thinking that they could thrive only at home. They were wrong, Friedan insisted. According to her survey of her classmates at Smith College, many housewives were troubled with vague but persistent feelings of anger and discomfort. “The only way for a woman. . . to know herself as a person is by creative work of her own,” she wrote. A “problem that had no name” was stifling women’s potential.
The Feminine Mystique provided what later came to be known as “consciousness raising” for thousands of women. Over a million copies were quickly sold. Friedan was deluged by hundreds of letters from women who had thought that their unease and depression despite their “happy” family life were both unique and unreasonable. Many now determined to expand their horizons by taking jobs or resuming their education.
Friedan had assumed that if able women acted with determination, employers would recognize their abilities and stop discriminating against them. As feminists were outlining plans to strengthen women’s claims to fair treatment in the workplace, they won an unexpected victory. In 1964, during a debate on whether to ban racial discrimination in employment, Virginia Senator Howard Smith, seeking to scuttle the law, proposed that women also be protected from discrimination in hiring and promotion. Several congresswomen immediately endorsed the idea and proposed an amendment to that effect. This became Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
In 1966 Friedan and other feminists founded the National Organization for Women (NOW).
“The time has come for a new movement toward true equality for all women in America and toward a fully equal partnership of the sexes,” the leaders announced. “The silken curtain of prejudice and discrimination against women” in government, industry, the professions, religion, education, “and every other field of importance” must be drawn back. In 1967 NOW came out for an equal rights amendment to the Constitution, for changes in the divorce laws, and for the legalization of abortion, the right of “control of one’s body.”
The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which would make it unconstitutional to deny equal rights “on account of sex,” had been proposed by the National Woman’s party in 1923; by the late 1930s it appeared headed for adoption by Congress. But Eleanor Roosevelt and other women’s groups killed the amendment, fearing it would rescind laws that protected poor women and their children. By the late 1960s, however, NOW’s campaign for the ERA was yielding dividends. In 1971 the House of Representatives approved the ERA and the Senate followed the next year. By the end of 1972, twenty-two states had raced to go on record to ratify the amendment: What politician could prudently oppose equal rights for women? At the outset of 1973, only sixteen more states needed to ratify ERA before it was added to the Constitution.
Feminist activists soon turned to another major goal: legalization of abortion. The Constitution made no reference to abortion. But during the nineteenth century botched surgical abortions that killed many women prompted the American Medical Association to call for the “general suppression” of the practice. By 1900, every state except Kentucky had passed antiabortion laws. Most states granted exceptions when the woman had been impregnated by rape or incest or when a doctor thought it necessary to save the woman’s life. In 1967, for example, Governor Reagan of California, an opponent of abortion, signed a law allowing doctors to perform abortions if childbirth would “gravely impair the physical or mental health of the mother.” The number of legal abortions in California increased from 5,018 in 1968 to more than 100,000 by 1972.
In 1970, however, feminist activists persuaded the Hawaii legislature to repeal its criminal abortion statute, the first state to do so. Later that year, another battle was waged in New York. It pitted feminists, liberals, and the medical establishment against
The National Organization for Women holds a rally in Illinois for the Equal Rights Amendment. In 1982, as the deadline for ratification was about to expire, a majority in the Illinois legislature favored the ERA but not by a sufficient margin. The defeat in Illinois meant that the ERA was dead.
Conservatives and the Roman Catholic Church. The state assembly repealed its antiabortion law by a single vote. Feminists regarded this as a crucial but sobering victory. If a liberal state such as New York had barely mustered a majority in favor of abortion rights, how long would it take for the campaign to prevail elsewhere?
View the Image Jimmy Carter Signs the House of Representative Resolution for the Equal Rights Amendment, 1972 at Www. myhistorylab. com
The question soon became moot; the United States Supreme Court took the decision out of the hands of state legislatures. A key factor was a new concept in constitutional law: the “right to privacy.” In the nineteenth century, the Catholic Church had persuaded many state legislatures to ban dissemination of information on contraceptives and birth control.
Connecticut was one such state. But in 1961 Estelle Griswold, head of Planned Parenthood in Connecticut, opened a birth control clinic to challenge the law. In the case of Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court, headed by Earl Warren, struck down the Connecticut statute, contending that it violated couples’ “right to privacy.” While conceding that no such term appeared in the Constitution, the Court held that various other constitutional provisions—such as freedom of speech and press and prohibitions against unreasonable searches—together provided an “umbrella” of privacy-related rights. This “right to privacy” protected people from unwarranted intrusions by the state.
Then, in 1969, Norma McCorvey asked her doctor for an abortion. She was unmarried, unemployed, twenty-five years old, and pregnant. Her doctor refused. Abortion, he told her, was illegal in Texas unless performed to save the woman’s life. McCorvey’s
A woman endorses Roe v. Wade in New York in 2003, the thirtieth anniversary of the ruling.
Lawyer encouraged her to challenge the law. She consented, using the pseudonym “Jane Roe,” and her lawyer filed suit against Henry Wade, the Dallas County prosecutor.
In 1973, after McCorvey had the baby, the U. S. Supreme Court rendered a decision in Roe v. Wade. Rejecting any “single” theory of life, the justices maintained that a fetus did not have a “right to life” until the final three months of pregnancy, when it could likely survive without the mother. Until then, the mother’s right to “privacy” took precedence. The state could not prevent a woman from having an abortion during the first six months of pregnancy. Most abortions were no longer illegal. A major goal of the feminists had been achieved almost overnight.
The Roe v. Wade decision resulted in a rapid expansion of abortion facilities. From 1973 to 1980, the number of abortions performed annually increased from 745,000 to 1.5 million. Abortion had become the nation’s most common surgical procedure. The new feminist movement had prevailed on a number of issues that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier.
•••-[Read the Document Roe v. Wade (January 22, 1973) at Www. myhistorylab. com
World History
