Women's status and rights

In the post-World War II period, many women reluctantly yielded to convention and returned to the home, only to wage a battle for women’s status and rights in the 1960s.

The effects of the movement for women’s rights and status were far-reaching, influencing legislation as much as Americans’ everyday lives. With such widespread implications, the women’s movement helped to alter both the way many Americans viewed women and the relationships between men and women. While the modern movement began in the 1960s, the economic, political, and social roots lie in the World War II and postwar years. Women had been working outside of the home since the early days of industrialization, but not until World War II did a large percentage of women participate in wage labor. At the war’s end, while millions of women ceased working for wages, their time spent in the paid workforce carried important consequences for future generations.

Though many women did work exclusively in the home, the domestic image of the 1950s masks the growing number of women entering and remaining in the paid workforce during the decade. While working-class white women and women of color had previously worked outside the home for wages, a growing number ofwhite middle-class married women, particularly mothers, entered the paid workforce in the 1950s. The majority of women worked in female-dominated industries. At first, women’s paid work did not challenge the domestic ideal because most Americans still assumed that women derived their satisfaction from being mothers and wives. Little recognition was given either to the importance of these women’s wages to the family income or to the sense of personal satisfaction women derived from their jobs. Yet by the 1960s, the inequalities within the labor system could no longer be ignored. Women’s organizations and governmental agencies such as the Women’s Bureau of the United Auto Workers, the National Manpower Council, and the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs worked throughout the 1950s to increase economic opportunities for women. The Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor also noted shifts in women’s labor force participation and began advocating policies intended to draw women into the workforce and opposing discriminatory protective legislation. In 1954, the Women’s Bureau dropped its opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), designed to give women equal legal protection under the Constitution. While these efforts often did little to change conditions for women, the networks formed and the work begun helped bring about change in the 1960s.

Other important events provided a backdrop for the movement for women’s status and rights. In 1963, Betty Friedan, former journalist and housewife, published The Feminine Mystique. Using interviews with Smith College alumni, Friedan argued that through POPULAR CULTURE, education, and mental health services, women had been forced out of the public arena and into the home. Women described feeling isolated and unhappy in spite of their material comfort and efforts to fill their lives with volunteer activities. Friedan called these feelings “the problem that has no name.” Because of its focus on white, middle-class women, the book received criticism from some activists and scholars. Yet, hundreds of women, not all of whom were middle-class, wrote to Friedan after the book’s publication and told her that they identified with what she had written. While feminism existed in the United States before, even in the conservative 1950s, the conversation built around The Feminine Mystique provided one way for a large number of women to be exposed to a growing feminist sensibility.

At the same time, under the persuasion of the head of the Women’s Bureau, Esther Peterson, President John F. Kennedy formed the President’s Commission on the Status of Women in the early 1960s. Chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, the commission drew delegates from a wide range of organizations that utilized networks formed in the 1960s. Published in 1963, the report of the commission amassed a large amount of data from each state and documented the legal, economic, and social discrimination faced by women. As a result of the commission’s report, Congress passed the Equal Pay Act of 1963 that prohibited the differential pay of men and women for the same work. Other important legislation followed. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, specifically Title VII, made it illegal for employers to discriminate on the basis of sex, religion, race, or ethnicity. This legislation had limits, but it provided an important legal basis from which activists could demand equality.

With the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, activists hoped that conditions for women would improve. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) received a large number of sexual discrimination complaints, but it acted on few of them. After they became aware that many of the complaints to the EEOC went unaddressed and that the organization supported some exclusionary policies, Friedan and other activists formed the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966. Created to give women the political force to ensure that antidiscrimination legislation be used, NOW, in its mission statement, called for the equal participation of women in American society. While comprised mostly of white, middle-class women, NOW did address efforts toward issues that affected working-class women. For example, now supported factory women who sued companies that refused to hire women. NOW worked largely within the system to change legal and social policy, but the members also protested, marched, and raised awareness about those issues affecting women.

There were rifts within the organization, however, and not all women felt comfortable in NOW. Some found the group elitist; others disagreed on the organization’s stance on particular issues; and still others felt the organization did not fully critique the system. After being labeled the “lavender menace” in the late 1960s by Betty Friedan, many lesbians left NOW, upset at the implication that lesbianism compromised the legitimacy of the group. In 1973, however, now officially recognized the civil rights of lesbians, after those lesbians who remained in the group demanded equal protection.

While white, middle-class married women worked to end the discrimination against women in the United States, they were not the only women who comprised the women’s movement. In their union activism, working-class women in several industries became a part of a growing feminist consciousness. In addition to professional and working-class women, a younger generation of women also posed challenges to the status quo. Many of these women gained activist experience in other political movements of the 1960s, such as the Civil Rights movement, New Left, and student movements. The personal experiences of subordination these women faced as part of their work in such groups led to a recognition of the systemic exploitation and discrimination American women faced.

In 1965, for example, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) workers Casey Hayden and Mary King critiqued the treatment of women in their position paper, “Sex and Caste: A Kind of Memo.” Pointing to the way leaders relegated tasks traditionally thought of as female, such as secretarial work, to women in the groups, they argued that women were held back from full participation in the movement. They and others were also offended by civil rights leader Stokely Carmichael’s sexist—and sexual—comment when asked about the role of women. “The only position for women in SNCC,” he said, “is prone.” The paper resonated with many women and caused discussion within SNCC about the role of women in the group. Similarly, women in New Left organizations, such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), struggled to have their voices heard in meetings and to influence the agenda of the organization. Often, male leaders made them feel that their viewpoints were not important. Women also experienced sexual exploitation, feeling their status in the group depended on the degree of their sexual involvement. As they felt torn between the goals of the New Left and their growing awareness of their status as women, many used the networks found in SNCC, SDS, and antiwar groups to articulate their feelings about the

Women hold up protest signs during a demonstration for women's rights, 1968. (Getty Images)

Experience of being women in these groups. Several times, women tried to give speeches about their subordination, only to be met with jeers and obscenities from the audience. For some women, these episodes proved to be the last straw. Many women left these political organizations to form their own groups. Robin Morgan described her decision to leave the movement in the 1970 paper “Goodbye to All That.” In it she called for a new movement, writing that it was the job of the feminist to “build an even stronger independent Women’s Liberation Movement, so that sisters in their counterfeit Left captivity will have somewhere to turn. . . . Power to all the people or none.”

Often considered more radical, this “women’s liberation movement” spread in part due to consciousness-raising groups. Just as former members of the New Left had gathered together to talk about their experiences, women met in groups formed with classmates, coworkers, and neighbors to discuss those issues they felt to be important. Considering their personal lives as political, these women considered the transformation of themselves and their relationships to be as much an integral part of changing society as the enforcement of antidiscriminatory legislation. “The personal is political” became their slogan. Working outside of the political and legal system, many different activist grass-roots organizations formed. They created battered women’s shelters and boycotted and protested companies that discriminated against women or did not provide adequate services for women. They protested the 1968 Miss America Pageant, which they felt epitomized the objectification and commodification of women. Others, such as the New York Redstockings, held speakouts for women to talk about their experiences with illegal abortions. In Chicago, a group of feminists formed an underground abortion service called “Jane.”

While African American women and Mexican-American women had participated in the women’s movement from the beginning, these women sometimes formed their own groups. In 1971, for example, hundreds of Chi-canas met at the First National Conference of Chicanas. African Americans created the National Black Feminist Organization in 1973. Torn between the sexism they sometimes experienced within their communities and the racism they sometimes experienced within women’s groups, minority women met to talk about what it meant to be a woman and a person of color. They also worked on issues that they felt most affected their communities. At the same time, African-American women and Chicanas forced white activists to confront the racism that existed within the larger women’s movement.

The cultural critique of the late 1960s and early 1970s resulted in the proliferation of new kinds of media opportunities for women. Interested in reaching women who were not involved in the movement, journalist Gloria Steinem founded the mainstream magazine Ms. in 1971. From the beginning, the magazine attempted to cover a wide range of issues that spoke to the diversity of experience among women. In 1973, a Boston health collective published Our Bodies, Ourselves, a book intended to educate women about their bodies and their health care options.

Further reading: Dennis A. Deslippe, “Rights, Not Roses”: Unions and the Rise of Working-Class Feminism, 1945-1980 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Sara Evans, Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America (New York: The Free Press, 1989); Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America (New York: Viking Press, 2000).

—Heather L. Tompkins

Yep, Laurence (1948- ) author

Best known as an author of children’s books, Laurence Yep is a multitalented writer who has written historical fiction, short stories, and novels.

Yep was born on June 14, 1948, the son of second-generation Chinese Americans. He grew up in an apartment above the grocery store his parents owned in the Western Edition District, a predominantly black neighborhood in San Francisco, California. Yep left his neighborhood for school, taking the bus to Chinatown. He drew upon his feelings of isolation and his adaptation into different cultures in his writings and credited them for his love of science fiction: “In the 1950s when I was growing up, there were no books on being Chinese American,” Yep later reported. “I really liked science fiction because kids from the everyday world were taken to another world, and had to learn another language, another culture. Science fiction was about adapting and that’s what I was doing every time I got off the bus.”

Yep discovered his love of writing while attending a predominantly white Catholic high school. A teacher encouraged him to pursue his writing, telling Yep that if he wanted an “A” in the course, he had to get his work published. Although he did not get any of his writing published at that time, the experience of applying for publication helped Yep in the future. From there Yep went to Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. While in college, his short stories began to get published, earning him awards and accolades. He returned to California where he graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz.

In 1973, Sweetwater, his first science fiction novel for children, was published. “I didn’t realize it at the time, but the aliens in the book are based on the bachelor society in Chinatown,” Yep explained, referring to the large number of unmarried Chinese immigrant men in the early part of the century. Much of Yep’s fiction expressed alienation, recalling his childhood feelings of living between two cultures and having to adapt to unfamiliar surroundings. He enrolled in the doctoral program in literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo. In 1975, he earned his Ph. D., and he saw the publication of the award-winning Dragonwings. The novel for young adults, based on a true story, is about a Chinese American aviator who built and flew a flying machine in 1909. The book enjoyed wide success, receiving numerous awards, including the Newberry Honor Book award for the best children’s book in 1976.

Yep has enjoyed many other literary successes, including Dragon's Gate, winning him his second Newberry, the wildly popular The Rainbow People and Tongues of Jade, compilations of Chinese folktales, and the production of the stage adaptation of Dragonwings. Yep has also taught creative writing at the University of California at Berkeley.

Further reading: Dianne Johnson-Feelings, Presenting Laurence Yep (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995).

—Elizabeth A. Henke