The Women's Movement (AQA A-Level History): Revision Notes

The Women's Movement

Introduction

During the 1960s and early 1970s, a renewed feminist movement emerged in the United States, inspired by Betty Friedan's influential work The Feminine Mystique. This movement achieved measurable progress in addressing discrimination against women, particularly through legislative reform and legal challenges. However, the movement's overall success remained limited due to internal divisions between moderate and radical factions, particularly with the emergence of the Women's Liberation Movement, and its failure to engage working-class women.

Emergence of the movement

Eleanor Roosevelt's commission

Eleanor Roosevelt played an instrumental role in exposing the extent of workplace discrimination against women. In 1960, she established a commission to investigate the employment status of women. Though Roosevelt died before the commission completed its work, the findings published in 1963 revealed the second-class status women occupied in the American workforce.

The 1963 report documented stark inequalities across professional and technical fields. Men held 95 per cent of company management positions and 85 per cent of technical roles. Women represented merely seven per cent of doctors and four per cent of lawyers. Beyond occupational segregation, the commission uncovered a substantial wage gap: women typically earned between 50 and 60 per cent of the wages paid to men performing identical work. Most women remained concentrated in low-paid occupations with limited prospects for advancement.

Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique

Betty Friedan exerted even greater influence on the movement's development through her 1963 publication The Feminine Mystique. Friedan's work articulated what many American women privately felt but had not publicly expressed: that life offered more fulfillment than domestic duties alone.

The Feminine Mystique refers to the prevailing cultural assumption that a woman's happiness derived entirely from her role as wife and mother.

Friedan challenged women to reject this limiting ideology and demanded expanded employment opportunities for women. She argued that raising children should constitute a shared responsibility between both parents, enabling wives to pursue careers if they chose. By 1963 and 1964, Friedan grew increasingly frustrated with the lack of tangible progress despite government legislation addressing employment discrimination. This disappointment prompted her to establish the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966.

National Organization for Women (NOW)

NOW attracted predominantly white, middle-class women who sought to combat explicit examples of workplace discrimination through organized action. The organization experienced rapid growth, reaching 40,000 members by the early 1970s and coordinating demonstrations in multiple American cities.

NOW pursued a legal strategy, challenging discriminatory practices through the court system. Between 1966 and 1971, these legal efforts secured $30 million in back pay for women who had not received wages equal to their male counterparts. This approach demonstrated that systematic legal challenges could produce concrete financial results for working women who had experienced pay discrimination.

Women's Liberation Movement

A more radical strand of feminism emerged under the banner of the Women's Liberation Movement. These activists, also identified as feminists (supporters of women's rights who believe men and women deserve equality in all spheres), adopted far more confrontational aims than NOW. The Women's Liberation Movement distinguished itself through its wholesale rejection of male supremacy in all its forms.

These radical feminists demanded the removal of male dominance from employment structures, political institutions, and media organizations. They argued that true equality required eliminating all manifestations of patriarchal control, not merely securing equal pay or employment rights. Some activists viewed even wearing cosmetics as an act of compliance with male supremacy and deliberately avoided makeup as a form of protest.

The Women's Liberation Movement employed dramatic tactics designed to generate maximum publicity. Activists burned brassieres in public demonstrations, presenting these undergarments as symbols of male domination over women's bodies. In 1968, feminists organized a protest outside the Miss America beauty contest in Atlantic City, where they crowned a sheep "Miss America" to mock what they considered the degrading treatment of women as objects for male judgment.

Impact and limitations of radical tactics

The theatrical nature of these protests diverted attention from pressing concerns such as equal remuneration and improved employment opportunities, which required sustained political and legal pressure rather than symbolic gestures.

Campaign to legalise abortion

Abortion remained illegal throughout the United States during this period. Feminists contested this restriction, maintaining that forcing women to continue unwanted pregnancies constituted an unacceptable limitation on women's autonomy. They pursued change through the judicial system, recognizing that legal precedent could establish abortion rights more effectively than legislative action.

The most consequential case addressing abortion rights was Roe v. Wade, which proceeded through the courts from 1970 to 1973. Sarah Weddington, a feminist lawyer, represented one of her clients, Norma McCorvey. To protect McCorvey's anonymity, legal documents identified her as Jane Roe. McCorvey already had three children who had been placed in care and wished to terminate another pregnancy rather than have additional children she could not raise.

Achievements and limitations

The women's movement secured several legislative victories that established legal frameworks for equality, though implementation often lagged behind the passage of laws.

The 1963 Equal Pay Act mandated that employers pay women the same wages as men for performing the same work. This legislation addressed wage discrimination for women already in employment. However, the Act contained a substantial limitation: it did not address discrimination preventing women from obtaining certain positions in the first place. Women continued to face barriers when seeking jobs in male-dominated fields.

The 1972 Educational Amendment Act prohibited sex discrimination in education, ensuring girls could follow the same curriculum as boys. This legal change promised to expand career opportunities by providing girls with identical educational preparation to their male peers. Nevertheless, schools required considerable time to modify their traditional curricula, and the benefits of curriculum equality filtered through slowly to the broader education of girls.

That same year, the Supreme Court ruled that the United States Constitution guaranteed equal rights to men and women. Despite this constitutional interpretation, many Americans who opposed equal rights for women refused to accept this ruling. The practical impact of the decision remained contested.

An increasing number of women entered professions that had previously been male preserves, particularly law and medicine. The traditional family structure, featuring a male breadwinner and female homemaker, gradually gave way to a two-career family model in which both parents pursued professional employment. This represented a substantial shift in American domestic arrangements, though it remained more common among middle-class families.

Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment, but the states did not ratify it. This failure demonstrated the limits of the women's movement's political influence. Constitutional amendments required not only federal approval but also state-level consensus, which the movement could not secure.

The women's movement attracted substantial support from middle-class women who possessed the education and resources to engage in organized activism. However, few working-class women participated in the movement. This class divide weakened the movement's claim to represent all American women. Additionally, the movement experienced ideological fracturing between moderate feminists who sought gradual reform through legal channels and extreme feminists whose radical tactics alienated potential supporters. These divisions limited the movement's overall effectiveness.

Evidence of progress in employment

Statistical evidence reveals mixed progress in women's employment between 1950 and 1970. Women constituted 38 per cent of all workers by both 1960 and 1970, compared to eight per cent in 1950, indicating substantial overall growth in female workforce participation.

Within white-collar occupations, women's representation increased from 40 per cent in 1950 to 48 per cent by 1970. However, this growth was unevenly distributed across different professional categories. Women's share of professional positions actually declined slightly from 40 per cent in 1950 to 38 per cent in 1960, before recovering to 40 per cent in 1970. Managerial roles showed minimal improvement, rising from 14 per cent in both 1950 and 1960 to just 17 per cent by 1970.

Women achieved more substantial gains in clerical positions, increasing from 62 per cent in 1950 to 74 per cent by 1970. This concentration in clerical work reflected persistent occupational segregation, with women channeled into administrative support roles rather than decision-making positions. Sales positions showed modest growth from 34 per cent in 1950 to 39 per cent by 1970.

Blue-collar employment demonstrated slow but steady progress. Women's representation in craft occupations remained extremely low, rising from three per cent in both 1950 and 1960 to merely five per cent by 1970. Operative positions increased from 27 per cent in 1950 to 32 per cent by 1970. Labourer positions doubled from four per cent in 1950 and 1960 to eight per cent by 1970, though from a very low baseline.

Women dominated private household work consistently, maintaining 95-96 per cent of these positions across all three decades. Other service sector employment increased from 45 per cent in 1950 to 55 per cent by 1970. Farm work remained stable at approximately nine to ten per cent across the period.

These figures demonstrate that while women entered the workforce in greater numbers, they continued to face significant barriers to entry in many professional and skilled occupations, particularly management positions and traditionally male-dominated trades.

Key dates

• 1963: Publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique
• 1964: Establishment of the Equal Opportunities Commission
• 1966: Formation of the National Organization for Women (NOW)
• 1972: Passage of the Educational Amendment Act