Gender Equality In The 1960s And 1970's

Gender equality is not simply defined by the achievement of suffrage, as depicted in ‘Women’s Liberation March,’ which is an image photographed on the 26th of August, 1970; gender equality is the achievement of fair treatment from a professional, economic, and intellectual standpoint and is attained only through the drive to change the view of an entire global society on the roles of a class of citizens that still ranks second to the male patriarchy, which is exactly what feminism in the 1960s and 1970s was trying to prove.
The 1960s and 1970s were a period of evolution for American society; the country was recovering from the turmoil of the war in Vietnam and was still combatting antiwar sentiments. This instability proved to be the ideal
breeding ground for a widespread effort to redefine the hard-standing cultural norms in America, which gave rise to movements such as the Civil Rights movement and the “second wave” of the Feminist movement.
Women in the 1960s, despite having attained suffrage through the 19th Amendment in 1920, were still undeniably second class citizens, and their lives were, in every sense of the word, limited. Women were legally subject to their husbands, had no right to their husband's wealth or property, and, for the 38 percent of women that had jobs in the 60s, they were confined to careers in education, healthcare, and social work. It was difficult for women to participate in professional graduate programs such as medical school or law school, and they were often paid lower than men and were barred from promotions or career advancements- all unspoken rules that were excused with the assumption that women were excluded from the responsibilities of supporting a family.
The “first wave” of feminism had sought suffrage because feminists in the 1840s through the 1920s thought having a voice in politics and in the legal actions of the country would make them equal, through all terms of legality, to the male patriarchy. What these early feminists hadn’t realized was that, as No Permanent Waves boldly captures, no waves are permanent . Women in the 60s and 70s realized that it was going to take a lot more than political and legal participation to enlighten American society to its vital need for gender equality. Women were tired of being confined to the role of ‘homemaker’ and to female-normative careers, tired of being undermined by the lack of equal pay, professional opportunities, and legal independence that patriarchal America was forcing down their throats, and tired of inequality. In an effort to empower women and reinforce the ideas of the “first wave” of feminism, women in the 60s and 70s drove the pursuit of gender equality beyond professionalism, politics, and the law and into its “second wave,” declaring, with an impeccable strength and determination, that they were tired of being tired.
If we are to analyze what it has taken for women to realize that gender equality means more than the ability to vote, we must retrace the landmarks of feminism to the Seneca Falls Woman’s Rights Convention of 1848, which was “the moment when disparate forces came together to provide the impetus, leadership, and program for a distinct woman’s rights movement in the United States, ”and was advertised to address the religious, social, and civil rights of the American woman.
The Seneca Falls Woman’s Rights Convention was organized by a number of local Quaker women and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and was strategically scheduled during Philadelphia-stationed orator Lucretia Mott’s visit to the
area.
For many women, the Seneca Falls Woman’s Rights Convention was an extension of the pursuit of women’s roles in education, religion, the antislavery movement, and the family, which were issues that Elizabeth Stanton and her co-workers had spent most of 1840 through 1848 trying to debate and clearly define. It was an opportunity for women to stake claims on the privileges in America that had always been a “man’s territory” because American women had come to the realization that these male privileges were basic human rights that were constitutionally due to every American citizen, including women.
At the convention, American women voiced their discomfort in the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions, which proposed the resolutions to the routine unjust treatment towards women and the rationale these women had behind their propositions. This Declaration proposed that the pursuits of mankind were driven by “substantial happiness” and that if any laws “conflict… with the true and substantial happiness of woman, [they] are… of no validity.” It also remarked that “woman is man’s equal,” as intended by the Creator, and that the fate of the human race “demands that she should be recognized as such.” Up until this point in American history, women had become comfortable with being second class citizens due to the manipulation of the religious and patriarchal machines. Before conventions like the Seneca Falls convention in 1848, the fear that defying these machines was corrupt and perverse was ever-present for women in America, but by declaring that they were equal to the male supremacy and demanding that they be given legalized equal rights to men, women had etched away that fear to reveal a new driving force behind the early women’s rights movement; suffrage.
The Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions was the first document to propose that women should be informed and active participants of the laws under which they are governed, stating that it is woman’s “sacred right” to secure herself to the “elective franchise” of this country. The Declaration claimed that the male patriarchy “[had] compelled [women] to submit to laws… of which she had no voice, withheld [women] from [their] rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men,” and had made women “in the eye of the law, civilly dead,” all propositions that set the foundation for the early waves of the feminist movement’s centerpiece: suffrage.
What is most disturbing about the standard of living for women during the 19th century is that they openly voiced feeling “civilly dead,” which should have been the first indication to the powerful machines of American society that the ideals of equality and the “Pursuit of Happiness” that they were spoon-feeding its citizens were actually mouthfuls of hypocrisy, and that the people had seen through the hazy fraudulence of the “American Dream.” However, since these powerful machines were elite and privileged, Anglo Saxon, Protestant men, it wasn’t too strenuous on their boyish sensitivities for them to disregard grievances that weren’t their own.
Despite the fact that Seneca Falls had laid the foundation for the early feminist movement’s focus on the goal of suffrage, the Declarations and Resolutions proposed by women at the Seneca Falls convention had achieved little else than focus. In fact, many powerful men mocked women for the desire to experience more than what their conservative lives as wives and mothers had offered them. This dysphoria followed women into the 1900s, and from January 10, 1917 to June 4, 1919 a group of women in favor of women’s suffrage set out to combat gender inequality through a different approach.
These women were known as the Silent Sentinels, due to the silent manner by which they protested for women’s voting rights. The Sentinels picketed six days a week in front of the White House until the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution was passed during Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, which, after a seventy-year-long battle, granted women the right to vote and achieved the ultimate goal, at least at the time, of the early feminist movement . Between 1910 and 1918, the Alaska territory, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, and Washington all extended voting rights to women. By the 26th of August, 1920 all 50 states had ratified the 19th Amendment after it had initially been proposed to the house on May 21, 1919. Unfortunately, voting rights were the only rights America had extended towards its women; women were still subject to their husbands and were little more than the property of the patriarchy, all proponents that propelled the feminist movement in America into its “second wave”. The “second wave” of feminism was sparked during the period of the Vietnam War and endured through postwar America. During the 1950s through the 1970s, women had become nurses and soldiers, but were treated as second class soldiers throughout their military career and as veterans, which wasn’t unlike how they were treated as second class American civilians. Nurses represented the bulk of women serving during the Vietnam War and nursing orientations for these women were often brutal. One woman recounts that her orientation consisted of a surgeon throwing a pair of scissors at her and saying "Don't just stand there. He's going to lose that arm anyway. Cut it off. " Her orientation had ended after the patient’s “arm hit the pail.”
For many women during the period of the Vietnam War, establishing careers as nurses and soldiers was a means of staking their claim on freedom from the responsibilities; the war was thrilling and dangerous, and the lives of women during the 50s, 60s, and 70s were lacking in adrenaline. There also wasn’t a house full of children and a demanding husband to maintain at their posts abroad.
After the Vietnam War ended on April 30th, 1975, the patriotic determinism of many American women shifted from support for the war to post-war activism in order to highlight the country’s need for women’s liberation; the impressive performance of women as nurses and soldiers during the Vietnam war had evidently not been significant enough to prove to the American patriarchy that women were as capable as and equal to men. Despite the fact that the country had entered the 20th century, its deep-rooted misogyny and underestimation of femininity still existed to overshadow the women’s rights movement.
Starting more specifically in the 1960s, the “second wave” of feminism targeted the specific issues of sexual equality, including the right to bodily integrity and autonomy, to equal career opportunities, to be free from sexual harassment and rape, to have access to birth control and to have an abortion, to fair and equal wages, to property ownership, to have marital or parental rights, to enter into legal contracts, to hold public office, and to professional education programs.
In 1962 Betty Friedan illustrated the struggles of women during the 1960s for these specific rights and captured the despair of a generation of educated housewives in her book The Feminine Mystique. What Americans found most shocking and what many women found most compelling about Friedan’s work was that she confronted the “universal truth” that women were content as “server[s] of food… bedmaker[s]... [and] somebody [to] call upon ” and defied it through the voices of the disconcerted women in the 1960s. Initially, Friedan had been asked to conduct an interview of her former Smith College classmates at their 15th anniversary reunion and found that many women were discontent with their roles in the family and in society, which inspired her to write The Feminine
Mystique.
In her novel, Friedan called on women to seek opportunities outside their homes and invest in self-fulfillment, which terrified the American patriarchy, and while her work initially catered to the educated, upper-middle-class white women in America, it had such an immense impact on feminism as a whole that it is credited to have sparked feminism’s “second wave.” It is what largely inspired women to demand that their idea of “Pursuit of Happiness” was not the astoundingly discriminatory ratio of men to women with access to career and educational opportunities, was not the wage gap, which reached 59.4% during the 1970s, and was not the portrayal of women as sexual objects, which is something that an entire division of pop culture in America is built upon; the “Pursuit of Happiness” of the American woman was equality.
Feminism’s “second wave” focused heavily on dismantling employment and income inequality for women and targeted the growing issue of gender parity. On July 2nd, 1965, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) was instituted, which was meant to enforce laws against workplace discrimination. However, it quickly became clear to American women that this commission wouldn’t enforce laws that would protect female workers, so in response to the inefficiency of the EEOC, a group of feminists, including Betty Friedan, established the National Organization for Women (NOW) in the summer of 1966, which directly targeted workplace discrimination through the judicial system.
What Betty Friedan and other feminists during the 1960s aimed to achieve was to make the “prevailing system ” open to American women, not destroy it, which is what is most important about the history of feminism in America; the women’s rights movement has never sought to demonize or destroy men, but to prove that women are, in the state of nature, just as capable, important, and equal to men.
What we know about the earliest wave of feminism, and what feminists are most well-known for, are the demands of women such as Elizabeth Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and Susan B. Anthony, who assumed that suffrage would cure the ails of sexual inequality in a country that has failed for centuries to comprehend the power that is the female entity. However, what feminists in the 1840s through the 1970s and even now have failed to realize is that, despite the small steps that American women have taken towards the ultimate achievement of sexually equality, small steps don’t necessarily add up, and this is simply the fault of feminism’s “shoe size.”
The disheartening truth about change is that it takes immense passion, a knack for persuasion, and an impeccable size to de-wire the hard drive of a society programed specifically to be a machine of male dominance. The disheartening truth about feminism is that women in the 1840s, as well as in the 1970s and in recent history, are still not seen as big enough to overcome centuries of belittlement and desensitization to their own dissatisfaction.
It is not a stretch to claim that the wage gap, workplace inequality, the sexualization of women, unequal educational opportunities, and general misogyny through the perpetuation of religious and political machines still exists in the 21st century. It is not a stretch to claim that a patriarchy still exists in the 21st century. It is, however, a stretch to claim that it is a “man’s world,” because in every important event in American history, a woman has been behind the scenes, patiently waiting for the age of woman. Now that feminism has extended into its “third wave,” and perhaps most radical, the question of what it will take for America to acknowledge the power of the American woman is more prevalent than ever, and until women are capable of permanently altering the misogynistic views of the patriarchy, this is a question that may never be answered. However, it is up to women to continue defining the meaning of gender equality.