What Is The Feminist Movement Of The 1960's

The Feminist movement of the 1960's focused on braking down workplace inequality. In 1964, Representative Howard Smith of Virginia planned on adding a prohibition on gender discrimination into the Civil Rights Act that was under consideration. The law passed with the amendment intact. Later realized that the Equal Employment Opportunity commission, was not going to help enforce the new laws protecting women at work. A group of feminists decided to found and organization that would fight gender discrimination through the courts and legislatures. Summer of 1966, they launched the National Organization for Women or NOW. NOW lobby Congress for pro-equality laws and help women needing legal aid as they battled workplace discrimination in court. They wanted to get more women to participation on a public, political level.
The women's liberation movement wanted to demolish the patriarchy.
They believed this was oppressing every woman’s life, public and private. "The personal is political" was a strongly believed idea during this time. Women's political inequality was equally important to their personal ramifications. This affected their relationships, sexuality, birth control, clothing and body image, and roles in marriage, housework, and childcare. The feminist movement wanted women's equality on both a political and personal level. The success of the feminist movement was driven by an economic and societal changes. By the early 60s, two-thirds of all jobs went to women. One feminist wrote, "The women's movement is a nonhierarchical one. It does things collectively and
experimentally."