Women’s Rights

The feminist movement also grew in the 1960s. Women were active in both the civil rights movement and the labor movement, but their increasing awareness of gender inequality often did not find a receptive audience among male leaders in those movements. When Casey Hayden and Mary King, presented a document entitled “On the Position of Women in SNCC” about the treatment of women within their organization, Stokely Carmichael crassly responded that the appropriate position for women in SNCC was “prone.” 

In response, many of these women began to form movements of their own, inspired by many of the same strategies used by the civil rights and labor movements. Soon the country experienced a groundswell of feminist consciousness that rewrote the expectations of women in postwar America. Though often described as the “feminist movement,” it’s more accurate to discuss a plurality of women’s movements in the 1960s due to the variety of concerns and goals espoused by women of different ages, classes, races, ethnicities, and sexualities.

Political Changes

An older generation of women who preferred to work within state institutions figured prominently in the early part of the decade. When John F. Kennedy established the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women in 1961, former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt headed the effort. The commission’s official report, released in 1963, found discriminatory provisions in the law and practices of industrial, labor, and governmental organizations.

Change was recommended in areas of employment practices, federal tax and benefit policies affecting women’s income, labor laws, and services for women as wives, mothers, and workers. This call for action addressed the types of discrimination primarily experienced by middle-class and elite White working women, many of whom were used to advocating through institutional structures like government agencies and unions. The specific concerns of poor and non-White women, who lacked access to these sources of political power, lay largely beyond the scope of the report.

The Pill

Medical science also contributed a tool to assist women in their liberation. In 1960, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the birth control pill, freeing some women from the restrictions of pregnancy and childbearing. Women with access to the pill could limit, delay, and prevent reproduction, creating opportunities to work, attend college, and delay marriage. Within five years of the pill’s approval, some six million women were using it.

The pill’s development did not benefit all women, however. To secure FDA approval, the pill’s creators tested a high dosage version of the pill on women in Puerto Rico. The women were informed that the pill would prevent pregnancy but were not told that they were part of a clinical trial. Some experienced severe side effects that were largely dismissed by the men conducting the trial. In addition, thirty states passed laws following the FDA’s approval of the pill making it a criminal offense to sell contraceptive devices, thereby limiting women’s access to the pill in these states.

The pill was the first medicine ever intended to be taken by people who were not sick. Even conservatives saw it as a possible means of making marriages stronger by removing the fear of unwanted pregnancy and improving the health of women. Its opponents, however, argued that it would promote sexual promiscuity, undermine the institutions of marriage and the family, and destroy the moral code of the nation.

The Feminine Mystique

Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique hit bookshelves the same year that President Kennedy’s commission released its report. Friedan, a former union activist, journalist, and now suburban mother, identified in her book the “problem that has no name.” In her work, she cataloged the growing data on suburban women like herself who not only felt unfulfilled in their role as housewives, but felt a profound guilt and isolation because of their dissatisfaction. In doing so, she helped many White middle-class American women come to see their dissatisfaction as housewives not as something “wrong with [their] marriage, or [themselves],” but instead as a social problem experienced by millions of American women.^[1] No longer would women allow society to blame the “problem that has no name” on discredited explanations such as a loss of femininity, too much education, or too much female independence.

NOW

In 1966, the National Organization for Women (NOW) formed and proceeded to set an agenda for the feminist movement. Framed by a statement of purpose written by Friedan, the agenda began by proclaiming NOW’s goal to make possible women’s participation in all aspects of American life and to gain for them all the rights enjoyed by men. Among the specific goals was the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment.

Other women’s advocacy groups considered the intersection of racism and poverty, drawing on the dual emphasis of the African American civil rights movement. Mothers on welfare began to form local advocacy groups in addition to the National Welfare Rights Organization, founded in 1966. These activists, mostly African-American, fought for greater benefits and more control over welfare policy and implementation. Women like Johnnie Tillmon successfully advocated for larger grants for school clothes and household equipment in addition to gaining due process and fair administrative hearings prior to termination of welfare benefits. For many of these women, the goals of NOW and Friedan’s wing of the feminist movement were not especially relevant to their needs. The right to work and escape suburban boredom held little relevance for poor women of color, for whom working was a necessity and a suburban house remained a far-off dream.

Yet another mode of feminist activism was the formation of consciousness-raising groups. These groups met in women’s homes and at women’s centers, providing a safe environment for women to discuss everything from experiences of gender discrimination to pregnancy, from abusive or unhealthy relationships to self-image. The goal of consciousness-raising was to increase self-awareness and validate the experiences of women. Groups framed such individual experiences as relevant examples of society-wide sexism, and claimed that “the personal is political.”Carol Hanisch, “The Personal Is Political,” in Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt, eds., Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation (New York: Radical Feminism, 1970).[\footnote] Consciousness-raising groups created a wealth of personal stories that feminists could use in other forms of activism and crafted networks of women from which activists could mobilize support for protests.

Figure 1. The Women's Strike for Equality on Connecticut Avenue NW in Washington, DC August 26, 1970. (credit: “Washington Area Spark”/Flickr)

The end of the decade was marked by the Women’s Strike for Equality, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of women’s right to vote. Sponsored by the National Organization for Women (NOW), the 1970 protest focused on employment discrimination, political equality, abortion, free childcare, and equality in marriage. All of these issues foreshadowed the backlash against feminist goals in the 1970s. Not only would feminism face opposition from other women who valued the traditional homemaker role that feminists challenged, the movement would also fracture internally as Black and minority women challenged White feminists’ racism, and lesbians and transgender women vied for equal recognition within feminist organizations.