Abstract
Chapter 3 provides an overview of the women’s movements during the decades after suffrage. It discusses the diversity in race/ethnicity, class, ideology, and organization within the feminisms of the 1930s–1970s. Notwithstanding the divisions and tensions among women’s groups, there was room for collaboration. In this context, feminists actively challenged the status quo, becoming a major force by the late 1960s.
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Notes
- 1.
O’Farrell and Kornbluh, Rocking the Boat; Barakso, Governing NOW, 19–20.
- 2.
Orleck, Rethinking American Women’s Activism. For a critique of the “wave” theory, see Dayton and Levenstein, “The Big Tent of U.S. Women’s and Gender History,” 808; and Orleck, Rethinking American Women’s Activism, xi.
- 3.
DuBois, “Eleanor Flexner,” 81–90, quotes on 84; Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique, 5, 10; Storrs, “Red Scare Politics,” 4 n8. An important but short-lived (1946–1950) Popular Front organization was the Congress of American Women, an advocate for peace, social justice, racial equality, and women’s rights; it included African American women in leadership positions. During the Second Red Scare, it was targeted, causing its demise: Swerdlow, “The Congress of American Women,” 296–312.
- 4.
Quote from Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique, 149; Storrs, “Red Scare Politics,” 496. On the idealization of homemaker and mother, see May, Homeward Bound.
- 5.
Storrs, “Red Scare Politics,” 524; Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique, 11.
- 6.
Friedan, The Feminist Mystique; Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique, 102–123, 229–233, 153, 169, quote on 231; Randolph, Florynce “Flo” Kennedy, 1–9, 152–67.
- 7.
Storrs, “Red Scare Politics.”
- 8.
Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique, 251; quote on 123. For founders’ profiles, see NOW, “Honoring Our Founders.”
- 9.
O’Farrell and Kornbluh, Rocking the Boat; Cobble, “Recapturing Working-Class Feminism, 60, 72; Gabin, Feminism in the Labor Movement. Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement, uses “labor feminists” to refer to working-class women activists.
- 10.
Cott, “Feminist Politics in the 1920s”; Orleck, Rethinking American Women’s Activism, 31–34.
- 11.
Rupp and Taylor, Survival in the Doldrums 1–8, 46; see 24–44 for a discussion on the NWP during the 1940s–1960s.
- 12.
Orleck, Rethinking American Women’s Activism, 44–48.
- 13.
Orleck, Rethinking American Women’s Activism, 55–56, 62–63.
- 14.
Cobble, “Recapturing Working-Class Feminism,” 57–83; Orleck, Rethinking American Women’s Activism, ix.
- 15.
Evans, Tidal Wave, 1; Kyle Swenson, “Who Came Up With the Term ‘Sexual Harassment’?” Nov. 22, 2017, Washington Post, accessed Aug. 16, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/11/22/who-came-up-with-the-term-sexual-harassment/.
- 16.
Women in the labor force increased from 28 percent in 1947 to 37 percent in 1968; working married women increased from 15 percent in 1940 to 37 percent in 1967. As more women worked, their opportunities for higher-status positions decreased: as professional and technical employees, they constituted 45.4 percent in 1940 but only 38.6 percent in 1968. Meanwhile, those same years saw an increase of women as clerical workers, from 52.6 percent in 1940, to 72.6 percent in 1968. Freeman, The Politics of Women’s Liberation, 28–31.
- 17.
Breines, The Trouble between Us, 4–6, quote on 6.
- 18.
Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique, 226–230; Hartmann, “Pauli Murray,” 76; Barakso, Governing NOW, 12; Harrison, On Account of Sex, 192–96; Orleck. Rethinking American Women’s Activism, 84–93.
- 19.
NOW, “Statement of Purpose,” 1–3, Oct. 29, 1966, ID 48.957, MC 450, EP.
- 20.
Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique, 231–233.
- 21.
For example, Freeman, The Politics of Women’s Liberation, 17, 38–43.
- 22.
Mayeri, Reasoning from Race.
- 23.
Blair, Revolutionizing Expectations.
- 24.
Deslippe, “Organized Labor, National Politics, and Second-Wave Feminism,” 144, 150, 161; O’Farrell and Kornbluh, Rocking the Boat.
- 25.
Orleck, Rethinking American Women’s Activism, 137–57, quote on 138; Springer, Living for the Revolution; Roth, Separate Roads to Feminism; Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows; Nadasen, Welfare Warriors; Breines, The Trouble between Us, 155.
- 26.
Evans, Tidal Wave, 24–26, 61–62, 70–77, esp. 26 and 72; Breines, The Trouble between Us, 119. 148.
- 27.
Roth, Separate Roads to Feminism; Breines, The Trouble between Us; Springer, Living for the Revolution; Chávez, “‘We Have a Long, Beautiful History,” 77–97.
- 28.
Quote from Beale, “Double Jeopardy,” 441. Breines, The Trouble between Us, 4–9, 148; Evans, Tidal Wave, 32–36, 119; Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins,” 93–118. Crenshaw introduced “intersectionality” in Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.” For a critique of the scholarship on intersectionality, see Nash, “re-thinking intersectionality.”
- 29.
Evans, Tidal Wave, 98–109, quote on 98. Ryan, Feminism and the Women’s Movement, 49–50.
- 30.
Gilmore, “Thinking about Feminist Coalitions,” 1–13.
- 31.
Bradley, Mass Media and the Shaping of American Feminism, 4; Dow, Watching Women’s Liberation, 1970.
- 32.
Douglas, Where the Girls Are, 223–225, 244.
- 33.
Barker-Plummer, “News as a Political Resource,” 316.
- 34.
Barker-Plummer, “News as a Political Resource,” 308–316, quote on 309; Barker-Plummer, “Producing Public Voice,” 188–205.
- 35.
Orleck, Rethinking American Women’s Activism, 118–121, quote on 120; Bradley, Mass Media and the Shaping of American Feminism, 143–193.
- 36.
Butler, Two Paths to Equality, 1, 59; quote on 99.
- 37.
Fry, “Alice Paul and the ERA,” 8–24. On Alice Paul, see Walton, A Woman’s Crusade; Cahill, Alice Paul, the National Woman’s Party and the Vote; and Paul interview by Fry.
- 38.
Sklar, “Why Were Most Politically Active Women Opposed to the ERA in the 1920s?” 25–35; Butler, Two Paths to Equality, 90–107; Evans, Tidal Wave, 65–67. For a study of the struggle for the ERA, see Harrison, On Account of Sex, 3–51.
- 39.
Evans, Tidal Wave, 30–38; Echols, Daring to Be Bad, 51–101.
- 40.
Early studies divided women activists into liberal, socialist, radical, and cultural feminists who were white and middle class. Later studies critiqued this characterization for failing to recognize the importance of race and class and the crucial achievements of feminists of color. See Breines, The Trouble between Us, 6–7.
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Tamura, E.H. (2022). Women in Action, 1930s–1970s. In: We Too! Gender Equity in Education and the Road to Title IX. Historical Studies in Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-02074-2_3
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