Broadening of the campaigns for civil rights - Women's rights - OCR AReactions to changes in the role of women

Betty Friedan

Betty Friedan was a journalist who carried out research into how women felt about their lives in the early 1960s. She published her findings in a book called The Feminine Mystique (1963), which quickly became a best-seller. It was a very controversial book as it challenged the idea that women’s home lives made them happy. It also showed the frustrations that many educated women felt about being trapped at home in what Friedan called “comfortable prisons”.

Friedan argued that women should have equal rights to men. However, she was disappointed by the limited changes that resulted from the 1963 Equal Pay Act, such as administrative roles not being included. In addition, Friedan was disappointed with parts of the 1964 Civil Rights Act as it only focused on women’s roles at work. Friedan believed these acts would not end discrimination against women.

National Organization for Women (NOW)

The civil rights movement and free speech activists at universities convinced some women that they needed to do more to achieve equality with men. Feminists, including Friedan, set up the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966. They wanted the government to do more to enforce the laws to end discrimination against women and help to provide them with better career opportunities. To persuade politicians to get their ideas into law, NOW went on marches, organised strikes and petitions, and fought legal cases against discrimination.

By the beginning of the 1970s, NOW had around 40,000 members. It had managed to get around $30 million in backpay for women who had not been paid properly between 1966 and 1970.

NOW wanted an amendment to be added to the US Constitution to guarantee equal rights for women. These rights included:

• laws to guarantee maternity leave from work when women had children
• laws to ensure women had access to contraception and abortion
• laws to provide equal access to education and employment opportunities

However, not all women agreed with NOW. Some thought NOW was too extreme. Others thought that NOW wasn’t addressing the issues facing poorer and black American women, as it was mainly white middle-class women who had created NOW. There were also some feminists who thought that the actions of NOW had not gone far enough.

Women’s liberation movement

Feminists who thought that NOW had not gone far enough in its demands, were called the women’s liberation movement. They wanted to challenge discrimination more openly. Many of them did not want anything to do with men and challenged male dominance of business and the media. Some rejected makeup and bras, as they saw them as things that had been invented by men to control women. They also tried to highlight businesses they thought were sexist by organising sit-ins. Some of them deliberately broke sexist rules.

One of the most well-known protests by the women’s liberation movement was at the Miss America beauty pageant in 1968. Protesters gave out leaflets and shouted feminist slogans outside where the competition was taking place, arguing that it was degrading for women. They also drew media attention by throwing away their bras and makeup, and symbolically crowning a sheep as Miss America.

While protests like this drew a lot of attention to the movement, they also made the movement seem too extreme to some people. Some more moderate feminists thought it distracted the media and politicians from legal attempts to improve rights for women.