history
Suggested readings:
Women in the 1920s
The vote, despite its symbolic importance, did little to challenge the barriers of race, class and gender that plagued American women. These factors had far more everyday significance for most women than did political involvement. One of the most important and consequential internal population movements in United States history took place during the first few decades of the 20th century as African American families, whose opportunities in the South were curtailed by the end of Reconstruction, moved to northern cities.
Young African American women proved their mettle as they moved north to take the only kind of employment that was available to them: domestic service. These young women carried domestic service to a fine art, serving wealthy white women and their families, and eventually gaining more control over their schedules and work.
The lifestyles espoused by the privileged middle-class came to characterize the decade of the 1920s in the popular imagination. The "roaring twenties" saw greatly expanded opportunities for young, white, middle-class women who had access to education and jobs. Age proved to be a dividing line among women. Increased economic independence and greater availability of birth control allowed young women freedoms that shocked and annoyed many of the older generation of women.
Fertility control made the 20th-century "sexual revolution" possible. Birth control also allowed married women the option of having careers for the first time. College-educated men and women emphasized the equality of their relationships and companionate marriages that placed primary emphasis on the quality of husband-wife bonds were in vogue. Again, the lives of the middle and upper class contrasted to the work-a-day world of less affluent women who labored in factories, agricultural work and domestic service. Typically, the "color line" tended to define these women since lack of education and lack of employment opportunities stemmed from the same cause: prejudice.
Typically, wealthier women were white and of European extraction. Many poor working women were also white, but the ranks of the poor included most of the black, Native American, Asian, Hispanic and recent immigrant women as well.
M4 The Great Depression and World War II
The Great Depression
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The following decade of the 1930s was a stark contrast to the "roaring twenties." Black despair replaced carefree attitudes for many women and their families. The universal suffering brought about by the Great Depression served to limit the upward mobility of many working women from the previous decade. Women who worked in fields designated as "women's work" often managed to keep their jobs, but married working women and "career girls" were condemned for taking the few jobs available away from men who had families to support. Women who did not work outside their homes resorted to the frugal methods of earlier generations of housekeepers in order to make ends meet. Women who continued to work outside their homes considered their jobs as means of supporting their families, rather than avenues toward independence and personal fulfillment. Furthermore, the Great Depression undermined the structure of many families, newly descended into poverty through the loss of the family's primary income: that of the husband. Family bonds broke down under the emotional stress of poverty the marriage rate dropped, as did the birth rate. Family stress reflected the common desperation of a country wracked by economic ruin. Poor and minority families suffered as the economy got worse. The urban poor, African Americans, rural women and Mexican Americans all faced hardship and discouragement.
As the New Deal policies of the Roosevelt administration put people back to work, more attention was paid to issues concerning women and children. A series of laws targeting conditions and wages benefited working women. Eleanor Roosevelt made women's issues a central part of her contribution as First Lady. Highly visible in her efforts on behalf of women and children, she lobbied both publicly and privately for reform and increased involvement of women in the political process. During the 1920s and 1930s women had experienced both best and worst life had to offer.
World War II
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Two sisters who left the farm to keep our airmen flying. NYA trainees at the Corpus Christi, Texas, Naval Air Base, Evelyn and Lillian Buxkeurple are shown working on a practice bomb shell. By Unknown, from Franklin D. Roosevelt Library & Museum, Library ID: 65716(8), Public Domain. |
World War II has probably had more lasting impact on women's economic progress than any other event during the 20th century. As men were called into wartime service, women by tens of thousands took their places in factories, in munitions plants, on railroads, in shipyards and steel plants, as bus and taxi drivers. In contrast to the earlier mobilization of women in World War I, many of these women were older, married and had children. Between 1941 and 1945, over 60 percent of the women who entered the work force were over the age of thirty-five. Thrust into a workplace that was designed for men, women faced problems of sexual harassment, lack of child care and inconvenient hours. Nevertheless, many of them thrived on the challenges and the feeling that they could fill men's shoes. Women who had been discouraged from working during the depression were told that their patriotic duty required them to do so now. After the war, public opinion predictably reversed itself women were supposed to do their patriotic duty by returning to their homes, thereby allowing newly discharged servicemen to return to work. On the surface anyway things would return to "normal", however, the seeds of change had been sown and World War II proved to be only a prologue to greater changes in the following decades.
The momentous political and economic events of the first half of the 20th century served to blur traditional separation of gender roles as women took over men's jobs during the world wars and again during the Great Depression when many men suffered loss of identity along with their employment. The subsequent recoveries to more secure and prosperous conditions did redress these changes to some extent, most notably after the Second World War, but each of these disruptions resulted in more women who chose not to return to the home and stayed in the workplace, even if it meant demotion when men reclaimed their jobs.
1950s
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In 45 seconds, this electronic surface unit will cook eggs. One cup of water boils in two minutes! The microwave tube that sends out cooking waves is directly below the fiberglass disk that holds the food to be cooked. The panel of switches on the wall will command the perforated hood to drop down and cover the disk. Cooking action starts only after the hood fits securely into groove around the disk, stops when the hood rises. The hood automatically goes up when the timer on the surface unit rings, stopping cooking action." 1959 Microwave " ( CC BY 2.0 ) by SportSuburban |
The Cold War and domestic anti-communism characterized the social and cultural as well as the political landscape during the immediate post-World War II era. The impact of the cold war on women was significant. Socially, women were encouraged by policy planning experts to mirror diplomatic containment by constraining their lives, especially their sexuality, to their homes. This resulted in a return to middle-class feminine domesticity and more traditional gender roles.
For some women, especially young recently married ones, the end of the war came as a relief. Increasing marriage rates among young women dictated a return to domesticity after the war. These young women wanted time to raise families, fueling a booming birthrate. For other women though, the transition proved difficult. Many older women whose children were grown did not want to be full time homemakers. Self-supporting single women, lesbians and other nontraditional women needed their jobs, and enjoyed the pay boost they got during the war years.
Women's employment showed substantial rises in the period following World War II. Women’s jobs, however, changed significantly. Factories usually reserved assembly line jobs for returning veterans. Women were often hired, but not at their wartime pay levels, or at their former jobs. Women’s work typically included “pink-collar” service sector positions such as clerks and secretaries.
The strong American economy associated with the Korean War and the Cold War, based on manufacturing and dependent on consumerism, fueled a demand for consumer goods such as cars and household appliances. Families moved to the suburbs, and distances traveled to work, to schools, to shopping areas increased. Suburban homemakers found their days filled with church groups, women's clubs, children's activities and domestic responsibilities.
Fulfilling the "American Dream" became the goal of many post-war families. This dream fostered reliance on cars for transportation, the building of vast highway systems and the conversion of crop land to housing developments. There were also increasingly disturbing undercurrents regarding female sexuality as widely available birth control separated sex from reproduction, and the "problem that has no name" moved closer to a definition in Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique.
Some families moved into a rapidly expanding middle class, enabled in many cases by married women entering the work force. At the same time, this affluence contributed to a redefinition of "middle-class" among formerly "working-class" families whose newly achieved prosperity looked like wealth compared to their parents' lives during the Great Depression. Suddenly, all Americans were "middle class." Or where they? Geographical segregation caused by the simultaneous migration of the white middle-class to the suburbs and impoverished rural blacks to the cities emerged. Popular culture facilitated by television emphasized the universality of white middle-class lifestyles, while ignoring the reality faced by households headed by non-white women, and single women from all cultural backgrounds.
1960s
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Sit-in at Woolworth's lunch counter - Tallahassee
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In contrast to the comparative placidity of the 1950s, the 1960s were years of rapid social change affecting women and families. This period of complex social issues and precipitant political reversals completely reordered the country in the terms of gender, race and international agenda. The intensity of the Vietnam War protests, visibility of the youth counterculture, the "second wave of feminism" and the civil rights movement all shook the nation into legal changes, social action and introspection about national mission and attitudes about gender and multiculturalism. The violence and rhetoric of this era still evokes intense emotions for those who lived through these events.
The tumultuous 1960s erupted with political activity and social change on several fronts simultaneously. Women began to find public outlets for their frustrations, and a unified voice. Cross-fertilization between the civil rights movement and women's issues mirrored the previous alliance between abolition and women's right of a century earlier. As was the case in the 19th century, women's organizational skills matured as their commitment to those causes grew. Mothers' concerns for the welfare of their children and future generations placed many of them in the forefront of peace movements, opposing both the spread of nuclear weapons and the escalation of the Vietnam War. The birth control pill provided new choices for women by separating intercourse from reproduction, but a new definition of female sexuality proved elusive. Birth rates and marriage rates dropped. Divisions developing between organizations founded by older and younger women presaged the emergence of a full-fledged "women's liberation" movement in the 1970s.
The Women's Liberation movement, which grew from the radical social activism du jour, affected all women, even those critical of the movement. The strength of this movement came from the middle class, as seasoned professionals and younger, more radical women united to create an atmosphere for change. The effects of self-examination, increased education and greater awareness of political potential were not limited to the middle-class, however. Black and Chicana women, experienced in civil rights activism, provided methods and effective strategies for the feminist movement as well. Extension of the Civil Right Act to include "sex" along with "race creed and national origin" provided a vehicle for voicing women's grievances. The formation of a political organization, the National Organization for Women, in 1966, provided a way for women to address civil rights on a national level. Ultimately, the political and legal changes of the 1960s and 1970s resulted in greater rights for women through affirmative action, control of reproductive rights and legal recourse against sexual-harassment.
During the 1960s and early 1970s, women made great advances in education. The inclusion of women's perspective in educational materials became a major focus of educational establishments and book publishers for the first time. Women also got more jobs as teachers and administrators in education. Most of these opportunities, however, remained unavailable to poor and non-white women.
Increased numbers of women receiving advanced college degrees led to increased numbers of trained, well-educated young women entering the workplace. Some critics blamed these educational opportunities and the resulting economic independence of women for the increased divorce rate and greater numbers of single women heading households. Despite these advances, most women continued to be hired for positions of lower responsibility and less pay than men. The structural inequalities of the system plus continuing discrepancies between opportunities for women of different classes and ethnicity did little either improve the conditions for working women or recover the unity of the earlier gender-based suffrage movement. Educational opportunities went hand-in-hand with changes in views on human (especially female) sexuality, popular conceptions of marriage and definitions of family. Questions about the nature of gender role definition and the "true vocations" of women and men continued to be debated everywhere from small social groups to popular literature.
The political and cultural chaos of the 1960s and 1970s created both opportunities and challenges for women. A broad- based consciousness of women's concerns as a collective category stirred both support and resistance among American women. While less affluent women had always worked outside the home, this period saw a generalized movement of women from different backgrounds, including the middle class, into the workplace. This movement, fueled partly by perceived needs generated by increased consumerism and partly by a real decrease in purchasing power, changed the meanings of "traditional" gender role definitions. More women moved into many formerly all-male jobs and professions, albeit in smaller numbers and often at lower rates of pay.
The Feminine Mystique and Beyond
1970s and '80s
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First Lady Betty Ford sports a button expressing her support for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment while taking some personal time as President Ford plays in the Jackie Gleason Inverrary Classic Celebrities Golf Tournament, Hollywood, Florida. February 26, 1975By Karl Schumacher, Public Domain. |
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Democratic Party politician Geraldine Ferraro at the Democratic National Party Convention in San Francisco, California, 1984. By Nancy Wong - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0 |
During the 1970s, the "women's liberation" movement provoked rapid and profound social, political and legal change. The presumption of what it meant to be a woman changed. The intersections between gender, race and socioeconomic class continued to form both stimulus to action and points of friction. As was true of suffrage at the end of the previous century, the ERA formed a similar, but less successful rallying point. "Women" were not and are not a monolithic group and the contention among the various groups eventually became an obstacle to cooperation. Right-wing traditionalists spoke to redressing the excesses of liberal feminists. Suspicion about the increasingly vocal role of lesbians and militant feminists frightened traditional women. They supported the concept of "equal pay for equal work," but feared the consequences of unorthodox sexuality on family stability. By the end of the decade, the battle over abortion polarized women. Demographic changes resulting from high divorce rates, such as increased numbers of single parents and female heads-of-household, foreshadowed a "feminization of poverty" in the 1980s.
The eventual emergence of a vocal, political antifeminist movement in the mid-1970s set the stage for confrontation between the feminist movement and women who felt threatened by the rapid changes. Women who had followed traditional roles as homemakers and mothers and wanted to maintain the status quo felt that "Women's Liberation" had failed them and had denigrated their contributions to their families and society in general. Feminist alliances with lesbians and other groups they perceived as radicals frightened them. Aided by a growth in the political "New Right" these groups, exemplified by Phyllis Schlafly's STOP ERA, attacked feminism and contributed to growing divisions within feminism. A new President and an economic downturn shifted public attention away from feminist issues in the 1980s.