women's movement

A movement in support of women's rights, especially the mid-twentieth century movement in North America and Europe.

Or the Women's Liberation Movement (WLM), which has had multiple agenda for women, comprising: equal opportunities in education, employment, and pay, self-determination on issues such as contraception, and abortion, improved public facilities for child care, tightening of legal sanctions against violence against women whether in the public or the private sphere, and an end to discrimination on grounds of sexuality, race, religion, and ethnicity. The title of the movement was consciously adopted in the 1960s to move away from the objectification of women in political discourse as was represented by the construction of ‘the woman question’. WLM drew its inspiration from the American New Left movement and represented a general shift in the radical political discourse of the time from a rights-based political language to one based on concepts of ‘oppression’ and ‘liberation’ and of activism. WLM depended on pooling women's lived experiences, and politicizing them through consciousness-raising programmes of meetings, demonstrations, exhibitions, and so forth. WLM, while challenging the frameworks of power within which women are oppressed in different contexts, also emphasized working within the system. This position led many radical feminists to dissociate themselves from WLM.

— Shirin Rai

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I. From Its Origins to 1960

The history of American feminism--the self-conscious desire to achieve sexual equality--began soon after the Revolution, when women's rights tracts first appeared in print. Citizens of the late eighteenth century might read Englishwoman Mary Wollstonecraft's treatise on Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) or Judith Sargent Murray's essays in New England magazines. Both authors urged increased independence for women through access to education. The egalitarian spirit that pervaded their works reappeared in many ways over the next two centuries.

During the early nineteenth century, women participated in numerous efforts to improve women's status, defend their interests, and increase their rights. Educators, such as Emma Willard, Mary Lyon, and Catharine Beecher, promoted advanced training for women in female academies and seminaries. Thousands of women in the 1830s and 1840s joined moral reform societies, organized to end licentiousness, seduction, and prostitution. Female temperance societies strove to save abused wives and families from drunken spouses. Individual reformers spoke out for women's rights. Scottish radical Frances Wright, a follower of Robert Owen, addressed eastern audiences on women's need for equal education, legal equality, and divorce rights. Another Owenite, Ernestine Rose, campaigned for married women's property rights. Author Margaret Fuller led "conversations" among Boston women devoted to "woman and her rights." Among women in the antebellum North, the "woman question" became a lively issue.

The first women's rights movement emerged in part from women's sense of alliance with one another and their shared discontents. It arose also from their experience in reform, especially antislavery. William Lloyd Garrison's wing of abolition, the American Anti-Slavery Society (1833), welcomed women into its ranks and introduced them to politics. Fervent campaigners, such as Philadelphia Quaker Lucretia Mott, Sarah and Angelina Grimké of South Carolina, and Abby Kelley of Massachusetts, served as organizers and lecture agents. But their activism evoked disputes about women's role in public life. Forced to defend their right to speak to audiences of both men and women, the Grimké sisters became advocates of sexual equality. "The investigation of the rights of the slave has led me to a better understanding of my own," Angelina Grimké declared in 1836. Younger women in abolitionist circles, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucy Stone, learned political tactics and absorbed the Garrisonian ideology of human rights.

The first women's rights meeting, at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, capitalized on women's antislavery experience. Called by Mott and Stanton, who had met at an 1840 antislavery convention in London, and some Quaker friends, the convention attracted about three hundred women and men. One-third of the participants signed a "Declaration of Sentiments," modeled on the Declaration of Independence and drawn up by Stanton. The declaration denounced the "absolute tyranny" of men and presented resolutions demanding equal rights for women in marriage, education, religion, employment, and political life. This manifesto channeled a diffuse array of grievances into an agenda to change women's lives. The call for the vote, the most controversial resolution, directly challenged male dominance. Unlike the others, which were unanimously adopted, it won approval by a bare majority only after strenuous efforts by Stanton and abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

During the 1850s, the new women's rights movement promoted its broad agenda through annual conventions. Its leaders waged legislative campaigns to attain married women's property rights and worked independently to rouse support. Susan B. Anthony canvassed New York State, organizing meetings and seeking recruits. But limited by its abolitionist affiliation, the movement was unable to expand its small following. During the Civil War, women's rights leaders maintained their antislavery stance. After the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 made abolition of slavery a Union war goal, they organized the National Women's Loyal League to support the Union war effort, promote the Thirteenth Amendment, and press for woman suffrage.

The immediate postwar years proved a crucial period for women's rights. The controversial issue of black political rights--and debate over the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments--quickly made woman suffrage the most prominent of women's demands. Women's rights leaders formed the Equal Suffrage Association of 1866 to strive for both black and woman suffrage and joined a referendum campaign on these issues in Kansas in 1867. But in that state, male abolitionist support for woman suffrage dwindled. Alienated from their former allies in the antislavery movement, Stanton and Anthony began to campaign independently. Through their publication Revolution, financed by the eccentric Democrat George Francis Train, they promoted a broad spectrum of women's rights--equal suffrage, equal pay, marriage reform, more liberal divorce laws, and "self-sovereignty." They denounced the Fifteenth Amendment, which enfranchised only black men and which other women's rights leaders endorsed. In 1869, two rival suffrage movements emerged. The New York-based National Woman Suffrage Association (nwsa) led by Stanton and Anthony, accepted only women and opposed the Fifteenth Amendment. The Boston-based American Woman Suffrage Association (awsa), which included men, supported black suffrage as a step in the right direction. Among its leaders were Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe.

The new woman suffrage associations followed separate paths for two decades. The nwsa campaigned for a federal woman suffrage amendment, but made no progress. The awsa published the Women's Journal and waged state campaigns, but lost all state referenda. By 1890 only Utah and Wyoming had enfranchised women. Although women had acquired partial voting rights (in local elections or school board elections) in nineteen states, equal suffrage remained elusive. Meanwhile a larger "woman movement" developed. Women's clubs, which started in 1868, multiplied. The clubs promoted self-education through cultural discussions, and after their federation in 1892, turned their attention to civic affairs. Black women's clubs, which also federated in the 1890s, supported racial causes, discussed women's issues, and worked on philanthropic projects. The huge Woman's Christian Temperance Union attracted members by the thousands. Under the leadership of Frances Willard, many members supported woman suffrage. Other women became involved in the campaign for higher education, the establishment of women's colleges, and the promotion of women into the professions.

Although suffragists won no major victories, the growing woman movement provided a potential constituency. The ranks of women activists increased in the Progressive Era with the emergence of new women's organizations devoted to reform. Such endeavors as the settlement movement, the National Consumers League (1899), the Women's Trade Union League (1903), and the women's peace movement abetted the suffrage crusade. By taking part in public affairs, women reformers helped legitimize suffragist claims. Advocates of the ballot had always combined demands for sexual equality (women deserved the vote) with arguments based on sexual difference (women would bring special qualities to politics). During the progressive years, suffragist rhetoric tilted toward an emphasis on the good that women would do for society if enfranchised.

In 1890, the rival women suffrage organizations united in the National American Woman Suffrage Association (nawsa) and began the long path toward victory. Under the leadership of Anna Howard Shaw (1904-1915) and Carrie Chapman Catt (1900-1904, 1915-1920), the nawsa ran a propaganda crusade and campaigned in the states. In its final decade, the suffrage movement built up the momentum that had thus far eluded it. By now, the ballot symbolized all the rights for which women had campaigned. During World War I, conflict arose between the nawsa and Alice Paul's more militant National Woman's party, which waged hunger strikes and picketed the White House. In 1919, Congress at last approved woman suffrage and in August 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified by the states.

In the last decade of the suffrage campaign, the word feminism first came into use. Its appearance marked a watershed dividing the long suffrage crusade from modern feminism. During the course of the struggle for suffrage, the ballot had assumed paramount importance, obliterating the once-broad agenda of women's rights. To Susan B. Anthony, suffrage had been "the pivotal right, the one that underlies all other rights." Modern feminists envisioned a new type of emancipation embracing political equality, economic independence, liberation from convention, and changed relations between the sexes. "All feminists are suffragists, but not all suffragists are feminists," one adherent explained in 1913. Modern feminism embodied paradoxes. Its supporters stressed, variously, women's equality with men and differences from men. They advocated both individualism and gender solidarity. Similar contradictions had long been evident among feminists, from Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose Women and Economics (1899) energized turn-of-the-century activists.

With suffrage achieved, the contradictions within feminism led to conflicts among feminists. These conflicts emerged in the 1920s, a high point of feminist activity. The suffrage movement remobilized for future battles. The nawsa became the League of Women Voters, which sought to educate women about politics and maintained a nonpartisan stance. Disputes erupted between the National Woman's party, which proposed an Equal Rights Amendment (era; 1923), and reform-minded activists in the League of Women Voters and other women's organizations, which opposed it. An era, the reformers claimed, would vitiate laws protecting women workers. Adding to the conflict within the movement was the apparent failure of woman suffrage to change politics. Women failed to vote as a bloc, support women candidates, or effect reforms. Passage of the Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921, which provided funds for maternal and child health clinics, represented the sole legislative triumph of the suffrage movement. Another set of problems was loss of constituency, failure to connect with the next generation, and diversion of feminist energies into careerism or new causes, such as birth control. Finally, feminists of the 1920s might face attacks for trying to dismiss sex differences or, alternately, for dwelling on them and fostering "sex antagonism."

The spirit of social reform dominated women's work in public life during the 1930s. Women who filled important posts in the New Deal--the circle of women around Eleanor Roosevelt--came from the reform-minded wing of the women's movement. Like Labor Secretary Frances Perkins and Mary W. Dewson, head of the Women's Division of the Democratic party, they had experience in settlements, women's clubs, and social welfare, and they opposed the National Woman's party position on an era. Often staunch defenders of women's interests, they described themselves as reformers, not feminists.

The feminist movement reached a low ebb during the 1940s and 1950s. Now aging or retiring, the veterans of the last feminist wave were not replaced by newcomers. Old organizations shrank and vanished or else lost their feminist drive. The remnant of the National Woman's party, the only group still committed to sexual equality, had little influence. World War II undermined women's egalitarian goals. During the war, women won attention as workers in defense industries, but in public life women had little impact on policymaking. The postwar era represented a nadir of feminist history. Characterized by suburbanization, consumerism, and the baby boom, the 1950s constituted a domestic decade. Mass culture emphasized women's family roles, disparaged career women, condemned working mothers, and labeled feminism a form of deviance.

Yet the 1950s saw some important developments that would contribute to the revival of feminism. One was the rapid expansion of higher education. Although the proportion of women among college students fell during the postwar years, their numbers kept rising. This meant a far larger constituency of educated women, always the nucleus of feminist movements. Another major development was the steady, incremental increase of women, notably married women, in the postwar labor force. The rising number of working wives reflected the impact of birth control; women now completed their families at younger ages. It also reflected the postwar growth of the middle class. Among upwardly mobile Americans, the desire to maintain a middle-class lifestyle began to legitimize the two-income family. These developments set the stage for a feminist revival in the 1960s.

Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (1987); Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America (1978); William L. O'Neill, Feminism in America (1969; 2nd ed., 1989).

Nancy Woloch

See also American Woman Suffrage Association; Equal Rights Amendment; League of Women Voters; Married Women's Property Acts; National American Woman Suffrage Association; National Woman Suffrage Association; National Woman's Party; Seneca Falls Convention; Suffrage; and entries for individual feminists.

II. From 1960 to the Present

The revival of feminism in the sixties is often dated from the appearance of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. This 1963 best-seller found a receptive audience among middle- and upper-class women whose experiences Friedan captured. Although her book was important for its challenge to the ideology of domesticity, other factors also contributed to the reemergence of feminism. Unprecedented numbers of married women were being drawn into the job market--albeit on unequal terms--as the service sector of the economy expanded and consumerism fueled the desire of many families for a second income. Both the growing numbers of women graduating from college and the availability of the birth-control pill (which accelerated the already noticeable decline in the birthrate) further encouraged women's entry into the work force. By the early sixties the contradiction between the realities of paid work and higher education, on the one hand, and the still pervasive domestic ideology, on the other, could no longer be reconciled. Equally important in sparking feminist consciousness were the oppositional movements of the sixties, particularly the black freedom movement, which was a source of inspiration and a model for social change for second-wave feminists.

The new feminism emerged from two groups of educated, middle-class, predominantly white women. The National Organization for Women (now) consisted mainly of politically moderate professionals; those who stressed women's liberation were younger, more radical women and typically veterans of the black freedom movement and the New Left. For the former, John F. Kennedy's establishment of the President's Commission on the Status of Women (pcsw) in 1961 and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited employment discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, and national origin, were important catalysts for change. The pcsw, with Eleanor Roosevelt as chair, was charged with the task of documenting the position of American women in the economy, legal system, and the family. Its 1964 report uncovered such pervasive sex discrimination that many commissioners were shocked. Most states also convened commissions that similarly documented widespread sex discrimination. It was at the third national meeting of the state commissions in 1966 that now was born. Angered by the failure of the newly created Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (eeoc) to enforce the anti-sex discrimination provision of Title VII, twenty-eight women (including Friedan) formed the organization to pressure the government into challenging sex discrimination.

Like the naacp after which it was modeled, now adopted a legalistic and assimilationist approach to achieving women's equality. Rather than challenging their subordination in domestic life, the feminists of now committed themselves to fighting for women's integration into public life. Early debates in now concerned the group's advocacy of abortion rights and the Equal Rights Amendment (era). Indeed, when now accorded top priority to the era in its 1968 Bill of Rights, women from the United Auto Workers (out of whose offices the first now mailings had been sent) were pressured to resign from now because of their union's opposition to the amendment. From the moment the era was first discussed by feminists in 1920, it had caused enormous divisiveness; many feared that its passage, by invalidating legislation protective of women, would lead to worsening work conditions for them. This time around, however, opposition to the era from progressive and feminist quarters evaporated quickly when it became clear that the courts and the eeoc were already interpreting Title VII as invalidating protective legislation. Indeed, the women of the United Auto Workers rejoined now two years later when their union endorsed the amendment.

Over the years now's membership became more heterogeneous and its political stance more daring. Although its primary commitment to the era continued, especially after the election of Eleanor Smeal as its president in 1977, now supported even more controversial issues, including lesbian and gay rights, an issue it had earlier skirted. The era ratification effort tripled now's membership (210,000 members by 1982), but its ultimate failure in 1982 deflated the organization's spirit and its numbers. The era campaign had been important in keeping alive public discussion of sex discrimination, but now's focus on the amendment had diverted attention from such pressing problems as child care, abortion rights, and the feminization of poverty.

Within a year of now's formation white women involved in the black freedom movement and the New Left began meeting in small groups to discuss sexism within the radical movement. In contrast to the Old Left, which gave token support to the struggle against male chauvinism, neither the New Left nor the black movement directly addressed the question of female inequality. But the New Left's efforts to expand political discourse to include personal relations (encapsulated in the slogan "the personal is political") unintentionally fueled feminist consciousness as it encouraged women to define housework, relationships with men, and sex in political terms. Moreover, despite the sexism they encountered, women through their work in these movements developed new skills and confidence, as they defied conventional norms of femininity. Important as well was their exposure in the black movement to assertive black women--both older community leaders and the younger activists--whose behavior was at odds with the ideology of domesticity.

Although they sometimes worked with now, these women's liberationists opposed now's moderate politics and its emphasis on legal equality on the grounds that this policy ignored women's subordination in the family and that it encouraged women's integration into a class- and race-stratified system rather than seeking to dismantle that system. Deeply skeptical of achieving substantive change through reform, they disagreed with now's focus on electoral politics, legislation, and lobbying. Instead, like other sixties' radicals, they sought a movement that would maximize individual participation and lead to a radical restructuring of society.

If women's liberationists were united in their opposition to now's liberal feminism, they found themselves in disagreement over two issues: (1) the proper relationship between their fledgling movement and the larger radical movement and (2) the source of women's oppression. Some women (who were called politicos and later identified themselves as socialist-feminists) argued that the two movements should be closely connected: socialism would achieve women's liberation. Others (who called themselves radical feminists) maintained that the women's movement should be entirely independent: capitalism was not the sole source of male dominance nor socialism its remedy. This schism often resulted in separate organizations in larger cities.

The arguably most far-reaching and provocative analyses of male supremacy were propounded by radical feminists such as Shulamith Firestone, Kate Millett, and Ti-Grace Atkinson, who, following Simone de Beauvoir, maintained that gender exists as a social construct, not a biological fact. They were the first to criticize marriage, the nuclear family, normative heterosexuality, violence against women, and sexist health care. By the early seventies both socialist-feminists and liberal feminists had come to agree with much of their analyses.

In the mid-seventies radical feminists became concerned less with confronting male dominance than with building a women's counterculture where "male" values would be banished and "female" values nourished. In this shift, they were following a course taken by some radicals of the sixties. Socialist-feminists who had organized a network of women's liberation unions in many cities found these unions attacked by sectarian leftists who believed that feminism was diverting women from the more important class struggle. As a consequence, socialist-feminism exists primarily in the academy as a theoretical tendency. The liberal feminists of now, benefiting most from the refocusing of radical feminism and the attenuation of socialist-feminism, became the recognized voice of feminism. By 1975 the women's movement as a whole was facing a formidable backlash, one that was orchestrated by the Right but did not lack female adherents. The antifeminists exploited women's fears that feminism would encourage male irresponsibility and female vulnerability and would eliminate male protection of women, especially wives.

Each strand of feminism had drawbacks. Liberal feminism's emphasis on the liberating nature of work ignored the realities of the jobs held by most American women. Radical feminists' contention that gender is the primary contradiction impeded their efforts to reach beyond their white, middle-class base. Socialist-feminists often spoke a language too abstract and jargon-filled to appeal to most women. As one of them, Barbara Ehrenreich, conceded, in trying to "fit all of women's experience into the terms of the market," socialist-feminists were at times "too deferential to Marxism."

Nevertheless, the women's movement probably accomplished more profound and lasting changes than the other radical movements of the sixties:

• Although the increase in the number of women elected to Congress from 1975 to 1988 has been slight--from 19 to 27--the number of women elected to state legislatures has doubled in the same period, from 604 to 1,261.
• Women's rights to work and to equal pay are generally no longer arguable. Because sex segregation in the work force has preserved the wage differential, however, feminists have pioneered a new concept--that of comparable worth for jobs of equal skill and expertise. By 1987 more than forty states and seventeen hundred local governments had taken steps to implement the comparable-worth policy.
• The number of women in professional occupations and in professional and graduate schools has risen dramatically. For example, in the late 1980s one-quarter of all new graduates of law, medical, and business schools were women, compared to 5 percent twenty years earlier. Most colleges and universities have established women's studies programs, and feminist scholars produced some of the most significant work to come out of the academy in the seventies and eighties.
• Feminist efforts to reverse the law's traditionally punitive stance toward victims of rape and domestic violence have been fairly successful. In cases of rape, most states now prohibit evidence regarding a woman's past sexual history and no longer require corroboration in the form of a witness or proof of resistance. Moreover, many police departments have adopted new policies for investigating rape and domestic violence.
• Because feminists have regarded abortion rights as vital to women's self-determination, they have played a key role in abortion's decriminalization and in subsequent efforts to keep it legal.
• The movement's critique of the nuclear family and compulsory heterosexuality has eliminated much of the stigma attached to remaining single and has made it easier for lesbians and gay men to live "outside the closet."
• Most important, the movement has brought about a rethinking of gender that has resulted in far less constricting cultural definitions of maleness and femaleness.

Future prospects depend upon the movement's ability to acknowledge women's differences--both those rooted in race, class, and sexual preference and those arising from different political perspectives. Although it was black women's example that originally helped inspire white women's liberationists, few black women became involved in the early women's movement. Their noninvolvement had many sources, but crucial were white feminists' dichotomization of race and gender, their hostility to the family (traditionally a refuge from racism for blacks), and their idealization of paid work as liberating for women--all of which were at odds with the lived experience of most black women. Since the mid-seventies growing numbers of women of color have joined the feminist movement, and it is from within that they have criticized white feminists' tendency to speak of "women" as a single concept and to analyze gender in isolation rather than in relation to other systems of oppression. How the movement responds to this challenge in the future will determine whether or not it becomes truly multiracial.

Also emerging in the eighties as a divisive issue was the question of pornography. Some feminists, contending that pornography causes violence against women, campaigned for legislation that would effectively eliminate much of it. Other feminists opposed such efforts on civil libertarian grounds and criticized as well the antipornography feminists' critique of pornography as "male"; they argued that this unin tentionally fortifies the traditional distinction between "good" and "bad" women. These "sex wars" did not follow the familiar fault lines of the past; indeed, the salient categories of the late sixties and seventies (radical feminism, socialist-feminism, and liberal feminism) were far less useful for understanding feminist politics in the eighties.

On another issue, some feminists questioned whether mandating equality in circumstances of inequality might not in some cases have deleterious consequences for women: they called for an equality that acknowledges or includes difference. But as other feminists noted, arguments rooted in female difference have usually been invoked by conservatives wishing to maintain gender inequality. It remained to be seen how successfully "equality with difference" could be pursued.

Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975 (1985); Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (1970).

Alice Echols

See also Abortion; Education; Equal Rights Amendment; Friedan, Betty; National Organization for Women; Steinem, Gloria; Women and the Work Force.

A movement to secure legal, economic, and social equality for women, also called the feminist movement. It has its roots in the nineteenth-century women's movement, which sought, among other things, to secure property rights and suffrage for women. The modern feminist movement, often said to have been galvanized by the publication of Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique, began in the 1960s and advocates equal pay for equal work, improved day care arrangements, and preservation of abortion rights. (See Equal Rights Amendment, feminism, and Gloria Steinem.)

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