Women's Movement of the 1960s

Women’s Movement of the 1960s

While every week on CBS June Cleaver wore a string of pearls as she served dinner on her perfectly polished china, more than 40% of American women over the age of 16 were working outside of the home. The public image of the perfect wife and mother being the only image that women should or could aspire to was not truly indicative of what the country was growing to look like. In Betty Friedan’s seminal book The Feminine Mystique she wrote, “I think this has been the unknown heart of a woman’s problem in America for a long time, this lack of a private image. Public images that defy reason and have very little to do with women themselves have the power to shape too much of their lives.” The fact was, women were working but the problem was they weren’t working for equal pay, in comparable or meaningful jobs and were even expected, in the case of stewardesses, to retire by 32 so that they could start a family.

Betty Friedan leads a protest

Even though women were working, they still couldn’t do basic things such as get a credit card in their names, serve on a jury in most states, get an Ivy League education and be in charge of their own reproductive concerns.

Feminist leaders like Betty Friedan, Robin Morgan and Simone de Beauvoir had started a new conversation to address these and other women’s rights around the world. These women, and other organizers, began forming groups such as the New York Radical Women and the National Organization for Women (or NOW!). Borrowing tactics from the leaders of the Civil Rights movement, these organizations were mirrored after SCLC and SNCC. And though these organizations served as a blueprint for the women’s movement, many women inside these organizations were being met with discrimination and were expected to do things like bring Martin Luther King coffee and make copies.

NOW logo

On September 7, 1968, the New York Radical Women gathered more than 100 protesters to disrupt the sexist and belittling Miss America Pageant. At this demonstration, women threw things such as girdles, bras, hair curlers and other symbols of beauty standards into the “Freedom Trashcan” and chanting “Freedom for Women!” in Arabic inside the convention hall. When reporters came to cover this event, NYRW protesters insisted only on speaking to female reporters.

New York Radical Women group protests 1968 Miss America Pageant

Other, larger, movements had taken place – five thousand women dressed in black had marched on Washington in protest of the Vietnam War. When asked why there had been very little press coverage, the managing editor Clifton Daniel said that there was little chance of violence and therefore no need to cover it. The success, however, of the 1968 Miss America protest had hinged on the fact that 1) there were already news cameras covering the event, 2) the request for female reporters only rippled into another conversation about the lack of women in media and ultimately led to more women being employed as journalism and 3) the massive coverage became the launch of the Second Wave of Feminism.

By the end of the 1960s, women were being admitted into Yale University, a government agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, had been formed to enforce Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that prohibited job discrimination had changed the sexist practices in the flight attendant workforce, Muriel Siebert became the first woman to own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange - leading the way for more women to infiltrate male dominated fields - and June Cleaver was no longer on television.

Muriel Siebert

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