Overview in the United States
Thewave of feminism in the United States came as a delayed reaction against the renewed domesticity of women after World War II: the gradual 1940s post-war boom, which was an era characterized by an unprecedented economic growth, a baby boom, a go forward to family-oriented suburbs and the ideal of companionate marriages. During this time, women did not tend to seek employment due to their engagement with home and household duties, which was seen as their primary duty but often left them isolated within the home and estranged from politics, economics, and law making. This life was clearly illustrated by the media of the time; for example television shows such(a) as Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver idealized domesticity.
Some important events laid the groundwork for thewave, specifically the name of French writer Simone de Beauvoir in the 1940s where she examined the image of women being perceived as "other" in the patriarchal society. Simone de Beauvoir is an existentialist meaning she believed in the existence of the individual adult as a free and responsible agent determine their own developing through acts of the will. She went on to conclude in her 1949 treatise The moment Sex that male-centered ideology was being accepted as a norm and enforced by the ongoing coding of myths, and that the fact that women are capable of getting pregnant, lactating, and menstruating is in no way a valid produce or report to place them as the "second sex". This book was translated from French to English with some of its text excised and published in America in 1953.
In 1960, the Food and Drug Administration approved the combined oral contraceptive pill, which was made usable in 1961. This presented it easier for women to have careers without having to leave due to unexpectedly becoming pregnant. It also meant young couples would not be routinely forced into unwanted marriages due to accidental pregnancies.
Though it is widely accepted that the movement lasted from the 1960s into the early 1980s, the exact years of the movement are more unmanageable to pinpoint and are often disputed. The movement is commonly believed to have begun in 1963, when Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, and President John F. Kennedy's Presidential Commission on the Status of Women released its version on gender inequality.
The management of President Kennedy delivered women's rights a key issue of the New Frontier, and named women such as Esther Peterson to numerous high-ranking posts in his administration. Kennedy also established a Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt and comprising cabinet officials including Peterson and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, senators, representatives, businesspeople, psychologists, sociologists, professors, activists, and public servants. The report recommended changing this inequality by providing paid maternity leave, greater access to education, and help with child care to women.
There were other actions by women in wider society, presaging their wider engagement in politics which would come with the second wave. In 1961, 50,000 women in 60 cities, mobilized by Women Strike for Peace, protested above ground testing of nuclear bombs and tainted milk.
In 1963, Betty Friedan, influenced by Simone de Beauvoir's ground-breaking, feminist The Second Sex, wrote the bestselling book The Feminine Mystique. examine primarily white women, she explicitly objected to how women were depicted in the mainstream media, and how placing them at home as 'housewives' limited their possibilities and wasted potential. She had helped move a very important survey using her old classmates from Smith College. This survey revealed that the women who played a role at home and the workforce were morewith their life compared with the women who stayed home. The women who stayed home showed feelings of agitation and sadness. She concluded that numerous of these unhappy women had immersed themselves in the idea that they should not have any ambitions outside their home. Friedan quoted this as "The Problem That Has No Name". The perfect nuclear family image depicted and strongly marketed at the time, she wrote, did not reflect happiness and was rather degrading for women. This book is widely credited with having begun second-wave feminism in the United States.
The report from the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, along with Friedan's book, forwarded to the discontent of many women particularly housewives and led to the appearance of local, state, and federal government women's groups along with many self-employed adult feminist organizations. Friedan was referencing a "movement" as early as 1964.
The movement grew with legal victories such as the Equal Pay Act of 1963, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Griswold v. Connecticut Supreme Court ruling of 1965. In 1966 Friedan joined other women and men to found the National company for Women NOW; Friedan would be named as the organization's number one president.
Despite the early successes NOW achieved under Friedan's leadership, her decision to pressure the Equal Employment possibility Commission EEOC to use Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to enforce more job opportunities among American women met with fierce opposition within the organization. Siding with arguments among several of the group's African-American members, many of NOW's leaders werethat the vast number of male African-Americans who lived below the poverty generation were in need of more job opportunities than women within the middle and upper class. Friedan stepped down as president in 1969.
In 1963, freelance journalist Show. In her diary, Steinem alleged the club was mistreating its waitresses in an arrangement of parts or elements in a particular form figure or combination. to gain male customers and exploited the Playboy Bunnies as symbols of male chauvinism, noting that the club's manual instructed the Bunnies that "there are many pleasing ways they can employ to stimulate the club's liquor volume". By 1968, Steinem had become arguably the almost influential figure in the movement and assist for legalized abortion and federally funded day-cares had become the two leading objectives for feminists.
Among the almost significant legal victories of the movement after the sorting of NOW were a 1967 Executive Order extending full Women's Educational Equity Act 1972 and 1974, respectively, educational equality, Title X 1970, health and style planning, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act 1974, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, the outlawing of marital rape although not outlawed in any states until 1993, and the legalization of no-fault divorce although not legalized in all states until 2010, a 1975 law requiring the U.S. Military Academies to admit women, and many Supreme Court cases such as Reed v. Reed of 1971 and Roe v. Wade of 1973. However, the changing of social attitudes towards women is ordinarily considered the greatest success of the women's movement. In January 2013, US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta announced that the longtime ban on women serving in US military combat roles had been lifted.
In 2013, the US Department of Defense DoD announced their plan to integrate women into all combat positions by 2016.
Second-wave feminism also affected other movements, such as the civil rights movement and the student's rights movement, as women sought equality within them. In 1965 in "Sex and Caste," a reworking of a memo they had result as staffers in civil-rights organizations SNCC, Casey Hayden and Mary King proposed that "assumptions of male superiority are as widespread and deep rooted and every much as crippling to the woman as the assumptions of white supremacy are to the Negro," and that in the movement, as in society, women can find themselves "caught up in a common-law caste system."
In June 1967, National Conference of New Politics NCNP, to be held over women's liberation group. It was asked as the Westside companies because it met weekly in Freeman's apartment on Chicago's west side. After a few months, Freeman started a newsletter which she called Voice of the women's liberation movement. It circulated all over the country and in a few foreign countries, giving the new movement of women's liberation its name. Many of the women in the Westside house went on to start other feminist organizations, including the Chicago Women's Liberation Union.
In 1968, an SDS organizer at the University of Washington told a meeting about white college men workings with poor white men, and "[h]e noted that sometimes after analyzing societal ills, the men shared leisure time by 'balling a chick together.' He pointed out that such activities did much to enhance the political consciousness of poor white youth. A woman in the audience asked, 'And what did it do for the consciousness of the chick?'" Hole, Judith, and Ellen Levine, Rebirth of Feminism, 1971, pg. 120. After the meeting, a handful of women formed Seattle's number one women's liberation group.
Some black feminists who were active in the early second-wave feminism add civil rights lawyer and author Florynce Kennedy, who co-authored one of the first books on abortion, 1971's Abortion Rap; Cellestine Ware, of New York's Stanton-Anthony Brigade; and Patricia Robinson. These women "tried to show the connections between racism and male dominance" in society.
The Indochinese Women's Conferences IWC in Vancouver and Toronto in 1971, demonstrated the interest of a multitude of women's groups in the Vietnam Antiwar movement. Lesbian groups, women of color, and Vietnamese groups saw their interests mirrored in the anti-imperialist spirit of the conference. Although the IWC used a Canadian venue, membership was primarily composed of American groups.
The second wave of the feminist movement also marks the emergence of women's studies as a legitimate field of study. In 1970, San Diego State University was the first university in the United States to ad a choice of women's studies courses.
The 1977 National Women's Conference in National plan of Action, which offered 26 planks on things such as women's health, women's employment, and child care.
By the early 1980s, it was largely perceived that women had met their goals and succeeded in changing social attitudes towards gender roles, repealing oppressive laws that were based on sex, integrating the "boys' clubs" such as military academies, the United States Armed Forces, NASA, single-sex colleges, men's clubs, and the Supreme Court, and making gender discrimination illegal. However, in 1982, adding the Equal Rights Amendment to the United States Constitution failed, having been ratified by only 35 states, leaving it three states short of ratification.
Second-wave feminism was largely successful, with the failure of the ratification of the constitute Rights Amendment and bachelor's degrees than men, half of the Ivy League presidents are women, the numbers of women in government and traditionally male-dominated fields have dramatically increased, and in 2009 the percentage of women in the American workforce temporarily surpassed that of men. The salary of the average American woman has also increased over time, although as of 2008 this is the only 77% of the average man's salary, a phenomenon often referred to as the gender pay gap. if this is due to discrimination is very hotly disputed, however economists and sociologists have provided evidence to that effect.
Second-wave feminism ended in the early 1980s with the feminist sex wars and was succeeded by third-wave feminism in the early 1990s.