Feminism - the Recent, the Present, the Future

Feminism in the 1970s begins with Betty Friedan's last radical feminist act - she organized the Women's Strike for Equality on August 26th, the 50th year anniversary since the 19th Amendment was passed. After this strike Betty Friedan slowly sank into the deep waters of age, her feminism becoming more moderate as well. She will always be remembered for her Feminine Mystique and her later moderate feminism will always be forgotten, as is the way of radfems, libfems, and white feminism in its entirety.

Earlier in 1970 the court case Schultz v. Wheaton Glass Co. ruled that companies couldn't change the job titles of women so they could pay them less, a huge leap for wage equality. However the Equal Rights Amendment doesn't get ratified by the states, so it's pretty obvious that the court ruling is not going to be supported and implemented freely. Though, in the same year married couples are given the right to use contraceptives - Eisenstadt v. Baird - and Title IX of the Education Amendments explicitly bans sexism in schools, which is supported by the case Reed v Reed, extending the protections of the 14th Amendment to everyone regardless of gender. The infamous Roe v Wade gave women abortion rights, the Equal Credit Opportunity forbid discrimination based on race, gender, religion, etc.,  marital rape laws are enacted in several states, and pregnant women are specifically protected from discrimination. So 1972 was a year of losses and wins, good steps forward for women's rights overall.

Of course, even with all those court cases, laws, and amendments passed, the fight didn't end. Dubbed the 'war on women' by many feminists, or men trying to keep women from exercising what they call fundamental rights of human beings. The number of court cases following the 1970s are ridiculous, to be brutally honest, because they all rule the same thing essentially - women are human beings with rights that no one especially men can violate. Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, ruling that sexual harassment is not just a sexual crime but blatant discrimination in the workplace; Planned Parenthood v. Casey reaffirming women's right to contraceptives and abortions if she so chooses to have one (but allowed all the restrictions placed upon the act, including the possible life-threatening one that made women tell their spouse they were getting an abortion); United States v. Virginia ruled that the all-male Virginia Military School had to desegregate gender-wise or close; Kolstad v. American Dental Association said that a women could sue for damages from sexual discrimination. A ridiculous number of court cases, and there are still plenty more where those came from.

In these recent years of feminism there seems to be a lot more advancement and regression than any other period of feminism. Sandra Day O'Connor was the first female U.S. Supreme Court Justice in 1982; women all over America were finally being ordained by their religions, Lutheran denominations and Jewish Renewal Movement being some of the first ones; Sally Ride becomes the first female astronaut and goes into space; Geraldine Ferraro is the first women to run for vice president from a major political party in 1984, the Democrats; Janet Reno becomes the first female Attorney General.



Susan Faludi even wrote a book about the backlash against women and feminism during the 1980s, appropriately named Backlash. Not a book easily disputed, given all the court cases that had to reaffirm women;s rights during the 80s alone. The newly dubbed Third Wave Feminism came out from what were perceived as the failings of the 1960s - 1980s in terms of women's equality. It was also influenced by the shift to focus on LGTBIA+/MOGAI (Marginalized Orientations, Gender identities, and Intersex) rights, as the third wave of feminism focuses most on issues of race and gender issues. The music movement Riot Grrrl came into existence during the 1990s as well, supporting more women in the punk scene and creating safe spaces for not just punk women but their female fans as well.

There have always been two sides to the feminism coin, but it seems that they split even more widely after third wave feminism takes hold of the modern movement. On paper radical feminism and liberal feminism seem simple enough - the former seeks to essentially destroy all gender roles including the concept of them while the latter aims to make women equal to men in the eyes of the law and everyone. Same goal basically. Now, if you truly love yourself you will never delve much deeper into these two groups for their dark depths are with toxic, vitriol wastelands where nothing makes sense and something is always on fire. Because within each group there are extremists who are just out of this world with their beliefs. If you're lucky you might find a nice moderate radical or liberal feminist to converse with, but mostly you'll be running into those extremists since they are the most outspoken and active feminists in their groups. 

Into the 2000s. The Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act was put into effect by President Obama, allowing women to file complaints about unfair wages 180 days after their last, instead of first, unfair paycheck. Kind of a common sense move to me - how are you going to know if your paycheck is unfair if you don't have multiple paychecks to compare to? Very nice act there. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta declared in early 2013 that the military would now start allowing women to serve in combat roles overseas. The final step in equality for those female nurses, pilots, and messengers from WWII - now women are recognized to be able to fight just like a man. The only thing left is including women in the draft, a highly controversial topic for MRAs and supported by most feminists.

Sadly there is always regression to stem the advancement of women's equality. An ongoing issue since the dawn of man - women' sexual education. Go pick up any high school health textbook and look at the chapter(s) for sexual health. I can guarantee there's at least one full chapter dedicated to the penis, whole sections dedicated to masturbation habits of adolescent boys, and too many photos of penises including at least one actual real life picture. There will be no chapter on female sexuality, only one about adolescent change and pregnancy, with medical diagrams of vaginas that are not fully labelled or even explained properly. The education about women's health is so abysmal as to be non-existent in America's schools. Thousands of girls have died because they weren't properly educated about their bodies, or doctors, teachers, and parents refused to take complaints about irregularities and pain seriously. Add in the fact that condoms are distributed to boys for free yet tampons and pads are not distributed for free to girls and it become glaringly obvious that serious change is needed.

Most of the 2000s feminism seems to be a mesh of the 1970s advancement and 1980s regression with an added-in war between radical and liberal feminists (just both sides extremes). There has been more shifting within the movement regarding color; more black women have been outspoken about how much white feminism doesn't help them, signaling perhaps a new feminist movement? Black Feminism is already well in the works with tons of support, taking cues from previous movements' ideas and goals to advance black women's rights. Though the movement is for black women it creates a much better idea of feminism for any young girl, as it calms down the liberal and radical extremes into a much more inclusive, moderate movement. And getting young girls and women into feminism is what changes the world, so I'm looking forward to seeing Black Feminism change the face of the movement in the future.



Have a real life Rosie the Riveter.

The Decades Between Feminism Waves

The forgotten era of feminism: the 1940s and 50s, and yet without these years women would be miles behind in their movement. Out of these two decades came work reform, wage reform, unionization, and even comic books all for and because of women. You'd be hard pressed to find someone who didn't recognize the iconic Rosie the Riveter; she was created to help usher women into factory jobs making tanks, ammunition, guns, and other military items for World War II. Though their pay was low in the beginning of the job shift, many women were able to work their way up corporate ladders into high-paying jobs. Three million women joined labor unions to fight for increased wages, benefits, and basic respect from employers - all the rights male worker already had, essentially. Seeing as how most women workers were forced from their jobs once World War II was over, these contributions towards women in the workplace were forgotten, as women weren't really allowed to work once more. But these struggles and reforms created the basis for the fight in women's workplaces; they may not have been the best of advances but they were better than nothing, and allowed feminists more leverage to fight for more reform in later years.

Alongside Rosie the Riveter came another iconic character - Wonder Woman. Designed as an advocate for women's rights, she called for women to work hard because they were just as good as men. She reached a readership of ten million and spread a view of femininity that was intelligence, patriotism, beauty, and strength.

As women got swept into the 1950s, not all of them happily accepted domestic life in suburbia. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt worked for President Truman after her husband's death, helping the United Nations and women's organizations after the war and encouraging more women to become politically active. But Eleanor Roosevelt's wildness was nothing compared to Margaret Sanger, who could be called 'the mother of birth control'. She had been active in feminism ever since the early 1910s, working as a nurse and informing women about birth control - a term she coined herself. Soon facing federal charges for distributing "obscene material", she fled to England for a short while before returning to America and opening a birth control clinic - which soon also came under fire. But out of this came the exception that doctors may give women birth control for medical reasons - a breakthrough at last. Margaret founded the American Birth Control League in 1921 and two years later opened the first legal birth control clinic called Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau. She fought in the legal world for birth control rights as well, but her biggest and greatest breakthrough ever was in the 1950s when she contacted Gregory Pincus to research a magic birth control pill. Funded by millionaire Katherine McCormick, the birth control pill Envoid was created and approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1960.

Two court cases, Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade, made tremendous progress for women's right to birth control. Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 struck down laws that prohibited the use and distribution of birth control, stating that it violated the Constitutional right to privacy. This case led to another victory in 1973 in Roe v. Wade, which made abortion legal with some restrictions in the later months of privacy. Margaret Sanger lived to see Griswold win his case in the Supreme Court and we can easily assume she died a happy women the year after.

No two feminist books before the 1950s were ever as popular as "The Second Sex" by Simone de Beauvoir and "The Feminine Mystique" by Betty Frieden. Both books attacked notions of women being inherently inferior to men and wanting to be domestic servants. These two books became so widespread that they managed to spark a second wave of feminism in the 1960s.

Betty Frieden founded the National Organization for Women - NOW - and led it to reform seven different fields that affected women. Education, equal opportunity of employment, legal and political rights, poverty, family, image of women, and women and religion. Their main focus in the first three fields was removing the barriers that kept women from being hired, discrimination against skilled women, and the wage gap. With the passing of Title VII in the Civil Rights Act barred discrimination based on gender and color, and President Johnson’s Executive Order 11246 what became known as affirmative action began pushing women into the jobs they deserved and the schools they wanted to attend, but equality was still a long ways off. Still, a great deal of progress was made and these acts opened the way for women to fight discrimination and inequality in courts where they made many small successes, such as striking down laws that prohibited women from serving on juries and awarding women abortion rights.

As for the other four fields, NOW always had a Task Force on Women in Poverty ever since the beginning, despite the image of all feminists of the 50s and 60s being middle class white women. The Task Force on Family focused on fighting the idea of men being the breadwinners and never taking care of the children and fought the notion that marriage was the end game for women's lives. The image of women was protested widely, with a Miss America pageant protest against impossible beauty standards, racism, and that being beautiful should be the dream of every American girl.

The 1940-50s are often forgotten in the timeline of feminism, with the 60s overshadowing most of the movement's progress. But they laid important groundwork for feminist reform in the workplace, education, domestic life, and abortion rights. If feminists had gone underground during this time period - like many people seem to think they did - we wouldn't have had such huge reforms and victories during the 60s. Groundwork for change is just as important as the change itself, which is why the 40s and 50s are just as important to feminism as the 60s. Without those decades, women might be making a lot less than men (even moreso than now), would be barred from most high-level jobs, and be unable to attend college past a simple Associates Degree in 'feminine' fields of study. 

Women of the 20s and 30s

The suffragettes kept marching and protesting without cease until they got their 19th Amendment in 1920. The Great War aided their cause a great deal, as women flocked to the factories in droves to make up for the men sent overseas to fight in the war. They were able to show they could work just as hard as any man could, and were far more stubborn as well since they continued to demand voting rights during a time when they should have been concentrating solely on the war effort.


The infamous Rosie the Riveter propaganda poster.

But continue with their cause they did, and the 19th Amendment was the tasty fruit of their labor. Many women dropped out of the suffragette, now called feminist, movement afterwards, feeling that they had been rewarded all the rights they deserved. Alice Paul and her radicals didn't fade out though; they went on trampling everywhere, attempting to get the Equal Rights Act passed by Congress, and generally fighting for women to have all the same rights as men. Part of this continued movement did indeed focus on all women, regardless of color (mostly). The day when Alice Paul dies will be a sad one; the death of this typhoon will be a sad day indeed.

As the years went on ticking with corporations and government throwing poor people under the bus, racism running rampant in all economic fields, and religion kept trying to become supreme ruler of America - business as usual, essentially - women didn't fade away into the background and stay stagnant like men thought they would after the passage of the 19th amendment. Whether young or old, women refused to become wallpaper again.

Women became the shoppers of the era. Housewives made all the purchases for their households from food to clothing to appliances such as vacuum cleaners. Younger women, usually single but not always, shopped for themselves, buying trinkets like jewelry, small home decor pieces, and the latest fashion. These younger women received their wages from the new 'womanly' job sector of industrialization: department store sellers, laundresses, clothing manufacturing, teachers, and the such. These jobs gave women a sense of purpose, self-respect, and especially freedom. The fashionable clothing they bought was quite different from the clothing older, married women bought. Radically different.



Yes, the 1920s: era of The Flapper

Skirts cut above the knee? Short hair like a boy? High heels? Wore makeup? Thin and flat? The personification of their mothers' worst nightmare.
They went out without escorts, smoked in public, danced with strangers in nightclubs, drank at bars with men - flappers rebelled against every Victorian-age rule there was and then some.

Young women of the 1920s sought to be every bit as free as their male counterparts. They threw most modesty out the window and engaged in sexual activities outside of their marital bedroom. Many attempts were made to more widely distribute birth control than before, but religious communities quickly smothered these efforts - though by the end of the 30s, birth control was available to women with large families in order to lessen the burden on her husband to provide for such a large crowd of children.

Outside of this, flappers didn't really do much else. They took the reins on their own lives but politically, they accomplished nothing. They actually probably contributed to the regression of women's rights.

National Recovery Administration codes set lower required minimum wages for women than men working the same job.
New Deal job agencies such as the CCC and CWA refused to hire women and colored people.
Social Security Act and the Fair Labor Standards Acts didn't cover domestic and agricultural work - women's main two areas of work.

And then added to all this (or perhaps the true cause of?) was the idea - sexist and religious - that women belonged tucked away at home to domesticate rough, rowdy bread-winning men and raise the future workers of America,  the children.

In addition to female discrimination in the workplace, blatant racism was running as rampant as ever. More African America were migrating to cities than ever before, in search of jobs after crop failures, crop prices dropping, and general debt pileup. African American women found work mostly as domestic servants while the men scrounged the city streets for any job they could find, no matter how dirty or rough. As previously mentioned, blacks weren't aided or protected by the New Deal agencies and codes and were left to struggle on their own.

Racists took the new social security movement and used it to discriminate against against African Americans even more. Women were hurt the most, as their domestics jobs weren't covered or protected as mention earlier, with the added stigma that any black woman on social security/welfare was lazy, greedy, and un-American. The new stigma hurt their attempts to get jobs, or better ones, to no one's surprise.

[Out of time period analysis: welfare is actually used to break apart families, particularly black ones. A black woman with children gets more support without the father around than if he was with them and had a minimum wage job. So the government supports broken, unhealthy black families that at greater risk of turning to crime to get out of poverty which in turn gives government a 'reason' to break apart these 'violent thugs' families at the earliest chance.]

Even today this stigma holds great power in people's minds. Single white women are the largest group to be aided by welfare yet society's idea of the average welfare recipient is a lazy, fat black woman. African American men get paid about 75¢ to every white man's dollar, and African American women get paid 70¢ to that same dollar. This means less money going into social security for them, so later when/if they retire they'll get less money than a white man or woman who worked the exact same job as them! Cheated all around, then get labeled lazy and greedy when all blacks want is the same respect and rights as the whites around them.

March On Suffragettes

It began when Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were banned from the World Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840 and they were moved to create a women's movement for America. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony carried on their task, morphing it into the women's suffrage movement, where they fought for everyone to have the right to vote, not just men. The National American Woman Suffrage Association is formed with Elizabeth Cady Stanton as president (though the conservative, Christian side of the suffrage movement soon abandons her for being "too radical"). NAWSA and women's suffrage was losing steam and attention by the early 1900s, however, and they needed some fuel to keep the cause supported.

This is when Alice Paul walked in. An even more radical suffragette than Elizabeth Cady Stanton, this Quaker was more focused on federal approval and support of women's suffrage. She concocted a plan to have the NAWSA and other suffragettes march on Washington, D.C. shortly before Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated to gain publicity and support. It took her two months to raise money enough for the parade, which included nine bands, four mounted brigades, three heralds, more than twenty floats, and upwards of five thousand marchers.

The parade itself was a huge success, grabbing the attention of the media and President Wilson (seeing as it stole the limelight from him). Attacks from spectating men and policemen garnered more support for the suffragettes' cause. There were congressional hearings about the mistreatment of the women by the crowds and the lack of protection from the police, which gained the suffragettes even more attention from the federal government. Alice Paul was proud of her work that day, proud to have gained so much more support and attention for her cause.

But, as we scan through the history archives and pictures of the event, we discover that we can only find pictures and stories about the white marchers. If this is a parade for universal suffrage for all, regardless of gender, then where are the minority women?

Are they here?

Or here?

Where are the black suffragettes? Where are Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary Church Terrel, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Anna Julia Cooper? They were all black suffragettes striving and fighting for equal voting rights. Why were they told to march at the very back of the parade, where no one could see them? The answer is plain and simple: racism. White women either didn't to get the vote for black women or they wanted them to be in the movement but unseen and unheard. These black suffragettes refused to comply with the white women's demands and fought for the rights publicly and without fear.

 Ida B. Wells-Barnett refused to march at the back of the 1913 parade and marched in front with the Illinois delegation, was a founding member of the NAACP, founded and led the Negro Fellowship League, and was elected to a chair in the Chicago Equal Rights League.

Mary Church Terrel helped form the National Association of Colored Women in 1896 after the 1893 World Fair refused to let her participate. 

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper formed YMCA Sunday Schools, became a leader in the Women's Christian Temperance Union, and refused to take the World Fair's insult laying down by going after the organizers and charging them with refusing to allow colored folks participate. 

Anna Julia Cooper wrote one of the most influential feminist books, A Voice from the South: By A Woman from the South, which called for the cultivation of intelligent black women to help the entire black community.

        




Racism within the suffrage movement was greater than most know. Half of the NAWSA was made up of white, Christian, middle- to upper-class women who only wanted to get the vote for themselves. The other half wanted to get universal voting rights but told black women to lay low in the movement. To a point this was semi-understandable: to get an amendment that guaranted women the right to vote to the Constitution passed require two-thirds of the states to pass it. Southern states were vehemently against allowing black women to vote. So having the face of the suffragette movement be white would gain more support from the Southern states.

Sojourner Truth says it best "And ain't I a woman?" Black women were still women who deserved to fight for the vote and have their voices heard. The state support argument can only go so far; eventually it comes down to plain racism - white women who think that black women are inferior to them.

This hasn't changed much since the 19th Amendment finally passed in 1920. Black women have always been shoved to the sidelines and out of side in feminist movements. If they do want to label themselves as a feminist or a role model for younger women, they have to be absolutely flawless. They aren't allowed to make a single mistake, have to match the white women's ideal of beauty, be smarter than everyone else, and must always be ready to drop their lives to defend feminism. The standards for black women to be feminists are atrocious! You never see white women held up to these standards.



Modern-day examples of this are Nicki Minaj and Beyoncé. They are constantly attacked for calling themselves feminists; they face attacks on their feminist standpoints with their attackers' ammunition being everything from past irrelevant actions to internalized misogyny that they've worked on correcting to their own self-confidence. Seriously, just because they are proud of their bodies and display them as they choose to doesn't change anything - if anything, it only reinforces their feminism by refusing to comply to white men's and women's ideas of beauty and submissiveness.

Then we have these white pop-stars Tayler Swift and Iggy Azalea who are hailed as supreme feminist leaders when they are extremely problematic, to say the least. Tayler Swift is working on her internalized misogyny and changing her ideas of feminism, but both these ladies support the wrong idea of feminism. Submissiveness to men, the need to be sexy for men, attack other women for men - they have major problems with their ideology and yet the media acts like no one can get more feminist than them. We already have two very great feminist musicians with very little problems who have proved to be able to improve themselves and their ideas to better fit with true feminist ideas, so we don't need these two problematic white women to be the only ones focused on in feminism.

Black suffrage and black feminism have always faced pressure to fold under white ideals but the strength, determination, and sheer iron will of black women will always refuse to buckle and will always keep fighting for black rights and respect.

Anastassia Hill Check-In Blog

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Hi! I'm Anastassia Hill. This is me with my awesome flower crown.

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