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.