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.
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