Washington, DC

Connecting to the timeline about "The Feminine Mystique", this fueled a resurgence of the feminist movement where middle-class women all across America began to advocate for women's political and social equality. In 1963 President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act of 1963 in Washington DC where women could no longer be paid less compared to men for doing the same job. So, employers cannot award unequal wages or benefits to women and men that require “equal skill, effort, and responsibility, and which are performed under similar working conditions.” Esther Peterson, head of the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor, was a vocal supporter for the legislation. She was chaired Kennedy's Presidential Commission on the Status of Women. Also, Edith Green and Katharine St. George also helped lead the passes of the bill. Although there was opposition for this Bill from Retail Merchants Association and Chamber of Commerce which were powerful business groups, it was passed. This was among the first federal laws in America to address gender discrimination.

There has been Supreme Court rulings which continued to advocate for this second-wave feminism. With the Griswold v. Connecticut Supreme Court ruling of 1965 which prevented anyone from limiting a women’s access to contraception’s or other types of birth control. Also, this ruling would then be used in the Roe v. Wade in 1973 which protects the women’s right to have an abortion. This was a controversial decision to America. “Framing the right to abortion as an equality right, in contrast, would entitle women to freedom from compulsory motherhood, a right that requires both state nonintervention (decriminalization of abortion) and state intervention( to provide access to abortion and to protect women’s sexual autonomy).” (Chen, Chao-ju) In America, great legal victories in Washington were made, further progressing women’s autonomy in the workplace, sexuality and reproductive rights but women of color were still disenfranchised. This leads into the Third Wave were the movement is more inclusive to the challenges of women of different races, gender identities and classes.

 

U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The Equal Pay Act of 1963. https://www.eeoc.gov/statutes/equal-pay-act-1963.

Noguchi, Yuki. 50 Years after the Equal Pay Act, Gender Wage Gap Endures. NPR, 10 June 2013, https://www.npr.org/2013/06/10/189280329/50-years-after-the-equal-pay-act-gender-wage-gap-endures.

 

 Chen, Chao-ju. “Choosing the Right to Choose: Roe v. Wade and the Feminist Movement to Legalize Abortion in Martial-Law Taiwan.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, vol. 34, no. 3, 2013, pp. 73–101. EBSCOhost, doi:10.5250/fronjwomestud.34.3.0073.

Parent Map

Map: Race, Gender, Class, Sex
Test Map: 02 The Long Civil Rights Movement

Coordinates

Latitude: 38.899583425983
Longitude: -77.211914062500

Timeline of Events Associated with Washington, DC

Date Event Manage
1963

The Feminine Mystique and the Second Wave of Feminism

The Second Wave of Feminism is after the ratification of the 19th amendment in 1920, which allowed women to vote. After this, feminism seemed to slow down greatly. During this time, there was the Great Depression and then World War Two took place. Women have always worked outside of home but never in the great numbers as during WW2 when the men were overseas. After the war, most women returned home, and let go of their jobs to the men. Over this time, there was activists fighting for women’s rights but the next greatly significant feminist movement is believed to have been started in the 1960s.  This second wave of feminism broaden the debate of issues: sexuality, workplace, reproductive rights, and legal inequalities.  This took place along with other social and political movements. Historians view the end of the second-wave feminist era in America to end in the early 1980s due to intra-feminism disputes over issues as pornography ad sexuality.

Ten years after the publishing of "The Second Sex", “The Feminine Mystique" was published by American feminist writer Betty Friedan in 1963.  She builds up the foundation of Simone de Beauvoir’s ideas and implemented the philosophical thought into her own personal experiences.  Friedan was a writer, journalist and activist but she then got married and had children.  She was a housewife in the suburbs for years and was unhappy and saw society’s pressure for women to be pink-collar workers, mothers and homemakers. Friedan wanted to see if she was alone in her feelings so she conducted interviews over 5 years to white middle-class women and they all felt the same dissatisfaction. These women felt trapped and unfulfilled in a world where men monopolized the positions of power and autonomy.

 In the book she criticized that the separation and constraint of motherhood and homemaking, were just to women. When in comparison to men, they were allowed to excel in power, politics and work while women were trapped. Friedan encouraged women to fight gender oppression, which she called “the problem that has no name”. Also, she wanted women to pursue careers that were “the life long commitment to an art or science, to politics or profession” (Friedan). Although there was a blind spot with “The Feminine Mystiques” with her not taking account systemic barriers especially towards working-class women and women of color where having a job isn’t a choice but a necessity. Although her book brought great attention to the disparities of the work force and the realization for women’s efforts to reform and realize the needed new rights at the workplace. This then helped make gains though civil rights and labor movements.

 

Works Cited

Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 286, 289. On women’s responses to the book, see Stephanie Coontz, A Strange Stirring: Th e Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (New York: Basic Books, 2011

Turk, Katherine. “‘To Fulfill an Ambition of [Her] Own’: Work, Class, and Identity in The Feminine Mystique.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, vol. 36, no. 2, 2015, pp. 25–32. EBSCOhost, doi:10.5250/fronjwomestud.36.2.0025.

 A drawing from the 1950s.