Women's Bid for Equality in the United States in an Era of Backlash: Two Steps Forward and One Step Back

Abstract

Women in the U.S. have made great strides in achieving equality and human rights as a result of activism and the political climate of the late 1960s. This paper will recall that progress but then show that a counter-reaction has set in, a reaction that is being paid for by mothers and disproportionately by women who are at the lower economic levels and among poor members of minority groups. This reaction is called backlash. THE FEMINIST PERSPECTIVE Feminism which sprang out of the women's movement offers a woman-centered approach to understanding behavior across the lifespan; this understanding extends from the treatment of infants and little girls to the challenges facing elderly women. The women's movement is often described in terms of three waves, the first of which took place during the struggle for women's suffrage. The First Wave ended with the passage of the 19 th amendment in 1920 which finally granted to women the right to vote. From the late 1960s through the 1980s, The Second Wave was concerned with equality of opportunity, an end to blatant sex discrimination, and an acknowledgement of the physical victimization of women, whether on the streets, in the workplace, or in the home (1). Members of the women's movement pressed for significant changes in labor law, reproductive laws, and social justice. An interesting fact about the women's movement is the extent to which it made (white, middle, and upper class) women aware of their own powerlessness apart from their connection to a powerful man which some had but many did not have, would never have. The new consciousness made women aware, moreover, for the first time of sexism in the language, for example, that the word man and the pronoun he were not universal after all but generally referred to just the male of the human race. In the early years of the movement (the late 1960s to 1970s) as women challenged the male power structure, the women's movement was ridiculed in the media and by the general public as a joke. It was referred to mockingly as "women's lib". But the biggest joke was on the opponents of the women's movement in an action designed to defeat the movement for civil rights legislation. This action had in fact happened several years earlier when a southern Senator who was a segregationist added sex to the 1964 civil rights act. This was his way of making a mockery of the act in order to ensure its defeat. Curiously, the fact that women actually could legally file claims of sex discrimination, as could other minority groups was largely overlooked until about a decade later. During the same historical period as the mass people's rights movements and peace activism of the 1960s and