Feminism's Second Wave
During the second wave period of the American feminist movement, women fought not only for equal rights in the workplace, but for a number of reproductive issues. Feminism grew in diversity as women from varied backgrounds joined the struggle.
The second wave of feminism encompassed a wide variety of issues involving sexual orientation, race, workplace issues, and privacy matters. Tension between these caused feminism to splinter into smaller movements, including womanism, lesbian feminism, radical feminism, and ecofeminism. Each made contributions to the second wave. Ecofeminists, for example, believed that any sort of domination, including human domination over the planet, was wrong. Lesbian feminists believed that women who depended on men were not truly free. Radical feminists claimed that oppression of women was the root of all oppression. Womanists were concerned with feminism from a black woman’s perspective.
A parallel movement to get women back to the home, their “proper place,” was launched in the media to combat the rising tide of women joining the work force. Women’s magazines ran articles with titles like “Have Babies While You’re Young” and “Femininity Begins at Home.”
The movie Mona Lisa Smile, starring Julia Roberts as Katherine Watson, featured a scene when Roberts’ character, a teacher in the 1950s, showed her class slides of advertisements which featured women as housewives and mothers. Hoping to inspire her students to think about their own destinies instead of blindly accepting the default offered by society, she asks them to consider their futures and define it themselves. Not every woman found happiness in the perfect, traditional family, and more were beginning to realize the life could encompass a great deal more than the home.
Even with societal claims that women found fulfillment through their family and housework, statistics showed otherwise. In a 1962 Gallup Poll, 90% of housewives wanted their daughters to get an education and marry later in life, instead of following the same path they did.
By the 1960s, an estimated 23 million women worked outside the home. But not only had they secured positions in the corporate sector, they had also been elected to governmental positions. Fifteen women served in the House of Representatives throughout the 60s.
As women took charge of their working lives, they also wanted control over their reproductive lives. Birth control became a very important and explosive issue, even though a majority of Americans were quietly taking advantage of it. But the availability of birth control brought out traditionalists who equated women with motherhood, and who wanted to continue to restrict access to contraceptives.
In 1965, Estelle Griswold, the Executive Director of the Planned Parenthood League in Connecticut, and Charles Lee Buxton, the Medical Director of the same organization, got into trouble because they distributed information on contraceptives to married couples. Griswold and Buxton were charged under a Connecticut law which prohibited the distribution of such information. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Griswold, citing that, although privacy is not explicitly covered in the Constitution, marital privacy was an issue which fell under the Bill of Rights. The resulting decision allowed for a clearer interpretation of privacy in respect to the Constitution.
More changes followed quickly. In 1972, Eisenstadt v. Baird overturned a Massachusetts law that prevented unmarried persons from obtaining contraceptives. In 1973, Roe v. Wade overturned state laws banning abortions, as did the similar case of Doe v. Bolton.
Feminism’s second wave laid a foundation for later generations, and freed women to work outside the home and to control their own bodies and their pregnancies. However, is the second wave’s progress being unraveled with efforts to increase population, give working parents more rights, and redefine feminism? If the second wave got women into the workplace, it pushed new issues regarding work/life balance to the forefront, creating a backlash which continues to elevate motherhood as the pinnacle of female achievement.
Next month:
Has this third wave of feminism created a backlash against the childfree?
Copyright . Published 4 May 2007 in Features.
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