The Great Society, Feminism and Roe v Wade
Two Reformist Presidencies
When John F. Kennedy was sworn in on 20 January 1961, he was 43 years old, the first Catholic president, and his inaugural address asked Americans ‘ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country’. His domestic agenda — the New Frontier — promised federal aid to education, healthcare for the elderly and a higher minimum wage. Most of these bills stalled in a Congress dominated by southern Democrats. Kennedy’s legislative record was thin. After his assassination on 22 November 1963, his vice-president Lyndon Johnson used Kennedy’s memory to push through the most ambitious domestic reform programme since the New Deal — the Great Society.
Kennedy’s New Frontier produced the Equal Pay Act 1963 but most legislation stalled. Johnson’s Great Society from 1964 delivered the Civil Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the War on Poverty — the most ambitious reform programme since the New Deal.
Johnson’s Great Society
Johnson, a Texas Democrat and former Senate majority leader, declared an ‘unconditional war on poverty’ in his January 1964 State of the Union address. The 1964 Economic Opportunity Act created Job Corps (vocational training for poor young people), Head Start (pre-school for poor children, eventually serving around 700,000 children a year), and Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA, a domestic Peace Corps). Around 22% of Americans had lived in poverty in 1959; by 1973 the figure had fallen to around 11%, the largest reduction in American history.
Healthcare was transformed. The 1965 Medicare programme provided federal health insurance for Americans aged over 65; Medicaid in the same year provided healthcare for the very poor. The two programmes covered around 19 million elderly and 10 million low-income Americans by 1969 — healthcare access on a scale the New Deal had been unable to deliver. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of April 1965 sent over $1 billion of federal money to schools serving poor children, the first major federal aid to education in American history. The Immigration and Nationality Act of October 1965 abolished the 1924 quota system that had favoured northern Europeans, opening the door to immigration from Asia, Africa and Latin America.
The Great Society was undermined by Johnson’s own Vietnam War. American military spending in Vietnam rose from around $100 million a year in 1964 to roughly $20 billion a year by 1968 — money that could not also fund anti-poverty programmes. By the end of 1968 around half a million American troops were in Vietnam and about 36,000 had been killed, 16,899 of them in 1968 alone. Public opinion turned, especially among young Americans facing the draft. Johnson announced in March 1968 that he would not seek re-election. Richard Nixon won the November 1968 election promising ‘peace with honour’. The reform energy of the Great Society did not survive Vietnam.
The Feminine Mystique and the New Women’s Movement
In 1963, Smith College graduate Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique — a book based on a survey of her former classmates that asked ‘is this all there is?’. Friedan argued the post-war ideal of suburban housewifery left educated women trapped, depressed and unfulfilled — what she called ‘the problem that has no name’. The book sold around 3 million copies in three years and gave a vocabulary to a generation of women who had absorbed the post-war domestic ideal and found it hollow.
In June 1966 Friedan and twenty-seven other women, including Pauli Murray and Aileen Hernandez, founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) — sometimes called ‘the NAACP for women’. NOW lobbied for equal pay, anti-discrimination enforcement, federal childcare and reproductive rights. Membership grew from 300 in 1966 to around 40,000 by 1974. NOW was a moderate, integrationist organisation; younger women’s liberation groups (Redstockings, the Furies) pushed harder on cultural and personal politics.
Equal Pay, Title VII and the 1972 Equal Rights Ruling
The Equal Pay Act of June 1963, signed by Kennedy, made it illegal to pay men and women different wages for equivalent work. Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act banned employment discrimination on grounds of sex (the word ‘sex’ was added by a southern segregationist congressman, Howard W. Smith, who hoped to defeat the bill; it passed anyway). In 1972 the Educational Amendments included Title IX, banning sex discrimination in any federally funded education programme — transformative for women’s sport, science and graduate study. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Reed v Reed (decided in November 1971, and listed with the 1972 equal-rights ruling in the specification) extended equal-protection guarantees to women on the same basis as race — a major constitutional shift. Women’s share of the federal civil service workforce, share of medical and law school admissions, and visibility in the workplace all rose sharply through the 1970s.
Roe v Wade and the Limits of Reform
On 22 January 1973 the Supreme Court ruled by 7–2 in Roe v Wade that state laws banning abortion violated a constitutional right to privacy. ‘Jane Roe’ was the legal pseudonym of Norma McCorvey, a Dallas waitress who had been unable to obtain a legal abortion under Texas law. The decision legalised abortion across the United States. It was hailed by NOW and women’s liberation groups as a decisive victory for reproductive rights.
It also produced the most durable opposition. The proposed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), passed by Congress in March 1972, would have written sex equality into the Constitution. It needed ratification by 38 states. By the original 1979 deadline only 35 states had ratified. The defeat was largely the work of one woman: Phyllis Schlafly, a Catholic conservative whose STOP ERA campaign argued that the amendment would force women into the military draft, end alimony, abolish single-sex bathrooms and undermine the family. Schlafly mobilised middle-class housewives across the South and Midwest. The ERA expired unratified in 1982. Roe v Wade itself was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2022.
Schlafly’s STOP ERA campaign was effective for several reasons. Many married women in the early 1970s benefited from a legal regime that gave them alimony, presumed custody and exemption from the draft, and feared losing those protections. The campaign reframed feminism as a threat to family security rather than an expansion of women’s opportunity. The amendment’s wording was vague enough to allow opponents to argue it would have unforeseen consequences (gay marriage, mixed-sex bathrooms, women in combat). Reformers also misread the politics: by 1977 the women’s movement had grown more radical and lost some moderate support; Roe v Wade made abortion central to the debate, alienating many religious women. By 1973 American feminism had won landmark victories (Equal Pay Act, Title VII, Title IX, Roe) but the conservative backlash had organised. The 1980 Reagan election would mark its political arrival.
The Equal Pay Act 1963 banned wage discrimination by sex; Title IX 1972 banned sex discrimination in federally funded education; the ERA would have written sex equality into the Constitution but failed ratification by 1982. Roe v Wade 1973 legalised abortion across the United States.