Feminism and the women's movement
The Feminine Mystique and the Women’s Movement
In 1963, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique. The book argued that educated middle-class women were trapped by an unspoken cultural expectation — what Friedan called “the problem that has no name” — that their only true fulfilment lay in marriage, motherhood and housekeeping. The book sold three million copies in three years and is credited with sparking the second wave of American feminism. It gave a name to a widespread but previously unarticulated dissatisfaction.
The year 1963 also saw tangible progress on policy. President Kennedy’s President’s Commission on the Status of Women (established 1961) reported in 1963, documenting systematic workplace discrimination. The same year, the Equal Pay Act was signed — the first federal law banning sex-based wage discrimination. It required equal pay for “equal work” but was narrowly defined and left many inequalities untouched.
The Equal Pay Act (1963) required equal pay for equal work but was narrowly defined. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act (1964) banned employment discrimination on grounds of sex as well as race, and created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission — but enforcement was initially weak.
NOW and the Equal Rights Amendment
In 1966, Betty Friedan, Pauli Murray and others founded the National Organisation for Women (NOW). NOW combined mainstream lobbying with legal challenges: it filed complaints with the EEOC about sex discrimination, campaigned against “help wanted — male” job advertisements, and pushed for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). The ERA — a constitutional amendment stating that “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex” — had been introduced in Congress in various forms since 1923. In 1972, Congress passed it and sent it to the states for ratification.
The ERA’s ratification campaign ultimately failed. Phyllis Schlafly’s STOP ERA campaign organised effective opposition, arguing that the ERA would remove beneficial protections for women — including exemption from military draft — and lead to unisex toilets and other outcomes many Americans found alarming. By 1982, the ERA had failed to win ratification from the required 38 states. Schlafly’s success demonstrated that the women’s movement faced genuine organised opposition, not merely inertia.
In late June 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village, New York City. Such raids were routine — homosexuality was illegal in most states. What was different was the response: bar patrons, including Marsha P. Johnson and other prominent figures, fought back against the police over several nights. The Stonewall riots are widely regarded as the founding moment of the modern LGBT rights movement. Within a year, LGBT organisations had formed across the country and the first Gay Pride marches were held. In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders.
Roe v Wade and the Limits of Progress
In 1972, the Supreme Court’s Eisenstadt v Baird ruling guaranteed single people the same right to contraception that married couples had received in Griswold v Connecticut (1965). The following year, in January 1973, the Supreme Court ruled 7–2 in Roe v Wade that the Constitution protected a woman’s right to an abortion in the first trimester. The decision was framed in terms of privacy, not sex equality, and immediately triggered a powerful conservative counter-movement. By the mid-1970s, the feminist movement had achieved significant legal gains but faced fierce organised opposition on multiple fronts.
Pauli Murray was a Black civil rights lawyer and activist who helped design the legal strategy connecting the ban on sex discrimination to the Civil Rights Act. She had been arguing since the 1940s that the same constitutional arguments used against racial discrimination applied equally to sex discrimination. She was a co-founder of NOW and served on the President’s Commission on the Status of Women. Murray’s career demonstrates that the civil rights and feminist movements were not separate: many activists, especially Black women, worked in both simultaneously and saw the struggles as inseparable.
Phyllis Schlafly’s STOP ERA campaign argued the amendment would harm women by removing protective legislation and subjecting them to military conscription. By 1982 it had failed to win ratification from the 38 states needed — the first major legislative defeat of second-wave feminism.