women, two-thirds of them married. By 1970 per-
haps 20 million women—after returning home from
work, fixing dinner, putting the children to bed, and
doing a load of laundry—collapsed in front of the
television set and watched domestic heroines such as
Donna Reed vacuuming the house in high heels and
pearls, making clothes and cakes from scratch, sooth-
ing the fragile psyches of her husband and children,
and otherwise living a fantasy that accorded with the
views of Spock and others.
When they returned to the office, store, or fac-
tory the next day, however, such women were acutely
aware of the fact that men in similar jobs were paid
more and had better opportunities for advancement.
Women noticed, too, that minorities had improved
their situations by fighting publicly. Increasingly
activists for women’s rights adopted similar strategies;
they were the founders of the modern women’s liber-
ation movement.
One of its leaders was Betty Friedan, an activist
journalist in the labor movement during the 1930s
and 1940s who shifted to gender issues in later
decades. In The Feminine Mystique(1963), Friedan
argued that advertisers, popular magazines, and other
“authorities” brainwashed women into thinking that
they could thrive only at home. They were wrong,
Friedan insisted. According to her survey of her class-
mates at Smith College, many housewives were trou-
bled with vague but persistent feelings of anger and
discomfort. “The only way for a woman... to know
herself as a person is by creative work of her own,”
she wrote. A “problem that had no name” was stifling
women’s potential.
The Feminine Mystiqueprovided what later came
to be known as “consciousness raising” for thousands
of women. Over a million copies were quickly sold.
Friedan was deluged by hundreds of letters from
women who had thought that their unease and
depression despite their “happy” family life were both
unique and unreasonable. Many now determined to
expand their horizons by taking jobs or resuming
their education.
Friedan had assumed that if able women acted
with determination, employers would recognize
their abilities and stop discriminating against them.
As feminists were outlining plans to strengthen
women’s claims to fair treatment in the workplace,
they won an unexpected victory. In 1964, during a
debate on whether to ban racial discrimination in
employment, Virginia Senator Howard Smith,
seeking to scuttle the law, proposed that women
also be protected from discrimination in hiring and
promotion. Several congresswomen immediately
endorsed the idea and proposed an amendment to
that effect. This became Title VII of the Civil
Rights Act of 1964.
In 1966 Friedan and other feminists founded
theNational Organization for Women (NOW).
“The time has come for a new movement toward
true equality for all women in America and toward a
fully equal partnership of the sexes,” the leaders
announced. “The silken curtain of prejudice and dis-
crimination against women” in government, indus-
try, the professions, religion, education, “and every
other field of importance” must be drawn back. In
1967 NOW came out for an equal rights amend-
ment to the Constitution, for changes in the divorce
laws, and for the legalization of abortion, the right
of “control of one’s body.”
TheEqual Rights Amendment (ERA), which
would make it unconstitutional to deny equal rights
“on account of sex,” had been proposed by the
National Woman’s party in 1923; by the late 1930s
it appeared headed for adoption by Congress. But
Eleanor Roosevelt and other women’s groups killed
the amendment, fearing it would rescind laws that
protected poor women and their children. By the
late 1960s, however, NOW’s campaign for the ERA
was yielding dividends. In 1971 the House of
Representatives approved the ERA and the Senate
followed the next year. By the end of 1972, twenty-
two states had raced to go on record to ratify the
amendment: What politician could prudently oppose
equal rights for women? At the outset of 1973, only
sixteen more states needed to ratify ERA before it was
added to the Constitution.
Feminist activists soon turned to another major
goal: legalization of abortion. The Constitution made
no reference to abortion. But during the nineteenth
century botched surgical abortions that killed many
women prompted the American Medical Association
to call for the “general suppression” of the practice.
By 1900, every state except Kentucky had passed
antiabortion laws. Most states granted exceptions
when the woman had been impregnated by rape or
incest or when a doctor thought it necessary to save
the woman’s life. In 1967, for example, Governor
Reagan of California, an opponent of abortion,
signed a law allowing doctors to perform abortions if
childbirth would “gravely impair the physical or men-
tal health of the mother.” The number of legal abor-
tions in California increased from 5,018 in 1968 to
more than 100,000 by 1972.
In 1970, however, feminist activists persuaded
the Hawaii legislature to repeal its criminal abortion
statute, the first state to do so. Later that year,
another battle was waged in New York. It pitted fem-
inists, liberals, and the medical establishment againstThe Emergence of Modern Feminism 827