The Movement Of Womens Rights Essay Research — страница 3

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Women’s Bureau of the Dept. of Labour in 1961. She considered it to be the government’s responsibility to take an active role in addressing discrimination against women. With her encouragement, President Kennedy convened a Commission on the Status of Women, naming Eleanor Roosevelt as its chair. The report issued by that commission in 1963 documented discrimination against women in virtually every area of American life. State and local governments quickly followed suit and established their own commissions for women, to research conditions and recommend changes that could be initiated. In it she documented the emotional and intellectual oppression that middle-class educated women were experiencing because of limited life options. The book became an immediate bestseller, and

inspired thousands of women to look for fulfillment beyond the role of homemaker. Betty Friedan, the chairs of the various state Commissions on the Status of Women, and other feminists agreed to form a civil rights organization for women similar to the NAACP. In 1966, the National Organization for Women was organized, soon to be followed by an array of other mass-membership organizations addressing the needs of specific groups of women, including Blacks, Latinos, Asians-Americans, lesbians, welfare recipients, business owners, aspiring politicians, and tradeswomen and professional women of every sort. During this same time, thousands of young women on college campuses were playing active roles within the anti-war and civil rights movement. It wasn’t long before these young

women began forming their own “women’s liberation” organizations to address their role and status within these progressive movements and within society at large. These various elements of the re-emerging Women’s Rights Movement worked together and separately on a wide range of issues. Small groups of women in hundreds of communities worked on grassroots projects like establishing women’s newspapers, bookstores and cafes. They created battered women’s shelters and rape crisis hotlines to care for victims of sexual abuse and domestic violence. They came together to form childcare centres so women could work outside their homes for pay. Women health care professionals opened women’s clinics to provide birth control and family planning counselling-and to offer abortion

services – - for low-income women. The number of women doctors, lawyers, engineers, architects and other professionals has doubled and doubled again as quotas actually limiting women’s enrolment in graduate schools were outlawed. In society at large, the Women’s Rights Movement has brought about measurable changes, too. In 1972, 26% of men and women said they would not vote for a woman for president. In 1996, that sentiment had plummeted to just over 5% for women and to 8% for men. Do you realize that just 25 years ago married women were not issued credit cards in their own name? That most women could not get a bank loan without a male co-signer? That women working full time earned fifty-nine cents to every dollar earned by men? Help-wanted ads in newspapers were segregated

into “Help wanted – women” and “Help wanted- men.” Pages and pages of jobs were announced for which women could not even apply. The National Organization for Women (NOW), had to argue the issue all the way to the Supreme Court to make it possible for a woman today to hold any job for which she is qualified. To many women’s rights activists, its ratification by the required thirty-eight states seemed almost a shoo-in. The campaign for state ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment provided the opportunity for millions of women across the nation to become actively involved in the Women’s Rights Movement in their own communities. Women’s organizations of every stripe organized their members to help raise money and generate public support for the ERA. Generous

checks and single dollar bills poured into the campaign headquarters, and the ranks of NOW and other women’s rights organizations swelled to historic sizes. Seventy-five percent of the women legislators in those three pivotal states supported the ERA, but only 46% of the men voted to ratify. Historically speaking, most if not all the issues of the women’s rights movement have been highly controversial when they were first voiced. Allowing women to go to college? Employ women in jobs for pay outside their homes? Cast votes in national elections? The people attending that landmark discussion would not even have imagined the issues of the Women’s Rights Movement in the 1990s. Today, young women proudly calling themselves “the third wave” are confronting these and other