Women Rights

Introduction

In the last few decades, women in the United States have made great strides in politics. Although women have historically voted in lower numbers than men, a higher percentage of women have registered and voted in presidential elections than men since 1984. Women now also win election at rates comparable to their male counterparts. In Congress, women have made substantive policy changes that positively influence women. Beyond Congress, women have achieved other political successes. Hillary Clinton almost gained the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, Sarah Palin was the second woman to be a major party vice-presidential nominee, and Condoleeza Rice recently served as the first black woman secretary of state.

Description and Analysis

Historically, women were perceived almost exclusively as caregivers because of their biological role as child bearers. Relegated to the home, women were restricted by law or by cultural norm to lives engaged solely in domestic duties and child rearing. Men controlled public roles in commerce, politics, law, religion, medicine, and education. These biologically based roles led to the assumption that women were inferior to men physically and intellectually. A British author and early dissenter, Mary Wollstonecraft, challenged those assumptions in 1792 in a seminal feminist book, Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Widely regarded as one of the first feminist treatises, Wollstonecraft denied male superiority over women and argued that education was the key for women to break out of subjugation (Conover, 90).

Many historians place the second wave of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s—more than 40 years after the granting of women's suffrage. In the era commonly called the women's liberation movement, feminists focused on discrimination against women in law and policy, the marginalization of women in public life, and sexist images and limiting stereotypical assumptions about women and men. The seeds of the second wave were sown as a result of three social changes.

First, the birth control pill was developed in the 1950s. Margaret Sanger had been a strong advocate since the 1930s of safe birth control for women. In the 1950s she raised tens of thousands of dollars to support the development of the first oral contraceptive for women. Much more effective than prevalent contraceptive methods in preventing pregnancy, the pill liberated women, like men, to more freely exercise their sexuality, beginning in the early 1960s (Gilligan, 89).

Second, Betty Friedan's book, The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, transformed the understanding of suburban middle-class women's lives. Friedan questioned whether these women were satisfied to identify themselves only through relationships with others—a wife, a mother, a caregiver—rather than as individual persons with agency in their own right. The book sparked a revolution, including new conversations among groups of women meeting in each others' homes— conversations called “consciousness rises.” Women's experiences in private became shared with other women. The personal became political, a popular phrase of the decade. Friedan went on to join with others to form the National Organization for Women, a feminist organization that brought the voices of women into the public sphere (King, 12).

Third, the civil ...