CWB - Women (Lesson)

Women.

  • Early women's rights advocates: De Gouges, Wollstonecraft, Pankhurst
  • Second wave of women's movement first assumed real significance in the late 1960s, gathered strength in the 1970s, and won major victories in the 1970s and 1980s

 

Marriage and Motherhood:

  • In the postwar era, women continued to marry earlier
  • Typical woman in Europe, U.S. and Canada had children quickly after marrying
  • Average of only 2 children per family
  • Motherhood occupied a much smaller portion of a woman's life than at the turn of the century
  • Birth control use increased with oral contraceptives and intrauterine devices

 

Women in the workplace:

  • In 20th century, especially after WWII, opportunities for women of modest means to earn cash income at home practically disappeared
  • Thus, sharp increase across Europe and North America in number of married women who became full-time and part-time wage earners outside the home
  • Rising employment of married women became a powerful force in drive for women's equality and emancipation
  • Rising employment for married women became a factor in decline of the birthrate

 

Women's Rights Movement.

Simone de Beauvoir - The Second Sex (1949)

  • existentialist ideas
  • Argued women were in essence free but had almost always been trapped by particularly inflexible and limiting conditions
  • Only by courageous action and self-assertive creativity could women become free and escape the role of inferior other
  • Inspired a future generation of women's rights intellectuals

Betty Friedan - The Feminine Mystique (1963)

  • American Women expected to conform to false, infantile pattern of femininity and live for husbands and children
  • Founded National Organization for Women (NOW); inspired European groups

 

Goals of women's rights movements:

  • Create new statutes in the workplace: laws against discrimination, "equal pay for equal work," maternity leave and affordable day care
  • Answer gender and family questions: right to divorce (in some Catholic countries), legalized abortion, needs of single parents (usually women) and protection from rape and physical violence
  • In almost every country, effort to legalize abortion became catalyst for mobilizing an effective women's movement

 

 

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