CW - Women (Lesson)

Women

  • The early women's rights advocates: De Gouges, Wollstonecraft, and Pankhurst.
  • The second wave of the 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.
  • Typically women in Europe, the U.S., and Canada had children quickly after marrying.
  • There was an 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 the 20th century, especially after WWII, opportunities for women of modest means to earn cash income at home practically disappeared.
  • Thus, a sharp increase across Europe and North America in the number of married women who became full-time and part-time wage earners outside the home.
  • The rising employment of married women became a powerful force in the drive for women's equality and emancipation.
  • The rising employment of married women became a factor in the 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 are expected to conform to false, infantile patterns of femininity and live for husbands and children.
  • Founded National Organization for Women (NOW); inspired European groups.

Photographs from left - Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan

 

Goals of women's rights movements:

  • Create new statutes in the workplace: laws against discrimination, "equal pay for equal work," maternity leave, and affordable daycare.
  • 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, the effort to legalize abortion became a catalyst for mobilizing an effective women's movement

 

 

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