Feminist Movement - Scope

Scope

As a movement, these women produced the deepest transformation in American society and enlisted the largest number of participants. Underlying the specific conflicts in political economy and culture evoked an intensified awareness of gender issues to activists on all sides of the issue and to millions of other ordinary citizens. Historian Nancy Cott wrote "feminism was an impulse that was impossible to translate into a program without centrifugal results" about the first wave of the movement. What made a change in gender order feel necessary to so much of society was the fate of the family wage system: the male breadwinner/female homemaker idea that shaped government policies and employment in businesses. In the years of the movement women accomplished many of the goals they set out to do. They won protection from employment discrimination, inclusion in affirmative action, abortion law reform, greater representation in media, equal access to school athletics, congressional passage of an equal rights movement, and more.

Demographic changes started sweeping industrial society: birth rates declined, life expectancy increased, and women were entering the paid labor force in large numbers. New public policies emerged fitted to changing family forms and individual life cycles. The work of these women also changed the popular understanding of marriage and the very meaning of life; women came to want more out of their marriages and from men, education, and themselves.

The efforts and accomplishments of these women and organizations throughout the women's movement inspired many authors of that time to write about their personal experiences with feminism. Jo Freeman and Sara Evans were two such authors. Both women participated in the movement and wrote about their firsthand knowledge of feminism. Freeman, American feminist and writer, wrote several feminist articles on issues such as social movements, political parties, public policy toward women and many other important pieces about women. Evans wrote her experiences in books such as The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left and Born for Liberty. Her works focused more on young women activists recognizing that the "personal is political" as well as showing how these women used discussion sessions to expand understanding of the social roots of personal problems and worked towards developing different practices to address those issues.

Part of what made feminism so successful was the way women in different situations developed their own variants and organized for the goals most important to them. All women - Native American women, working class women, Jewish women, Catholic women, sex workers, and women with disabilities - described what gender equality would mean for them and worked together to achieve it.