Sorting Women's History, Part 1 (1960s-70s) Quiz

Dagmar Wilson and Bella Abzug, a U.S. Representative and a lawyer, co-founded Women Strike for Peace to protest nuclear weapons testing in particular and war in general. While 50,000 women nationwide demonstrated in various cities around the USA, about 1500 gathered by the Washington Monument.

Bella Abzug would later join Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, and Shirley Chisholm to form the National Women's Political Caucus, a multi-partisan grassroots organization to help women seeking elected and appointed office.

There were essentially two branches of the women's liberation movement in the 1960s-1980s, the liberal feminists and the radical feminists. When credit is given to 'The Feminine Mystique' for sparking Second-Wave feminism, it is actually for liberal feminists, who saw themselves as they read the book, which described "the problem with no name", the lack of fulfillment that educated and middle-class women were experiencing when supposedly they were living the ideal suburban life.

For the young women of radical feminism, their entry into women's rights came from their experiences of discrimination during the Civil Rights movement. In particular they were tired of being assigned menial roles, being denied leadership, having their work minimized, and facing sexual harassment and assault from male members (and even leaders). They sought more structural changes in relations between men and women on a personal level, with the slogan "the personal is political". More information about this can be found in the book "Daring to Bad" by Alice Echols.

Title VII almost was not originally part of the Civil Rights Act and was added as a joke and an attempt to get the entire legislation to fail (it backfired). Other laws passed in this period that expanded women's rights include the Equal Pay Act 1963, the Women's Educational Equity Act, and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act 1974, which forbade banks from denying women a credit card or a checking account on the basis of sex. (Previously, women had to have a male relative as a co-signer.)

In 1968, women held a protest of the Miss America pageant and the unrealistic expectations for women's beauty. They tossed "instruments of female torture" including saucepans, foundation garments, and hair curlers into a metal trashcan that they planned to set afire, but the police stopped them. Even so, the media characterized the demonstrators as "bra-burning feminists", and the name stuck to the women's liberation movement for years.

The protestors stormed the convention hall, unfurled a banner, and shouted slogans.

They also crowned a sheep as Miss America.

As the Second Wave of feminism gained momentum, student and faculty activism led to the development of Women's Studies as academic discipline, or better stated as an interdisciplinary or trans-disciplinary academic field. The first such course was at Cornell University in 1969. The first Women's Studies department was at San Diego State College (now San Diego State University) in 1969.

This is not to be confused with women's history, which as a sub-discipline of history is a little older. Gerda Lerner offered the first course in women's history in 1963, but the field really took off in the 1970s. Women's Studies is trans-disciplinary covers history, literature, psychology, and even science.

The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was intended to guarantee equal rights and equal protection for women. Congress set a deadline for ratification by 38 states by March 22, 1979. By then, 35 states had approved, and the deadline was extended to 1982. Major organizations such as the AFL-CIO refused to hold their conferences in Miami and Las Vegas, in protest of Florida's and Nevada's failure to ratify the ERA in 1979.

The second wave of feminism, while flourishing in academia, began to suffer as the wing of the conservative movement based in California gained momentum nationwide in the 1980s. The Stop ERA organization led by Phyllis Schafly was very successful in killing support for the amendment as well.

The Alice Paul Institute and other organizations have argued that since other amendments have been ratified past their deadlines without objection from Congress, the ERA should be afforded the same treatment. Nevada and Illinois ratified the ERA in 2017 and 2018, respectively, decades after the original deadline, and lastly Virginia ratified it 2020. The National Archivist at that point refused to certify the ERA unless compelled to do so by the Supreme Court.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s there were other Supreme Court cases that expanded women's rights. Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), which legalized contraception for married couples, was the first decision in which Justices explicitly named "zones of privacy" guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

This concept would be used for later decisions, such as Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972), which legalized contraception for unwed couples, and for Roe v. Wade (1973), which legalized abortion. This last decision divided the nation and became a focal point for organizing right-wing in American politics as well as for the women's movement. Subsequent court cases limited the scope of the Roe v. Wade.

"Time" dramatically declared in 1975 that "enough U.S. women have so deliberately taken possession of their lives that the event is spiritually equivalent to the discovery of a new continent." The magazine selected not one particular woman but the American Woman because the revolution in American society and culture was not so much among the elite achievers at the top as in "the status of the everyday, usually anonymous woman, who moved into the mainstream of jobs, ideas and policymaking."

That same year, Nebraska became the first state of the Union to criminalize marital rape. It became a crime nationwide in 1993.

Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906) and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) were the two most important figures in the women's suffrage movement, or First-Wave feminism (1848-1920). They were angered when the 14th and 15th Amendments, which gave equality and voting rights to men of color, specifically excluded women. Together they organized the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869. Then in 1872, Susan B. Anthony attempted to vote in a federal election and was fined $100 (equivalent to around $2000 in the 21st century).

In 1978, Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin introduced legislation to modify the proposed Liberty dollar to replace the face of Lady Liberty with that of Susan B. Anthony. Representatives Mary Rose Oaker and Pat Schroeder introduced the House bill. Chief Engraver Gasparro designed the Susan B. Anthony dollar, which used the modified Apollo 11 insignia (a bald eagle landing on the moon) utilized in the Eisenhower silver dollar. This first dollar to feature a real woman (rather than Lady Liberty) was minted from 1979 to 1981, and then again in 1999, though the vending machine industry lobbied against the coin. The United States Postal Service continued to use them in their vending machines, however.

U.S. President Jimmy Carter selected March 8 because it coincided with International Women's Day, which originated in European labor movements and had been adopted by the United Nations in 1977. Later in 1980, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R) and Rep. Barbara Mikulski (D) co-sponsored the first Joint Congressional Resolution declaring a "National Women's History Week 1981".

This would eventually expand by 1987 to Women's History Month (namely March), to be proclaimed yearly by the President of the United States.

The theme of that first Women's History Month was "Generations of Courage, Compassion, and Conviction". Women's History month is also celebrated in March in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia.