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Unlock This CourseDuring the Second World War millions of American women had worked in factories and offices. When the men came home, women were expected to give the jobs back. In the 1950s television, magazines and adverts all showed the same picture of the ideal woman. She was a happy housewife in the suburbs, looking after her husband and children.
Real life was changing. By 1960 about 38 per cent of women had a paid job, and women made up about a third of all workers. But they were not treated equally.
Most women were in low-paid 'women's jobs' such as secretary, waitress, nurse or teacher. Newspapers printed job adverts in separate lists headed 'Help Wanted Male' and 'Help Wanted Female'. Only about 6 per cent of doctors and 3 per cent of lawyers were women. Airlines could sack an air hostess when she married.
In 1963 a woman working full time earned about 60 cents for every dollar a man earned. Employers could legally pay a woman less than a man for the same job. A married woman often could not get a bank loan without her husband's signature.
Half of all women were married by the age of about 20. A wife was expected to leave work when she had children, and there was very little childcare if she wanted to stay.
Key terms:
Eleanor Roosevelt was the widow of President Franklin Roosevelt and was respected around the world. After 1945 she had helped to write the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948).
On 14 December 1961 President Kennedy set up the President's Commission on the Status of Women. He asked Eleanor Roosevelt to be its chair. Much of the daily work was led by Esther Peterson, the most senior woman in Kennedy's government. Its job was to look into how women were treated at work and in the law. Roosevelt's name made the country take it seriously. She died in November 1962, before it finished.
Its report, 'American Women', came out in October 1963.
It still mattered. The government now had proof, in its own report, that women were treated unfairly. By 1967 all 50 states had set up their own commissions on women, which put active women in touch with each other. And in June 1963 Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act, which said men and women must get the same pay for the same work. But it left out many jobs and did nothing about women being kept out of better jobs in the first place.
Betty Friedan was born in 1921 and went to Smith College, a top women's college. By the 1950s she was a housewife and mother in a suburb of New York. In 1957 she sent a list of questions to about 200 of her old college classmates. Many of these well-off women told her they felt bored, trapped and empty.
She turned her findings into a book, 'The Feminine Mystique', published in February 1963.
The book became a best-seller and went on to sell millions of copies. Its importance was that it put a private feeling into words. Thousands of women found out they were not alone, and began to see their unhappiness as a problem with society, not with themselves.
But Friedan wrote about white, middle-class, college-educated women. Poorer women and many black women had always had to work, and their problems were low pay and bad jobs, not boredom.
The Civil Rights Act (1964) banned discrimination in jobs because of sex as well as race. But the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which was meant to enforce it, did not take women's complaints seriously. It even carried on allowing separate male and female job adverts.
In June 1966 angry delegates at a meeting of the state commissions on women in Washington decided to act. Friedan and 27 other women set up the National Organisation for Women (NOW), and Friedan became its first president. They wanted a pressure group (a group that pushes the government to act) that would do for women what the NAACP did for black Americans.
NOW's founding statement said it would 'bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society now'. In practice that meant making the government enforce the law against sex discrimination, equal pay, equal chances in education and jobs, paid leave for mothers and childcare centres.
NOW worked inside the system. It lobbied Congress and the President, sent petitions, took employers to court and picketed (stood outside with signs in protest). In December 1967 its members picketed EEOC offices over job adverts. On 26 August 1970 it organised the Women's Strike for Equality, when about 50,000 people marched in New York.
Results: in October 1967 President Johnson ordered that firms working for the government must not discriminate against women. In 1968 the EEOC ruled that separate male and female job adverts were illegal. NOW grew from about 1,000 members in 1967 to around 40,000 by 1974.
Limits: most members were white, middle-class and well educated. Pay stayed unequal. Some younger women thought NOW was far too slow and polite, as you will see in Women's Liberation, Abortion and Phyllis Schlafly.
Don't say Eleanor Roosevelt set up NOW. She chaired the Commission and died in 1962, four years before NOW began.
Extract A (a practice extract written for this lesson, in the style of a modern history book)
From a modern history textbook.
'NOW spoke the language of the law court and the committee room. Most of its founders were lawyers, professors and officials, and its president was a best-selling author from the comfortable suburbs. It wrote polite letters to presidents and brought careful cases about job rules and newspaper adverts. For the waitress, the cleaner or the black mother who had always worked, there was little here. A year after it began, this self-appointed voice of American women had only about a thousand members.'
What impression does the author give about the National Organisation for Women (NOW)? You must use Extract A to explain your answer. [6 marks]
The author gives the impression that NOW was a narrow group for privileged women that was out of touch with ordinary women. The author's language makes it sound cut off from real life: it spoke 'the language of the law court and the committee room' and its leader came from the 'comfortable suburbs'. Words such as 'polite' and 'careful' make its methods sound timid. The phrase 'self-appointed voice' is mocking, as it suggests that nobody had asked NOW to speak for women. The author has also chosen to stress who was left out, 'the waitress, the cleaner or the black mother', and its small size, 'only about a thousand members'. Nothing is said about what NOW won, such as the ruling against separate job adverts, which shows the author has selected points to make it look unimportant.
What lifts this to the top level: it names one clear impression, then proves it from the author's choice of words, what the author stresses and what the author leaves out.
Don't just retell the extract. Pick out loaded words such as 'self-appointed' and 'comfortable' and say what each one suggests about NOW. Then add one sentence on what the author chose to leave out. That is what moves an answer from Level 2 to Level 3.