Women in the 1960s “A time of transition, change, and confusion”

 Equality (public) : Political rights, economic opportunity  Belief that men and women are inherently of equal worth  Any individual or group effort to empower women that does not seek to disempower others.  Equality (private): family, marriage

 Women marrying younger: average age: 20; 1/3 of all women in 1951 married by 19  Increase in birth rate – after falling steadily since (during Depression even below replacement levels)  Dr. Benjamin Spock, Baby and Child Care – first published in 1946, 50 million copies sold :Child-centered approach to parenting, urged mothers to trust their own instincts.

 “No job is more exacting, more necessary, or more rewarding than that of housewife and mother.”  Debbie Reynolds in 1955 movie: “A woman isn’t a woman until she’s been married and had children.”  Impact on choices made by women – education  Women smaller percentage of student pop. In 1950s than 1920s. Fewer finishing school. “We married what we wanted to be.”

Fanny Lou Hamer

Ella Baker

Jessie Lopez de la Cruz

Presidential Commission on the Status of Women (1963)

Betty Friedan The Feminine Mystique (1963)

 Betty Friedan: focused on dissatisfaction of housewives  “the problem that has no name”: aspirations stifled by postwar domestic ideal  “As she made beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night – she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question -- Is this all?”

Griswold v Connecticut (1965) 