A Matter of Simple Justice. Lee Stout

      The social milieu was changing as well. The younger sisters and daughters of the women workers of World War II had seen women in different roles; this would also lead to changing values. A sexual revolution had been brewing since the turn of the century. Arguments over birth control, advocated nationally by Margaret Sanger, melded into the liberating days of the 1920s. In that era, the divorce rate rose, and there was a growing awareness that premarital sex—always present in the past but furtively hidden—had now become an open topic of discussion.

      After World War II, many of the social trends reverted to earlier norms. People married at a younger age, and the percentage of single people in the population declined. Similarly, women had more children and did so at a younger age. Divorce rates declined, as did college attendance rates for women. The long disruptions of the Great Depression and World War II had made the possibility of a secure, “normal” life very attractive once again.

      But as it turned out, family life was different: women did more housework (in part because “hiring a girl to help around the house” had become less common than in the past). The new popular culture, as represented in television, film, magazines, and books, generally emphasized the proper role of women as homemakers and mothers. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, however, women’s roles were gradually called into question more often. At the same time, men were periodically jolted into a new consciousness that women were increasingly looking for new opportunities, not just to contribute to the family income but also to both earn a living and achieve the satisfaction of meaningful work. These were times of economic growth and a fondly idealized golden era of placid and orderly life. But it was, of course, the 1960s that was the linchpin of all that would culminate in the modern women’s movement. “The Sixties”—love ’em or hate ’em—were a tumultuous time when the cultural, social, and political changes that are now so familiar to us first began to accelerate.

      Society had received a wake-up call with the Kinsey Reports on sexual behavior in, first, the human male in 1948 and, then, the human female in 1953. Their “cold” statistics, with “hot” implications, staggered social conservatives. Playboy magazine (first published in 1953) and the mega-selling novel Peyton Place (1956) further stoked the fires. With the introduction of the birth control pill, approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1960 and later backed by the 1965 Supreme Court decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, which legalized the sale of contraceptives and introduced the constitutional right to privacy, Victorian sexual mores were on the ropes.

      This was only one aspect of an increasingly unpredictable and edgy social environment of rock ’n’ roll music, liberalized dress and hairstyles, a growing interest in recreational uses of drugs, health warnings against tobacco, concern for the environment, and the youth culture’s increasing rejection of adult authority and expertise. Along with these changes came increasingly ambitious government programs to fight poverty, improve life in the cities, enhance healthcare and education and a variety of other initiatives, matched by anxiety over nuclear war and genuine anguish over the country’s involvement in Vietnam. As the Woodstock generation confronted the Cold Warriors, the generation gap became absolutely frigid.

      Another key element of the 1960s, the civil rights movement to seek justice for long-oppressed African Americans, had entered its most active phase in 1955 with the Montgomery bus boycott. It continued with sit-ins, marches, demonstrations, voter registration drives, and other nonviolent protests over the crumbling Jim Crow culture of the South and the more subtle prejudices of the North. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 would be the signal pieces of legislation of the Johnson administration that began to move the nation beyond one of America’s greatest social conflicts.

      However, in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, forbidding discrimination in employment based on race, color, religion, or national origin, an older member of the House of Representatives, Judge Howard W. Smith of Virginia, who was chairman of the House Rules Committee, had kindly added sex to the list of aggrieved classes as an ostensible favor to Representative Martha Griffiths (D-MI) and other women in the House. Privately he thought adding women to the bill made it so outrageous that it would surely be voted down. Much to the surprise of many, it made it all the more attractive, and the bill passed and was signed into law. The act also created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) as an arbiter for complaints of failure to comply with the law.

      The EEOC did not accept women’s complaints for adjudication until 1968, however. Feminists’ frustration with the EEOC, among many other concerns, led to the creation in 1966 of the National Organization for Women (NOW), with Betty Friedan as its first president. Their lobbying, along with that of other women’s groups in 1967, helped add sex to the list of causes for discrimination in President Johnson’s Executive Order 11246, which forbade discrimination by federal contractors.

      Of course, Betty Friedan had gained her fame as the author of The Feminine Mystique, which was published in 1963. Her critique of the occupation of housewife and what that role entailed argued that women had become “dehumanized.” Friedan said that society should encourage women to develop their intelligence and broaden their capabilities for the greater good of the nation as well as their own self-actualization. Her book landed like a match in a tinder-dry forest. It sold three million copies in its first three years in print and today is seen as one of the most influential books of the twentieth century. Although Friedan’s analysis covered all women who struggled with feeling trapped at home, it spoke in particular to the younger, college-educated women who had, by and large, been Friedan’s survey research subjects, providing much of the data and sensibilities on which the book was based.