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The Future of the Women's Movement: Resuscitation or Rebirth?
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10711 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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1 / 1986 |
3,898 Words |
| Author
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Sarah E. Petersen
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A recent article in the New York Times Magazine by feminist Betty Friedan proposes "How to Get The Women's Movement Moving Again." Is the women's movement dead or stagnant?
This is her second attempt in recent years to redirect the movement that her initial book The Feminine Mystique launched. Her follow-up book, The Second Stage, preceded the current article.
This years' bitter fight within The National Organization for Women (NOW) which Ms. Friedan founded (the contenders being Eleanor Smeal and Judy Goldsmith; the battle being over its presidency) coupled with the return of NOW to the already-failed political strategy of the Equal rights Amendment, symbolizes the dead end direction of those who style themselves the "women's movement."
Ms. Friedan diagnoses the problem in her works: feminists of the NOW variety, steeped in the rhetoric and strategy that worked a decade ago, are caught in a time warp. Ms. Friedan, to her credit, is larger than the solutions offered by the organization she "mothered" in 1966. In 1985 she chose to attend the United Nations World Conference of Women in Nairobi rather than the strife-torn NOW convention intentionally scheduled for the same time in New Orleans. Ms. Friedan held international seminars under an African tree while Maureen Reagan, the conservative President's daughter, worked the convention hall inside.
While NOW worries about marching Washington for the ERA and feminists complain of the lack of interest shown by younger women who have benefited from past feminist activism, modern women are trying to balance career and family--and struggling to do so.
From suffrage to social engineering
The social position and role of women has changed dramatically in America in the past two decades. Prior to 1963, women's suffrage was the most recent political achievement, and had required nearly a century of political action by women to initiate change. The changes in feminist politics over the next decade-and-a-half were dramatic and rapid. The Feminine Mystique was published in 1963; three years later NOW was formed. While the radical elements of the movement were dramatized in the media--bra burning, lesbian sexual activity--the more substantial legal and administrative reforms did take place in record time. Women were admitted to all-male universities, political offices, and sports from which they were previously barred. Women obtained legal redress for sexual harassment on the job and gender discrimination in employment. Wife-beating, once considered a private matter, is no longer acceptable and there are shelters for battered women in many communities. While not all stereotypes or misconceptions concerning women have vanished, women are able to go farther today than the women of the 1960's would have dared to imagine.
Feminists were, from the beginning, more inclined to the Democratic Party (Gloria Steinem was active in George McGovern's campaign for the presidency) and were attracted to social engineering as the solution to gender discrimination. It is interesting to observe that most of the earlier changes were indeed necessary. Legal support to end sex discrimination on the job, for example seems, in retrospect, quite necessary. The feminists engaged in analysis of political issues
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