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Among all the challenges to the conformity of post-war America, the women's movement had perhaps the most far-reaching and lasting consequences, for it reached into the most intimate structures of everyday life — work, marriage, the family, sexuality, and the body. The domestic ideal of the 1950s had confined the model American woman to the roles of homemaker and mother; within two decades that ideal had been decisively challenged, and the legal, economic, and cultural position of women transformed. This lesson examines the rise of second-wave feminism — from Betty Friedan's diagnosis of "the problem that has no name" and the founding of the National Organization for Women, through the campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment and its defeat, to the landmark abortion ruling of Roe v. Wade — and it sets alongside it the wider transformation of social attitudes, including the emergence of the gay rights movement after the Stonewall uprising.
For the Edexcel depth study, the women's movement and the broader liberalisation of attitudes are the deepest and most durable expression of "challenge." Where the anti-war movement faded and the counterculture's utopian moment passed, the transformation of gender roles and social mores reshaped American life permanently. Mastery of this topic depends on distinguishing the strands of the movement — liberal, reformist feminism working through law and politics, and a more radical women's liberation emerging from the New Left — and on assessing, with balance, both the movement's genuine achievements and the powerful conservative reaction it provoked, above all over the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion. The subject must be handled critically and even-handedly: these were, and remain, contested questions, and the strongest analysis presents the arguments of both the movement and its opponents as historical phenomena to be understood.
By the end of this lesson you will be able to:
This lesson belongs to Edexcel 9HI0 Paper 2, Option 2H.2 (Route H depth study): "The USA, 1955–92: conformity and challenge." It covers second-wave feminism, the Equal Rights Amendment, Roe v. Wade, the gay rights movement, and the wider change in social attitudes. Within our own teaching sequence it completes the arc of "challenge," tracing the transformation of the private sphere of family, sexuality, and gender that the domestic conformity of the opening lesson had defined, and it looks forward to the conservative reaction that later lessons develop.
Because Paper 2 is a depth paper, the reward is for fine command of a short period and for source judgements set firmly in context. (For the precise weightings and question wording, consult the official Edexcel specification and sample assessment materials rather than any paraphrase.)
Key definition. Second-wave feminism refers to the resurgence of the women's movement from the early 1960s (the "first wave" having secured the vote in 1920). Where the first wave had focused on legal and political rights, the second wave addressed a wider range of issues — the family, sexuality, the workplace, reproductive rights, and cultural representations of women — encapsulated in the slogan "the personal is political."
The revival of American feminism in the 1960s had several roots. The first was the gap, examined in the opening lesson, between the domestic ideal of the 1950s and the reality of women's lives: even as the culture insisted a woman's place was in the home, the proportion of married women in paid work rose, and many educated women found the confinement to domesticity frustrating and unfulfilling. The second was the example and the methods of the civil rights movement, which demonstrated how a disadvantaged group could organise for equality. The third, for younger and more radical women, was their experience within the New Left and the anti-war movement, where they often found themselves relegated to subordinate roles despite the movements' egalitarian rhetoric — an experience that helped spark a distinct women's liberation current.
The catalysing text was Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963), which named "the problem that has no name" — the pervasive, unspoken dissatisfaction of educated middle-class women confined to the roles of wife and mother. The book sold in enormous numbers and is widely credited with sparking the modern women's movement. Early institutional and legal gains followed quickly:
| Development | Year | Significance |
|---|---|---|
| Presidential Commission on the Status of Women | 1961 | Chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt; documented widespread discrimination against women |
| The Feminine Mystique | 1963 | Named women's discontent and galvanised the movement |
| Equal Pay Act | 1963 | Required equal pay for equal work regardless of sex |
| Title VII of the Civil Rights Act | 1964 | Prohibited employment discrimination on grounds of sex |
| National Organization for Women (NOW) | 1966 | Founded by Friedan and others to pursue women's equality through law and politics |
The inclusion of "sex" in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act is one of the more striking episodes of the era: the word was added late in the legislative process, partly by opponents hoping the addition would help sink the bill, yet it survived and became one of the most powerful legal instruments available to the women's movement. The founding of NOW in 1966 — after federal authorities proved reluctant to enforce Title VII's sex-discrimination provisions — gave liberal feminism a national organisational vehicle, modelled in part on the civil rights organisations, to press for equality through lobbying, litigation, and political action.
A crucial analytical distinction runs through the movement. Liberal feminism, represented by NOW and figures such as Friedan, sought equality within existing institutions — equal pay, equal access to jobs and education, equal legal rights — and worked through conventional political channels. Women's liberation, emerging from the younger, more radical milieu of the New Left, went further, challenging the deep structures of "patriarchy" in the family, sexuality, and culture, and pioneering new methods such as "consciousness-raising" groups. Its slogan, "the personal is political," insisted that the most intimate arrangements of private life — housework, childcare, sexuality — were themselves political questions. The two currents sometimes clashed, but together they gave the movement both institutional weight and cultural radicalism, and their combination is essential to understanding its breadth.
The central legislative goal of liberal feminism in the 1970s was the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution, which would have guaranteed that equality of rights could not be denied on account of sex. First proposed in the 1920s, the amendment was passed by Congress in 1972 and sent to the states for ratification, and it initially enjoyed broad, bipartisan support: within a year most of the necessary thirty-eight states had ratified it, and its adoption seemed assured.
The amendment nonetheless failed. Its defeat is one of the most instructive episodes in the whole option, because it reveals both the achievements of the women's movement and the power of the conservative reaction it provoked. The campaign against the ERA was led by the conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, whose "STOP ERA" movement mobilised a coalition of religious conservatives and traditionalist women with remarkable effectiveness. Schlafly's arguments — that the amendment would strip women of protections and privileges, expose them to conscription, and undermine the family and traditional gender roles — resonated with many Americans, particularly as the cultural changes of the era generated anxiety. Ratification stalled, several states moved to rescind their approval, and despite an extension of the deadline the amendment fell short of the required thirty-eight states and was never adopted.
The ERA's defeat is significant on several levels. It demonstrated the limits of the women's movement in the face of an organised conservative backlash; it revealed deep divisions among women themselves, for the anti-ERA movement was substantially led and populated by women who felt the feminist movement did not speak for them; and it marked an early and important victory for the emerging New Right, which would fuse traditionalism on questions of gender and family with economic and religious conservatism. A balanced account must present Schlafly's campaign not as an aberration but as an expression of a genuine and widely held set of values, which the movement's advances had brought into open political conflict.
If the ERA marked the movement's most visible legislative defeat, the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade (1973) marked its most consequential — and most contested — victory. The Court held that the constitutional right to privacy extended to a woman's decision to have an abortion, establishing a framework, organised around the trimesters of pregnancy, that restricted the states' power to prohibit it. For the women's movement, the ruling was a landmark affirmation of reproductive autonomy and of a woman's control over her own body — a central demand of women's liberation.
The decision also, however, galvanised the opposition. It energised a pro-life movement, drawing heavily on Catholic and, increasingly, evangelical Protestant Americans, that regarded abortion as the taking of human life and that would become one of the most powerful forces in American politics for the following half-century. Together with the ERA battle, Roe v. Wade helped to make questions of gender, sexuality, and the family — the "social issues" — central to the conservative resurgence, and to bind religious conservatives to the Republican coalition. For the depth study, the essential point is that the movement's greatest gains and the reaction against them were bound together: the very advances of second-wave feminism helped to create and mobilise the New Right that would dominate the politics of the 1980s.
The transformation of attitudes to gender ran alongside a transformation in attitudes to sexuality, and the period saw the birth of the modern gay rights movement. Its symbolic origin was the Stonewall uprising of June 1969, when patrons of the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village, New York, resisted a police raid of the kind that had long been routine, and several nights of confrontation followed. Stonewall became the catalyst for a new, more assertive gay liberation movement, which rejected the earlier strategy of quiet respectability in favour of open, public assertion of gay identity and rights; the anniversary of the uprising was soon commemorated in the first "pride" marches.
Progress was real but partial and contested. Activists organised, some cities and states began to repeal discriminatory laws, and a growing openness challenged the deep stigma that had surrounded homosexuality. Yet the movement too provoked a conservative reaction, and it would face, from the early 1980s, the immense challenge of the AIDS epidemic, which lies largely beyond this lesson's period but which reshaped the movement in the years the later lessons cover. For the purposes of this topic, Stonewall belongs firmly within the broader liberalisation of social attitudes that the women's movement both expressed and accelerated.
The women's and gay rights movements were part of a broader loosening of social norms across these decades. The "sexual revolution," underpinned by the contraceptive pill (approved in 1960) and by changing mores, transformed attitudes to sex, marriage, and the family: rates of divorce and cohabitation rose, and the near-universal early marriage of the 1950s gave way to more varied patterns of family life. Attitudes to authority, to personal freedom, and to the roles of men and women shifted permanently. These changes were genuinely liberating for many Americans, but they also generated profound unease among those who valued the older order, and that unease was among the deepest wellsprings of the conservative reaction. A rigorous assessment holds both in view: the transformation of American social life was real, extensive, and irreversible, and it was precisely its depth that made the backlash against it so powerful.
The historiography of the women's movement turns on how to assess its achievements and limits, on the relationship between its liberal and radical wings, and on the significance of the backlash it provoked. For Section B you need to characterise these positions and weigh them, always paraphrasing a school of thought rather than inventing quoted words for a named historian.
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