Feminism and the Tunisian Revolution · CHAPTER 1 ·
Origins of second-wave feminism
Chapter 1 of Protest and Change: Second-Wave Feminism and Tunisia, 1945–2015: “The Problem That Has No Name”
By 1945 women in the United States, Britain and France could vote, yet the law still treated them as second-class citizens: in 1961 three Southern states barred women from juries. Married women entered paid work in growing numbers while the suburban homemaker became the ideal, and The Feminine Mystique appeared in February 1963.
WW2 is free in full, and chapter 1 of every atlas is free. A free account opens 3 more chapters a day. Starter, at $9 a month, opens all 21 with no daily limit — see the plans.
Free printable Feminism and the Tunisian Revolution study guide, sent by email ↓
The map above is the world of Women’s rights, November 1961 — Jury service in the US states; the vote elsewhere.
Every state on the map that year: The world in 1960 · Europe in 1960.
Part of IB History: Second-wave feminism and Tunisia →
SHORT EXPLANATION
By 1945 women in the United States, Britain and France could vote. The first wave of feminism had pursued the ballot from the 1840s into the 1920s. Its victory did not settle what equality would mean in the workplace or in civic life: employers could pay women less for the same work, newspapers divided job advertisements by sex, and many states restricted jury service.
A jury judges fellow citizens, yet the 1961 map shows that women could not share that duty everywhere. Three Southern states, in charcoal, barred them altogether; eighteen grey-tan states exempted them simply because they were women. The ballot had given women a political voice while other laws denied them an equal place as citizens.
After the war, millions of families moved to suburbs such as Levittown. Educated women heard that fulfillment lay in housework and motherhood even as more married women took lower-paid jobs. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) treated “woman” as a role made by society. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) gave the unhappiness of college-educated housewives a name: “the problem that has no name”.
The second wave sought equality beyond the vote. In 1963 Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women, a panel of experts like a government task force today, documented unequal laws state by state; the Equal Pay Act made unequal pay for equal work illegal. This atlas asks how experiences become public claims, how protest creates change, and whose experiences a movement may leave out.
The full story
In 1957 Gwendolyn Hoyt struck her husband with a baseball bat during a quarrel in Tampa, Florida. He died, and an all-male jury convicted her of murder. Florida placed women on jury lists only if they registered to serve. Few did so, and the Supreme Court upheld the arrangement in Hoyt v. Florida (1961). Woman, the Court reasoned, was “still regarded as the center of home and family life.”
The map lets us see the reach of that idea. Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina, colored charcoal, excluded women from juries altogether. The grey-tan states exempted women because of their sex, so that juries remained overwhelmingly male. Jury service was a duty of citizenship, but a system that required women to volunteer left most of them without a practical opportunity to exercise it. The law recognized women as voters while continuing to place their family role ahead of their civic role.
Meanwhile, the setting of family life was changing. Federal mortgage guarantees and the GI Bill, which paid for veterans’ homes and college places, helped families move to suburbs. Levittown on Long Island acquired 17,447 houses between 1947 and 1951. The suburban homemaker became a national ideal, although the economy was drawing married women into paid employment.
By 1960 about a third of married women worked for pay, mostly in low-paid “women’s jobs”; full-time women earned around 60 cents for every dollar men earned. In that year the Food and Drug Administration approved the contraceptive pill. It had been tested on women in Puerto Rico in 1956, a connection shown by the arrow to the mainland. Within five years millions of American women used it. Paid work and contraception altered women’s choices, while familiar ideals and unequal laws continued to govern their lives.
The emerging movement needed ways to explain those tensions. The arrow from Paris to New York follows Beauvoir’s ideas: her book reached American readers in English in 1953, suggesting that inequality made by society could be changed by society. Friedan approached the question through women she knew. In 1957 she surveyed her classmates at their fifteenth reunion at Smith College, an elite women’s college in Massachusetts. Published on 19 February 1963, her book sold more than a million copies within a few years.
Officials were gathering evidence too. Kennedy appointed the President’s Commission on the Status of Women in 1961; its report, American Women, appeared in October 1963 and recorded unequal pay, unequal jury laws and a lack of childcare. The Equal Pay Act, passed on 10 June 1963, was the first federal law against sex discrimination at work. The report and the law addressed identifiable inequalities. Friedan’s account helped readers connect their own disappointments to a wider condition, giving them a reason to consider acting together.
FULL EXPLANATION
How unhappy were the housewives?
Friedan’s suburban wives became a powerful picture of the 1950s, but historians have asked how much that picture leaves out. Joanne Meyerowitz examined 489 articles in mass-circulation magazines from 1946 to 1958. Alongside praise of domestic virtue she found praise for women’s public achievements and paid work. The “feminine mystique” was present, but it did not exhaust the messages women received. Daniel Horowitz showed in 1998 that Friedan had herself written about working women’s rights as a left-wing labor journalist in the 1940s. She played down that experience when presenting herself as an ordinary housewife who discovered the problem in her kitchen. bell hooks’s criticism in 1984 concerned whose lives the book described: its women were white, married and middle-class, whereas Black and working-class women had always worked for wages and rarely experienced paid work as liberation. Self-selected surveys and letters cannot tell us how unhappy housewives as a whole were. Friedan gave a real experience its powerful public expression for one group, whose education, money and access to publishers helped make that expression heard.
The jury box and the meaning of citizenship
Linda Kerber asks us to consider the duties of citizenship as well as its rights. An exemption from jury or military service could look like a favor, yet it also marked women as lesser citizens. In Hillsborough County the effect was plain: only a few hundred of many thousands of eligible women had volunteered for jury service, leaving the pool in Hoyt almost entirely male. Lawyers drew on civil-rights strategies to challenge such rules. Pauli Murray, a Black lawyer, called sex discrimination that mirrored Jim Crow racial segregation “Jane Crow”. She argued that the Fourteenth Amendment’s promise of “equal protection of the laws” applied to sex as well as race. Murray and Dorothy Kenyon won White v. Crook in 1966, ending Alabama’s exclusion; South Carolina admitted women jurors in 1967 and Mississippi in 1968. Taylor v. Louisiana (1975) ended the volunteer-only systems upheld in Hoyt. Ruth Bader Ginsburg later acknowledged Murray and Kenyon by listing them as co-authors on a landmark brief. The 1961 map thus shows rules that courts and legislatures would change over the following fourteen years.
A commission that built a movement
The President’s Commission on the Status of Women grew partly out of a dispute within women’s organizations. As Cynthia Harrison shows, Kennedy created it in December 1961 partly to manage disagreement over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), a proposed constitutional guarantee of equal rights regardless of sex. Esther Peterson, a former union organizer who headed the Labor Department’s Women’s Bureau, wanted to deflect the ERA. She and most labor feminists feared it would remove laws limiting women’s working hours and protecting them in factories. The Commission recommended using the Fourteenth Amendment to challenge discrimination case by case, leaving the Constitution unamended. Its work also had an unplanned consequence. Governors were encouraged to establish state commissions, and all fifty states had one by 1967. Hundreds of informed, well-connected women met at national conferences and compared their findings. The Commission supported the Equal Pay Act, first introduced in 1945; it passed only after the standard changed from “comparable” to “equal” work, leaving jobs performed only by women untouched. The network created around the Commission gave women a means to press further demands. At its third national conference in 1966, participants founded the National Organization for Women (NOW), the movement’s first national campaigning body.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
The vote without equality. The Nineteenth Amendment secured women’s vote in 1920, but the expectation that political power would bring legal equality was left unfulfilled. Older rules survived: in some states married women needed a court’s or a husband’s permission to run a business or manage property, jury rules excluded women, and pay scales openly assigned them lower rates. These everyday restrictions supplied grievances for a movement that would look beyond the ballot.
A contradiction inside the suburban ideal. Offices, shops and services were expanding and needed women’s labor. By 1960 about a third of married women had paid jobs, usually low-paid work segregated by sex. Yet magazines, advertising and television celebrated the full-time homemaker and presented domesticity as women’s natural destiny. Women who encountered both expectations could see the distance between the ideal and the conditions in which they worked.
Education without outlets. College offered more women an education, but graduates were widely expected to marry, leave work and devote themselves to family. Friedan’s Smith classmates had studied economics, literature and science; many were now running suburban households. Their education shaped their expectations and gave them skills and social confidence to recognize discrimination, write, organize and lobby. The movement’s first leaders came disproportionately from this group.
Ideas that crossed the Atlantic. Why might inequality survive the vote? Beauvoir’s account of women as “the Other”, defined in relation to men, suggested an answer in institutions and upbringing. The Vatican condemned her book, but an abridged English translation reached American and British readers from 1953. Her argument gave feminists a way to understand inequality as socially constructed and therefore open to political change.
THE TURNING POINT
The Feminine Mystique, 19 February 1963. A 1957 questionnaire for Friedan’s Smith College reunion began an inquiry that grew through five years of interviews. Her book appeared on 19 February 1963 and sold more than a million copies within a few years; thousands wrote to her saying they had thought themselves alone. The Commission and Equal Pay Act were already under way. Friedan gave readers who might never attend a conference a way to recognize their disappointments as shared, and so to discuss and organize around them.
What it changed
A language for consciousness-raising. Women in the small “consciousness-raising” groups of the late 1960s compared experiences and found political roots in personal problems. Friedan’s account had helped make that connection available: “the problem that has no name” entered the language, and housework, marriage and ambition became subjects for public discussion.
A network ready to act. State commissions had brought together hundreds of experienced women from law, unions, universities and government. At their Washington meeting in June 1966, they could not pass a resolution urging enforcement of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the new law against sex discrimination at work. Some participants founded the National Organization for Women on the spot. The connections made through the commissions now supported an independent organization.
Equal pay in law, unequal pay in fact. The Equal Pay Act addressed unequal pay for the same job, while leaving the division of jobs by sex untouched. Most jobs in 1963 were segregated in that way, and women’s earnings stayed at about 60 percent of men’s for the next fifteen years. Activists pursued strikes and lawsuits and pressed for enforcement of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned sex discrimination in hiring and promotion.
A movement defined by one group of women. The early texts centered educated, married, middle-class women, and their concerns with careers, professional schools and escape from home shaped the agenda. Women who had always worked, or who faced racism, poverty or forced sterilization, could find their own problems missing. Their differing experiences would become a deep argument within the movement over whom its demands should serve.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Was The Feminine Mystique a cause of second-wave feminism, or a symptom of changes that were already under way?
The book appeared amid changes already in progress. Married women were entering paid work in large numbers, the Pill was on sale, Kennedy’s Commission was gathering evidence, and the Equal Pay Act passed four months after publication. Meyerowitz and Horowitz show, too, that Friedan described one group and drew on a decade of earlier writing about women and work. In these respects her book was a symptom of conditions that preceded it. But conditions alone do not explain how people come to act together. The flood of letters suggests that Friedan gave readers who might never join a commission a way to recognize their troubles as common and political. The book was a catalyst: it acted on pressures already present. Structural change can make protest possible; naming a grievance, whether by a writer, a martyr or an event, often helps turn that possibility into mobilization.
An interesting fact
Howard Parshley, who translated The Second Sex into English in 1953, was a zoology professor at Smith College, where Friedan surveyed graduates in 1957. Knopf hired him, reportedly expecting a scientific study of sex. He cut between a tenth and a sixth of the text, and scholars later criticized his rendering of several philosophical terms. English readers encountered the book that launched a generation of feminism in this abridged form for more than fifty years. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier produced a complete translation in 2009.
Related
THE FREE PRINTABLE STUDY GUIDE
Get the printable study guide for Protest and Change free. I’ll send you a few short letters, then one when a new atlas opens. That’s all. — Paul
NO TRACKING · YOUR ADDRESS IS USED FOR THE DISPATCH AND NOTHING ELSE · UNSUBSCRIBE ANYTIME