First Wave Feminism By Betty Friedan - 1171 Words

Background Knowledge: Second-wave feminism refers to the period of feminist activity that focused on social and legal issues of gender equality such as sexuality, family, the workplace, reproductive rights and equal opportunity in education and the workplace. Source 1: The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan In 1963, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was published. Friedan discussed the problem that â€Å"lay buried, unspoken† in the minds of the suburban housewife, saying that they were too socially conditioned to recognize their boredom and lack of fulfillment. The book isn’t reliable in that it failed to address the struggle of minority and working-class women who didn t have the choice to stay at home or easy access to higher†¦show more content†¦In 1966, the National Organization for Women (NOW) was founded by twenty-eight women to function as a civil rights organisation for women. The majority of the organisation were white, middle-class women. The groups main goals were reproductive freedom, gender equality in the workplace and the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. To achieve their goals they employed techniques such as legislative lobbying, legal action and public demonstrations. In Schultz v. Wheaton Glass Company in 1970, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that jobs held by men and women must be substantially equal but not identical to fall under the protection of the Equal Pay Act. This was a success for the feminist movement, as it made it illegal for employers to change the job titles of women workers in order to pay them less than men. Betty Friedan organised the Women s Strike for Equality on August 26, 1970 which was the 50th anniversary of woman suffrage in the U.S. 50,000 women participated in the Strike to demand equal rights. In 1972, Washington, D.C., established the first rape crisis hotline. The Title IX of the Higher Education Act was passed by Congress in 1972, meaning that discrimination on the basis of sex in any educational program was prohibited. As a result, all-male schools began to include women and athletic programs had to sponsor and