jan 1, 1923 - Equal Rights Amendment first introduced in COngress

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Another contingent of activist women focused on securing legal equality with men. In 1923, Alice Paul, founder of the National Woman’s Party, persuaded congressional allies to consider an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution. The proposed amendment stated simply that “men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States.” Advocates were hopeful; Wisconsin had passed a similar law two years earlier, which had helped women fight gender discrimination. But opponents pointed out that a national ERA would undermine recent labor laws that protected women from workplace abuses. Such laws recognized women’s vulnerability in a heavily sex-segregated labor market. Would a theoretical statement of “equality” help poor and working women more than existing protections? This question divided women’s rights advocates, and Paul’s effort fizzled. The ERA would be introduced repeatedly in Congress over the next five decades, leading to eventual passage and a bitter ratification struggle in the 1970s (see “The Women’s Movement and Gay Rights” in Chapter 28).

Women pushed for rights in another realm in the post–World War I years as well: reproduction. In 1921, Margaret Sanger founded the American Birth Control League, which established birth control clinics and promoted women’s sexual health (it was renamed Planned Parenthood in 1942). Earlier such attempts had landed birth control advocates in jail, because contraceptive devices were illegal in most states and banned from the federal mail. But Sanger had achieved a legal victory in 1918 that permitted her to operate clinics as long as physicians prescribed contraception for medical reasons. She became an internationally recognized leader of the birth control movement in the 1920s, but women’s rights activists in later decades denounced Sanger because she advocated policies based on eugenics — a theory positing the genetic superiority of white over darker races and the genetic inferiority of groups of people such as prostitutes and criminals.

Groups such as the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) had fought for suffrage in the 1910s, just as white women had. But the constitutional right of black women to vote was meaningless in the South, where disfranchisement was law. Black women sought racial, not just gender, equality. When Addie Hunton, field secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and sixty black women from the NACW urged the National Woman’s Party to work against Jim Crow voting restrictions, Alice Paul refused, declaring disfranchisement to be a racial not a gender injustice. Hunton countered that “five million women in the United States cannot be denied their rights without all women of the United States feeling the effect of that denial. No women are free until all women are free.”

Magazines, advertisements, and Hollywood movies crafted idealized images of an American “new woman” in the 1920s. She had thrown off Victorian modesty and claimed a place for herself alongside men in the new culture of consumption and fun. Such images, used primarily to sell products to the middle class, exaggerated reality. But women’s roles — and their ambitions — were changing. The nineteenth-century notion of separate spheres for men and women had eroded considerably by 1930. More women attended college than ever before. Female athletes such as the golfer Glenna Collett, adventurers such as the celebrated pilot Amelia Earhart, and performers such as the brilliant jazz singer Josephine Baker carved out new, more liberated places for women in public life.

Social change takes time, however, and for the majority of American women in the 1920s ordinary life was far less glamorous. In some professions, such as medicine, women actually declined as a percentage of the workforce, and by the end of the decade only 3 percent of lawyers and 4 percent of physicians were women. Women’s wages lagged far behind those of men, and women remained confined to gendered occupations: sales clerks in the new department stores, secretaries in the growing corporate world, and low-paid assembly-line workers in industry, alongside their traditional roles as domestic servants. African American and Latina women could not even get jobs as clerks and secretaries. Thus although American women in this era, especially the young, left behind the Victorian ideal of modesty and confinement to a female-only separate sphere, they had yet to fully dismantle their second-class standing.

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