1 janv. 1970 - National Women's Strike for Equality

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Title IX: Law passed as part of the Education Amendments of 1972 guaranteeing women equal access and treatment in all educational institutions receiving federal funding



Among women, the late 1960s marked a decided break with the past and spawned new expressions of feminism: women’s liberation and black and Chicana feminisms. Activists for the former were primarily younger, college-educated women, often coming out of the New Left, antiwar, and civil rights movements. The male leaders of many left organizations, they discovered, considered women little more than pretty helpers who typed up their manifestoes and fetched coffee. In a manifesto of her own — entitled “Goodbye to All That” — the feminist Robin Morgan described the “counterfeit, male-dominated Left” as a movement composed of “men competing for power and status at the top, and women doing all the work at the bottom.”

Fed up with second-class status, and fluent in the tactics of organization and protest, women radicals broke away and organized on their own. Unlike the more centralized National Organization for Women (NOW), the women’s liberation movement was composed of loosely tied together collectives in New York, San Francisco, Boston, and other big cities and college towns. Often meeting in small “consciousness raising” groups to discuss their experiences of gender injustice, women’s liberationists cast their movement as more than a demand for legal equality with men — they sought a cultural revolution in society’s treatment of women. “Women’s lib,” as it was dubbed by a skeptical media, went public in 1968 at the Miss America pageant. Demonstrators carried posters of female bodies labeled like butcher’s diagrams — implying that society treated women as meat. Mirroring the identity politics of Black Power activists and the theatricality of the counterculture, women’s liberation sought to highlight the denigration and exploitation of women. “Sisterhood is powerful!” read one women’s liberationist manifesto. The nationwide Women’s Strike for Equality in August 1970 brought hundreds of thousands of women into the streets for marches and demonstrations.

By that year, the women’s movement had made new terms such as sexism and male chauvinism part of the national vocabulary. As converts flooded in, the radical and liberal offshoots of the movement began to converge. Radical women realized that key feminist goals — child care, equal pay, and reproduction rights — might be achieved by conventional political pressure. At the same time, more traditional activists, often known as “liberal feminists” to distinguish them from women’s liberationists and exemplified by Betty Friedan, developed a wider view of women’s oppression — and adopted some of the radical feminist positions they had earlier rejected. They came to understand that women required more than equal opportunity: a culture that primarily regarded women as sexual objects and helpmates to men had to change as well. Although still largely white and middle class, feminists of all stripes began to think of themselves as part of a broad social crusade.

“Sisterhood” did not unite all women, however. The mostly white feminist organizations such as NOW rarely addressed the concerns of women of color, and black and Chicana women primarily remained within the larger civil rights movement, linking their feminism to the crusade for racial justice. In the late 1960s, new groups such as the Combahee River Collective and the National Black Feminist Organization arose to speak for the concerns of black women. Black feminists criticized sexism but were reluctant to break completely with black men and the struggle for racial equality. “Given the mutual commitment of Black men and Black women alike to the liberation of our people,” the black feminist Frances Beal wrote in 1970, “the total involvement of each individual is necessary.” Mexican American feminists, or Chicana feminists as they called themselves, often came from Catholic backgrounds in which motherhood and family were held in high regard. “We want to walk hand in hand with the Chicano brothers, with our children, our viejitos [elders], our Familia de la Raza,” one such feminist wrote. While black and Chicana feminists did embrace the larger movement for women’s rights, they also sought to address specific needs in their communities.

A poster announcing a protest organized by a women’s liberation group and the Black Panther Party of Connecticut in 1969, in support of six female Black Panthers who were being held in Niantic Connecticut State Women’s Prison. White, black, and Chicana feminists all grew more radical in their activism and demands in the late 1960s, part of a wider radicalization of politics after 1968.



One of the most important contributions of the new feminisms was to raise awareness about what feminist Kate Millett called “sexual politics.” Liberationists, along with black and Chicana feminists, argued that women could not freely shape their destinies without control over their own bodies. They campaigned for reproductive rights, especially access to abortion, and railed against a culture that blamed women for their own sexual assault and turned a blind eye to sexual harassment in the workplace.

Progress on many of these fronts — sexual harassment in particular — was slow and would take decades, but the surging women’s movement drove many changes that were more immediate and visible. Women’s opportunities expanded dramatically in higher education. Starting in 1969 and continuing through the 1970s, dozens of formerly all-male bastions such as Yale, Princeton, and the U.S. military academies admitted women undergraduates for the first time, often under pressure from lawsuits filed by feminist attorneys. Women’s studies programs emerged at many institutions, and the proportion of women attending graduate and professional schools rose markedly. With the adoption of Title IX in 1972 (of the Education Amendments bill), Congress broadened the 1964 Civil Rights Act to include educational institutions, prohibiting colleges and universities that received federal funds from discriminating on the basis of sex. Title IX guaranteed women access to the same educational opportunities as men and all but eliminated male-only institutions of higher education. By requiring comparable funding for sports programs, Title IX also made women’s athletics a significant presence on college campuses.


Women also became an increasingly visible presence in political life. Congresswomen Bella Abzug and Shirley Chisholm joined Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, the founder of Ms. magazine, to create the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971. Abzug and Chisholm, both from New York, along with Congresswomen Patsy Mink from Hawaii and Martha Griffiths from Michigan, sponsored equal rights legislation — and helped to revive and eventually pass the Equal Rights Amendment. Congress authorized child-care tax deductions for working parents in 1972 and in 1974 passed the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which permitted married women to get credit — including simple financial tools such as credit cards and mortgages — in their own names.

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