The women's movement of the 1960s was a renewal of an earlier movement for women's rights that culminated in women's universal suffrage, or voting rights across the nation, with the adoption of the 19th Amendment in 1920. This movement is sometimes referred to as the second wave. However, as the political, social, and economic hardships of the Great Depression (1929–41) and World War II (1939–45) began to dominate American life, the momentum of the earlier women's movement started to fade. Instead, long-standing societal issues may receive more attention because of the postwar era's stability and prosperity. To fight for greater equality in their lives, many women banded together in the late 1960s to launch the second wave of the women's movement. Women fought for equal rights in the workplace and under the law, as well as for the liberation of women from oppressive stereotypes in domestic and other cultural contexts, inspired by the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which focused on gaining rights for African Americans.
A cultural reverence for family that imposed limits on family members emerged in American society in the 1950s. However, the social stigma of women dates back to the early nineteenth century. Television, magazines, religious authorities, and politicians all praised the typical middle-class family unit, which had a breadwinner husband, a stay-at-home wife, and their kids, who were all happily living in the same household. As a result, only 16.2% of married women with children under six had jobs outside the home in 1950. However, the figures were shifted in 1960: 18.6 percent of married women with children under the age of six and 34.8% of women over sixteen who worked outside the home were married. Betty Friedan successfully conveyed these women's sense of irritation and limitation in the book, The Feminine Mystique. The challenges many women had in pursuing the traditional family life, in which the roles of wife and mother defined women by their relationships with others rather than as individuals, were detailed in Friedan's book, published in 1963.
To obtain equal rights for women, Friedan founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966 with the help of 300 women and men. When they failed to pass resolutions requiring the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to acknowledge its legal obligation to end sex discrimination under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 at the National Conference of the Commission on the Status of Women that year in Washington, D.C., the group formed out of frustration. The Equal Rights Amendment, which guarantees that women be treated equally under the law, was ranked highly on the organization's list of political objectives by NOW members. Mass demonstrations, rallies, and nonviolent civil disobedience protests were all organized by NOW to further its causes. NOW also engaged in political lobbying and filed lawsuits. Many gender-equalizing pieces of legislation, such as maternity leave laws that ensured women could give birth without losing their jobs, legal restrictions on newspaper ads designating employment opportunities as either "male" or "female," and welfare reform that offered job training, were made possible thanks to NOW's lobbying efforts. By filing cases in courts across the nation, NOW contributed to the enforcement of numerous laws. The Civil Rights Act of 1964's prohibition against sex discrimination was first enforced by a court in 1969 thanks to an argument made by NOW's southern regional director Sylvia Roberts in front of the Fifth District Federal Court. The government decision allowed women to apply for and hold jobs requiring more than thirty pounds of lifting. Although the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled in 1968 that newspaper help-wanted ads could not be labeled by gender, most newspapers continued to publish separate male and female job ads until NOW successfully took the case to the Supreme Court; the court's 1973 ruling allowed women to apply for and hold any job based solely on skill. Real cultural restrictions on discussing or displaying one's sexuality in public existed. The buzz regarding sex in 1960s public discourse, literature, media, and entertainment was novel. The 1960s saw the elimination of societal and legal barriers to discussing or engaging in sex. The first oral contraceptive pill was introduced in 1960, and this sparked a public conversation about sex and contraception. Allowing previously banned references to and depictions of sex in books, publications, and motion pictures. Without these restrictions, sex became a contentious subject, and during the decade, people started talking about the start of a "sexual revolution."
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