6.8: Civil Rights Case Study--Sex

“The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.”

—Seneca Falls Declaration ⁽¹⁾

“The backlash against U.S. women is real. As the misconception of equality between the sexes becomes more ubiquitous, so does the attempt to restrict the boundaries of women’s personal and political power. . . Let this dismissal of a woman’s experience move you to anger. Turn that outrage into political power. Do not vote for them unless they work for us. Do not have sex with them, do not break bread with them, do not nurture them if they don’t prioritize our freedom to control our bodies and our lives. I am not a post-feminism feminist. I am the Third Wave.”

—Rebecca Walker ⁽²⁾

The Condition of Women in the Early Nineteenth Century

In the early part of the nineteenth century, women could not vote, own property, or sign legally binding contracts. Tradition and the laws of marriage held that men ruled over their wives and controlled whatever income they earned. Nor could women easily escape horrible marriages, as divorce was extremely difficult to obtain. The so-called Cult of True Womanhood or the Cult of Domesticity held that women should be the moral cultivators of their children, should be devoted to their domestic duties, and should be morally pure, religiously pious, and submissive to men. Even though institutions of higher education would admit women starting in the 1830s, educational opportunities for women were limited until after World War Two. Women who worked out of the home were almost always relegated to low-paying factory work, or later, to low-paying office or classroom work. Moreover, they were banned by social custom, educational disadvantage, and professional discrimination from entering higher-paying or prestigious professions like law, medicine, and business. Women were banned from religious leadership positions, and in some cases were forbidden even to speak in church. ⁽³⁾

Overview of the Women’s Movement

The women’s movement has undergone four waves of activity.

• First Wave Feminism focused on attaining the right to vote and other changes in the law.
• Second Wave Feminism worked to change discriminatory laws, but also saw that de facto social discrimination was equally responsible for the oppression of women.
• Third Wave Feminism was concerned about the backlash against women, male violence, and harassment. Also, it witnessed the emergence of intersectionality, “the complex, cumulative way in which the effects of multiple forms of discrimination—such as racism, sexism, and classism—combine, overlap, or intersect, especially in the experiences of marginalized individuals or groups.” ⁽⁴⁾
• Fourth Wave Feminism focuses on the empowerment of women, the use of internet tools, and intersectionality. It also seeks greater gender equality by focusing on gendered norms and the marginalization of women in society.

Is there a Fifth Wave of Feminism? Some social scientists are arguing that the Covid-19 pandemic has brought forth a new wave, which aims to destroy the current systems and build a new world that prioritizes the needs of all marginalized people. ¹⁵ However, it's too early to tell if this hypothesis is correct.

Establishing Political Equality

Beginning in the late eighteenth century, women started to question the exclusion of half the human population from the principles espoused by natural rights philosophers—i.e., liberty, equality, and property. In 1792 England, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797)—incidentally, the mother of Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein—wrote the extremely influential book, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, as an explicit attack on liberal theories that argued for liberty and equality only among men. She emphasized that women and men were both capable of developing their mental faculties through education, but that women were denied that opportunity. She wrote that, “to render . . . the social compact truly equitable . . . women must be allowed to found their virtue on knowledge, which is scarcely possible unless they be educated by the same pursuits as men. For they are now made so inferior by ignorance and low desires, as not to deserve to be ranked with them.” ⁽⁶⁾

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

The U.S. feminist movement supported, and received support from, the abolition movement that developed in the 1830s and 40s. For example, abolitionist leaders such as Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison spoke out against the second-class status of women. In 1840, Lucretia Mott (1793-1880) and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) attended the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London as representatives of American abolitionist organizations. However, the mostly male delegates refused to allow the female delegates seats. Due to that snubbing, the two women had to watch the proceedings from the balcony. That experience led to the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. The ensuing Seneca Falls Declaration was modeled after the Declaration of Independence, asserting that, “all men and women are created equal,” and leveled a series of charges against men—that they have denied women the right to vote, the right to own property, education, employment opportunity, and that women are held to a different moral standard than men.

After the Civil War, the Republican-dominated Congress passed the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which guaranteed the right to vote regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Feminists were outraged when the Fifteenth Amendment left women out, and they created two organizations to fight for the right to vote: The National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association, which differed in their tactics. The two organizations merged in 1890 to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Carrie Chapman Catt (1859-1947), took over leadership of the Association from Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906). Feminists marched in parades, held demonstrations, gave speeches, wrote editorials, chained themselves to the gates of the White House, and went on hunger strikes in prison. The suffragettes were often attacked by angry crowds and suffered daily insults and criticism. Between 1906 and 1920, NAWSA membership grew from less than 20,000 to two million, and a whole series of states granted women the right to vote. The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, granting the right to vote regardless of sex, passed Congress in 1919 and was ratified by Tennessee in 1920, just barely giving it enough states to put it into effect.

Other Frontiers for Women’s Civil Rights

While passing the Nineteenth Amendment was the hallmark achievement of feminism in the U.S., there have been numerous other successes. In 1890, 19 percent of women worked for pay outside of the home, typically as domestic servants, textile workers, food workers, and other low-paid factory workers. While these jobs were similar to male workers, female workers were routinely paid less. Labor unions saw female workers as competitors and their presence in the workforce as suppressing male wages. As a result, women formed their own unions, such as the Women’s Trade Union League and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. The first major female-led labor strike took place in 1909-1910 among low-paid garment workers in New York City. The strike collapsed when male garment workers went back to work in 1910. The next year, a massive fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. Because management had locked the fire escapes, 146 workers, mostly women, perished in the blaze. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire was a watershed in both the women’s movement and the worker-safety movement.

The role of women in the workplace was transformed by the labor requirements of World War II. As men flooded into the armed services, millions of women worked in arms factories doing skilled jobs that had never before been opened to women. In addition, thousands of women served in the armed forces in capacities ranging from nurses to pilots. ⁽⁸⁾ When the war ended, women were again displaced by men in the workforce. In addition, women continued to face discrimination in professional fields such as medicine, law, sports, and business. For instance, both Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsberg—who later became Supreme Court justices—faced discrimination in the law profession in the 1950s when they graduated from law school.

Many people argue that the second wave of feminism was launched by the 1963 publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which argued that women—especially educated women—are unfulfilled by the social requirement of subsuming their identities under their domestic duties demands as wives and mothers.

Even though many professional doors opened, discrimination persisted. In 1976, the Supreme Court ruled that discrimination against pregnant women was not a form of sex discrimination that was forbidden by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because not all women are pregnant. Congress responded in 1978 and passed the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, which banned discrimination “on the basis of pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions” in medium and large sized companies. ⁽⁹⁾

Alice Paul, of the National Women’s Party, first proposed an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution in 1923. It reads:

“Men and Women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction.”

The proposal languished for decades in the U.S. Congress, despite being reintroduced repeatedly. A later version did pass Congress. It read “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”

The Equal Rights Amendment was three states short of the three-quarters needed for ratification when the deadline ran out in 1982. In 2020, Virginia became the thirty-eighth state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, but in the meantime, some states had rescinded their amendment support. Democrats in the House of Representatives pushed through a measure to retroactively eliminate the ratification deadline. However, Republicans in the Senate refused to take up the measure and the Trump administration did not support it either. ⁽¹⁰⁾ If supporters of the Equal Rights Amendment want to see it pass, they may have to start over with Congress resubmitting it to all the states and setting an indeterminate clock for ratification.

Oral contraceptives were developed in the 1960s, and they revolutionized sexual relationships by giving women greater choices and control over whether and when to have children. States continued to try to limit access to birth control devices. The Supreme Court ruled in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) that married couples had a right to privacy with respect to reproductive issues, thereby striking down a Connecticut law that forbade anyone from selling contraceptive devices or instructing anyone on their use. Roe v. Wade (1973) granted a fundamental right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy in the first trimester. Most feminists defend the “right to choose” as essential to women taking their place alongside men in modern society. In addition, a government that is strong enough to force a woman to carry a pregnancy to term against her will is strong enough to intrude itself into any sort of intimate medical or personal decision a woman or a man might want to make.

Update: On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court declared that the constitutional right to abortion, upheld for nearly a half-century, no longer existed. As result, a Michigan law dating back to 1931 would make abortion a felony. Meanwhile, 'trigger laws', which were newer laws pushed through by anti-abortion rights legislators in many states in anticipation of the Supreme Court's action, will also go into immediate effect. The Supreme Court ruling will disproportionately impact people who are poor, low income, and representative of minority groups.

During the 1990s, third-wave feminism was forcefully articulated by women from ethnic minority groups, who had intimately felt oppressed on account of their gender as well as their race. In addition, the movement embraced the cause of lesbians and trans-gendered people. This overreaching ideology also consisted of eco-feminists, who understood ecological degradation as being linked to women’s oppression and the triumph of male-oriented exploitive behaviors.

Black and Pink Feminist Symbol

Today, one of the most difficult obstacles to feminism is the sense that leaders of the past have already “solved” women’s problems. Fourth-wave feminists note that women are still subject to verbal harassment and physical violence at the hands of men; that they are portrayed in the media as men’s playthings; that they are subject to moral double standards not inflicted upon men; that male politicians seem to be on a crusade to control women’s bodies; and that their aspirations are often not supported by educators. This kind of treatment is referred to by feminist writer Laura Bates as Everyday Sexism. This type of sexism serves to make the public sphere—public streets, mass transit, workplaces, colleges, and universities—hostile places for women. ⁽¹⁴⁾

References

1. Seneca Falls Declaration.
2. Rebecca Walker, “Becoming the Third Wave,” Ms. Magazine. January/February 1992. Pages 39-41.
3. No author, “Women’s Rights,” US History.org. No date. Graham Warder, “Women in Nineteenth Century America,” Virginia Commonwealth University Library’s Social Welfare History Project. 2015.
4. Merriam Webster Dictionary.
5. Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” The University of Chicago Legal Forum. Volume 1989, Issue 1. Article 8. Page 140.
6. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. London: Penguin Books, 2004. Page 216.
7. Quoted in Sharon Hartman Strom, Women’s Rights. Wesport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003. Page 156.
8. Emily Yellin, Our Mothers’ War: American Women at Home and at the Front During World War II. New York: Free Press, 2004.
9. Pregnancy Discrimination Act.
10. Clare Foran, “House Votes to Eliminate Equal Rights Amendment Ratification Deadline,” CNN. Feburary 13, 2020.
11. Monica Steiner, “Marital Rape Laws,” Criminal Defense Lawyer. No date.
12. Stephanie Gilmore, “Looking Back, Thinking Ahead: Third Wave Feminism in the United States,” Journal of Women’s History. 12(4): Winter 2001. Page 218.
13. Julie Zeilinger, “3 Reasons ‘Feminism’ is not a Dirty Word,” Huffington Post. Posted 5/17/2012.
14. Laura Bates, Everyday Sexism. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2014.
15. Natasha Garcha, COVID: The Fifth Wave of Feminism: Five ways women are redefining the 'new normal'. Medium.com Posted May 31, 2020.

Media Attributions

• Elizabeth Cady Stanton © Henry Bryan Hall, Jr. is licensed under a Public Domain license
• Feminist Symbol © TMagen is licensed under a CC BY-SA (Attribution ShareAlike) license