American Women's History During the 1970s

Abstract

Hugh Davis Graham is professor of history at the University of Mary land in Baltimore. The modern feminist move ment came of age during the 1970s. Yet these events have been so recent that we lack both the histori cal perspective and the evidence necessary to understand their full meaning. In short, the mature books that we need on the 1970s have not yet been written. Now that the major archival holdings are being opened for research, we can soon expect to receive a wave of second generation studies that probe the events of the 1970s. This essay will survey the current major literature and specu late on the contours of the coming interpretations. It will concentrate on the realm of public policy, espe cially in the national arena. Much of the future history of women in the 1970s will lie outside the gambit of national politics and policy--in the rich lodes of popular culture, of social and economic life, intellectual and professional development, women's biography and organiza tions, state and local history. But as in the past, with the movements for black civil rights and women's suf frage, the original tone of interpre tation tends to be set by national studies of politics and policy. American feminism was reborn in the 1960s. It spun off of the movement for black civil rights, much as the radical feminism of the Civil War era had flowed from the egalitarian logic and reform experi ence of abolitionism. Yet not until 1980 did we get our first archival based history of women and public policy during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. This was Patricia Zelman's able monograph, Women, Work, and National Policy (1980). The 1960s witnessed the passage of the Equal Pay Act of 1963; the publication of American Women, the report of President Kennedy's Commission on the Status of Women (also in 1963); the unex pected inclusion of gender protec tion in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964: and the formation of the National Organization of Women (NOW) in 1966 to pressure the recal citrant Equal Employment Oppor tunities Commission (EEOC) to enforce the rights of women as well as those of minorities. The second mature histori cal study of the 1960s, Cynthia Harrison's On Account of Sex (1988), covers the postwar years through 1968. Whereas Zelman looks mainly at job discrimination against women and efforts to combat it, Harrison's more comprehensive study surveys a broad range of women's national policy issues. Most of them cen tered on the running battle among Democrats between the special pro tectionists led by Eleanor Roosevelt, Mary Anderson, and Esther Peter son, and the younger feminists of the 1960s, like Marguerite Rawalt and Pauli Murray, who pushed for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). These books appeared as late as the 1980s largely because the Kennedy and Johnson presidential libraries, upon which Zelman and Harrison mainly based their research, did not open their collections on domestic policy until the 1970s. For much the