Women as competent community builders. The other side of the coin.

Abstract

The women's movement was revived in America in the late 1960s after a 40-year hiatus (Freeman, 1979; Sochen, 1971) and sprang from two immediate sources. First was the fact that in 1961 President Kennedy created a President's Commission on the Status of Women which led to the establishment of 50 similar state commissions. The men and women who were involved in these commissions formed a network which later became the foundation of NOW, established by Betty Friedan and others in 1966 (Friedan, 1976). In the mid-1960s, the second source emerged. It was a grass roots movement characterized by women coming together in small groups to share their personal experiences, particularly their frustration, anger and unhappiness. Some of these women had participated in the Civil Rights movement and later the anti-war movement and were stunned to find that, despite the rhetoric of equality, they were confined to second-class status in those movements.