Women's Rights Movement Analysis

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AP® UNITED STATES HISTORY 2011 SCORING GUIDELINES (Form B) Question 5 Compare and contrast the women’s rights movement of the 1840s–1860s with the women’s rights movement of the 1960s–1980s. The 8–9 Essay • Contains a clear, well-developed thesis that compares and contrasts the women’s rights movement of the 1840s–1860s with the women’s rights movement of the 1960s–1980s. • Develops the thesis with substantial and relevant historical information. • Provides effective analysis of both movements; treatment of multiple parts may be somewhat uneven but does not detract from the overall quality of the comparison and contrast. • May contain minor errors that do not detract from the quality of the essay. • Is well organized and well written. The…show more content…
Over the next 20 years the nature of the average family would change dramatically. In the 1950s more than 70 percent of American families with children had a father who worked and a mother who stayed home. By 1980 only 15 percent of families were configured that way. Activism Middle-class women in particular, influenced by the civil rights movement, begin to question their own second-class status. They initially did not challenge male sexism or careerism but wanted opportunities for women too. White, middle-class women in the political mainstream provided most of the national leadership and much of the constituency for the new feminism. Betty Friedan’s 1963 book The Feminine Mystique identified “the problem that has no name” as the frustration of educated middle-class wives and mothers who had subordinated their own aspirations to the needs of men. Three issues initially predominated: equal treatment at school and work, an equal rights amendment, and abortion rights. Equal Treatment The Presidential Commission on the Status of Women in 1961 led to the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and President John F. Kennedy’s banning of sex discrimination in federal employment. In 1964, in congressional debates over Title VII of 1964 Civil Rights Act, conservatives added an amendment to include gender, hoping it would kill the bill, but the amendment and full bill passed. Although future National Organization for Women (NOW) founders Aileen Hernandez and Richard Graham fought hard as members of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to enforce Title VII’s prohibition on sex discrimination, they were ultimately outnumbered 3–2, and the EEOC decided in September 1965 that sex segregation in job advertising was permissible. A month later, at a conference on Title VII and the EEOC, Dr. Pauli Murray — a law professor at Yale and a member of the President’s Commission on the

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