Women's Suffrage

There was no real upsurge among the women in the United States until another kind of revolt had broken out - the racial upsurge of the 1950's, triggered by the Supreme Court decision against "separate but equal" educational facilities. First in the South and eventually everywhere in this country, women were involved in these struggles. Some white women learned the degree to which black women were worse off than they were, or than black men. White and black women learned what the minority of women active in the organized labor movement had learned much earlier: that women were typically excluded form policy-making leadership roles of even the most radical movement, a lesson that would have to be relearned again and again in the political and peace campaigns of the late sixties. One powerful weapon in this struggle was a book, Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, Strident, repetitious, but passionate, the book's main thesis was that American mass media were programming college-educated women into the role of homemakers, concerned not with the quality of life, but with an insatiable and insensate level of consumerism. Only a meaningful career, the author argued, could offer educated women adequate alternatives to the boredom, alcoholism, and meaningless hobbies of their households. Some lines from the book are: "Recently there has been a tendency to low-rate the winning of woman suffrage as something less than the great achievement it seemed to those who carried on the struggle. As a matter of fact, the opposition to woman suffrage itself bears witness, in a perverse kind of way, to its significance; nothing unimportant would have been so bitterly resisted."Maried women were handicaped, whether from economic necessity or independence of spirit. Married women could not sign contracts; they had no title to their own earnings, to property even when it was their own by inheritance or dower, or to their children in case of legal separation. Although women would be regarded as inferior, and therefore properly subordinate human beings for hundreds of years, forces where at work undermining such attitudes from the earliest colonial days. It was not merely that Protestantism held idleness to be a sin, and therefore required of women that they weave, spin, make lace, soap, shoes, and candles, as well as care for