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The 1960s Revolution: Feminism versus the Illusion of Equality [1]

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Date: 2025-06-25

The 1960s witnessed a powerful eruption of feminist activism—a rebellion against America’s gender roles, legal structures, and cultural norms. It challenged the hypernormalized illusion that postwar America had solved “the woman question”—that women’s roles, rights, and status in society had been settled through domestic stability, consumer abundance, and suburban life. Beneath the myth of the “happy homemaker,” millions of women felt stifled, dismissed, and denied full personhood. Their rebellion became known as second-wave feminism, building on the first wave that had culminated in women’s suffrage and the 19th Amendment in 1920.

While this movement was essential, it largely sidelined the needs of women of color, who were navigating compounded injustices—racism, poverty, and police violence. As had occurred in the suffrage movement of the 1800s, women of color would again be forced to organize independently, laying the foundation for intersectional feminism in the following decade.

The FDA’s approval of the birth control pill in 1960 gave women a reliable method of reproductive control, launching the sexual revolution. Women gained more agency over their bodies, sexuality, and life paths. Yet this empowerment sparked significant conservative backlash, revealing deep anxieties about female autonomy—anxiety that persists today.

In February 1963, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was published, based on interviews she conducted over five years. The book gave voice to the dissatisfaction of middle-class suburban housewives who, despite material comfort, felt unfulfilled, isolated, and erased. Friedan called this gendered misery “the problem that has no name.” The book pierced the illusion of postwar contentment, became a bestseller, and inspired a new wave of feminist organizing.

In June 1963, President Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act. At the time, white women earned about 59 cents for every dollar earned by white men in similar roles. The amount for black women was 42-45 cents. Though symbolically important, the law had major loopholes and excluded many job categories, limiting its impact.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 seemed more consequential. It banned employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex. Ironically, “sex” was added by a Southern congressman trying to kill the bill. Instead, it became a vital legal foothold for feminist challenges to workplace inequality. Unfortunately, early enforcement was weak, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) often treated sex discrimination with indifference, if not outright disdain.

This frustration led to the creation of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966 by activists including Betty Friedan, Pauli Murray, and Muriel Fox. NOW became the nation’s largest feminist organization, advocating for legal protections, educational access, reproductive rights, childcare, equal pay, political representation, and the long-stalled Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), first introduced in 1923 and every session since but largely ignored by Congress until the 1970s.

At the same time, a younger, more radical generation of feminists emerged—many pushed out by the sexism they encountered in civil rights and antiwar movements. These women formed consciousness-raising groups, feminist newspapers, and collectives like the Redstockings and WITCH (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell). They rejected patriarchal norms embedded in language, religion, beauty culture, family structures, and heterosexuality.

The feminist movement shattered the myth of gender progress. While postwar America promoted an image of gender harmony—fueled by technological convenience and suburban comfort—the reality was stark:

**Women earned significantly less than men for the same work (and still do).

**Married women often had no legal or financial independence and could be denied credit, employment, or property rights without a husband's approval.

**Abortion was illegal in most states, and women's health decisions were controlled by male-dominated institutions.

One of the most visible and symbolic feminist actions of the decade was the 1968 Miss America Protest in Atlantic City, led by New York Radical Women. About 200–400 women protested the pageant’s beauty standards and commodification of women. They discarded bras, girdles, heels, curlers, and magazines into a “Freedom Trash Can” and crowned a live sheep to mock the objectification onstage. Although no bras were actually burned, a journalist’s misreporting popularized the term “bra-burning,” which became a cultural shorthand for the movement—often used to mock or dismiss it.

Feminism in the 1960s was a rebellion against invisibility, inequality, and cultural gaslighting. It brought private pain into public discourse, politicized the personal, and challenged a patriarchal order that presented itself as natural and eternal. It pierced illusions that America had achieved gender equality, that women were fulfilled by modern life, and that feminism was no longer needed.

Though the system responded with mockery, repression, and commodification, the feminist uprising cracked open the foundation of gender power. It did not yet overturn it—but it made it impossible to pretend everything was fine. The seeds sown during this decade would reshape the landscape of gender politics for decades to come.

Day 157: days left to January 20, 2029: 1,305 days

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