Name _____________________________ Class ______ Date ________________
Video: Makers – Women Who Make America – Episode 1
Awakening
1. In 1967 Katherine Switzer became the first woman to compete in the Boston Marathon. For 70
years the Boston Marathon excluded women.
2. The race director, Jock Semple, ran after her, grabbed her and yelled “get the hell out of my race
and give me those numbers.”
3. For the high school graduates of the 1950s life looked good. America was booming, creating a
prosperous new middle class.
4. For boys the future held almost limitless possibilities, but society did not see as much promise for
girls.
5. For middle class American women the ideal was to get married and then to cheerfully assume
their proper place in the home as wives and mothers.
6. Everywhere it seemed the culture was reinforcing the image of the happy homemaker.
The Feminine Mystique
7. It wasn’t always so for American women. During World War II many women were working in
factories building the tanks and airplanes vital to the war effort.
8. By the early1950s female workers had swapped tanks and airplanes for typewriters and
mimeograph machines.
9. Though the number of women in the workplace gradually increased throughout the decade their
jobs were almost always low paying and dead end.
10. As dismal as were the jobs held by most white women, they were high paid careers next to those
available to African Americans.
11. Even those women advantaged by the best educations had almost no shot at a high paying
professional job.
12. Even if they held jobs for a time most middle class women eventually became homemakers.
Tucked between white picket fences they were supposed to be settled and happy. Some were,
but more and more felt like something was missing.
13. In 1963 a writer named Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique , her scathing expose of
the happy homemaker myth.
14. Betty Friedan had given up the chance for an academic career to become a homemaker and parttime journalist in the 1950s. Feeling something was missing in her own life, she wondered if other
women felt the same way.
15. But to the women content with their traditional roles The Feminine Mystique felt like a slap in the
face.
Founding NOW
16. However it was received, Betty Friedan’s book was certainly timely as women’s rights was
beginning to surface as a national issue. In 1963 President Kennedy issued a report finding
widespread discrimination against women in the workplace.
17. The next year President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. Title VII of the act barred
unequal treatment on the basis or religion. In a surprise last minute move Congress included a
ban on gender discrimination as well. Few took the provision on gender seriously. Even the
director of the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, the new agency created to enforce the
law called it a fluke. Eileen Hernandez who had risen through the ranks of the labor movement
was the only woman on the commission.
18. Stewardesses were forced to retire at age 32. Furious, the stewardess marched to Washington to
file a claim with the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission. But in fact the EEOC did
nothing. Under pressure from the airlines they refused to act.
19. Eileen Hernandez joined a small group of female lawyers and politicians who had watched and
waited in vain for the EEOC to act.
20. The National Organization for Women or NOW invited Betty Friedan to be its first president.
21. Like the NAACP, NOW chose a legal strategy looking for test cases they could use to challenge
discriminatory laws. They focused on an obscure case wending its ways through the Georgia
courts in the fall of 1967. Lorena Weeks was a telephone operator in Wadley Georgia struggling
to get by with three children. She sued Southern Bell because they had blocked her advancement
in the company.
22. When an opening for switchman came up Weeks applied. By Southern Bell’s own seniority rules
the job should have been hers.
23. Week’s application was turned down. She was told by her superior that the job was reserved for
men.
24. Weeks sued Southern Bell. In court the company successfully argued that they were merely
protecting women from having to lift equipment weighing as much as 30 pounds.
25. The National Organization for Women provided a young lawyer, Sylvia Roberts, to handle Weeks’
appeal. During the trial Roberts arranged for several objects weighing more than 30 pounds to be
brought into the courtroom.
26. Even after Robert’s demonstration the case dragged on for nearly two years but Weeks refused to
give up.
27. Finally in March 1969 a federal appeals court ruled in Weeks favor stating that Title VII rejects this
type of romantic paternalism. The promise of Title VII is that women are now to be on equal
footing.
Origins of Activism
28. From the Weeks case NOW moved on to other important victories including the end of segregated
help want ads and male-only clubs and restaurants. But the organization and the movement itself
were limited, concerned mostly with the travails of white middle class women.
29. For most black women the preoccupations of middle class white women seemed a world away.
30. For years black women had been lending their energy to the civil rights movement. Excelling as
organizers and occasionally assuming highly public leadership roles.
31. Many college-age white women flocked south to join the struggle. Where they were inspired by
the example of their black sisters.
32. Radicalized by their experiences in civil rights these younger women began to look at their own
lives differently.
33. The civil rights and anti-war movements not only inspired younger women but also exposed them
to deep sexism, even within their own ranks.
34. These young women had a much more sweeping vision of change than their sisters in NOW.
They called it women’s liberation.
35. The new ideas of women’s liberation, born in consciousness-raising groups jumped from campus
to campus and city to city.
36. Women drew from their most personal experiences a whole new world view. They coined a
phrase for it – “The personal is political”.
Demonstrations
37. In 1968 women’s liberationists introduced themselves to the American public with a protest against
one of America’s most cherished institutions.
38. At the time of the Miss America Pageant Robin Morgan was anti-war activist. On September 7th,
Morgan and hundreds of other women gathered on the boardwalk outside the Atlantic City
convention center.
39. Though few in number women’s liberationists knew how to turn bold public actions into media
coverage expanding the reach of their ideas.
40. Women’s magazines provided a particularly rich target for women’s liberation. Read by millions,
Glamour, Redbook, and especially The Ladies Home Journal promoted a stereotype of the happy
homemaker loathed by feminists.
41. The editor of The Ladies Home Journal was a soft-spoken southerner named John Mack Carter.
42. Exhausted Carter finally agreed to give the occupiers 8 pages in an upcoming issue to write
whatever they wanted. Spurred by women’s liberationists the movement looked for a way to make
an even splashier public statement.
Strike for Equality
43. On August 26th feminist leaders summoned women all over the country for a show of force.
44. In New York and cities across the country, women marched.
45. No sooner had the marches ended, however, than the national media sneered at them.
46. Sometimes television talk show hosts would book radical feminists just to confront them.
47. Sure enough the strident views of radical feminists shocked and repelled many Americans.
48. Worried about alienating mainstream America, Betty Friedan tried to distance herself and the
movement from the women’s liberationists.
49. Friedan was especially wary of lesbians, who she once referred to as “the lavender menace”.
50. Like many women, lesbians had found their voices through the women’s movement.
51. Charlotte Bunch had married when she was 22 years old, but her world was turned upside down
when she met fellow activist Rita Mae Brown.
52. But Bunch and Brown received a cold shoulder from the women’s movement itself.
53. It was just lesbians who felt excluded. Women of color also saw little in the movement to move
them.
54. Disaffected African-Americans began to talk and write about their own vision of feminism.
A New Leader Emerges
55. With Betty Friedan unable to bridge the widening rifts in the movement, there was suddenly room
for a new leader to emerge.
56. Gloria Steinem grew up in Toledo, Ohio. Her mother had given up her career as a journalist to
support her husband’s ambitions. Steinem watched her spiral into depression.
57. As a girl Steinem saw little hope of avoiding the same fate.
58. Steinem arrive in New York in the early sixties hoping to forge her own career in journalism, but
she found herself stymied at nearly every turn.
59. As the women’s movement gathered strength, Steinem looked for opportunities to write about it.
In 1969 she covered a public hearing on abortion which was interrupted by women wanting to tell
their own stories.
60. Awakened to her own deep anger, Steinem began to speak out in public herself .
61. Steinem believed that feminism would never be given a fair hearing in the magazines she wrote
for, so she started her own with a group of other successful journalists. They called it “Ms.”
62. The major media immediately predicted the demise of “Ms.”
63. One of the readers of Ms. was Rose Garrity a young mother in Binghamton, New York, trapped in
an abusive marriage.
64. Risking the wrath of her husband, Rose smuggled copies of Ms. and other feminist publications
into an old blanket chest in her home.
65. As Ms. magazine widened the reach of feminism, it helped usher in a new era of the women’s
movement. In the years to come the movement would migrate from an outsider’s insurgency to
the mainstream of American life, where it would lay siege to the country’s most established
institutions, even the relationship between men and women.