Social Scientists and the Shaping of Modern Feminism

In the early and still-influential historiography of modern feminism, writers grouped feminist activists in several ways. One of the most basic was the pairing of middle-aged, professional, “women’s rights” feminists with young, radical, “women’s liberation” feminists.  The former sought to gain guarantees of equal pay, equal opportunities for professional advancement, and equal access to economic, educational, and political institutions such as lines of credit, medical school, and jury duty. The latter, by contrast, aimed to interrogate all aspects of society from capitalism to the nuclear family to understand and undermine the production and reproduction of patriarchy, taking “the personal is political” as their motto.

Feminist social scientists in the 1960s and 1970s did not easily fit into slots.  Some of the most prominent, middle-aged and older, were deeply committed to understanding how such “personal” issues as sex role socialization and family organization shaped gender in society.  Indeed, their work was crucial to feminist analysis of family power dynamics.  To take one example, the sociologist Alice Rossi was an early member of the National Organization for Women and in 1963 presented a succinct articulation of the ideals of liberal feminism in her paper “Equality Between the Sexes: An Immodest Proposal.”  But she also floated the idea of all-female child-rearing communes. Moreover, many younger psychologists and sociologists worked on such “liberal” projects as advancing the status of women within the profession. Most importantly, the work done by psychologists and sociologists as early as the 1950s provided an intellectual foundation for radical feminist critiques of American society.

In recent years, historians have begun to complicate the periodization and categorization of modern feminism.  This paper is part of that project.