Session Abstract

Second wave feminism fomented drastic changes to women’s roles in American society after World War II. Feminist principles and activism remade women’s status in the family, the media, and especially the labor force. In the typical postwar workplace, men held positions of leadership while women performed supportive tasks. In 1964, Title VII created the legal category of workplace sex equality, and scholars have documented the ways in which women worked through feminist groups and labor unions to open new job categories to women and to strengthen their workplace rights. Scholars have also revealed that conflicts over women’s workplace rights reflected broader societal struggles over the terms of sex equality and difference. Some feminists argued that the fundamental equalities between men and women should open new opportunities to women. Others insisted that legally mandated workplace equality could undercut vital protections and privileges women were granted by virtue of sex difference. And many conservatives questioned the very legitimacy of women’s paid labor outside the home.

Yet, many women in the postwar era held more complicated relationships toward the heated questions of sex equality and difference. Their rights consciousness did not stem from an underlying feminist or class consciousness; nor were they members of feminist or conservative organizations.  Many women encountered the second wave by virtue of their status as individual workers with specific and personal concerns and struggles.  Our papers analyze the decisions and actions of varied groups of women who encountered the second wave as that movement touched their working lives. We consider, for example, early struggles among women, activists, courts and businesses to define and implement new sexual harassment policy; social scientists’ early engagement with, and complication of, feminist ideas about work, family, and femininity; the limitations of federal education policy and professionalization on women athletes; and the legal challenges flight attendants posed to airlines to control their careers and personal lives. 

In so doing, we contribute to a lively conversation about the standard narrative and periodization of the second wave. We ask whether the ‘second wave’ remains an effective allegory to describe the vast array of women who fought for pragmatic, personal successes in the home, the office, and the courtroom. Considered together, our papers suggest that scholars should expand narratives of women workers in the postwar era in order to include those whose experiences fall outside the standard tale of second wave feminist employment activism. Our papers also underscore the challenges facing a broad social movement attempting to represent and speak for all women. Finally, we examine how even the most storied victories of the second wave simultaneously enabled new choices and circumscribed women’s options in unforeseen and varied ways.