Session Abstract

Outsiders to Second-Wave Feminism in the United States: Expanding a Traditional Narrative

This panel examines communities and networks of workers, veterans, and legislators who have been considered outside of the mainstream second-wave feminist movement but nevertheless did the ideological work of furthering American women’s rights after World War II.  Scholars have traditionally defined the second wave by looking to the activities of white, middle-class, college-educated women who sought to achieve political and social equality with men and free themselves from the constraints of their biological sex.  Within the formal setting of groups such as the National Organization for Women (NOW), activists lobbied the state to further women’s progress, fighting for equal pay guarantees, equal employment opportunity law enforcement, and the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, for instance.  Other women formed less structured groups that sought to fight gender inequity by increasing women’s awareness of their own oppression, locating the subordination of women in everyday occurrences and interpersonal relationships.

Noted scholars have already begun to dismantle the conventional and narrow parameters of the second wave that have overlooked the contributions of women of color, lower-class women, pro-feminist men, and other outsiders to the mainstream movement who sometimes had objectives that differed from those of the most visible feminist organizations.  Recent scholarship has suggested that historians rethink the periodization of women’s agitation for equality by locating power and activism in communities and networks that were not explicitly feminist in their aims, including labor unions, local governments, and religious associations.

The individual papers in this panel heed the challenge of recent scholarship to uncover activism among understudied actors and to reassess the goals of the advancement of women’s status.  One paper will consider the influence of professional women’s career ambitions on the course of the office workers’ movement in the 1970s and 1980s.  It will demonstrate the ways the movement of women into male-dominated jobs further solidified clerical work as unskilled, lacking in prestige and without upward mobility.  Another paper will examine how women Vietnam veterans capitalized on second-wave ideology to demand changes in Veteran’s Administration policy regarding veteran’s healthcare in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  It reveals that the military could function as an unlikely pro-feminist vehicle through which women serving in-country would ground their expectations upon returning home after their tours of duty.  The last paper will be a study of black politicians who advocated for abortion rights in state legislatures and in Congress in the 1960s and 1970s.  These African-American men introduced some of the first bills to reform and repeal state abortions laws, predating NOW’s advocacy of abortion rights and the formation of radical feminist groups who ultimately appropriated the issue.  Taken as a whole, these papers propose that the movement towards greater gender equity came from a variety of political, social, and economic arenas.  The actors defined women’s progress in ways that could support, alter, or contradict traditional second-wave goals, thus expanding our understanding of postwar feminism.