The Women's Movement and LGBTQ+ Rights

Why a new women's movement developed

In the early 1960s, American women already had the vote, but political citizenship had not produced equality in everyday life. Women were concentrated in occupations such as secretarial work, nursing and teaching, and were poorly represented in senior positions. In 1960, only two of the 100 US senators were women. Lower pay for women doing the same work as men was commonplace, while many states restricted married women's control over property, contracts or earnings.

These inequalities helped produce a renewed feminist movement. Its supporters challenged both discriminatory laws and the expectation that a woman's main purpose was to be a wife and mother. Campaigns increasingly connected apparently private experiences—such as dependence within marriage—with wider questions of power and opportunity.

Betty Friedan and the Status Commission

President Kennedy established the President's Commission on the Status of Women in December 1961, with Eleanor Roosevelt as its chair. Its 1963 report brought discrimination into national political debate. It recommended equal employment opportunities, more childcare and an end to legal restrictions on married women's property ownership, business activity and contracts. Government investigation therefore helped establish that inequality was a public problem requiring action, rather than simply an individual woman's difficulty.

Also in 1963, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique. She described the dissatisfaction of women who were expected to find complete fulfilment through marriage, housework and motherhood. Naming this experience helped women recognise that their frustrations were shared and could be challenged collectively.

The book was especially concerned with white, married, educated, middle-class suburban women. Its influence was substantial, but this focus did not represent every woman's experience: poorer women and many black women already worked outside the home and faced additional inequalities.

From equal pay to wider employment rights

The Equal Pay Act of 1963 required equal pay for men and women performing the same jobs under equal conditions. It directly challenged separate male and female pay scales. However, equal pay for the same work did not by itself ensure that women could enter better-paid occupations or obtain promotion.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 addressed this broader problem by prohibiting employment discrimination on grounds including sex. Women could use it to challenge discriminatory hiring and promotion. The Act established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, or EEOC, to investigate complaints.

The distinction between a legal right and its enforcement was crucial. Initially, the EEOC concentrated on racial discrimination and gave insufficient attention to sex discrimination. Women therefore had a law they could use, but still needed organised pressure to make its protection effective.

NOW: turning legal promises into action

Friedan helped found the National Organisation for Women (NOW) in 1966 and became its first president. NOW wanted women to participate fully in mainstream American society as equal partners with men. Its methods included lobbying politicians, bringing legal challenges and pressuring federal agencies and employers.

For example, NOW challenged airline rules requiring stewardesses to retire when they married or reached the age of 32. These rules restricted women's working lives in ways that did not apply equally to men. Such campaigns made employment discrimination concrete rather than treating equality as an abstract principle.

NOW also pressed for stronger government action. In 1967, President Johnson issued Executive Order 11375, prohibiting sex discrimination by government contractors and requiring affirmative action to improve women's representation in their workforces. In 1968, the EEOC ruled that separate job advertisements for men and women violated Title VII. These changes show how campaigners used the Civil Rights Act to widen opportunities and strengthen enforcement. NOW's membership reached about 40,000 by 1974.

Women's liberation and the limits of agreement

NOW was not the whole feminist movement. A younger, more radical women's liberation movement also developed among women involved in civil rights and student activism. Some had found that movements demanding equality still expected women to perform subordinate or clerical roles.

Women's liberation groups used small discussion groups, known as consciousness-raising groups, to connect personal experiences with shared inequalities. They also used direct action, including the 1968 Miss America protest, to challenge narrow expectations about women's appearance and roles. Whereas NOW often sought equal access to existing institutions, more radical feminists questioned the assumptions on which those institutions rested.

Campaigners did not agree on every priority. Within NOW, demands for abortion reform and an Equal Rights Amendment generated disagreement. Some feared that controversial issues would distract from employment equality; others worried that an equality amendment could remove protective labour legislation for women.

The Supreme Court: equality and reproductive choice

Campaigners could seek change through the courts as well as through Congress. The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment required states to give people equal protection of the laws, providing a constitutional basis for challenging arbitrary discrimination.

In Reed v. Reed, decided on 22 November 1971, Sally Reed challenged an Idaho law that automatically preferred men over equally entitled women when appointing someone to administer a deceased person's estate. The law had given her former husband preference over her in managing their son's estate simply because he was male. The Supreme Court ruled that this arbitrary preference violated equal protection. It demonstrated that a state could not justify such unequal treatment merely as a convenient way to choose between applicants.

The 1972 equality ruling in Eisenstadt v. Baird, decided on 22 March, concerned access to contraception. Massachusetts law allowed married people to obtain contraceptives through authorised doctors or pharmacists, but denied unmarried people access for preventing pregnancy. William Baird had been convicted after giving a woman contraceptive foam following a lecture.

The Supreme Court held that treating similarly situated married and unmarried people differently in this way violated the Equal Protection Clause. It also explained that privacy belonged to the individual, not simply to a married couple. The ruling extended equal access to contraception to unmarried people. This mattered to feminist demands for reproductive choice: decisions about whether to have children affected women's opportunities in education, employment and personal life. It was a ruling about contraception, not abortion.

In January 1973, Roe v. Wade recognised that the constitutional right to privacy covered a woman's decision to terminate a pregnancy. The ruling restricted states' ability to prohibit abortion within a framework that took account of the stage of pregnancy and fetal viability—the point at which a fetus could survive outside the womb. It was a major advance for reproductive choice, but not an unrestricted right to abortion at every stage, and it remained politically contested.

Constitutional reform and continuing opposition

In 1972, Congress approved the proposed Equal Rights Amendment, which would prohibit denial of equal rights on account of sex. However, it required ratification by 38 states before becoming part of the Constitution. Congressional approval was therefore an important advance, not a completed constitutional victory. Phyllis Schlafly's STOP ERA campaign, founded in 1972, opposed it, arguing that it would remove protections women held, including exemption from military conscription.

By 1974, feminism had secured important changes in law and enforcement and had made discrimination more visible. Nevertheless, legislation and court rulings did not automatically eliminate unequal opportunities or social expectations. Its impact was substantial but incomplete.

Stonewall: resistance and gay liberation

Gay rights campaigning existed before Stonewall. Organisations challenged police entrapment and discrimination in government employment, and tried to change hostile public and professional attitudes towards homosexuality.

In June 1969, a police raid on the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, New York, provoked resistance and rioting. Stonewall became a symbol of refusing intimidation and helped accelerate a more open and militant gay liberation movement.

Afterwards, gay liberation fronts spread from New York to other major cities and university campuses. Campaigners sought legal protection, equal employment opportunities and recognition in education. Some women left male-dominated organisations to establish lesbian feminist groups, linking challenges to discrimination based on sexuality with challenges to women's inequality.

Stonewall's significance lay chiefly in mobilisation, visibility and confidence, rather than an immediate change in national law. In 1974, the first federal civil rights bill for gay men and lesbians was introduced in Congress, but introduction was not the same as enactment. Like the women's movement, gay liberation demonstrated that organised pressure could put previously marginalised demands onto the national political agenda without yet securing full equality.