The making of the women's liberation movement, 1953--1970.
Item
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Title
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The making of the women's liberation movement, 1953--1970.
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Identifier
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AAI3127871
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identifier
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3127871
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Creator
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Giardina, Carol.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Barbara Welter
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Date
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2004
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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History, United States | Women's Studies
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Abstract
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This study is a new interpretation of the origins of the women's liberation branch of American feminism. I argue that the belief that a society free of sexism was possible, and that they themselves could create it, impelled the founders of women's liberation to action. Based on oral histories, unpublished correspondence, and organizational documents, my analysis recasts the making of the movement and shows the national influence of women in the South.;The study demonstrates that women's liberation founders were aware of the impositions of male privilege before they experienced them in the 1960s movements. They had espoused feminism growing up in the 1950s, some as "red diaper babies" or grandchildren of suffragists, others as transformative readers of Simone de Beauvoir. They knew that sexism was a political problem, although they did not know how to fight it. In the civil rights movement and the New Left, they experienced a margin of freedom for women greater than in the larger society. Their own effective organizing, and the leadership of black women, taught the founders to challenge male domination collectively. With the preparation they brought, this experience gave them the knowledge and the courage to start a movement for women's liberation.;Historians agree that women in the civil rights movement and the New Left experienced greater gender equality than in the mainstream society. They attribute the birth of women's liberation to the clash between women's rising expectations and subordination by male coworkers. But the impression that subordination was responsible predominates.;We know little of the rising side or of the new egalitarianism women experienced in that margin of freedom. This study provides the particulars, highlighting the leadership lessons women's liberation founders learned in civil rights and the New Left, and the traditions of struggle passed on in activist families. Here then is a new view of the 1950s, a fresh picture of the distinctively democratic aspects of the movements of the 1960s, and a deeper understanding of the origins of the women's liberation movement.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
