Title: "I have been here from the start, and I am staying to the finish:" Women in Massive Resistance.
Abstract: UCLA, “Thinking Gender” 2013. Panel: Gendered Justice. Paper: Rebecca Brueckmann. “I have been here from the start, and I’m staying to the finish:” Women in Massive Resistance. The national African-American Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Liberation movement have been analyzed as interdependent on several levels. As Sara Evans has argued, the Civil Rights Movement, particularly its inventive forms of direct action, “provided” women’s rights’ activism with “a new model for social change and language about equality, rights, and community.” i Activism in both movements overlapped, and one of the achievements for social equality and women’s rights was the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” became one of the rallying points of the Women’s Liberation Movement, and her description of “the problem that has no name” gave a name and a narrative to gender expectations, ideas of “motherhood,” and the separation of the public and private sphere, seemingly mandated by 1950s domestic containment policies. ii This depiction has been increasingly differentiated, however, as historians have pointed out that postwar popular culture was not as uniform as portrayed and “also expressed ambivalence about domesticity,” and that Friedan’s and other liberal feminists’ assessment was both race- and class-specific. iii Moreover, questions were raised as to whether the framing of women’s rights’ activism in the popular “waves”-model is entirely adequate, if meaningful continuities to prior years can be established, and if and how the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1960s and 1970s was based on earlier women’s social activism. Indeed, a number of liberal white women, for example, as members of the Urban League, the NAACP or the National Council of Jewish Women, had already intertwined questions of race and gender equality in their social activism and fight against
Publication Year: 2013
Publication Date: 2013-04-05
Language: en
Type: article
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