Women's Liberation

The feminist movement in the 1960s and 1970s began with the rejection of previous values.  In the 1950s, the women was considered the wife, and nothing else. Women in the 1950s married at some of the youngest ages, many tying the knot soon after high school, with only 1.2% of women at that time period attending universities.  The role of women were to be perfect wives, who cooked, cleaned, and took care of their children and husbands. The spread of suburbs and the general longing among the country after the war to settle down and gain peace and prosperity provided the perfect situation for this to occur.  Those who did work were greatly held back by their sex, receiving far less than men.  Their jobs also proved to have little chance in upward mobility without a college education, with 70% of working women working in clerical or assembly line jobs. However things began to change in later years.  The pill was invented in the 50s, giving women the chance to put off having a family.  Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique criticized the domestic lifestyles that women were often forced to lived, and made many women realize that there was something that they wanted to make of themselves other than wives and mothers. Many women began to reject symbols of feminine domesticity, such as beauty products and homemaking magazines. They threw away these items in the Freedom Trashcan Protest and the protests of the Miss America Pageant, advocating for themselves to be seen as more than their bodies. They also began to advocate for sexual reproduction rights and equal wages, issues that are still present today.