Women in America 1945-1975

• The campaigns for African American civil rights encouraged other protest movements, including those campaigning for Women's rights.

The Women's movement

The movement occurred for several reasons:

• Inequality in employment: the number of women in employment had continued to increase in the years after the second World war, but work for women was overwhelmingly low paid, with many earning only 50 per cent of the wages of men for doing the same job.
• In 1963, Betty Friedan wrote a bestseller called The Feminine Mystique. This was her term for a set of ideas that said that women's happiness came from being wives and mothers. Friedan challenged this notion, insisting that married women needed employment to avoid frustration and boredom. She wrote of hundreds of college-educated women who felt little better than domestic servants.
• Women's attitudes also changed because of the introduction of the contraceptive pill in 1960. This changed women's attitudes to sexual relations and gave them much greater independence.
• Women's rights received a boost from the federal government, which passed a number of important measures, and from the supreme court.
• In 1963, the Equal Pay Act required employers to pay women the same as men for the…