Yet it took the modern women’s movement to address the many ways women felt exploited, to lend legitimacy to their growing sense of injustice.

Just two words summed up the hidden injuries women suffered in silence: “That’s life.”Īmerican women’s participation in both the labor force and the sexual revolution had dramatically altered their lives. No language existed to make sense of marital rape, date rape, domestic violence or sexual harassment. The public believed that rape victims probably had “asked for it,” and most women felt too ashamed to report it. If a woman wanted an abortion, legal nowhere in the United States, she risked her life searching among quacks in back alleys for a competent and compassionate doctor. Few people knew more than a handful of women professors, doctors or lawyers. Edgar Berman, a widely known physician, proclaimed on television that women were too tortured by hormonal disturbances to assume the presidency of the nation. All hurricanes bore female names, thanks to the widely held view that women brought chaos.Īs late as 1970, Dr. No women ran big corporations or universities, worked as firefighters, sat on the Supreme Court, climbed telephone poles or owned construction companies. Some states even excluded women from jury duty. Banks routinely denied women credit or loans. Before the 1950s, the president of Harvard University saw no reason to increase the number of female undergraduates because the university’s mission was to “train leaders.” Newspaper ads separated jobs by sex. They did, however, subvert authority and transform society in dramatic and irrevocable ways.Ĭonsider the last half of the 20th century. Activists didn’t hurl tear gas canisters at the police or burn down buildings, overthrow the government or achieve economic dominance. Such was the case with the modern women’s movement.

Though people may suffer greatly, their pain is hidden. Yet some revolutions are harder to recognize: No cataclysms mark their beginnings or ends, no casualties are left lying in pools of blood. In many ways, the women’s movement has been the longest revolution of the century.īursts of artillery fire, mass strikes, massacred protesters and bomb explosions are our usual images of revolution. American women entered the 20th century without the right to vote and ended it with the right “to have it all” as long as they “do it all.” Progress? It depends on whom you ask.

The World Split Open by Ruth Rosen