The Paradox of Gender Equality: How American Women's Groups Gained and Lost Their Public Voice

3. The Second Wave Surges—And Then?

48 Just as the period from the late 1870s through the 1950s encapsulated a major women’s movement, so too did the period from 1960 to 2000. The first wave movement coalesced around suffrage and later around a maternal and child health bill. The second wave movement coalesced around a raft of policies to protect women from institutionalized discrimination and facilitate their access to nontraditional gender roles. The second wave took root in the mid-1960s, reached its heyday in the 1970s, and, depending on the account, either petered out or was institutionalized in the early 1980s. The second wave movement encompassed different ideological strands, such as radical, socialist, cultural, maternal, and liberal (Echols 1989); different notions of women’s distinctiveness from men; different temporal incarnations, such as an older branch and a younger branch (Freeman 1975); and different organizational foundations, such as a collectivist mode and a bureaucratic mode (Ferree and Hess 2000; Rothschild-Whitt 1979). Before, during, and after the second wave, women’s roles as mothers, workers , and advocates were transformed. As in the suffrage era, the second wave gave birth to a lively debate about whether those transformations and the policy victories that accompanied them would have lasting effects on women’s voice and influence in public affairs. Inthischapter,Iexaminewomen’sorganizations’engagementinnational policy debates—as measured by congressional hearing testimony—for the 1960–2000 period. I assess whether the wave theory of women’s collective engagement, which originated in this era, fits the observed patterns or three The Second Wave Surges—And Then? The Second Wave Surges 49 whether an alternative account—stressing the continuous rivers of postmovement participation—better depicts the reality of women’s political history. Three distinct phases unfold in this period: the early 1960s, which began with three major national policy victories advancing women’s rights and status; the late 1960s to the early 1980s, when women organized and sustained the second major national female rights movement, which pressured policymakers and social institutions to end the unequal treatment of women in employment, the market, education, government, and the family ; and the 1980s–90s, when the women’s movement was alternately said to have institutionalized or to have faded away. Thus, the period from 1960 to 2000, with its massive organizational effort by women and its many feminist policy advances, offers a second opportunity to explore the relationship between the expansion of rights and the scope and nature of political participation.The last chapter showed that contrary to many accounts,the extension of full voting rights to women in 1920 was followed by a steady expansion in their presence on Capitol Hill. Women’s groups flourished after suffrage. Their numbers proliferated , their agendas broadened, their prominence at hearings increased, and they played a growing role in important policy debates. For four decades after suffrage, a period that includes the purportedly stifling 1950s, women ’s groups took full advantage of their newfound constitutional rights to enlarge their voice in American democracy. The experience of women in the postsuffrage decades raises an obvious question: Was the expansion of women’s rights in the period centered on the 1970s likewise followed by an expansion in women’s collective engagement in national policy debates? In terms of the familiar wave theory of women’s mobilization, the question is whether the women’s liberation and rights movements would maintain their momentum or whether they would crash on the shoals of victory, burn out, or endure a backlash. Not surprisingly, as was the case with the postsuffrage era, historians disagree about what happened to second wave feminism. Early popular assessments in the news media and in some scholarly works, proclaimed that the second wave movement had died by the 1980s, and some observers went so far as to claim that feminism itself, as an identity frame for collective action, had likewise fallen into disrepute. By these accounts, the wave crashed. More recently, however, scholars have argued that feminism as a movement and an identity did not fade away but merely changed forms. The wave rolled on; it just looked different. I evaluate these competing perspectives with evidence from women’s groups’ appearances on Capitol Hill, together with supporting evidence 50 the PArAdox of Gender equAlity from secondary sources. First, I introduce the early 1960s, which marked a lull in women’s organizational engagement but witnessed the enactment of important public policies that would shape the movement to...