Word: womens
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...then, do so few -- 33% -- identify themselves as "feminists"? Why did 76% of those polled say they pay "not very much" or "no" attention to the women's movement? In many ways, feminism is a victim of its own resounding achievements. Its triumphs -- in getting women into the workplace, in elevating their status in society and in shattering the "feminine mystique" that defined female success only in terms of being a wife and a mother -- have rendered it obsolete, at least in its original form and rhetoric. "Saying the women's movement is dead is like saying the cold...
Consider just a few measures of change. In the 1950s, women made up only 20% of college undergraduates -- in contrast to 54% today -- and two-thirds did not complete their degrees (conventional wisdom then held that an "M.R.S." was more important). As for aspirations, well, they were limited. When more than 13,000 female college graduates were asked, in the early '60s, how they defined success for themselves, the two most common answers were to be the mother of several accomplished children and to be the wife of a prominent man. In 1960, three years before Betty Friedan...
...changes were the result of feminist ideology. Female employment in the U.S. has been rising since the 1890s, accompanied, not coincidentally, by a rise in the average age at which women marry, a decline in family size, and a jump in the divorce rate. The sole exceptions to these trends occurred in the 1950s, when, in the prosperous aftermath of World War II, motherhood and babymaking became a kind of national cult: there was a return to earlier marriage, families were bigger and divorce rates stabilized. Though women continued to pour into the workplace during the '50s, this fact...
...only now, when 68% of women with children under 18 are in the work force (in contrast to 28% of women with children in 1960), that maternity leave and child care -- always issues for the working poor -- have become important for the majority of American women. Only today does the women's movement seem remiss in having failed to give greater emphasis to these matters. "The things I fought for are now considered quaint," complains Erica Jong, a best-selling feminist novelist. "We've won the right to be exhausted, to work a 30-hour day. Younger women...
...wage gap and the segregation of women into low-paying jobs, together with the lack of affordable child care, take their greatest toll on unmarried women, particularly single mothers. Today more than 60% of adults below the federal poverty line are women, and, contrary to popular mythology, the majority are white. More than half the poor families in America are headed by single women. In the early '80s the "feminization of poverty" became an issue for the women's movement, but the situation has barely budged. High divorce rates have added to female destitution. In The Divorce Revolution (1985), sociologist...