Tidal Wave - How Women Changed America at Century's End

Zusatztext The Washington Post [Evans'] depictions...vivify, as no generalizations could, the extraordinary creative reach of the movement. Informationen zum Autor Sara M. Evans is Distinguished McKnight University Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, where she has taught women's history since 1976. The author of Born for Liberty and Personal Politics and the coauthor of Free Spaces and Wage Justice, she lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. Klappentext As recently as 1960 few women worked outside the home, married women could not borrow money in their own names, schools imposed strict quotas on female applicants, and sexual harassment did not exist as a legal concept. In Tidal Wave, Sara M. Evans, one of our foremost historians of women in America, draws on an extraordinary range of interviews, archives, and published sources to tell for the first time the incredible story of the past forty years in women's history.Encompassing the so-called Second Wave of feminism (1960s and 1970s) and the Third Wave (1980s and 1990s), Evans challenges traditional interpretations of women's history at every turn. Covering politics, economics, popular culture, marriage, and family, and including the perspectives of women ranging from leaders of NOW to little-known women who simply wanted more out of their lives, Tidal Wave paints a vast canvas of a society in upheaval. The movement's shocking success is evinced, Evans notes, by the simple fact that we now live in a country in which all women are feminists, in practice if not in name. Leseprobe Chapter One: The Way We Were; The Way We Are The "first wave" of women's rights activism in the United States built slowly from its beginnings in the middle of the nineteenth century, finally cresting in 1920 with the passage of the nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guaranteeing women the most fundamental right of citizenship, the vote. It swelled slowly and steadily, riding this single, symbolic issue. By contrast, a "second wave" of women's rights activism in the last half of the century arose almost instantly in a fast-moving and unruly storm, massive from the very outset. This driving storm, with shifting winds and crosscurrents, never focused on a single issue and sometimes seemed to be at war as much within itself as with patriarchy. Yet that storm, with all its internal conflicts, produced a tidal wave of feminism that washed over the United States and changed it forever. It is startling to realize that in the early 1960s married women could not borrow money in their own names, professional and graduate schools regularly imposed quotas of 5-10 percent or even less on the numbers of women they would admit, union contracts frequently had separate seniority lists for women and men, and sexual harassment did not exist as a legal concept. It was perfectly legal to pay women and men differently for exactly the same job and to advertise jobs separately: "Help Wanted -- Men" and "Help Wanted -- Women." Feminism, the broad banner under which the second wave named itself, not only shattered a set of legal structures that upheld inequalities between women and men but also challenged prevailing "commonsense" everyday practices built on the assumption that women were naturally docile, domestic, and subordinate. Should a corporate secretary also be an "office wife" who serves coffee and buys birthday presents for the boss's wife? Should etiquette demand that men hold open doors for women but not the reverse? Must women change their names upon marriage? Can men tolerate having a female boss? Can women operate heavy machinery or wield surgical knives with meticulous precision? Must women always be the ones to make and serve coffee? Would successful businessmen take legal advice from female lawyers? Can language accommodate the possibility that firemen, policemen, and chairmen might, in fact, be women? Are women's inc...

Dettagli sul prodotto

• Autori: Sara Evans, Sara M. Evans, Sara Margaret Evans
• Editore: Simon & Schuster USA
• Lingue: Inglese
• Formato: Tascabile
• Pubblicazione: 24.02.2004
• EAN: 9780743255028
• ISBN: 978-0-7432-5502-8
• Pagine: 320
• Dimensioni: 140 mm x 216 mm x 19 mm
• Categoria: Scienze sociali, diritto, economia > Sociologia > Teorie sociologiche