Women's Rights Movement

The women's rights movement of the mid-nineteenth century unified women around several issues that were seen as fundamental rights for all citizens; they included: the right to own property, access to higher education, reproductive rights, and suffrage. Women's suffrage was the most controversial women's rights issue of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and divided early feminists on ideological lines. After women secured the right to vote in 1917, the women's rights movement lost much of its momentum. World War I and II encouraged women to do their patriotic duty by entering the workforce to support the war effort. Many women assumed they would leave the working world when men returned from service, and many did. However, other women enjoyed the economic benefits of working outside the home and remained in the workforce permanently. After WWII, the women's rights movement had difficulty coming together on important issues. It was not until the socially explosive 1960s that the modern feminist movement would be re-energized. By 2000, the women's movement had tackled many issues that are considered discriminatory toward women, including, sexism in advertising and the media, economic inequality issues that affect families, and violence against women. Two major issues in which women sought social change into the twenty-first century were those having to do with wage discrimination and reproductive health.

Overview

Women's Rights

Like most modern social movements, the women's rights movement comprises diverse ideals. Feminist and American responses to the movement have generally fallen along three lines:

• Staunch opposition to change;
• Support of moderate and gradual change; and
• Demand for immediate radical change.

The women's rights movement rose during the nineteenth century in Europe and America in response to great inequalities between the legal statuses of women and men. During this time, advocates fought for suffrage, the right to own property, equal wages, and educational opportunities.

In the United States, suffrage proved to be one of the driving issues behind the movement. However, when the movement first began, many moderate feminists saw the fight for voting rights as radical and feared that it would work against their efforts to reach less controversial goals such as property ownership, employment, equal wages, higher education, and access to birth control. The divide between moderate and radical feminists started early in America's history and continues to be present in the women's movement.

Suffrage

First proposed as a federal amendment in 1868, women's suffrage floundered for many years before the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote in 1920. It was 1917 when the National Woman's Party (NWP) met with President Woodrow Wilson and asked him to support women's suffrage. When the women were dismissed by Wilson, members of the party began a picket at the White House. Their protest lasted eighteen months. Harriot Stanton Blatch, the daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Alice Paul were among the first organizers of the picket. However, the picket was not supported by the older and more conservative women's rights group, the National American Women's Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Its members saw the picket as somewhat militant and sought to win suffrage state by state rather than through a federal amendment.

America's involvement in World War I during the spring of 1917 affected the women's suffrage movement in several ways. The NWP refused to support the war effort, while NAWSA saw support of the war as an act of patriotism and a way to further women's rights issues. The differences between the two groups led to hostility that continued until August 1919, when the Nineteenth Amendment was passed. Both the NWP and NAWSA claimed responsibility for the passage of the amendment. Historians disagree about which party was most influential. Many credit the combination of militant and moderate strategies that were employed by each group.

After the women's suffrage movement, some men and women considered the fight for women's rights to be over. Many of the organizations that had been so active in promoting suffrage disbanded after the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified. Though some women's suffrage groups did continue as organizations—namely the League of Women Voters—the feminist movement sputtered without a unifying cause. The Great Depression of the 1930s further hurt the women's movement: most women simply did not have the time or energy to dedicate to feminist causes. With America's entry into World War II, many women entered the workforce for the first time. However, this entry was accompanied by the assumption that women would exit the workforce once American men returned from service. Postwar America saw a steep decline in participation in the women's rights movement. The numbers of women attending college dropped during the 1950s as women married earlier and had more children.

Applications

The women's rights movement reformed during the 1960s as the women's liberation movement. The period would mark the "revitalization of feminism".

According to Judith Lorber, twentieth-century feminism was more fragmented than nineteenth-century feminism, perhaps because of a deeper understanding of the sources of gender inequality. In the twenty-first century, many issues continued to challenge women's economic and political status, and globally, women continued to fight various battles.

Various challenges to gender equality exist. Some of the most common issues include:

• Education: Men tend to have higher educational attainments, though this gap has mostly closed in the US.
• Wages and Employment: Men occupying the same jobs as women tend to be paid more, promoted more frequently, and receive more recognition for their accomplishments.
• Healthcare: In some countries, men have more access to and receive better healthcare than women.
• Violence and Exploitation: Women are subjected to violence and exploitation at greater rates than men.
• Social Inequality: Women still perform most domestic duties, such as housework and childcare.

Educational Attainment

Women's unimpeded access to educational opportunities is strongly supported by feminists. The gap in educational attainment is shrinking rapidly in the industrialized world, and the gap in the US is quite small. In the 2021–22 academic year, 61.9 percent of the students enrolled in master's programs in the US were women, and 53.6 percent of doctoral candidates were women. However, lack of education still hurts women in fundamental ways, the most obvious being economic. This essay will discuss in more detail the gender wage gap that exists in the US. While education does increase a woman's earning potential, research suggests that a definite and pervasive gender wage gap exists at every level of the workforce.

Gender Pay Gap

A "gendered division of labor" exists across the globe. A 1980 United Nations report stated that women performed two-thirds of the world's work, garnered 10 percent of wages worldwide, and owned 1 percent of the world's property. Even in the early twenty-first century, the workplaces of industrialized nations continue to demonstrate a curious paradox. While research shows that companies that encourage diversity and promote women to leadership roles have higher levels of financial performance than companies with less diversity, women's earnings are still significantly less than men's.

The UK, like the US, has grappled with the existence of the gender pay gap for many years. The US passed the Equal Pay Act in 1963, and the UK instituted its own Equal Pay Act in 1970. These acts "offered women a legitimate avenue to seek remuneration for unequal pay." In 1970, the pay differential in the UK was 30 percent. In 2008, the gender pay gap still hovered around 17 percent, the highest of all EU countries, and in early 2023, CNBC reported a gap of 9.4 percent in the UK. Similarly, in March 2023, the US Department of Labor reported that women earned only 83.7 percent of what their male peers did. The question remains, if women are legally guaranteed equal pay, and if promoting women is generally recognized as good for business, why do women still earn less than men? The causes of the gender wage gap are various and complex.

The fact that many women choose to leave their jobs to have children is often identified as one reason for the wage gap. Proponents of this theory argue that, statistically, women earn less than men because some women do not hold paying, full-time jobs, thus dragging down women's average wages. However, most studies of the wage gap only count the earnings of women who work full-time. These studies reveal that of the women who do work full-time, those with children under the age of eighteen earn 5 percent lower wages per hour per child than women who do not have children earn. In the UK, by age forty, men who have children earn 19 percent more than men without children, while childless women earn 11 percent more than working mothers' counterparts do, according to researchers at the Institute for Public Policy Research. These statistics show that women's incomes are negatively affected by parenthood, while men's incomes appear to benefit from it. Further research in the early 2020s revealed this trend's continuance. Though some improvements were made, Black and Hispanic women were noted to only earn 65 to 70 cents for every dollar earned by White men. When these women have children, the pay gap widens to 47 cents on the dollar. Considering all races, men tended to earn more money as they had children, while women earned less.

De Vita offered a few other explanations for the gap:

• Social norms,
• Workplace biases,
• The low expectations women may have of themselves, and
• The competing demands that work and family responsibilities place on women.

"Occupational segmentation," or the gendered division of different industries and types of work, is one pervasive societal norm. Women are more likely to enter "caring, catering, and public sector" jobs, according to De Vita, where wages are generally low. Men, on the other hand, are more likely to pursue jobs in such high-paying industries as energy and engineering. Additionally, men are more likely to hold managerial positions while women more frequently occupy administrative positions. One reason for this segregation may be that women are socially conditioned to gravitate toward these jobs and lack role models for careers and jobs that are generally male dominated. However, other research shows that in the UK, men still earn higher salaries than women even when they occupy similar positions in similar industries. Thus, the gender wage gap is pervasive across industries.

Furthermore, according to De Vita, the pay gap starts before a woman even accepts her first job. In one study of American postgraduate students, during negotiations for their first jobs, 57 percent of men asked for higher salaries, while only 7 percent of women did. As a result, on average, the men's starting salaries were 7.6 percent higher than women. Because a person's starting salary is the figure on which all their future salary negotiations are based, it can have an enormous impact on their lifetime earnings. According to data in early 2023, this may add up to a US$400,000 difference across a forty-year career.

How men and women approach salary negotiations may, again, be attributable to social norms and social conditioning. Men may be more confident in negotiations, and their behavior may be viewed in a positive way. Women, on the other hand, may be seen as aggressive or pushy if they try to negotiate, and their behavior may be viewed negatively.

Equal education is not proving to be as effective in leveling the playing field for women wage earners as was once thought. For many years, educational deficits had been blamed for holding women's wages back over time and contributing to the wage gap. However, studies suggest that wage gaps continue to exist regardless of a woman's educational attainment. A trend in both the UK and the US is the growing gap between men and women at the senior management level. US wage data from 2011 indicated female chief executives earn only 69 percent of what their male counterparts take home (Glynn & Wu, 2013), and in 2021, female CEOs continued to earn 13 percent less than their male counterparts. This extends through upper management levels all the way to boards of directors. While it was once assumed that higher educational attainments increased earnings, the more educated a woman is, the larger the gap between her earnings and those of her male peers.

Women in industrialized countries are narrowing the gap in educational attainment, which has long been one of the goals of the women's movement, but looking at the issue of the wage gap, one might wonder how education is benefiting women. According to former lieutenant governor of Massachusetts Evelyn Murphy and Brandeis University's resident scholar E. J. Graff, "Unfair pay means all women lose. All women—rich and poor, whatever their race or color or native language—are being cheated by wage inequity" (2005).

Reproductive Rights

Reproductive responsibilities and rights have been ongoing concerns for centuries. Throughout history, women and men have actively sought to make conscientious decisions about family planning. Education, contraceptives, and family planning information are among the greatest assets available to women seeking to control their reproductive systems. In the US, where safe and effective contraceptives are widely available, access to contraceptives is no longer as divisive a topic as it once was. Instead, the truly polarizing reproductive rights issue is abortion.

In 2022, twenty-four countries maintained strict laws that banned abortion in all situations, but according to the World Health Organization (WHO), six out of ten of all unwanted pregnancies ended in abortion that year. Of those abortions, 45 percent were conducted under unsafe conditions or by someone lacking the necessary training. The Guttmacher Institute reported an average of 73 million abortions each year, many of which were performed in developing nations, and many resulted in the woman's death. It is difficult to calculate the number of women who suffer serious consequences from self-administered, or "botched" abortions, but restricting access to abortions, as indicated by this data, does not reduce the number of abortions performed.

Though abortions had been available and tolerated in the US throughout the nineteenth century, by the turn of the twentieth century, they were illegal in all US states ("The History of Women's Reproductive Rights," 2005). It was not until 1973, when the Supreme Court ruled that states could not ban first-trimester abortions, that women were again able to seek legal abortion options. Following the landmark decision of Roe v. Wade (1973), federal funds were authorized through Medicare to help low-income women pay for abortions. Almost as soon as the legislation passed, opposition arose. In 2022, Roe v. Wade was overturned, removing federal abortion protections and returning the legal decision over abortions to the individual states.

Feminists and others who support women's reproductive rights have been working to protect the gains won through the original Roe v. Wade ruling. While some countries make access to abortion easier, in the United States, similar efforts have faced considerable opposition. Polls show that most Americans are ambivalent about abortion. While most supported keeping abortion legal in the early 2000s, many also supported keeping some restrictions in place. This mixed opinion was evident in the reaction to the 2022 decision of Roe v. Wade.

Legislation

The Partial Birth Abortion Act of 2003 was seen as a victory for many opponents of abortion, or pro-life advocates. The law prohibits the dilation and extraction procedure (D&X), commonly known as partial-birth abortion, which is generally performed during the second trimester of pregnancy. During this type of abortion, labor is induced, and the fetus is partially delivered, with its head remaining inside the uterus. The base of the fetal skull is then punctured, and the skull's contents are suctioned out, resulting in the skull's collapse. The fetus is then entirely removed from the woman's body. It is a highly controversial type of abortion that has been variously portrayed as

• A "rarely" employed procedure that is used to abort a fetus that is likely suffer severe developmental issues if brought to term and to do so in such a way as to pose the least danger to the woman undergoing the procedure; and
• "A gruesome and inhumane procedure that is never medically necessary and should be prohibited" ("Partial Birth Abortion Act of 2003," 2004)

Three years after it passed, the Supreme Court ruling Gonzales v. Carhart (2007) upheld the act. To pro-life and pro-choice advocates, the ruling was seen as a precursor to further restrictions on abortion rights ("A Question of Life or Death," 2007; Center for Reproductive Rights, 2011). In 2011, 92 restrictions on abortion access were passed across the country, and an additional 43 were enacted the following year (Guttmacher Institute, 2012).

Feminist View—Reproductive Rights

Feminists who support abortion rights have embedded the abortion debate into the larger issue of reproductive rights. Their arguments include a more holistic approach that places importance on reducing the need for abortion by supporting sex education, access to contraceptives, and other educational initiatives. It is hoped that the women's movement's emphasis on prevention will help to win over middle ground by proposing solutions that will reduce unwanted pregnancies. International organizations such as the WHO advocate for such changes to bring down the numbers of abortions, particularly those considered "unsafe," as part of broader public health efforts.

Other feminist voices call for moving toward a more European model of women's reproductive healthcare that would support a wide range of services that would be covered under health insurance plans. They argue that women ought to have access to:

• inexpensive contraceptives,
• comprehensive prenatal care,
• excellent birthing services,
• paid medical leave (maternity leave or other), and
• abortions, if desired.

According to authors Kissling and Michaelman, the US systematically "eviscerated" reproductive health services, leaving women struggling to maintain and control their reproductive health. The feminist perspective argues that society needs to "respect the necessity of allowing individual women to make [reproductive] choices" (Frantz, 2007).

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 created new provisions for health insurance coverage of an array of reproductive health areas. Among these are routine gynecological exams, contraceptives, counseling and screening for sexually transmitted diseases and HIV, cancer screenings, prenatal care, and breastfeeding assistance.

Conclusion

The women's rights movement of the nineteenth and twentieth century has become the modern feminist movement of the twenty-first century. Early activists in the women's rights movement understood that many of the issues that affect women would be decided in the political arena. Thus, passage of the Nineteenth Amendment laid a foundation that would ensure that generations of women following the early suffragists would be able to exert political influence over issues that were of importance to them. The modern women's movement is seeking to educate and advocate on several important, ongoing social issues, including wage disparity, economic equality, and women's health issues.

Terms & Concepts

1963 Equal Pay Act: Prohibits employers from offering unequal pay to employees on the basis of sex.

Feminism: Defined as political, cultural, and social movements that work to obtain equal rights and opportunities for women.

Gender Pay Gap: The disparity in wages paid to men and women who hold similar jobs or perform similar work.

Occupational Segmentation: The gendered division of different industries and types of work.

Roe v. Wade: A 1973 US Supreme Court case that resulted in the ruling that states cannot ban first-trimester abortions, which was overturned in 2022.

Women's Suffrage: A social movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that sought to secure voting rights for women. It resulted in the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.

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Wharton, A. S. (2012). The sociology of gender: An introduction to theory and research (2nd ed.). John Wiley & Sons.