paragraph on women of 20th century
Answers
“I feel empty somehow… incomplete… I feel as if I don’t exist.” A sense of numbness was not uncommon for many women who lived in the suburban world of the 1950’s. Confined by a strong emphasis on family and gender roles, women acted as wives and mothers, but did not live as individuals; always being their child’s mother, or their husband’s wife, led these women to lose their sense of self. As prisoners of their own lives, suburban housewives experienced an identity crisis that stripped them of the desire to become whoever they wanted to be, and forced them to become what they were expected to be. The traditional housewife was not the only woman who found herself in a prison during the middle of the twentieth century, as a decade
There has been so much history and so many changes to our country over the last 100 years. I will focus on the changes that women have fought for and helped in making positive changes in our country.
“If one compares a woman in 1900 with her counterpart in 2000, the gains have been significant. There were the obvious changes, such as the right to vote and other governmental policies supporting women in the 1960s and 1970s. The results were women successfully engaging in certain jobs for the first time. Where women were once a minority, or excluded entirely, by 1980, they accounted for more than half of all undergraduate students”,
Between 1900 and 1920, women started taking jobs outside the home. It started with teaching, nursing, and social work but soon women began taking clerical jobs if they were native born white women with an education. Thus leading to “Rosie the Riveter”, which we will discuss later. “American Feminists, in the early 20th century included a segment of working-class women, participating alongside better-known middle-class and elite adherents of feminist ideas”, (Greenwald, 1989).
During World War II, many people moved in to new jobs for the war effort. This included women by the millions. “Rosie the Riveter” was a national symbol of women taking jobs in the industrial field while the men were away fighting the war. “She was fictional, but represented the ideal government worker, including being loyal, efficient, and patriotic”, (Bowles, 2011).
Another area in which women made changes was with their appearance. Women used their attire and style to show an independence, a certain freedom in which they alone had control. Starting with the “Gibson Girl”, women dressed in long, slim dresses, freeing themselves of the poufy petticoats of yore. Women started wearing shorter dresses and shorter hairstyles, leading to “Flapper Jane”. “Women started wearing “less” clothing, shorter dresses, cutting off their hair, and just being more “sensual” than normal”, (Bliven, 1925).
Along with taking control of their wardrobe and style, women also
As in the past, there were also advocates of change; in fact, the modern feminist movement, reanimated by Wollstonecraft, was gaining momentum with its advocacy for suffrage when it was largely derailed by the Civil War, in the United States. By the early 20th Century suffrage was again an issue, as women began participating more in public life. Still, everything that was important, in terms of power and prestige, was under male control: politics, economy, etc.
When Vassar opened in 1865, the first college aimed exclusively at educating women, the ideas of equality began an upswing. With more education, more women were allowed to participate in society, but it was really only upper class women, whose families could bear the expense of the education. The success of Vassar and the other women’s colleges that followed in its success, germinated the idea that in education, if nowhere else, the roles could be equal. Women could be the intellect partners of men, even if they couldn’t be professional partners. From the late 1860s to the early twentieth century, women began to press to be allowed into professional occupations, as doctors and lawyers. (In the beginning, they could get the degrees but not the licenses to use them.)
Underlying all of these theories about women’s suitability or lack of suitability for professional public work, was the idea of suffrage. Voting was seen as symbolic of all the rights women were denied, and they believed voting would allow them to get into other areas of influence in society.
For the most part, men didn’t want women to vote, usually for a number of reasons. They feared a loss of the control of women. They didn’t want women to vote as a block, a very logical fear as women represent 51% of the population. Some men (and some women) as well) didn’t believe women were capable of understanding all the ramifications of situations they would be voting on— remember logical reasoning was not seen to be in their natures. Finally, some people saw that allowing women to vote and have a voice in governmental decision-making eroded part of their traditional way of identifying themselves, i.e., they literally conceived of men as the opposites of women and women as the opposites of men, as defined by nature and their actions.
The perception of the time (not necessarily the reality) was that women were more moral than men; they were the upholders of the moral standard. Women were seen to be more religious than men. Even though the religious leaders of day were all male, women were the strongest component of the congregations. This was important because, as in the nineteenth century, women were the ones to uphold morals in the family. In part due to this belief about themselves, perhaps, women did begin to act politically as the men feared, introducing moral legislation which advocated regulations in labor laws, so there could be no child labor, etc..
Another debated issue of the time was birth control and its degree of morality (or lack of morality). As a general rule, birth control was seen as immoral; many believed that women did not have the right to control family size, as that was the prerogative of the husband/father and God, Himself. The church saw it as a sin akin to murder, and the government controlled it, as materials even mentioning pregnancy prevention techniques were thought “obscene.” Many people worked for the right for women to gain access to birth control, such as Margaret Sanger, who helped found Planned Parenthood.
Some recent historians have suggested that the government did not just control the access of birth control for moral reasons but as a method of controlling the economy, as keeping women out of the workplace by having them at home raising lost of children, kept them out of position where they could gain power, potentially, and allies, and it kept the rate of unemployment steady, since the perception was that only men needed jobs.
The political battle for suffrage—equal voting rights—took many years with women and men working together, but the 19th amendment was eventually passed in 1920. At this point, after women voted in their first federal election in 1922, many women believed that they were the political equals of men, and the target of their activism shifts, and women begin to pursue more personal freedoms. Women begin engaging publicly in “male” activities. They begin to drink publicly, which was also an illegal activity at the time, since it was during the Prohibition, when alcohol consumption was a crime. Skirt lengths went up, and thus were less constraining of women’s movements. Their hair