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The Feminine Mystique: The Fight For Women's Rights

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The Fight for Women’s Rights For long, women were considered inferior to men. Before the start of the women’s rights movement, people thought that females were destined for a life of cleaning, taking care of kids, and being a good; submissive wife. They couldn’t own property, couldn’t vote, couldn’t attend school nor college, couldn’t work, couldn’t even take care of their own money; it was as if they were objects, destined for reproduction. In medieval times, women were even considered the devil’s work. This was such a common belief that even St. Jerome (who was a saint) once said: Women is the gate of the devil, the path of wickedness, the sting of serpent, in a word a perilous object”. It took women, a long time before they finally had …show more content…

The feminist movement is mostly focused in the 60s and 70s, a time when women only made up 3% of America’s lawyers, 6% of America’s doctors, and less than 1% of American engineers; women would mostly work as secretaries, nurses and teachers. The feminist movement started after the publication of Betty Friedan’s, The Feminine Mystique, it was focused on workplace equality such as equal payment and access to better jobs. The Civil Rights Act was the first law that stated that it was illegal to discriminate anyone based on sex in a workplace. That, of course, had little effect and Betty Friedan (together with other feminists) established the National Organization for Women (NOW), destined for the protection of women in the workplace. The NOW assisted women on finding legal assistance to help them battle workplace discrimination in court and lobbied in Congress in favor of pro-equality laws. The feminist movement turned out to be a great success, many women acquired new jobs thanks to the economic boom that ended up forcing employers to accept women in jobs, since there were not enough men to occupy them. The movement was also incredibly organized since many of the women were also involved in the Civil Rights movement and they had acquired organizational

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