Feminism Unfinished: A Short, Surprising History of American Women’s Movements by Dorothy Sue Cobble & Linda Gordon & Astrid Henry

Author:Dorothy Sue Cobble & Linda Gordon & Astrid Henry [Cobble, Dorothy Sue]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2014-08-25T00:00:00+00:00

Culture

Cultural change happens particularly slowly, with few precise milestones, so we may not notice it or what created it. In fact, feminism transformed popular culture, though often it took decades for everyone to see the results.

The influence of women’s liberation was most visible in clothing. Before the 1970s, working women had to wear stockings, garter belts or girdles, high heels, and dresses. By 1980, a generation of feminists had legitimated comfortable low-heeled shoes, rejected girdles, and made pants acceptable for all occasions. Many women still love heels and skirts, but they have a choice. The 1970s radicals tended also to reject makeup and the carefully coiffed hair of the 1950s, but this by no means meant a rejection of beauty; it merely changed standards of what was beautiful. Civil rights had similarly made “natural” black hair beautiful and fashionable, and white women with curly hair adopted a version for themselves.

Feminist influence likewise affected attitudes toward female bodies, for which delicacy had once been the norm. Much of the credit for this transformation should go to Patsy Mink, congresswoman from Hawaii, who brought us Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, prohibiting sex discrimination in schools. Title IX drew tens of thousands of women into active sports, and they then redefined strong, muscled bodies as beautiful. Of course, merchants soon capitalized on these new norms, and, as always in a consumerist society, styles that were once rebellious and countercultural soon became new standards, sometimes as conformist or even coercive as the old.

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