Women and the American society

The history of women in America serves to highlight the ironies and contradictions of our society. Although women comprise a majority of the population, they nonetheless are often treated like a minority group – assigned to a definite "place" in the social order, denied access to careers and power in the public arena, and viewed as dependent, weak and submissive by "nature". On the other hand, unlike minority groups, women do not live together in a "ghetto", are distributed through every region, class and social group, and often share greater proximity and intimacy with their "oppressors" than with one another. Any attempt to understand women's experience, therefore, must inevitably come to grips with both their oneness and their diversity. While for purposes of social control women have historically been viewed as "all alike", their individual activities and personal stories are richly various.

Due to these paradoxes women's history offers a distinctive point from which to assess and understand how our society has worked in the past and what changes
have – or have not – occurred in the recent years. Clearly, any change in behavior that affects the largest single group in America will have a dramatic impact on the society. Similarly, any shift in cultural attitudes about male and female "roles" will bespeak significant modifications in the picture of ourselves that we carry around in our heads. Yet examining these changes must not obscure the continuities of women's experience, or what these continuities tell us about how gender interacts with other categories such as race and class to deny individuals and groups thepossibility of equal opportunity and treatment.

Cultural prescriptions about women's proper "place" have remained remarkably constant over time. Although enormous changes have taken place since the past, women's primary role as citizens should be to influence men through their positions as "housewives and mothers" – the same cultural worldview that guided colonial America. Constancy of cultural norms, however, did not necessarily signify that women universally acted to implement such ideas in their daily lives.

When there were forests to be cleared, crops planted, businesses to be run, and a household economy to be managed, women and men both became indispensable partners in the daily struggle to survive and prosper. Segregated "spheres" were a luxury few could afford, and stereotypes of women as "ornamental" and revered were more honored in the breach than in reality.

During the middle and late nineteenth century, however, reality began to approximate more closely to the cultural ideal – at least for the daughters of the white middle and upper classes. As the industrial revolution separated home and workplace, it became a symbol of success for a man to provide for his family through his career in the public arena, with women now limited to domestic roles at home. Although some historians have viewed this development as an occasion for women to carve out a new sphere of power over family and home ("domestic feminism"), increasing involvement in the domestic sphere could also become a trap, severely limiting women's capacity to act freely in the public arena or pursue economic aspirations.

Despite such constraints, some middle- and upper-class women still made a significant impaction public policy. Joining together in voluntary associations such as missionary societies or women's clubs, they moved gradually but steadily into the public arena of concern over child labor, alcohol abuse, and factory safety conditions. Frequently they allied with younger women professionals who were inspired to seek careers and transform the world they found around them.

By the early twentieth century, woman suffrage[2] had become a primary objective of such groups. The vote for women was seen not only as a significant step toward equal legal status, but also as an indispensable prerequisite achieving social reform, cleaning up government and politics, and making morality a priority for public officials. The suffrage, it was believed, would help transform the society, even as it promoted women into a larger role of responsibility and equality. In such an atmosphere women received the right to vote in 1920.

Most of the ambitious hopes for the suffrage amendment proved to be in vain, however.

It was World War Two that provided the catalyst for most of the changes that have occurred in both behavior and cultural attitudes. Women who a few years before had been told that it was a moral sin to leave home and take a job now were urged as a matter of patriotic necessity to do so by replacing soldiers gone to the front.

With the onset of peace, the changes that had taken place during the war came face-to-face with the resurgence of traditional attitudes. On the surface it appeared that America had reverted totally to a prewar mentality, with the vast majority of middle-class women returning happily to domestic tasks. Yet under the surface major shifts were taking place in women's economic and social roles that eventually would lay the foundation for an onslaught on traditional sex stereotypes. It was against the background of these changes that a strong women's movement challenging these stereotypes came anew.

By the end of the 1960s the women's movement had succeeded in challenging nearly all of America's traditional cultural assumptions about women's proper place. Although it was denounced by some and ridiculed by others, the women's movement did make an impact that transformed the attitudes of many people in the USA.

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