Organized Labor, National Politics, and Second-Wave Feminism in the United States, 1965–1975

Abstract

Second-wave feminism, scholars argued until recently, was a product of middle-class educated women who rejected inequality masquerading as domestic tranquility in the postwar United States. Women unionists were either invisible in these accounts or dismissed as unimportant to the development of feminism's objectives and strategies. Recent labor history research has called this portrayal of working women into question. Whether considering a single union or broad national patterns of political change, several historians have pointed to unionists' contributions to campaigns for equality. These came in the areas of pay and job discrimination as well as in the effort to pass the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).