Ogork,+A.

Before the 1960s, traditional American society encouraged young women to find happiness and fulfillment through marriage and homemaking.
 * FEMINIST MOVEMENT**

But not every woman wanted to wear pearls and bring her husband his pipe and slippers when he came home from work. Some women wanted careers of their own. In 1963, ** Betty Friedan ** published a book called **// The Feminine Mystique //** that identified "the problem that has no name."

In short, the problem was that many women did not like the traditional role society prescribed for them. Friedan's book struck a nerve. Within three years of the publication of her book, a new feminist movement was born, the likes of which had been absent since the suffrage movement. In 1966, Friedan, and others formed an activist group called the ** National Organization for Women **. NOW was dedicated to the "full participation of women in mainstream American society." They demanded equal pay for equal work and pressured the government to support and enforce legislation that prohibited gender discrimination. When Congress debated that landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination in employment on account of race, conservative Congressmen added gender to the bill, thinking that the inclusion of women would kill the act. When this strategy backfired and the measure was signed into law, groups such as NOW became dedicated to its enforcement.

The word ** "sexism" ** entered the American vocabulary, as women became categorized as a target group for discrimination. Single and married women adopted the title **// Ms. //** as an alternative to //Miss// or //Mrs.// to avoid changing their identities based upon their relationships with men. Despite voting for four decades, there were only 19 women serving in the Congress in 1961. For every dollar that was earned by an American male, each working American female earned 59¢. By raising a collective consciousness, changes began to occur. By 1980, women constituted a majority of American undergraduates.

BETTY FRIEDAN But even in a time of tributes and accolades, we can't forget the "lavender menace", a term that Friedan infamously coined in 1969. Friedan, like a number of conservative feminists, saw her movement as calling for a reconfiguring of heterosexual relationships along more egalitarian lines. But throughout her life, she seemed bewildered by those women who shared her political commitments but did not share her romantic interest in men. Rather than build feminist solidarity between women with a different orientation and hetoreosexual women, Friedan sought to purge NOW of those women who did not share her orientation. She feared for the future of the movement, but she also -- according to those who knew her -- seemed genuinely and persistently unnerved by women different than her. Friedan also quarreled with most of the later leaders of the feminist movement, like Gloria Steinem and Patricia Ireland. Her 1981 manifesto, The Second Stage, was a startling statement of essentialism (the notion that women are, biologically speaking, more inclined to be nurturing and relational than men). A long excerpt from that book is  [|here] . She wanted the movement to de-emphasize relationship issues, for fear that they were inflaming the right. She wrote: ...the sexual politics that dis-torted the sense of priorities of the women's movement during the 1970's made it easy for the so-called Moral Majority to lump E.R.A. with homosexual rights and abortion into one explosive package of licentious, family-threatening behavior.