Makers: Women Who Make America

The story of the birth of the modern Women’s Movement. When Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique came out in 1963, millions of American women felt the constraints of 1950s post-war culture, which confined them to the home or to low-paying, dead end jobs. At the same time, another group of women were emerging from the anti-war and civil rights movement determined to achieve their own revolution.

In the early 1970s, feminism became a force that reshaped the relationships between men and women in the most fundamental ways. Divorce rates spiked as women chafed under their traditional roles but, where men could adapt, marriages became stronger than ever. With the widespread adoption of the contraceptive pill, women’s sexuality was freed from the constant worry over pregnancy.

As the Movement achieved long-sought goals, a new generation of women were re-evaluating some of its most basic assumptions, especially the balance between work and family. By the 2000s, the movement was again under attack from conservatives seeking to rollback abortion and contraception laws, and by younger women fleeing the very word “feminism.”