Introduction
In this paper, I will examine the extent of support for greater women’s rights outside the domestic sphere, specifically in the business, industrial, and governmental sectors of society, in the 1960s. I will first observe the trends on the basis of an individual’s gender. Next, expecting that women will act in their own self interest, I will further investigate the support for this issue among males only, specifically in regards to their education. Finally, I will test whether there existed a correlation between support for the Civil Rights Movement and support for increasing women’s equality in the workplace.
I hypothesize that females are more supportive of the cause, since the topic in discussion pertains to them. Secondly, I expect that the support for this second wave of feminism will be greater among men who were more educated, for they were more likely to be knowledgeable about the issue of rights and equality in society. Lastly, I expect for proponents of the Civil Rights Movement to also be advocates of the gender equality cause, since both of these movements addressed societal injustices.
My findings suggest that some of these postulates held to be true, while others did not, as explained in the following sections of this paper.
Data
The data in this paper uses information found in cumulative files of the Survey Documentation and Analysis of the American National Election Studies for the years 1964, 1968, and 1972. The study, conducted by the US government, uses geographic stratified sampling and 60-minute, in-person interviews in the homes of 5,833 surveyees in order to collect answers to certain questions (American National Election Studies, 2014). Analysts then converted these responses into numerical data that could then be used as a representation of the opinions of a larger population size on the topics in question.
To answer my three questions of interest, I compiled data from three cross-tabulation tables that were created using the ANES database. These tables show, in regards to the topic of greater equality for women, the respondent’s position based on gender, the position of male respondents based on level of education, and the respondent’s position based on his or her position on desegregation. I used the respondent’s position (in support, in between, in opposition, or no opinion) on greater gender equality in the workplace as the dependent variable in all of my tables. For Table 1, I used gender (male or female) as the independent variable; for Table 2, I used education level (less than high school, high school graduate, or college and above) as the independent variable; and for Table 3, I used the position on desegregation (in support, in between, in opposition, or no opinion) as the independent variable. For Table 2, I filtered the data by gender so that I could examine only the position of men on the topic.
Analysis
This section includes the analysis of the data from each of the tables as it relates to my hypotheses, which are associated with this second-wave feminist movement that strived to secure more rights for women.
Table 1 provides the data for the position on increasing women’s rights based on the respondent’s gender. The results were fairly equal for both genders: 48.4% of males and 44.8% of females were in support of greater gender equality in the workplace. Although I had expected for females to be more supportive of this topic, the figures in Table 1 show that a slightly greater percentage of males than females supported providing equal opportunities for women. It is interesting to note that more men than women supported this cause, even though it was for the benefit of women. The above result may have risen due to the fact that the raw sample size of males in this study was nearly 20% smaller than that of females.
Table 2 displays the positions of males on increasing gender equality based on their level of education. As the data in this table suggests, 57.0% of men who had completed education until college or above were in support of higher equality for women in society, whereas this statistic only held for 46.4% of high school graduates and for 38.2% of men with education less than high school. Even though the number of respondents in the “College and Above” group had the largest sample size, the percentage of those who were in support of women’s rights in this group was still higher than in the other groups. This, therefore, reinstates my hypothesis regarding the relationship between educational background and one’s perspective on gender inequality.
Table 3 provides data that shows the correlation between support for the Civil Rights movement and the support for greater women’s equality. 57.6% of those that favored desegregation also agreed that women and men should have an equal role in the workplace, while 41.4% of those who favored strict segregation also believed that women’s place is in the home. Inferring that those who favor desegregation are in support of the Civil Rights Movement, this demonstrates a positive correlation between support for this cause and support for greater equality for women in the workplace. This is a rational finding because, as stated in the hypothesis, Civil Rights activists called for equality for African Americans in a societal context, while feminists similarly called for equality on a gender basis.
Conclusion
Upon examining the extent of support for greater gender equality for women in the workplace of 1960’s America, I learned that the support for increased female equality was even among both men and women. Among men, those who were more educated were more likely to support the issue. Finally, there existed a positive trend when comparing the support of the Civil Rights Movement, which was taken to be synonymous to the support of desegregation in society, and the support of greater equality for women.
These trends can be widely credited to Betty Friedan’s influential novel, The Feminine Mystique. Published in 1963, this best-selling book explicitly revealed to the public the injustices that women faced outside the domestic setting, which thereby prompted President John F. Kennedy to release an official report that addressed these gender inequalities and provided recommendations for how to resolve them (Shames & O’Leary, 2013). These events allowed American citizens to become more aware of such issues, and thus the feminist movement garnered the support of both women and men alike. Furthermore, these texts were more likely to have been consumed by the educated communities of society, hence leading them to favor these ideologies. As for the Civil Rights Movement, its main goal in the 1960s was to achieve social equality and to secure basic rights for African Americans. Later in the same decade, the Women’s Liberation Movement grew out of this main struggle, since it adopted a similar agenda of obtaining greater rights for an underrepresented minority group in society. It did so by focusing on securing equality for women in the workplace and improving academic opportunities that were available to them (Napikoski, 2015). Thus, the topic of increasing women’s rights in the workplace was largely supported in the American society of the 1960s.