Tidal Wave Ho Women Changed America at Century&39s End [Paperback]

As recently as 1960 few women worked outside the home, married women could not borrow money in their own names, schools imposed strict quotas on female applicants, and sexual harassment did not exist as a legal concept. InTidal Wave,Sara M. Evans, one of our foremost historians of women in America, draws on an extraordinary range of interviews, archives, and published sources to tell for the first time the incredible story of the past forty years in women's history.
Encompassing the so-called Second Wave of feminism (1960s and 1970s) and the Third Wave (1980s and 1990s), Evans challenges traditional interpretations of women's history at every turn. Covering politics, economics, popular culture, marriage, and family, and including the perspectives of women ranging from leaders of NOW to little-known women who simply wanted more out of their lives,Tidal Wavepaints a vast canvas of a society in upheaval. The movement's shocking success is evinced, Evans notes, by the simple fact that we now live in a country in which all women are feminists, in practice if not in name.Sara M. Evansis Distinguished McKnight University Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, where she has taught women's history since 1976. The author ofBorn for LibertyandPersonal Politicsand the coauthor ofFree SpacesandWage Justice,she lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.Chapter One: The Way We Were; The Way We Are

The first wave of women's rights activism in the United States built slowly from its beginnings in the middle of the nineteenth century, finally cresting in 1920 with the passage of the nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guaranteeing women the most fundamental right of citizenship, the vote. It swelled slowly and steadily, riding this single, symbolic issue. By contrast, a second wave of women's rights activism in the last half of the century arose almost instantly in a fast-moving and unruly storm, massivelcw