Monthly Displays

From the end of the 19th century, the women of the European countries energetically demand the right to vote, better working conditions, and education, just like the Suffragette movement in England. Despite some progress, results are slow to come when the year 1914 dawns. But with the lack of a male workforce, gone off to the war, factories are forced to employ women in positions traditionally occupied by men. The image of the world of work has changed definitively and forever. Once the First World War ends, women finally and gradually obtain the rights they were demanding. The Roaring Twenties and the post-war libertarian movements usher in this wind of freedom. Female emancipation brings a liberation and a consideration for the body and well-being of the woman as an individual. Many women politicians and artists emerge and are able to express their creativity and opinions in total freedom and especially with total legality, continuing the struggle for equality of the sexes.

The story of the birth of the modern Women’s Movement is framed by two important publications—The Feminine Mystique and Ms. Magazine—and by the women who authored them: Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. When Friedan’s book came out in 1963, millions of American women had become uneasy under the constraints of 1950s post-war culture, which confined them to the home or to low-paying, dead-end jobs. The Feminine Mystique was, in the words of one reviewer, “a brick through the rose colored picture window of the American suburban bungalow.” At the same time, another group of women—younger and more radical—were emerging from the anti-war and Civil Rights movements determined to achieve their own revolution in American society. By the time Steinem founded Ms. Magazine in the early 1970s, these two streams of women had converged to create the modern Women’s Movement. Pivotal moments range from the early legal challenges brought by flight attendants and a rural Georgia telephone operator to the protests at the Miss America pageant and the takeover of the offices of Ladies Home Journal. It is a story filled with the spirit, humor, and courage of a revolutionary generation.

African-American women have captured the moral imagination of mainstream America through their essays, novels, poetry, and other artistic endeavors, breaching the static lines of race, gender, and class. How have their reflections so clearly articulated the hopes and philosophies of so many? In this program, writers Alice Walker and bell hooks and Ohio State University faculty Dr. Martha Wharton, of the departments of African-American studies and women’s studies, and Dr. Valerie Lee, of the departments of English and women’s studies, examine the emergence of African-American women as popular and powerful voices of social conscience.

Despite the progress of the international women’s movement in exposing and correcting human rights abuses against females, in many countries women are still fighting to attain the most basic of civil liberties. This program contextualizes that struggle by comparing women’s rights in the U.S. with the status of women in China, Afghanistan, and Kenya. Hopeful signs such as rising levels of education for girls, female representation in government, and business opportunities for women are contrasted with the continuing practice of age-old antithetical abuses that have yet to be eliminated—nonconsensual marriage and severe domestic violence, to name two—and the demoralizing effect of seeing hard-won rights overturned.