The University of Utah's Independent Student Voice

The Daily Utah Chronicle

The University of Utah's Independent Student Voice

The Daily Utah Chronicle

The University of Utah's Independent Student Voice

The Daily Utah Chronicle

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Write for Us
Want your voice to be heard? Submit a letter to the editor, send us an op-ed pitch or check out our open positions for the chance to be published by the Daily Utah Chronicle.
@TheChrony
Print Issues

Feminism – Then & Now

Flip through the 1965 archives of The Daily Utah Chronicle, and you’ll find stories about animal cruelty, a photo of the Homecoming queen of that year (sporting a hella fine beehive ‘do) and plenty of sexism.

The masses often think of feminism as a unified concept, but like every other “ism,” feminism has changed and grown in relation to the rest of society. In the West, it started as a political movement to earn the right to vote for women. You know — suffragettes, Susan B. Anthony and Co., who campaigned for legal representation. In the United States, the 19th Amendment wasn’t passed into law until 1920. That was 95 years ago. Think about that: American women have only been voting for an amount of time that can be represented by double-digits. Fast-forward to 1965. Second-wave feminism was just getting started. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, one of the iconic texts of the movement, had been published two years previously.

The Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, established by John F. Kennedy to study gender discrimination in America, found in 1961 that — huge shocker — women were being unfairly treated in basically every facet of life. The Equal Pay Act finally became law in 1963: Women were supposed to be paid the same amount as men for doing the same work, though the law didn’t cover male-dominated fields such as executive labor until much later.

Second-wave feminism wasn’t so much concerned with basic legalities — like the right to vote — as it was with implicit rights. It studied sexuality, contraception and the position of women within families and in the workplace. U.S. women in the ‘50s were idealized by shows like “Leave it to Beaver,” strapped into aprons and confined to domesticity. Second-wave feminism fought that standard of femininity; women, said feminists, didn’t have to be wives and mothers. They could be workers and leaders, soldiers and politicians as well.

Glancing through 1965 issues of The Daily Utah Chronicle, though, you might not guess it.

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@emilyjuchau