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Feminism in the Mid-1970s







women's equality—for example, regarding guidelines for Title IX of the 1972 Educational Amendments Act prohibiting sex discrimination in education, displaced homemaker legislation, sex equality in social security and pensions, tax credit for child care expenses, funding for child care centers for poor children, part-time and flexible-time employment, the abolition of sex discrimination in vocational educational, and prohibition of discrimination against older women. WEAL's legal actions have included class suits charging universities with sex discrimination, a jointly filed suit that charges two federal agencies with violation of anti-bias sex laws, and support for many individual sex discrimination cases.

Because WEAL's goals are more specialized, its style more conventional, and much of its work concentrated in Washington, its local chapter organization has not been as extensive as NOW's and its total membership is 4,500 compared with NOW's membership of 55,000.

Footnotes

Footnote :

5. During the years 1974 and 1975 an important part of NOW's membership began to disagree with this statement. For a discussion of their objections to participating in mainstream America see pp. 42—45.

Footnote :

6. Because WEAL does not publish membership data, this figure is my estimate. Upper and lower limits for the total membership of WEAL's thirty divisions (or chapters) are, I believe, 10,000 and 2,000.

The more radical women among potential recruits are probably attracted by NOW's greater ideological flexibility while the more conservative may be attracted to other more conventional organizations like the League of Women Voters, The Business and Professional Women's Clubs, and even the American Association for the Advancement of Science which, in the last few years, have moved into the areas that were once WEAL's near-exclusive territory.

2. National Organizations with Specialized Goals

None of the thousands of feminist organizations founded in the 1970s have such far-reaching goals as have NOW or WEAL. Among the newer non-establishment groups with specialized goals are about a hundred whose goals are national, as opposed to local, in scope. Each of these organizations pursues a special problem relating to women and/or concentrates on a limited number of strategies to produce change. A few are membership organizations, but most are nonmembership groups run by a small staff of two to twenty people who serve a nation-wide clientele of hundreds or thousands. A brief description of twenty-two of the most important of these nationally-oriented organizations follows. Most of them are, by conventional standards, small and insignificant. But by the standards of a reform movement they are important. The best measure of their contribution to feminism is the extent to which their ideas have been and are being taken over by established groups.

Footnotes
Footnote :

7. A list of these, and all the other non-establishment and establishment-related feminist groups mentioned in this report, is given in Appendix II.

In this Appendix and throughout this report I have, for convenience, omitted "inc." or "Incorporated" from the groups' names. The great majority of groups are, in fact, incorporated.

(a) MEMBERSHIP GROUPS

  • The National Women's Political Caucus, founded in 1971, has no formal membership but reports 35,000 "supporters." It is organized at both the national and local chapter levels, with the objective of helping qualified women participate fully in the local and national political system, and, in particular, to attain positions of political power.