PREFACE
1. Laura Bergquist, "What Women Really Meant to JFK," Redbook , November 1973, 53. [BACK]
2. New York Times , 26 February 1945. [BACK]
3. Leila J. Rupp, "The Survival of American Feminism: The Women's Movement in the Post-War Period," in Reshaping America: Society and Institutions, 1945-1960 , ed. Robert H. Bremner and Gary W. Reichard (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982), 33-65. [BACK]
4. Martha Weinman Lear, "The Second Feminist Wave," New York Times Magazine , 10 March 1968, 25, 50. [BACK]
5. Abbott L. Ferriss, Indicators of Trends in the Status of American Women (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1971), 85-86, 99, 104; U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1975 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1975), 346-347; William Chafe, The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic, and Political Roles, 1920-1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 181, 218-219. For a full examination of this phenomenon, see Valerie Kincade Oppenheimer, The Female Labor Force in the United States: Demographic and Economic Factors Governing Its Growth and Changing Composition (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1971). [BACK]
6. The scholarly discussion over the explanation for the emergence of an energetic feminist movement in the latter part of the sixties has engaged both historians and political scientists. The two most important works on the roots of the women's movement have been Jo Freeman's The Politics of Women's Liberation (New York: Mckay, 1975) and Sara Evans's Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Knopf, 1979). Freeman, in her excellent and original study of the relationship of social conditions, social movements, and policy, described the origin of the two main branches—one reformist, one radical—of the women's movement in the sixties, their convergence, and the impact of the movement on policy. Evans details the genesis of women's liberation among radical women in the civil rights movement. Leila Rupp and Verta Taylor, in a recently published work, Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women's Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), trace the feminist impulse during the 1950s; they denominate the period before the modern grassroots feminist movement as the "elite-sustained" phase of the women's movement. In particular, they explore the dynamics of feminism within the National Woman's party, the chief proponent of the Equal Rights Amendment during this period.
Chafe, The American Woman , provides the best overview of women's experiences for the period between suffrage and the new feminist movement. Other helpful works include Ethel Klein, Gender Politics: From Consciousness to Mass Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984); Ellen Hole and Judith Levine, Rebirth of Feminism (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1971); Judith Sealander, As Minority Becomes Majority: Federal Reaction to the Phenomenon of Women in the Workforce, 1920-1963 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983); and Nacy E. McGlen and Karen O'Connor, Women's Rights: The Struggle for Equality in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: Praeger, 1983).
Susan M. Hartmann, The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s (Boston: Twayne, 1982); Leila Rupp, Mobilizing Women for War: German and American Propaganda, 1939-1945 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978); D'Ann Campbell, Women at War with America: Private Lives in a Patriotic Era (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984); Eleanor Straub, "Government Policy Toward Civilian Women During World War II" (Ph.D. diss., Emory University, 1973); Karen Anderson, Wartime Woman (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981); and Maureen Honey, Creating Rosie the Riveter: Class, Gender, and Propaganda During World War II (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), discuss the experience of American women on the homefront and the impact of World War II on their lives.
The Torch Is Passed: The Kennedy Brothers and American Liberalism (New York: Atheneum, 1984), by David Burner and Thomas West, is an especially insightful volume on the impact of the liberalism of the Kennedy administration. Herbert Parmet's Jack: The Struggles of John F. Kennedy (New York: Dial Press, 1980) and JFK: The Presidency of John F. Kennedy (New York: Dial Press, 1983) and James MacGregor Burns's John Kennedy: A Political Profile (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961) help the reader understand the evolution of Kennedy's politics. William H. Chafe, The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), is a useful survey of the postwar period and one of the few that looks at the development of the women's movement or at events from the perspective of women's experience. Virtually none of the books on the Kennedy, Eisenhower, and Truman administrations considers policy concerning women. [BACK]