The Legacy of World War II In the years that immediately followed World War II, the ideology of patriotic motherhood seemed to have reached its apogee. The trend toward young marriages and large families that was known as the “baby boom” affirmed life and hope after the death and despair of the war years. Not […]

During the postwar era, the restoration of the father-headed family seemed a step toward normality and stability. Callously overlooking the many families left without fathers, the German sociologist Helmut Schelsky predicted that with the return of male heads of household the women who had been “over­emancipated” in wartime would wish only to retire to the […]

Among the trends that we have noted is the transformation in conception of motherhood from a lifelong status to a role—an identity that could be taken on, thrown off, or combined with other identities. In 1956, Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein announced that women now occupied two roles: at home and at work.75 Of all […]

Although this era’s discussion of the maternal role was in a long tradition, the social changes of the postwar era brought it into a new phase. Earlier generations of feminists had assumed that the commitment of most women to motherhood was necessary to the future of society, which was otherwise threatened by a “twilight of […]

Between 1970 and the present lies a great deal of history, which included many changes in the status of women and of mothers. Nonetheless, the old problems persist. And of all these problems, the maternal dilemma is among the most intractable. The difficulty of reconciling maternal and familial responsibilities with individual aspirations is still a […]

So what is the future, or even, is there a future, for feminism? Is it, at least in the affluent West, needed any longer? In 1992 the American Susan Faludi argued cogently, and in chilling detail, that feminists have been experiencing what she terms a ‘backlash’, with women who had undoubtedly benefited from the movement […]

‘Sisterhood is powerful’ was one of the most popular feminist slogans in the 1960s and 1970s. But the phrase has been questioned, and sometimes contested, both at the time, and ever since. As the black American poet Audre Lorde argued in 1983, it glosses over difference of race, sexuality, class and age… Advocating the mere […]

What is sometimes termed ‘second-wave’ feminism emerged, after the Second World War, in several countries. In 1947, a Commission on the Status of Women was established by the United Nations, and two years later it issued a Declaration of Human Rights, which both acknowledged that men and women had ‘equal rights as to marriage, during […]

During the early 20th century, English women achieved legal and civil equality, in theory if not always in practice. Some women, those over the age of 30, were allowed to vote from 1918, and there were arguments about whether their priority was to press hard for enfranchisement on the same terms as men, or to […]

The term ‘suffragette’ was coined in 1906 by the Daily Mail; it was a derogatory label that the growing militant movement adopted as their own and transformed. It was only very gradually that some suffragists, at least, had come to realize that they were achieving very little by peaceful means. But as early as 1868, […]