Almost 50 years ago, on June 10, 1963, the Equal Pay Act came into effect in the United States, banning gender discrimination in pay. It was the most serious economic victory of American feminists. But the “women’s” revolution, like all the others, failed to stop in time, degenerating, in the opinion of many, men and women alike, into absurdity. But even in today’s thoroughly feminized America, the constitutional amendment guaranteeing equal rights on the basis of gender has not been ratified.
Slave Rebellion
The Oxford English Dictionary defines feminism as “a movement for the equalization of the rights of women with men, based on the idea of the original equality of the sexes. What is meant by “rights” and by “equality” remains a matter of endless debate – as do the strategy, ideology, achievements, and costs of the feminist revolution. For example, one Internet site provides a range of “feminisms”: militarist, anarchist, cultural, sexual, environmental, racial, individualist, liberal, Marxist, economic, moderate, pop feminism, radical, separatist. Visitors to the site are invited to continue the list.
In order not to drown in this sea of “women’s tears” shed over centuries of male-dominated culture, the following will focus mainly on economic and political feminism. These are the direct heirs of the suffrage movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Western Europe and North America.
Some advanced female representatives of the fair sex had thought about the unequal social status of women even before that. For example, the Englishwoman Mary Wollstonecraft (the mother of the future writer Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein) wrote about this in the late 18th century. However, the first organized waves of women’s liberation movement swept across the world only a century later – in parallel with the social revolutions in the Old and New World (not overlooking Russia, where there was also a movement of “equal rights”).
For example, the founding fathers of the American nation, basing it on the principle of the equality of all men before God, understood “men” to mean only free men. In 1776, the wife of the future second president of the United States of America, John Adams, wrote to her husband in Philadelphia, where he was receiving the Declaration of Independence, and asked that the men gathered there “not forget their ladies in the text”. Her husband joked off in the spirit that ladies should not forget their homes and children, but inserted in the text of the declaration the opening line-mine phrase that exploded two centuries later: “All men and women are created equal.”
But even in the nineteenth century, the idea of legal equality of the sexes sounded like an outrage to the ears of the enlightened American. Because the legal system of that time was based on “customary” (or common law) law borrowed from the English, according to which “in marriage husband and wife are one. From this it followed that wives could not have political or economic interests different from those of husbands, who voted and conducted all economic activities on behalf of wives and in the interests of the family. As the drafters of the programmatic suffragette document noted – Abigail Adams went down in feminist history only because she asked her husband not to forget the ladies when drafting the Declaration of Independence, and he cowardly agreed.
The Declaration of Sentiments and Decisions, adopted in 1848 at the first conference on women’s rights in Seneca Falls – “in terms of civil rights and before the law, married women are virtually equal to the dead.” It is interesting that the text of this “declaration of independence” was signed by delegates of both sexes – 68 women and 32 men.
In addition to the rules of customary law, American women were also enslaved by the 19th century principle of different social roles for men and women (now called gender roles), which allowed the application of constitutional rules according to gender. From the mid-nineteenth century, when the U.S. Supreme Court was assigned constitutional functions, and until the 1960s, this body pursued in theory and in practice a line on gender discrimination. Its classic formulation came in 1873, when the Supreme Court upheld an Illinois law prohibiting women from practicing law, stating, “Natural biological differences render women unfit for certain professions in civil life. Their principal occupation remains domesticity and maternity. The man is or should be the patron and protector of wives and mothers, including expectant mothers, from non-feminine work.”
Further complicating matters was the terminological confusion in the text of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, adopted in 1868. The amendment guaranteed equal protection under law to all persons with citizenship and forbade state legislatures to deny American citizens the privileges and benefits to which they were entitled, but it also reserved voting rights only for male citizens.