Answer: The movement for women's rights is ever changing. The most influential group was the women during the 1840s to the 1860s and 1960s to 1980s. In the 1950s increasing numbers of women went to college and worked outside home but were not expected to pursue long-term careers. Instead they were expected to devote themselves to family and home. A double standard of sexual behavior prevailed. In her book The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan called the American home “a comfortable concentration camp.” Middle-class women in particular, influenced by the civil rights movement, begin to question their own second-class status. They initially did not challenge male sexism or careerism but wanted opportunities for women too. White, middle-class women in the political mainstream provided most of the national leadership and much of the constituency for the new feminism. Betty Friedan’s 1963 book The Feminine Mystique identified “the problem that has no name” as the frustration of educated middle-class wives and mothers who had subordinated their own aspirations to the needs of men. Three issues initially predominated: equal treatment at school and work, an equal rights amendment, and abortion rights. By the 1990s women held more than 10 percent of the seats in Congress and more than 20 percent of all state executive offices and state legislative seats. After 1992 there were a record 53 women in Congress. In 1981 President Reagan appointed Jeane Kirkpatrick as U.S. Representative to the United Nations and named Sandra Day O’Connor to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1993 President Clinton appointed Janet Reno to be attorney general, and in 1997 Clinton named Madeleine Albright as secretary of state.
