This paper examines Ruth Rosen's The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America, analyzing the major forces and turning points that propelled second-wave feminism in the United States. Beginning with the constrained domestic roles women occupied in the 1950s, the paper traces five pivotal developments: women's re-entry into the workforce, the youth rebellion of the 1960s, the sexual revolution and birth control pill, federal legislation such as the Equal Pay Act and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, and the formation of NOW. It concludes by contrasting the lives of American women in the 1990s with those of the 1950s.
The paper demonstrates sustained textual engagement with a single primary source, using page-specific citations throughout to support each analytical claim. Rather than summarizing broadly, the writer identifies discrete "turning points" as an organizing framework, allowing for structured analysis of a complex historical narrative.
The paper opens by establishing the social conditions that made women's liberation necessary, then moves through five labeled turning points — workforce re-entry, youth rebellion, the sexual revolution, federal legislation, and organizational formation — before closing with a comparative assessment of women's lives in the 1950s versus the 1990s. Each section builds directly on the previous one, maintaining a logical cause-and-effect chain throughout.
Why were American women unhappy? In building her case regarding the unhappiness that women in America experienced in the 1950s, Ruth Rosen — author of The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America — goes into considerable detail. Rosen points out that after World War II, pregnancy and motherhood were extremely common and culturally expected for American women. A woman who was not married was considered "an embarrassment," and Rosen quotes actress Debbie Reynolds from the film The Tender Trap as saying that marriage is "the most important thing in the world" and that a woman is not "really a woman" until she has a wedding and babies (Rosen, 13).
But after taking care of babies all day, doing housework, running errands, and cooking dinner for the family — all the while using the products and appliances that would help make her a "professional homemaker" (Rosen, 14) — the wife of the 1950s was still expected to be sexually appealing to her husband at bedtime. Popular "how to" literature of the era insisted that a blissful marriage required husband and wife to achieve simultaneous orgasm (Rosen, 16). A book called Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique went further, asserting that if a woman was sexually stimulated but did not achieve climax, this resulted in "an injury," and that if this happened frequently it could lead to "permanent — or very obstinate — damage to body and soul" (Rosen, 16).
These expectations — domestic, maternal, and sexual — formed the suffocating framework within which American women of the postwar era were expected to find fulfillment. As Rosen documents, many did not, and their growing discontent would become the engine of second-wave feminism.
One of the first turning points toward women gaining greater power over their lives was their re-entry into the labor force, roughly a decade after men returned from the war in Europe and Asia. At the end of World War II, women had largely been pushed out of their jobs to make room for returning veterans. But in the mid-1950s, businesses and corporations began hiring single women — and educated married women — as a source of inexpensive labor to increase corporate profits. As a result, married women accounted for 52% of the female workforce by 1960 (Rosen, 20), up from 36% in 1950. More strikingly, by the end of the decade, families with two incomes had increased by 222% over the previous twenty years (Rosen, 20).
The troubling reality, however, was that this was a "sex-segregated" workforce. Even when women performed the same tasks as men, with identical job titles and descriptions, "they received substantially lower wages" (Rosen, 25). Yet this injustice became a turning point in itself, forming a central plank in the platform that would drive the women's liberation movement. As Rosen notes, women began to gain "awareness" of how their identity as females had become "the basis for their exclusion" from full participation in American life (Rosen, 36).
The second major turning point emerged in the early 1960s, as the daughters born immediately after the war came of age during a period of social upheaval, anti-war protests, youth rebellion, and widespread questioning of traditional values. These young women, Rosen explains, saw how unhappy their mothers were and began to fear becoming "ordinary housewives" themselves (Rosen, 39) — which, in their view, would mean lives of misery, controlled by husbands, employers, families, and society's expectations.
With these dynamics as a backdrop, young women enrolled in college in large numbers, postponed marriage, and became involved in political movements that rejected the "feminine mystique" (Rosen, 45). Although the media tended to portray all feminists as "white middle-class women" (Rosen, 46), many of the women who became activists came from blue-collar or secular working-class Jewish families in which the parents had already been politically active.
The third major turning point was the birth control pill, the sexual revolution, and women's involvement in the peace movement. Women "eagerly embraced their sexual freedom" (Rosen, 55), but still sought language through which to articulate their opposition to what felt like the servitude of marriage. Many read Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex and were moved by its "brilliant and daring analysis of women's condition" (Rosen, 57). The peace movement — spurred by nuclear fallout from weapons testing, poverty, and pollution — also gave women an alternative to the traditional path of marriage, family, and homemaking.
Rosen, Ruth. The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America. New York: Viking, 2000.
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