Margaret Sanger Analysis

The work of Margaret Sanger symbolizes the end of the first wave of feminism and the start of the second wave with the introduction to the undercurrent that is bodily autonomy which flows between the waves; educated women who had served in the war were reluctant to return home to their domestic duties whilst the women of Friedan’s era chose to go home and adopt these domestic duties. Sanger’s work empowered the next two generations of women and there was a general consensus emerging that women deserved to have information about their own bodies and sexual health . Betty Friedan’s peers inherited the rights earned by First Wave feminists as well as the practical accomplishments of Sanger. These women grew up with access to a form of contraception
As the young men returned from the war, young women started having a lot of children, and stopped in the workplace. The new writers for magazines were now all men, back from the war, who had been dreaming about home and a cosy and domestic life and subsequently encouraged women to be homemakers. Therefore the social progressions which women made from the acquisition of the vote in 1920 were haltered by America’s involvement in the war in 1941 as women were thrust into the workforce to fill the holes left by the soldiers and to support the war effort. A period in history which shifted the social paradigm for women as it provided them with a taste of independence and responsibilities in the workforce which was duly reduced when the men returned at the end of the war. A new generation was born at the end of the war and it was this new generation who pitied career women in favour of the splendour of a destiny as a housewife, “the girls we bring now as college guest editors seem almost to pity us. Because we are career women, I suppose”. This difference in social perception as a result of contextual events therefore implicates that the characterisation of the wave of feminism because of its achievements is not directly linked to the comprehensive view of that wave in the particular time
‘The Feminine Mystique’ began to define a woman’s place in the post-war “family-centred, prosperous, middle-class life-style” and it combined these pre-war ideas of a sexualized and therefore modernised version of motherhood. Both the First and Second World War affected both women’s liberation and the birth control movement as reproduction was a necessary tool America needed to boost society post war and the occurrence of contraception would have prevented this. The Cold War also affected ‘The Feminine Mystique’ and added a dimension of sexual fear where anticommunism merged with homophobia starred in adverts to “purge public employment and the military of sexual perverts”. A public campaign which made women fear of the accusation of being a lesbian if they did not desire a life with a husband and children as soon as they were old enough to date. Women were the symbols of safety and security as they were in the 1920’s and society continued to support the position of women in the home after the World War Two with the public advertisements of washing machines, hoovers and cleaning products; all of which were designed to appeal to women. The country had to boost not only society itself but also the economy