The Women's Liberation Movement By Baxandall And Gordon

Baxandall and Gordon’s article “The Women’s Liberation Movement” discusses the trials and tribulations that women have had to go through to gain traction politically, socially, and economically. The article starts off with them identifying the myths that revolve about women’s liberation. They prove to the reader that these weren’t just white upper-class women whining just because they wanted to hear the sound of their own voice. These were real women trying to help better the world and achieve gender equality.
The movement started in the 1950’s with women discovering the feminine mystique and wanting something more for their life. Nevertheless, there was also more women in work and in college than ever before. Politically woman were rise and
In “the 1960’s, there was a sense of unity” (RP 709) and people were “sensitized to injustice” (RP 710) these combined together and resulted in a “movement for free speech” (RP 710). An example of this is document, Feminist Guerrilla Theatre, they were protesting the Annual Miss America Pageant and calling it out for promoting consumerism and sexism. They accomplished their goal by using their words to accumulate mass crowds and media coverage. However, there is a contradiction between the document Houston, 1977 and The Women’s Liberation Movement. Houston, 1977 gives an account of the National Women’s Conference and the twenty-six resolutions that they agreed on to help resolve some of women’s grievances. Yet, at the end of the section “Political Roots of Women’s Liberation”, Baxandall and Gordon go on about how women still have a little role in politics and that women “remained far less visible and less powerful than the men who dominated the meetings and the press conferences” (RP 712). Baxandall and Gordon make it seem as if these women were just being secretaries and the men were going out and doing the real political work. Yet, there is the National Women’s Conference which was “one of the most democratically selected gatherings in American history (MAW 262)” with 130,000 people. It does not seem like the women are just “cooking, organizing social events, and catering to the egos of male leaders” (RP