Abstract
Since about the middle of the nineteenth century, American politics have been punctuated by the emergence, transformation, and marginalization of a women's movement. Beginning in 1848 with the Seneca Falls Women's Rights Convention and ending in 1920 with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, the first wave of the women's movement struggled toward the recognition of American women as United States citizens. After more than forty years of comparative inactivity, a second wave of the women's movement emerged in the mid-1960s which continued, extended, and challenged both the strategies used and the goals set by the first wave as it engaged in protests, direct actions, and consciousness raising in order to secure the Equal Rights Amendment, reproductive rights, and women's liberation. During the 1980s, however, the second wave seemed to wane in its influence as Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, the Equal Rights Amendment was defeated in 1982, and the Webster decision was handed down in 1989. Indeed, according to many journalists and commentators in the media, the eighties represented the decade within which feminism was recognized as, at best, irrelevant for American women.
Journal Title
Iowa Journal of Communication
Volume
28
Issue
1
First Page
21
Last Page
46
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Recommended Citation
Biesecker-Mast, Susan L.
(1996)
"Susan Faludi's Backlash as Constitutive Rhetoric,"
Iowa Journal of Communication: Vol. 28:
No.
1, Article 4.
Available at:
https://scholarworks.uni.edu/ijc/vol28/iss1/4
Copyright
©1996 Iowa Communication Association
