Helen Keller had said in "We vote? What does that mean? Right after women got the vote, the measure of their social progress can be seen in an advice column written by Dorothy Dix that appeared in newspapers all over the country. The woman should not merely be a domestic drudge, she said:. A writer in early , boosting the beauty business, started off a magazine article with the sentence: "The average American woman has sixteen square feet of skin.
It seems that women have best been able to make their first escape from the prison of wifeliness, motherhood, femininity, housework, beautification, isolation, when their services have been desperately needed-whether in industry, or in war, or in social movements.
Each time practicality pulled the woman out of her prison-in a kind of work-parole program-the attempt was made to push her back once the need was over, and this led to women's struggle for change. World War II had brought more women than ever before out of the home into work. By , 36 percent of all women sixteen and older- 23 million women-worked for paid wages. But although 43 percent of women with school-age children worked, there were nursery schools for only 2 percent- the rest had to work things out themselves.
Women were 50 percent of the voters-but even by they held 4 percent of the state legislative seats, and 2 percent of the judgeships. The median income of the working woman was about one-third that of the man. And attitudes toward women did not seem to have changed much since the twenties. In the civil rights movement of the sixties, the signs of a collective stirring began to appear.
Women took the place they customarily took in social movements, in the front lines-as privates, not generals. In the office of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Atlanta, a Spelman College student named Ruby Doris Smith, who had been jailed during the sit-ins, expressed their anger at the way women were relegated to the routine office work, and she was joined in her protest by two white women in SNCC, Sandra Hayden and Mary King. The men in SNCC listened to them respectfully, read the position paper they had put together asserting their rights, but did not do very much.
