Two types of feminism have dominated the American women’s rights movement. During the middle decades of the 20th century, “difference feminism” — which emphasizes women’s differences from men and their distinct roles in society (ones related to motherhood and domesticity) — was the dominant approach among equal rights activists. The argument was that, because women were inherently different from men, society would benefit by having their different gifts and approaches fully included.
This strategy produced wins in a variety of realms.
Between the 1930s and 1950s, for example, professional political women gained a great deal of influence over presidential campaigns as the heads of the Women’s Divisions of the Democratic and Republican National Committees. Women’s Division directors argued that women worked best with other women and that separate spaces within their respective parties were necessary to enable them to meet their full potential as campaigners and activists.
And these weren’t secondary perches. The DNC Women’s Division wrote the vast majority of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s campaign materials, distributing millions of posters with titles like “The Truth about Taxes” and “Farmers – Make Your Choice.” Later, the women’s division was a key player in helping President Harry Truman secure an upset victory in 1948. Throughout the last month of that campaign, they broadcast twice-weekly radio programs that dramatized inflation, a major campaign issue, by announcing the prices of staple goods in various cities on that day vs. at the end of 1947.
The gains women made through difference feminism extended beyond the political realm. Some working-class women in the 1950s were able to maintain their seniority within unions and get maternity leave by arguing that they required different treatment in the workplace because they were mothers. By the middle of the decade, all major CIO union contracts, including those covering industries that employed large numbers of women like meatpacking, included these rights as well as health insurance programs that covered childbirth. Officials in the federal Women’s Bureau had encouraged women in the labor movement to demand such benefits to compensate for the lack of progress at securing protections like healthcare for all Americans legislatively.
The selective nature of these benefits reflected how difference feminism was never able to secure truly equal opportunities and rights for all Americans. No government action came on maternity leave or universal healthcare in the 1950s, and the Equal Pay Act failed to pass repeatedly, despite support from President Dwight Eisenhower.