Friday, February 26, 2016

Logos of Second Wave Feminism Protests

The 1960's were a time of advocacy. African Americans stood up against segregation, college students across the nation protested the Vietnam War, and women decided that it was time for work and pay equity.

In the 60's, it was extremely uncommon for women to hold high-ranking positions in the workplace. Though there was a greater number of women in the workforce than there was in the 50's, most of those women held part-time, low paying jobs. The advocates of second-wave feminism believed that women were inherently equal to men, and deserved equal workplace representation for equal pay.

Analyzing logos as it's simple definition, an application of reason or logic, our hindsight is our greatest asset. In today's world, and even to some people in the 60's, work and pay equity for women seems like a no-brainer. The reasoning employed by feminist activists like Shirley Chisholm and Betty Friedan eventually got the Equal Rights Act passed through congress, a bill that had been written 40 years before its ratification and was proposed to every congress since.

Mia Salenetri

1 comment:

  1. Mia, very nice post. And you're so right that hindsight allows us to be quite logical here about workplace equality (even if we've failed to yet achieve it completely). I wonder about the argument made on the sign itself. It leaves out gender/sex completely from the argument, which is quite Chishiolm-esque. This underscores the complete equality drive, which refuses to privilege one sex over the other. This complete equality idea is one difference between perceptions of feminism then vs now. (Even if it is a misrepresentation, many now see feminism as privileging women over men--but we can see how that would get murky, even in these two photographs!)

    ReplyDelete