Women's Rights & Issues

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Women Strike for Equality in 1970

https://www.yahoo.com/news/don-t-iron-while-strike-170005774.html

https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/UKleztVOhIWUBiDm2RQkZw--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTEyNDI7aD05ODk7Y2Y9d2VicA--/https://media.zenfs.com/en-US/homerun/time_72/2ebabd011254da47c4f1110edf37db42

Sponsored by the National Organization for Women and organized largely by Betty Friedan, the march put forth a feminist agenda that included access to free abortion, round-the-clock childcare centers and equal opportunities in work and education. Organized around the slogan, “Don’t iron while the strike is hot,” the march was originally intended to result in a national work stoppage among women, as Friedan aimed to demonstrate the unequal burden of domestic labor.

“No one knows how many shirts lay wrinkling in laundry baskets last week as thousands of women across the country turned out for the first big demonstration of the Women‘s Liberation movement,” TIME wrote in its Sept. 7, 1970 issue. “The strike, on the 50th anniversary of the proclamation of the women‘s suffrage amendment, drew small crowds by antiwar or civil rights standards, yet was easily the largest women‘s rights rally since the suffrage protests.”

The strike — which took place at the end of the working day in an effort to boost participation — “made the women’s movement a household word,” Ruth Rosen, author of The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America, told the New York Times in 2006. As TIME noted in 1970, the march “won new support and undoubtedly new awareness among both men and women of the case for female rights.”

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