Feminism in the 1960s was not about catfights

Fifty years ago this month, nearly 50,000 women marched down Fifth Avenue in New York. On August 26, 1970, they carried placards reading “Sisterhood is Powerful!”. They linked arms and blocked traffic, commemorating the passage of the 19th amendment, which in 1920 granted American women the right to vote. That hot summer day became known as Women’s Equality Day. The march was the brainchild of Betty Friedan, the author of The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, which is credited for the second wave of feminism in the US that lasted for nearly two decades and inspired feminists across the world. Friedan – as well as Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm, Bella Abzug and Phyllis Schlafly – are some of the 1970s women featured in the mini-series Mrs America , which has been hotly contested as inaccurately portraying key points of the feminist movement. " Mrs America is hopelessly wrong," Ms Steinem, the founder of the National Women's' Political Caucus, and co-founder of the magazine Ms recently told the Los Angeles Times . "I don't think it's necessarily on purpose, but it is just factually, historically wrong." Other feminists from that era I spoke with about Mrs America told me the focus of the series is twisted. They cite that the series misses key challenges of the movement; and they don't like the fact that it pits the women against one another. I agree with all this. But one positive aspect of Mrs America is that it can introduce to a new generation the cast of characters who fought hard to empower women. Kamala Harris would not be the Democratic choice for vice president today if it were not for Shirley Chisholm, a brilliant African-American congresswoman. Chisholm was the first Black candidate for a major party's nomination in the 1972 Presidential elections. It is important these women are remembered. It is also important to use Mrs America as a yardstick to realise how far we have come and how much further we have to go. In 1970, when the march took place, abortion was still illegal in the US. In upstate metropolitan areas in 1970, women's median wage incomes averaged between 40 per cent and 50 per cent of those of men. Many women still did not work outside the home. Freidan had organised the march so that women could stop cleaning and cooking for a day and protest against the unequal distribution of labour. The march made visible women’s struggle for equal rights. "The huge number of marchers, young and old, made a convincing case that this was a movement for everyone," Joyce Antler, a historian who participated in the March, told Time magazine. As a young writer in the early 1990s, I was once given an assignment to profile Gloria Steinem. I was too young to participate in those heady Second Wave feminist events, but I had grown up in awe of Steinem the icon. By the time I arrived at her Manhattan apartment on the Upper East Side, I was a nervous wreck. Ms Steinem had forgotten I was coming. She answered the door –having just woken up – in silk pyjamas. At 60, she was beautiful, with her characteristic flowing blonde hair and sharp intelligence. I remember being struck by the fact that women can be this beautiful and this smart. It sounds banal but that was the 1990s, a time when newsrooms were still sexist places; where attractive women were sent to the style section and men to the foreign desk. In Mrs America , Steinem is pitted against Phyllis Schlafly. Schlafly is depicted as a conservative, whip-smart Midwestern housewife who tries to squash the Equal Rights Amendment and helps launch the Moral Majority, a 1970s political action group that promoted white Christian conservative views in the US. Her character, played by Cate Blanchett, annoyed insiders, who say the Equal Rights Amendment was defeated by the insurance industry and other people who were profiting off women’s cheap labour, and not because of Schlafly. "It galls me when Mrs America keeps underscoring the friction among feminists rather than grappling with the complexity of our challenges," writes Lottie Cottin Pogrebin, who co-founded Ms magazine with Steinem, adding that she doesn't want it mistaken for "history". I understand how women who dedicated their lives for the cause can find the show's narrative problematic. But I do think Mrs America can be used as a reminder for a younger generation to see how far we have not come. Take the wage gap , for instance. While we are better off than we were when the march took place that August, the gap in the US for women is still vast. According to Census Bureau data, women of all races earned, on average, just 82 cents for every $1 earned by men of all races. The young men and women I teach in my classes at Yale are smart, switched on, empowered. They will go on to do great things. But despite their brilliance, I wonder if they realise how hard it was for women before them to fight just to be admitted to Ivy League colleges, or to work in tough professions like finance or science. The #MeToo movement made it possible for more victims to come forward and for men to think twice about harassment but it hasn't entirely solved women's problems. Mrs America reminds us of another time, when choices were limited. When women were either feminists marching down Fifth Avenue or housewives in aprons. There weren't many alternatives. Watching the show reminds us of the changes that have taken place in the past five decades. We live in times where Kamala Harris can run for office and stand a chance of winning. But more importantly, Mrs America allows us to take stock of where we are now, to see the gaps and aspire to change them. That is what I wish for my female students – in fact, for all young men and women, whether they watch Mrs America or not. Janine di Giovanni is a senior fellow at Yale’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs and the author of the coming 'The Vanishing' about Christians in the Middle East

Feminism in the 1960s was not about catfights

Unlike in the show 'Mrs America', the second wave feminist movement was not about women pitted against one another