Feminism--United States

Data from the 1992 American National Election Study are used to examine three issues: first, who is most likely to identify as a feminist; second, who is likely to show a feminist consciousness; and finally who possesses both the feminist identification and feminist consciousness that demonstrate a feminist collective identity. The results indicate that feminist identification and feminist consciousness are separate but related constructs and that overall feminist collective identity among women is weak. The findings indicate a need to make clear which dimension--feminist identification or feminist consciousness--is being used in efforts to understand women's feminist collective identity and how these three concepts interact with cohort, employment status, income, education, race, and marital status.

One of the key catalytic feminist works of our time is The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan. Although acclaimed as a well researched artifact designed to help "American women" recognize and understand how and why they were being manipulated via a social phenomenon Friedan terms a "feminine mystique," upon close examination of this work we find that the preponderance of inductive examples Friedan uses to persuade her implied audience excluded another audience, specifically black women. The effect of this "rhetorical exclusion" (and other means of segregation) has been the disaffection of most black women from the contemporary women's movement. This study, therefore, provides a critical analysis of specific inductive examples found within The Feminine Mystique, demonstrates how such examples affected both Friedan's implied and excluded audiences, and suggests how such forms of "rhetorical exclusion" can be avoided in the future.

The years following World War II were grim ones for women's organizations. Although the National Woman's Party (NWP) managed to survive, it never managed to thrive. Great determination on the part of its members to ban gender discrimination by means of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) did not prove adequate to the task of getting the amendment through Congress. Frustration within the NWP at the continued failure of ERA turned member against member. Unable to attract replacements for those who had left the party, the NWP diminished in strength. Before it collapsed entirely, upon the death of founder Alice Paul in 1977, the NWP introduced a new generation of feminists to ERA.