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The Personal is Political: How Followers of the Women's Liberation Movement Contributed to Social and Cultural Change in the 1970s

By Lois Ruskai Melina, Gonzaga University

Academic Citation: Lois Ruskai Melina, "The Personal is Political: How Followers of the Women's Liberation Movement Contributed to Social and Cultural Change in the 1970s," Kravis Leadership Institute, Leadership Review, Vol. 7, Spring 2007, pp. 38-56.

About the Author: Lois Ruskai Melina is a Ph.D. candidate in leadership studies at Gonzaga University. Her research involves using performance ethnography to explore how women who entered their adult lives in the 1970s negotiated and performed gender at a time of significant change in expectations, roles, and opportunities for women.

Keywords: Organizational Culture, Women's Liberation Movement, Followership

Abstract

While the women's liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s created a climate for cultural change and set an agenda for those changes, the testing of its espoused values happened at the interpersonal and organizational level, often by individuals who were not activists or leaders in the movement. These individuals might be called "followers" of the movement, even though they might have disavowed the label of "feminist." Their willingness to challenge the status quo in their personal and work relationships, often in one-on-one interactions, played a key role in effecting changes sought by the women's liberation movement. Edgar Schein's model of organizational culture change frames an understanding of how the actions of individual women who entered the workplace in the 1970s shifted the culture of organizations and the larger society to reflect women's needs and perspective. This look at how individuals can advance the goals of social movements, even if they are not activists in the movement, can inform the understanding of how social movements create change.

Introduction

On August 26, 1970, tens of thousands of women all over the United States took part in the Women's Strike for Equality, held on the 50th anniversary of women's suffrage. Betty Friedan, founder and president of the National Organization for Women, wanted to demonstrate that the goals of the women's liberation movement had broad-based support and could no longer be dismissed as the complaints of radical feminists on the fringe of society.¹ She challenged women outside of feminist organizations to take a stand for change:

I propose that the women who are doing menial chores in the offices cover their typewriters and close their notebooks, the telephone operators unplug their switchboards, the waitresses stop waiting, cleaning women stop cleaning, and everyone who is doing a job for which a man would be paid more—stop--every woman pegged forever as assistant, doing jobs for which men get the credit--stop. In every office, every laboratory, every school, all the women to whom we get word will spend the day discussing and analyzing the conditions which keep us from being all we might be.²

The strike was a risk; feminists were not certain women would respond, which would have been an embarrassment and a setback to the movement.³ However, the response in cities throughout the country made the strike the largest demonstration ever held for women rights, attracting many women with no previous affiliation with the organized movement.⁴

I was 18 years old at the time, getting ready to make choices that would impact my adult life, but I have no memory of that event. I recall being focused on packing my trunk for my freshman year of college, spending as much time as possible with my boyfriend before we left for separate schools. However, I left for college in the shadow of the thousands of women who marched that day, unaware of how the consciousness of the country had shifted; unaware of how much change would happen in the next few years and the significance for my life.

Like many of the women who did march that day, I was not an activist in the women's liberation movement nor even a member of a feminist organization. Like many other women, I was reluctant to even call myself a feminist, a term that had become associated with angry, unshaved, man-hating women. However, like many other women, I was a "follower" of the movement. The activists of the movement had created a climate in which I could question and change the beliefs and values that I had grown up with. The movement had created an awareness that there were many ways to "be" a woman, and that, as a white, middle class, college-educated woman, I could choose my identity, roles, and the ways in which I could have influence. More important, the widespread support for the goals of the women's liberation movement that was communicated through the Women's Strike for Equality ushered in a brief period of unparalleled optimism in which it appeared that equal opportunities and rights for women would be realized. This meant that I could make nontraditional choices with an expectation of acceptance—or so I thought. Like many women in the 1970s, I took my new values, choices, and expectations into my personal and work relationships.

It has become common for writers to declare the women's liberation movement a failure.⁵ It is true that the Equal Rights Amendment never became part of the Constitution. Women still lag behind men in salaries and struggle to break through the glass ceiling into the highest leadership positions. Pundits in 2006 question whether the country is "ready" for a president who is a woman. Instances of sexual harassment and sexual discrimination have not disappeared, but have just become more covert and harder to prove. However, as Wandersee noted:

The gains of the seventies should not be devalued or trivialized. Although the degree of liberation has been limited by the realities of the patriarchal capitalistic system, and the new problems of postfeminism have emerged to replace the old problems of the "feminine mystique," young women growing up in America today face a set of options very different from those that were available to earlier generations.⁶

Young women growing up in America today may not realize the progress that has been made unless women who entered their adult lives in the 1970s tell their stories. The power of these stories became clear to me recently, as I watched the movie North Country with a young woman. As the overtly hostile acts of men toward the women who were among the first to work in a Minnesota mine unfolded on the screen, the young woman expressed surprise that such behavior existed as recently as 1989, commenting, "Nobody could get away with that today."

Women in the 1970s brought new values and beliefs into businesses and organizations and used those values and beliefs as the basis for effecting changes in practices and policies. In doing so, they helped transform those cultures as well as the culture of the larger society.

In his book on organizational culture, Schein said that espoused values only become embedded in a culture when they have been tested and found to work.⁷ I suggest that while social movements create a climate for cultural change and set an agenda for those changes, the testing of the espoused values of a social movement happens at the interpersonal and organizational level, often by individuals who are not members of social movement organizations; do not participate in the collective actions of a social movement, such as protests and demonstrations; and may not even share the collective identity of the movement. These individuals might be called "followers" of social movements, as they are not heading social movement organizations or shaping their agendas. Their willingness to challenge the status quo in their personal and work relationships, often in one-on-one interactions, is essential to effecting the changes sought by social movements.

In this article, I will tell the stories of some of those women. I will use Edgar Schein's model of organizational culture change to frame an understanding of how the actions of individual women who entered the workplace in the 1970s shifted the culture of organizations and the larger society to reflect women's needs and perspective.⁸ This look at how individuals who are sympathetic to the goals of social movements can advance those goals, even if they are not activists in the movement, can inform the understanding of how social movements create change.

Social Movements

The study of social movements has emphasized collective identity and collective action. Sociologist Herbert Blumer defined social movements as "collective enterprises to establish a new order of life".⁹ Zald and Ash said a social movement "is a purposive and collective attempt of a number of people to change individuals or societal institutions and structures".¹⁰ In summarizing more recent theoretical approaches to the study of social movements, Jean Cohen noted that even new paradigms assume that social movements involve organized groups, collective action, and participants who are members of organizations.¹¹ Indeed, organization, both in terms of behavior and structure, is said to be what distinguishes a social movement from a fad, trend, or crowd.¹²

In addition, the actors in social movements share a collective identity. Eyerman and Jamison said that no social movement exists until individuals "enter into process of collective identity formation".¹³ Freeman agreed:

Of utmost importance is the consciousness that one is part of a group with whom one shares awareness of a particular concern. Individuals acting in response to common social forces with no particular identification with one another may be setting a trend, but they are not part of a movement.¹⁴

Consequently, much of the study of social movements has focused on the study of the organizations that made up the movement and the roles of individuals with a collective identity in those organizations or in organized efforts.

In the wake of World War II and the success of the Nazi, fascist, and communist movements, many sociologists viewed social movements as examples of deviant behavior that represented threats to the social order.¹⁵ To them, followers in social movements operated under the spell of charismatic leaders who controlled ideas and directed activities.¹⁶ Researchers identified the societal and economic conditions that gave rise to social movements, explored the psychology of collective behavior, analyzed modes of communication, and looked at the recruitment and mobilization of members.¹⁷ Less attention has been given to the role individuals play apart from social movement organizations that changes social institutions or structures in line with changes advanced by the organized social movement.

Unlike other social movements, the women's liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s emphasized that a deep change in beliefs was accomplished one person at a time. Radical feminists in particular believed consciousness-raising was the foundation for the liberation of individual women, and they believed this would lead to an individual commitment to social revolution.¹⁸

The Women's Liberation Movement

Freeman said that the resurgence of an organized women's liberation movement in the 1960s can be traced back to three events early in the decade: The 1963 report of the President's Commission on the Status of Women documented women's unequal status and created the expectation that necessary steps would be taken to change this inequality. Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, suggested that middle class women were not satisfied with their roles as housewives and urged them to find meaningful work outside the home. The addition of "sex" as a category in the 1964 Civil Rights Act was an acknowledgment that women's rights needed protection. These events led to the formation of the National Organization for Women in 1966. At the same time, younger, more radical women, influenced by the heightened social awareness of the sixties, arrived at their own conclusions about the need for changes in the consciousness and treatment of women and the strategies for effecting those changes.¹⁹

As both college-age and older women attempted to negotiate the goals and strategies of the women's movement, a younger group of women watched. Born in the early 1950s, they grew up with the mothers Betty Friedan identified as suffering from "the problem that has no name," i.e., dissatisfaction with their roles as housewives. They came of age as the second wave of feminism crashed into consciousness. They entered puberty at roughly the same time as the "Summer of Love," aware of changing roles and mores for women, but not old enough yet to experiment with them.

By the time these women entered college in the 1970s, dramatic, public efforts to draw attention to the goals of the women's movement, such as the "freedom trash can" outside the Miss America pageant in 1968 into which women tossed bras, girdles, false eyelashes and other symbols of female oppression, had largely been replaced by more strategic efforts at change. Legislative gains and other changes in the early 1970s marked the maturity and legitimacy of the movement: Congress passed the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, the 1972 Amendments to the Equal Pay Act of 1963, and the Women's Educational Equity Act of 1974. In 1972 Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment and 22 states immediately ratified it, making it appear—incorrectly—that women's rights would soon by protected by the Constitution. Shirley Chisholm became the first black woman to run for president in one of the major political parties. The Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973 with its ruling on Roe v. Wade. Women's organizations filed hundreds of sex discrimination suits on behalf of women, many of whom had no previous involvement with feminist groups.²⁰ Feminist thought moved onto college campuses in the form of women's centers and women's studies courses.

Consciousness-raising groups, small groups in which women met to discuss their own lives, were a key means for women to explore how sexism affected them personally. These groups grew dramatically in number and membership in the early seventies, while the number of feminist publications grew from 10 in 1969 to 83 by 1973. By 1972, feminists had their own slick, mass circulation magazine, Ms. A feminist culture with self-help groups, women's clinics, women's presses, and women's music emerged. "The early seventies was characterized by an enthusiasm, an excitement, that was unlike anything that had gone before in the history of women."²³

I believe that those of us who were entering our adult lives in the early 1970s made choices about how we wanted to "be" as adult women during this time of unprecedented optimism about the opportunities for women. During my first year of college, I seriously considered the counsel I received to study for a career as a medical technologist because such jobs were more open to women and more compatible with family life than in the field in which I was interested: journalism. However, by the time I graduated from college in 1973, I not only had rejected a gender-safe occupation as a "back-up," I joined with my female classmates in what felt like a courageous vow not to accept a newspaper job if it meant filling the traditional role for female reporters, i.e., writing about weddings and recipes. I did not consider myself a feminist, but my expectations had changed because new opportunities seemed possible.

By the time women graduated from college in the early to mid seventies, the women's movement had created the expectation, at least among white, middle class women, that they could and should find meaningful work outside the home, which Friedan had identified as the solution to the suburban housewife's problem.²⁴ Whether or not women identified themselves as "feminists" or were active in the women's liberation movement, these women had an unspoken charge to implement the beliefs and values of the women's movement in their personal and work relationships. Yet they had no models for how to "have it all," i.e., marriage, children, and career.

Women who entered their adult lives even a few years later may not have had the same sense of optimism, even though they may have had similar expectations. By the mid-seventies, feminism was being taken seriously enough in the mainstream culture for a backlash to organize against it.²⁵

How Actions Effect Cultural Change

Social movements seek both social and cultural changes. Social change refers to changes in the patterns of relations between people, groups, and societies, while cultural change refers to changes in values, norms, and standards.²⁶ An increased presence of women in traditionally male professions such as engineering represents a social change, while a growing recognition that women as a group are as competent as men in math and science constitutes a cultural change. The former is easier to accomplish than the latter. Women might have been hired into nontraditional jobs in the 1970s in larger numbers than ever before, but that did not mean people believed they belonged there.

Because culture reflects deep, unspoken, and pervasive beliefs, it is both difficult to change and a powerful place to effect change. Johnston and Klandermans noted, "Codes, values, and norms of behavior that from a distance appear to be widely shared are far from consensual and hegemonic when they are viewed closer up."²⁷ From these "cracks and fissures" in the dominant culture can emerge alternative "symbols, values, languages, and frames" that form the basis of social movements.²⁸ Social movements are the way people express their belief that deeply held attitudes, values, and behaviors of the dominant culture do not work for them. Schein discussed organizational culture and not social movements. Nonetheless, his model of cultural change is a useful framework for an analysis of how social movements reflect disagreement with deeply held cultural beliefs and how the values of social movements become embedded in culture through the actions of individuals.

Schein's Model of Organizational Culture Change

Schein analyzed culture at three different levels of visibility.²⁹ Artifacts are the most visible expressions of culture—clothing styles, language, artistic creations, arrangements of physical space, rituals and ceremonies, manners of interaction between people, organizational processes and structures, and other observable phenomenon.³⁰ Underlying these behaviors is a deeper level of cultural embeddedness called espoused beliefs and values.³¹ These are the conscious, explicitly stated beliefs, norms, and rules of behavior that guide and predict behavior in a group.³² These beliefs and values become accepted by the group because they provide solutions or, in some way, have been found to work.³³ The deepest level at which culture is established is that of basic assumptions.³⁴ These are the beliefs, thoughts, perceptions, and feelings that have proven so reliable in solving problems that the group has come to believe they reflect how nature really works.³⁵ They reflect the group's beliefs about the fundamental aspects of life:

the nature of time and space, human nature and human activities, the nature of truth and how one discovers it, the correct way for the individual and the group to relate to each other, the relative importance of work, family, and self-development, the proper role of men and women, and the nature of the family.³⁶

Schein said underlying assumptions about the nature of human relationships must solve these four basic problems for each member of the group:

1. Identity and Role—Who am I supposed to be in this group and what will be my role?
2. Power and Influence—Will my needs for influence and control be met?
3. Needs and Goals—Will the group's goals allow me to meet my own needs?
4. Acceptance and Intimacy—Will I be accepted, respected, and loved in this group? How close will our relationships be?³⁷

Because basic assumptions are often held at an unconscious level, they are difficult to change.³⁸ The loss of the existing order would mean a loss of solutions upon which the group has come to depend, a loss of predictability, and, perhaps more important, a loss of meaning about the fundamental aspects of life.

The women's liberation movement had a variety of goals and strategies, however, feminists agreed on its core components.³⁹ I have reframed these as feminism's solution to the four problems outlined by Schein:

1. Identity and Role—Feminists want women to be valued as individuals equal to men and to have opportunities to choose whatever roles they want in society.
2. Power and Influence—Feminists want to break down barriers in education, politics, and the workplace that hold women back from having power and influence.
3. Needs and Goals—Feminists want women to define what it means to be a woman. Women's liberation is achieved when the world meets women's needs as defined by women.
4. Acceptance and Intimacy—Feminists want women to be loved and accepted as individuals and not seen primarily in the context of their relationships to men or to their children.

The women's liberation movement developed artifacts to express these underlying assumptions. The formal address Ms. was encouraged over Miss or Mrs. to draw attention to the belief that women should be seen as individuals, not through their relationship to a spouse. The movement questioned practices that symbolized women's unnecessary dependence on men, such as the practice of men holding doors open for women. The espoused values of the women's liberation movement included equal pay for equal work; equal education and employment opportunities; availability of birth control, abortion, and child care; an end to sexual harassment, workplace discrimination, and domestic violence; reform of health care practices; and more appreciation for the historical and domestic contributions of women.

Opposition to new artifacts and espoused values reflects resistance to change at the level of underlying assumptions. While individuals in the 1970s might not have objected to women being paid the same wage as men for the same work, feminist beliefs about roles, identity, power, and acceptance threatened the established order.

The Process of Change and Resistance to Change

Once basic assumptions are accepted as reflecting the way nature is, they become nonnegotiable and nonconfrontable. Beliefs, norms, and rules of behavior supporting these assumptions are articulated in their place.⁴⁰ Any challenge to the underlying assumptions releases anxiety and defensiveness.⁴¹ The group interprets the challenge as an unnecessary request to abandon ways of thinking that are natural and replace them with assumptions that have not been proven to be workable.

The women's liberation movement challenged existing roles and relationships. The more radical factions of the movement, which suggested that women did not need men, that women could be fulfilled without raising children, and that capitalism had to be overthrown for equality to be achieved, directly challenged nonnegotiable and nondiscussable beliefs. If women rejected their domestic roles, who would cook dinner, clean the house, and be responsible for the future of the human race? If women became competitive in the workplace, would men lose opportunities to support their families? Rather than experience such anxiety, people tend to distort, deny, or otherwise falsify what may be happening.⁴² To shore up existing assumptions about the way the world worked, the dominant culture portrayed feminists as "deviant, man-hating, unrepresentative radicals who were a threat to society."⁴³

However, men and those in positions of power were not the only people who experienced anxiety. Working class women and women of color also felt threatened by the women's liberation movement, which often seemed designed primarily to advance the goals of bourgeois white women at the expense of other oppressed people.⁴⁴ Even some middle class white women felt anxiety as a result of the women's movement. They did not necessarily want a life without a husband or children. They did not want to be labeled as feminists if that meant they would be ostracized.⁴⁵ They wanted the opportunities of capitalism, not its overthrow. Consequently, many women who wanted equality and self-determination found it difficult to develop a sense of collective identity with feminists. Despite being outside of the collective identity and organization of the movement, I believe these women were integral to the cultural changes the movement sought.

A Case for Individual Women as Actors in the Women's Liberation Movement

For cultures to change, people have to endure a psychologically painful period of unlearning previous ways of thinking and behaving, and they have to learn that the new ways work better.⁴⁶ For the beliefs and basic assumptions of feminism to take hold in the culture, the "nonnegotiable" and "nonconfrontable" assumptions of interpersonal and institutional relationships had to be confronted and negotiated. This would happen in marriages, churches, workplaces, and government as individual women tested new ways of being and new ways of being in relationship. Schein said the keys to successful cultural change involve a correct assessment of whether the potential for new learning is present and management of the anxiety that is released while underlying assumptions are unlearned and learned.⁴⁷ This, too, fell to individual women. Each woman had to decide when and where to leverage change and how to do so in such a way that managed the resulting anxiety. Often that meant women treaded softly rather than mounting an aggressive campaign.

Having entered the workplace and their personal relationships simply wanting to live their lives in keeping the principles of women's liberation, these women were not always prepared to be change agents and had no role models to follow. Their stories illustrate how people who may be viewed as "followers" nonetheless contribute to sociocultural change. These stories are important to understanding the 1970s and social movements, but few have been told.

Janice Yoder wrote about her experience as one of the first female professors at a U.S. military academy.⁴⁸ She reported that she was labeled as a "feminist/libber" in part because she rejected being assigned to the same role that wives of faculty members played and in part because she called attention to sexist behavior.⁴⁹ She resigned her position feeling ineffective, isolated, and ignored, yet felt guilty that she had jeopardized opportunities for other women—a responsibility that she noted other women who were "test cases" also felt.⁵⁰ Tokenism, she concluded, "often must be endured and overcome by at least one generation."⁵¹

Although it is not clear what years Linda Nielsen was describing in her article about her experience as the first female faculty member in a department at one university, she provided some clues as to why more of these stories have not been told:

What is as important as recounting these sexist incidents, however, is their profound, personal impact. I have not recovered from the events of those four years. I am not a "success story"—a woman who demonstrates that if you are competent, persistent, and clever, you too can secure your place in the university. . . . My alternative to dwelling on pain was something far more destructive and insidious—self-blame and guilt. . . . Self-blame is a prevalent response among victims in any form of discrimination.⁵²

How many women have not told their stories because they felt isolated, guilty, or blame-worthy?

Only many memoirs of consciousness, communities, groups, issues, and struggles could begin to get at the richness and the contradictions, could hint at the scale of what was, from the first, a mass movement….Many others must write. Every woman has her story, her still-changing stories, of her encounter with modern feminism.⁵³

With the perspective of some 30 years, however, it may be possible to see how events that were painful, frustrating, or appeared to be defeats for feminism actually contributed to the process and history of cultural change.

Narratives

Rita's Story
The experiences of a woman I will call "Rita" are one example of the richness of these narratives and how they can provide insight into how women changed organizational culture. Rita was the first and only female engineer in the places she worked in the 1970s. The culture of the workplace reflected the dominant culture's underlying assumptions of the way nature worked: men are providers and women are nurturers. A man left his identity as a husband or father at the threshold of the office. As more women entered careers traditionally held by men, women were expected to demonstrate the same professional commitment. The fear was that professional women would take extended maternity leave or stay home to care for sick children, delaying important projects. Women like Rita understood that if they were to be taken seriously as professionals, they had to relieve this anxiety without sacrificing their nurturing roles.

What I remember most having to do with work [is] having to hide the fact that I would have to do something for my kids, take them to the dentist, something normal. So I always would make up a little lie and say I had to go to the dentist. I remember that because at that time, you know, it wasn't OK for you to be home with a sick child, to be taking your kids to the doctor. All those kinds of things. You just wouldn't. Now it's not that way, but back then it really was. . . . I didn't share my family life with people I worked with. I worked with all men, and it was hard enough working with all men, let alone talking about getting up in the middle of the night with my babies. I did not discuss it because it would have damaged my career. Any kind of showing of a weakness like that in a male-dominated society is going to [be interpreted as a sign] that "she can't handle it--she's got to get up every night.". . . I didn't share anything like that. I remember that specifically. I didn't feel bad about not being fully truthful about it because I knew I had to. I knew that [to talk about my personal life] would be career suicide.⁵⁴

Not only was Rita aware that it would have been detrimental to her career for her to remind her colleagues that she was not only an engineer, but a wife and mother, but she recognized that she was being closely scrutinized as a test case and that future opportunities for women rested on her success. "In non traditional careers, women were under the spotlight. Any move you made, men and women were going to make gross assumptions."⁵⁵

Although Rita did not mention her children in any way that might cause her colleagues to conclude that she could not handle her responsibilities as a mother and an employee, she did not conform to the norms of behavior for men that often placed a rigid barrier between work and home. Rita hid but did not abandon maternal behavior, balancing her professional and domestic responsibilities without calling attention to her efforts. She decided for herself how she would "be" as a mother and as a professional.

Although Rita was acutely aware that her decisions would impact the way other women were seen, she did not necessarily see herself as an activist. In fact, she was conscious that in many ways she could not be effective if she was perceived as having a feminist agenda. Rita once arranged for a male employee to work from home after his wife had a baby. It was radical, and she had to defend her decision to Human Resources. She couldn't have taken that risk for a female employee without being accused of favoritism. Once the company found that this new way of being an employee could work, the practice became embedded in the company's culture, which benefited both men and women. Had Rita taken that same stance on behalf of a woman, however, she likely would have met more resistance. She would have reinforced the belief that women with children were liabilities. Rita affected the artifacts, espoused beliefs, and underlying assumptions of her workplace, which led to new policies. Gradually, this transformed the culture of the organization in ways that reflected feminist values. Today, both men and women can acknowledge their domestic roles and responsibilities in the workplace without it hurting their careers. Rita said, "You need the radicals. You need people being really out there," but at the same time, she realized that was only one approach. "I would be in a conflict at work and think, 'You know if I were a more radical feminist I wouldn't be able to even talk to this person, he wouldn't even be listening to me at the minimal level he's listening to me.'"⁵⁶

My Story

In 1978, five years after graduating from college, I became one of the first women hired as a reporter outside of the women's department at a particular daily newspaper in the Midwest. I knew that one of the arguments against the hiring of women as reporters was the fact that the work sometimes involved going to crime scenes or other story sites alone, at night, in parts of town that might not be considered "safe." I felt a responsibility to prove that women did not need protection or special treatment. I remember one election night in which I was trying to obtain an interview with the losing congressional candidate. Shortly before my 1 a.m. deadline, the candidate's campaign manager finally agreed to arrange the interview, explaining that the candidate was in a hotel room downtown. As I rode up the elevator, walked down the hall, and knocked on the hotel room door, I prayed that I was not being foolish. I got the interview without incident (although today I realize that is not evidence of lack of foolishness). What I also remember is that I realized I could not tell my editor how nervous I had been, or even that I had to go to the candidate's hotel room. I had been successful enough at my job to be assigned a top election night story, and I did not want to even raise the question of whether that was an appropriate assignment for a woman.

Conclusion

The women's liberation movement changed the awareness of individuals about opportunities and roles for women whether those men and women consciously adopted the values and behaviors called for by the movement or not. Those individuals brought that awareness into their relational space. When individual women behaved in their social relations and in organizational settings in new ways consistent with feminist values, they exerted a force that had the potential to "disturb" the beliefs and underlying assumptions of that system. The response to that disruption further impacted the system. Wheatley described how such a small disturbance can be circulated, interpreted, and amplified to the point that an organization (or relationship) changes in order to survive.⁵⁷ Once the culture of a system has changed, it has the potential to affect other systems in its environment.⁵⁸

Schein's model of organizational culture provides a framework for an understanding of the way underlying assumptions about women's identity, roles, and relationships began to shift in the seventies. These shifts often were imperceptible, becoming embedded in culture gradually. Perhaps because there is much work remaining before feminist values are fully reflected in the culture, the progress that has been made is not fully appreciated except when compared to the culture of the seventies, and the contributions of women who initiated that process have been undervalued. The actions of individual women moved organizations and institutions away from a rigid patriarchal culture toward one that was somewhat more egalitarian and respectful of different perspectives and relationships. Women like Rita, who quietly demonstrated that women could effectively balance their roles as wives, mothers, and workers, did, in fact, raise the consciousness of those around them. Rita, and women like, her provided the real-life tests of the espoused values of the women's liberation movement. When such events proved to be solutions not only for women but for men, the underlying assumptions about the relationships between men and women gradually began to shift.

Notes

¹Friedan, B. "It Changed My Life": Writings on the Women's Movement. New York: W.W. Norton, 1985, pp. 137-141.

²Friedan, B. "Call to Women's Strike for Equality." In B. Friedan, "It Changed My Life": Writings on the Women's Movement, 143-145 New York: W.W. Norton, 1985. (Originally presented as a speech at a NOW convention in Chicago, IL, 1970), pp. 143-145.

³Friedan B."It Changed My Life": Writings on the Women's Movement. New York: W.W. Norton, 1985, p. 142

⁴Wandersee, W. D. On the Move: American Women in the 1970s. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988, p. 43; Klein, E. Gender Politics: From Consciousness to Mass Politics. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984, p. 1.

⁵See, for example, Fox-Genovese, E. Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life: How Today's Feminist Elite Has Lost Touch with the Real Concerns of Women. New York: Nan A. Talese, 1996.

⁶Wandersee, W. D. On the Move: American Women in the 1970s. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988, p. 201.

⁷Schein, E. H. Organizational Culture and Leadership. 3rd ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004, pp. 26-29.

⁸Schein E. H. Organizational Culture and Leadership. 3rd ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004.

⁹Blumer, H.. "Social Movements." In B. McLaughlin (ed.), Studies in Social Movements: A Social Psychological Perspective, 8-29. New York: The Free Press, 1969. (Reprinted from New Outline of the Principles of Sociology, pp. 199-220, by A.M. Lee, ed., 1951, New York: Barnes & Noble), p. 8.

¹⁰Zald, M.N., and Ash, R.. "Social Movement Organizations: Growth, Decay and Change. In B. McLaughlin, (ed.) Studies in Social Movements: A Social Psychological Perspective, 461-485. New York: The Free Press, 1969. (Reprinted from Social Forces, 1966, 44, 327-341, p. 464.

¹¹Cohen, J.L. "Strategy or Identity: New Theoretical Paradigms and Contemporary Social Movements" [Electronic version]. I, 1985, 52, 663-716, p. 673.

¹²Freeman, J. "Introduction." In J. Freeman (ed.), Social Movements of the Sixties and Seventies, 1-5. New York: Longman, 1983, p. 1.

¹³Eyerman, R., and Jamison, A. Social Movements: A Cognitive Approach. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991, p. 56.

¹⁴Freeman, J. "Introduction." In J. Freeman (ed.), Social Movements of the Sixties and Seventies, 1-5. New York: Longman, 1983, p. 2.

¹⁵Eyerman, R., and Jamison, A. Social Movements: A Cognitive Approach. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991, p. 40.

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