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Dissertation Information for Carol Frances Cini

NAME:
- Carol Frances Cini

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (2007)

ADVISORS:
- Ellen Carol DuBois

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Carole Pateman
- Janice L. Reiff

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: Making women's rights matter: Diverse activists, California's Commission on the Status of Women, and the legislative and social impact of a movement, 1962--1976

Abstract: This dissertation analyzes the modern American women's movement at the state level revealing how coalitions of diverse activists played a significant role in its origins and its transforming legislative and social impact. Since the state level is where most laws maintaining gender bias existed, reflecting the still-influential system of coverture, this aspect of the movement's history deserves more attention. Despite their conflicts, post-World War II activists from different economic, racial, and political backgrounds built alliances by the early 1960s, targeting discriminatory state legal codes. In their push for new laws and policies, coalitions of women's rights advocates, from professional organizations, labor unions, civil rights groups, and other women's associations, pressed elected officials to create state commissions on the status of women; these commissions were gained in all fifty states between 1962 and 1967, and in California by 1965. Given impetus by the President's Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW) established in 1961, but pursuing their own longstanding agendas for change, networks of activists used state commissions to promote ever-expanding goals of gender equity. Previous studies of the women's movement have focused on the PCSW, the National Organization for Women, founded in 1966, and women's liberation groups that emerged later. However, the earlier push for state commissions, as well as their legislative influence and social impact, remain underevaluated components of the women's movement's success.

A case study of the politically significant state of California illustrates how activists used commissions in an era of very few women lawmakers. Public hearings, media coverage, commission reports, papers of Governors Edmund "Pat" Brown and Ronald Reagan, oral histories of state legislators, and letters from ordinary women, as well as records of their diverse organizations, reveal the struggle that ensued. The commission and a wide network of women's groups organized grassroots support, confronted resistance in the nearly all-male legislature, and lobbied to create a new legal and social framework for equal opportunity. Their impact is evident in hundreds of bills concerning education, employment, reproductive choice, marriage, maternity leave, child care, and violence against women, which created a sea-change in arenas of state law that had enforced gender bias. In effect, activists made women's rights matter, not only in the state legislature, but in the larger society as well.

This examination of a state commission and its advocates offers new perspectives on the 1960s as a pivotal era. It demonstrates connections between women's post-World War II activism and the rise of a women's movement by the 1960s, illustrating the importance of long-existing organizations that broke ground for women's rights. It makes visible the racial and class diversity of activists involved in such a struggle, as well as the conflicts and transforming coalitions among women's groups. It also reveals a bipartisan women's network which contributed to commission achievements and confronted backlash by the 1970s. Finally, it indicates state-level precursors to federal anti-discrimination measures, underlining the significance of state-level women's movements.

MPACT Scores for Carol Frances Cini

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calculated 2008-08-06 12:46:19

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Students under Carol Frances Cini

ADVISEES:
- None

COMMITTEESHIPS:
- None