Schenken Suzanne O’Dea. From Suffrage to the Senate: An Encyclopedia of American Women in Politics (2 Volumes)

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Women’s Political Caucus joined the campaign and began seeking dele-

gates who would support Farenthold. Gloria Steinem nominated Faren-

thold from the convention floor, and Fannie Lou Hamer and others sec-

onded the nomination. Farenthold received more than 400 votes, but the

nomination went to Thomas Eagleton, who ran with presidential nomi-

nee George McGovern. Farenthold campaigned for the McGovern-Eagle-

ton ticket and cochaired Citizens for McGovern.

Chair of the National Women’s Political Caucus from 1973 to 1975,

she ran for governor again in 1974 but lost in an underfinanced campaign.

She served as president of Wells College from 1976 to 1980.

Born in Corpus Christi, Texas, Farenthold earned her bachelor’s de-

gree at Vassar College and her law degree at the University of Texas in 1949.

See also Democratic Party, Women in the; Hamer, Fannie Lou Townsend;

National Women’s Political Caucus; State Legislatures, Women in; Steinem,

Gloria Marie

References Crawford and Ragsdale, Women in Texas (1992).

Farrington, Mary Elizabeth Pruett (1898–1984)

Republican Elizabeth Farrington of Hawaii served as territorial delegate to

Congress from 31 July 1954 to 3 January 1957. Elected to fill the vacancy

created by the death of her husband, Joseph Farrington, she continued his

campaigns for statehood for Hawaii and Alaska. Her accomplishments in-

clude the establishment of the Geophysics Institute in Hawaii, designating

the City of Refuge on the island of Hawaii as a national historical park,

and passing a measure to reapportion Hawaii based on population, an

achievement that had eluded others for thirty years. She also worked to

improve the market for Hawaii’s sugar. Farrington lost her reelection at-

tempt in 1956 and returned to Hawaii.

Born in Tokyo, Japan, Farrington graduated from Ward-Belmont Ju-

nior College in 1916 and from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in

1918. She did later graduate work at the University of Hawaii. She was a

newspaper correspondent from 1918 to 1957.

Active in Republican Party politics, Farrington was president of the

League of Republican Women in Washington, D.C., from 1946 to 1948

and president of the National Federation of Republican Women from

1949 to 1953. She was publisher, president, and director of the Honolulu

Star Bulletin from 1946 to 1967, president and director of the Star Bulletin

Printing Company from 1957 to 1963, and president of the Hawaiian

Broadcasting System from 1960 to 1963. After serving as director of the

Office of Territories in the Department of the Interior from 1969 to 1971,

she worked in the congressional liaison office from 1971 to 1973.

Farrington, Mary Elizabeth Pruett 255

See also State Legislatures, Women in

References Hardy, American Women Civil Rights Activists (1993).

Federal Women’s Program

The Civil Service Commission of the federal government created the Fed-

eral Women’s Program (FWP) in 1967 to implement President Lyndon

Johnson’s Executive Order 11375, prohibiting discrimination on the basis

of sex by the federal government and its contractors. FWP sought to en-

hance women’s employment and advancement in the federal government.

The program had three objectives: to create a legal and an administrative

framework to provide equal job opportunity for federal employees, to

eliminate prejudices that limited women to certain jobs, and to encourage

women to seek jobs with the federal government and to participate in

training programs that offered the possibility of advancement.

The FWP underwent a number of changes in 1969, when President

Richard Nixon signed Executive Order 11478. The order integrated the

FWP into the Equal Employment Opportunity Program, making agency

directors responsible for it and for development of affirmative action

plans. The directors were also charged with designating an FWP chair and

a committee to provide advice on women’s concerns and to monitor

progress of the agency’s affirmative action program. In 1971, Nixon ap-

pointed Barbara Hackman Franklin to identify and recruit women for

high-level federal appointments.

See also Affirmative Action; Federally Employed Women; Franklin, Barbara

Hackman

References Markoff, “The Federal Women’s Program” (1972).

Federally Employed Women

Founded in 1968 to fight sex discrimination in employment by the U.S.

government, Federally Employed Women (FEW) grew out of a conference

for executive women employed by the federal government. The catalyst

for FEW’s organization had occurred the year before, when Executive Or-

der 11375 had added sex to the forms of discrimination prohibited within

the federal government and by its contractors in Executive Order 11246.

Executive Order 11375 also established the Federal Women’s Program to

enhance women’s employment opportunities in the federal government.

FEW’s organizers believed that the measure had the potential for improv-

ing women’s opportunities and at the same time believed that implemen-

tation and enforcement of its provisions deserved monitoring.

FEW’s structure includes chapter, state, and national levels that each

have four program areas: legislative, training, compliance, and diversity.

Federally Employed Women 257

The legislative area involves developing an agenda, educating members,

lobbying members of Congress, offering testimony, and monitoring leg-

islative action. Legislative priorities have included support for affirmative

action, improvements in processing employment complaints, an end to

sexual harassment, and protection against discrimination based on sexual

orientation. Other priority areas are child care and elder care and access

to benefits for women in the military.

In the area of compliance, FEW officers work with departmental and

agency management to encourage their enforcement of Executive Order

11375 and to monitor the effectiveness of the Federal Women’s Program.

Although not a labor union, FEW’s representatives help agencies develop

goals and objectives to achieve equality of opportunity in the federal

workforce. At a 1997 congressional hearing on discrimination in the fed-

eral workforce, however, FEW’s president testified that most women con-

tinued to work in the lowest-paying jobs, that thousands of discrimina-

tion complaints were filed annually, and that resolutions of the

complaints took too long.

See also Affirmative Action; Child Day Care; Executive Order 11375; Federal

Women’s Program; Lesbian Rights; Military, Women in the; Sex Discrimina-

tion; Sexual Harassment

References www.few.org.

Feinstein, Dianne Goldman (b. 1933)

Democrat Dianne Feinstein of California entered the U.S. Senate on 10

November 1992. She first gained national attention in 1978, when she be-

came mayor of San Francisco following the murder of Mayor George

Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk by a former supervisor.

Born in San Francisco, California, Feinstein received a bachelor’s de-

gree in history from Stanford University in 1955. Following graduation,

she was a Coro Foundation intern and became familiar with various gov-

ernment agencies through a study of the administration of justice in Cal-

ifornia. She then worked for the California Industrial Welfare Commis-

sion. In the 1960s she served on city, county, and state criminal justice

commissions and boards.

Feinstein entered politics as a member of the San Francisco Board of

Supervisors, where she served from 1970 to 1978. Because she was presi-

dent of the board of supervisors and thus next in line, the assassinations

of Milk and Moscone resulted in her becoming mayor. Helping the city

heal from the tragedy and making the city safe were her first priorities. She

introduced and passed a measure banning handguns, but California

courts found it unconstitutional. She enlarged the police department, re-

duced emergency response time from eight minutes to two minutes, and

258 Feinstein, Dianne Goldman

cut the crime rate by 27 percent. To become better acquainted with city

residents and to demonstrate her commitment to community service,

Feinstein spent Saturday mornings leading neighborhood cleanup patrols,

cleaning up trash and painting over graffiti. She retired as mayor in 1987.

In 1990, Feinstein ran for governor against U.S. senator Pete Wilson,

who won. Wilson resigned from the Senate with four years remaining in

his term and appointed John Seymour to serve until 1992, when an elec-

tion would be held. Feinstein entered the 1992 Senate race, defeated Sey-

mour, and completed the term that Wilson had begun. During her cam-

paign, Feinstein argued that the Senate needed more than the two women

serving in it at the time, saying, “two percent may be good for milk, but

it’s not good enough for the Senate.”When Feinstein and Congresswoman

Barbara Boxer won their races for the U.S. Senate in 1992, California be-

came the first state to send two women to the Senate to serve together. In

1994, Feinstein ran for a full six-year term and won.

As a member of the Senate, Feinstein passed the California Desert

Protection Act, placing more than 3 million acres into two national parks,

Joshua Tree and Death Valley, and one national preserve, East Mojave, in

addition to another 3 million acres designated as wilderness. The prime

mover behind bills banning assault weapons, she explained: “It really

Feinstein, Dianne Goldman 259

Senator Dianne

Feinstein (D-CA) was

reelected to a second

term in the U.S.

Senate, 1998 (Archive

Photos)

comes down to a question of blood or guts—the blood of innocent peo-

ple or the Senate of the United States having the guts to do what we should

do when we take that oath to protect the welfare of our citizens.” Coau-

thor of the 1994 Gun-Free Schools Act, she wrote and passed the Hate

Crimes Sentencing Enforcement Act. Another measure that she played a

key role in, the Comprehensive Methamphetamine Control Act of 1996,

created new controls over the manufacture of the drug and increased the

criminal penalties for possession and distribution of it. She has proposed

a measure to amend the U.S. Constitution by adding a Victims’ Bill of

Rights and has sought passage of the Federal Gang Violence Act. In addi-

tion, she has worked to stop illegal immigration, create harassment-free

workplaces, and create new loans for small businesses.

See also Boxer, Barbara Levy; Congress, Women in; Family and Medical Leave

Act of 1993; Sexual Harassment

References Boxer, Strangers in the Senate: Politics and the New Revolution of

Women in America (1994); Congressional Quarterly, Politics in America 1994

(1993); H. W. Wilson, Current Biography 1979 (1979); Roberts, Dianne

Feinstein: Never Let Them See You Cry (1994); www.senate.gov/~feinstein/

dfbio.html.

Felton, Rebecca Ann Latimer (1835–1930)

Democrat Rebecca Felton of Georgia served in the U.S. Senate from 21

November 1922 to 22 November 1922. She was the first woman to serve

in the U.S. Senate and had the shortest term, one day. Felton’s first expo-

sure to politics came when her husband served in Congress in the 1870s

and she was his campaign manager and press secretary. In the early 1880s,

she investigated convict camps, found them appalling, and persuaded the

Woman’s Christian Temperance Union to join her crusade to house male

and females prisoners separately and to house juvenile offenders and adult

criminals separately.

By the 1890s, Rebecca Felton had become established as a political

leader in her own right, lecturing against convict leasing and liquor. In the

early 1900s, she became active in the woman suffrage movement and in

efforts to provide vocational training for poor white girls. By that time,

she had begun writing a column for the Atlanta Journal, articulating her

racist, anti-Catholic, and anti-Semitic views and her opposition to child

labor laws.

When she was eighty-five years old, she helped elect her old friend

Thomas Watson to the U.S. Senate. Watson won, served two years of his

term, and died in 1922. The governor of Georgia, who had opposed

woman suffrage and wanted a symbolic gesture to appease women voters,

appointed Felton to serve between the time of Watson’s death and the

260 Felton, Rebecca Ann Latimer

election of his successor. After the election, Felton convinced the newly

elected senator to wait one day to present his credentials, giving her the

opportunity to take the Senate seat on 21 November 1922 and to make a

speech. After 143 years of an all-male Senate, Felton told her colleagues:

“When the women of the country come in and sit with you, though there

may be but a very few in the next few years, I pledge to you that you will

get ability, you will get integrity of purpose, you will get exalted patrio-

tism, and you will get unstinted usefulness.” The following day, she re-

signed, and the new senator was sworn in. It was almost ten years before

another woman, Hattie Caraway, was sworn into the Senate.

Born in DeKalb County, Georgia, Felton attended private schools

and graduated from Madison Female College in 1852. The next year she

married William Harrell Felton, who was a physician, Methodist clergy-

man, and farmer. During the Civil War years, the Feltons sought refuge in

a farmhouse near Macon, where they experienced the horrors of war

when outlaw members of the Union and Confederate armies and freed

slaves pillaged their home and terrorized them.

Rebecca Felton wrote My Memoirs of Georgia Politics (1911), The

Subjection of Women and the Enfranchisement of Women (1915), Country

Life in Georgia in the Days of My Youth (1919), and other works.

See also Caraway, Hattie Ophelia Wyatt; Congress, Women in; Suffrage;

Woman’s Christian Temperance Union

References Boxer, Strangers in the Senate: Politics and the New Revolution of

Women in America (1994); James, ed., Notable American Women, 1607–1950

(1971); Office of the Historian, U.S. House of Representatives, Women in

Congress, 1917–1990 (1991).

The Feminine Mystique

The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, published in 1963, helped launch

the modern feminist movement in the United States by exposing the

haunting sense of dissatisfaction many women felt and by portraying the

experience as one that many women shared. Friedan articulated the social,

educational, and economic limits on women’s lives that restricted their

development as human beings and that hobbled their participation in the

full range of human endeavors. Women readers responded by launching

projects to change the conditions, laws, relationships, and institutions that

hindered them.

The themes in The Feminine Mystique emerged from responses to a

questionnaire Friedan sent to her former Smith College classmates in

preparation for the fifteenth anniversary of their 1942 graduation. Respon-

dents described personal problems, prompting Friedan to investigate fur-

ther to see if women in the larger population had encountered comparable

The Feminine Mystique 261

problems and frustrations. Expanding her research beyond the initial ques-

tionnaire, Friedan found that many women yearned for more than making

beds, shopping for groceries, caring for their children, and doing the other

tasks related to homemaking and mothering. Using birth rates, statistics on

age at marriage, cultural images, social norms, and personal experiences,

Friedan found that many women shared the “problem with no name.” It

was not described in medical or psychological references, but women across

the country described feelings of emptiness and desperation.

Friedan concluded that since World War II a concerted effort had

been made to convince women that they could only be happy in their

roles as wives, mothers, and homemakers. Friedan called the ideology “the

feminine mystique.” Friedan wrote: “It is my thesis that as the Victorian

culture did not permit women to accept or gratify their basic sexual needs,

our culture does not permit women to accept or gratify their basic need

to grow and fulfill their potentialities as human beings.” Declaring that

housework was boring and that the home had become “a comfortable

concentration camp,” she pointed to several cultural components that en-

couraged women to limit their world. She included the educational estab-

lishment, Freudians, women’s magazines, and mass advertising in her in-

dictment and concluded that women should be able to seek equality in

both the private and public worlds.

The book prompted women to begin making changes in their lives.

Some women questioned their primary roles as wives and mothers and

explored new roles in their homes, communities, and the workplace.

Women already in the workplace began to question the limits placed on

the jobs they could hold and the wages they could earn. They challenged

their legal status, their economic status, and their political status and

worked to change them.

Friedan used the celebrity and power that she acquired from The

Feminine Mystique to speak on behalf of women and to encourage women

to speak for themselves. The sense of shared fate that the book helped

women identify significantly contributed to the emergence of the modern

feminist movement.

See also Feminist Movement; Friedan, Betty Naomi Goldstein

References Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil

Rights Movement and the New Left (1979); Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

(1963); Schneir, Feminism in Our Time (1994).

The Feminist Majority

Founded in 1987, the Feminist Majority recruits women for public office

and works for women’s equality, reproductive freedom, and increased hu-

man services. Organized by Eleanor Smeal, former president of the Na-

262 The Feminist Majority

tional Organization for Women, Peg Yorkin, and Katherine Spillar, the

Feminist Majority was originally known as the Fund for the Feminist Ma-

jority. The group received its initial financial support from Peg Yorkin,

who gave $10 million to the Fund for the Feminist Majority Foundation,

50 percent of which went to endow the foundation, with the balance sup-

porting the legalization of the abortifacient RU-486 in the United States.

The Feminist Majority has established several programs to further its

goals. The “Feminization of Power Campaign” works to encourage

women to seek public office and to assist them as they campaign. The

Rock for Choice project reaches out to young people through music to ed-

ucate and organize them to support abortion rights. The Feminist Major-

ity Foundation educates the public on women’s issues, defends women’s

rights in legal cases, and conducts research.

See also Abortion; Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act of 1994; National

Organization for Women; RU-486 (Mifepristone); Sexual Harassment; Smeal,

Eleanor Cutri; Violence Against Women Act of 1994

References www.feminist.org.

Feminist Movement

The modern feminist movement, or the “second wave” of feminism, en-

compasses a wide range of theories and philosophies that hold at their

center the quest for women’s social, economic, and political equality. The

first wave emerged in the mid-1800s, advocated and won woman suffrage

rights, and essentially dissolved after ratification of the Nineteenth

Amendment. The second wave of feminism began in the 1960s with two

primary branches—the women’s liberation movement and the feminist

movement—that merged into the feminist movement in the 1970s.

Several factors contributed to the emergence of the modern feminist

movement, including women’s participation in World War II as members

of the military and as members of the workforce, the President’s Com-

mission on the Status of Women’s report in the early 1960s, the creation

of state commissions on the status of women, and the publication of The

Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan in 1963. By identifying and articulat-

ing discrimination on the basis of sex, women transformed areas of life

that had long been considered family or personal matters into social and

political issues. Women formed rape crisis centers, domestic violence shel-

ters, day care centers, and abortion clinics, and they sought to change laws,

policies, and society. Existing organizations, such as the American Associ-

ation for University Women, the League of Women Voters, and others

adopted legislative agendas that reflected feminist priorities, and new or-

ganizations, including the National Organization for Women and the Na-

tional Women’s Political Caucus, emerged for the purpose of identifying

Feminist Movement 263

and advocating women’s issues. The single most visible solution to sex dis-

crimination that feminists sought was passage and ratification of the

Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). The ERA failed in 1982, but the focus

on women’s status that accompanied it contributed to policy changes in

the areas of education, employment, pay, crime, credit, and health.

Feminists have sought to give women greater power over their lives

and in business and politics. They have argued that each woman must

control her own body, which includes the choice to bear children or not,

access to means of birth control and to fertility resources, and availability

of abortion services. Other, less controversial forms of power have also

been feminist goals. Women have sought power through elective and ap-

pointive offices, and other women have supported their efforts by con-

tributing to their campaigns and working in them. The increasing num-

bers of women in state legislatures and in Congress reflect the successes

women have had.

Feminists have challenged and changed an array of social traditions

and practices. Homemakers entered the workforce and found that hold-

ing the equivalent of two jobs, one at home and one at their employer’s,

was too much, and they implored their husbands to help with household

and child care responsibilities. At the office, women decided that making

the coffee, picking up their boss’s laundry, and other traditionally female

tasks were not in their job description and protested. Vocabulary and

word usage came under scrutiny, and the exclusive use of male nouns and

pronouns was deemed sexist. For example,“worker” replaced “workman,”

and “police officer” replaced “policeman.” In addition, adult females de-

cided that being addressed or referred to as “girls” was demeaning and ob-

jected. Women who found sexist jokes offensive concluded that they did

not have a social obligation to laugh at them. Feminists sought and ob-

tained changes in their religious denominations to permit the ordination

of women. Other women found that Christianity and other male-domi-

nated theologies did not meet their needs and explored ancient, goddess-

centered religions and beliefs.

American culture and education have also been affected by the fem-

inist movement. Women writers, artists, and musicians have found greater

acceptance and new audiences for their works. Women’s studies and

women’s history courses at colleges and universities have made women’s

lives, achievements, and contributions more visible to students.

As the feminist movement transformed American politics, society,

and culture, a conservative movement developed to stop and reverse the

changes. New women’s organizations, including Eagle Forum, Concerned

Women for America, and other groups, claimed that women belonged at

home taking care of their homes and children, that husbands should pro-

264 Feminist Movement