Ch. 14 - Counter Culture Strikes Back - Women's Movement

The Women’s Movement liberated women’s lives more, and gave women the opportunity to go to college and then get white-collar jobs. This changed how men treated the women. Men started to expect women to be more accessible. Also men with wives expected them to be lovers, breadwinners, and homemakers. Women complained that the sexual revolution benefited the men more than them. In the movies women were not supported as much, they appeared less in movies. When women did get a part in a movie they played the stereotyped roles of madonnas or whores. For example Jane Fonda played an unfaithful wife in The Chase and a prostitute in Walk on the Wild Side. In one movie Doris Day got a part as a white-collar worker as an accountant executive, but she also earned the screen persona of a sexual tease. Movies in the 1960’s did not contain more liberated depicted woman, and it was not until the late 1970’s and early 1980’s that women began to get the rolls of white-collar and blue-collar workers in film. I think that this was because when women first started to show their independence and began to become liberated it shocked the men. Men were not used to having their wives go to work or school. Men went to work and women stayed at home with the children and cooked and cleaned, but when that started to change to movie industry did not accept it right away.