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40 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 209 (1998-1999)
The Sixties Shift to Formal Equality and the Courts: An Argument for Pragmatism and Politics

handle is hein.journals/wmlr40 and id is 221 raw text is: ESSAY THE SIXTIES SHIFT TO FORMAL EQUALITY AND THE COURTS: AN ARGUMENT FOR PRAGMATISM AND POLITICS MARY BECKER* Conventional wisdom tells a simple story of feminism during the first seventy years of this century. As the century opened, the women's movement was single-mindedly focused on suffrage, arguing that women should have the vote both because they are men's equals and because they are different from men in that their finer sensibilities will transform and purify politics. When women finally won suffrage in August of 1920, the coalition of women's organizations that had worked so long and so hard to achieve this goal fell apart from sheer exhaustion.' Feminism slept during the next forty-plus years.2 The depres- sion saw women forced out of a tight labor market that reserved jobs for male breadwinners.3 The 1940s saw women drawn into and then pushed out of the labor market as men left for and re- turned from World War II.4 The 1950s were particularly dismal * Arnold I. Shure Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. A version of this essay was presented as the George Wythe Lecture at the William and Mary School of Law on April 13, 1998. Research support was provided by the Jerome S. Weiss Faculty Research Fund and the Jerome F. Kutak Faculty Fund. I thank Paul Bryan, Shirley Evans, Connie Fleischer, Caroline Goddard, Amy Hagen, Greg Nimmo, Bill Schwesig, Charles Ten Brink, and Josh Yount for research and other assistance. I also thank my partner Joanne Trapani for helpful comments on an earlier draft. 1. See MARY BECKER ET AL., CASES AND MATERIALS ON FEMINIST JURISPRUDENCE 14 (1994); JUDITH HOLE & ELLEN LEVINE, REBIRTH OF FEMINISM 13-14 (1971). 2. See HOLE & LEVINE, supra note 1, at 14. 3. See Nancy E. Dowd, Work and Family: Restructuring the Workplace, 32 ARIZ. L. REV. 431, 436 (1990). 4. See id. 209

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