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From the Archive: Why women won

How, when, and why did women in the US obtain legal rights equal to men’s regarding the workplace, marriage, family, Social Security, criminal justice, credit markets, and other parts of the economy and society, decades after they gained the right to vote?
How, when, and why did women in the US obtain legal rights equal to men’s regarding the workplace, marriage, family, Social Security, criminal justice, credit markets, and other parts of the economy and society, decades after they gained the right to vote?
Monday 21 September 2026 | 1 hour 12 minutes 39 seconds
Watch on YouTubeDownload File | 99.78MB

The story begins with the civil rights movement and the somewhat fortuitous nature of the early and key women’s rights legislation. The women’s movement then formed to press for further rights. Of the 155 critical moments in women’s rights history from 1905 to 2023, 45% occur between 1963 and 1973. The greatly increased employment of women, the formation of women’s rights associations, and the unstinting efforts of various members of Congress were behind the advances. But women became splintered far more than did men. A substantial group of women emerged in the 1970s to oppose various rights for women, just as they did during the suffrage movement. They remain a powerful force today.
Claudia Goldin is the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University and holds the Lee and Ezpeleta Professorship of Arts & Sciences at Harvard University. She was the director of the NBER’s Development of the American Economy program from 1989 to 2017 and is a co-director of the NBER's Gender in the Economy group. Goldin was awarded the 2023 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel "for having advanced our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes."