Women's Rights - The Modern Women's Rights Movement

For many decades of the twentieth century, supporters of women's rights had little success in legislatures or in the courts. Gender inequality meant that women could legally be discriminated against in employment, education, and other important areas of everyday life. The CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT of the 1960s drew the support of many college-educated women, much like the women who supported the abolitionist cause a little more than a hundred years before. Like their predecessors, these civil rights workers realized that discrimination based on race existed side by side with discrimination based on gender. The result was the birth of the modern feminist movement and the quest for women's rights.