d support for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), as well as for reform of abortion laws. The issues of abortion and the ERA became divisive for NOW and led to a splintering of the group-some women felt that the issues did not belong on the organization’s agenda, while others wanted the agenda to push harder, to be more radical. Some NOW members broke off into smaller groups, but continued to fight.With the inclusion of Title IX in the Education Codes of 1972, equal access to higher education became law. (Eisenberg 6) Women were now able to enter professions that had always been impossible. The number of women in fields such as medicine, law, and engineering grew and continues to grow. The past century has witnessed enormous changes in the lives of American women. In many ways women’s lives have come to resemble men’s. One in every five doctors and one in every five lawyers are now women, up from one in twenty and one in a hundred, respectively, at the turn of the century. In 1900 women made up eighteen percent of the work force; by the year 2000 they are expected to make up almost half. (Rosenberg 247) Women’s educational attainment, which lagged behind men’s at the post-high school level for decades, is now virtually the same. And women’s wages, which were stalled at roughly sixty percent of men’s between 1950 and 1980, have begun to rise as women’s training and work force participation have increased (and men’s wages have fallen); they currently stand at seventy percent of men’s earnings. (Rosenberg 247)Women have achieved a great deal since 1848, but the fight for equality is not over. From the suffragettes to the revolutionary feminists, each wave of feminism has left a mark on the culture and has provided a foundation, or more properly a launching pad, for the next. Women need human equality, which means a broader evolution in culture and in the attitudes of me...
