1970s: Defending and Reshaping Voluntarism

A new feminist movement surfaced in the early 1970s as more and more women entered the workplace. By the end of the decade, slightly over half of all American women worked outside the home. More than 60 percent of those women had school-age children, and another 45 percent had children under the age of six. Women married later, and the divorce rate doubled between the early 1960s and the mid-1970s. In 1972, Congress approved the Equal Rights Amendment, and the following year, the Roe v. Wade decision by the Supreme Court legalized abortion. The decade saw women assuming increasingly prominent roles in society, with Shirley Temple Black of the Palo Alto League the U.S. Representative at the United Nations Conference on the Environment. In Great Britain in 1979, Margaret Thatcher became the first woman to serve as prime minister.