You Push the Door Open, and It Swings Back: Four Thresholds

American women had been fighting for the vote for over seventy years, counting from the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. By the summer of 1920, the 19th Amendment had been ratified by 35 states — just one state short of the required three-quarters. Tennessee was the last battleground, its legislature deadlocked. The pivotal figure was Harry Burn, at 24 its youngest member, publicly opposed — yet carrying in his pocket a letter from his mother Febb: "Be a good boy and vote for suffrage."

On August 18 the first two roll calls tied 48–48. On the third, Burn suddenly answered "Aye" — 49–47, making Tennessee the 36th and decisive state, and the amendment law. Some 26 million American women were nominally enfranchised. But the door opened only halfway: Black women in the South were still barred from the polls by poll taxes, literacy tests, and violent intimidation, and would not truly walk through until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

"The law grants a right" and "you can actually use it" are two different things. Today's fights over voter registration hurdles, ID requirements, and polling-place access run along the same fault line: formal eligibility is not the same as real access.

After Pearl Harbor in 1941, young American men enlisted in droves, yet the war plants had to run flat out building planes, tanks, and ships. The government mobilized women to fill the gap with the icon of Rosie the Riveter — the 1943 "We Can Do It!" poster became the emblem of the age. Roughly 6 million women entered heavy-industry floors for the first time, earning wages and taking jobs that had belonged only to men.

They proved they could weld, rivet, and run cranes. But the moment the war ended in 1945, the script reversed: returning veterans needed jobs, and women were laid off or eased out back into the kitchen en masse. Propaganda pivoted overnight to glorify the devoted homemaker, paving the way for the housewife revival of the 1950s. Historian Ruth Milkman, in Gender at Work (1987), argues this employment surge was a temporary requisition: the postwar structure of the sexual division of labor snapped almost exactly back into place — the door pushed open, and shut again the instant the war stopped.

"Summoned when needed, dismissed when not" is far from obsolete. In downturns or pandemic shocks, women, part-timers, and gig workers are often the first pushed in and the first cut loose — the convenience of flexible labor is routinely borne by whoever has the least bargaining power.

In the American suburbs of the 1950s, material abundance reached new heights, yet middle-class housewives were widely gripped by an emptiness and depression they could not articulate. Journalist Betty Friedan (1921–2006), surveying her old Smith College classmates, found this was no individual ailment but the collective condition of a generation of well-educated women trapped in the home.

In 1963 she published The Feminine Mystique, naming that suppression "the problem that has no name" — once named, it could be discussed and organized around. The book sold millions and is seen as the fuse of second-wave feminism. In 1966 Friedan co-founded the National Organization for Women (NOW). Legislation advanced in parallel: the Equal Pay Act of 1963, and Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act barring sex discrimination in employment.

"Whoever defines the problem sets the agenda." Every movement that speaks for a group faces the same trap: the voices heard first tend to come from the group's most resourced members, while those most in need go unheard.

In September 1959, the prime minister of Ceylon (today's Sri Lanka), S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, was assassinated. His widow, Sirimavo Bandaranaike (1916–2000), who had never held office, was pushed to the front by her late husband's party, inheriting his political capital.

In July 1960 she led the party to victory, becoming the world's first elected woman head of government — decades before Britain or the United States. Opponents mocked her as the "weeping widow" campaigning on tears, yet she served as prime minister three times over more than a decade. Note, though: her rise rested on her late husband's family and party legacy, and her governing agenda did not put advancing ordinary women's status at its center. Later leaders — Indira Gandhi (India), Benazir Bhutto (Pakistan), Corazon Aquino (Philippines) — mostly followed the same "widow or daughter inherits" path to the top.

The number of women in high office is indeed rising, yet a large share still ascend through dynastic politics or the "glass cliff" of a crisis — handed the top job when things are hardest. An individual breakthrough is worth celebrating, but it is not the same as the structure loosening.