TIME Person of the Year: A Photo History, American Women

ROBERT DEAR / AP

In 1975 TIME named "American Women" People of the Year

"The root of the discontent in American women is that they are too well educated ... There will be no real content among American women unless they are made and kept more ignorant or unless they are given equal opportunity with men to use what they have been taught. And American men will not be really happy until their women are."

— Pearl S. Buck

TIME's 1975 Women of the Year cover celebrated the changing roles and diversity of American women and proclaimed that "enough U.S. women have so deliberately taken possession of their lives that the event is spiritually equivalent to the discovery of a new continent."

Although TIME selected and profiled a dozen remarkable women in various fields as symbolizing the new consciousness of women, it found the truly exceptional development to be the change in "the status of the everyday, usually anonymous woman, who moved into the mainstream of jobs, ideas and policymaking." Women have continued to make steady gains in the corporate and professional world over the past quarter-century, but while progress has been impressive in some areas, the overall pace has slowed from that heady time in the mid-70's, to the discouragement of some.