Chapter 30 Flashcards
New Left
One of the most visible results of the increasingly assertive
youth movement was a radicalization of many American college and university students, who in the course of the 1960s formed what became known as the New Left—a
large, diverse group of men and women energized by the polarizing developments of their time. The New Left embraced the cause of African Americans and other minorities, but its own ranks consisted overwhelmingly of white people. Blacks and minorities formed political
movements of their own. Some members of the New Left were the children of radical parents (members of the so-called Old Left of the 1930s and 1940s). The New Left drew from the writings of some of the important social critics of the 1950s—among them C. Wright Mills, a sociologist at Columbia University who wrote a series of scathing and brilliant critiques of modern bureaucracies. Relatively few members of the New Left were communists, but many were
drawn to the writings of Karl Marx and of contemporary Marxist theorists. Some came to revere Third World Marxists such as Che Guevara, the South American revolutionary and guerrilla leader; Mao Zedong; and Ho Chi Minh. But the New Left drew its inspiration above all from the civil rights movement, in which many idealistic young white Americans had become involved in the early 1960s.
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)
In 1962, a group of students, most of them from prestigious
universities, gathered in Michigan to form an organization to give voice to their demands: Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Their declaration of beliefs, the Port Huron Statement, expressed their disillusionment with the society they had inherited and their determination to build a new politics.
Free Speech Movement
A 1964 dispute at the University of California at Berkeley over the rights of students to engage in political activities on campus gained national attention. The Free Speech
Movement, as it called itself, created turmoil at Berkeley as students challenged campus police, occupied administrative offices, and produced a strike in which
nearly three-quarters of the Berkeley students participated. The immediate issue was the right of students to pass out literature and recruit volunteers for political causes on campus. But the protest quickly became as well an expression of a more basic critique of the university and the society it seemed to represent.
draft opposition
Closely related to opposition to the war was opposition to
the military draft. The gradual abolition of many traditional
deferments—for graduate students, teachers, husbands, fathers, and others—swelled the ranks of those faced with conscription (and thus of those likely to oppose it). Some draft-age Americans simply refused induction, accepting what occasionally were long terms in jail as a result. Others fled to Canada, Sweden, and elsewhere (where they were joined by deserters from the armed forces) to escape conscription. Not until 1977, when President Jimmy Carter issued a general pardon to draft resisters and a more limited amnesty for deserters, did the Vietnam exiles begin
to return to the country in substantial numbers.
hippies
Closely related to the New Left was a new youth culture openly scornful of the values and conventions of middle-class society. As if to display their contempt for conventional standards, young Americans flaunted long hair, shabby or flamboyant clothing, and a rebellious disdain for traditional speech and decorum. Also central to the counterculture, as it became known, were drugs: marijuana—which after 1966 became almost as common a youthful diversion as beer—and the less widespread but still substantial use of other, more potent hallucinogens, such as LSD.
There was also a new, more permissive view of sexual
behavior—the beginnings of what came to be known as a sexual revolution. To some degree, the emergence of relaxed approaches to sexuality was a result less of the counterculture than of the new accessibility of effective contraceptives, most notably the birth-control pill and, after 1973, legalized abortion. But the new sexuality also reflected the counterculture’s belief that individuals should strive for release from inhibitions and give vent to their instincts and desires.
Wounded Knee occupation
A more celebrated protest occurred in February 1973 at
Wounded Knee, South Dakota, the site of the 1890 massacre of Sioux by federal troops. Members of AIM
seized and occupied the town of Wounded Knee for two months, demanding radical changes in the administration of the reservation and insisting that the government honor its long forgotten treaty obligations. A brief clash between the occupiers and federal forces left one Indian dead and another wounded.
U.S. v. Wheeler
In United States v. Wheeler (1978), the Supreme Court
confirmed that tribes had independent legal standing and could not be “terminated” by Congress.
“Chicano”
But some did respond to the highly charged climate of the 1960s by strengthening their ethnic identification and organizing for political and economic power. Young Mexican American activists began to call themselves “Chicanos” (once a term of derision used by whites) as a way of emphasizing the shared culture of Spanish-speaking Americans. Some Chicanos advocated a form of nationalism not unlike the ideas of black power advocates. The Texas leaders of La Raza Unida, a Chicano political party in the Southwest, called for the creation of something like an autonomous Mexican American state within a state; it demonstrated significant strength at the polls in the 1970s.
Cesar Chavez
One of the most visible efforts to organize Mexican
Americans occurred in California, where an Arizona-born
Latino farmworker, César Chávez, created an effective union of itinerant farmworkers. In 1965, his United Farm Workers (UFW), a largely Mexican organization, launched a prolonged strike against growers to demand recognition of their union and increased wages and benefits. When employers resisted, Chávez enlisted the cooperation of college students, churches, and civil rights groups
(including CORE and SNCC) and organized a nationwide boycott, first of table grapes and then of lettuce. In 1968, Chávez campaigned openly for Robert Kennedy. Two years later, he won a substantial victory when the growers of half of California’s table grapes signed contracts with his union.
Stonewall riot
On June 27, 1969, police officers raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City’s Greenwich Village, and began arresting patrons simply for frequenting the place. The raid was not unusual; police had been harassing gay bars (and homosexual men and women) for years. The accumulated resentment of this long history of assaults and humiliations caused the extraordinary response that summer night. Gay onlookers taunted the police, then attacked them. Someone started a blaze in the Stonewall Inn itself, almost trapping the policemen inside. Rioting continued throughout Greenwich Village (a center of New York’s gay community) through much of the night. The “Stonewall Riot” helped make the gay liberation movement—a movement that had been gaining strength since at least the 1950s—a significant and highly public force. New organizations sprang up around the country. Public discussion and media coverage of homosexuality, long subject to an unofficial taboo, quickly and dramatically increased. Gay and lesbian activists had some success in challenging the longstanding assumption that homosexuality was “aberrant” behavior. They argued that no sexual preference was any more “normal” than another.
gay liberation movement
Most of all, however, the gay liberation movement
transformed the outlook of gay men and lesbians themselves. It helped them to “come out,” to express their preferences openly and unapologetically, and to demand from society a recognition that gay relationships could be as significant and worthy of respect as heterosexual ones. Even the ravages of the AIDS epidemic which affected the gay community more disastrously than it affected any other
group, failed to halt the growth of gay liberation. In many ways, it strengthened it.
Betty Friedan’s the Feminine Mystique
The 1963 publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine
Mystique is often cited as an important early event of contemporary women’s liberation. Friedan, a magazine journalist, had traveled around the country interviewing the women who had graduated with her from Smith College in 1947. Most of these women were living out the dream that postwar American society had created for them: they were affluent wives and mothers living in comfortable suburbs. And yet many of them were deeply frustrated and unhappy. The suburbs, Friedan claimed, had become a “comfortable concentration camp,” providing the women who inhabited them with no outlets for their intelligence, talent, and education. The “feminine mystique,” she wrote, was responsible for “burying millions of women alive.” By chronicling their unhappiness and frustration, Friedan did
not so much cause the revival of feminism as help give voice to a movement that was already stirring.
Equal Pay Act of 1963
In 1963, the Kennedy administration helped win passage of the Equal Pay Act, which barred the pervasive practice of paying women less than men for equal work.
National Organization for Women (NOW)
In 1966, Friedan joined with other feminists to create the
National Organization for Women (NOW), which soon became the nation’s largest and most influential feminist organization. Like other movements for liberation, feminism drew much of its inspiration from the black struggle for freedom.
The new organization responded to the complaints of the women Friedan’s book had examined—affluent suburbanites with no outlet for their interests—by demanding greater educational opportunities for women and denouncing the domestic ideal and the traditional concept of marriage. But the heart of the movement, at least in thebeginning, was directed toward the needs of women already in the workplace. NOW denounced the exclusion of women from professions, from politics, and from countless other areas of American life. It decried legal and economic discrimination, including the practice of paying women less than men for equal work (a practice the Equal Pay Act had not effectively eliminated). The organization called for “a fully equal partnership of the sexes, as part of the worldwide revolution of human rights.”
Sexual Politics (1969)
Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1969) signaled the new direction by arguing that “every avenue of power within the society is entirely within male hands.” The answer to women’s problems, in other words, was not, as Friedan had suggested, for individual women to search for greater personal fulfillment; it was for women to band together
to assault the male power structure.
women’s political and economic achievements
substantial. In 1971, the government extended its affirmative action guidelines to include women—linking sexism with racism as an officially acknowledged social problem. In the meantime, women were making rapid progress in their efforts to move into the economic and political mainstream. The nation’s major all-male educational institutions began to open their doors to women. (Princeton and Yale did so in 1969, and most other all-male colleges and universities soon followed.) Some women’s colleges, in the meantime, began accepting male students. Women were also becoming an important force in business and the professions. Nearly half of all married women held jobs
by the mid-1970s, and almost 90 percent of all women with college degrees worked. Two working parent households became more accepted and there were symbolic changes (Ms.)
Gains were also made in politics and sports.
Equal Rights Amendment
In 1972, Congress approved the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, which some feminists had been promoting since the 1920s, and sent it to the states. For a while, ratification seemed almost certain. By the late 1970s, however, the momentum behind the amendment had died. The ERA was in trouble not because of indifference but because of a rising chorus of objections to it from people (including many antifeminist women) who feared it would disrupt traditional social patterns. In 1982, the amendment finally died when the time allotted for its ratification expired.
Roe V. Wade
Abortion had once been legal in much of the United States,
but by the beginning of the twentieth century it was banned by statute in most of the country and remained so into the 1960s (although many abortions continued to be performed quietly, and often dangerously, out of sight of the law). But the women’s movement created strong new pressures on behalf of legalizing abortion. Several states had abandoned restrictions on abortion by the end of the 1960s. And in 1973, the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, based on a relatively new theory of a constitutional “right to privacy,” first recognized by the Court only a few years earlier in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), invalidated all laws prohibiting abortion during the “first trimester”—the first three months of pregnancy. The decision would become the most controversial ruling of the century.
