However, she felt the societal pressure to find ultimate happiness as a mother and a homemaker. In at her year Smith College reunion, Friedan surveyed her classmates and found that they also were unhappy being confined to the home. For the next five years, Friedan conducted interviews with white middle-class women who were grappling with their roles as housewives.
Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act of into law. This Act was the result of a group of women in the White House, lead by labor activist Esther Peterson. Peterson was appointed as the head of the Women's Bureau in the Department of Labor in She convinced President Kennedy to establish a Presidential Commission on the Status of Women to work towards achieving equality.
The commission included revolutionary women such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Dorothy Height. After collaborating with the commission, Peterson submitted a draft of the Equal Pay Act to congress on behalf of the Kennedy administration.
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of prevented employers from discriminating against employees on the basis of race, religion, sex, or national origin.
In addition to the Civil Rights Act, the Griswold v. This case would be used in the famous Roe v. These legal victories gave some women more autonomy in both public and private life. However, many women of color were still disenfranchised.
Early in the second wave, feminist writer Gloria Steinem gained national attention by going undercover as a Playboy Bunny. Steinem went on to become one of the most recognizable leaders of the second wave. Steinem first spoke publicly in at an event to legalize abortion in New York State. Shortly afterwards, she began writing and publishing books that would influence a generation of feminists.
Unfortunately, this amendment guaranteeing equal constitutional rights for women failed to be ratified in 38 states within seven years. When the second wave of feminism began, the Civil Rights Movement was already in full swing. After emancipation, African American men and women still had to fight against racism, violence, and segregation to exercise their basic human rights. Connecticut and Roe v.
Wade also furthered the feminist cause. The NOW, under Friedan, tried to enforce more work opportunities for women but there was fierce opposition to this demand. The opposition argued that at that time, male African Americans, who were heavily discriminated against by the white population were in greater need of employment than middle-class white women.
As a result, Friedan stepped down from the presidency in The legal victories of the movement post-NOW creation were extensive.
A Executive Order gave full affirmative action rights to women. A order made sex-segregated help wanted ads for employment illegal, thus drastically decreasing female exclusion from the workforce. Title X of addressed health and family planning, and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of and Pregnancy Discrimination Act of were all notable reforms.
The outlaw of marital rape by all states in and the legalization of no-fault divorce greatly reduced the dependence of wives on their husbands and gave them the tools to live healthier lives. All these successes were impressive, and many believed that the objective of female liberation had been achieved. Many ambitious and resourceful feminist leaders like Friedan arose during this wave.
A young journalist, Gloria Steinem, became a feminist leader when her writing about the Playboy Club and its chauvinist elements gained popularity with women. She was a staunch advocate for legalizing abortions and federally funding daycares.
Like Friedan and Steinem, there are other feminists who were forerunners of the Second Wave. In , feminist writer Kate Millet wrote Sexual Politics about how patriarchy invaded sexual discourse and led to gender oppression. She stated that discrimination began with gender and then occurred between race and class. Another writer that had an impact still felt today was Carol Hanisch. Her essay, The Personal is Political , argued that even the most private aspects of life like housework and gender roles are politically relevant for women and must be brought into the public sphere.
As a whole, the Second Wave can be characterized by a general feeling of solidarity among women fighting for equality. It also saw the creation of several types of feminism. Radical feminism was prevalent, which involved the complete elimination of male supremacy and challenging of all gender roles. Socialist feminism was also a form of feminism created post the Second World War.
Like Marxism, it acknowledged the oppressive nature of a capitalist society and saw a connection between gender and racial discrimination. Eco-feminism was widely recognized. While the Second Wave was a hugely successful movement that comprised many legal and cultural victories leading to greater equality, it had its shortcomings.
At the time in the United States, the movement against racism was active too. Women of colour found themselves to be under-represented by the feminist movement. Prominent feminists were white middle-class women who wrote feminist theory centred around their own experiences and troubles.
While there were many black, Latina, Asian and Native American members of the movement, they felt excluded from the narrative and ignored. The agenda of the leading white feminists were often a contrast to theirs. In and , the American G. Although they were unable to repeal the poll tax, their efforts did bring in new Hispanic voters, who began to elect Latino representatives to the Texas House of Representatives and to Congress during the late s and early s. In California, a similar phenomenon took place.
When Mexican-American Edward R. With this support, Roybal was able to win the election and become the first Mexican American since to win a seat on the Los Angeles City Council. Edward R. The highest-profile struggle of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement was the fight that Caesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta waged in the fields of California to organize migrant farm workers.
In , when Filipino grape pickers led by Filipino American Larry Itliong went on strike to call attention to their plight, Chavez lent his support. When Chavez asked American consumers to boycott grapes, politically conscious people around the country heeded his call, and many unionized longshoremen refused to unload grape shipments.
In , Chavez led striking workers to the state capitol in Sacramento, further publicizing the cause. Martin Luther King, Jr. However, the farm workers did not gain all they sought, and the larger struggle did not end. Proudly reclaiming and adopting a derogatory term as a symbol of self-determination and ethnic pride, Chicano activists demanded increased political power for Mexican Americans, education that recognized their cultural heritage, and the restoration of lands taken from them at the end of the Mexican-American War in From this movement arose La Raza Unida , a political party that attracted many Mexican American college students.
It addressed negative ethnic stereotypes of Mexicans as presented in mass media and the American consciousness. Early activists adopted a historical account of the preceding years, highlighting an obscured portion of Mexican-American history. These activists identified the failure of the United States government to live up to the promises it had made in Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. When the movement faced practical challenges in the s, most activists chose to focus on the immediate issues of unequal educational and employment opportunities, political disfranchisement, and police brutality.
In the late s, when the student movement was globally active, the Chicano movement brought about spontaneous actions, such as the mass walkouts by high school students in Denver and East Los Angeles in and the Chicano Moratorium in Los Angeles in There were also many incidents of walkouts in the LA County high schools of El Monte, Alhambra, and Covina particularly Northview , where students marched to fight for their rights.
In , similar walkouts took place in Houston to protest the discrepant academic quality for Latino students. There were also several student sit-ins in objection to the decreased funding of Chicano courses. In , as part of the Annual Chicano Student Conference in Los Angeles County, a team of high school students discussed different issues affecting Mexican Americans in their barrios and schools.
In , the YCCA decided to wear brown berets as a symbol of unity and resistance against discrimination. The Brown Berets took on a more militant and nationalistic ideology as the group focused on community organizing against police brutality and advocation for educational equality. Student groups like these were initially concerned with education issues, but their activities evolved to include participation in political campaigns, and protest against broader issues, such as police brutality and the U.
Some women felt that the Chicano movement was too concerned with social issues that affected the Chicano community as a whole rather than problems that affected Chicana women specifically. In , this group won the case of Madrigal v. Quilligan, obtaining a moratorium on the compulsory sterilization of women and adoption of bilingual consent forms. Prior to the case, many Latino women who did not understand English were being sterilized in the United States without proper consent. In the United States, the New Left was the name loosely associated with liberal, sometimes radical, political movements that took place during the s, primarily among white college students.
The New Left was a loosely organized, mostly white student movement that protested the Vietnam War and advocated for democracy, civil rights, and various types of university reforms. The New Left did not seek to recruit industrial workers, but rather concentrated on a social activist approach to organizing, convinced they could be the source for a better kind of social revolution. By , the SDS had emerged as the most important of the new campus radical groups; soon it would be regarded as virtually synonymous with the New Left.
The organization developed rapidly in the mids before dissolving at its last convention in The SDS became the leading organization of the anti-war movement on college campuses during the Vietnam War.
As the war escalated, the membership of the SDS also increased greatly as more people were willing to scrutinize political decisions in moral terms, and the people became increasingly militant. As opposition to the war grew stronger, the SDS became a nationally prominent political organization, and opposition to the war became an overriding concern that overshadowed many of the issues that had originally inspired the SDS.
On October 1, , the University of California, Berkeley, became the site of the first widespread student protests. Student protests, known as the Free Speech Movement, took place during the academic year under the informal leadership of students Mario Savio, Art Goldberg, Jackie Goldberg, and others. The demonstrations, meetings, and strikes that resulted all but shut the university down, and hundreds of students were arrested.
Shortly after, in February of , President Johnson dramatically escalated the war in Vietnam by bombing North Vietnam and introducing ground troops in the South. Campus chapters of the SDS all over the country started to lead small, localized demonstrations against the war.
The media began to cover the organization and the New Left. The fall of saw a great escalation of the anti-war actions of the New Left. Peaceful at first, the demonstrations turned into a sit-in that was violently dispersed by the Madison police and riot squad, resulting in many injuries and arrests.
A mass rally and a student strike then closed the university for several days. After conventional civil rights tactics of peaceful pickets seemed to have failed, the Oakland, California Stop-the-Draft Week ended in mass skirmishes with the police. Night-time raids on draft offices began to spread.
About one million students stayed away from classes that day in the largest student strike in the history of the United States. It was largely ignored by the New York City-based national media, which focused on the student protests at Columbia University in New York. While black students in the Student Afro-American Society occupied a building in protest of racism at Columbia, white students in SDS occupied a separate building in protest of entanglement in the Vietnam War.
In spite of its liberal reputation, SDS was not known for having diversity of gender or race, and was mainly led by white men.
This protest had a particularly theatrical end, as over students were arrested by the New York Police Department. Membership in SDS chapters around the United States increased dramatically during the academic year. In and , the SDS began to split under the strain of internal dissension and an increasing turn towards Maoism. Along with adherents known as the New Communist Movement, some extremist factions also emerged, such as the Weather Underground Organization.
The convention ultimately fell apart, and in the fall of , many of the SDS chapters split up or disintegrated. Modern environmentalism grew in the s and s, with the support of organizations and large-scale media campaigns.
In the United States, the beginnings of an Environmental Movement can be traced as far back as For centuries it was known as conservation, and it was not called environmentalism until the s. The conservationist principles, as well as the belief in an inherent right of nature, were to become the bedrock of modern environmentalism.
In the 20th century, environmental ideas continued to grow in popularity and recognition. Organizations like the Sierra Club and Greenpeace, as well as the book Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, contributed to the growth of the environmental movement during this time period.
The Sierra Club was founded on May 28, , in San Francisco, California, by the conservationist and preservationist John Muir, who became its first president. After a focus on preserving wilderness in the s and s, the Sierra Club and other groups broadened their focus to include such issues as air and water pollution, population control, and the exploitation of natural resources.
In , American biologist Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, a book that is widely credited with helping launch the Environmental Movement.
It cataloged the environmental impacts caused by the indiscriminate spraying of the pesticide DDT in the U. The book argued that uncontrolled and unexamined pesticide use was harming, and even killing, not only animals and birds, but also humans. In response to the publication of Silent Spring and the public concern that ensued, U.
President John F. Using direct action, lobbying, and research to achieve its goals, Greenpeace has been described as the most visible environmental organization in the world. In the mids, independent groups using the name Greenpeace started springing up worldwide.
By , there were 15 to 20 Greenpeace groups around the world, and on October 14, , Greenpeace International came into existence. A major milestone in the Environmental Movement was the establishment of Earth Day, which was first observed in San Francisco and other cities on March 21, , the first day of spring.
It was created to give awareness to environmental issues. On March 21, , United Nations Secretary-General U Thant spoke of a spaceship Earth on Earth Day, hereby referring to the ecosystem services the earth supplies to us, and hence our obligation to protect it and with it, ourselves.
It marked a turning point in the development of international environmental politics. By the mids, many felt that people were on the edge of environmental catastrophe. The Back-to-the-Land movement combined ideas of environmental ethics with anti-Vietnam War sentiments and other political issues.
Roosevelt and Muir: Early Environmentalism : U. The Sexual Revolution and the Feminist Movement of the s established a political climate that fostered the struggle for gay and lesbian rights.
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