United States History

B

The Women’s Movement

Like the civil rights movement, the women’s movement used various means to end discrimination. Activists created pressure groups, adopted confrontation tactics like sit-ins and marches, and tried to capture media attention. By the end of the 1960s, feminists had created an energetic campaign that called both for legal equity and for the restructuring of gender roles and social institutions.

In 1961, Kennedy established the first presidential Commission on the Status of Women. In 1963 the commission issued a report citing employment discrimination, unequal pay, legal inequality, and insufficient support services for working women. The same year, a new book by journalist Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, challenged the notion that women could find fulfillment only as wives and mothers. A final catalyst of the early 1960s was the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned race discrimination in employment and set up the EEOC to enforce the law. Unexpectedly, perhaps accidentally, and after heated debate, legislators amended the bill to bar sex discrimination in employment as well. When the EEOC ignored gender-based charges, women formed the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966. Betty Friedan led the new civil rights group, which urged equal opportunity and an end to sex discrimination.

Meanwhile, another wing of feminism developed. Young women who had been active in the civil rights and other protest movements began to form small “consciousness-raising” groups, which rapidly expanded in number. In these groups, women met to discuss the inequity of “sexism,” a counterpart to racism; to strive for “women’s liberation”; and to start feminist projects, such as health collectives or rape crisis centers.

The two wings of feminism often clashed. NOW focused on legal change, and women’s liberation urged revolutionary transformation. But the two factions served complementary functions and sometimes joined forces, as in The Women’s Strike for Equality in August 1970. With parades and marches, women celebrated the 50th anniversary of woman suffrage and pressed for new causes—equal employment opportunity, an equal rights amendment, and more liberal state abortion laws.

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In the early 1970s, the women’s movement achieved extensive results. In 1972 Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to provide for equality of the sexes under the law. However, the states failed to ratify the amendment. Still, the fact that Congress passed the ERA signified feminism’s new legitimacy. In Roe v. Wade (1973), the Supreme Court legalized abortion. Finally, women made astounding gains in education and employment.

Editors scoured elementary and high school textbooks to remove sexist elements. In 1972 Congress passed Title IX of the Higher Education Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any educational program receiving federal funds, including athletic programs. At the college and university level, once all-male colleges and military academies began to accept women students.

In employment, state and federal courts overturned labor laws that curtailed opportunities for women, such as laws that barred women from night work or overtime. The courts supported legal actions against employers that discriminated against women in their hiring or promotion policies. Women also entered new vocations. Some went into blue-collar fields, such as construction; others found jobs in banking, finance, business, and government. The proportions of women in the professions—as lawyers, doctors, and engineers—increased as well.

One of the most enduring movements to emerge in the 1960s, the women’s movement left strong institutional legacies—pressure groups, professional organizations, and women’s studies programs in colleges.

C

The Youth Movement

As the baby boom generation veered toward adulthood, its members began to challenge the status quo. By the mid-1960s nearly three out of four students finished high school, and about half of those students went on to college. College campuses filled with young people who had the freedom to question the moral and spiritual health of the nation.

One facet of the youth movement was a disaffected, apolitical counterculture, made up of people who were known as hippies. These young people decried materialism, mocked convention, spurned authority, joined communes, enjoyed rock music, and experimented with drugs and sex. Often hippies asserted their rebellious attitude through elements of personal style, such as long hair and tie-dyed clothes. In August 1969 hippies gathered at the Woodstock Festival, a music festival where young people convened to celebrate love and peace. Woodstock represented a high point in the counterculture, but hippie lifestyles continued into the 1970s.

Another wing of the youth movement included activists from political protest movements, such as the civil rights movement. This wing was more visible on college campuses and more politically conscious. In 1960 a small group of young people formed Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and adopted The Port Huron Statement, written by student leader Tom Hayden. The manifesto urged participatory democracy, or the idea that all Americans, not just a small elite, should decide major economic, political, and social issues that shaped the nation. It also criticized American society for its focus on career advancement, material possessions, military strength, and racism. By 1968 some 100,000 young people around the nation had joined SDS.

Student protesters denounced corporate bureaucracy and campus administrators. Universities and colleges, they believed, were dictatorial and exercised too much control over students. Students held rallies and sit-ins to protest restrictions of their rights. In 1964 a coalition of student groups at the University of California, Berkeley, claimed the right to conduct political activities on campus; the coalition became known as the Free Speech Movement. Political activism and protests spread to other campuses in the 1960s.

The youth movement’s demonstrations soon merged with the protests of students who opposed the Vietnam War. By the spring of 1968, student protests had reached hundreds of campuses. At the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, antiwar demonstrators clashed with the police, and the images of police beating students shocked television audiences (see Chicago Convention of 1968). Violence peaked at an antiwar protest at Ohio’s Kent State University in May 1970, when National Guard troops gunned down four student protesters.

The political activities of the youth movement had enduring effects. Colleges became less authoritarian, ending dress codes and curfews and recruiting more minority students. Students also contributed mightily to the movement against the war in Vietnam. Both the counterculture and student activism, finally, fueled a backlash that blossomed in the 1970s and 1980s.

D

The Environmental Movement

A movement to preserve the environment took root with the best-selling book Silent Spring (1962) by Rachel Carson. The book attacked toxic pesticides like DDT. Carson described how DDT threatened both animals and human beings. Her book raised Americans’ awareness of threats to the environment and moved many to take action. Students and teachers at over 1,500 colleges and universities and at over 10,000 schools held teach-ins on the environment. Hundreds of thousands of other Americans staged protests and rallies around the nation. These activists formed a number of environmental groups, including the Environmental Defense Fund in 1967, Friends of the Earth in 1968, Greenpeace in 1970, and the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund in 1971. In 1970 some 20 million Americans gathered for what organizers called Earth Day to protest abuse of the environment.

In response to growing citizen protests, Congress in 1970 passed the National Environmental Policy Act, which created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), an independent agency responsible for protecting the environment and maintaining it for future generations. Congress also enacted laws to curb pollution, preserve wilderness areas, and protect endangered species. The Supreme Court allowed conservationists to sue businesses for polluting the environment and government agencies for failure to enforce the law.

Several events in the 1970s suggested the danger of environmental threats. In 1978 residents of Love Canal in New York, who had been experiencing high disease rates, were found to be living on a former chemical waste dump; the area was evacuated. In 1979 an accident at the nuclear power plant on Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania showed the potential dangers of radioactive material in nuclear reactors.

As concern for the environment spread, more Americans became involved in efforts to maintain forests, parks, and wildlife refuges; prevent air and water pollution; conserve energy; and dispose of hazardous waste safely. Environmentalists persisted in their efforts into the 1980s, although often challenged by conservatives who believed that environmental regulations restricted property rights protected by the Constitution.

E

The Warren Court

Judicial activism (taking an active role in shaping public policy) completed the liberal agenda of the 1960s. Ever since Earl Warren’s appointment as chief justice in 1953, the Supreme Court had enraged critics on the right, who pressed for Warren’s impeachment. In the 1950s the Warren Court had integrated public schools in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954). In the 1960s Kennedy and Johnson appointed four Supreme Court justices, including Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP lawyer who had argued the Brown case and the high court’s first African American justice. With a liberal majority in place, the Warren court handed down a series of landmark cases that enhanced civil liberties and spurred or legitimized social change.

The Warren Court of the 1960s declared prayer in public schools unconstitutional, enabled Communists to obtain passports, and limited communities’ power to censor books and movies (thus making sexually explicit material available to adults). In Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) the Court ruled that state bans on contraceptives were unconstitutional. The Court also consistently upheld civil rights. It found local ordinances upholding segregation in private businesses (such as lunch counters) unconstitutional; reversed the convictions of black demonstrators who had refused to disperse; upheld the civil rights laws of 1964 and 1965; declared delays in school desegregation intolerable; and upset a state law that forbade marriage between persons of different races.

Warren Court decisions of the 1960s affected electoral procedures, too. In Baker v. Carr (1962), the Court upheld the principle of “one man, one vote,” which meant that state legislatures had to be reapportioned on the basis of population. Finally, the Court issued controversial decisions that transformed criminal justice. In Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), the Court held that a poor person charged with a felony had the right to be represented by a state-appointed lawyer. In Miranda v. Arizona (1966) the Court declared that a confession could not be introduced as evidence unless the defendant had been informed of his or her rights, including the right to remain silent.

F

The 1960s in Retrospect

The climate of reform that erupted in the 1960s continued into the 1970s, where movements for change met different fates. Feminism and environmentalism continued and prospered. The counterculture peaked and faded, although drug use exploded. In civil rights, the early goals of colorblindness ceded place to race consciousness and “identity politics,” or jousting for place among contending ethnicities. Overall, few great dreams that pervaded the fervent 1960s were achieved. Hopes for participatory democracy and an end to racism and patriarchy eluded realization.

Still, in domestic policy, the 1960s were an era of enduring change. Although the Vietnam War undercut the Great Society, Johnson’s programs increased justice and fought poverty. The Warren Court upheld individual rights. The civil rights movement ended legal segregation, registered black voters, battled race discrimination, engendered black pride, and vastly liberalized white attitudes. The spread of feminism forced reexamination of gender roles. Overall, reform movements of the 1960s expanded free expression, challenged tradition, blasted the placidity of the 1950s, and, for better or worse, dispelled the widespread respect for government that had prevailed since World War II. Antiwar protest was a vital part of this process. The Vietnam War of the 1960s and 1970s shattered Americans’ long-held faith in both the wisdom of the state and in Cold War policies of the 1950s.

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