Modern Feminist Movement and Contemporary Issues: 1961 to Present

By Facts On File

Written in engaging and accessible prose by experts in the field, this reference introduces readers to the "hidden" history of women in America from 1961 to the present, bringing their achievements to light and helping them gain the recognition they deserve.

Chapters include:

• Arts and Literature
• Business
• Education
• Entertainment
• Family
• Health
• Politics
• Science and Medicine
• Society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Facts On File
• Release date: Feb 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781438183251

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title

Modern Feminist Movement and Contemporary Issues: 1961 to Present

Copyright © 2020 by Infobase

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Contents

Chapters

Women in American History, 1961–Present

Women in Society, 1961–Present

Women's Health, 1961–Present

Women's Education, 1961–Present

Women in Politics, 1961–Present

Women in Science and Medicine, 1961–Present

Women in the Arts and Literature, 1961–Present

Women in Business, 1961–Present

Women in Entertainment and Sports, 1961–Present

Women and Family, 1961–Present

Chapters

Women in American History, 1961–Present

The 1960s and 1970s ushered in a period of shifting social mores in the United States, and the lives of women were forever changed as a rejuvenated civil rights movement and the birth of the second wave of the women's movement redefined what it meant to be an American. Various minority groups began to demand a voice, and such diverse groups as students, Native Americans, Chicanos, gay men and lesbians, environmentalists, animal rights activists, and pro-life activists joined the protest movement. With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the United States pulled to the right politically, but neither Reagan nor his successor George H.W. Bush were able to undo all of the liberal reforms of the 1960s and 1970s.

The latter part of the 20th century was also characterized in large part by technological advances that included the home computer, the internet, cell phones, cable and satellite television, video gaming, digital video recorders, mp3 players, and home theater systems that made the world smaller and changed the way Americans lived their daily lives. Unprecedented advances in medical technology expanded life spans, even as lifestyles made Americans more susceptible to certain medical conditions such as heart disease.

Because the second wave of the women's movement had helped to break so many barriers for women, females of the late 20th and early 21st centuries were able to take advantage of unprecedented opportunities in the various fields of technology and advance them further. The number of women attending graduate schools surpassed that of males, and diverse student bodies on all college campuses became more representative of the general population than they had in the past. Older women began returning to school to pursue new degrees or to complete degrees they had set aside during marriage and motherhood. Women also earned degrees in fields that had once been closed to them. The gap in wages between males and females was narrowed, but not closed, and women continued the difficult task of trying to balance their lives as career women with their roles as wives and mothers.

The Kennedy and Johnson Administrations

In the 1960s, the women's movement, which had begun with the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, finally came to fruition as part of a massive social revolution. Although many changes occurred only incrementally over the following decades, they did serve to bring the country closer to emphasizing that all people were assumed to have been created equal. As the first year of the decade drew to a close, Democrat John F. Kennedy won one of the closest presidential elections in American history to become the second-youngest American president. Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline (Jackie) brought youth and vigor to the White House and were extremely popular. John Kennedy began his presidency with a call to action, advising Americans to ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country. Because of Kennedy's youth and idealism and the mood of hope and rejuvenation that swept the country, his administration was nicknamed Camelot. It was only later that the public learned about Kennedy's chronic medical issues and rumors of extramarital affairs.

Kennedy aided developing third world countries through programs such as the Peace Corps and the Alliance for Progress. He continued the arms race and challenged the Soviet Union to a space race to land a man on the moon. He also traveled to Berlin to protest Soviet construction of the Berlin Wall, which prevented East German refugees from escaping into non-communist West Berlin. The Kennedy Administration was defined by two key cold war crises involving Cuba: the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. The Bay of Pigs Invasion had been planned by the Eisenhower Administration, but Kennedy chose not to provide air cover for the U.S.-trained Cuban exiles who conducted the invasion. When the Cuban people did not rise up to join them, the exiles were quickly killed or captured. The failure was a major public embarrassment for Kennedy, but he accepted responsibility for the fiasco.

The following year, Kennedy learned that the Soviet Union was building missile sites on the island and transferring ballistic missiles there, aiming them at the United States. Kennedy instituted a naval blockade around Cuba. The crisis was ultimately resolved when the United States agreed not to invade Cuba, and secretly pledged to remove nuclear weapons from Turkey in exchange for the Soviets permanently removing nuclear weapons from Cuba.

By the fall of 1963, Kennedy had helped to raise public consciousness about issues of both gender and race. On the morning of November 22, he was assassinated while riding on a motorcade through downtown Dallas, Texas. Officially, assassin Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy by firing from the fifth floor window of the Texas School Book Depository. Various conspiracy theories raged for decades, and many people refused to accept the official explanation. The assassination led to a sense of lost innocence among Americans that was never regained, and many Americans forever remembered where they were when they heard the news of the president's death. Some historians designate the Kennedy assassination as the symbolic point at which the relative peace of the 1950s and early 1960s came to an abrupt end.

When Vice President Lyndon Johnson assumed the presidency after Kennedy's assassination, he pledged to enact the programs Kennedy had left unfinished. Johnson's implementation of the Great Society and his War on Poverty created the biggest expansion of federal government authority since Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal of the 1930s. Johnson's programs included increased federal funding of education, job training, and housing; the Head Start program to prepare preschoolers from poor families for school; urban renewal; conservation; and federally-funded health care for the poor and the elderly through Medicaid and Medicare.

The grassroots civil rights movement that became a national phenomenon in the 1950s continued into the 1960s as African Americans battled ongoing discrimination, segregation, poverty, and the loss of civil rights. Although African Americans were guaranteed the right to vote in the Fifteenth Amendment, many southern states blocked them from voting. Without that political voice, African Americans were limited in their ability to precipitate change. Under the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and groups such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, African-American women such as Rosa Parks, Daisy Bates, and Fannie Lou Hamer joined in protest marches and demonstrations. Civil rights activists included both black and white women, as did the Freedom Riders and participants in sit-ins who challenged segregation and pushed for an end to Jim Crow laws in the south. King electrified the country when he delivered his I Have A Dream speech to a crowd of hundreds of thousands of people in Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963. The Johnson Administration passed several key pieces of legislation, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which ended many forms of legal discrimination and created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC); and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which allowed the federal government to oversee voters registration in areas with historic patterns of discrimination.

New Forms of Activism

In response to the publication of several books, ranging from Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963) to Erica Jong's Fear of Flying (1973), women continued their long struggle for equality during the 1960s and 1970s, and the second wave of the women's liberation movement gave new meaning to the word feminism. In the workplace, women sought equal pay for equal work, access to traditionally male occupations, and an end to the glass ceiling, an informal practice that prevented women from rising to the top tiers of professions. Legally, women sought more equitable divorce laws, more stringent rape laws, an end to violence against women, and control over their own reproduction. They also sought to overcome the traditional feminine ideal of beauty and the belief that happiness could only be achieved through marriage and family. Some feminists wore pants and comfortable clothing, shunned makeup, did not shave, protested beauty pageants, kept their maiden names, and used the title Ms. rather than Mrs. or Miss. Activists such as Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan formed the National Organization for Women (NOW) to serve as a focal point of the movement.

Minorities, such as Native Americans and Mexican Americans, also fought for equality during the turbulent 1960s. Native Americans, both on and off reservations, faced poverty, high unemployment, high alcoholism and suicide rates, and discrimination. Native-American activists battled to improve these conditions while seeking the return of lost tribal lands, more control of tribal governments, the reburial of remains exhibited in museums, and fishing and timber rights. The militant group American Indian Movement (AIM) staged sieges of symbolic sites such as Alcatraz Island off the coast of San Francisco, California, and Wounded Knee, South Dakota, site of a U.S. Army massacre of women and children in 1890. Activists such as Wilma Mankiller fought the discrimination of women within the Native-American community and mistreatment of Native Americans in the greater society. By 1985, Mankiller had become the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation. The Chicano Movement sought to instill Mexican-American cultural pride and precipitate an end to poverty, discrimination, and segregation. Cesar Chavez gained national attention by founding the National Farm Workers Association to improve migrant farm worker rights. Chicano women decided to create the Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional because they felt that males within the movement were not addressing their particular needs. Gay men and lesbians also fought for their rights in the 1970s and later. Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, for instance, were instrumental in forcing NOW to add lesbian rights to the feminist agenda.

The tumultuous 1960s were also characterized by the rise of the youth-driven counterculture and growing activism on college campuses. The counterculture came mainly from young, middle-class Americans who warned, Don't trust anyone over 30. Former Harvard professor Timothy Leary used LSD and encouraged his followers to turn on, tune in, and drop out. Folk and rock music became forms of protest, and a sexual revolution encouraged free love and an end to sexual repression. The most famous element of the counterculture were the hippies, who protested mainstream society through their appearance, including jeans, long hair and beards, flowers, beads, peace symbols, and bright clothing.

The Vietnam Era

Arguably the most protracted protests of the period were those surrounding the Vietnam War. The United States had become involved in events in Southeast Asia and Vietnam in the post–World War II period in order to help activists who were fighting for independence from colonial rule. The country was divided into North and South Vietnam in 1954, and when communist leader Ho Chi Minh of North Vietnam allied himself with the Soviet Union, the United States began providing aid to South Vietnam to ensure that it did not fall to communism. A 1964 incident in the Gulf of Tonkin provided President Johnson with the impetus he needed to escalate the war. Although Americans initially supported U.S. involvement in Vietnam, it came to be viewed as a politician's war that gave no thought to human costs. As cover-ups and atrocities came to light, support for the war declined, and activists demanded that it end. On March 31, 1968, President Johnson gave a televised speech in which he proclaimed that he would not seek or accept the Democratic Party's nomination heading into the 1968 presidential election.

As the United States approached the presidential election, more and more Americans were alarmed at the direction in which the country was headed, feeling that society had become an out-of-control chaos of protest movements and violent incidents. The 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. only added to the turmoil, sparking race riots in over 100 cities, including Washington, D.C. Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon and his running mate, Spiro Agnew, campaigned on a theme of restoring America to law and order and engineering peace with honor in Vietnam. Nixon claimed he spoke for the great quiet forgotten majority of the American people. The campaign was marred by a nationally televised violent clash between antiwar protestors and police outside the Democratic Party convention in Chicago and the assassination of Democratic frontrunner Robert Kennedy in June. The Republicans won the election with the help of southern Democrats who were still smarting over the success of the civil rights movement.

One of Nixon's first priorities was the gradual withdrawal of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, a process known as Vietnamization. Nixon was unwilling to simply abandon South Vietnam. Instead, he escalated the war by launching bombing raids on neighboring Cambodia and Laos. His actions accelerated antiwar protests on college campuses, including the 1971 incident at Kent State University in Ohio in which a clash between students and National Guard troops left four students dead. In 1973, Congress withdrew funding for the Vietnam War, and American troops began to withdraw. When North Vietnam took over South Vietnam in 1975, American television broadcast images of Vietnamese desperately jumping onto the last departing American helicopters.

President Nixon's main interest lay in foreign affairs. In addition to Vietnam, he was concerned with easing the tensions of the cold war, opening Soviet markets to U.S. businesses, and placing limits on the nuclear arms race. Results of détente included a Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I). One of Nixon's biggest achievements was his extension of diplomatic recognition to the People's Republic of China for the first time since it had become communist in the late 1940s. Domestically, Nixon was a moderate conservative who sought to decrease the size and authority of the federal government. He had a mixed record on women's rights and civil rights.

Nixon enjoyed high approval ratings and won his reelection bid in 1972. Afterward, Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein broke the story of a cover-up involving high administration officials following the break-in of the Democratic National Headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in 1972. As Nixon's role in the cover-up became clear and as the activities of his Committee to Reelect the President (CREP) came to light, Nixon was forced to resign, becoming the first president in American history to do so. Gerald Ford, who had recently been appointed vice president after the forced resignation of Spiro Agnew, assumed the presidency. Ford's credibility was almost immediately damaged by his unpopular pardon of Nixon, who had been named an unindicted coconspirator in the Watergate scandal, and by economic problems and ongoing battles with Congress. Georgian Jimmy Carter was elected to the presidency in 1976 as a Washington outsider. Many Americans continued to be cynical about politics as the legacy of the Watergate scandal lingered.

The Post-Watergate Era

Like Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter frequently battled with Congress over legislative issues. Carter was also confronted with growing economic troubles, including periodic recessions, growing federal budget deficits, an unfavorable balance of trade, and the development of stagflation, the coupling of a stagnant economy with high inflation. Under