Which inspired a second wave of the womens movement

This made it easier for women to have careers without having to leave due to unexpectedly becoming pregnant. The perfect nuclear family image depicted and strongly marketed at the time, she wrote, did not reflect happiness and was rather degrading for women.

This book is widely credited with having begun second-wave feminism. Military Academies to admit women, and many Supreme Court cases, perhaps most notably Reed v.

Reed of and Roe v. Wade of Public Opinion about Roe v. Wade : Graph showing public support for Roe v. Wade over the years.

However, the movement did fail, in , in adding the Equal Rights Amendment to the United States Constitution, coming up three states short of ratification. Gender discrimination refers to prejudice or discrimination based on gender, as well as conditions that foster stereotypes of gender roles. Sexist mindsets are frequently based on beliefs in traditional stereotypes of gender roles, and is thus built into many societal institutions.

Gender stereotypes are widely held beliefs about the characteristics and behavior of women and men. For example, women who are considered to be too assertive or men who lack physical strength are often criticized and historically faced societal backlash. Gender stereotypes : A poster depicting gender stereotypes about women drivers from the s.

There are several prominent ways in which gender discrimination continues to play a role in modern society. Violence against women, including sexual assault, domestic violence, and sexual slavery, remains a serious problem around the world. Many also argue that the objectification of women, such as in pornography, also constitutes a form of gender discrimination. After the Civil War agitation for the cause resumed.

In , the Fifteenth Amendment of the Constitution which gave black men the right to vote, split the movement. Campaigners such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton refused to endorse the amendment, as it did not give women the right to vote. Others, such as Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe, argued that if black men were enfranchised, it would help women achieve their goal. In June , the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, giving women the right to vote, was brought before the Senate, and after a long discussion it was passed, with 56 ayes and 25 nays.

It would take until August for enough state legislatures to ratify the amendment, thus making it the law throughout the United States. In addition to their strategy to obtain full suffrage through a constitutional amendment, reformers pursued state-by-state campaigns to build support for, or to win, residence-based state suffrage.

Towns, counties, states, and territories granted suffrage, in full or in part, throughout the 19 th and early 20 th century. As women received the right to vote, they began running for, and being elected to, public office.

They gained positions as school board members, county clerks, state legislators, judges, and eventually as Members of Congress. The feminist movement refers to a series of campaigns for cultural, political, economic, and social equality for women. Compare and contrast the three waves of feminism in the United States and their historical achievements. Women constitute a majority of the population and of the electorate in the United States, but they have never spoken with a unified voice for civil rights, nor have they received the same degree of protection as racial and ethnic minorities.

The second wave, generally taking place from the early s to the late s, was concerned with cultural and political inequalities, which feminists perceived as being inextricably linked. The movement encouraged women to understand aspects of their own personal lives as deeply politicized and reflective of a sexist structure of power. Some appeared to be spontaneous outcomes of protest gatherings, while others included armed seizure of public facilities.

American Indian Movement : The flag and symbol of the American Indian Movement contained four vertical stripes black, yellow, white, and red with a red symbol in the middle. The activists took over the Bureau of Indian Affairs BIA , occupying it for several days and causing millions of dollars of damage. During this time, AIM developed and publicized a point list to summarize its issues with federal treaties and promises. The list addressed the failed responsibilities of the U. The Longest Walk, in , was an AIM-led spiritual walk across the country to support tribal sovereignty and bring attention to 11 pieces of anti-Indian legislation.

The first walk began on February 11, , with a ceremony on Alcatraz Island, where a Sacred Pipe was loaded with tobacco and carried the entire distance. The African American bid for full citizenship was surely the most visible of the battles for civil rights taking place in the United States. However, other minority groups that had been legally discriminated against or otherwise denied access to economic and educational opportunities began to increase efforts to secure their rights in the s.

The Mexican American Movement was part of the American Civil Rights Movement of the s and s; it sought political empowerment and social inclusion for Mexican Americans. Prior to the movement of the s and s, Mexican American civil rights activists had achieved several major legal victories.

The Mendez v. Texas ruling declared that Mexican Americans and other historically subjugated groups in the United States were entitled to equal protection under the 14th Amendment of the U.

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. Unfortunately, many of these mainstream feminists rejected their participation. Lesbian women protested their treatment, including a demonstration at the Second Congress to Unite Women in Simultaneously, Lesbians of color like Audre Lorde started writing about their particular experiences.

Lorde published "Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches" in The second wave of the feminist movement is not only known for the tensions between various streams of feminism. On September 7, a few hundred women interrupted the live broadcast of the Miss America Pageant to protest beauty standards and the objectification of women. By the late s, the second wave of feminism began to lose steam. As multiple sub-groups created new organizations for themselves, other debates within feminism grew.

One of the key debates was over pornography and sexual activity. By the early s, the second wave came to a close and a large-scale feminist movement would not return for another decade. Deborah Carlin and Jennifer DiGrazia. Gay, Roxane. Lee, Jennifer. Choi, Carmen Hermo, and Stephanie Weissberg.

Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Museum, Morris, Bonnie J. Women were participating in the freedom struggle, and independence promised freedom from imperialism and their marginalized role in society. While the feminist movements in the West and India fought for the ultimate goal of equality, the problems they tackled and obstacles they hit were vastly distinct.

While the Second Wave was invaluable to broadening the scope of the feminist cause, it had flaws and failures. It is from issues of racial discrimination within the Second Wave that rose Intersectional Feminism. In feminist terms, it means taking into account disparities in discrimination and sexism faced by different ethnicities and races and thus making feminism not selective, but all-inclusive equality.

The Second Wave was pivotal to the feminist movement and brought women into the mainstream in many spheres, but it had its mistakes. Learning from these is what will determine what shape the movement takes next.

Featured Image Credit: Feminist Current. A student at Ashoka University, Tara loves poetry, impassioned conversation and brewing warm cups of tea. As the successes of second wave feminism propelled women into the workforce and careers of their own, women found themselves having to face […]. They excelled — until the men came home. CE Murphy has a great urban fantasy novel set in this era that does a nice job of showing what it must have felt like for a lot of those women — emotions that ultimately led to Second Wave feminism.

In the s, not all women were satisfied with sitting at home or desired to achieve the standard of beauty that had been defined by popular culture. The Feminine Mystique encouraged women to get out and go to work, to balance the gender imbalance, and demand equality from a society where it was not readily available.

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