SECTION 5 : Protest Movements

Part 1 : The changing roles of women in the USA

• The Second World War had given women new roles and opportunities.

• The birth control pill became available in the 1960s.

• In 1961 John F Kennedy appointed Eleanor Roosevelt to lead a Commission on the Status of Women.

• In the early 1960s 5% of managers and senior administrators were women. 12% of professionals were women. 35% of undergraduates were women.

• Women earned on average 59% of the pay of men for the same work,

• The Equal Pay Act of 1963 stated that men and women had to be given the same pay for the same job.

• In 1963 Betty Friedman published the ‘Feminine Mystique’.

• The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned discrimination on the basis of gender.

• In 1966 the National Organisation for Women was set up, by 1970 it had 40,000 members.

• In 1972 the Educational Amendment Act banned all forms of gender discrimination in education, including in school books

• In 1976 women were admitted to West Point and Anapolis, the elite academies for army and naval officers.

Part 2 :The student movement

Young people’s protest began in the 1950s:

• Beatnik poets, like Allen Ginsberg protested at the smug life of suburbia. He suggested dropping out, taking drugs etc.

• Rock n’ roll outraged middle class America when it appeared in 1955. Teenagers’ music became a separate world.

• James Dean and Elvis Presley became heroes of the younger generation.

* However, the real protests began in the 1960s

• The growth of pop music focused more attention on the younger generation.

• Increased education meant that teenagers did not have to earn their livings.

• The death of Kennedy raised questions about US society and Civil Rights encouraged civil disobedience and Kennedy himself backed the Freedom Riders.

• The bombing of North Vietnam in 1965 lead to many student protests. 3,000,000 Americans served in the war and their average age was nineteen. Many resorted to drugs to help themselves survive the horrors of the war.

• By the later 1960s the tactics adopted by the USA to try to win the war clearly involved killing civilians and brutalising soldiers.

• The slogan ‘Hey! Hey! LBJ! How many kids have you killed today?’ became widespread. The two issues of Civil Rights and Vietnam joined together, as blacks pointed out the disproportionate numbers of black soldiers in the Vietnam War.

• Protests reached a peak in 1968, when ‘Flower Power’, with its slogan ‘make love not war’ became the rage.

• In 1970 four students at Kent State University were killed by National Guardsmen. Crowds shouted at President L B Johnson: “Hey! Hey! LBJ! How many kids have you killed today?”

• The two issues of Civil Rights and Vietnam joined together, as blacks pointed out the disproportionate numbers of black soldiers in the Vietnam War.