Where Do We Go From Here?
Term Paper for AMH202 with Mark Howard Long
25 April 2005
The personal is political. Everything that once was private and individualistic is now public. To what can we attribute this drastic change in American culture and policy? In my opinion, we can directly attribute this to World War II and the ‘containment’ beliefs of the 1950s. When one directly tries to contain or hide portions of themselves or entire groups of people, the result usually ends up as an explosion of sorts. The 1960s and 1970s “Movement of Movements” can be seen as direct evidence that a large portions of minorities in American were sick of being pushed under the rug and sick of attempting to contain themselves, assimilate themselves. The civil rights movement with its theory of nonviolent protest and desire to participate in the consumer culture of the ‘50s directly influenced the Second Wave Feminists, the American Indian Movement, the Gay Rights movement, the Chicanos and a variety of other usually marginalized people to attempt to regain what they saw as rightfully theirs.
World War II saw an increase of the government directly telling people how they were supposed to live. From propaganda posters to advertisements in newspapers, everyone was supposed to believe that the United States was simply fighting for what was right, to spread democracy and assist those less fortunate than themselves. Men were supposed to go fight oversees, women were supposed to stay home and maintain a solid home front or go out to work in factories to support the war effort, while children were expected to learn what was right and American and what was wrong. The difference between right and wrong also included the gender roles that Americans were supposed to fit into. Following WWII was the Cold War Era, in which the baby boom occurred. Men and women attempted to follow their prescribed gender roles; women staying at home with the children and men out at work “bringing home the bacon.” Though many of these men and women were not satisfied with this style of life, they continued to stay in it, thinking that this was the way life was supposed to be.
The great white flight into the suburbs facilitated Americans putting themselves into “their own little boxes.”[1] Formerly marginalized ethnic groups (Italians, Jews, Eastern Europeans) were welcomed into white suburbs, allowing those ethnic groups to turn their attention to who they felt were outsiders: African Americans, Chicanos, and other “colored” people. Inconsistencies between treatment toward the races were pushed to the side, either by de jure or de facto segregation. Whites continued to pretend that things between themselves and the “coloreds” were equal, just as they pretended that their lives were fulfilled in the narrow constructs they had created for themselves.
World War II era and the 1950s were all about containment. Containing the personal feelings that one had, containing the problems within the home, containing the races to their specific and separate spheres. But all that containment just allowed racial tensions and issues between genders to fester. The book The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan allowed middle class white women to confront their feelings of frustration and depression and find relief that other women were having the same problems they were, leading to more and more women attempting to throw off the cloak of domesticity, trying to gain employment out of the home and prevent their own daughters from falling into the trap that they themselves had fallen into.[2] Young men also wanted to free themselves from the image of their fathers, the men who worked constantly and seemed to have nothing to show for it. Both genders were pushing for a change, but neither could have anticipated how it was to start.
Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Junior was the poster boy for the civil rights movement of the ‘50s and early ‘60s. His idea of non-violent protest with marches and sit-ins paved the way for continued work on civil rights. Supporters of Dr. King were actively turning their personal lives into political ones. Rosa Parks, a NAACP member and seamstress, felt that not giving up her seat on the bus in 1958 (an act of non-violent protest) was something that she “just had to do.”[3] That seemed to be the pervasive feeling of most civil rights activists.
In fact, many people of the time, not just civil rights activist felt that protesting was something that they just had to do. The civil rights movement spawned SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee), which in turn lead to a number of other student organizations. Methods used by SNCC, like sit-ins or peaceful demonstrations were adapted by other organizations in order to prove their point.[4] More and more often, citizens of America were speaking up for what they felt were injustices, which is quite different than the containment approach that Americans previously adhered to.
Young people, students in particular, were the driving force behind a large amount of the movements of the 1960s and 1970s. An excerpt from the Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) shows how youths were motivated into action:
As we grew, however, our comfort was penetrated by events too
troubling to dismiss. First, the permeating and victimizing
fact of human degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle
against racial bigotry, compelled most of us from silence to
activism. Second, the enclosing fact of the Cold War, symbolized
by the presence of the Bomb, brought awareness that we ourselves,
and our friends, and millions of abstract "others" we knew more
directly because of our common peril, might die at any time. We
might deliberately ignore, or avoid, or fail to feel all other
human problems, but not these two, for these were too immediate
and crushing in their impact, too challenging in the demand that
we as individuals take the responsibility for encounter and
resolution.[5]
Student groups such as SDS and FSM (Free Speech Movement) continued to push as predefined roles in society. New politics were emerging out of the beliefs of these young people. The founders of SDS referred to their beliefs and movement as the “New Left” to “distinguish themselves from the ‘Old Left’ – communities and socialist of the 1930s and 1940s.”[6] These groups didn’t just want to change what was occurring in the country with the civil rights movement, but also want to put an end to the war in Vietnam. Protests for peace were held in nearly every conceivable place, from college campuses to parks to Washington, D.C.
In addition to the civil rights and peace movements, a variety of other minorities were being to speak up for themselves. The American Indian Movement (AIM) formed in 1968 was interested in taking back what they believed was theirs all along. Members of AIM staged an occupation at Wounded Knee, the site of a Sioux massacre in 1890, in order to bring attention to the inadequacies of the governments dealings with Native Americans.[7]
Mexican Americans took a cue from the Black Panthers and formed the Brown Berets, promoting Chicano interests and political candidates. Along with black studies being added at college campuses, so was Chicano studies, in deference to the requests of students and educators alike.[8]
Along side the various racial groups that were struggling to make headway, the second wave feminist movement as started gaining speed, demanding equal rights for women, equal opportunities and equal pay. These radical feminists also protest what they believed were sexist organizations, like the Miss America pageant where they set up a “freedom trash can” and encouraged women to toss away the “symbols of female oppression” like false eyelashes, girdles, bras, etc.[9]
Homosexuals also started pushing for equal rights, protesting social and legal oppression based on sexual orientation. Activist took the name ‘gay’ over homosexual, much as the Mexican Americans preferred ‘Chicano’, and founded various advocacy groups in an attempt to support those who ‘came out’ or who wanted to belong to part of a group of like beings.
The 1960s and 1970s was the era of the “Movement of Movements” with each sub-culture or social group trying to make a change to better their situation. What was once intensely personal became public and political in an attempt to gain support and further their cause. Even the government got into the act, with the New Right aligning themselves more closely with religion and labeling those who did not fall within their guide lines as godless or deviants. All the things that used to be considered personal, sexual orientation, gender, family life, religion, were now all open for public debate. The methods of non-violent activism can still be seen today on college campuses everywhere, including our own. The far reaching hand of God still comes into politics, with leaders being chastised by the media for not attending church or with those same leaders declaring their agenda as guided by God. Activism still exists, the personal is still political, we are still not an equal society, but I guess that we’re still trying to sort all this out.
[1] Professor Susan M. Holcomb. Class Lecture. ANT3302: Sex, Gender and Culture. 13 April 2005.
[2] Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, (Minneapolis: Basic Books, 1999), 187-190.
[3] James A. Henretta, David Brody, and Lynn Dumenil, America: A Concise History, 2nd ed., vol. 2, (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002), 800.
[4] Henretta, Brody, Dumenil, America: A Concise History, 830.
[5] Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society, 1962, available in its entirety at http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/huron.html
[6] Henretta, Brody, Dumenil, America: A Concise History, 850.
[7] Henretta, Brody, Dumenil, America: A Concise History, 858.
[8] Henretta, Brody, Dumenil, America: A Concise History, 858.
[9] John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 302.
All contents copyright Elizabeth Tibbert 2005.