A People’s History of the United States: Chapter 19 Summary & Analysis

After 1920, women could vote alongside men. And yet, “their subordinate condition” barely changed; sexism continued to be rampant in the U.S. One of the first major disruptions in sexism in America occurred during World War Two, when women were required to work outside of the home, since many young men were fighting overseas. However, even after World War Two, women continued to hold far less political power than men—they represented fifty percent of the voting population, but less than four percent of political office-holders.

Women played a key role in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s. Around the same time, Betty Freidan published the feminist classic The Feminine Mystique, in which she denounced the social system that forced women to surrender their dreams and serve their husbands and children. Women of the late 1960s played key roles in demonstrating against Vietnam and fighting for Civil Rights. In 1968, a group called Radical Women protested the Miss American beauty pageant by throwing bras and beauty products into the trash.

The feminist movement took a unique form among working class women. Without “talking specifically about their problems as women,” many working-class women organized neighborhood people to fight injustice and lobby for services. Many working-class female activists connected the problems of women with a need for overall social and economic change, so that the “antagonist” against which working-class feminists protested was not just “aggressive male domination,” but also “capitalism.”

One of the key issues of the feminist movement of the late sixties and early seventies was abortion. Women protested for their right to control their own bodies; their protests contributed to the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision, in Roe v. Wade, to legalize abortion and give women the right to decide whether or not to have a child. Women in the late sixties also began to speak openly about rape and domestic violence and to support a Constitutional amendment ensuring gender equality, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Another key aspect of the feminist movement of the 1960s and 70s was the emphasis on the female body. Influential feminist figures, such as the poet Adrienne Rich, argued that women were subjugated in part because they were stereotyped and judged for their bodies in ways that men never experienced. Rich and other feminists argued that the powerful elite used sexism as a tool to trick the people into controlling themselves: women were indoctrinated to be meek and submissive, and to teach others to be submissive, too. Therefore, by teaching women how to be revolutionary and active in society, feminism could free women (and, perhaps, all people) from the control of the state.

The sixties also saw the beginning of a widespread movement against the prison system. There had always been prison riots in America, but in the 1960s the number and scale of these riots increased greatly. Furthermore, as countless studies have shown, poor, black, homosexual, or socially radical people were more likely to be arrested and sentenced to prison for a given crime than upper-class, white, conservative, heterosexual people, and the injustice of their sentencing prompted some convicts to become more radical in their thinking.

One of the key prison riots of the 1970s took place in Attica Prison in 1971. There, prisoners learned that George Jackson—a Californian prisoner who’d been sentenced to ten years in jail for committing a seventy-dollar robbery, and who’d become a well-known radical writer—was shot in the back by his guards, allegedly because he was trying to escape. Enraged with the suspicious circumstances of Jackson’s murder, prisoners rose up, took guards as hostages, and took over four prison yards. One of the most striking features of the Attica uprising was the racial unity between the different inmates. After five days of waiting, the New York state government, with the full support of the Nixon administration, sent in the National Guard to attack the prisoners (who had no firearms), violently ending the uprising. Attica, Zinn concludes, marked “the caring of prisoners for one another, the attempt to take hatred and anger of individual rebellion and turn it into collective effort for change.”

For much of the 20th century, it seemed that Indians wouldn't organize into social activist groups. However, in the 1960s, Indians came to the forefront of social activism. In 1961, five hundred Indian leaders met in Chicago and formed the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC). As a result of NIYC action, Indians petitioned the federal government to address the hundreds of Indian treaties that the government had broken over the last four hundred years. When the government supported the building of a dam on Seneca land, Indians cited treaties the government had signed during the George Washington administration, promising that the U.S. wouldn’t build on Seneca land. Other Indian groups organized “fish-ins,” during which Indians fished in rivers that white residents wanted exclusively for themselves.

A key event in Indian activism of the sixties took place in 1969, when Indians, led by the Mohawk leader and professor Richard Oakes, occupied the Californian island of Alcatraz and refused to leave. Oakes read a sardonic document stating that Alcatraz should, by all rights, be an Indian reservation, since it was isolated and rocky, had no running water, and housed prisoners. After six months, federal forces physically removed the Indian occupiers.

Indians were at the center of the anti-Vietnam movement; many who served in the war drew connections between American soldiers’ treatment of Vietnamese peasants and past soldiers’ treatment of Indians. Indians also staged protests against the holiday of Columbus Day, and lobbied history textbook companies to include more respectful accounts of Indian culture.

In 1973, armed Indians occupied the town of Wounded Knee, where, in the 19th century, American troops had massacred Indians. They declared the town “liberated” from the U.S., citing an 1868 treaty that allowed the town to remain under Indian control. Hundreds of FBI agents and marshals blockaded the town and ordered the Indians to disarm. Over the next 71 days, Indians and FBI agents fought several gun battles. Finally, the blockade ended when the U.S. government promised to “investigate Indian affairs.” Later, the government concluded that the 1868 treaty was superseded by the principal of “eminent domain.” Nevertheless, the Wounded Knee incident provoked enormous international sympathy for Indian activism.

The sixties and seventies represented nothing less than a “general revolt against oppressive, artificial, previously unquestioned ways of living.” Sexual behaviors changed very quickly, and books and films appeared that explored sexuality in ways that hadn’t been normal before. Musicians, such as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, wrote songs protesting the Vietnam War. The sixties also saw a revolution within the Catholic church: while some “old-time religious revivalists” continued to be popular, other priests spoke out against their organization’s sexism and racism.

In all, the sixties represented a series of widespread, rapid changes, in which Americans questioned authority of all kinds: government, business, religion, and tradition. In the seventies, the powerful elite went to work trying to restore order.