Rights Movements Beyond the 1960s
Study women rights, Latino activism, Indigenous activism, Asian American activism, disability rights, LGBTQ rights, and environmentalism.
A lesson of US History, in Civil Rights and Contemporary America, about 10 minutes.
By the end of this lesson, you will be able to describe the women's liberation movement, Chicano movement, Native American activism, LGBT rights movement, and environmental movement, and analyze how they built on and diverged from the Civil Rights Movement.
The Second Wave and Its Discontents
The Civil Rights Movement inspired a wave of rights claims in the late 1960s and 1970s. Many activists borrowed its tactics — direct action, coalition-building, consciousness-raising — while adapting them to different constituencies.
The crucial insight of the new movements: the Civil Rights Movement had established that entrenched discrimination could be challenged and changed. If Jim Crow could fall, so could other systems of exclusion.
Women's Liberation
Context: despite formal legal equality and the 19th Amendment, women faced systematic discrimination in employment, education, and family law.
Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963): named "the problem that has no name" — educated women's dissatisfaction with a life limited to domesticity.
NOW (National Organization for Women, 1966): demanded equal pay, access to jobs and education, and reproductive rights.
Second wave issues:
- Equal Pay Act (1963): required equal pay for equal work
- Title VII (Civil Rights Act 1964): banned sex discrimination in employment
- Title IX (1972): banned sex discrimination in federally-funded education → transformed women's sports
- Roe v. Wade (1973): legalized abortion as a constitutional right
Divisions within the movement: radical feminists (patriarchy as the root problem; structural revolution needed) vs. liberal feminists (equal rights and opportunity within the existing system). The movement also faced criticism for centering white, middle-class women's concerns while neglecting Black women, working-class women, and women of color.
The Chicano Movement
Background: Mexican Americans faced discrimination in employment, education, housing, and political representation.
César Chávez and Dolores Huerta — United Farm Workers: organized California's largely Mexican American migrant farmworkers; grape boycott; won collective bargaining rights (1975 California Agricultural Labor Relations Act). Combined union organizing with Mexican Catholic cultural identity and nonviolent tactics borrowed from Gandhi and MLK.
The Brown Berets: urban youth organization; community service + confrontational politics.
Educational demands: bilingual education, ethnic studies, "walkouts" by Chicano students demanding culturally relevant curriculum.