IB History Protest and Activism Notes

Protest and Activism: How Feminists Organised and Fought

1. By the 1960s, women across the United States were organizing in two broad ways: working through institutions to change laws, and challenging the culture and systems that shaped everyday life.
   1. These approaches overlapped, clashed, and fed off each other throughout the decade and into the 1970s.

Consciousness-Raising

1. One of the most distinctive tactics of second-wave feminism was the consciousness-raising group.
   1. Small circles of women met regularly to share personal experiences, from workplace discrimination to domestic expectations to body image.
   2. The point was not therapy.
   3. It was political analysis.
2. The slogan "the personal is political" captured this idea.
   1. Issues like unpaid domestic work, sexual violence, and reproductive control were not private problems to be solved at home.
   2. They were political questions that required political solutions.
3. Consciousness-raising groups spread rapidly through the late 1960s and early 1970s.
   1. They were decentralized and low-cost, which meant ordinary women with no connection to formal organizations could participate.
   2. Many women who passed through these groups went on to join campaigns, start publications, or form new activist organizations.
4. Radical feminists were especially committed to this approach.
   1. They argued that institutional lobbying alone could not dismantle patriarchy, which they saw as a system embedded in culture, language, family structure, and everyday relationships, not just in law.
5. Redstockings, a radical feminist group founded in 1969, pushed consciousness-raising directly into public view.
   1. The group staged public speak-outs where women testified openly about abortions and sexual harassment, turning private experience directly into political testimony.

From Lobbying to Street Protests

1. Alongside consciousness-raising, mainstream feminist organizations worked within political institutions.
   1. The National Organization for Women (NOW), founded in 1966 by Betty Friedan and Pauli Murray, became the largest feminist organization in the country.
   2. It focused on lobbying Congress, filing lawsuits, and pressuring employers to end discriminatory practices.
2. In 1971, the National Women's Political Caucus (NWPC) was founded to get more women elected to office at every level of government.
   1. Ms. magazine launched in 1972 under Gloria Steinem, giving the movement a national media platform and reaching audiences far beyond activist circles.
3. The movement was not limited to lobbying and publishing.
   1. In September 1968, feminists staged one of the movement's most famous demonstrations outside the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City.
   2. Protesters crowned a live sheep, tossed bras, girdles, and copies of Cosmopolitan into a "Freedom Trash Can", and unfurled a "Women's Liberation" banner inside the auditorium.
   3. No bras were actually burned, despite the enduring myth, but the protest still won national television coverage and put the phrase "women's liberation" in front of a mass audience for the first time.

1. On August 26, 1970, feminists staged the Women's Strike for Equality in cities across the country.
2. The date marked the 50th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which had granted women the right to vote.
3. Around 50,000 people marched in New York City alone.

1. The strike showed that liberal and radical feminists could act together on shared goals, even when they disagreed on strategy and theory.
   1. Public protest gave the movement visibility in a way that legislative work alone could not.

The ERA Campaign and Its Defeat

1. The most ambitious legislative goal of the feminist movement was the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).
   1. It had first been proposed in 1923.
   2. By the early 1970s, it finally had the momentum to move through Congress.
2. Congress passed the ERA in 1972 and sent it to the states for ratification.
   1. Supporters argued it would close loopholes in existing anti-discrimination law, give women a constitutional guarantee of equality, and remove legal barriers that varied from state to state.
3. The campaign ran into powerful organized opposition.
   1. Phyllis Schlafly, a conservative activist, launched the STOP ERA campaign.
   2. She argued the amendment would eliminate legal protections that benefited women, such as exemption from the military draft and entitlement to financial support from husbands.
   3. She framed the ERA as a threat to the family and to traditional roles that many women valued.
4. Schlafly's campaign was effective at the state level.
   1. She organized local volunteers, spoke at state legislatures, and reframed the debate away from equality and toward consequences.
   2. By the 1982 deadline, only 35 of the required 38 states had ratified.
   3. The ERA failed.

Divisions Within the Movement

1. It would be a mistake to treat second-wave feminism as a unified movement with a single agenda.
   1. In practice it was a coalition of sometimes competing groups, divided by strategy, class, race, and sexuality.

1. The "lavender menace" controversy illustrated how sexuality split the movement.
   1. Betty Friedan used the phrase "lavender menace" to describe the threat she believed lesbian feminists posed to NOW's public image.
   2. The organization initially excluded lesbian issues from its agenda.
2. In response, lesbian feminists organized.
   1. A group called the Radicalesbians published a manifesto in 1970 arguing that the "woman-identified woman" was central to, not a problem for, the feminist project.
   2. They argued that excluding lesbians meant accepting a male-defined standard of respectability.
3. Friedan later reversed her position.
   1. By 1971, NOW passed a resolution recognizing lesbian rights as a feminist issue.
   2. The episode shows how the movement both excluded and then incorporated groups it had initially sidelined.
4. Race was another fault line.
   1. Many Black women felt that the mainstream feminist movement spoke primarily to the experiences of white women.
   2. Activists like Pauli Murray pushed for an intersectional approach from within the movement, but organizations like NOW remained predominantly white in leadership through the 1970s.
5. These divisions came into full public view in 1977, at state and national women's conferences held under a federal mandate.
   1. The National Women's Conference in Houston (1977) brought thousands of delegates together and passed a wide-ranging National Plan of Action, but conservative women led by Phyllis Schlafly organized a rival counter-conference nearby, showing how deeply the country, and the movement itself, was split over feminism's goals.