Betty Friedan (Women’s Liberation)

The 1950’s were a period in United Stated where gender roles were strictly and narrowly defined and anyone who broke those set definitions was regarded as strange and different. Women in that era were supposed to take care of their children and husband, cook food, and look beautiful. However, in the 1960’s a number of movements began to emerge and a number of women took on the task to expand the gender roles and give women the opportunity to do more with their lives than just staying home and taking care of the house. Betty Friedan wrote a book called The Feminine Mystique in which she talks about the ‘problem’ that every middle class woman faces but can not do anything about. In a quote from her book, Friedan writes,

The problem lay buried, unspoken for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, -A sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slip-cover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night-she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question- “Is this all?”…

I think Zinn talks about Friedan because she served as a spokesperson for all the women that dreamt to achieve something in their lifetimes. She advocated that a woman’s role in society should not just be limited to making her family happy but she should be given the opportunity to discover herself and have a right to do “creative work of her own”.

Prisoners

The 1960’s were a time for change and as Women, Indians and Gay people fought for their rights, the prisoners too organized in an effort to bring change. Zinn includes prisoners because their story depicts how America treated its poor class during that time. Dostoevski once said: “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” America’s prisons were a place where the prisoners were provided with unbearable living conditions. A Walpole prisoner recalled the food as unbearable “with hundreds of cockroaches running away from the trays”. The poor were also more likely to get prisoned because they could not afford to hire expensive lawyers or to get bailed and the judges who were mostly orthodox white males tended to show little or no sympathy to the poor, homosexuals and the blacks etc. This all created a sense of resentment and hatred within the prisoners and finally led to a number of furious protests and revolutions. Another Walpole prisoner stated that, “Every program that we get is used as a weapon against us. The right to go to school, to go to church, to have visitors, to write, to go to the movies. They all end up being weapons of punishment. None of the programs are ours, Everything is treated as a privilege that can be taken away from us. The result is insecurity-a frustration that keeps eating away at you”

Therefore, it was not long before that the prisoners realized that their condition could only be ameliorated if they took the task upon themselves and resisted to the injustices done to them.

Overall both the women’s liberation movement and the Prisoner’s movement are examples of the circumstances that led America to become the radical and rebellious country that it was in the 1970’s and people finally realized that in order to achieve equality, they needed to break the narrow mindedness of the society and finally start looking beyond one’s color, gender or class.