The beginning of the 1970’s brought emerging social movements. The largest of these was the Women’s Liberation Movement which fought for equal pay, better education, birth control and abortion rights for women. The 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe vs. Wade, legalized abortion., allowing women more options for dealing with unwanted pregnancies. Divorce laws were amended in many states, allowing women the ability to seek divorces and obtain spousal support. Women joined the workforce in huge numbers and  outnumbered men on college campuses.

Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.

 “Just what was the problem that has no name? What were the words women used when they tried to express it? Sometimes a woman would say “I feel empty somehow . . . incomplete.” Or she would say, “I feel as if I don’t exist.” Sometimes…. “A tired feeling … I get so angry with the children it scares me. … I feel like crying without any reason.”

The quote shows that women were not satisfied with their role in society anymore and wanted more in life.  Women had a new life plan including not viewing housework as a career; not trying to find total fulfillment through marriage and motherhood alone; and finding meaningful work that uses the woman’s full mental capacity. Betty Friedman was among the women who took a step to bring about these changes to society. She wanted to give women the right to do anything they desired. She spoke for the whole female population and influenced them to change, therefore Howard Zinn included her in his writings.

American Indian Movement

The most surprising uprising of the 1970’s was the American Indian Movement(AIM). At the turn of the 20th century, American Indians organized in large numbers in the 70’s to address the wrongs done to them since the time of Columbus. In dramatic fashion, members of AIM occupied the former island prison of Alcatraz in 1969 to draw attention to their grievances against the American government.

Chief Luther Standing Bear, in his 1933 autobiography, From the Land of the Spotted Eagle, wrote:

 True, the white man brought great change. But the varied fruits of his civilization, though highly colored and inviting, are sickening and deadening. And if it be the part of civilization to maim, rob, and thwart, then what is progress?I am going to venture that the man who sat on the ground in his tipi meditating on life and its meaning, accepting- the kinship of all creatures, and acknowledging unity with the universe of things, was infusing into his being the true essence of civilization… .

For many Americans in the early twentieth century, the problems of Native Americans too often seemed distant. Luther Standing Bear was an advocate for reform in the United States government’s often neglectful policies toward Native Americans. Much of his writing addresses the inequities and injustices of a system that consigned Indians to life on reservations without adequate schools, housing, or medicine. A year after the publication of The Land of the Spotted Eagle, Congress passed the Indian Reorganization Act (1934), legislation designed to return to Native Americans control of reservation resources, reduce disproportionately high unemployment rates, and restore the administrative authority of individual tribes. Thus, Howard Zinn included him in his writings.

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.

Sid Mills was a Native American who, for all intents and purposes to the U.S government was a protester first, and a Vietnam war veteran second.  Sid was arrested at Frank’s Landing in 1968 during a protest. He later made a statement in which he highlighted the lack of consideration and respect for Native American tribes, especially those which included veterans of the war. ‘we have already buried Indian fishermen returned dead from Vietnam, while Indian fishermen live here without protection and under steady attack…’ (493) He concluded his statement by saying that the indigenous people’s would fight for their rights. Zinn included this because this statement creates an opening for the topic of the Native American plight over the course of America’s short history. The native tribes have been fighting against the oppression of the white settlers for as long as the threat has posed itself. However, in more modern history, their fight has been a partially dormant conquest. The natives have been thought to be a nearly extinct peoples, without much claim left and a seemingly lost cause. This was not the case. The occupation of the village of Wounded Knee is but one example of the Native American resistance. Sid Mills brings light to the relentless disregard of Native Americans. Veteran’s of the war, whose ancestors homeland was invaded, have given their lives to this country are still left without protection. As Sid Mills stated ‘Just three years ago today, on October 13, 1965, 19 women and children were brutalized by more than 45 armed agents of the State of Washington at Frank’s Landing on the Nisqually river in a vicious, unwarranted attack. …’. The natives have made attempts to assimilate but they are still met without any real prominence in government standing. They are treated as outcasts, when they are factually more American, not less.

On the topic of women’s suffrage, a much more broad point was made through a woman named Adrienne Rich. Adrienne’s inclusion instills the argument that the control of women in society was not done directly by the state as with other oppressed people, but within the family, in their very homes. After women had gained the right to vote many years prior, there were no vital outstanding laws preventing women from proceeding as prominent members of society. Nearly any and all oppression was birthed within the walls of one’s own family. ‘the family was used-men to control women, women to control children, all to be preoccupied with one another, to turn to one another for help, to blame one another for trouble, to do violence to one another when tidings weren’t going right.’ Adrienne was a housewife fulfilling the ‘traditional’ tasks as a woman, completing her role. She questioned her doings, but was met with the answer ‘this is what women have always done’. Women’s liberation began with the women themselves, within their own bodies, as women’s bodies are the very base of their exploitation. The largest part of women’s suffrage and perhaps the most difficult was within the boundaries of the home. ‘They could revolutionize thought and behavior in exactly that seclusion of family privacy which the system had counted on to do its work of control and indoctrination. And together, instead of at odds-male, female, parents, children-they could undertake the changing of society itself’