Women In The 1930s To The 1960s

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Estefan Bello Mrs. Penny 19 February 2012 The Struggle for Rights within Minorities The 1930s to the 1960s were classified as very turbulent times. As the country shifted from a conservative to a more modern standard of living, a severe clash between several classes initiated, mostly between the “minorities” at the time, such as African-Americans and women, and the majority, which consisted of white men. The mid-twentieth century was specifically marked by the struggle for more rights for African-Americans and women who proved to be persistent against the conservative mindset that African-Americans were slaves, just like the Civil War era, and that women belonged in the household, just like the mindset of the nineteenth and the beginning…show more content…
Because of this, women have always had little to no rights and their position in society has always been classified in the home. However, women have had enough and this was seen through their efforts in the twentieth century, most evident in the 1960s. The momentum of the women’s movement was gained at the turn of the sixties, when the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved birth control pills. This helped to establish the beginning of the reproductive rights that women will strive to pursue. Furthermore, women gained support for the feminist movement through the social media. Betty Freidman’s, The Feminine Mystique, described the melancholy lives and dissatisfaction that women led because of the restrictions put on them by the male-dominated community. Friedman says, “A woman is handicapped by her sex, and handicaps society, either by slavishly copying the pattern of man's advance in the professions, or by refusing to compete with man at all.” (Friedman 56). This means that women gave up the fight before they even gave it a chance and men took advantage of that. This acclaimed book ignited a dormant fire inside the oppressed women and feminism swept the nation during the 1960s. Soon after, women pushed for equality in the workplace…show more content…
As a result, buses that contained both black and white people combined into several buses and went through the South, from Washington D.C. to New Orleans. Trips like these can be most accounted for by John Howard Griffin’s book, Black Like Me. John Howard Griffin is a white man living in Mansfield, Texas in 1959. Committed to the cause of racial injustice and wanting to understand the world from a black man’s perspective, Griffin decides to undergo medical treatment to change the color of his skin and temporarily become a black man. After his transformation, Griffin sets himself out towards the South to find prejudice, oppression, and hardship but never expected it to be to this extent. It was impossible for him to find a job or even a bathroom. Everywhere he went, he experienced being called a “nigger.” This went on and such traumatic events became common throughout his trip. Then, he goes to the Deep South, where it is even worse. This type of behavior went on for decades until African-Americans have just had enough and decided to fight back and improve their own lives by taking it into their own hands. As a result, several legislations and court cases were passed in their favor and set the stone for black
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