The social movements of the 60s gave American women the skills to name and address the injuries they faced in their own lives, and led to a global women’s movement that is now facing a violent backlash. We need to know this history in order to fight for women’s rights today
The idea of gender equality has almost always had its origins in a civil war, a revolution or a social movement. In the United States, the women’s movement had its origins in the American civil rights and anti-war social movements of the sixties. What was called “The Movement” gave birth, after a long and hard labour, to a movement that eventually flourished in the United States and spread around the globe.
The conventional wisdom is that the men in the New Left in the United States treated women so badly, that they gradually began leaving to start a movement that addressed their own lives. This is true, but does not capture a more complicated picture of the past. The “Movement" was also a tremendous gift to young women in which they learned how to name injustices, question the supremacy of one group over another in the civil rights movement, and to challenge the authority of the government in the anti-war movement.
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