Port Huron Statement Analysis

In primary documents such as The National Organization for Women, is a civil rights organization form in 1966 by feminist group. The organization mainly focused on women rights issues more specifically the inequality in the workplace, legal system, politics, and education. Feminist began forming groups that would support them in their fight to gain full equality. The organization took action against the public perception of women and inequality in private life. Whereas, within the secondary primary document, The Port Huron Statement, is a meeting in 1962 that was sponsored by a radical student organization known as the Students for Democratic Society. The meeting held at Port Huron, Michigan where college students adopted a document that

Many women believed that gaining the right to vote was the gateway toward gaining other rights. The founding of the National Organization for Women was the first public organization that focus on the public realm of gender equality especially in the workplace. Feminist leaders such as Betty Friedan wanted the organization to “demanded equal opportunity in jobs, education, and political participation and attacked the “false image of women” spread by the mass media” (Give Me Liberty 1006). She believe that American women employment was declining, “working women are becoming increasingly – not less – concentrated on the bottom of the job ladder” (Voices of Freedom 292). During the 1960 the number of married women entering the workforce increased yet, the average working woman earned “only 60% of what men earn.” In addition, the textbook, Give Me Liberty support the dispute on gender discrimination by stating that women’s “husbands controlled their wives’ earning” (1004). Men generally treated their wives as nothing more than possession which resulted in many women to be dissatisfied with their lives as housewives and “educated women [were] trapped in a world that viewed marriage and

The document reflect on the beliefs of young college students who opposed the violation of individual rights of morality, racial bigotry, economic manipulation, and the spread of nuclear weapons. The Port Huron Statement sought to address the problems that Americans were facing due to the constant threat of war. The statement is quick to analysis the country’s failure such as its foreign policy, “the proclaimed peaceful intentions of the United States contradicted its economic and military investment in the Cold War status quo” (Voices of Freedom 282). The Port Huron Statement offer ways to resolve these failures through social change. The students want to create a new democratic system that would reject bureaucracy, “of, by, and for the people” (Voices of Freedom 284). This meant that the individual would need to have direct involvement in decisions that would affect their everyday lives. The textbook, Give Me Liberty, adds on to the success of SDS by demonstrate how the student’s criticism of social arrangements had spread across campus as Berkeley students who outraged about the Free Speech movement. The responded to freedom of expression, “represent the very dignity of what a human being is… you can speak freely” (Give Me Liberty 995). As a result, the students were successful with