Women In The 1960s

The social and cultural movements of the 1960s began to upset the traditional “norms” of gender constructs, family and social structures, racial biases, and portrayals of white suburbia that existed in the 1950s. In February 1960 black college students in Greensboro, North Carolina sat in on a “white’s only” lunch counter, as similar sit-ins began to happen in other southern cities as well. In 1961 the Freedom Rides which supported integration in transportation, began taking place on buses. In August 1963, men and women gathered in Washington DC for a “March on Washington” where they called for freedom, justice and equality, and expressed concerns over minimum wage and unemployment. In the mid-1960s when the new focus of the civil rights movement was about black power, there were other groups out there that were not happy with the other reforms that were already in place. Student activists became more radical by taking over college campuses and organizing huge anti-war demonstrations in many different public places. Sometimes it got so bad, bombs were made and campus building were being set on fire.
In 1963 around the same time all these other movements were taking place, young middle class women who got their hands on the publication The Feminine Mystique written by Betty Friedan, were realizing that their role

Young Americans thought that freedom also meant cultural freedom. In the late 1960s, for the first time American history young people rebelled against their middle class family values and other norms such as clothing, language, sexual behavior, and drug use, because they just wanted to be happy. They were completely against nuclear weapons and the Vietnam war, they were all about peace. Many of these young people dropped out of a life of politics altogether and became hippies. They moved away to communes to get far away from the everyday life, to practice “free love” instead (Foner