Read the entire chapter and answer the following questions.

Instructions:
1. Each detail is worth a point. For example, if a question is worth 6 points,
you must give 6
correct/exact/complete details from the chapter.
2. Answers must be ONLY from the chapters in the book and not online or
other sources. No points
will be given for answers that are not from the book.
3. Bullet mark your answers and write short simple answers. I will ask you to
re-submit your answers if
they are long and is not directly answering the questions.
4. "Bulleting" your answers still means that they have to be in full sentences.
The bullet points are for
you to keep track of the number of details to be included as each detail
carries a point.
5. Number your answers to correspond with the question number.
6. Do NOT retype the questions.
7. Each bullet point should have the detail that is the correct answer which is
worth one point for a total
of the points for that answer. Since these are open book assignments, it is
very easy for students to
reproduce what is in the chapter. Writing just the correct answers and to the
point will demonstrate to
you and me that you have understood the material well.
8. Upload a pdf file. No other format.
QUESTIONS:
1. Who was Irene Morgan in the Supreme Court case of Morgan v. The
Commonwealth of Virginia?
What was the incident that eventually led to the case before the Supreme
Court? How did the Supreme Court rule in this case? (3 Points)
2. Who was Dolores Huerta? What organizations did she have a leading role
in? How many children and husbands did she have? What was the opinion of
her ex-husbands on her activities? (6 Points)
3. Who coined the term “Feminine Mystique”? How as this term introduced to
the world and when?
What was the contention of this person about the “Feminine Mystique”? (4
Points)
4. President John F. Kennedy appointed a National Commission on the Status
of Women with Eleanor Roosevelt as the Chairperson. She interviewed him in
the White House. What did President Kennedy say in the interview was his
primary interest in appointing the Commission? How did President Kennedy
explain why there were few women in politics, policy-making positions and
legislatures? (3
Points)
5. 5. What crucial role did women play in the strike against the Empire Zinc
Mine in New Mexico in 1951? What benefits did they secure for themselves
and their families as a result of their activities? (5
Points)
6. What was the birthrate in 1933 and what was it in 1955? In 1955 what
percentage of women wanted four or more children? What was the effect of
the baby boom on housing and on the economy? (

Chapter 9
COLD WAR, WARM HEARTH

Native American Activism and Resistance Asian American Women Activists A

NEW FRONTIER The President’s Commission on the Status of Women Primary
Source 9-6: President Kennedy’s Call for a National Commission on the Status
of Women
Change on the Horizon THINK MORE ABOUT IT READ MORE ABOUT IT KEY
CONCEPTS
O
n June 3, 1946, the United States Supreme Court handed down a rul-ing in a
case titled Morgan v. The Commonwealth of Virginia . Irene Morgan, the
plaintiff, was a twenty-nine-year-old black woman from
Virginia. Two years earlier, in July 1944, she had boarded a Greyhound bus in
Gloucester, Virginia, for a trip to Baltimore, Maryland. She bought her ticket
at the “colored” window, she sat in the bus in the colored section. At the next
stop, the bus picked up a white couple and the bus driver strode back to
where Morgan was seated and demanded that she stand so that the white
couple could sit. She refused. The bus driver drove to the nearest police
station, where Morgan was arrested for violating the segregation laws of the
Commonwealth of Virginia. She was convicted, but appealed her case, which
eventually came before the Supreme Court. Thurgood Marshall, an NAACP
lawyer who later became the first black justice on the Supreme Court,
argued that the segrega-tion laws of Virginia unfairly interfered with
interstate commerce. The Court agreed, and segregation on interstate bus
lines was banned. Nine years later, Alabama seamstress Rosa Parks attended
a two-week session at Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee.
Highlander Folk School, founded in 1932 to support and train labor
organizers, began to include civil rights work for African Americans in its
curriculum in 1944. By 1953, the school was training men and women
interested in achieving school deseg-regation and voting rights for blacks.
Several months after her training session in 1955, Parks boarded a bus in
Montgomery, Alabama, on her way home after a long day at work. The bus
became full and she was asked to leave her seat in the colored section so the
“whites-only” section could be expanded to accommodate the later arrivals.
She refused. She, too, was arrested. She, too, was convicted. Her case
provided an opportunity for the black community of Montgomery to make a
public statement about segregation. A boycott of the buses followed Parks’
arrest, and after more than a year, the system nearly bankrupt with the loss
of riders, segregation on buses in the city of Montgom-ery ended. The next
phase of the struggle for civil rights had begun. Rosa Parks became an icon
in American history for her resistance to segrega-tion that eventually
sparked a showdown over the issue. But Parks always pointed ut that she
had not been the first to resist segregation. Women throughout the South,
black and white, fought as they had fought in the years since Plessy v.
Ferguson had legalized segregation in 1896 (see Chapter 7). They used
activism, lawsuits, resistance, and personal and professional sacrifice to
achieve their goals. Except for the beginnings of the modern civil rights
movement in the South, women’s actions in the public sphere in the 1950s
are often de-emphasized, in the same way that many women’s abilities were
dismissed by employers after World War II. Demobilization after the war left
America with millions of unemployed men, and a strong cultural
pronouncement that women belonged at home raising children and turning
over their well-paying jobs to the returning soldiers. This pronouncement
became even more powerful with the advent of television in the 1950s. The
new medium helped to promulgate a mythic view of American women in
weekly situation comedies and dramas that advertised both products and
lifestyles no American woman would appar-ently want to live without.
Conspicuous consumption in the 1950s rivaled that of the 1920s. Underlying
both this consumerism and the back-to-home movement was Americans’
deep desire for normal life again after years of depression and war, and now
a new threat that possessed unimaginable destruc-tive power, the atomic
bomb. Yet, despite cultural constraints and expecta-tions, American women
again lived lives that did not match the images culture provided. American
women took different paths after World War II, continu-ing their activism as
well as embracing hearth and home in ways promoted by the dominant
culture in their lives.
( ROSA PARKS Rosa Parks heads the line to board a newly integrated city bus
after the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott ended in December 1956.
Parks became an icon of the civil rights movement after her arrest over a
year earlier for refusing to give up her seat to a white person. Irene Morgan
did the same ten years before to help overturn Jim Crow laws segregating
black Americans on interstate buses.)

DEMOBILIZATION
After the war was over, Americans, women and men both, returned to their
homes as part of a process called demobilization, where the government
gradually discharged soldiers from their assignments. The process was slow:
months after V-E Day, frustrated soldiers eager to return home rioted on
overseas military bases. American armed forces, 12 million strong in June
1945, shrank to 1.5 million by June 1947. President Truman and his ad-
ministration feared such rapid demobilization would lead to high unem-
ployment and would compromise military strength. Nevertheless, Congress
continued to dismantle the military machine that had won the war, shrink-ing
the defense budget from $90 billion in January 1945 to $10 billion by 1947.
America retained the largest army and navy in the world, as well as sole
possession of the atomic bomb, but lost many experienced soldiers and
military administrators who returned to civilian life.
The Armed Forces
Demobilization after World War II included both the armed forces and the
civilian workforce. As clerks and secretaries, women processed the papers
for the hundreds of thousands of returning soldiers. Women’s military units
created during the war—WACs, WAVES, SPARS, and women Marines—
downsized drastically from their height of 400,000 women. The WASP had
already disbanded in December of 1944 as soon as enough male pilots
returned from European victories to take their place. The women pilots had
flown 60 million miles and lost 42 women in service, but they received no
veteran or survivor benefits for years. While government leaders failed in
that regard, others praised women’s service. General Dwight D. Eisenhower,
who commanded the Allied forces in Europe, had been op-posed to women in
service before the war, but testified favorably in Con-gress about the
possible formation of permanent women’s organizations within the armed
services. He said, “During the time that I have had women under my
command, they have met every task assigned them. Their contribution in
efficiency, skill, spirit and determination are immeasurable.” Such support
from the most popular general of the war (and a future president of the
country) helped servicewomen in their struggle to become part of the
permanent armed forces after the war. The government also recognized and
awarded women’s contributions to the winning of the war in other ways.
Medals went to 657 WACs, in-cluding Purple Hearts (for injuries from enemy
actions) and Bronze Stars (for meritorious service overseas). By December
1946, WAC strength had fallen to less than 10,000 women, most of whom
wished to stay in the army, a desire fulfilled when President Harry Truman
created a permanent Women’s Army Corps in 1948. Likewise, the WAVES of
the navy did the same: most WAVES left the service, but a core group
became the basis for a permanent branch of the navy. The Coast Guard’s
SPARs and women marines faced skeptics such as Marine Corps Brigadier
General Gerald C.

Thomas, Director of Plans and Policies, who stated: “The American tradition
is that a women’s place is in the home . . . women do not take kindly to
military regimentation. During the war, they have accepted the regulations
imposed on them, but hereafter the problem of enforcing dis-cipline alone
would be a headache.” Others accused or implied that women wanting to
stay in the armed services were lesbians. During the war, such accusations
against women were dealt with informally. After the war, as the services
needed fewer women, lesbians more often faced formal action, such as
“undesirable” discharges. More than 9,000 lesbians and gay men who served
their country during the war were disqualified for veterans’ benefits because
of such discharges. Despite this kind of opposition, women in the coast guard
and marines became part of the Armed Services of the United States, under
the newly created Department of Defense, which replaced the Departments
of the Army and Navy.
The Home Front
When World War II ended in August of 1945, millions of women war-plant
workers had already lost their jobs as American industry prepared for re-
turning veterans to assume their places in the workforce. In 1940, only 28
percent of the labor force were women. In 1944, women were 35.4 percent of
the civilian labor force; in 1945, they were 36.1 percent. Of those women,
22.5 percent were married, and over 12 percent had children younger than
ten years old. By war’s end, 30 percent of women were employed in
factories, and domestic employment had dropped from nearly 18 percent to
only 9.5 percent. Women still earned less than men employed at the same
tasks, but more than they had in low-paying, tradi-tional women’s work. As
the war ended, surveys showed 75 percent of women wanted to keep their
higher-paying wartime jobs. Employers began firing women workers in the
spring of 1945, anticipat-ing victory in Europe (V-E Day). Millions of women
were fired—first black women, then women belonging to nonwhite ethnic
groups, then white women. At the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama,
for example, the first 200 workers laid off in June 1945, after V-E Day, were
primarily black women. In August, after the victory over Japan, V-J Day, 500
workers, mostly women, were furloughed from the facility. By the end of
October 1945, no women production employees remained at the Arsenal. At
the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York, women workers had been aggressively
recruited throughout the war and held over 6 percent of the jobs at the
massive facility—some 4,657 out of over 71,000 workers were women. By
the end of the war, nearly all the women workers were gone, replaced by
men who held seniority rights in the unionized workforce or by male veterans
who benefited from the government’s policies of preferential hiring of
returning soldiers. The federal government watched veterans hunt for jobs
with consider-able concern. Firing women supposedly made room for men
coming home from the war, but the rapid decline in military production
meant there were few jobs available for men, either. So many men
demobilized so rapidly from the army and failed to find jobs that
unemployment threatened tosend the economy into crisis. In 1944, hoping to
avoid such problems, President Roosevelt had signed the Servicemen’s
Readjustment Act, better known as the G.I. Bill, to provide immediate
unemployment insurance for veterans. The bill also provided funding for
education, vocational training, and low-cost loans for veterans to buy houses
or start businesses. While male veterans took advantage of the bill, one-third
of women veterans did not even know of the bill and its provisions. Only
about 64,000 women took advantage of the bill to attend college, compared
to 9.2 million men who attended educational institutions or received on-the-
job training. Higher education leading to better jobs would take time,
however. Fearing another Great Depression, President Truman proposed
legislation to secure full employment as part of his domestic program called
the Fair Deal . His “Full Employment Bill,” attempted to even out the boom–
bust business cycle that had plagued the American economy for years. By in-
creasing federal spending and linking it to the unemployment rate, Truman
hoped to guarantee full employment every year for Americans as a basic
right that the power of the federal government would maintain. Such in-
terference with market economics met with nearly universal dismay, and
Congress transformed the bill into the Employment Act of 1946. This act set
up a council of economic advisors to the president who suggested ways that
he could promote policies resulting in “maximum employment, pro-duction
and purchasing power,” rather than guaranteeing jobs to all who wanted
them. Without that guarantee of full employment, the Employment Act of
1946 carried little meaning. It did, however, show that Presidents Truman
and Roosevelt both wanted to prevent another economic depression. It also
reflected the understanding many policy makers had gained from the eco-
nomic turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s. Government failure to deal effec-
tively with massive unemployment during those decades led to the rise of
dictatorial regimes, such as those led by National Socialists in Germany and
the Communist Party in the USSR. As the horrors of the Holocaust became
increasingly apparent to Americans after men and women returned from the
war in Europe, and as veterans and prisoners of war from the Asian theater
told terrible stories of torture, killings, rapes, and other crimes, activists
sought ways to ensure such tragedies would never happen again.

{ WOMEN AND MEN AND UNEMPLOYMENT As the war ended in 1945, women
and men filed for unemployment benefits in Michigan. Similar scenes
appeared across the country as both mil-itary and civilian workforces were
demobilized.}

( DAUGHTERS OF BILITIS, STATEMENT OF PURPOSE

Lesbian women objected to their demoniza-tion by popular culture, but
remained largely unorganized until the 1950s. The Daugh-ters of Bilitis, a
social group for lesbian women, first formed in San Francisco in 1955.
Denigrated by the press and the pub-lic, fearful of persecution in the sexually
re-pressive 1950s, founders Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon sought to contact
and to educate other women to learn about and to accept their
homosexuality. Their group published The Ladder, a newsletter that printed
their mission statement explaining their

goals. They used the word variant instead of lesbian, as the latter word had
negative connotations they wished to avoid.
“Daughters of Bilitis—Purpose
“A women’s organization for the pur-pose of promoting the integration of the
homosexual into society by: “(1) Education of the variant, to enable her to
understand herself and make her adjustment to society . . . in all its social,
civic and economic implications—this to be accomplished by establishing and
maintaining as complete a library as pos-sible of both fiction and non-fiction
lit-erature on the sex deviant theme; by sponsoring public discussions on
perti-nent subjects . . . by advocating a mode of behavior and dress
acceptable to society.
“(2) Education of the public at large through acceptance first of the individ-
ual, leading to an eventual breakdown of erroneous taboos and prejudices;
through public discussion . . . through dissemination of educational literature
on the homosexual theme.
“(3) Participation in research projects by duly authorized and responsible
psy-chologists, sociologists, and other such experts directed towards further
knowl-edge of the homosexual.
“(4) Investigation of the penal code as it pertains to the homosexual,
proposal of changes to provide equitable handing of cases involving this
minority group, and promotion of these changes through the due process of
law in the state legislatures.”)
WOMEN ACTIVISTS FOR A BETTER WORLD
The United States enjoyed enormous power at the end of World War II. It
possessed the largest army and navy, its infrastructure was largely undam-
aged by warfare, its population suffered little deprivation compared to those
of other nations. Its greatest threat came from its former ally, the USSR The
USSR violated the international Yalta agreement of February 1945 that called
for democratic elections in eastern European governments as they were
restored after the war. By May 1945, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill
warned President Truman that the Soviets were draw-ing an “iron curtain”
across Eastern Europe, as the USSR moved to dom-inate the area. Before
long, a cold war began between the United States and the USSR. As the
USSR shut off its territories to free markets and emigration, as it achieved
nuclear capabilities, and as it promoted atheism, the United States
responded with attacks on “godless communism” within its borders. The cold
war would dominate American foreign policy for the next forty years, pitting
activists seeking alternatives to the forces that had led to World War II with
those determined to promote the United States as a Judeo-Christian nation,
rejecting not only communism and socialism, but also atheism and other
religious traditions, as well as lesbianism and other so-called deviant
behavior. (See Primary Source 9-1.)
Communists and Socialists
Women’s activism after World War II took many forms. Some women looked
toward the communism and socialism of the USSR as antidotes for
the excesses of capitalism. Communists argued that collective ownership
was necessary for a society to prosper. They drew upon the ideas of German
political philosopher Karl Marx who held that individuals in society should
both contribute to it as they could and receive from it what they needed. By
1949, the two major communist powers, the USSR and China, became
communist dictatorships, but sympathizers saw them less as dictatorships
and more as role models for how America should modify its capitalist
system. Labor union leaders supported some communist ideas, as did many
of the rank-and-file of groups such as the United Electrical Radio and
Machine Workers of America (UE). Because communists emphasized that
workers or the state, rather than bosses, should own the means of produc-
tion, their ideas appealed to labor supporters who had sacrificed during the
war and now wanted to repair the years of economic restrictions on wages,
prices, and supplies with changes that would benefit them. In 1946, Betty
Friedan, later a founder of the modern women’s rights
movement, began writing for the UE News, the union newspaper. She
penned articles that supported not only communism, but also suggested
automatic seniority in employment for African Americans in the union who
had been discriminated against for years, child care support for women in
the indus-try, and a pay-equity system that would help women workers
overcome the discrimination that they faced in the union shops. She wrote
articles describ-ing instances of racism against African Americans and
Latinas, and charged union officials as well as management with being both
anti-Semitic and sex-ist. She documented the differences between
management and labor with a portrait of each that delineated the wealth of
the former and the poverty of the latter. Working-class women, she declared,
did not even earn enough money to provide fresh vegetables or new clothes
for their families, while their bosses spent extravagantly on consumer goods.
Women were valued as customers, but not as workers. Friedan pointed out
that advertisements glo-rified American women in “gleaming” General
Electric kitchens, using West-inghouse appliances, watching Sylvania TV sets.
Nothing was too good for the American woman, except decent pay and
working conditions from Gen-eral Electric, Westinghouse, Sylvania, and other
corporations producing the goods she was expected to buy. While not a
member of the Communist Party, Friedan believed that communism valued
women for their labor.
( ELEANOR ROOSEVELT SPEAKS TO THE UNITED NATIONS
The former first lady and chairperson of the Commission on Human Rights
spoke before the United Nations on March 27, 1958, to celebrate the tenth
anniversary ofthe Decla-ration of Human Rights. Her ideas, embod-ied in the
document, echoed a long trajectory of political theory that governments are
duty-bound to respect the inalienable rights ofthose they govern. Roosevelt,
however, em-phasized the humanitarian aspect of equal rights and the
community’s role in protect-ing those rights. “Where, after all, do universal
human rights begin? In small places, close to home—so close and so small
that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of
the indi-vidual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he
attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the places
where every man, woman, and child seeks equal jus-tice, equal opportunity,
equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there,
they have
little meaning anywhere. Without con-certed citizen action to uphold them
close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.
“Thus we believe that the destiny of human rights is in the hands of all our
citizens in all our communities.”)

Internationalists
While communism attracted some women activists, others participated in
different international organizations. Eleanor Roosevelt, who left the White
House in April 1945 after her husband died, reemerged in the later 1940s
and 1950s as an internationalist. Shortly after President Roosevelt’s death,
President Truman appointed Mrs. Roosevelt to the United States Delega-tion
to the United Nations (UN), a newly formed organization dedicated to
achieving world peace. While there, she chaired the Human Rights
Commission to draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a docu-ment
that she hoped would be as important as the French Declaration of the Rights
of Man and the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights. The General Assembly of the
UN adopted the document in 1948, and Roosevelt re-mained prouder of that
accomplishment than of any other achievement in her long career. Her
humanitarian concerns, her warmth and humor, and her innate intelligence
were made even more formidable by her steely resolve that humans—all
humans—deserved to be treated with respect and dignity (see Primary
Source 9-2). She debated the Soviets in the UN and in 1948 threatened to
resign if President Truman refused to recog-nize and aid the controversial
founding of the new nation of Israel, which she viewed as a haven for Jews
after the horrors of the Holocaust. In addition to her work in the international
community, Roosevelt con-tinued her activism on the national stage. She
joined the NAACP board of directors and spoke out on the importance of civil
rights. She helped cre-ate the group Americans for Democratic Action to
push for social reform. She continued her service on the Women’s Division of
the Democratic National Committee until the party disbanded the committee
in 1953, integrating women into the party structure. She interviewed world
and national leaders on an educational television show called Prospects of
Mankind, and served on presidential commissions not only on civil rights, but
on women’s rights as well.
Many women in the postwar years continued to join activist groups.
The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) car-ried
on the work it had launched at the beginning of the century. During World
War II, it defended the war as necessary to aid the innocent victims of
fascism, and in 1946, American Emily Greene Balch, its international
secretary, received the Nobel Peace Prize, the second American woman todo
so (the first had been Jane Addams in 1931). In her acceptance speech,
Balch spoke for the entire organization in hoping that the year would be a
turning point for peace, disarmament, and the “renunciation of power
politics,” but it was not to be. International tensions shifted the focus to Asia,
as Communists in China, the USSR, and Korea fought for control of the
Korean peninsula. War broke out in June 1950, and the United Nations joined
the fray, sending troops to try to resolve the conflict. The WILPF opposed the
war, and member Jeanette Rankin, who had cast the lone vote in the House
of Representatives opposing the U.S. entry into World War II, spoke out
against the Korean War and in favor of total disarmament and the end of war.
Another women’s group active after the war was the Congress of
American Women (CAW), founded in Paris in 1945 as the U.S. branch of the
Women’s International Democratic Federation, an antifascist, pro-Soviet,
leftist organization. The group, a prolabor, antiracist organization that
attracted a number of African American supporters among its officers and
members, had more black women as officers than any other feminist
organization before or since. CAW affiliated itself with numerous other
national organizations to work for integration, against racism, for a higher
minimum wage, against postwar inflation, as well as for child care for work-
ing mothers, job training and women’s access to professional schools, and
for laundries and kitchens in public housing projects. The group, a link to
earlier suffragists and Progressive reformers, attracted numerous women
eager to work in the wider world as they called for world peace as well as full
economic, social, legal, and political rights for women.
Cold War Reactions
After only a year, CAW had 250,000 members. In 1947, however, the group,
like so many other international groups after the war, came up against
President Truman’s containment policy, the Cold War, and the anti-
communist hysteria of the late 1940s and 1950s, and was forced to defend
itself against attacks from the administration. Truman, fearing the spread of
communism through Soviet expansion into Europe and Chinese domi-nance
in Asia, announced that the policy of the United States would be to contain
that spread by helping any country trying to resist communism. Communism,
declared Truman, was “based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed
upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and
radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.” The Cold
War between the two systems of economy and gov-ernment, capitalism and
democracy versus communism (led by the United States and the USSR), led
to an arms race as both sides manufac-tured increasingly destructive nuclear
weapons. Civil defense against such weapons required the participation of
every American, including women. The government urged women, as
mothers and nurturers, to prepare their families for attacks. Its publications
emphasized women’s responsibility to control the fear and panic family
members might feel while they simultane-ously prepared for an attack. The
government also encouraged women to
organize their homes in case of disasters, telling them that “good house-
keeping is the first line of defense against fire,” explaining how to stock first-
aid kits, prepare basement shelters, and how to recognize the different air-
raid alert signals that would alert Americans to a feared Soviet onslaught. As
the Cold War escalated, women’s peace organizations such as CAW were
criticized and linked to communism in ways that discredited their work.
Groups lost members as the government called various groups to testify
before Congress regarding their links to communism and, specifically, to the
Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). For example, in
1948, the House of Representatives’ House Unamerican Ac-tivities
Committee (HUAC) attacked CAW because it called for the United States to
ban atomic bombs and to establish friendly relations with the Soviet Union.
HUAC accused CAW of being an enemy agent of the govern-ment, despite a
membership roster that included Susan B. Anthony II (the suffragist’s niece),
Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s daughter Harriot Blatch, Wom-en’s Air Force Service
Pilots’ former director Jacqueline Cochran, Eleanor Roosevelt’s daughter-in-
law Faye Emerson, and Anne Carter Schneiderman, the national vice
president of the American Jewish Congress. By 1950, mem-bership had
dropped to 3,000. Threatened with a $10,000 fine and five years’
imprisonment each, officers of the group gave up, and the CAW disbanded,
unwilling to register as an enemy agent of the United States. Attacks on
women’s activist movements drove many women away from
such groups. The HUAC, in particular, specialized in ruining lives and
reputations. In the Senate, Senator Joseph McCarthy, chair of the Govern-
ment Committee on Operations of the Senate, magnified the HUAC indings
with hearings that were televised, broadcast on the radio, and re-ported
breathlessly in the press as uncovering communist infiltration ev-erywhere.
The hearings were nothing more or less than witch-hunts. McCarthy used
lies, innuendos, gossip, and occasionally, though not often, facts to accuse
hundreds of mostly innocent Americans of links to com-munism. Republican
McCarthy, inspired by earlier trials of spies who had given the Soviet Union
plans they used to produce atomic weapons (and afraid he would lose his
Senate seat if voters discovered he had lied about his war record and was
taking bribes from Pepsi-Cola), seized upon a friend’s suggestion that he
“find” communist subversives in the Democratic administration. He began
his smear campaign in 1950, claiming to know of dozens of people in the
State Department who were communists. When people responded with
demands for proof, McCarthy suggested that asking for proof meant they
were communists, too. One of his followers, Richard Nixon, used similar
tactics in the California senatorial race of 1950. He accused his opponent,
Representative Helen Gahagan Douglas, of being “pink,” or communist,
“right down to her underwear.” Douglas failed to convince voters the attacks
were false and lost the election. Anti-Communist hysteria reached its peak in
1952. The McCarthy hearings were successful because Americans were
worried. The war in Korea was going badly, China had become communist,
the Soviet Union had “the bomb,” and McCarthy seemed to have valid
information that communist spies had infiltrated the State Department. He
moved on to investigate the entertainment industry, American colleges, and
anti-American library books. Union members and homosexuals came under
attack as well. An enduring legacy of the Cold War era came in the form of
an Executive Order that President Eisenhower signed in 1953 (and in force
until 1975) mandating the firing of any federal employee deemed guilty of
“sexual perversion,” causing lesbians in all kinds of government employment
—from clerical workers to supervisors in public agencies—to lose their jobs.
Meanwhile the antihomosexual witch-hunt in the military escalated, with
lesbians subject to incarceration as well as “other than hon-orable”
discharges throughout the cold war era.

(CIVIL DEFENSE BOMB SHELTER Frightened of nuclear war after the USSR
announced it too had achieved nuclear capabilities in 1949, many Americans
built underground bomb shelters. Above-ground testing of nuclear weapons
caused radioactive fallout, so city dwellers relied on government-provided
bomb shelters, stocked with emergency supplies, and often organized by
women as volunteer civil defense wardens. Here, a young woman relaxes in
a fallout shelter in 1961.)

(MARGARET CHASE SMITH’S PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN SONG

Sen. Margaret Chase Smith eventually ran for president in 1964. Lyrics to her
cam-paign song refl ect the cultural necessity of combining cultural
standards of femininity with the unfeminine feat of running for president.
“Leave It to the Girls” by Hildegard (Gladys Shelley)
Leave it to the girls, Where there’s a frill,)
And a powder puff there’s greater skill
Leave it to the chicks
They’ve got a million magic tricks To change the course of history Their
know-how is a mystery
Leave it to the girls They’re heaven sent
It could be that our next president Will wear perfume and pearls
Be diplomatic in pin curls For love and glory leave it to the girls
G is for the good in every woman I is for ideals for which they stand And r
and l and s And now, as you may guess, When you spell girls, my friend You
spell success.
Source: © Gladys Shelley, from [Link]/
program/library/[Link].
Finally, in 1954, Sen. McCarthy attacked the U.S. Army and the secre-tary of
the army, Robert Stevens. Televised hearings made clear to all who watched
McCarthy’s despicable actions. So did speeches by senators such as
Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, the first woman elected to the Senate (see
Chapter 8). She declared that as a woman, as a Republican, as a senator,
and as an American, she was appalled at the tactics used by HUAC and
McCarthy, even if at times the accusations were genuine. Americans needed
to maintain their fairness and respect for others who held different beliefs,
she said. At the same time, Smith proposed making the Communist Party
illegal in a bill that she introduced in 1954. Like many politicians, Smith
walked a fine line to preserve her office during a time when Americans
greatly feared communism and the specter of atomic warfare. (See Primary
Source 9-3.)
BACK TO THE HOME
The ruined reputations and lives of Americans accused of links to com-
munism gave pause to many who might otherwise have involved themselves
in the public sphere. Millions of American women had already made that
choice, however, less for reasons of politics than for reasons of home and
family. Promoted by the government and confirmed by popular culture, the
back-to-home movement after World War II spawned suburbs, a baby boom,
a culture of consumerism, and the revival of a cult of true woman-hood,
repackaged as the “Feminine Mystique.”
The Government’s Push for Domesticity
The federal government, concerned about the economic impact of demo-
bilization, made a priority of convincing women working in war industries to
give up their jobs to returning servicemen. While many women resented
leaving good-paying jobs, others did not. The government used one war-time
survey to promote a return to the home, since it reflected women’s
ambivalence about working. Of those women surveyed, 74 percent of women
wanted to marry and become a homemaker while about 18 percent wanted
marriage and a successful career. Government-sponsored newsreels
interviewed working women eager for their men to come home and take
over. Other newsreels showed children playing in the streets, and blamed
working mothers for juvenile delinquency. Combined with the continued
difficulty women had finding adequate daycare, many mothers would find it
impossible to continue working after the war. The government also
contracted with the American Historical Asso-ciation to find scholars to
research and write forty-two pamphlets examin-ing various issues important
to the postwar world, including women working. The War Manpower
Commission then distributed the pamphlets for discussion among soldiers to
prepare them for their return home. One pamphlet asked soldiers, “Do You
Want Your Wife to Work after the War?” The author and sociologist Clifford
Kirkpatrick recognized that not all women were alike, any more than men
were, and that many women enjoyed their jobs in wartime industries and
might be reluctant to return to what
some viewed as the drudgery of housework. He suggested that returning
veterans be open to discussion with their wives (making the assumption all
veterans were men), and that they remember that many schemes had been
suggested for solving what he termed the “woman problem,” namely, that
“women will continue to want babies and to want work that is satisfying.”
Husbands should recognize this and do their part, said Kirkpatrick, even if it
meant doing the occasional dish. The Christian Science Monitor, among other
popular publications , was not impressed with the War Department wasting
its time producing a “booklet of instructions” for soldiers “on the mysteries of
women!” Asking soldiers to help do dishes, one author re-marked
sarcastically, would “slow down demobilization.” “G.I. Joe” had enough to
worry about as it was, and the “military master of manners” who had come
up with the idea ought to let him exercise his masculine pre-rogative and
“splash in the dishpan” instead. Women did leave their wartime jobs, but
continued to work, filling jobs that had gone begging during the war, and
seeing their income drop from an average wage of fifty to thirty-seven
dollars per week. By 1947, there were more women working than before the
war and more married women working as well. Seventy percent of
professional women worked in fields traditional to women: teachers, nurses,
and librarians. More white women went to college than before, but a greater
proportion dropped out to marry—only 37 percent finished their degrees.
Ninety percent of black women who went to college finished their degrees,
but far fewer black women were able to attend institutions of higher
education, and racial discrimination kept many African Americans out of the
professions. Numbers of African American farm women declined as well, as
black southerners continued to migrate north and west. Near Las Vegas,
Nevada, for example, thousands of black women, originally drawn to the city
by war industries, settled into a substantial black community. Recruited by
the Basic Magnesium Corporation that produced magnesium used in bombs
during the war, whole families had migrated from towns in Arkansas and
Mississippi. After the war, new employment opportunities became available
for black women in the casinos and hotels of the growing Las Vegas area.
They traded chopping cotton at $2.50 a week for, as one worker put it “eight
dollars a day and working in the shade.” Domestic work in the South paid
only about $5.00 a week, and included ironing, cooking, child care, and
serving, leaving workers little time to spend with their families. In Las Vegas,
however, women’s jobs such as cleaning hotel rooms were often protected
by unions such as the Culinary Workers Union. Unions meant better wages,
possible advancement, and leisure time after one’s shift. De-spite the
discrimination that still existed in both jobs and housing, Las Vegas, along
with other cities in the North and West, offered new possi-bilities to African
American women fleeing the South’s Jim Crow segrega-tion and lack of
economic mobility. The black population of Las Vegas climbed from 178 in
1940 to 16,000 by 1955.
Despite the millions of women who continued in the workforce after
the war, however, the government and industry continued to portray work-
ing women as oddities. The government was anxious to prevent another
depression; industry was anxious to increase consumer spending as they
shifted from war materiel to consumer goods. Advertising agencies, in league
with the government and manufacturers, made a concerted effort to inform
American women that their proper place was in the home, consum-ing
goods.
(WOMEN’S FASHIONS FOR WOMEN’S NEW ROLE In 1947, after years of
making do with made-over clothes and wartime uniforms, American women
woke up to new possibilities of fash-ion with designer Christian Dior’s “New
Look.” Characterized by fuller skirts, rich fabrics, and constricting
construction, these clothes were made for women with new amounts of
leisure time to spend, rather than laboring in factories. The look epitomized
the return of the True Woman in twentieth-century style.)

The Baby Boom, Suburbia, and Conspicuous Consumption

Returning veterans and the women in their lives began the road to con-
spicuous consumption by making babies and outfitting them with all the
goods they could. The average age at first marriage dropped from 21.5 in
1940 to 19 in 1955, rising slightly to 20.3 in 1962. One-third of all women
who married in 1951 were only 19. Women also began having children at
younger ages. Between 1946 and 1960, on average, women had all their
children before they turned 26. The birthrate climbed from 18.5 children per
thousand women to 25.3 children per thousand women between 1933 and
1955. In 1940, only 2.6 million babies were born; by 1957, there were 4.7
million. The average family size grew as well because women wanted more
children. Surveys taken by government agencies showed that over 40
percent of women in 1955 wanted four or more children, and nearly 60
percent wanted two or three. Fewer than 5 percent wanted no children, a
choice made possible by easier access to birth control (Margaret Sanger’s
Birth Control League had become Planned Parenthood in 1942). By 1960,
when birth control pills were first introduced, an even larger proportion of
women wanted four or more children, and the majority of women still wanted
at least two or three. Childbearing rates were even greater for women of
color and immigrant women, as well as for rural women. Nearly all American
women contributed to what was termed the baby boom in the years from
1946 to 1964.
Families with children needed places to live. Shortly after the war,
responding to a critical housing shortage, the housing boom began in ear-
nest. In Pennsylvania, halfway between urban centers of Philadelphia and
Trenton, New Jersey, developer William Levitt built more than 17,000 single-
family homes on some 5,500 acres. He patterned them after the government
housing he had built for defense workers in 1941 near the naval shipyard in
Norfolk, Virginia. Levitt went on to perfect his mass building techniques with
other communities in New York, New Jersey, Puerto Rico, and in
Pennsylvania. The planned communities included shopping centers, schools,
churches, and recreational facilities—parks, ball fields, and community
swimming pools. Suburbs such as Levittown pro-vided white Americans with
a respite from crowded urban living and left additional housing in cities
available for immigrants and people of color. For as little as sixty-seven
dollars a month, and with mortgages often sub-sidized by the G.I. Bill,
suburbanites could own their own homes in the country, complete with
developer-provided landscaping. Homes were standardized, with only a few
models available. Levitt planned his houses with children in mind, using large
open spaces, patio areas where adults could congregate while keeping an
eye on the children, and modern kitch-ens with the latest appliances, as he
advertised, to “take the labor out of housekeeping.”
Advertisements for suburban housing were often directed at women. “When
a woman goes house-hunting,” read one ad for the General Electric
appliances in a Levittown house, “the place she usually heads for first is the
kitchen. This is where she spends so much of her day. This is where she’s
most likely to fall in love with the house, or reject it.” Levittown’s chief
architect bragged that thanks to the number of appliances the houses con-
tained, “the girls will have three hours to kill every afternoon.” Time saved
by appliances would be spent in shopping for additional consumer goods,
sewing clothes and curtains, caring for more children, participating in var-
ious activities involving children, and planning events revolving around
family life and children. The nuclear family, which had been disrupted by the
Great Depression and World War II, reappeared as the norm. The culture of
conspicuous consumption and production, centered around the growing
family, was further spurred by advertisements on tele-vision, the new
medium of choice. There were 3 million televisions sets in America in 1950.
By 1960 there were 55 million, and 530 television stations broadcast
programs in the United States. Food was invented to serve while watching
television—the frozen TV dinner, heated in the oven and placed on TV trays
to eat while watching shows that glorified suburban life, such as Father
Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver . Wives in the television shows dressed in
the latest fashions, often cleaning in dresses and pearls. Hus-bands left
home to go to “the city” for work, and returned to solve the dilemmas wives
and mothers seemed unable to resolve. While occasionally screenwriters
allowed women characters to vent their frustration at their never-ending
round of domestic chores, the lack of appreciation for their work, and their
limited options to change their lives, usually by the end of the half-hour
show, women became resigned to their lives as housewives and embraced
domesticity as what they and their families really wanted.
The Feminine Mystique
In many ways, the decade of the fifties represented a revival of the cult of
domesticity that had characterized the first half of the nineteenth century,
promoting many of the same ideas: the home is a woman’s base of power
and her true sphere for activity. The God-given task of all women became
once again to be a wife and mother. Any deviation from that task would lead
to unhappiness for women and the rest of society, including men and
children. The education of women remained useful because it would help
them rear children to be useful citizens of the nation. Once again as well,
mothers were the religious leader of the family in that they were respon-sible
for the morality of home and the religious upbringing of the children. Mothers
achieved happiness and satisfaction only through service to others. A wife’s
task was to create a haven for her hard-working husband who worked hard in
the public sphere. Feminists were neurotic, homosexual, envious of men, and
wanted to be men. In the same way that the cult of domesticity and the
ideals of True Womanhood were grounded in nineteenth-century white,
middle-class America and assumed followers had an income that made it
possible to pursue domesticity to the exclusion of earning a living, so did
mid-twentieth-century domesticity. This time it had a different name: the
feminine mystique.
The term feminine mystique was coined by Betty Friedan in her book of the
same name published in 1963. It was a sociological survey of Friedan’s
former Smith College classmates in the 1950s. Friedan had earned her
degree in 1942, then married and had children. While she had spent much of
the 1940s writing for labor organizations, in her book she disguised or
ignored that part of her life to focus instead on her life in suburbia. She
emphasized that she had done much the same as many women of the period
so that she could make a larger point: life in suburbia was stifling women by
presenting them with a virtually unattainable role model. Friedan had gone to
graduate school to study sociology, but faced dif-ficulties when the men in
her department refused to take her or her work seriously because she was a
woman. She also saw other women facing sim-ilar problems. Many of the
women she interviewed during her research were bored with their suburban
lives, the lack of challenge or chance to use their educations. Society
recognized the problem Friedan described, that highly educated women were
living limited lives and were denied any respect from society at large, despite
the activities they undertook to raise the next generation safely and well.
Instead, various experts told women that they “could desire no greater
destiny than to glory in their own fem-ininity. . . . All they had to do was
devote their lives from earliest girlhood to finding a husband and bearing
children.” According to the experts, devoting one’s life to fulfilling one’s
feminin-ity by marrying and bearing children was the highest goal that a
woman could achieve. A woman who failed to accept that goal, who wished
to have a career outside the home in addition to or instead of marriage and
chil-dren, was always going to have and be a problem. Women who wanted
careers were trying to be men, instead of housewives and mothers, their true
destiny. Friedan argued that this belief—the feminine mystique—had limited
women by declaring that those who did not live up to it were de-nying their
femininity. She particularly objected to negative ways in which the image of a
true American woman, one who believed and lived the feminine mystique,
were promoted in popular culture. One way the cultural myth of the feminine
mystique was promulgated was by dressing it up using terms drawn from
sociology, psychology, and psychiatry. One 1947 best-seller using such
terminology was Modern Woman: The Lost Sex written by psychiatrist
Marynia Farnham, MD, and sociologist Ferdinand Lundberg. In this
antifeminist polemic, the authors divided mothers into two categories: those
who produced normal children and those who produced neurotic children.
Neurotic mothers produced neu-rotic children by rejecting them,
overprotecting them, dominating them, and being overly affectionate toward
them. Neurotic mothers also produced delinquents, children with difficult
behavior problems, “some substantial” percentage of criminals, confirmed
alcoholics, and general all-around trou-blemakers. The common factor that
all neurotic mothers shared was the
limited number of children they had—only one or two. The implication
women could readily draw was that if they wished to avoid such problem
children, they should have as many children as they could.
Popular Culture and Domesticity
The mass media also promulgated the feminine mystique in books, maga-
zines, television, and the movies. In 1946, the Best Picture Oscar went to a
movie called The Best Years of Our Lives . The story followed soldiers re-
turning home from the war, looking forward to marriage and suburbia. The
one character with a wife who did not want children divorced her in favor of
the stay-at-home girl who did. Another Oscar-winning film, for best actress,
featured Joan Crawford. In Mildred Pierce, Crawford played a suc-cessful
career woman with a spoiled daughter. Mildred divorced her first husband,
whom she emasculated by being more successful at her job than he was at
his. The spoiled daughter then stole Mildred’s second husband and later
killed him, an unsubtle warning to women who put their careers before their
families. Women’s magazines promoted home life—the elaboration of
interiors, more complex cooking, more time-consuming chores, and home
sewing. They printed interviews with doctors and psychologists on marriage
and motherhood and published articles with titles such as “How to Help Your
Husband Get Ahead” and “What Is a Well-Dressed Woman?” Romance novels
promoted “happily ever after” endings. Best-sellers in the postwar era
included advice books on homemaking, cooking, catching a husband, and
raising a family. The most famous was Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Common Sense
Book of Baby and Child Care, first published in 1945, revised continu-ally,
translated into 39 languages, and selling over 50 million copies. In the end,
however, television had the greatest impact in promulgating the feminine
mystique. The number one show in the nation in its time slot from 1952 to
1955 was I Love Lucy, starring Lucille Ball. Two-thirds of all Americans
watching television at that moment were watching her situation comedy. The
show had a domestic orientation—the story of a wife and her Cuban
bandleader husband, played by Ball’s real-life husband, Desi Arnaz. The wife
in the show was childlike and economically dependent on her husband. The
show revolved around Lucy’s attempts to perform in her husband’s club or
take other jobs. Whenever Lucy tried to work, she failed because of
incompetence, stupidity, or ignorance, or because she was dis-covered
behind a disguise she had to assume in order to work because her husband
did not think she should. To make society’s point regarding work-ing women
even clearer, those women on the show who did work were portrayed as
extremes: unattractive and bossy, or sexy, beautiful home-wreckers.
Lucille Ball, ironically, was one of the most powerful women in Hollywood
during and after the course of the show. She was an actress, singer, dancer,
comic, radio star, a brilliant businesswoman, and the firstwoman to own a
major studio. Her fans adored her and millions watched every week as she
portrayed a woman incapable of functioning in a sphere other than the
domestic one so many women occupied. Unlike the char-acter she played,
who had little interest in the world outside the domestic sphere, Lucille Ball’s
fame did not shield her from the larger political world. She was called before
the HUAC to testify about her Communist Party membership in 1953.
Apolitical, she had joined in 1936 to please her grand-father, a socialist. She
disavowed any knowledge of the party in her testi-mony and provided, as
historian Dan Georgakas put it, “garbled and meaningless testimony.” Her
husband Desi was quoted as saying the only thing red about Lucy was her
hair and that was fake. Playing dumb—playing “feminine”—got her out of the
HUAC hearing unscathed. The feminine mystique, pervasive in so many
ways, was hostile to pow-erful women and to feminism as well. Despite
widespread activities by well-known women peace activists, the postwar
period saw the collapse of the major political organizations for women. The
leaders of the suffragist movement were retired or dead. The Women’s Trade
Union League dis-banded in 1950. Goals many women’s groups had fought
had been achieved: the vote, the abolition of child labor, protective
legislation. Another major goal of the feminists, the Equal Rights
Amendment, had little support. Promoted by the National Woman’s Party,
approved by the Senate in 1950 and 1953, it was opposed in the House as
well as by leading women’s groups, such as the American Association for
University Women (AAUW), the Young Women’s Christian Association
(YWCA), and the League of Women Voters, because it would mostly likely end
protective legislation for women. Even the White House had become less
interested in women’s issues. The New Deal’s support for change that had
come from Eleanor Roosevelt and the Democrats disappeared in 1952 with
the election of the Republican president Dwight Eisenhower. Outgoing
president Harry Truman’s wife, Bess, had advised her husband behind the
scenes. Eisenhower’s wife, First Lady Mamie Eisenhower, however, was
known better for her bangs and her love of pink than her activism. “Every
woman over fifty,” said Mrs. Eisenhower to the White House chief usher on
her first day as first lady, “should stay in bed until noon,” and so she did,
reading and watching her favorite soap opera until lunchtime. Having spent
years following after her husband and his military postings to various locales,
Mamie Eisenhower was thrilled to settle into the White House and believed
that women be-longed primarily in the domestic sphere. While part of Mamie
Eisenhow-er’s reluctance to participate in politics was due to her health
problems (heart disease, asthma, and Meniere’s disease, which affected her
balance), she also believed that women with careers were “unfeminine.” In
an article for Today’s Woman magazine, she declared, “Our lives revolve
around our men, and that is the way it should be. . . . Being a wife is the best
career that life has to offer a woman. . . . [A] job that will take you out among
people and give you extra money seems very desirable. But life will be far
more rewarding if you do not yield to that temptation. If you do, you may find
yourself with nothing but a job twenty years from now.”

AFRICAN AMERICANS AND THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

Where Mamie Eisenhower did take a stand on a public issue, unexpectedly,
was with her quiet support for civil rights. African Americans had always
resisted the constant pressure exerted by white society to limit their ac-
tivities. Their successful participation in World War II, where they fought and
died to free Europeans and Asians from the forces of Nazi Germany and
Imperial Japan, combined with the rise of new leaders in the fifties to renew
the fight for civil rights and against the segregation so institutional-ized in
the South.
Resistance to segregation and discrimination, as was true of resistance
to slavery, took many forms. For some, like Mamie Eisenhower, it was largely
symbolic, exemplified by her integration of the White House Easter Egg roll
and her honorary membership of the National Council of Negro Women. For
some in authority, such as her husband the president, it in-cluded forcing the
integration of the Navy yards, veterans’ hospitals, and public services in
Washington, DC. For others, it might be an act fraught with the possibility of
public humiliation, such as sneaking a drink from a “whites only” drinking
fountain when no one was looking, or refusing to give up a seat on a bus—a
seat paid for—to a white passenger, as Irene Morgan had done in 1946.
Desegregation and the Law
The civil rights movement in the second half of the twentieth century
included both individual acts of resistance that blossomed into collective
action, as well as concerted efforts in the courts to overturn Plessy v.
Ferguson, the decision that legalized segregation as long as “separate but
equal” facilities existed. In 1938, the Supreme Court ruled that an African
American applicant to the law school of the University of Missouri had to be
admitted, since there were no separate but equal law schools in Missouri for
him to attend. In 1949, the Kansas State Supreme Court ruled that black
children in a dilapidated ninety-year-old school building were not being
treated equally with white students at a brand-new school and con-sequently
should be admitted to the new school. In 1950, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled
in favor of integration in similar cases in Texas and Oklahoma. Morgan v.
Virginia (1946), with which this chapter began, overturned seg-regation in
interstate transportation. Smith v. Allwright (1944) overturned the all-white
primaries in the South. Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) struck down restrictive
covenants that prevented homeowners from selling to minorities, restrictions
all too common in postwar housing developments. In 1954, Constance
Motley, graduate of Columbia Law School and a lawyer for the NAACP’s Legal
Defense and Educational Fund (LDEF), worked with Thurgood Marshall, an
NAACP lawyer and future Supreme Court justice, on the case of Brown v.
Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the case that overturned legal
segregation in schools. Motley had experience trying cases related to
education in Alabama, Oklahoma, Texas, and Georgia. As a black woman
lawyer practicing in the South, she faced discrimination and prejudice daily.
LDEF lawyer Derrick Bell pointed out that to South-ern male lawyers, African
America women “were either mammies, maids or mistresses. None of them
had ever dealt with a Negro woman on a peer basis, much less on a level of
intellectual equality, which in this case, quickly became superiority.” Motley,
a native of Connecticut, found no housing but that provided by black
Southerners sympathetic to her work, could not eat but in segregated
restaurants, and typically was introduced or referred to by judges by her first
name alone, all instances reflecting the casual white supremacist methods
used in the South to oppress black Americans. In the end, however, she
succeeded, not only in the Brown case, but in her career, becoming the first
black woman federal court justice in the country. The Brown decision in
which Motley played such an important role revolved around Linda Brown of
Topeka, Kansas, who wanted to go to a local school four blocks from her
house, rather than the all-black school, a five-mile bus ride away. The local
chapter of the NAACP helped the parents of Brown and thirteen other
children file a class-action lawsuit against Topeka’s Board of Education. When
the case went to the Supreme Court, the justices ruled unanimously that the
doctrine of separate but equal established by Plessy v. Ferguson was
inherently unequal when it came to public schools. Topeka’s elementary
schools integrated peacefully; its middle and high schools were already
integrated.
Desegregation and Nonviolent Protest The court cases that culminated in
Brown provided black and liberal white
Americans with the legal ammunition to end segregation. Achieving that end,
however, required popular protest as well. One example, the Montgomery
Bus Boycott, began in December 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama. Rosa Parks
had already been arrested and fined in 1943 for refusing to give up her seat
to a white person when a bus driver ordered her to. In 1955, four other
women, Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald, Claudette Colvin, and Mary Louise
Smith, were arrested on similar charges. These women would eventu-ally file
a lawsuit against the city. Parks tried a different tactic. After training in
protest methods at Highlander Folk School in the summer, on December 1,
1955, she again refused to give up her seat in the colored section to a white
man when the bus driver—the same who had done so in 1943, ironically—
ordered her to. She was arrested and charged first with refusing to obey the
orders of the bus driver and later with violating city ordinances that deter-
mined where she could sit based on her race. Black activist Edgar Daniel “E.
D.” Nixon, along with Virginia and Clifford Durr, liberal white support-ers of
civil rights who had urged Parks to go to Highlander, bailed the quiet,
dignified, resolute woman out of jail. (See Primary Source 9-4.) The night
Rosa Parks was arrested, Jo Anne Robinson, an English professor at Alabama
State College and president of the Women’s PoliticalCouncil (WPC) of
Montgomery, mimeographed 30,000 flyers calling for a bus boycott for
distribution. Robinson’s group, organized because the League of Women
Voters in Montgomery remained all-white, had been active since 1946. In
1954, Robinson had written to the mayor threatening a boycott if the city’s
practices on buses did not change. The WPC not only wanted buses to stop
at more corners as they did in white neighbor-hoods, but, more important, it
wanted the city to eliminate the practice of blacks being forced to board and
pay at the front, then get off the bus, walk to the back door, and enter from
there, often being left behind after they had paid their fare. The mayor
refused. Now, over a year later, came an opportunity for the black
community to carry out its threat. Some 200 volunteers distributed the flyers
Robinson printed and the one-day boycott on December 5 was such a
success that the president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr., called for it to continue. It did so, for more than a year.
Seventeen thousand blacks formed car pools, walked, and received rides
from sympathetic or, often, frustrated employers who wanted them doing
their jobs. Dr. King promoted nonviolent, passive resistance to segregation
laws, hoping to wear down those who opposed him and his followers, “by our
capacity to suffer.” Over one hundred people were arrested during the
boycott, includ-ing Dr. King. His house and that of E. D. Nixon were bombed.
The boycott spread to Tallahassee, Florida, where it lasted from May 1956
until 1958, and to Macon, Georgia, in 1962. Since African Americans were the
majority of bus passengers, losing them as customers could bring a bus
company to its knees. On June 19, 1956, a federal district court ruled that
segregated busing violated the Fourteenth Amendment, denying African
Americans equal pro-tection of the laws and due process. The class action
lawsuit Browder v. Gayle, filed by the four women arrested prior to Parks,
went to the Supreme Court and ended segregated busing. On November 13,
1956, the Supreme Court refused to overturn the lower court ruling.
Montgomery and the state of Alabama appealed, but on December 20, the
Supreme Court or-dered integrated busing. After 381 days the boycott was
over. In her memoir, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who
Started
It, JoAnn Robinson recalled that on the day of victory, “the black citizens
were too tired to gloat, to lose their dignity in public rejoicing. The time was
too sacred, the need prayerful, the masses tearful and filled with thanks-
giving. For God had led them through the wilderness of discrimination and
abusive treatment. . . . They could pay their fare as others did, take a seat,
go to their destinations by bus with dignity and respect and be treated as
human beings!” Rosa Parks recalled that she did not feel particularly
victorious, either. “There still had to be a great deal to do.” Parks was
correct. Segregation in public transportation had ended, but many other
forms of segregation continued. The nonviolent resistance black
Montgomerians practiced during the boycott proved difficult for white au-
thorities to overcome, but the tactic took time. Black Americans grew im-
patient and sought a quicker way to end segregation. In January 1957, Dr.
King and his followers met in Atlanta and formed the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference (SCLC) to capitalize on the success of the boycott and
coordinate efforts to continue the fight to desegregate America. The voter
registration drive of the SCLC began shortly after Congress passed the Civil
Rights Act of 1957. The act established a Civil Rights Commission and a Civil
Rights Division in the Justice Department of the federal govern-ment. The
latter would focus its work on cases of African Americans being prevented
from voting or registering to vote. The SCLC seized the initia-tive and
announced they would register 2 million voters. Women in the SCLC included
South Carolinian Septima Clark, who had worked with Thurgood Marshall and
the NAACP to equalize teachers’ salaries in South Carolina so that black
teachers were paid the same as whites. Her salary tripled after the success
of the court case in which she had participated. Interested in activities such
as providing health care for poor children and providing scholarships for
deserving students, Clark worked with various benevolent organizations,
particularly interracial ones such as the Community Chest, as well as groups
such as the Metropolitan Council of Negro Women. In 1954, after the Brown
decision, Clark was fired from her teaching job for refusing to relinquish her
membership in the NAACP. She was hired by Highlander Folk School as
director of the workshops that would train so many civil rights activists. She
viewed the work of the SCLC as parallel to her work with Highlander, where
she worked until the state shut the school down in 1961 for making
moonshine (illegal alcohol), selling chewing gum, and being entirely too
successful at training activists who helped to register African Americans to
vote.

( THE SOUTHERN BELLE AND CIVIL RIGHTS

Southern white women who participated in the civil rights movement
overcame not only racism but the ever-present mythic fig-ure of the
Southern Belle. Virginia Durr attended Wellesley College in the 1920s, a
Southern belle and a bigot. There she learned racial tolerance and
intellectual open-mindedness at the integrated tables of the college dining
halls. After her marriage,
she and her husband worked in Washington as New Dealers. In 1938, Virginia
helped found the Southern Conference on Human Welfare, and worked with
Eleanor Roos-evelt to lobby Congress to abolish the poll tax, designed to
keep blacks from voting. The Durrs returned to Alabama in 1951
and joined the NAACP, wholeheartedly supporting the Montgomery Bus
Boycott.

About her life as a Southern white woman activist, Durr liked the description
in the foreword that Studs Terkel wrote for her autobiography.
“[T]here were three ways for a well-brought up young Southern white woman
to go. She could be the actress, playing out the stereotype of the South-ern
belle. Gracious to ‘the colored help,’ flirtatious to her powerful father-in-law,
and offering a sweet, winning smile to the world. In short, going with the
wind. “If she had a spark of independence or worse, creativity, she could go
crazy on
the dark, shadowy street traveled by more than one stunning Southern belle.
“Or she could be the rebel. She could step outside the magic circle, abandon
privilege, and challenge this way of life. Ostracism, bruises of all sorts, and
defa-mation would be her lot. Her reward would be a truly examined life. And
a world she would otherwise never have known.”)

Nonviolence Provokes Violent Resistance

While protesters against segregation led by King and the SCLC practiced
nonviolence, those who resisted desegregation did not. African Americans
continued efforts to integrate schools, assisted by the Supreme Court’s rul-
ing in 1955 that such integration should proceed “with all deliberate speed.”
They met violent resistance in every state. In Little Rock, Arkansas, Elizabeth
Eckford was one of nine students determined to desegregate the local high
school. Governor Orval Faubus, who had actually desegregated public
transportation and investigated integrating schools, responded to his white
supremacist constituency. He declared that Central High School would
remain segregated and that “blood will run in the streets” should any black
students attempt to enter the school. Faubus called out the Arkansas
National Guard to prevent Eckford and her classmates from en-tering the
school, and an unruly mob greeted the students, jeering and spitting on
them, shouting and threatening them. Eckford, alone because she had not
been told her classmates were meeting together before attend-ing school,
remembered looking for a kind face in the mob and finding none, hearing
only the words they shouted, “No nigger bitch is going to get in our school!
Get out of here!” She fled to a nearby bus stop where she waited to ride a
bus to safety. Newspapers published searing images: a fifteen -year-old
Eckford carefully carrying her books as she walked through the crowd while
behind her a young white woman shouts at her, her face twisted with hate;
in another, a crowd of angry whites surrounded her as she waited quietly on
the bus bench. The photographs brought home to the rest of America visual
evidence of both the nonviolence Eckford prac-ticed, and of the violence she
faced.
President Eisenhower responded to the crisis by sending in federal troops to
be sure the students safely arrived at the school. The troops remained in
Little Rock for the entire school year, and the governor shut the schools
down the following year. Not until 1959 did the schools reopen as the courts
ruled against attempts in both Arkansas and Virginia to cut off state funding
to public schools. Only the Deep South continued to hold out against inte-
gration. In 1960, six-year-old Ruby Bridges was guarded by federal marshals
on her way to integrate her elementary school in New Orleans, Louisiana.
The sight of the tiny girl escorted by white male guards inspired Norman
Rockwell’s famous painting of her called The Problem We All Live With.
NTEGRATION OF HIGHER EDUCATION IN THE DEEP SOUTH Surrounded by
men, including National Guard troops, photographers, and Deputy U.S.
Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, twenty-year-old Vivian Malone
approaches Foster Auditorium to register for classes at the University of
Alabama, the first African American woman to do so.
Bridges got in the door of her school safely, but other attempts at
desegregating educational institutions were accompanied by violence. A
federal court in Georgia ordered that Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes
be admitted to the University of Georgia in 1961. Hunter, who lived in a
dormitory on campus, survived a riot outside her dormitory where a mob
smashed windows. She and Holmes were suspended for their own safety,
and only reinstated after another lawsuit. James Meredith chal-lenged the
University of Mississippi’s refusal to admit him and won in 1962, attending
after federal troops arrived to keep him safe. A riot that killed 2, injured 160,
and left 28 federal marshals shot did not prevent him from attending. In
1963, Vivian Malone became the first black woman to attend the University
of Alabama, despite segregationist governor George Wallace’s claim that he
would not allow her in. A man who had vowed “Segregation now, segregation
tomorrow, segregation forever!” at his inauguration, Wallace literally blocked
her entrance to the school with his body until the federal government
stepped in and he was forced to accept integration of the university. One day
later, Medgar Evers, a prominent civil rights leader who had helped Meredith
enter the University of Mississippi, was shot to death in his driveway while
his wife and children watched from their home. His killer, a white
supremacist, was finally convicted thirty-one years after the murder. Women
students were an important part of the civil rights movement in the South.
Not only did they break the segregation barrier at universities, many of them
took time away from their studies to protest segregation in other settings. In
Greensboro, North Carolina, four students at North Carolina A & T conducted
a “sit-in” at a lunch counter in a Woolworth’s store that was willing to take
blacks’ money for merchandise but refused to allow them to eat at the in-
house lunch counter. The young men were soon joined by African American
women students from nearby Bennett College, as well as white women
students from the University of North Carolina Women’s College. Spelman
College student Ruby Doris Smith organized Atlanta area students in sit-ins
across Atlanta. By the spring of 1960, over 2,000 students had been arrested
in demonstrations, boycotts, sit-ins, and other forms of resistance to
segregation. Students in other parts of the country showed their support for
desegregation by protesting at northern branches of national stores and
chains that discriminated against blacks in the South. While numbers of
African American women participated in these acts
of resistance, most played a supportive role, allowing black men to take the
lead. Ella Baker, cofounder of In-Friendship, a group that aided victims of
racial terrorism, epitomized the difficulties that many activist women ex-
perienced in the civil rights movement. King asked Baker to go to Atlanta to
work for the SCLC in its Crusade for Citizenship, an educational pro-gram
designed to help increase voter numbers. Baker went and worked, but
clashed with ambitious young men in the movement who did not ap-preciate
her ardor, her booming voice, her bluntness, nor her differing view of tactics.
By mid-April, Baker had helped lead a conference at Shaw University and
helped give birth to a new organization, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC), made up of students deter-mined to forge their own
paths and direct their own projects. SNCC preferred using nonviolence to
achieve its goals, but also supported direct action, confrontation, and
increased militancy if necessary. Baker pointed out that integrating lunch
counters was all well and good, but that the movement was “bigger than a
hamburger.” It was also bigger than any leader. Baker believed in sharing
power and participatory democracy, and often grew frustrated at the top-
down approach of the SCLC. Neverthe-less, the two organizations
collaborated for years. In the spring of 1961, SNCC activists undertook
freedom rides to southern states to protest continuing segregation.
Interracial groups of stu-dents shared bus seats to continue the process of
integrating public trans-portation. White violence against freedom riders
included mobs firebombing the buses, beating the escaping riders, and
arresting them. The federal government sent in 400 federal marshals, but
riders were still ar-rested and served time. SNCC members moved on to
continue voter reg-istration efforts in Albany, Georgia, but were stymied in
their efforts to provoke the kind of response that would enable the federal
intervention that the movement relied upon in order to generate real change.
The activ-ists moved on to Birmingham, Alabama, where, in 1963, after sit-
ins and marches, SCLC leaders King and Ralph Abernathy were arrested.
King’s arrest gave him time to pen a thoughtful treatise on the impor-tance
of direct action against racism. “All segregation statutes are unjust,” he
wrote in his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail , “because segregation
distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false
sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority.” The
SCLC, worried that the movement would lose momentum with Dr. King in jail,
allowed a “children’s crusade” in Birmingham on May 2 and 3, 1963, after
training high school and college youth in nonviolent techniques. More than
1,000 young people marched on May 2 and were arrested. Even more
showed up the next day to do the same, and the local sheriff, T. Eugene
“Bull” Connor, ordered police dogs, clubs, cattle prods, and fire hoses turned
on the unarmed marchers. Newspaper photographers and, more importantly,
television news cameras captured the images of snarling dogs attacking
women and men, and fire hoses, held by southern white men, knocking
African Americans off their feet. The resulting outrage was inter-national in
scope. Martin Luther King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, recover-ing from the
birth of the couple’s fourth child, called President John F. Kennedy and his
brother Robert, the attorney general, for help. She feared that King would
never leave jail alive. The Kennedys used their powers to force the city to
meet with the federal attorney for civil rights to negotiate a settlement. On
May 10, the SCLC and Birmingham’s business commu-nity reached an
agreement to desegregate public accommodations, to re-lease jailed
protesters, to set up a committee to oversee hiring practices in the city, and
to ensure that black and white leaders would communicate to avoid further
demonstrations.
The white community responded with violence to the “Birmingham
Truce,” bombing King’s brother’s house. President Kennedy sent in 3,000
federal troops to prevent further disturbances. The civil rights victory in the
deepest part of the Deep South, and in Birmingham, a place King had once
called “the most segregated city in America,” provided inspiration for future
laborers in the cause. In August 1963, civil rights leaders called for a March
on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Hundreds of thousands of marchers,
perhaps half a million total, descended on the capitol city. Or-ganizers
originally planned to speak on economic issues, but a proposed civil rights
bill before Congress changed the focus of the march. Speakers included the
male leaders of the movement: Dr. King, Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, James
Farmer of the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE), John Lewis of SNCC,
Whitney Young Jr. of the Urban League, and A. Philip Randolph, president of
the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Women of the movement had less
prominent roles that day, but were
praised in a “Tribute to Negro Women Fighters for Freedom” that intro-duced
to the crowd Rosa Parks, Daisy Bates (the NAACP leader in Arkansas who
organized the Little Rock students), Diane Nash (a SNCC leader from
Tennessee), Gloria Richardson (a leader from Cambridge, Maryland), and to
the widow of a man killed for trying to register to vote, a woman known only
as Mrs. Herbert Lee. Tribute was paid as well to the absent Myrlie Evers,
widow of Medgar Evers, slain two months before. In her speech to the crowd,
Daisy Bates pledged to the leaders of the movement that women would join
hands with the men to fight for civil liberties. “We will kneel-in, we will sit-in,
until we can eat at any counter of the United States. . . . [ W ]e will walk until
we can take our children to any school in the United States. . . . [W]e will lie-
in, if necessary, until every Negro in American can vote,” she declared.
Singers Marian Anderson, Eva Jessye, and Mahalia Jackson provided music,
and sixty-year-old enter-tainer and international star Josephine Baker
proclaimed it “the happiest day of my life.” The afternoon ended with a
stirring speech by Dr. King, “I Have a Dream,” which he delivered
extemporaneously, departing from his prepared remarks to speak as a
preacher would to a crowd of believers. His dream of racial harmony was
saluted by the crowd, the press, and many in the nation. His words and his
work, supported by countless women and men, paved the way for federal
civil rights legislation to end racial discrimination.
ACTIVISM IN ETHNIC COMMUNITIES
The civil rights movement, revivified when ethnic minorities returned from
their service in World War II, included other activists: Mexican Americans,
Puerto Ricans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans. With similar goals,
using similar tactics, ethnic minorities achieved similar results during the
1950s.
Mexican Americans Protest in the West and Southwest
As was true for African Americans, Mexican Americans returned to the United
States after World War II with a new sense that they deserved bet-ter
treatment. Over 350,000 Mexican Americans (Chicanos) had served in the
war, and they had suffered proportionately greater casualties than any other
group, as well as winning proportionately more medals for their service.
During the war, thousands of Mexicans were brought into the country to work
—some in well-paying war industries, but mostly as agri-cultural workers,
living in appalling conditions, often without toilets, drink-ing water, or water
for bathing. In 1943, outright attacks on minorities led to the so-called Zoot
Suit riots in Los Angeles, where servicemen and civil-ians attacked young
Mexican, Chicano, Filipino, and African American men, beating them and
stripping them of their “zoot suits”—the fashionable and distinctive outfits
they wore. The California governor had investigated and found substandard
living conditions contributed to the unrest. Mexican Americans had long
faced limited educational opportunities, discrimination in housing and
employment, and racism. Activists seeking to end wide-spread discrimination
against them founded the Community Service Or-ganization (CSO) in
California, and began its legal challenges. In 1947, California banned the
segregation of Mexican, Asian, and Native American children into separate
schools.
The CSO listed its goals in California in letters to the community: “improve
living conditions, protect group and individual interests, protest, remedy and
prevent violations of human rights, and provide a medium for social
expression, leadership development, and inter-group cooperation.” Much of
its work focused on civil rights. With chapters in at least thirty-five different
cities and with thousands of members, half of them women, the group
focused on registration drives and voting rights. By 1949, their efforts had
elected Edward Roybal, the first Latino to serve on the Los Angeles City
Commission. As the organization grew, it established net-works with other
groups such as the AFL-CIO, and the Quakers at the American Friends
Committee. It also enjoyed praise in newspapers, such as the New York
Herald and the Washington Post . Chicanas were the backbone of the CSO,
raising funds, using their clerical skills to run meetings, record activities,
make flyers, and stuff en-velopes, feeding the crowds attending meetings,
even campaigning for their husbands when they ran for office. Other women
served as leaders. Hope Mendoza, an experienced labor agitator, used her
skills advocating in labor disputes, as well as teaching CSO members about
fair employment prac-tices. The most famous woman in the CSO, former
teacher Dolores Huerta, joined in 1955 after deciding she could do more for
migrant workers by organizing them to fight for their civil rights than by
teaching their chil-dren, who were often too hungry to focus on education.
She moved to Sacramento to work as a labor lobbyist to the state legislature,
founding the Agricultural Workers Association in 1960. In 1962, she formed
the National Farm Workers Association (later the United Farm Workers) with
Cesar Chavez, and they began a five-year boycott of California table grapes
to try to convince the industry to treat workers fairly. Huerta’s career was
remarkable. Latino mothers faced cultural pressures much stronger than
those of Anglo women when it came to activism or work outside the home.
Huerta had eleven children, and despite mothering them successfully, her
two ex-husbands criticized her activism and blamed her actions outside the
home for the end of their marriages. But in the barrios that were home to the
Hispanics and Latinos in California, women activists such as Huerta proved
invaluable registering new voters, conducting petition drives to improve
public facilities such as sidewalks and streetlights in their neighborhoods,
and lobbying for vaccinations and free hearing tests for Latino children in
their schools. With so many Latina women active in the CSO, the
organization was able to incorporate traditional women’s issues into the
goals it wished to achieve. Another activist group, the G.I. Forum, was
founded in Texas by
Dr. Hector Garcia and Molly Galvan in 1947. The forum fought for the rights
of returning Mexican American veterans. It wanted desegregated schools and
hospitals and the abolition of the white primary and poll taxes that kept
many Chicanos from voting. Working to provide scholarships for children, and
seeking to influence the communities in which members lived through civic
participation, Galvan and his followers also organized G.I. Forums in
Colorado, as well as Utah, where members challenged the fed-eral
government’s discriminatory hiring practices at Hill Air Force Base. Beyond
such organizations, Latinos and Hispanics also used labor strikes to protest
segregation and discrimination as well as working conditions. In 1951 in
Hanover, New Mexico, Empire Zinc mine workers struck for better working
conditions. When the company invoked the fed-eral Taft-Hartley Act of 1947
that forbade strikers from picketing, the wives of the strikers took up the
picket line. When arrested, the women filled the jails and the men stayed
home to care for the children. The company, nonplussed by women picketers
who would not give up even if arrested, capitulated. Men who experienced
firsthand the difficulty of caring for chil-dren under the substandard living
conditions their wives faced at home, particularly the lack of running water,
told the union to demand improve-ments in housing for workers’ families. As
a result, the company desegre-gated housing, the theater, and the pool, and
provided running water to the Mexican Americans’ houses as they had
already done for whites (see Primary Source 9-5).
Puerto Rican Activism in the East and Midwest
Puerto Rican women and men, citizens of the United States since 1917, also
participated in World War II—200 women served in the Women’s Army
Camps; 65,000 men served in Latin America, North Africa, and Europe. Those
who returned rejoined their families, primarily in urban areas in the East and
Midwest. Puerto Ricans had a long history of forming community associations
to provide both aid and opportunities for socializing. Church groups and
secular organizations such as the Casita Maria and the Puerto Rico Civic Club
provided gathering places for thousands of Puerto Rican women who earned
their wages in the textile and cigar factories in cities such as New York.
Thousands of Puerto Rican women were hired after World War II, and while
many belonged to labor unions to try to protect their rights, many more did
piecework, now called “section work,” to make a living. By 1960, Puerto
Rican women operated 25 percent of the sewing ma-chines in New York
City’s garment industry. Many also worked for employ-ers who paid less than
the legal minimum wage in cramped workplaces called sweatshops, which
were nonunion firetraps, with no safety features to protect workers. Dolores
Juarbe, employed in a sweatshop, recalled the working conditions under
which she labored. “There was not any union there. In that shop you had to
sew, as fast as you could. And everyone smoked. The shop was in a
basement. Once in a while the fire department would pay a little visit. The
boss told us to stop smoking, that the fire department was on the way. The
alerter heard that they were coming, you know, she used to pay them off. So
then, they could knock real loud on the door: bam bam bam! And all the
cigarettes would disappear.” In contrast, in union shops where women served
as chairs and organizers, working conditions improved. Rampant
discrimination, however, both racial and sexual, kept women at the lowest
rank in most union shops, as well as at the lowest pay rates. Other Puerto
Rican communities developed as contract labor workers, recruited by private
companies as well as government organizations, arrived in cities such as
Chicago; Buffalo; Philadelphia; Milwaukee; Gary, Indiana; and Camden, New
Jersey. In Chicago, a private employment company agreed to recruit
domestic and foundry workers for Puerto Rico’s Department of Labor. The
women brought from the island to fill domes-tic jobs on the mainland were
often under age. Wages were low, and from the $60 a month (plus room and
board) that they earned, the agency de-ducted $10 a month to pay for their
tickets from Puerto Rico as well as an additional $8.33 a month to bank for a
return trip. Labor contracts did not limit hours, and many young women
complained they were working fifteen hour days at wages far below the
prevailing ones, as well as being transferred from one employer to another
with little or no notice. Workers’ complaints made their way back to Puerto
Rico, and the Puerto Rican As-sembly passed laws to limit these abuses.
Women relied on the publicity that was generated by government reports to
improve their working condi-tions because most unions were of little help, as
was true for many women workers who did contract labor.
( THE SALT OF THE EARTH PRIMARY SOURCE 9-5
Anita and Lorenzo Torrez were picketer and striker, respectively, at Empire
Mine. A film based on their experiences, Salt of the Earth, was produced in
1954 by filmmakers black-listed by Sen. Joe McCarthy’s anti-Communist
witch-hunts. In a 2003 inter-view with a journalist, the Torreses described the
working conditions that led to the strike. “The conditions were harsh. Zinc
mining is underground mining. The miners were Mexican Americans. We
came back from World War II with the idea of democracy in our heads, and
we found the same discrimination we faced before. We rebelled against it.
We used the union to break the discrimina-tion that had existed all along. We
were determined to break through and be treated equally.
“This was a fight against racism and for equality. The union had 5,000 mem-
bers. It was an amalgamated local of the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers at
six mines.
“Even the pay lines were segregated, one for the Anglos, the other for the
Mexicanos. Housing was segregated. The movie theaters were segregated,
with Mexicanos on one side and Anglos on the other. We couldn’t sit
together. The swimming pool was segregated. There was one day a week
that the Mex-icanos could go swimming, and then they would drain the pool
and refill it. “The Mexicanos were fed up. The Anglos were in the skilled jobs.
The un-derground work was for the Mexicanos or African Americans—the
dirtiest, the roughest jobs. Native American Indians, who had been brought in
by the com-pany to work the mines during the labor shortage of World War II,
had been forced to move back to the reservations. The company pushed
them out and tore down their housing after the war. “[About the women’s
role in the strike:] if there was no picket line, the strike would be lost. There
was a lot of discussion within the union. Someone said the women were not
the ones on strike, so they could take over the pick-eting. Either you give up
the strike or bring the women in. Some thought it was the only way, but
others were op-posed. The word leaked out that the women were going to
picket, so we, the women, said, why not? A lot of them came to the picket
line out of curiosity. Once they got there, they decided to join the picket
lines.
“The law and the company were sur-prised and shocked that this was hap-
pening. They thought these women were crazy, that they can’t survive, they
can’t last, it’s not the proper thing for women to be doing. They took us to
jail. As time went on, the company tried to start a ‘back to work’ movement.
They hired people from out of town to cross our lines. That created violence.
It had been decided that the men would not get involved, so women were
going to fight it, the best way they knew how. When the women wouldn’t get
up, the police arrested them, but more women came to take their places. The
jail was full.”)

Native American Activism and Resistance

Native Americans had contributed to the war effort with nearly 50,000 men
and several hundred women in the WACs, WAVES, Army Nurse Corps, and
even the Marines, where Minnie Spotted-Wolf became the first Native
American woman to serve in the Corps. Another 12,000 Native American
women worked in war defense plants. Women left on the reservations took
over traditional men’s jobs, and many contributed money to the govern-
ment. Alaskan women bought war bonds with earnings from trapping. The
Red Cross and other volunteer organizations benefited from Native women’s
participation as well. While some Indian groups resisted any participation—
the Iroquois challenged the right of the U.S. government to draft them—
others participated at many levels. The Navajo basket weavers, for instance,
signed a resolution that outlawed the use of the swastika, a broken cross
motif that had been used for centuries by the weavers, but was later
adopted by the Nazis as a symbol of their hatred. After the war, however,
Native Americans soon found themselves in worse straits than those they
had occupied before the war. In 1945, John Collier left the Bureau of Indian
Affairs, and the government decided to settle Indian claims against the
government once and for all with an Indian Claims Commission. Collier’s
successor, Dillon S. Myer, the man in charge of relocating Japanese into
internment camps during World War II, took office in 1950. He was
determined to break Native Americans’ reliance on the federal government.
He planned to terminate the federal services pro-vided to Indian tribes, and
to relocate them to urban areas. Jurisdiction over Indian lands would pass to
the state and local governments, and fed-eral contracts, particularly for
timber and other natural resources, would be terminated. So would the social
services, such as hospitals, schools and other services paid for by those
contracts.
It would be years before tribal communities recovered even partially from
termination policies. Relocation efforts also failed. Many Native Americans
had moved from reservations after the Indian Allotment Act(see Chapter 6)
put them on small farms, and cities such as Denver, Chicago, Minneapolis,
Los Angeles, and elsewhere had growing numbers of Native American blue-
collar workers. Between 1952 and 1960, however, the Bureau of Indian
Affairs, gave incentives to Indians to move to cities—one-way bus tickets,
relocation centers, job training, free medical care, and a subsistence
allowance until they were settled in. But the contrast between rural reser-
vation life and the frenetic, capitalist competition of the cities made it
difficult for Native Americans to survive and prosper. Native Americans
protested termination and relocation, forming sup-port groups for the
displaced “urban Indians” such as Chicago’s All-Tribes American Indian
Center and St. Augustine’s Center for American Indians. The most important
activist group was the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), begun
in 1944. In 1954, under the leadership of Executive Director Dakota Helen
Peterson and Executive Secretary Cherokee Ruth Bronson, the NCAI stopped
the federal government’s termination and re-location program. The
organization’s Emergency Conference on Federal Legislation, held in
Washington in late February, educated both Congress and the public about
tribal opposition to termination, as well as providing an opportunity for
Native Americans to construct a Declaration of Indian Rights. One outcome
of this conference was a new policy of informed consent. Congress had to
notify tribes and gain their consent before pass-ing any legislation that would
affect their rights.
The NCAI also lobbied for voting rights to oppose government dam-building
on Indian lands. The dams flooded reservation lands and drove Indians away,
destroying their traditional communities. The Yankton, Crow, Cheyenne,
Seneca, Cherokee, and Mohawk nations all lost these battles against the
federal government, but Native American resistance continued. Younger
Indians, led by Mohawk Shirley Hill Witt, formed the National Indian Youth
Council (NIYC) in 1961, a student organization that paral-leled many of the
efforts of the NCAI. Both groups fought against govern-ment policies that
assumed, yet again, that Indians needed to assimilate to survive in America.
Asian American Women Activists
Asians and Asian Americans faced profound discrimination both during World
War II and afterward. Many Americans dismissed all Asians as en-emies
during the war, and with the advent of Communist China, their racism knew
few bounds. Despite changes after the war that included inter-racial
marriage, relaxed immigration laws, and a growing population of Asians in
America, most white Americans continued to expect that all eth-nic groups
would assimilate into American culture, and regarded those who did not
assimilate with suspicion. Japanese Americans refused to be branded traitors
simply because of
their race, both during World War II and afterward. Dillon Meyer’s suc-cessful
internment of thousands of Japanese in internment camps over the course of
the war ended before the war itself did. Several Japanese Americans
challenged their internment in court, and Mitsuye Endo, a twenty-two-year-
old clerk in the Motor Vehicle Department of California, volunteered to serve
as a test case. Like Rosa Parks, whose sterling char-acter made her the
perfect choice to battle segregation, Endo, who spoke no Japanese, had
never been to Japan, and had a brother fighting in the American army, was
the perfect choice to challenge the constitutionality, as well as the simple
illogic, of internment. Her lawyer, James Purcell, filed a writ of habeas corpus
in 1942, demanding that the government either release her or show the
threat that she posed to the nation. Fearing a Supreme Court showdown, the
government offered to release Endo any-where but in the restricted military
area of California. She refused the offer, and stayed imprisoned for another
two years until December 1944, when the court ruled in Ex Parte Endo that
loyal American citizens could not be held in detention camps against their
will. She was released, but the legality of the internment of other Japanese
was not decided by that case. By January 1945, internees had begun to
return to their homes, and eventually the courts ruled that native-born
citizens, such as Japanese Americans, could not be turned into enemy aliens.
Returning home, internees faced continued racism, discrimination, and
attacks, even after V-J Day in August 1945. In Santa Ana, California, Mary
Masuda, who had spent two and a half years in a relocation camp and whose
brother had been killed in the service fighting in Italy, faced threats from
locals. General Joseph Stilwell went to Masuda’s home in person to award her
brother’s medal, the Distinguished Service Cross, in December 1945, in a
well-publicized visit attempting to restore the peace and to prevent further
incidents. The government also provided some remuneration for Japanese
Americans who had lost everything when they were forced into the camps.
Truman signed the Japanese American Evacuation Claims Act in 1948, which
provided $38 million to reimburse those who were able to file claims, working
out to about ten cents on the dollar for their losses. Many Japanese
Americans never recovered economically from the war. Not until 1988 would
the government apologize for the internment and offer reparations to the
survivors. After the war, when Asian women from other countries arrived in
America, they also faced discrimination. In 1945, Truman signed the War
Brides Act, temporarily allowing members of the armed forces who had
married women they had met overseas to send for their wives. Unlike women
from Europe who faced little resentment, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and
Filipino war brides faced a great deal. Some 72,700 women arrived from
Asian countries between 1947 and 1964. In 1952, however, responding to
the rising fear of communism, Congress passed the McCarren-Walter Act,
adding Asians to the quota system that determined who was able to
immigrate to America. The legislation further restricted Asian immigration. In
all other instances, immigrants were defined by their country of origin.
Asians, however, were defined by their race, thus limiting the total number
who could immigrate to the United States. The increase in the numbers and
the visibility of Asian women in America worried many Americans,
particularly given Japan’s recent enmity, the fall of China to communism in
1949, and the Korean War, which lasted from 1950 to 1953. Writers for
popular magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post called attention to the
presence of war brides with articles such as “They’re Bringing Home
Japanese Wives,” pointing out the difficulties Japanese women had adapting
to cooking and cleaning in the American style. The article went on to
examine whether white Americans were ready to “help them along.” Some
white Americans were. The Red Cross, for example, offered classes to aid
assimilation, as did the YWCA, which had a War Brides program. Others were
not. Racial restrictions on property sales, threats against Asian brides
brought to American homes, and hand-wringing by the press continued. But
Asians’ decisions to assimilate and the lesser threat of their presence,
compared to the more worrisome prospect of African American integration,
eventually drove much of the racism against Asians to more subtle levels.
Changes in immigration policies and wartime marriages meant that the
ratio of Asian women to men became more nearly equal. No longer was there
a large male community of “bachelor societies,” as had been the case after
Chinese women were prohibited from immigrating to the United States in the
nineteenth century. The shift in population meant more Asians could marry
within their race if they desired. When California, the state with the largest
Asian population, repealed its antimiscegenation law in 1948, marriage
outside their race was easier for Asians as well. Conse-quently, Asians’ ability
to choose assimilation or not was easier for them to make. Given white
American society’s expectations of assimilation, and the pressure and
hostility directed at Asians who chose otherwise, many Asians chose to deny
their heritage. “I content to lose my Japanese blood stream in America,” said
Sachiko Pfieffer, war bride of a Chicago butcher. “I gonna die in America. This
is my home forever.”
A NEW FRONTIER
The years between the end of World War II and the election of 1960 had been
ones of fear and uncertainty for many Americans, despite rising pros-perity
over the course of a decade and a half. Americans feared atomic warfare and
fought to win the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Com-munism seemed so
powerful there, as well as in China and Korea, that Americans feared
Communists would infiltrate and corrupt American in-stitutions. In domestic
affairs, activists seemed determined to overturn white Americans’ traditional
positions so that they too could participate in the system. Resisting such
efforts, many white Americans turned to a pres-idential candidate that
promised to assuage their fears: Richard Nixon. The conservative Republican
nominee opposed many of the reforms put in place during the preceding
decades, and enthusiastically supported the hunt for communists, even
where they were not found. Democratic nominee John F. Kennedy, in
contrast, was young, inexperienced, photoge-nic, and sold to American
voters, claimed his wealthy father Joe, “like soap flakes.” Kennedy’s youth
and charisma outshone Nixon’s experience and tradition, particularly on
television, the new medium of political commu-nication. During the first
televised debate between presidential candidates, 70 million viewers
watched an attractive, poised Kennedy debate with a sweaty, nervous Nixon,
sporting a heavy five o’clock shadow. Kennedy won the debate and his
popularity continued to rise for the rest of the campaign, particularly after he
came out in support of Martin Luther King Jr., who had been arrested in
Atlanta for attempting to integrate a restaurant. The black vote helped
Kennedy win. Kennedy’s speech accepting his party’s nomination praised the
past but focused on the future. Americans were standing, Kennedy said, at
the edge of a “new frontier . . . a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils
—a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats.” He continued this theme at his
inaugural address, saying “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask
what you can do for your country” as he sought to shift Americans toward
the issues that the country needed to resolve. The new administration had
no election mandate—the election was the closest ever in American history
to that point—but Kennedy’s youth, optimism, and vitality inspired many
throughout the nation to commit themselves to bettering the lives of those
less fortunate.
The unrest in the South and continuing confrontations over the pace of
integration prompted Kennedy, urged by his brother, Attorney General
Robert Kennedy, to support Dr. King, particularly after attacks against civil
rights marchers in Birmingham in May of 1963. He even endorsed a civil
rights bill that would enforce rights guaranteed by the Constitution, but the
bill did not make it through Congress. There were other areas that Kennedy
pushed for change. He promised to nominate a woman to the cabinet, where
only two women had served—Frances Perkins as secretary of labor under
Franklin Roosevelt and Oveta Culp Hobby, secretary of health, edu-cation,
and welfare under President Eisenhower. He failed to do so. Kennedy, who
retained a reputation as a ladies’ man, retained as well the prejudices
against women held by men of his class and time. In 1961, addressing a
group of women delegates assigned to the United Nations, he responded
awkwardly to a comment from a delegate from Burma. She had taken
advantage of the president’s welcoming remarks to suggest that when a
woman was elected president of the United States, she would no doubt
welcome the men delegates to the UN. Her unexpected comment met with
his response, “I’m always rather nervous about how you talk about women
who are active in politics, whether they want to be talked about as women or
as politicians, but I want you to know that we are grateful to have you as
both today.” His gratitude, however, did not extend to inviting women to
participate in his administration.
The President’s Commission on the Status of Women
Kennedy’s difficulty in seeing women as both women and politicians may
have accounted for his failure to appoint women in roles of power. He did not
name a woman to his cabinet despite his promises, but made Elizabeth Rudel
Smith U.S. treasurer. He also named Sarah Hughes as the first woman federal
district judge in Texas, and appointed opera star Marian Anderson as a
trustee of the American Freedom from Hunger Foundation. Most importantly,
on December 14, 1961, Kennedy created the President’s Commission on the
Status of Women, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt. In his statement setting out
the rationale for the commission, Kennedy praised women participants in the
public sphere for bringing “sensitivity to human needs,” as well as
“opposition to selfish and corrupt purposes,” as the early suffragist leaders
had promised they would. He also declared that women should not have to
work unless they wanted to, nor be forced to give up their jobs “when
unemployment rises or war ends.” He hoped that the commission would
reveal “what remains to be done to demolish prejudices and outmoded
customs which act as barriers to the full partnership of women in our
democracy” (see Primary Source 9-6). As chairperson of the commission,
Eleanor Roosevelt brought years of experience to the process of analyzing
women’s status in America. She de-scribed the commission’s first meeting in
her column “My Day,” saying that Kennedy had joked that he had appointed
the commission in self-defense. May Craig, a feminist newspaper reporter,
often asked Kennedy in press briefings what he had done for women that
day. On this day, wrote Roos-evelt, Kennedy had appointed Esther Peterson,
head of the Women’s Bureau, to the commission. In the Women’s Bureau,
Peterson, a union activist who had organized teachers’ unions and worked for
the Amalgam-ated Clothing Workers of America, found herself with adequate
funding, twenty-six nationally known leaders (fifteen women and eleven
men), and participants who communicated their findings back to their
organizations. The real goal of the commission, reported Roosevelt, was to
ensure that
women could reach their potential without interfering with their ability to
care for their homes, husbands, and children. “We need to use in the very
best way possible all our available manpower—and that includes woman-
power,” she wrote. In April 1962, halfway through the commission’s work,
Roosevelt in-terviewed President Kennedy at the White House for her
Prospects of Man-kind television show. Kennedy reiterated that his primary
interest was ensuring that women who worked did so for equal pay and
under equal conditions. He maintained that women’s primary responsibility,
the home, took precedent in women’s lives and presented women with
special prob-lems when they wanted to participate “usefully in public and
private life.” He also acknowledged the prejudice that Americans had against
women working when unemployment rates were high, but pointed out that
most women worked because they needed to “to maintain their families,”
and that most women “work in areas which are really more suited to them
than to men.” For her part, Roosevelt asked Kennedy why more women were
not involved in politics, policy-making positions, and legislatures. Kennedy
replied that he thought that women’s careers were interrupted because of
their families. He defended his appointment record, admitted the country
had to do better, and acknowledged letters he had received “about getting
women in these policy-making jobs . . responsibility.”
. we are very conscious of that The commission’s recommendations,
published as the Peterson Report
on American Women on October 11, 1963, found widespread discrimina-tion
against women in all aspects of American life, particularly in the work-force
and in government. It laid out suggestions for a federal policy against sexual
discrimination, called for affordable daycare options for women who worked,
promoted expanded educational opportunities for women, and equal pay for
women doing the same jobs as men (the Equal Pay Act of 1963 had been
signed into law by President Kennedy on June 10). Perhaps most importantly,
it called for the government to recognize that the Four-teenth Amendment
guaranteeing equal rights to all citizens applied to women as well as men.
The report led to the widespread creation of state commissions on the status
of women, and provided concrete data that could be used by women
activists at every level as they began to evaluate the discrimination they
faced.

( PRESIDENT KENNEDY’S CALL FOR A NATIONAL COMMISSION ON THE

STATUS OF WOMEN
President Kennedy’s rationale for establish-ing a commission to examine the
status of women in the country was laid out in Execu-tive Order 10980 on
December 14, 1961. “WHEREAS prejudices and out-moded customs act as
barriers to the full realization of women’s basic rights which should be
respected and fostered as part of our Nation’s commitment to human
dignity, freedom, and democ-racy; and
“WHEREAS measures that contrib-ute to family security and strengthen
home life will advance the general wel-fare; and
“WHEREAS it is in the national in-terest to promote the economy, security,
and national defense through the most efficient and effective utilization of
the skills of all persons, and
“WHEREAS in every period of na-tional emergency women have served with
distinction in widely varied capaci-ties but thereafter have been subject to
treatment as a marginal group whose skills have been inadequately utilized;
and “WHEREAS women should be as-sured the opportunity to develop their
capacities and fulfill their aspirations on a continuing basis irrespective of na-
tional exigencies, and
“WHEREAS a Governmental Com-mission should be charged with the
responsibility for developing recommen-dations for overcoming
discriminations in government and private employment on the basis of sex
and for developing
recommendations for services which will enable women to continue their role
as wives and mothers while making a maximum contribution to the world
around them: “NOW, THEREFORE, by virtue of the authority vested in me as
President of the United States by the Constitution and statutes of the United
States, . . . [T]here is hereby established the Presi-dent’s Commission on the
Status of Women.”)

Change on the Horizon

The publication of the Report on American Women coincided with several
other events that presaged an explosion of political activism by women for
various causes in the coming decade. In 1961, the United States and the
Soviet Union resumed atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons. Women grew
greatly concerned with the radioactive fallout from such tests, par-ticularly
with strontium-90, a radioactive element that had begun showing up in their
children’s urine during medical examinations. Fearing their chil-dren might
someday develop cancer, opponents of nuclear testing used their social and
political connections, such as parent–teacher organizations, the League of
Women Voters, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom,
unions, peace organizations, and every other means possible, including
Christmas card lists, to ask women to take action in the form of a national
one-day strike. On November 1, 1961, some 50,000 women in at least sixty
cities walked out of their homes in protest, calling themselves the Women’s
Strike for Peace (WSP). After the one-day walkout, a smaller group formed to
continue orga-nizing protests. Along with leader Bella Abzug, a civil rights
lawyer defend-ing victims of the McCarthy hearings, twenty members of the
group were subpoenaed by the House Unamerican Activities Committee. At
the hear-ing, nursing mothers brought their hungry babies along. The
mothers tes-tified, in between infants’ cries, that they were not Soviet dupes,
as the committee members seemed to believe. Rather, they wanted “Pure
Milk, Not Poison.” Between their thoughtful testimony and effective slogan,
as well as their actions of nursing their children and bringing along playpens,
they helped destroy much of the HUAC’s credibility and its ability to limit
dissent. The committee limped along until it died in 1975. Partly as a result
of the protests by Women’s Strike for Peace and other
groups, the Soviet Union and the United States signed a Limited Nuclear Test
Ban Treaty to ban atmospheric testing in 1963. The nation became aware of
the environmental effects of radiation, thanks not only to Abzug and her
group, but also because Rachel Carson published her indictment of
Americans’ overuse of pesticides, Silent Spring, in 1962. Biologist Carson
presented Americans with a readable synthesis of the effects of scientific
“improvement” on the environment. The overuse of pesticides and herbi-
cides, needed to make suburban lawns green and protect humans from the
inconvenience of occasional insects, affected other animals as well. The
whole ecosystem was at risk, warned Carson. Eventually springs would be,
without the call of birds to mark the change of seasons. Her work would
serve to launch an environmental movement in the decades ahead. The
environment of the cities also came under examination. In 1961, The Death
and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs appeared. Jacobs, a
reporter, writer, and editor of Architectural Forum, criticized the govern-
ment’s new initiative of modern urban planning, characterized by large-scale
bull-dozing of so-called slums. While some slums featured buildings so
decrepit that replacement was imperative, other slums were simply
neighborhoods, often inhabited by minorities and third-generation white
ethnic groups, living in nonnuclear households. These people had little
recourse to stop governmental efforts at what was designated urban renewal
that destroyed a variety of low-cost housing available to them. Mixed-use
planning that preserved the diversity of homes and businesses made cities
livable, argued Jacobs. There was an ecology to cities, she wrote, develop-ing
organically over time. “The more niches for diversity of life and
livelihoods . . . the greater its carrying capacity for life.” The cities of America
had been left behind by middle-class whites fleeing to suburbs, and the
ecology of cities were in danger. Her work would launch efforts toward urban
renewal on a human scale. Jacobs’ critique of cities matched Betty Friedan’s
critique of suburbia in her 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique. She focused in
part on the isola-tion women in the new American suburbs faced. “Each
suburban wife struggle with it alone,” Friedan wrote. “As she made the beds,
shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter 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?’” For many women, it was not. The desire to do more and be more, to
participate more in the public realm, prodded greater numbers of American
women to action. The times were changing.
The greatest opportunity for activism still came in the American South,
where Irene Morgan, Rosa Parks, and countless others had fought so long
and so hard. Reactionary forces struggled to contain the forces of deseg-
regation, as hundreds of cities saw thousands of protesters march, picket,
boycott, and sit-in. On June 11, 1963, the sight of jeering white Alabamians
protesting Vivian Malone’s admission to the University of Alabama, of seg-
regationist Governor George Wallace obstructing her passage into Foster
Auditorium as she tried to register—the spectacle prompted President
Kennedy to call for congressional action to prevent further violence as
African Americans sought to exercise their civil rights. “We are confronted,”
he said to a national radio and television audience that same evening, “with
a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and as clear as the American
Constitution.” He asked whether all Americans “are to be afforded equal
rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow
Americans as we want to be treated.” He cited statistics showing that blacks
had a life expectancy seven years shorter than whites. They were half as
likely to complete high school, one-third as likely to complete college or
become a professional, and twice as likely to be unemployed as whites who
had been “born in the same place on the same day,” the president pointed
out. Nine years after the Brown decision, black children still attended seg-
regated schools. The problem of segregation was not regional or sectional,
but national, Kennedy argued, and it was time for Congress to step in by
enacting legislation that would speed the pace of school desegregation and
give all Americans, regardless of race, the right to be served in public fa-
cilities and to vote in safety. Everyone deserved those rights, Kennedy as-
serted, and it was wrong to tell African Americans that “the only way that
they are going to get their rights is to go into the streets and demonstrate. I
think we owe them and we owe ourselves a better country than that.” The
next day, June 12, civil rights leader Medgar Evers was assassinated
in Jackson, Mississippi. Undeterred, Kennedy crafted a civil rights bill and
sent it to Congress on June 19. Congressional hearings followed, but the bill
soon stalled in a Congress where Southern Democrats remained largely
opposed to such changes. The March on Washington later that summer
inspired many. White supremacists were not impressed, however, and as
desegregation orders continued, so did violence against blacks. In the early
fall of 1963, the United States Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered
Birmingham, Alabama, to integrate its schools. A few days after the deci-
sion, on September 15, a group of Klansmen exploded a bomb at the Six-
teenth Street Baptist Church, a center for civil rights meetings. Four young
girls attending Sunday school died in the blast: Denise McNair, age eleven;
and fourteen-year-olds Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Addie Mae
Collins. The heinous nature of the crime shook the entire country. “The
innocent blood of these little girls,” said Dr. King, “may well serve as the
redemptive force that will bring new light to this dark city. . . . Indeed, this
tragic event may cause the white South to come to terms with its
conscience.” Kennedy’s response was too slow and too measured for those
angered
by the blast. He sent FBI bomb experts and two special representatives,
while black leaders demanded federal troops. Distracted by the Test Ban
Treaty negotiations with the USSR, a coup in the Dominican Republic, a tax
bill, and an eleven-state tour to support Democrats in the upcoming
elections, Kennedy was also nonplussed by Alabama’s announcement that
state troopers had arrested men in connection with the bombing. The men
were charged with the misdemeanor crime of possessing dynamite without a
permit. Kennedy continued to push for his civil rights bill, but conceded by
the middle of November that it would take another year to pass it. In a
campaign speech to union supporters November 16, he said that creating
jobs in a slow economy was even more important than civil rights. In the
meantime, civil rights leaders continued to push both the president and the
Congress to meet their responsibility to protect black Americans. Despite
congressional foot-dragging, the new frontiers Kennedy men-tioned during
his short presidency seemed destined to include civil rights. Events seemed
to conspire in favor of change—the very air seemed ready for reform. As
1963 drew to a close, however, on a campaign visit to Dallas, Texas,
President Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald, an ex-marine,
Castro supporter, and ne’er-do-well, who was himself killed by Dallas
nightclub owner Jack Ruby while being taken to jail. The new medium of
television brought the tragedy into everyone’s homes—the death of the
young president, then the murder by Jack Ruby, then First Lady Jacqueline
Bouvier Kennedy and their two young children burying the president at
Arlington National Cemetery. The nation paused to mourn. The violence in
Dallas, however, foreshadowed the coming decade, when patience ran out
and reform turned to revolution.

(SARAH JEAN COLLINS, VICTIM OF THE BIRMINGHAM BOMBING By the time Ku

Klux Klansmen bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church of Birmingham, a
center for civil rights activists, there had been so many attacks that the city
had become known as “Bombingham.” In September 1963, four young girls
left their Sunday School room and were talking in the ladies’ room of the
church basement when nineteen sticks of dynamite stashed under the stairs
went off, killing the girls and blowing a hole in the side of the church. Sarah
Collins, sister of one of the dead girls, was partly blinded by glass from the
blast; twenty more victims were taken to hospitals. Decades later, three
Klansmen were finally convicted of the crime.)

(JACQUELINE KENNEDY AND LYNDON JOHNSON A stunned Jacqueline

Kennedy, her pink suit still spotted with the murdered president’s blood,
stands next to Lyndon Johnson as he is sworn in aboard Air Force One by
Judge Sarah Hughes. Lady Bird Johnson, the new first lady, is on the
president’s right. The violent end of the Kennedy administration presaged a
decade of unrest in the country.)

THINK MORE ABOUT IT

1. Return to the opening vignette on Irene Morgan and Rosa Parks. Detail the
ways in which the actions of these and other women were critical to the
growing civil rights movement during the post–World War II era. In what
other ways did women of diverse backgrounds express activism in the public
realm during these years? How does such activism contrast with the media’s
image of women’s lives in this era?
2. Discuss the development of the Cold War between the United States and
the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and examine the various ways in
which this conflict affected American women as activists, workers,
consumers, and citizens.
3. Analyze the origins and varied aspects of the back-to-the-home movement
that emerged after World War II. Whom did it benefit and in what ways? How
did it constrain women and how did some evade or resist these constraints?
How do statistics on women’s postwar employment and educational
attainments demonstrate the limits of this movement?
4. Explain the following statement: “in many ways the decade of the 1950s
represented a revival of the cult of domesticity of the first half of the
nineteenth century.” How did the cultural myth of the feminine mystique
become promulgated through science, advertising, and popular culture? How
did this view of women undermine women’s activism? Which groups of
women proved the special targets of this revived, repackaged cult of
domesticity?
5. What were the goals, tactics, and philosophies of civil rights activists and
their organizations in the two decades following World War II? Be sure to pay
attention to diverse activists and organizations. How successful were they,
why, and at what cost?
6. What were the major findings and recommendations of the report issued
in 1963 by the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, chaired by
Eleanor Roosevelt? How do these findings and recommendations recall those
put forward by earlier groups promoting
women’s rights and demonstrate both the advances American women had
made over the centuries as well as the continued obstacles to their
achievement of equal rights?
7. What did you learn in this chapter that you did not know before? How does
this new information help you understand the overall story of women in
American history? What topics would you like to explore further?

Respond by liner:

Step 1

Irene Morgan was a key figure in the Supreme Court case Morgan v. The
Commonwealth of Virginia.

• Irene Morgan was a 29‐year‐old Black woman from Virginia.

• She refused to comply when the bus driver demanded she give up her seat
for a white couple.

• The Supreme Court ruled that segregation on interstate bus lines was
unconstitutional.

Step 2

Dolores Huerta was a prominent labor and community activist.

• Dolores Huerta played a leading role as an organizer in the labor

movement for migrant workers.
• She was involved with the Community Service Organization and later co-
founded the National Farm Workers Association with Cesar Chavez.

• Huerta actively organized for migrant workers’ rights and improved labor
conditions.

• She had a significant personal life, having raised eleven children.

• She experienced two marital relationships.

• Her two ex-husbands criticized her activism, blaming her outside activities
for the breakdown of their marriages.

Step 3

The term “Feminine Mystique” was coined by Betty Friedan.

• Betty Friedan coined the term “Feminine Mystique.”

• She introduced it in her book, published in 1963.

• The term was based on her survey of her former Smith College classmates
during the 1950s.

• Friedan contended that the feminine mystique confined women to an

unfulfilling domestic role, stifling their personal and professional
development.

Step 4
President Kennedy’s appointment of the National Commission on the Status
of Women focused on labor and family issues.

• Kennedy stated his primary interest was to ensure that women working in
the public sphere received equal pay and working conditions.

• He emphasized that women should not be forced to leave their jobs when
unemployment rose or after a war.

• He explained that few women were in politics and policy-making positions

because their careers were often disrupted by family responsibilities.

Step 5

Women played a crucial role in the 1951 Empire Zinc Mine strike.

• The wives of the striking workers joined and sustained the picket lines at
Empire Zinc Mine.

• They actively participated by continuing picketing even when arrested.

• Their determination forced the company to take notice and negotiate.

• As a result, the company desegregated facilities, including housing,

theater, and swimming pools.

• They also secured improvements like running water in homes, thereby

bettering living conditions for their families.
Step 6

The chapter provides key statistics and impacts of the baby boom.

• In 1933, the birthrate was 18.5 children per thousand women, which
increased to 25.3 in 1955.

• In 1955, over 40 percent of women expressed a desire to have four or more

children.

• The baby boom spurred a significant housing boom and mass suburban
development.

• It stimulated consumer spending and economic growth by fostering a

culture of conspicuous consumption.

• The phenomenon reinforced the nuclear family model and reshaped

American social and economic life.

Step 7

Reflections on new learnings about women in American history.

• I learned about the extensive roles women played in civil rights, labor, and
political activism, beyond traditional domestic roles.

• The chapter revealed how women from diverse backgrounds actively

organized, protested, and fought discrimination.
• It showcased the contrast between the glamorous, idealized media image
of domesticity and the reality of women’s public and activist roles.

• This deeper historical context has enhanced my understanding of the

evolution of women’s roles in society.

• I would like to further explore the intersection of race, gender, and activism
and examine how these historical forces continue to shape modern social
and political life.

In conclusion, the answer is

• Irene Morgan was a 29‐year‐old Black woman from Virginia who refused to
give up her bus seat for a white couple, and the Supreme Court ruled that
segregation on interstate bus lines was unconstitutional.

• Dolores Huerta was a prominent labor and community activist who helped
organize migrant workers.

• She played a leading role in the Community Service Organization and co-
founded the National Farm Workers Association with Cesar Chavez.

• She dedicated herself to securing better labor conditions for migrant

workers.

• She had eleven children.

• She had two husbands.

• Her two ex-husbands criticized her activism and blamed her outside
activities for their marital breakdown.

• Betty Friedan coined the term “Feminine Mystique.”

• She introduced it in her 1963 book “The Feminine Mystique.”

• The term emerged from her sociological survey of her 1950s Smith College
classmates.

• She argued that this mystique confined women to a stifling domestic role,
limiting their potential for personal and professional fulfillment.

• President Kennedy stated his primary interest in appointing the

Commission was to ensure women worked for equal pay and equal
conditions.

• He emphasized that women should not be forced to leave their jobs during
economic downturns or after wars.

• He explained that few women reached political and policy-making roles

because their careers were interrupted by family responsibilities.

• Women, particularly the wives of the striking workers, took the lead on the
picket lines at the Empire Zinc Mine strike.

• They remained on the picket line even when faced with arrest.

• Their actions pressured the company to negotiate.

• They secured desegregated housing, theaters, and swimming pools for
Mexican American workers.

• They obtained improvements such as the provision of running water in

their homes for better living conditions.

• The birthrate increased from 18.5 per thousand women in 1933 to 25.3 in
1955.

• In 1955, more than 40 percent of women desired to have four or more

children.

• The baby boom spurred a major housing boom and mass suburban
development.

• It also stimulated consumer spending, thereby boosting the economy.

• It reshaped American society by reinforcing the nuclear family ideal and

driving domestic consumption.

• I learned about the significant, multifaceted roles women played in civil

rights, labor, and political activism, which extended far beyond domestic life.

• The chapter highlighted how women from varied backgrounds organized

and participated in protest movements.

• It contrasted the active public roles of many women with the idealized
media portrayal of domesticity during the era.
• This new insight deepens my understanding of the complexities of
women’s contributions in American history.

• I am interested in further exploring the intersections of race, gender, and

activism, and how these historical dynamics influence current social and
political issues.

Respond by Ai chat:

1.

 Irene Morgan was a twenty-nine-year-old black woman from Virginia,

the plaintiff in Morgan v. The Commonwealth of Virginia.
 In 1944, she boarded a Greyhound bus, purchased a ticket, and sat in
the colored section, refusing to give up her seat to a white couple.
 The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Morgan, declaring that segregation
laws on interstate buses were unconstitutional, thus banning
segregation on these transport lines.

2.

 Dolores Huerta was a prominent labor leader and civil rights activist.
 She was a co-founder of the National Farm Workers Association in
1962, later known as the United Farm Workers, alongside Cesar
Chavez.
 Huerta had eleven children and was married twice.
 Huerta, despite facing criticism from her ex-husbands, continued to
lead labor rights and civil rights movements, campaigning for better
working conditions and political rights for farm workers.

3.

 The term “Feminine Mystique” was coined by Betty Friedan in her book
published in 1963.
  Betty Friedan introduced the term "the problem that has no name" in
her landmark book, The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963
 Friedan argued that the "Feminine Mystique" limited women's potential
by promoting the idea that their ultimate purpose was to be wives and
mothers.

4.

 President Kennedy stated that his primary interest was to ensure

women's opportunities to work for equal pay in a male-dominated
workforce.
 -Kennedy acknowledged societal prejudices against women working,
especially during high unemployment rates, but acknowledged the
necessity for women's work to support their families.

5.

- Women played a crucial role in the 1951 strike against the Empire Zinc
Mine by participating actively in protests and picketing.

- They organized and led the strike when their husbands were arrested,
demonstrating their commitment to the cause.

- As a result of their activism, they secured improved living conditions,

including running water in their homes, better housing, and desegregation of
community facilities such as theaters and swimming pools.

- Their actions brought attention to labor rights and improved conditions for
their families.

- They also significantly influenced the decisions made by the workforce and
union concerning labor negotiations.

6.

- The birthrate in 1933 was 18.5 children per thousand women, and it rose to
25.3 by 1955.

- In 1955, over 40% of women expressed a desire to have four or more

children.
- The post-war baby boom contributed to a housing crisis, leading to a surge
in suburban developments as families sought adequate living spaces.

- This baby boom and suburban expansion significantly influenced the

economy, spurring consumerism and shifts in production towards family-
oriented goods.

Paraphrase:

1.

Irene Morgan, a 29-year-old African American woman from Virginia, was the
key figure in the Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia case.

-In July 1944, she bought a ticket at the "colored" window and sat in the
designated section on a Greyhound bus, but refused to yield her spot to a
white couple when instructed by the driver.

-The Supreme Court’s ruling in her favor deemed segregation on interstate

buses unconstitutional, effectively ending such practices on these routes.

2.

Dolores Huerta emerged as a notable advocate for labor and civil rights.

-In 1962, she helped establish the National Farm Workers Association—later
renamed the United Farm Workers—together with Cesar Chavez.

-A mother of eleven with two marriages behind her, Huerta faced criticism
from her former spouses, who attributed their marital breakdowns to her
activism.

-Undeterred, she persisted in championing labor rights and played a vital role
in civil rights initiatives.

Her work focused on securing better wages, working conditions, and political
empowerment for farm workers.

3.

-Betty Friedan introduced the phrase “Feminine Mystique” in her 1963 book.

She developed the concept while reflecting on a survey of her Smith College
peers, highlighting the discontent many women felt in suburban settings.
-Friedan contended that the "Feminine Mystique" confined women by
suggesting their sole purpose was to serve as homemakers and mothers.

-She believed this societal ideal triggered a widespread sense of unfulfillment

and identity struggles among women trapped by these norms.

4.

-President Kennedy emphasized his commitment to expanding job

opportunities for women, particularly with equal pay, in a workforce largely
controlled by men.

-During an interview, he noted the scarcity of women in political and

decision-making roles, attributing it to family duties that often disrupted their
professional paths.

-While recognizing societal bias against women working—especially amid

high unemployment—he underscored the importance of their contributions
to family support.

5.

-In the 1951 Empire Zinc Mine strike, women were instrumental, taking part
in demonstrations and picket lines.

-When their husbands were detained, they stepped up to organize and

sustain the strike, showing unwavering dedication.

-Their efforts resulted in tangible gains, such as indoor plumbing, improved

housing, and the integration of community spaces like theaters and pools.

-Through their activism, they raised awareness of labor issues and enhanced
living standards for their families.

They also played a pivotal role in shaping labor negotiations and union
decisions.

6.

-In 1933, the birthrate stood at 18.5 children per thousand women, climbing
to 25.3 by 1955.

-That year, more than 40% of women preferred having at least four children.

-The post-war baby boom fueled a housing shortage, driving rapid suburban
growth as families searched for suitable homes.
-This population surge and suburban sprawl reshaped the economy, boosting
consumer demand and redirecting production toward family-focused
products.

No plagiarism:
1.
 Irene Morgan, a brave 29-year-old African American woman from
Virginia, became a pivotal figure in the fight against segregation
through the landmark case Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia.

 In July 1944, after purchasing a ticket at the "colored" window and

sitting in the designated section of a Greyhound bus, she refused to
give up her seat to a white couple when the driver demanded it.

 Her courage led to a Supreme Court ruling in 1946 that declared

segregation on interstate buses unconstitutional, striking a major blow
to such discriminatory practices and paving the way for greater
equality.

2.

 Dolores Huerta, a tireless advocate for labor and civil rights, left an
indelible mark on history.

 In 1962, she co-founded the National Farm Workers Association, which

later became the United Farm Workers, alongside Cesar Chavez.

 A mother of eleven with two marriages behind her

  Huerta faced personal challenges, including criticism from her ex-
husbands, who blamed her activism for their marital struggles.

3.

 Betty Friedan sparked a revolution with her groundbreaking 1963 book,

The Feminine Mystique.

 The "Feminine Mystique" emerged as a key concept in the second

wave of feminism, highlighting the societal expectations and limited
roles women faced. published in 1963.

 Friedan argued that this societal ideal—that women’s sole purpose was
to be wives and mothers—trapped them in unfulfilling lives, leading to
widespread feelings of emptiness and identity crises.

4.

 In an interview, he pointed out the lack of women in political and

leadership roles, noting how family responsibilities frequently
interrupted their careers.

 While acknowledging societal biases against working women—

especially during times of high unemployment—he highlighted their
critical contributions to supporting their families and the economy.

5.

 During the 1951 Empire Zinc Mine strike, women played a crucial role
in the movement, participating in protests and picket lines alongside
their husbands for fair treatment.
  Their activism improved living conditions, housing, and community
spaces, raising awareness of labor issues and shaping union decisions,
ultimately enhancing their families' quality of life.

6.

 In 1933, the birthrate was 18.5 children per thousand women, but by
1955, it had surged to 25.3.

 In 1955, over 40% of women expressed a desire to have at least four

children.

 The baby boom led to a housing shortage, fueled by suburban

expansion, transforming the economy and shifting production towards
family-oriented goods, redefining the American dream.