Examining the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the women's movement, and the conservative movement, which would you argue was most successful at achieving its aims, and why?

Résumé du document

At the end of World War II, many movements in the United States gave rise to important changes in society. Of major importance were progressive movements for Civil Rights, against the war, or for women and gay rights. Some movements, though, were not progressive as claimed in their aims, like the conservative movement. Historians have engaged in spirited debates over how successful each of those movements was, but measuring the success of a struggle for political and social change remains quite difficult. To achieve the former, it was very important to define success. To measure success, we need an objective criterion; it will be the ability, or disability, of a given movement to modify the legislation, the mentalities and the reality of everyday life according to its initial aims. For each movement, success will therefore be defined as the achievement of substantial changes not only in laws and the constitution, but also in people's lives and mentalities. Using this precise criterion, the most successful of all those different movements arguably was the women's movement.

Extraits

[...] Examining the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the women's movement, and the conservative movement, which would you argue was most successful at achieving its aims, and why? At the end of World War II, many movements in the United States gave rise to important changes in society. Of major importance in postwar America were progressive movements for Civil Rights, against the war, or for women and gay rights. Some movements, though, were not progressive as to their aims, like the conservative movement. [...]

[...] The Civil Rights movement, led by Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), also succeeded in changing U.S. laws, with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voter Registration Act of 1965. Yet, the civil rights movement was less successful at changing the reality of everyday life and people's mentalities, as regards equality between Whites and African-Americans. While the decade between the 1954 Supreme Court decision and the 1964 Civil Rights Act undeniably destroyed the legal foundations of racism in the United States, racism did not vanish at all from the mentalities. [...]

[...] Its success remained limited, though the association nevertheless played a key role in securing the 1964 Republican presidential nomination for Goldwater, a truly conservative candidate. As regards the gay movement, the legislative success of groups like the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) was not tremendous. Nor was its ability to change mentalities as rapidly as the women's movement. Let us now focus, in a second part, on the women's movement. To what extent was it more successful than all the other movements? [...]

[...] In the immediate postwar period, despite the women's great contribution to the war effort, they were still discriminated against. Woman were paid less than men for the same occupations, they were barred from certain occupations . But employment figures for women nevertheless kept increasing, which led to the emergence of a new feminist movement in the late 1960's, made possible by important changes in society, such as the invention and availability of the contraceptive pill (1961)[9]. It was clear that contradiction between traditional definitions of women's place and the new frequency with which women were assuming active economic, political, and social roles outside the home”[10] was to play a key role in the outstanding success of the women's liberation movement, a movement that would become of the most significant forces of social change in the 1960's and 1970's[11]”. [...]

[...] As regards antiwar, conservative and gay movements, success, though real, was also limited. Of course, America's involvement in the Vietnam war eventually ended in 1973, when the last U.S. soldiers left Vietnam[6], but the United States was engaged in other wars since then (in Iraq and Afghanistan, for instance). Furthermore, the Vietnam war was only stopped in 1973, while the Students for a Democratic Society had begun to protest the war as early as 1965, demanding an immediate ceasefire: “There must be an immediate cease fire and demobilization”[7]. [...]