What Do We Want? America’s Cultural Revolution! When Do We Want It? The 1960s!
The United States of America (and in fact, the whole world) has a long history of protest. From Nat Turner’s slave rebellion, to the trans-Atlantic Shakespearean rivalry that sparked the Astor Place Riot, to every workers’ strike from 1877 onwards; history can at times simply look like a long line of people taking action to right what they see as wrong. And yet there is one prevailing period of which the definitive image and mood is that of protest: the 1960s. Furthermore, this was a decade which, for the first time, engendered a culture of protest, as opposed to the outright violence of secessionists which sparked the Civil War, or the demand of Suffragettes to …show more content…
The 1960s history of “the movement” is predated by and highly indebted to African-American activism in the previous decade. Colonisation of public space was no doubt the most potent ammunition available to 1960s protestors, techniques pioneered in Civil Rights battles such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Sit-ins, and the March on Washington. Echols notes that “television, the much-maligned boob tube … brought the civil rights movement into practically every American home.” Visibility was the key factor in the early successes of the Civil Rights Movement, and the dual use of public space and public media was a powerful method of attaining visibility. The most successful protest groups in the 1960s followed the example so visibly set by early civil rights campaigners, and these tactics became the backbone of Cultural Revolutionary action. This culturally symbiotic (or parasitic) relationship of black and white Americans, with roots in the Jazz Age, carried on throughout the 60s, culturally and politically. Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin draw a parallel between white idolisation and imitation of black music with the same reverence towards black civil rights activists. Certainly the small racial unities allowed by shared protest action altered the motives of some protest groups towards class systems rather than racial systems. Martin Luther King’s …show more content…
The spirit of the Cultural Revolution was still progressing forward, and would not rest. These protest groups were not immune to protest themselves, however, and the first cracks of discontentment came with the women’s liberation movement. In not only the SDS but also various racial movements, women spoke up about the failings of the movements to satisfyingly deliver equality for them as well. Male SDS members notably targeted their female comrades’ statements on equality with gendered slurs in 1965 and published their statements alongside an infantilising cartoon 2 years later. This statement, so cruelly framed, introduced key phrases such as “women’s liberation” and “male chauvinism” into the vernacular of the American Cultural Revolution. That’s not to say that all was equal and positive outside SDS; many mainstream American women were still stuck in the conservative trappings of the 1950s, “the problem that has no name” as detailed in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, or alternatively, in the words of Echols: “Talk about a culture of constraints!” In a similar, but more insular sense, gay liberation progressed from its assimilationist roots in the late 1950s to all-out (pun intended) riots and marches by the end of the decade. The fledgling gay liberation groups: The Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Billitis were, as John D’Emilio put it, “caught
The United States of America (and in fact, the whole world) has a long history of protest. From Nat Turner’s slave rebellion, to the trans-Atlantic Shakespearean rivalry that sparked the Astor Place Riot, to every workers’ strike from 1877 onwards; history can at times simply look like a long line of people taking action to right what they see as wrong. And yet there is one prevailing period of which the definitive image and mood is that of protest: the 1960s. Furthermore, this was a decade which, for the first time, engendered a culture of protest, as opposed to the outright violence of secessionists which sparked the Civil War, or the demand of Suffragettes to …show more content…
The 1960s history of “the movement” is predated by and highly indebted to African-American activism in the previous decade. Colonisation of public space was no doubt the most potent ammunition available to 1960s protestors, techniques pioneered in Civil Rights battles such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Sit-ins, and the March on Washington. Echols notes that “television, the much-maligned boob tube … brought the civil rights movement into practically every American home.” Visibility was the key factor in the early successes of the Civil Rights Movement, and the dual use of public space and public media was a powerful method of attaining visibility. The most successful protest groups in the 1960s followed the example so visibly set by early civil rights campaigners, and these tactics became the backbone of Cultural Revolutionary action. This culturally symbiotic (or parasitic) relationship of black and white Americans, with roots in the Jazz Age, carried on throughout the 60s, culturally and politically. Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin draw a parallel between white idolisation and imitation of black music with the same reverence towards black civil rights activists. Certainly the small racial unities allowed by shared protest action altered the motives of some protest groups towards class systems rather than racial systems. Martin Luther King’s …show more content…
The spirit of the Cultural Revolution was still progressing forward, and would not rest. These protest groups were not immune to protest themselves, however, and the first cracks of discontentment came with the women’s liberation movement. In not only the SDS but also various racial movements, women spoke up about the failings of the movements to satisfyingly deliver equality for them as well. Male SDS members notably targeted their female comrades’ statements on equality with gendered slurs in 1965 and published their statements alongside an infantilising cartoon 2 years later. This statement, so cruelly framed, introduced key phrases such as “women’s liberation” and “male chauvinism” into the vernacular of the American Cultural Revolution. That’s not to say that all was equal and positive outside SDS; many mainstream American women were still stuck in the conservative trappings of the 1950s, “the problem that has no name” as detailed in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, or alternatively, in the words of Echols: “Talk about a culture of constraints!” In a similar, but more insular sense, gay liberation progressed from its assimilationist roots in the late 1950s to all-out (pun intended) riots and marches by the end of the decade. The fledgling gay liberation groups: The Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Billitis were, as John D’Emilio put it, “caught