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The New Left / Hippie Movement

Decent Essays

Struggle for Equality Stansell (2010) noted, early in the women 's emancipation movement, which was profoundly embedded in the New Left, activists took an belligerent approach to their protests. Protests against sexism in the media vacillated from putting stickers saying "Sexist" on distasteful advertisements to embracing sit-ins at community media outlets, all the way to damage of newspaper offices p. 311. This method sometimes crossed the line into vulgarity, as at the 1968 sit-down outside the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, where activists avowed objectification of women by waving pejorative signs like "Up Against the Wall, Miss America." While the event fascinated widespread media coverage (and hurled the myth that feminists …show more content…

Meanwhile, in their drives for the legalization of abortion, activists swore before state legislatures and embraced public "speak-outs" where women owned up to illegal abortions and expounded their motivations for abortion; these happenings "brought abortion out of secret where it had been buried in secrecy and infamy. It was up-to-dated to the public that the majority of women were having abortions anyhow. People expressed from their hearts. It was heart-rending." The "speak-out" was also used to advertise the largely unacknowledged phenomenon of rape, as activists also set up rape crisis centers and advocacy groups, and pushed police departments and hospitals to handle rape victims with more benevolence. To expose date rape, the annually "Take Back the Night" march on college campuses was instigated in 1982. Engdahl (2012) noted, in 1960, the world of American women was restrained in almost every matter, from family life to the workplace p. 13. A woman was believed to follow one path: to marry in her early 20s, start a family swiftly, and allocate her life to homemaking. As one lady at the moment put it, "The woman doesn 't really expect a lot from life. She 's here as someone 's keeper — her husband 's or her children 's." As such, wives bore the full charge of housekeeping and child care, pay out an average of 55 hours a week on domestic chores. Engdahl (2012) noted, that woman were legally disciplined to their husbands

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