AP U.S. History 8.11: The Civil Rights Movement Expands

Feminism is the movement for women's legal, economic and social equality with men. In 1963 Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique described the frustration of educated women confined to the home, and in 1966 she helped found the National Organization for Women (NOW) to press for equal treatment.

The first laws came in the workplace. The Equal Pay Act of June 10, 1963, was written "To prohibit discrimination on account of sex in the payment of wages." In 1964 Representative Howard Smith of Virginia, an opponent of the civil rights bill, proposed adding sex to its ban on job discrimination, and Representative Martha Griffiths was instrumental in keeping it there, so Title VII covers sex as well as race. In 1972 President Nixon signed the Education Amendments, whose Title IX bars sex discrimination in any education program receiving federal money.

The largest goal was the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), first drafted in 1923 by the suffragist Alice Paul, which "guaranteed equal rights under the law for Americans regardless of their sex." The House approved it in 1971 and the Senate in March 1972, sending it to the states with a seven-year deadline.

Sources: Equal Pay Act (Avalon Project); Women's Rights legislation; Martha Griffiths and the ERA (National Archives).

Younger feminists went further. Many had worked in the civil rights and antiwar movements and found themselves kept out of leadership there. In women's liberation groups they met to talk about their own lives, a practice called consciousness-raising. Like others in the 1960s counterculture, they rejected many of the social, economic and political values of their parents' generation, and they pressed for changes in sexual norms, the unwritten rules about sex, dating and marriage. In 1968 activists protested the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City for judging women by their looks, and in 1970 a Boston women's collective published Our Bodies, Ourselves, a frank guide to women's health.

Not all women agreed. In 1972 Phyllis Schlafly, a conservative activist, founded STOP ERA. She and her allies argued that the amendment would subject women to the draft, end legal protections for wives and homemakers, and erase rules that kept the sexes apart. Ratification stalled. Congress extended the deadline to June 30, 1982, but by then only 35 states had ratified, three short of the 38 needed.

Sources: Martha Griffiths and the ERA; Equal Rights Amendment (National Archives).

By the 1950s, in the climate of the Cold War, hundreds of gay men and lesbians were fired from or refused federal jobs, in what is known as the Lavender Scare.

Frank Kameny, an astronomer for the Army Map Service, was one of them. He fought his firing through appeals and then in the courts, petitioning the Supreme Court in January 1961. He co-founded the Washington, DC, branch of the Mattachine Society, an early gay rights group, and organized the earliest protests for gay rights in the 1960s.

On June 28, 1969, New York City police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village. Patrons fought back, and protests went on until July 3. The National Archives writes: "The Stonewall Uprising is considered one of the seminal moments in the struggle for LGBTQIA+ equal protection rights." Afterward the movement grew louder. Groups such as the Gay Liberation Front formed, and in June 1970 the first pride marches marked Stonewall's anniversary. In 1973, under pressure from activists including Kameny, the American Psychiatric Association stopped classifying homosexuality as a mental illness. The federal policy against gay employees was overturned in the mid-1970s.

Sources: LGBTQIA+ records; LGBTQIA+ protest and reform (National Archives).

Latino and Asian American movements continued older demands for social and economic equality and for redress, a remedy such as an apology, compensation or restored rights for a past injustice.

In 1965 Filipino and Mexican American grape pickers struck at Delano, California. Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, co-founders of the union that became the United Farm Workers, led a nonviolent strike and a nationwide grape boycott that won union contracts in 1970. Young Chicanos, as many Mexican Americans now called themselves, built a movement of their own: in 1968 thousands of students walked out of East Los Angeles high schools to protest poor schools.

In 1968 students in California adopted the name Asian American for a movement joining Chinese, Japanese, Filipino and Korean Americans. At San Francisco State, Asian American, Black and Latino students struck in 1968 and 1969 and won the nation's first college of ethnic studies. In Lau v. Nichols (1974), a case brought for Chinese American children, the Supreme Court ruled that schools must help students who do not speak English. Japanese Americans began a campaign for redress for their wartime incarceration. In 1976 President Ford formally ended the order behind it, a first step; the campaign for an apology and compensation went on into the 1980s.

Sources: Hispanic heritage records; Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month (National Archives).