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Rebecca Dayton's NOTEWORTHY EVENTS FROM THE “ERA OF ACTIVISM” 1960 - 1975
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Publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring
the 1962 book that started the environmental movement. Carson begins Silent Spring with “A Fable for Tomorrow.” In the fable, she describes a lovely country town surrounded by farms and wilderness, by beauty and the sounds of wildlife. Carson's fable links two protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Both the environmental movement and the consumer movement demanded honesty and accountability from industry and government -
Publication of Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique
02/17/1963 Publication of Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique caused a sensation in the suburbs of America. It addressed the women who had everything that society said they should want: husbands who were good providers, healthy children, a house in the suburbs—often even the time and money to furnish and refurnish the comfortable homes they ran for their families. But many of these women were not happy, and when they said so, they were often called “neuro -
Publication of Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed
While a student at Princeton University in the early 1950s, Nader protested the spraying of campus trees with DDT. His interest in automobile safety began while he was attending Harvard Law School. In 1964, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then Assistant Secretary of Labor, hired Nader as a consultant on the issue of automobile safety regulations. The government report Nader wrote developed into a book, Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-in Dang -
NOW is founded
In 1966, a group of 28 professional women, including Betty Friedan, established the National Organization for Women (NOW). These women were frustrated that existing women's groups were unwilling to pressure the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to take women's grievances more seriously. The goal of NOW was “to take action to bring American women into full participation in the mainstream of American society now.” -
UFW’s Nationwide Boycott of grapes picked on nonunion farms
The UFW's first target was the grape growers of California. Chávez, like Martin Luther King, Jr., believed in nonviolent action. In 1967, when growers refused to grant more pay, better working conditions, and union recognition, Chávez organized a successful nationwide consumer boycott of grapes picked on nonunion farms. Later boycotts of lettuce and other crops also won consumer support across the country -
Woodstock
Woodstock Music & Art Fair was a music festival, billed as "An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music". It was held at Max Yasgur's 600-acre dairy farm near the hamlet of White Lake in the town of Bethel, New York, from August 15 to August 18, 1969. -
ongress passes the Clean Air Act
The Clean Air Act is the federal law designed to make sure that all Americans have air that is safe to breathe. Public health protection is the primary goal, though the law also seeks to protect our environment from damage caused by air pollution. -
First Earth Day Celebration
Earth Day is a day that is intended to inspire awareness and appreciation for the Earth's natural environment. Earth Day was founded by United States Senator Gaylord Nelson as an environmental teach-in first held on April 22, 1970. While this first Earth Day was focused on the United States, an organization launched by Denis Hayes, who was the original national coordinator in 1970, took it international in 1990 and organized events in 141 nations. -
The EPA is Established
T2he EPA is Established When the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency formed many years ago, America had just awakened to the seriousness of its environmental pollution problem. Creation of EPA was part of the response to growing public concern and a grass roots movement to "do something" about the deteriorating conditions of water, air, and land. -
Supreme Court Rules to Legalize Abortion in the Roe vs. Wade Case
A landmark, controversial decision by the United States Supreme Court on the issue of abortion. The Court decided that a right to privacy under the due process clause in the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution extends to a woman's decision to have an abortion, but that right must be balanced against the state's two legitimate interests for regulating abortions. -
Protesters from the AIM take over the reservation at Wounded Knee
Just three months after AIM made national press in their takeover of the BIA headquarters in Washington they made the headlines once again when they seized the village for a seventy-one day takeover of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation of South Dakota. When AIM was originally asked to come out to the reservation AIM people claimed they wanted to stay out of local politics of the Sioux nation. But when the fight
