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Silent Spring
- Rachel Carson was a renowned nature author and a former marine biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. She was a native of rural Pennsylvania; she had grown up with an enthusiasm nature matched only by her love of writing and poetry. She wrote the educational brochures for the Fish and Wildlife Service, as well as her published books and magazine articles, were characterized by meticulous research and a poetic evocation of her subject.
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Publication of Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique
The Feminine Mystique begins with an introduction describing what Friedan called "the problem that has no name"—the widespread sadness of women in the 1950s and early 1960s. It talks about the lives of several housewives from around the United States who were unhappy even though they lived in material comfort and were married with children. Friedan points out that the average age of marriage was plummeting and the birthrate was growing for women throughout the 1950s. -
Clean Air Act
The Clean Air Act (CAA) is the wide-ranging federal law that controls air emissions from immobile and mobile sources. Among other things, this law authorizes EPA to establish National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) to protect public health and public welfare and to control emissions of hazardous air pollutants. One of the goals of the Act was to set and achieve NAAQS in every state by 1975 in order to address the public health and welfare risks posed by certain widespread air pollutants. -
Publication of Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed
Before Nader's 1965 book, Unsafe at Any Speed, car dashboards were usually made of metal. Seat belts were available only at exotic auto parts stores. At low speeds, a car wreck could propel passengers into the metal dashboard or hurt the passenger on the metal steering wheel. Nader's book focused on the Chevrolet Corvair, but many of the problems were applicable in every car. Unsafe at Any Speed led Congress to pass the Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966. -
Woodstock
The Woodstock Festival was initially a three-day concert which rolled into a fourth day. The Woodstock festival involved lots of sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll and a lot of mud. The Woodstock Music Festival of 1969 has become an icon of the 1960s hippie counterculture. -
First Earth Day Celebration
The idea for Earth Day came to a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, Gaylord Nelson, after he witnessed the effects of the 1969 massive oil spill in Santa Barbara, California. He realized that if he could infuse that energy with an emerging public consciousness about air and water pollution, it would force environmental protection onto the national political agenda. As a result, on the 22nd of April, 20 million Americans took to the streets and Thousands of colleges and universities organized protests -
UFW’s Nationwide Boycott
On September 8, 1965, Filipino American grape workers, members of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, walked out on strike against Delano. They protested against years of poor pay and conditions. The Filipinos asked Cesar Chavez, who led a mostly Latino farm workers union, the National Farm Workers Association, to join their strike. Cesar and the leaders of the NFWA believed it would be years before their small union was ready for a strike. -
EPA is Established
The United States Environmental Protection Agency(EPA or sometimes USEPA) is an agency of the U.S. federal government which was created for the purpose of protecting human health and the environment by writing and enforcing regulations based on laws passed by Congress. The EPA was proposed by President Richard Nixon and began operation on December 2, 1970, after Nixon signed an executive order. -
Roe v. Wade case
Roe v. Wade, is a landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court on the issue of abortion. The Court ruled 7–2 that a right to privacy under the due process clause of the 14th Amendment extended to a woman's decision to have an abortion, but that right must be balanced against the state's two legitimate interests in regulating abortions: protecting prenatal life and protecting women's health., the Court resolved this balancing test by tying state regulation of abortion to the 3rd trimester -
NOW is founded
NOW was founded on June 30, 1966, in Washington, D.C, The Statement of Purpose declares that "the time has come to confront, with concrete action, the conditions that now prevent women from enjoying the equality of opportunity and freedom of choice which is their right, as individual Americans, and as human beings. "The founders included Betty Friedan, Rev. Pauli Murray, and Shirley Chisholm. Betty Friedan and Pauli Murray wrote NOW's Statement of Purpose in 1966; the original was scribbled on a
